I feel it is time to tell the story of how Movie Reviews 101 came about and it is a story that is nearly twenty years in the making.
Before we get into the main ideas behind the site, we must go into my passion for film, which saw me raised on the original Star Wars, Indiana Jones and James Bond movies, mainly everything that BBC or ITV showed back in the days when they only used to be four television channels.
Once Sky got released, it opened up a brand-new selection of films for me, with one of my newest loves being horror, with Horror Channel, which turned into Zone Horror, before returning to the Horror Channel being a new home for watching films all night. I would stay up and watch movies, but never have anyone in my life that wanted to chat about these movies and the forums were full of aggressive people.
As my look to chat about the movies I watched grew, I was offered a chance to write with an old school friend who had created a movie blog, something I had never imagined doing, as I was never the strongest writer. I went ahead and tried, which gave me the ideas to try and start my own site, starting with ‘Newguy87’s Movie Reviews’. This was early 2010, when my first attempt of a review was just a couple of paragraphs with no construction to how it was written, only on the movies I enjoyed watching.
The years went past and I started getting into a rhythm with the daily posts before I got offered my first ever screener, a movie called ‘Dry Spell’. This opened up a door I never imagined, the micro budget movies that show us talented directors and actors who don’t get the praise they deserve. While I did take a while before I got asked to watch anymore movies for new releases, it was ‘Pernicious’ which was one of the first from a PR company, a horror movie, feeding my love for horror and most importantly indie horror.
I am now into a routine where I can mix up what I watch, be it movies I missed from years before, brand new streaming movies, or a host of different movies with upcoming releases. Being able to write about the movies I see has always been rewarding and being able to meet new people who will be open to conversations about these movies has been amazing.
I would always be open to give advice to anyone who wants to get into writing about movies, I will always be thankful for any opportunities I have had to watch movies early.
I have dreams of a bigger picture, bigger projects, I want to be able to have more people join the site to write about movies, I want to be able to bring more people together to chat about movies, create a network of people that will show the passion that can only be explained as something people love to do.
These might well be a pipe dream, but the dream will always be here and if the chance comes to make this a reality, we could build something amazing together. Lets talk, enjoy and love the movies we get to see.