Chadzilla ROARS!!!

Concordian Review: End of the World

Last year I started writing a book review column for the Digital Concordian, the on-line version of a local paper.  What follows is a reprint of my very first column, which was published in June 2011.  The column was my clumsy attempt at a humorous reaction to the faulty May 21, 2011 Judgment Day hoopla brought upon by Family Radio's Harold Camping.  

This column is also the only one where I review multiple books:

The End has always been on the verge of nigh for any number of reasons.  Which is why the popular End of the World genre offers readers so many great (and so many not so great) ways to enjoy the End of the World.  It is just a fun game of "What if...?"

My pick for the best of them is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer.  A comet slams into the Earth and causes earthquakes, tidal waves, torrential storms of saltwater rain, and massive flooding.  The novel also spares none of the more unpleasant details of what the End of the World would really be like.  It's a smart and scary book.

S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire, however, rushes past most of the unpleasantness brought on by its intriguing End of the World scenario (an as yet unexplained "Change" in the fabric of space and time renders all of modern day technology inoperable) and instead the story focuses on how the survivors turn their post-apocalyptic world into one big Renaissance Fair.  It's for Fantasy fans only, obviously.

The unexplained "Change" in Dies the Fire reminded me of Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason's novel Ill Wind, which has an oil-eating microbe getting loose and turning everything plastic into useless glop.  Ill Wind does an entertaining job of covering the disaster ground that Dies the Fire skipped over.

Two horror genre apocalypse stories of note are Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and Philip Nutman's Wet Work.  Both books find a fresh and inventive way to tell the now far too familiar story of what happens after the dead get up and start to eat the living.

Whether you are a Global Warming denier or believer, there is no way that you will not start giggling while reading Art Bell and Whitley Strieber's atrocious The Coming Global Superstorm, which warns that a mysterious "superstorm" is going to flash freeze our planet into a new Ice Age.  Insert summer reading joke here.

Being an almost life long fan of The Omen trilogy, I had to read some of Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's best-selling Left Behind series.  I really wish I hadn't, though.  The books are filled with the laziest writing and plotting that it has ever been my displeasure to read and, after suffering through a few of them, I wanted the world to come to an end sooner, rather than later.

You have been warned.

Oscar 2012 predictions

The Nominations were announced yesterday and I am certain that this will (finally) be Martin Scorsese's year to win that Best Director Oscar.

Best Picture: Hugo

Best Director: Martin Scorsese

Best Actor: Jean Dujardin (The Artist)

Best Actress:  Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role:  Christopher Plummer (Beginners)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role:  Berenice Bejo (The Artist)

Best Animated Feature:  [Since The Adventures of Tintin was not nominated, and the animated features that I did see all underwhelmed me, I have no idea which animated film will win, nor do I care.  None of them deserve it more than Tintin.]

Art Direction:  Hugo

Cinematography:  The Tree of Life

Costume Design:  Hugo

Film Editing: Hugo

Documentary (Feature):  Pina

Foreign Language Film:  A Separation

Make-Up: The Iron Lady

Score:  Ludovic Bource (The Artist)

Writing (Original):  Asghar Farhadi (A Separation)

Writing (Adapted):  John Logan (Hugo)

Watch (or record) the Oscars on February 26th, just to find out how my Oscar instincts fair this year.

 

Julia book cover

The Fog book cover

Classic Moment of Cinema: Body Double (1984)

Some pure WTF from Brian DePalma:

"Where's the cum shot?"

"What?"

"The cum shot.  I thought we were doing Body Talk here, not Last Tango."

TV Stuff: Body Double (1984) TV spot

Body Double (1984) movie poster

Body Double (1984): Telescope - Music by Pino Donaggio

Carnage (2011)

"I believe in a God of carnage."

The parents of two children that were involved in a violent altercation meet, to discuss what has happened.  At first the two couples alternate between being rigidly polite or gregariously conciliatory to each other.  But, as the tense and unpleasant meeting drags on and on, the resentments that are festering beneath their polite and peaceful behavior begin to work their way to the surface.

Verbal skirmishes lead to shouting matches between the various groups.  Only as the arguements drag on, the battle lines keep changing.  It's parent against parent, couple against couple, husbands against wives, wives against husbands, parenting technique against parenting technique, marriage against marriage.  

In their battle of words no verbal weapon is left unused...

In December of 2009 I made my first (of now many) travels to Broadway.  During that trip I had the privilege of seeing a performance of Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage.  In many respects, God of Carnage is similar in style and tone to one of Reza's earlier plays, Art.  Both feature a small cast of characters that discuss, then argue, and finally fight one another over an idea, or an opinion, or a concept.  In Art those ideas, opinions, and concepts that led to the discussions, arguments, and fights involved the various meanings, feelings, and opinions regarding what the title subject, art, was and was not.

God of Carnage, however, was (is) all over the place.  The arguments are about parenting, marriage, intellectualism versus instinctualism, gender and class bias, and so on and so forth.  The play, and Polanski's film adaptation of it, lives of up to the word carnage.  By the end the two couples, the four people, have literally torn each other to shreds; and in both the joy of it is in how methodically controlled, yet completely inevitable, their descent into savagery is.

Unlike the play, the film begins by showing the violent incident between the two boys (who are never shown in the stage play) and, to my eyes, it looked like a typical schoolyard altercation between boys.  This point of view is given credence later in the film, when parent Michael (John C. Reilly) tries to downplay the event by sharing how he did something similar as a boy.

Not to get too personal, or to project too much onto the film and the play, but, being the parent of an emotionally troubled child with special needs, I have had one or two run ins with school officials or concerned parents regarding aggressive behavior.  I have also had to struggle to find a way of explaining how to try and avoid a violent conflict while my inner self is shouting, "Oh just let the kid go and stomp the shit out of that loudmouthed bully of a fucktard!"  Carnage uses this very real and easy to relate to inner friction to wear its characters down to their unpleasant (and violent) "true selves."

Carnage, despite its outdoor opening and ending bookends, is also a very claustrophobic film.  The characters are literally trapped in an environment they cannot escape, while engaging in an argument that they cannot win.  While Polanksi has done this kind of claustrophibic style narrative before, and to good effect, (i.e. Repulsion) Carnage looks, sounds and feels like a stage play that has been transfered directly from the stage to screen.  The only difference is that whenever a character leaves the main stage (the living room) Polanski's camera can follow them into the kitchen, or the study, or the bathroom, or even out to the elevator.  While that widens the stage, it does not make the film feel any less cramped, which may (or may not) have been intentional.

What truly makes the film soar, though, is the acting.  While both John C. Reilly and Kate Winslet do excellent work, the bravura performances are delivered by Jodie Foster and Christoph Waltz.  Foster is so good that I expect to see her get an Oscar nomination.  It would be a well deserved one.

Three and a half stars out of four, and a Best of 2012 contender.

Movie News: Rejected Godzilla design

Whether or not the new American produced Godzilla movie will even get made (and released) remains to be seen.  From moment one I have been of the "I will believe it only when I am sitting in a theater and actually watching it" frame of mind.

Anyway, a family emergency has prevented me from writing a review for you today (there might be one of Friday, or there might not be one, the emergency situation is ongoing and ever changing at the moment) so I decided to share this rejected design art for the film, courtesy of an article that was posted on Dread Central:

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla - by Stephen King

There was a time when my desire to read each new book in Stephen King's epic fantasy tale The Dark Tower almost matched Roland of Gilead's obsession to reach the Tower itself.  Then I read the bloated and slow-paced fourth book, Wizard and Glass, (and I had to make two separate attempts before I was finally able to make it all the way to the end of that turgid narrative cul-de-sac) and all that changed.  I found that I no longer really cared whether or not Roland's ka-tet ever reached the Tower.  I also began to suspect that it would not really matter if they did.  Stephen King is not well known, or well regarded, for the strength of his endings.

