Festival fever

I've been MIA from posting for the past few days because I spent the weekend serving as a judge at the disastrous Festival of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and the Supernatural, a poorly organized and barely attended festival held in a hotel-casino convention space, and have been busy catching up on other work. I'll have a write-up on the festival in the coming issue of Las Vegas Weekly, but I will say now that if you are perusing your local Blockbuster or Hollywood Video in the next few months and come across either Mexican Werewolf in Texas or Death by Engagement, you might want to ignore your first instinct and give them a shot.

For those of you who live in the Las Vegas area and yearn to experience my sparkling presence in person, I'll be at another, better-organized, film festival this weekend. On Sunday, October 22, at 11 a.m., I'll be speaking on a critics panel as part of NeonFest, the Las Vegas gay and lesbian film festival, at the Gay and Lesbian Center of Southern Nevada. Admission is $10 and includes brunch, and the panel also features Mike Prevatt, arts & entertainment editor of Las Vegas CityLife; Victoria Alexander of Films in Review; and Anthony Del Valle, theater critic for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I spoke on the panel when they had it at the 2004 festival, and it was lively and lots of fun.