Sometimes, hey, it’s all about the tone.

Take, for example, Shallow Creek Cult, yet another micro-budget offering in the “found footage” sub-genre released in 2013 (although I’ve seen its actual production date listed as being 2012 and even 2009, so don’t ask me what’s up with that) that was filmed in BF Louisiana by a would-be writer/director/star who bills himself as “King Jeff.” Our guy Jeff — or our guy King, take your pick — is in good company in the pseudonym department given that the dude who plays his brother goes by the handle of “Gorio,” but beyond that, anything resembling actual originality is pretty hard to come by here : we’re told that the footage we’re about to see is property of the “Shallow Creek Police Department,” we open with snippet-length interviews of local residents talking about the supposed “cult” that operates in the area, and then…

So here’s an interesting one : more or less a one-man production helmed by writer/director/cinematographer/editor/star Josh Criss, 2012’s Leaving D.C. is the working definition of a “bare-bones” production. Lower than low-budget, lower than micro-budget, we’ve straight-up landed in “no-budget” territory here, a truly homemade effort shot on a now-outdated camcorder by a guy with only a rudimentary working knowledge of what he was doing — but bound and determined, for whatever reason, to make himself a movie anyway. And he took it all the way to Amazon Prime. Not bad for what probably was a few days’ work, am I right?

Here’s the most impressive part about the entire enterprise, though : it’s actually pretty good. And not just by “vanity project” standards, but by any standards.

Criss plays Mark Klein, a guy who’s gotten fed up with the big-city rat race in our nation’s capitol (hence the title) and…

First up out of the gate in our October-long look at some of the more — and I say this with all due respect — obscure horror offerings available for streaming on Amazon Prime we have Chameleon Shadow, a micro-budget affair from writer/director/star Sam Mills, who apparently spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 (probably of his own money) to shoot this thing in his hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah, earlier this very year. This is one of those flicks that barely has an IMDB presence and has attracted very few reviews to date, so let’s see if I can get the intrepid Mr. Mills on the “scoreboard” with his first official “external reviews” link, shall we?

Right off the bat we’re greeted with some far more well-composed and “artsy”-looking shots than we’re accustomed to from essentially “homemade” efforts such as this, and while I can’t say for…

Well, whaddya know : Stephen King seems to be experiencing one of those mini-resurgences in the overall pop culture zeitgeist that happens for/to him every now and then (the last probably being in 2007 with the box-office success of both The Mist and 1408), usually just at the point where it looks as though all the material that the prolific (to the point of being ubiquitous) horror scribe has cranked forth from his apparently-bottomless imagination has been mined for all it’s worth.  Granted, new King adaptations are almost always debuting somewhere on TV, the silver screen, or various streaming services, but their sheer and constant volume pretty much guarantees that few, if any, will have much impact beyond the author’s admittedly-large fan base — which is usually more than enough to ensure that they make at least a nice, tidy profit, I’m sure, but I doubt that most Hollywood observers…

Okay, look, who are we kidding? Fantagraphics’ Now #1 is the “big story” in comics this week, as well it should be, but I’m still cobbling my various and sundry thoughts on that one together for a comprehensive review that I should have ready in the next few days. Until then, though, let’s take a quick look at a handful of other items new on shelves and/or in my mailbox that grabbed my attention, for good or ill, this week —

Portrait is a self-published collection of strips by Simon Hanselmann that ran as part of his “Truth Zone” (or TZ, if you prefer) webcomics series. The initial printing sold out pretty quickly and I missed out on it, but I ordered one up pronto when word got out that he was headed back to press (or, more likely, Kinko’s) with it. Megg. Mogg, and Owl take aim at the…

Since completing his widely-acknowledged masterpiece, Punk Rock Jesus, Sean Murphy (take or leave the Gordon as you please) has divided his time between projects worthy of his talents (The Wake), projects obviously unworthy of it (Chrononauts), and projects that could have been worthy of it had they not descended into onerous and heavy-handed diatribes against techno-societal problems that literally every thinking person is already damn well concerned about (Tokyo Ghost). He’s brought his “A game” to all of these various endeavors — he always does — but even stellar artwork isn’t, at this point, enough to save, say, yet another lackluster developed-with-both-eyes-fixed-on-Hollywood-exploitation Mark Millar “idea.” What we’ve all been hoping to see, of course, is a new book, in whatever format, both drawn and written by Murphy, since we’re fully aware that he can do both, and the moment has finally arrived with…

That’s Trixie. We never really knew how old she was, or what kind of life she had before we picked her out at the pound, but we knew we loved her from the minute we got her — just a little over three years ago.

She was a pudgy little thing, and lazier than hell even by domesticated cat standards, but she could show a surprising amount of energy at the drop of a hat — when we first got her, for instance, she’d race to the kitchen and guard her food the minute you headed in that direction.  And she had a little bit of a pissy attitude, too — she hated being picked up, she’d snarl at you just for the hell of it sometimes, she’d go from purring away to biting at your fingers the instant you started rubbing her the wrong way, and she went through…