When The Dark Tower volumes V, VI, and VII came out, I tried to get excited about reading them.  Being a one time "Constant Reader" of King's work, I dutifully bought each one of them, with the sincerest intention of reading them.  But the books wound up sitting on my "To Be Read" bookshelf, collecting dust.  I eventually sold them, still unread, to a local used bookstore, just so I could make room for all the other books that I have been buying (and that also wind up just sitting there, "waiting" to get cracked open and read).  My interest in The Dark Tower series had "Moved On", not unlike the various worlds that Roland of Gilead and his ka-tet have traveled through on their seven book journey to the Dark Tower.  (And that is not counting the numerous short story, novella, and cameo appearance digressions they have made between books.)

For almost ten years it looked like I would never learn if the room at the top of the Tower was truly empty.  That I would never stand alongside Roland and his ka-tet in the Court of the Crimson King and do whatever it was that had to be done to save the Tower and the countless worlds that spun around (or off from) it.

But now that has all changed, obviously.  One should never say never, ever.  The need to finish business that is unfinished is a strong one.  So I downloaded the fifth Dark Tower novel onto my Kindle and promptly burned through it.  King had me from page one and I could not press the Kindle's "page turn" button fast enough as my eyes gulped down page after page.

Wolves of the Calla, like Wizard and Glass, is an almost traditional Western novel, albeit one jazzed up with science-fiction and fantasy elements.  Unlike Wizard and Glass, though, Wolves of the Calla is exciting and interesting reading.  The primary plot, the one that all the various story threads in the book, and there are a lot of story threads in the book, weave around will be familiar to any Western fan: a poor farming community hires Roland and his ka-tet to "handle" (i.e. to stop once and for all) the wolf mask wearing marauders that are terrorizing their town.  

For you folks out there that don't watch movies that were made before you were born, that's pretty much the plot of The Magnificent Seven.  It's also the plot of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which King fittingly calls Wolves of the Calla's true source of inspiration (The Magnificent Seven was just an American Western style remake of Kurosawa's film).  Be that as it may, King's story contains numerous homages and references to The Magnificent Seven.  The film is quoted at the beginning ("We deal in lead.") and the town Roland and his ka-tet are hired to defend is named Calla Bryn Sturgis.  Yul Brynner was the star of the film and the director was a man named John Sturges.

The Magnificent Seven is not the only pop culture reference/influence in this sprawling tale, though.  King also references many of his own works.  Wizard and Glass bookended with Roland and his ka-tet paying a brief, but memorable, visit to the post super-flu world of The Stand.  Wolves of the Calla does that one better, however, by bringing in the fallen Father Callahan, a character from King's 1975 novel, 'Salem's Lot.  What brought the former priest to the town, and onto the Path of the Beam, is one of the book's largest and longest digressions.  A digression that builds to a wonderful and inspired meta-fiction climax and cliffhanger.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  There are other troubles.  Susannah, one of Roland's ka-tet, has become pregnant by a demon and that pregnancy is a threat on multiple levels.  Then again, this is a Dark Tower novel and everything has multiple levels of meanings (and alternate worlds within worlds).  That King is able to take so many wildly different things and mix them together in a way that seems to make an off kilter kind of sense is a splendid example of the storytelling talent that turned him into a bestselling author.

Although I am reminding myself that King has troubles ending his tales, I had so much fun finding out what happened next in Wolves of the Calla that I almost started reading Song of Susannah, the next, and the next to last, book in the seven book series, the moment I reached the end of Wolves.  

It looks like I am going to make it all the way to the Tower after all.

Classic Moment of Cinema: Death Wish 3 (1985)

Death Wish 3 trailer

Death Wish 3 poster

Death Wish 3 Main Theme - by Jimmy Page

The Devil Inside (2012)

"We'll see if this is bullshit."

A young woman named Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) and a documentarian named Michael (Ionut Grama*) go to Rome to investigate whether or not Isabella's multiple-murderer mother, Maria (Suzan Crowley) is actually demonically possessed, or if the woman is just mentally ill.

During the course of their investigation, Isabella and Michael meet two "rogue" priests, Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth), who perform non-sanctioned exorcisms.  The two priests decide to take on the demon that has possessed Maria, but soon they wish they had not been so foolish...

Wow, somebody mixed together key elements and plot points from The Last Exorcism and The Rite and managed to create a home video variant of the legendarily stupid Exorcist II: The Heretic.  Wait, I take that back.  As legendarily stupid as Exorcist II: The Heretic was, at least it was hypnotically fascinating in its complete and utter studity.  The Devil Inside is just insufferably boring.  So much so that it almost becomes sleep inducing.  This is a movie so bad that I had to talk myself out of getting up and walking out on it not once, but twice.

Yes, The Devil Inside is that bad; and I am that foolish for making myself suffer through the entire thing, right up to its jawdropper of a "shock" non-ending.

Not once during its one hour and twenty-seven minute running time, which seemed more like one hour and twenty-seven hours while I was watching it, does The Devil Inside show any signs of having an original idea.  The "Crime Scene Walkthrough" opening is lifted directly from the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Having Isabella looking into the camera and explaining the what and the why of the documentary she is making (and even a later scene, where she tearfully babbles some nonsense about something that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of the events or conversations shown in the film) is from The Blair Witch Project.  The demonic body contortioning is straight out of The Last Exorcism and the "Is it really demonic possession, or is just mental illness?" debates, the visit to the Vatican's Exorcism School and the mental institution, and the demonically possessed priest are all taken from The Rite.

The complete and utter lack of originality of The Devil Inside's story is not the film's only problem.  The Devil Inside is yet another entry in the now seemingly endless number of "found footage" docudramas.  Once again the question of who "found" this footage and the why of it being edited into a coherent narrative story is unanswered.  Also, not unlike George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the film occasionally "breaks out" of its "found footage" narrative technique and opts for traditional narrative camera framing and editing.  Unlike the Romero film, The Devil Inside had me pondering why there were cameras needlessly set up in the car (well, so the events at the end of the film could be captured on camera, of course) and why Isabella was alone with her mother on the security camera footage, but Michael is clearly STANDING (or squatting, depending on which coverage shot wound up being used) RIGHT BESIDE ISABELLA IN THE ROOM AT THE TIME.  

The contemptuous indifference of the film makers, both to their own film and its viewing audience, was palpable throughout the entirety of The Devil Inside.  I can only recommend that you stay far outside of any theater unfortunate enough to be screening it.

NO STARS.  KILL IT!!!  KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!

* Is Ionut Grama even a real name?

House of Mystery #6 - 10 (Love Stories for Dead People)

"Every house is haunted."

After being gone for two weeks, Fig has returned to the House of Mystery.  Although Fig refuses to tell the others where her escape attempt took her, Bartender Harry and Piratess Ann are eager to try an alternate route.  

Their plan is to work their way out via the intricate maze of passages that are the basement of the House of Mystery.  The only problem with their plan is that the basement is not empty.  Something lives in the basement.

Something mean and nasty...

Oh, and there are also stories to be told:

The Cave of the Gilded Virgins:  The first time that the Pirate Ann Preston fell in love did not end well.  "The sea is cruel," Ann is fond of saying, "but it never lies."

The War:  There is reason why the war between cats and birds has raged for ages, and why neither side is allowed a decisive victory.

