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The Golden Spurtle (2025): Peaceful Porridge

Gavin

In a harsh world, porridge provides. 

This is somewhat of a difficult review to write. Usually I throw on something in the background for ambient noise. An optional distraction my eyes can wander over to when the novelty of writing wears thin. One small problem: The Golden Spurtle is the movie I started while writing this. It felt like an obvious choice, yet here I am. 20 minutes have disappeared and only two paragraphs are on the page. Once again I have been sucked into watching people take oatmeal very seriously. 

The Golden Spurtle is a bright spark of charm, quirk, and passion. As many people from small towns will tell you, pitching a documentary as being “about the quirky characters in a small town” is an immediate red flag. Great, somebody took a camera crew to a village of people minding their business and filmed until they got some kooky characters. Groundbreaking. 

Director Constantine Costi had other ideas. 

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Horror, TV/Film

Dolly: Some Assembly Required

Gavin

There are horror movies that are objectively good, but not necessarily tonally appropriate for throwing on near Halloween. Then there are movies that play things relatively safe, but ooze Halloweeny vibes. Dolly firmly, unabashedly belongs in the latter. Shot in 16mm, fuzz and scratches galore. Credits appear in chunky font that feels ripped straight from the cover of a Stephen King novel he doesn’t remember writing. I sat in my theater, bathed in a warm glow of text so red and soft you wanna hug it. I was sold from the very beginning. All scored by Nick Bohun (Creep Box) with a phenomenal series of late 70s horror synth drone tracks.

A trailer I found on YouTube sold Dolly to me as a Shudder-funded indie horror movie with a Film Threat review claiming it’s “The scariest movie yet in the great chainsaw massacre tradition.” I haven’t stumbled across a slasher pitch that appealing since In A Violent Nature, and that knocked my socks off. I damn near punched the air when I realized IAVN2 had a trailer before Dolly. 

I may not have seen past the first thirty minutes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I am firmly in the target demographic for Dolly. I’m in my thirties, a movie dork, and would rather watch ten 3.5/5 Shudder Originals trying something funky than one four-quadrant mega-franchise horror movie.

After all: it’s horror. It should have the guts to do weird shit, on occasion. 

Dolly lives for the weird shit. For better or worse.

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nonfiction, TV/Film

Building My Personal Streaming Service: The Software

Gavin

Well over a year ago I wrote my first article in this series charting my media server journey, and showing how you can do it to what I built to create my Jellyfin server. 

In that time, I’ve gone from using an off-the-shelf NAS to building an actual full-fledged media server, so I feel more comfortable writing with some level of “amateur but I know what I’m doing” expertise. For those of you interested in hardware, I intend on making a future installment of this series specifically about hardware I purchased, a build guide I found, and what I’d do differently if I was starting from scratch. That said, my gut says the next piece will be specifically about how one sources media for their media server (legally, before you get too excited).

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