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David McK (3562 KP) rated Outlaw (The Outlaw Chronicles, #1) in Books

Jan 30, 2019

"Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding throught the Glenn

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, and his bunch of blood-thirsty murderous outlaws ..."

Doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?

"Outlaw" is the story of Robin Hood, told from the perspective of Alan Dale. Like Bernard Cornwell's series of books about King Arthur (indeed, my copy of the book even had a "As good as Bernard Cornwell or your money back" sticker on it), Outlaw is a more earthy, more 'real', telling of the famous tale. All the famous characters are here: Robin Hood, Maid Marie-Anne (Marion), Little John, Friar Tuck, Guy of Gisbourne, and (obviously) Alan Dale himself.

Forget the recent BBC adaptation, or even the '91 film starring a not-very-English Kevin Costner; this is more what Robin Hood would have been like (if he ever existed) than the over-romanticised legendary figure.

Worth a read? If you like Cornwell (or Simon Scarrow's) style of historical fiction, then my answer is a definite yes.

Kudos

David McK (3562 KP) rated Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles #1) in Books

Jan 30, 2019

Billed as 'The Sharpe of the Civil War' (ever notice how these types of novels always use that character as their benchmark?), it's easy to see the influence of Cornwell's most famous creation on this novel, which (according to the author) is the first in a planned series of 10 books set during the English Civil War.

This is told from the POV of a soldier in the (doomed) Royalist army: a soldier who has a history with some in authority (like Sharpe and Wellesley), and who is chosen to go behind the enemy lines on a top secret mission (again, like Sharpe), with the beginning and end of the novel taking place during one of the battles of that war (yet again, just like a Sharpe novel ...). Enjoyable enough, and gets off to a strong start, but is just not as polished as one of Cornwells books. Still, an impressive effort for a debut novel, and I may pick up more of the sequels ...

Kudos

AJaneClark (3975 KP) rated Crawl (2019) in Movies

Jan 2, 2020

Crawl (2019)

2019 | Horror, Thriller

6.5

(38 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

The dog is cute (0 more)

Pointless death scenes (0 more)

Florida, hurricane season! When dad wasn’t answering his phone, Hayley’s sister pleaded for her to go and check on him.

Hayley drove to her old family home to find dad unconscious in the crawl space underneath the building. But he was not alone! Alligators from the local alligator farm (as an English person, I don’t understand this concept) has managed to access this sub level and were causing some trouble!

Water levels were beginning to rise, and their time was running out! What follows is a loop of escape and then more gator run ins.

I expected a little more from this film, but as a fan of shoddy animal related, creature feature horrors, whilst it didn’t wow me, it was not boring! I had issues with how unrealistic they were acting dispute their injuries. The gators were mostly realistic. And the acting wasn’t awful. It was just a very middle of the range film.