The Caretakers:  Bartender Harry was the first of the new "prisoners" in the House of Mystery.  Before others were allowed in some clean-up was needed.  It seems that Cain left behind a rather sizable collection of nightmares, so his brother Abel comes to collect them all.

Gothic Romance:  A lovely woman tries to warn a potential suitor that all of her romances end badly.  She seems to be a magnet for monsters.

Fig's Adventure in Stuffytown:  Fig Keele, child detective, goes to Stuffytown, the place where stuffed animals go after humans lose them, to find her missing rabbit pal, Walden.  Once there Fig is asked to find out who has been stealing cookies from the town's cookie jar.

I have no idea what mystery (or mysteries) that the wraparound story, Love Stories for Dead People, was supposed to solve, or have solved.  The conclusion raised far more intriguing questions than it offered interesting, or satisfying, answers.  All I was able to work out was that someone who had been lost, believed dead, was found.  But just how much of said person truly remains is up for debate.  

Once again everybody seems to be hiding some kind of dark and terrible secret, yet, from what I have seen, the secrets aren't all that dark or terrible.  It just means that (gasp) some people in the House of Mystery are not who (or... what?) they appear to be.  Which means more mystery and more secrets and more incessant teasing of answers that probably won't be forthcoming any time soon.  

That is not a complaint, it is just a statement of fact.

Another statement of fact: the five stories that Love Stories has been wrapped around are, once again, a reasonably entertaining lot.  Of the five I enjoyed Gothic Romance the most.  Bernie Wrightson's art and Lee Loughridge's coloring capture the look and feel of both the black and white Universal monster classics and the (also classic) color Hammer horrors.  I also appreciated how the narrator's male suitor shared a pronounced resemblance to a certain Hammer super star.

Coming in a close second is the whimsical Caretakers, which nicely ties together the Bronze Age run of House of Mystery (and its brother publication, House of Secrets) with this Next Gen format.  It's a one gag story, but it's a funny gag and it's perfectly told.

Tied for third are Gilded Virgins, a fairly straightforward adventure yarn, and The War, a rather heavy handed "pain and suffering are necessary for the human experience" fable.  

Coming in last is the bittersweet and irony laced Stuffytown.  On the surface it appears to be about a child detective's adventures in the land of Big Make Believe, but what the story is really about is that moment when a child is told that the time has come for her to put away her childish things.  It is time for her to start growing up.  If the last panel doesn't make you sad, then you just might not have a heart.  Or an imagination.

The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power - by Gene Healy

Two things, a thought and a memory, frequently came to mind while I was reading Gene Healy's The Cult of the Presidency.  The thought was: AND??? (A thought that might make little to no sense to readers that have been spared the irritating Coke Zero advertisement featuring a young man answering every offer or comment made to him with the demanding question, "And???")  The memory was of something my mother said to me back in 1979, when Ronald Reagan was running for President.  "I don't know why he's bothering," she told me, "he [Reagan] had more political power when he was the Governor of California."  That might have been true in post-Watergate 1979, but times, and the views/opinions regarding the Executive Powers of the President post 9/11, have changed considerably since then.  

Or have they?

With 2012 being a Presidential election year I thought it was an appropriate time to finally dust off Healy's book and crack it open, just to see what the Cato Institute senior editor had to say about "America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power."  Healy, being a Libertarian*, has very little good to say about it, of course.  I only wish that I had more good things to say about Healy's book.  While he has a valid point, he just does not argue it very effectively.

Starting with a brief history of how the Constitution was drafted, Healy describes the various, and very heated, arguments amongst the Founders about the Chief Executive's office and the scope of its powers.  Then Healy jumps forward a hundred or so years, pausing only for the briefest of glances at the Executive Power abuses of Thomas Jefferson (the Louisiana Purchase) and Abraham Lincoln, to the administrations of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.  These two Presidents, Healy claims, were the first to radically expand and abuse the perceived powers of the Chief Executive's office.  It was after this leap forward that I began asking "AND???" every few pages.

The reason for my continued asking of "AND???" can be summed up by paraphrasing a rather popular bumper sticker I see on the backside of numerous cars tooling along the highway, "Well-behaved Presidents don't make history."  Historians seem to favor noisemakers.  So, if one wants his (or her) name recorded in the historical texts for future study, the louder (or more power hungry) the President, the more attention and study he (or she) will get.

It is this simple truism that manages to trip Healy up, for he does not offer any empirical evidence that the quieter "forgotten" non-leader Presidents were better Presidents for the United States than the noisemakers.  Healy also lavishes attention on the countless misdeeds, mistakes, abuses, and troubles caused by an Imperial Presidency, while completely ignoring the non-history making "quiet" Presidents.  Just glossing over the supposed "Golden Age" of the Quiet President with the literary equivalent of a nod, a grin, and saying "Times sure were better for us then, eh?" without offering up any verifiable examples of how and why is just shoddy writing.  I'm not saying that Healy is wrong, because I can't.  But, without any evidence whatsoever, I can't say that he is right, either.

Healy also made several irksome statements that just bothered me.  While I agree that an argument could be made for the United States sitting out the First World War, I cannot agree with the casual mentioning of an argument for the United States sitting out the Second World War.  I also was bothered by the "politically incorrect" use of the term "Indian marauders."  Look, as painful and distasteful as it might be to admit, the United States was an occupying force.  One that invaded the land of an indigenous population, then subjugated and destroyed it.  They weren't "marauders," they were defending their land.  (Look, I love westerns and John Wayne, but that shit is just MYTH, okay?) 

There were two areas where Healy succeeded in making a compelling and winning argument, though.

The first is when he describes just how distanced and insulated from the real world the 20th and 21st century Presidents have become.  George W. Bush was not the first, nor will he be the last, "bubble president."  Every President since FDR (who strived to keep his use of a wheelchair out of the public eye) has been encased in an increasingly impenetrable bubble of security and secrecy.  Some have tried to puncture that bubble (most notably Presidents Nixon** and Carter) but none have ever succeeded in doing so.

The second is showing how the United States citizen/voter has grown to accept (or believe) that the President of the United States is responsible for everything.  I remember being furious at President Bush for bungling the Katrina response.  But when my emotions cooled, I realized that it was not his responsibility to respond to the disaster.  Nor was it President Obama's responsibility to respond to the BP disaster.  But people seem to believe that the President wears blue tights with a giant S sewn across the chest.  The President is somehow responsible for solving every single teeny-tiny issue that blights or irritates the United States.

That is not the President's job.  That is the citizen's responsibility.  As to the best way to remind, or educate, people on this fact?  Healy, like so many citizens and voters are about the office and the Executive Power of the President, is a tad ambivalent about it all.  He points out that the average citizen and voter distrusts the government and chafes at being ruled.  But he also points that those very same people willingly accept the theory (and expect) that the Imperial Presidency will have unlimited power.  Especially when the President just so happens to belong to the citizen and voter's very same political party.  What this does for checks and balances, I don't know.  But Healy seems to think that this cognitive dissonance will somehow evolve into a willingness for a less powerful president.

I remain unconvinced.  Humans are herd animals and, like most herds, we seek a leader of some kind to tell us where to go, or to point us in a preferred direction, at least.  I think the Imperial Presidency will be around for as long as the United States of America lasts.

* Thom Hartmann and Roger Ebert have both made fairly accurate descriptions of the Libertarian mindset.  Hartmann likes to say, "Libertarian's are Republicans that want to smoke dope and get laid," while Roger Ebert said that the mindset can be distilled down to, "I'm on board, pull up the lifeline." 

