If you’ve been a regular visitor for the last year or so, maybe you’ve noticed that content here has thinned out a little. Ordinarily, I’d just chalk that up to my own laziness and I think for a good portion of this time, I have. I think the reality of what was going on hit me this past weekend during the Blood Bath 3 film festival. It all started with an innocuous enough statement from my friend Tammy Dupal of Twisted Central fame. She tweeted:

Because of the obvious conflict of interest I will not be reviewing any films played during @doabloodbath.

Even then, I didn’t recognize the statement for what it was. Maybe it was later that it started to seep in. Maybe it was when Andrew Rose asked me if making a film had changed the way I review films. Of course, I responded that it hadn’t: no, it still hadn’t kicked in. It wasn’t until later as I sat at the bar, my face not nearly as red as it was earlier from overexposure to positive reinforcement, that it finally hit me.

I couldn’t do it anymore.
I couldn’t sit in judgement of who were now becoming my peers.

My peers? Yeah, I went and said it. My peers. I kinda consider myself a film maker now. Quite bluntly, I feel a bit shitty when I’m sitting in a theater picking a movie apart, writing it down and putting that criticism up to the world when what I may be watching may very well be a films I could be in competition with at a festival. To that end, it’s ends up being a conflict of interest. Otherwise, it feels the same as a beer-league hockey player telling Gretzky how to play the game. OK, maybe not Gretzky but certainly some level of professional. It just doesn’t feel right to me.

So, what am I going to do now?

Well, I can still turned my patented “Jaundiced Eye” to studio fare. There is still a pretty big difference between a film made for a few thousand dollars and one made for a few million dollars. I don’t have a problem speaking out on that. Beyond that, I’m not sure. I guess I can pontificate on the journey of a budding film maker. It’s already been a strange and wondrous journey. Maybe I can even find the words to do it justice. Whatever happens, please stick around. I promise to make it interesting.

Joe Lopez

Dubbed, "TerrorScribe" by a former editor, Joe made the conversion to horror sometime in the mid-2000s. Little did he know he'd favored the genre all of his life. When not struggling with short stories, he provided genre film reviews for local entertainment sites and later genre sites who could suffer his cynical views.

It was that same cynicism - and some might say hubris - that lead him to have a brief flirtation with filmmaking. His first two efforts, "Annotated" and "Antes Que Seja Tarde (Before It's Too Late)" both premiered at a local H.P. Lovecraft film festival. A third short, "Survivor Girl" proved to be his undoing though plans are in the works to revived the cursed project.

Born and raised in Dallas, TX., Joe now resides in a small Texas town. Statistics say more dead bodies turn up in small towns that big cities... though he claims to have NOTHING to do with that.