The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

I decided to expand on my first review I made of this book on shelfari because, well, I think I had more to say about it.

First, let me say that, I don't mind erotica in the least. I mean, haven't we all read fanfiction at one point or another? So I went into the first book of this series expecting to forgo plot and character for sex. Being erotica, the point is for the kinky fun times, that doesn't mean that there can't be a good plot and characters, but it's not a requirement.

I had been told, by multiple people, that these books are what 50 Shades of Gray wanted to be (now, I haven't read 50 Shades and don't have plans to) but from what I understand it is Mommy porn written by someone that doesn't quite understand how BDSM works. Dubious consent seems to be a standard for many erotica books, but at least Beauty has no qualms about putting how this is rape, it's not really excused. Well, it's not explicitly excused, but the characters in the book all seem okay with sending off their Princes and Princesses to another kingdom in order for them to become unwilling sex slaves. 

Surprisingly, though, this book is lacking the creativity department. It was 200+ pages of spanking. Cause that's apparently the only "kinky" things that they know how to do in this land where there is magic. I guess, much like they are all very accepting of turning royalty into sex slaves for another kingdom, everyone is way into spanking. Way into it.

There were a few other places where different sex stuff happened, but those parts were few and far between. Way far between.

 And then you had Beauty herself who starts off the book pretty accepting of being raped and taken prisoner and then at the very end of the book suddenly has a random change of heart just so she can get in trouble and be punished so that Anne Rice, sorry,  A.N. Roquelaure can write another book. I'm not knocking Beauty rebelling, if she had done so earlier the book would have been way more interesting, but having her do it at the very end with no hints as to why other than a prince telling her earlier that a harsh punishment helped him accept his slavery is a cop out.

Piranha (1978)

Oh, what to say about this movie. It is certainly a B movie, and one that was banking on the residual popularity of Jaws (1975) to boot. Piranha and Jaws both have the same opening scene of two teenagers skinny dipping at night, though in Piranha the skinny dipping is taking place in the woods at what appears to be a water treatment plant but then turns out to be a place where the government was breeding genetically modified piranha to use in the Vietnam War.

Well, when the war ended suddenly the researchers were left with tons of man-eating fishes to take care of, and as everyone knows, the government isn't about to let a perfect weapon such as a fish get destroyed before they got to use it on some unsuspecting populace; so they kept the fish in tanks until such time as they could be used. Did I forget to mention that these tanks were, for some reason, connected to a massive and popular river where a resort was about to open and a popular summer camp was held every year? Cause that's the way it was.

This movie was SyFy channel before the syfy channel was ever invented. The colonel that backed the fish is also one of the people who invested money in the resort. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots and see how this ends.

I kind of think that the whole movie was made for a specific line: "Sir, about the piranha..." "What about the piranha?" "They're eating the guests, sir."

The villains were stereotypical "Bad Guys" tm. More interested in collecting money than saving lives, that is, until the lives lost cost them money.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how this movie ends. But it was an amusing journey to say the least. Not nearly as annoying as the remake (Piranha 3D). I had a lot more to say about this movie, but once the credits began to roll I lost any attention I had for the movie so I'm just going to end this here.

If you like B movie concepts with syfy quality take a gander at this and you won't be disappointed.