** Yes, NIXON.

TV Stuff: Maniac (1980) controversy

Maniac (1980) trailer

Maniac (1980) poster

Goin' To A Showdown - by Don Armando's 2nd Avenue Rhumba Band

The Darkest Hour (2011)

American tourists in Moscow struggle to survive an aggressive (and lethal) alien invasion.

Oh, my aching head.  Why?  Why?  WHY do I do this to myself?

I went to see The Darkest Hour for two reasons.  Reason #1: It is a science-fiction/"horror" movie about aliens attacking and wiping out humanity on a grand scale and, being a life long fan of science-fiction, horror, and monster movies, I am genetically imprinted with the desire to see movies like this, no matter how hard my thinking brain tries to tell me that the movie will be bad.  Reason #2:  My wife and I went to Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg) last May and, seeing that The Darkest Hour is set in Moscow, I wanted to see how the fantasy Moscow of the movie matched up to the actual Moscow that we had visited.

But first, Reason #1:  The Darkest Hour tells the exact same story as Skyline, last yer's maligned aliens invasion movie.  Remember Skyline?  That was the movie where a never explained alien invasion swoops down and hypnotizes all us humans with a pretty light, only to then suck out and eat our brains.  The Darkest Hour has a never explained (and mostly invisible) alien invasion swoop down in a rain of pretty lights, only to then fry every human being into a swirling cloud of dust.  Both films feature a very small cast of surviving characters battling the aliens, and each other, to escape certain death.

The only thing that truly separates the two films is entertainment value.  Skyline, while a bad movie, was incredibly entertaining in a "I cannot believe how insanely stupid this thing is" kind of way.  The Darkest Hour is just boring.  Skyline benefited from an arsenal of monster effects.  The Darkest Hour just sits there.  Director Chris Gorak frames every scene in bland medium shots and does nothing to building tension or suspense.  Every familiar story beat is tapped out with a pedestrian and lackluster economy.  This also extends to the screenplay by Jon Spaihts, which never bothers to develop even a "defining characteristic" for any of the supposed characters running from one set piece to another.  The only character I remember is Sergei, a deus ex machina of an electrician (or plumber) that sings to his cat, and the only reason I remember him is because his name is said, or shouted, repeatedly over a short period of time.

Also unforgivable is the film's non-ending, which plays out more like the cliffhanger set-up for an ongoing television series than the ending of a major motion picture.  I don't think I was the only person in the audience to groan, "That's it?"

Now for Reason #2:  Having been to Moscow, I thought it was pretty neat to see Red Square and the GUM building (the deluxe shopping mall beside it) soon enough after having been there that I could still remember what it felt like to have stood there myself.  I also found it very amusing that, in a non-English speaking country, how many English speaking Russians managed to survive the alien apocalypse, just to risk their lives to help some idiotic American tourists get around town.  That outlandish impossibility was the most entertaining thing about The Darkest Hour.

One star.

2011 in Reading, Watching, and Consuming

Ever since I was in Middle [Earth] School I have attempted to keep a list of whatever I read, watch, or buy (to read or to watch) during the year.  I have done this because I have always been curious as to exactly how much I actually manage to read, watch, or buy in a given year.  Why?  I don't know.  Maybe I just want to look and see if there are (or were) any trends, or something, in my reading, viewing, and buying, I guess.

The problem with doing so is that I read and watch and buy a lot of stuff, and keeping track of it always becomes so labor intensive that I invariably give up on my list keeping some time in (or before) February or March.

But then I got an iPad and it not only became a whole lot easier for me to keep a list, but it became more difficult to lose track of it.  Now, for the first time in the history of ever, I have been able to make it through an entire year with a complete list of all the books and the comics that I have read, the books that I have bought, and all the movies that I have watched and/or bought.  

And now that it is 2012, the time has come for me to go all James Reasoner and blog about my 2011 adventures in reading, watching, and buying:

Books Read:  I have no idea how many "To Be Read" books that I had stacked around the house at the start of 2011.  But in November I listed ALL of them in the "What I Am Reading" column and, at that point in the year, I had a whopping 200 books sitting around, "waiting" to read.  That is a lot of books.  

I read, from beginning to end, a total of 43 (out of 44) books in 2011.  My first book of the year was Steve Alten's silly, albeit very entertaining, monster novel, MEG: Hell's Aquarium.  The last book that I finished reading before the arrival of the New Year was Gene Healy's flawed, but nonetheless fascinating, The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, a review of which will be posted on Monday, January 9th.   I cracked open book number 44  on Thursday, December 28th.  The book that has crossed over into the New Year with me is The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla, by Stephen King.  

In terms of volume (i.e. writers that appeared more than once on my Books Read during 2011 list) I read three books by Joe R. Lansdale, three by Peter David, two anthologies of Robert E. Howard's short fiction, and the first two books in The Strain trilogy, by Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan.  

The best book I read in 2011: Room by Emma Donoghue.  

The worst book I read in 2011 (Books I Could Not Finish do not qualify): Anthem by Ayn Rand.

Books Bought:  I bought 58 books in 2011.  Believe it or not, that is a really low number for me.  I used to buy two to three times that amount during any given year.  But now that I am self-employed, I have had to drastically (or responsibly) cut back on my impulse spending.  So it goes.

Seven of the books that I purchased in 2011 were not placed on my "To Be Read" list.  Six of them were books that I had already read (and "lost" at some point, for one reason or another) and that I just wanted to put back in my "permanent" library.  The seventh was a technical writing reference manual.  

That leaves 51 new books that were added to my "To Be Read" list.  Of the 51 remaining books that I bought in 2011, I managed to read 19 of them.  That leaves 32.  Deduct from that amount the remaining 25 books on my "Books Read" list and I end 2011 with seven more books than I had at the beginning of the year.  (Note:  For some strange reason I neglected to count the books that I received as gifts.  Those will be counted in 2012.)

That number could be a whole lot worse, believe me.  I have always bought an insane amount of books, more than I could ever hope to read, and every year I plan to cut back on my purchasing just enough so that I can manage to read a few more books than I buy.  Once again, that is my goal for the New Year.

2011 ended with 197 books on my "To Be Read" list.  Let's see if I can cut that number down a tad by December 31, 2012.  Okay?

The first book I bought in 2011: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, by Laird Koenig; one of the six "previously read" books that I regretted losing and restored to my permanent library.

The last book I purchased in 2011:  The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, by Stephen King.

Comic Books Read:  I did not make a list of all the comics that I bought in 2011, but I did make a list of all the comics that I read:  137.

First comic/graphic novel I read in 2011:  The Light (TPB)

Last comic book/graphic novel I read in 2011:  Hack/Slash #28.

Movies Watched:  You already know what I consider to be the very best and the absolute worst of the 73 "premiere movies" I saw in 2011.  But that is just a little over half of the 134 movies that I watched in 2011.  I watched another 61 "older movies" on DVD or on Netflix streaming.

The first movie I saw in 2011:  The abysmal Tron: Legacy.

The last movie I saw in 2011:  The sublime Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Movies Bought:  I have also cut back drastically (or responsibly) on my movie/television series set purchases.  In 2011 I bought a paltry 29 movies/television season sets.  Doing so brought my current movie and TV collection to an approximate 372 titles.  (Once again, I did not count the movies and season sets that I received as gifts.)

First movie bought in 2011:  George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (via iTunes).

Last movie bought in 2011:  The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

While I am on the subject of movies, and before I sign off...

By the time I realized that I wasn't keeping a list of the original motion picutre soundtracks that I was buying during the year, it was far too late to keep track.  This year I am going to start counting.  

I do know that the very last soundtrack album that I bought in 2011 was Perseverance's limited edition reissue of Ennio Morricone's score for 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic.

At the moment I have a library of some 440 motion picture soundtracks.  Granted some of those are multiples (thanks to my double dipping whenever a soundtrack I have on vinyl gets reissued on CD, or gets an expanded edition reissue) but I think that it is a safe bet that I will blow past the 500 mark before the end of 2012.

Let's see, shall we?

Have a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

The Best and Worst Movies of 2011

Another year, another list.

The Best:

1.  Super: Writer/director James Gunn's dark comedy was the most heartfelt and bittersweet viewing experience of the year for me.  Gunn's movie left me with a smile on my face, a glow in my heart, and even a tear in my eye.  Although the film certainly had its flaws, it was also perfect in its own idiosyncratic way.

2.  Midnight in Paris:  Woody Allen returns to form with this warm and lush love letter to the romantic mystique that is Paris and its rich artistic history.

3.  Troll Hunter:  You can keep Super 8, I will take this far superior Norwegian monster movie instead, okay?

4.  The First Grader: When the Kenyan government offers free education to all, an 84 year old man demands to attend primary school, so that he may learn how to read.  A touching and inspiring look at just how important it is to have an education.

5.  Melancholia:  Lars von Trier's "beautiful movie about the end of the world" really isn't either of those things.  What the film truly is, is a haunting examination (both literally and figuratively) of the effects of depression and the callousness of Life.

6.  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:  A truly thrilling spy thriller overflowing with wonderful performances from a talented cast.

7.  Hugo:  Not the children's (or family) film that Paramount marketed it as, but a truly breath taking and exilirating look at the birth and power of cinema.

8.  The Way:  I can still find the scars that Wisdom, Emilio Estevez's so-bad-it's-almost-good writing/directing debut, left on my movie watching pscyhe, so I will admit to being more than a bit hesitant about seeing this on the big screen.  But I did and I am glad that I did.  The Way turned out to be a touching and intelligent look at coming to terms with grief and belief.

9.  Win Win:  This small and bittersweet comedy manages to be an almost perfect blend of the bitter and the sweet.  A touching examination of the cost of doing either the wrong thing for the right reason and doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

10.  The Descendants:  George Clooney and the rest of the cast gave powerful performances in this heartbreaking drama about a man (Clooney) confronting the numerous painful revelations and decisions in the wake of his wayward wife's fatal accident.  Having been there and done that, I think the movie hits every single beat dead center.

Honorable Mentions:  Beginners; A Dangerous Method.

2011's Biggest Cinematic Guilty Pleasure: Drive Angry.

The Worst:

1.  The Tree of Life: A ponderous and intellectually vacuous piece of existentialist garbage.  Yes, it's the Book of Job, I get it.

2.  Vanishing on 7th Street: Who would have thought that the dark and the unknown could be so boring?

3.  Rubber: What I expected to see was a playfully absurd horror-comedy about a killer tire, but what I actually wound up seeing was a condescending rant about how utterly worthless the people that would want to a movie about a killer tire are.  No thanks.

4.  Creature: I am quite proud of the fact that I managed to see the second biggest cinematic flop in box office history on the big screen, on opening day.  But that dubious bragging right does not make up for my being bored in the Bayou while watching this Syfy Original level swamp creature feature.

5.  The Darkest Hour:  I do not know who had the bright idea to make a carbon copy of Skyline set in Moscow, but that person needs to stop making movies.

6.  Season of the Witch: Nicolas Cage sleepwalks through a crappy rip-off of Army of Darkness.  I had hoped that this movie would be a campy Guilty Pleasure on a par with Drive Angry.  It wasn't.

7.  Sucker Punch: A complete and utter cinematic train wreck from the shallow mind of Zack Synder.

8.  The Green Hornet:  Actor and co-screenwriter Seth Rogen took a classic hero and made him into an unlikable lout who had me rooting for the bad guys to win.

9.  30 Minutes Or Less:  A painfully unfunny attempt at screwball comedy that features a group of unlikable bozos behaving in a hateful and/or goofy manner.

10.  The Thing:  Part prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing, part remake of it, and a complete and utter train wreck from its needlessly over-the-top beginning to its intelligence insulting ending.  Like the equally awful Creature, the new Thing's script, writing, and acting were all on the level of a Syfy Channel Original.

Dishonorable Mentions:  I Am Number Four; Battle: Los Angeles; Shark Night 3D.

Classic Moment of Cinema: New Year's Evil (1980)

New Year's Evil poster

New Year's Evil trailer

New Year's Evil - by Shadow

2011: The Year in Writing

Not much to report this year.  I wrote six or seven short stories and I started a novel.  I also sold one of the short stories I wrote to the anthology The Big Book of Bizarro, and I began a regular book review column over at the Digital Concordian.

Next year there will be more to report.  A lot more.  I promise.

Search Me 4

Let's close out the Old Year and usher in the new one with some more whacky, strange, interesting, or silly sounding searches that brought people to my humble blog:

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The Island - by T.M. Wright

The Many Pines Inn, an increasingly dilapidated summer resort on the shore of Seventh Lake, in the Adirondacks, is in need of some costly repairs.  Arnaut (pronounced Arno) Berge, hoping to raise some much needed revenue, decides to open up the Many Pines Inn for the winter.

What Arnaut Berge does not know is that the sunken house at the bottom of Seventh Lake is still inhabited.  That during the winter months the residents of that house crawl out to seek warmth; and the winter guests of the Many Pines Inn are very warm...

Wow.  Man really is the warmest place to hide, I guess.

Although I have not read a great many of T.M. Wright's books, the ones that I have read have all been memorably chilling.  The Island is no exception.  There were passages where I felt the chill of the weather, or of the haunting, or just of the impending and unavoidable doom that a great many of the novel's cast of sympathetic characters faced, in a palpable manner.

Wright's books are dreamlike.  The world the characters inhabit, while similar to the real world of the reader, is also just ever so slightly off.  A T.M. Wright novel, to borrow a phrase used by the English language challenged Arnaut Berge, "is at right angles" to the reader's waking reality.

Reading a T.M. Wright novel is like drifting from waking thought into a deranged dream that cannot be easily awoken from.  It is like becoming lost in a fog.  A fog that is filled with voices that do not speak above an impossible to hear whisper, and forms that stay just out of eyesight.  You don't really "read" a T.M. Wright novel, you experience it.

The Island is old school 80s "Quiet Horror" in the vein of Charles L. Grant.  It is a vein that I cannot drink from enough.  (In fact, if I am ever at point where someone asks me which Horror/Dark Fantasy writers have most influenced my own writing, I will say that Charles L. Grant and T.M. Wright, despite my not being all that widely read of the latter, have [along with Ramsey Campbell and Shirley Jackson] been my most powerful influences.)  It is a character driven novel, as opposed to a story driven one, so there really aren't any "Plot Point A" and "Plot Point C" handles to grip onto or explain.  There is just the increasing icy chill of the snow, the lake, and the dead people in the lake.  Cold dead people that just want to be warm.

No matter what time of year you choose to read The Island, there is no weather hot enough to keep you from feeling that chill, and from shivering, and from wanting to feel warm...

Melancholia (2011)

"Life is only on Earth, and not for long."

Part One: Justine:  The wedding reception of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) is a complete and unmitigated disaster.  The bride and groom are two hours late, thanks to a too large limousine trying to navigate a too small curve.  The parents of the bride (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling) both behave deplorably.  The best man (Stellan Skarsgard) is also the bride's employer, an advertising executive that will not let a mere wedding stop him from hounding the bride for a desperately needed tagline.

The bride's sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law, John (Kiefer Sutherland) try desperately to keep the wedding reception running smoothly.  But, as the endless and surreal evening drags on and on and on, Justine's depression manifests and she behaves recklessly in a gradually escalating spiral of self-destructive behavior that ultimately destroys her world.

Part Two: Claire:   A short time after the wedding reception fiasco, Justine notices that a prominent star has disappeared in the sky.  The disappearance turns out to be the result of a rogue planet (named Melancholia) drifting in front of it.  Part Two begins with Melancholia, now clearly visible to the naked eye and growing larger almost by the minute, drifting toward Earth.  While Claire fears that Melancholia is going to hit the Earth, John vehemently denies that such an occurrence is even remotely possible.

Justine, however, seems to be almost comforted by the idea that the planet Earth will be pulvarised in a few short days... 

Although the only other Lars von Trier film I have seen to date is Dogville (which I adored to the point of placing it on both my best of the year and best of the decade movie lists) that was enough to get me excited about seeing Melancholia, his "science-fiction/disaster" film.  I knew enough about the man and his work to expect the unexpected.  I was not disappointed.

The title alone informs you that this will not be some over-the-top special effects laden spectacle.  Melancholia is defined as a "deep sadness or gloom" or a "mental condition marked by constant depression and ill-founded fears" and, even if the titular planet was excised from the film, the title would still be an appropriate one.  The condition melancholia saturates the first half of the film, long before anyone in the film is even aware that the end of the world is swooping toward them.

The melancholia of the first half of the film is quite literal, of course.  Although Von Trier opens his film with a silent (save for the brilliant use of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde) and highly symbolic interpretation of the themes and events to come, an opening that concludes with the Earth being smashed to bits by the gigantic and unstoppable planet Melancholia, the first hour that follows is a searing, discomforting, and dramatically straight forward examination of the corrosive effects of depression.

There is no better setting for this than a wedding reception.  A wedding is supposed to be the happiest of times, but it seldom is.  More often than not it is a stress filled nightmare and "comedy" of errors, or terrors.  Melancholia starts the disaster off with the deceptively funny trouble with the limousine, but the stress fractures the delay has caused are easy to see with Claire and John's frosty greeting of the bride and groom hours late arrival to the reception.  (Although the irony there is the planning and expense have been entirely handled by both Claire and John, so they are responsible for the embarrassing delay, not the bride and groom.)  Justine retaliates by causing a further delay, she runs off to say hello to a beloved horse, before joining the wedding party at the reception.  An act that nicely foreshadows her later, and far more destructive, behavior.

The stress fractures between Justine and Claire are shown to go back a long, long time.  All the way back to their emotionally immature and aloof father (John Hurt) and caustically neglectful mother (Charlotte Rampling), who both battle to make the most embarrassing and hurtful comments to each other during their "toast" to the bride and groom.

Just about everybody wants Justine to be happy.  But Justine is not happy.  Although she smiles (and smiles and smiles) she is clearly fighting a losing battle with her depression.  An affliction that clearly predates the events of the film's two stories.

While the "end of the world" in the first story is a symbolic one (in that the viewer is shown a marriage crushed and destroyed by the heavy, black emotional cloud of depression) and the depression quite literal; the film's second story has the end of the world be quite literal and the "black cloud of depression" be the ever present and quite ominous, although nonetheless hypnotically beautiful, visual symbol of the slowly approaching planet Melancholia.

It is during the second half that I think von Trier stumbles, albeit only slightly.  He switches his narrative focus from Justine (who is now just a crippled husk) to Claire (who is beginning to suffer from a Melancholia induced state of melancholia) and isolates them from all exterior distractions.

Let's wait just a moment.  Before I talk about where I think von Trier stumbled, I feel compelled to point out this isolation from an always unseen outside world.  Not once does the film ever leave the visual confines of Claire and John's mansion.  Save for some Internet searches, a few supply runs to an unseen village, and a power outtage that occurs during Melancholia's penultimate approach, there does not even appear to be an outside world.  This gives the proceedings the dreamlike feel of a nightmare.  

That dreamlike feeling reminded me of Shirley Jackson's surreal end of the world novel. The Sundial.  I do not know if Melancholia's atmospheric resemblance to Jackson's novel is intentional, or not.  But it was the prominant image of a sundial during the film's symbolic opening suite that awakened my memory of the book:

I can only look at that image and wonder if von Trier was winking at the readers in the audience, or if it was all just a "happy accident".

Now back to where I thought von Trier stumbled.  As the planet Melancholia approaches and Claire beomes more and more afraid, she and Justine have a rather odd conversation about Life.  Justine shares her opinion that life is evil and that no one will miss it when it is gone.  Because this is von Trier speaking directly through Justine's mouth, Claire cannot mount anything more than the most simplistic and clumsy of counter-arguments against Justine.  Depsite there being plenty of philosophical or theological defenses against such a trite and symplistic statement.  

At this point there could have been all manner of arguments/discussions between Justine and Claire, Clarie and John, John and Justine about the laws of physics, about how a true negative cannot exist without a corresponding true positive, or how the term Evil is a nothing but a human construct, that true Life exists entirely outside of the subjective concept of Evil, and so on a so forth.  

Von Trier manuevers around all of that by having Justine bestowed with some kind of psychic or otherworldly knowledge, which is just a deus ex machina to save her shallow and poorly defined depression induced nihilism from serious discussion or debate.  Which is too bad, for I think that von Trier has both the intellectual and artistic capabilites to explore and examine such ideas, concepts, and beliefs in a far more intelligent and thought provoking manner than he ultimately does in Melancholia.

Three and a half stars out of four.

Classic Moment of Cinema: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Silent Night, Deadly Night trailer

Silent Night, Deadly Night poster

Santa's Watching (Silent Night, Deadly Night remix)

Sides - by Peter Straub

How can I avoid sounding like the pompous (and fictitious) blowhard Putney Tyson Ridge while reviewing this hodgepodge of essays and ephemera from horror genre icon Peter Straub?  I don't know if I can.  I also do not know if that is a bad thing.  Ridge's over-the-top ramblings are very entertaining.

Sides gathers together some 21 plus years of Peter Straub's predominantly non-fiction writing.  Collected in this book are the totality of Introductions and Afterwards that Straub has written for either new "deluxe editions" of older, classic books, new editions of his own books, or for anthologies of a particular writer's short fiction.  The book also contains the complete text of his Guest-of-Honor speech at the 1998 International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, as well as a tear inducing essay about his mother.

The remaining work, a "frivolity" titled Why Electricman Lives in New York, and the collected ramblings of Straub's fictitious childhood friend, Putney Tyson Ridge, do not qualify as non-fiction.  Electricman is just a short-short about what an awesome and literate place New York City is, while the Ridge ramblings are just Peter Straub satirizing (or ridiculing, or making fun of) himself, his work, his friends, and even his family.

But first the real non-fiction.  Straub, who was working towards a doctorate degree in literature when he "bolted" from academia to become a writer of fiction, shows his literary chops in his introductions to Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives, Lawrence Block's Hope to Die, H.G. Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Of the quartet, the "introduction" to Block's novel (which became a literary critique of Block's entire Matthew Scudder series) is the undisputed highpoint.  When I finished the essay I wanted to close Sides and download some of Block's novels onto my Kindle, so I could start pouring over the text with refocused eyes.

Straub is at his worst, though, when he fawns over some "hot new thing", which he does in his introductions to Leningrad Nights and Tales of Pain and Wonder.  The less I say about Straub's utterly incomprehensible introduction to the Poppy Z. Brite collection, Are You Loathsome Tonight, the better.

But Straub is at his best when speaking respectfully and intelligently about a relative, friend, or fellow writer.  Straub's remembrance of the late, great "Quiet Horror" writer Charles L. Grant, Quietly Now, is a touching farewell to one of the great unknown giants in the Dark Fantasy field.  His essay about Stephen King, Secret Windows, is an excellent examination and defense of the oft-derided "King of Horror", and, as stated before, his easy about his mother, simply titled Mom, is capable of moving a reader to tears.  All three are rewarding reading and, coupled with the above praised quartet of essays, makes for an easy to recommend compilation of non-fiction writing.

Which leaves me with the fiction stuffed into this supposed collection of non-fiction.  It has been said that only the thinnest of razor thin lines separates horror and humor.  It has also been pointed out, with great frequency, what a bunch of pranksters most horror writers are.  The twenty or so caustically comical "critiques" and "remarks" by the "renowned literary figure and leader in Popular Culture Studies" that was Putney Tyson Ridge, Ph.D., shows that Straub could have made a living writing Woody Allen style comedy, had he been called to follow that path.  It's a side of Peter Straub's talent that I wished I could read more often.

Hack/Slash: Entry Wound [One Shot] & Hack/Slash #28: Something's Fishy

Entry Wound:

"An epic story is unfolding..."

Some kind of sentient hyper-concept known as Mary Shelley Lovecraft is destroying the walls between "idea space" (where fictional creations "live") and physical space (i.e. reality).  Characters from across the numerous idea space parallel realities come together to battle Mary Shelley Lovecraft and save entire dimensions and universes from a catastrophic reboot.

"This is not that story."

Just before the events of Foes and Fortunes, Cassie and Vlad are tooling through rural Pennsylvania.  Something is causing the Holiday, Seasonal and One-Day-A-Year slashers to become active at the same time.  Having defeated the slashers of Memorial Day, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Easter, and St. Patrick's Day, it is time to deal with Peter Lapage, the Candlemas Murderer (a.k.a. the Groundhog Psycho).

Something's Fishy:

"Fish-people have overrun my whole town."

Cassie and Vlad rush to help "Our Boy Taber" when they hear his panicked call into a radio program, telling of, well, see above quote...

What ties these two one shot issues together is the presence of one Mary Shelley Lovecraft, a "sentient hyper-concept of the nth level" that has been given a self aware consciousness by the "relevance and power" of its varied source materials, and her [or its] desire to obliterate the real world and replace it with a "superior realm of idea space."

In simpler words, "fictional characters are gonna hop out of books and take over."

Cassie and Vlad are not aware of Mary Shelley Lovecraft during the events of Entry Wound, a "new reader friendly" mini-story.  Her first appearance is treated as something akin to a joke, what with the "not that story" serving as the punchline to her grand entrance.  By the end of the story it is made clear that MSL is the reason why all of the Holiday, Seasonal, and One-Day-A-Year slashers are all becoming active.  The two battles converge without really converging, allowing Entry Wound to end with a touching explanation of what kind of story the Hack/Slash series is.

But the Lovebunny & Mr. Hell "gag reel" that has been popping up at the end of Hack/Slash showed MSL being reborn in another idea space reality.

How MSL made it from Lovebunny & Mr. Hell over to the Archie parody locale of Haverhill (last seen in the Hack/Slash issue number six story, Double Date) is unclear.  But get to Haverhill she [it] does and the result is a hilarious homage/parody of Archie, H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and, I am reasonably certain, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (what with MSL's meta-fiction plan to destroy "reality").

As was the case with Entry Wound, Something's Fishy ends on a somewhat poignant note.  As entertaining as MSL's visit to Haverhill was for the reader, it was something quite different for the residents of the parody town.  Their idea space world has changed in a subtle, but nonetheless noticeable manner.  Their world, like the mid-world locale of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, has moved on.

And while there is no ending gag hinting at a return of the tentacled villainess, I think that it is also made clear that Hack/Slash has yet to see the last of Mary Shelley Lovecraft.

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America - by David Hajdu

Reading David Hajdu's excellent book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, reminded me of the unpleasant dark side to the pop culture truism behind Paul Simon's song lyric, "every generation throws a hero up the pop charts."  Every generation also tosses its sacrificial scapegoat onto a funeral pyre and cheers while watching it burn, delighting in the perceived banishment of some perceived societal evil.

Just replace comic books with penny dreadfuls, or dimes novels, or jazz music, or dancing, or rock and roll music, or horror, fantasy, or science-fiction movies, television programming, or pulp magazines, nudie or pornographic magazines, or slasher movies, or heavy metal, or rap music, or even the Internet, and the truth in the line from the first Men in Black movie, "A person is smart.  People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals..." is easy to see and difficult to ignore.

I found the first half of the book, which described the birth and rise of the comic-book, easier to read than the second half, which described its painful collapse.  Learning how comic-books came into being and how the pioneers of the art form (and yes, it was and is an honest-to-goodness art form) created an all new storytelling format was fascinating stuff.  Reading about Bill Gaines disastrous appearance and testimony before Estes Kefauver's juvenile delinquency hearings was just painful and depressing.

With creative roots buried deep inside the fertile soil of the urban and immigrant experience, and with its shocking (for the time) combination of graphic illustrated images and the written word, the comic-book was lambasted (then and now) for being the lowest of lowbrow entertainment.  A pox on the developing intellects of the young children that read them.  The idea that adults might, and could, read comic-books was summarily dismissed by critics of the form.

But there is a happy ending, of a sort.  Even though social disinformationists, like (the now thoroughly discredited) Seduction of the Innocent author Fredric Wertham, "literary" critics, like children's book author Sterling North, and self-proclaimed protectors of cultural purity, like Bishop John Francis Noll, may have won their battle against comic-books, they ultimately lost their war.  Comic-books managed to survive and, even with the overly puritanical Comics Code smothering them for several decades, regain their edge and, even better, have managed to gain a modicum of respectability.

Comic-books survived and, to borrow a quite from one time Mad Magazine writer Stan Hart, from the end of the book, "survival is the best revenge."

Yes, it is.

Classic Moment of Cinema: Ghost Ship (2002)

Ghost Ship (2002) trailer

Ghost Ship (2002) poster

This poster looks awfully familiar, doesn't it?

Ghost Ship (2002): The Antonia Graza - Music by John Frizzell

Hack/Slash #26 & 27: Foes and Fortunes Parts 1 & 2 (of 2)

"They probably don't think of Chicago."

When the notorious Meat Man, the serial killer that "stole" Vlad's good name, is rumored to have returned to the mean streets of Chicago, Cassie and Vlad come calling.  Since the rumor seems to consist of a single witness, Cassie suspects the rumored return is nothing but a trap.  Her suspicions are quite correct.  The woman calling herself Santa Muerte has spread the rumor in order to catch and kill Cassie and Vlad.

But Santa Muerte and her partner are the least of Cassie and Vlad's worries...

Ghosts of slashers past ("Long past?", "No, your past.") have returned to create quite a bit of havoc for Cassie and Vlad in this entertaining two-parter.  A story that not once pauses to a take a breath or over stays its welcome.  Foes and Fortunes is about as close to what a "perfect" (for me, at least) Hack/Slash story should read like.

I knew I was going to love this story when a weird and out of left field love scene between Cassie and Samhain ("No... leave the mask on.") is revealed to actually be a fantasy that Cassie is using to enhance what she later describes as "drilling for maiden water".  Well, nights can get long and lonely while on the road.

Cassie is interrupted by Vlad, of course, which leads to a snicker inducing, albeit short lived, conversation.  One that shows just how comfortable Cassie and Vlad have become with each other, now that the two have worked out their sexual frustrations with other parties and are content to be friends without benefits.

The comfort they share allows Vlad to openly voice his confusion and concern regarding Cassie sparing the life of the slasher Samhain in the previous story.  Vlad reminds Cassie of how ruthless she was in dealing with a pack of children that had been exposed to the black flame liquid, and thus were becoming slashers.

It is a relevant question that needed to be asked (and one that shows just how focused and determined writer Tim Seeley is when it comes to holding his characters accountable for their actions) and begs to be answered.  

While the events of the Foes and Fortunes story does give Cassie a convenient escape, one that allows her to avoid answering Vlad's question, those very same events answer Vlad's question for him.  Foes and Fortunes draws upon the events and the villains from several of Cassie and Vlad's earliest adventures: Julian Gallo, the Mosaic Man, and, in a truly inspired touch, Laura Lochs, who controlled the puritanical slasher known as Father Wrath.  The hows and the whys of their links to Santa Muerte's motivations are a touching (and textbook) example how great evil can come from the desire to achieve a great good, or vice versa.  It is not an easy answer, nor is it a happy one.  But it certainly is satisfying.

 

Atoms and Evil - by Robert Bloch

Thirteen tales of once and future shock, from the genre Grand Master Robert Bloch!

Try This for Psis:  Professor Seine would like nothing more than to have his star psychic pupil, Frank Tallent, prove extrasensory perception skeptic Dr. Angus Welk wrong, once and for all.  Unfortunately Frank and Dr. Welk's daughter, Nora, have fallen in love, and Nora does not want her beloved father embarrassed by Frank Tallent's psychic talents.

Comfort Me, My Robot:  Henson wants to murder his wife, so he can alleviate some unwanted stress in their marriage and they can be happy again.  Which is the precise reason why 21st century scientists invented surrogate robots.

Talent:  Andrew Benson has the talent to imitate anyone and, it turns out, any thing.

The Professor Plays It Square:  A prestigious Professor of parapsychology "investigates" games of chance 

Block that Metaphor:  Vorm is a Mech, a cybernetic alien.  One that takes human metaphors a tad too literally.

Wheel and Deal:  An auto-erotic (i.e. female robot) dealership owner breaks in a new salesman.

You Got to Have Brains:  A strange inventor known only as Mr. Goofy claims to have a built a spaceship that only needs one thing to make it move.

You Could Be Wrong:  When Harry Jessup finally watches TV, he begins to realize just how truly fake the world around him has become.

Egghead:  In a conformist society there is a hefty price to be paid by the non-conformist, just ask Dick.  Better yet, don't.

Dead-End Doctor:  Dr. Howard Anson, the last psychiatrist on Earth, tries to find his place in a world of robots. 

Change of Heart:  A young man falls in love with a clockmaker's daughter.

Edifice Complex:  Wayne and Nora have come to Vergis IV to search for diamonds, what they find is a monstrous secret.

Constant Reader:  An exploration team discovers a planet without any life, but with a great deal of intelligence...

The cover of my Gold Medal paperback edition proudly, loudly and boldly states that this collection represents "Science Fantasy at its best!"  While such hyperbole is always debatable, if not extremely questionable, I am not all that inclined to argue with the statement, too much.  Robert Bloch was referred to as a Grand Master for numerous reasons, and Atoms and Evil contains several of them.

Even though the futurist technology and dystopian day-after-tomorrows in which the stories are set have become fairly dated (Egghead is set within the conform-or-else fascist police state that is the United States of America of 1978, and the metallic female robots of Wheel and Deal sound silly compared to what the sex dolls of today are like) Robert Bloch was never all that interested in writing about the toys.  He wrote about the people using the toys and about how the inner workings of the human mind could and would motivate a person to use or create those toys.  As sad as it is to say, the more things change, the more they really do seem to stay the same.  It is that simple truth that makes these thriteen tales retain a certain degree of freshness, although all of them are close to being sixty-plus years old..

But change a date and a cultural reference, or two, and any one of these stories in the collection could easily be imagined taking place today, or in our own not too distant future.  The worlds described in Comfort Me, My Robot, Wheel and Deal, You Could Be Wrong, Egghead, and even Dead-End Doctor are still easy to imagine and, once again, even though it is very sad to say and even sadder to admit, easy to relate to.

Not all of the thirteen stories collected in the book represent Bloch at the height of his storytelling abilities, though.  Some are just average slices of what is now thought of generic Twilight Zone era science-fantasy.  Try This For Psis, The Professor Plays It Square, and You Got to Have Brains, while culled from Bloch's famous comedic wordplay sandbox, are all fairly pedestrian.  I thought that Psis was the best of the trio, only because, unlike the other two stories, I could not figure out what the story's twist ending and/or punchline would turn out to be.  The other two I saw coming long before I reached the last line.  The very same thing can be said of the tragic love story Change of Heart, which, like Brains, reveals its twist ending in the title.

Which brings me to the monster stories.  I love monsters, so Talent, Edifice Complex, and Constant Reader brought joy to my reading world that the other ten stories could not.  I am not saying that these three tales were the best in the book.  (I think that Wheel and Deal, Egghead and You Could Be Wrong are the "best in show" for this particular collection.)  But my first true love has always been monster stories, and Talent, Edifice Complex, and Constant Reader all deliver great fun.  

One thing that I found very interesting was how Edifice and Reader both echoed another memorable Bloch story, The Bald-headed Mirage.  Edifice, Reader, and Mirage are all tales of small groups of space travellers that land on barren and "lifeless" planets that turn out to be not all that lifeless.  Each story serves as a beautiful example of how Bloch could take the same simple idea and turn into something fresh and fascinating, over and over again.

Which is why he is considered a Grand Master. 

Fallen Angel #22 - 26

"What, then, is the heroic journey?"

A troubled young boy named James sleepwalks into Bete Noire, where he is confronted by various nightmarish scenarios and beings.  Fleeing a fierce back alley battleground, James seeks shelter inside a nearby church.  There he meets the kindly Jude.  He also witnesses the beginning of a war...

With the Magistrate of Bete Noire able to wield the power to shape the world, for better or for worse, it is not at all surprising that there should be a governing body to not only monitor what the Magistrate is doing, but to also make "suggestions" for courses of action for the Magistrate to undertake.  That governing body is the Hierarchy.  

While the Hierarchy has been amused by some of the entertainments that Jude has brought to Bete Noire (i.e. such things as Church services and trials by jury) they are not at all pleased with the job that Jude has been doing as Magistrate.  The Hierarchy does not like that Jude has been trying to make the world a better place for the opposing team.  So a hostile takeover is, um, undertaken.

It is time to say good-bye to some familiar faces as the status quo of Bete Noire and Fallen Angel is given a shake-up worthy of a snow globe.  The war brings a new boss to power, and he is not at all friendly.  It's the demon lord Moloch, housed in the body and spirit of Jude's insanely jealous half-brother Jubal, who gets a rather unpleasant lesson in the truism of always being careful of what one wishes for, because you just might get it.

And, as I said, some people get got real good in this story arc.  There is not only a new magistrate, there is also a new Chief Examiner, someone literally loses his head, and Furors may or may not be closed for renovations.  As you can guess from that spoiler filled comment (these issue are three years old, at least, so the spoiler expiration date has come and gone) the battle for Bete Noire is not much of a war.  It's more of a one sided ass whooping for Team Jude.

That means the true war for control of the City That Shapes the World has only just begun to be fought.  Which also explains why, as interesting and exciting as the events in this story arc were, the conclusion left me feeling unsatisified and eager for some payback. 

I'm sure that will happen, in time.

Classic Moment of Cinema: Death Ship (1980)

Death Ship trailer

Death Ship poster