Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990): adapted by John Esposito from the short story by Stephen King; directed by Ralph S. Singleton; starring David Andrews (John Hall), Kelly Wolf (Jane), Stephen Macht (Warwick), Vic Polizos (Hose Guy), and Brad Dourif (Exterminator): Singleton's only film-directing credit; he was primarily known as a producer on such projects as Pet Sematary, Clear and Present Danger, and... Juwanna Mann? Well, at least he had range.
Rats are a problem at a decrepit Maine cotton mill in both the superior short story and this inferior movie.
Stephen King observed that the movie dumped a lot of money into the Maine economy. That's high praise!
But it's an enjoyable piece of trash, with mostly decent acting (though Pennsylvanian Macht's over-the-top struggles with a Maine accent are intermittently hilarious). Brad Dourif has an almost entirely self-contained and pointless cameo role. But he's always good, even in this dog.
Director Singleton seems to have no idea how to create mood in a horror movie. The basements, sub-basements, and sub-sub-basements are unterrifyingly well-lit, and Singleton is no Kubrick when it comes to well-lit horror.
Pre-CGI problems abound with the rat actors as well. Real trained rats can't actually flood areas with people in them the way they do in the claustrophobic, rat-crowded story. So they instead put in appearances from time to time, looking unbearably cute. By the end, the movie seems to be about a heroic human saving a bunch of cute rats from a lifetime of servitude to a mean, giant rat-monster tyrant.
The giant rat-monster (you knew there was a giant rat-monster in this, right?), so effectively revealed in the short story, instead just keeps showing up throughout the movie. Apparently it has a clock to punch. As it seem to have free access to the upper levels of the mill whenever it wants that access, its Final Boss Monster status has been completely eroded by the conclusion, when we see it for about the hundredth time (subjectively).
Still, there are worse ways to spend 100 minutes. And the beefy, yelling guy with the high-pressure hose is an unintentional bit of exquisite comedy. Badly recommended (new rating!).
Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (2007): based on characters created by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shushett, Jim Thomas, and John Thomas; written by Shane Salerno; directed by Colin and Greg Krause; starring Steven Pasquale (Dallas), Reiko Aylesworth (Kelly), John Ortiz (Morales), Johnny Lewis (Ricky), and Kristen Hager (Jesse):
Fun fact: so far as I could tell, 'Requiem' never appears as part of the title in the actual movie. Which makes a certain amount of sense because there's very little that's Requiemesque about this production.
Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (AVP2R?) surprised me by not being terrible. It's not good. But it entertained me sporadically for two hours. Its main strength is its absolute ruthlessness towards characters minor and major, and ruthlessness in its scenarios. An egg-laying Alien gets into a maternity ward. Hoo boy, is that brutal both in what's shown and what's implied! The Alien, actually a Predator-Alien hybrid, can lay multiple eggs out of its mouth. Ha ha! That's some grotesque stuff! Those mothers and fetuses are totally screwed!
And there's more where that came from.
On a television screen, the action is sometimes so dark as to be incomprehensible. That's not really a bad thing in a horror movie, though because of the darkness it took me two-thirds of the film to figure out which Alien was the ill-advised Alien/Predator hybrid. And good luck differentiating that hybrid in some scenes from the actual Predator sent to clean up the mess caused by a Predator research vessel crashing near a small town in Colorado and thus releasing a truckload of Facehuggers and that nasty hybrid.
The cast is anonymous but perfectly serviceable. British Columbia plays Colorado effectively. It's a decent time-waster and, though it' s a direct sequel to the first Aliens vs. Predator movie, one doesn't need to have seen that movie to understand this one. I do wish Robocop would get involved in these franchise crossovers, though. And Wolverine. Lightly recommended.
The Color Over Occam (2012) by Jonathan Thomas: Set in and around the New England town of Occam, The Color Over Occam is narrated by Occam city clerk Jeffrey Slater. Slater and his friend Wil run a public access cable show involving their investigations of the supernatural. As the novel begins, they're paddling around the city reservoir -- once farmland but flooded since the 1920's -- investigating claims of "ghost lights" on the waters at night. And they find them. But they're not ghosts.
You see, Occam was renamed from its original 'Arkham' a couple of decades back. And readers of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal horror story "The Color Out of Space" will quickly recognize that demon-haunted reservoir...
Thomas' first novel is a witty, cynical, often satiric addition to the Cthulhu Mythos. The problems of civic politics (and politicians covering their own asses) make for a welcome new spin on cosmic horror. There are points at which The Color Over Occam is quite funny, and not always bleakly (though Thomas does bleak too!).
I think one can read The Color Over Occam without having read "The Color Out of Space." Or perhaps preferably, read or re-read Lovecraft's story AFTER reading The Color Over Occam. Thomas deftly weaves the original into his novel without imitating Lovecraft's prose or narrative emphases.
While there's drollery and a bit of comic over-emphasis at points in the narrative, the text maintains a sense of verisimilitude throughout. How would a small-town government deal with cosmic horror building in its town? How would an amateur ghost-finder deal with potentially world-shattering events? How will Slater deal with his low alcohol tolerance? Why does office work suck so much?
The Color Over Occam compares favourably with several novels I can think of. Its occasionally hapless protagonist and the cosmic but town-centric events he's trapped within remind me of Ramsey Campbell's Creatures of the Pool and The Last Revelation of Gla'aki. The office- and civic-based comedy repeatedly reminded me of William Browning Spencer's hilarious Resumé with Monsters. And the subject matter recalls Michael Shea's fun, pulpy sequel to Lovecraft's original, The Color Out of Time.
But this novel is also its own self with an unusual mix of wit, satire, cosmic horror, and body horror that pay suitable homage to Lovecraft's great original without attempting to mimic "The Color Out of Space" in form, style, or mood. Highly recommended.
Life (2017): written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick; directed by Daniel Espinosa; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (David Jordan) and Rebecca Ferguson (Miranda North): A movie riddled with scientific, engineering, logical, and character idiocies -- that's Life!
I'm pretty sure the pitch for this movie was "Gravity meets Alien!" even though Alien was also set in and around space because Life has a lot of zero-G shots and ostensibly takes place in the present day, albeit a present day with radically different laws of physics.
There could easily be a good version of this movie in which a Martian octopus with an eating disorder attacks the International Space Station. Indeed, there have been many good versions of this movie, from both versions of The Thing to Alien to, I don't know, Hitchcock's Lifeboat.
This version, though, is an exercise in grim dumbness, surprisingly from the screenwriters of the jaunty Deadpool. By the end, you will be cheering for the Martian octopus, which is smarter than an entire station filled with astronauts because as we all know from Armageddon and many other movies, astronauts are really stupid when compared to Just Plain Folks. Not recommended.
Southern Gods (2011) by John Hornor Jacobs: An enjoyable, bloody, thoughtful piece of hardboiled Southern Gothic Lovecraftian cosmic horror blues.
In 1951 Tennessee, enforcer Bull Ingram gets loaned by his criminal employer to a record-company owner who has lost one of his employees in Arkansas. The employee was pursuing rumours of a strange bluesman named Ramblin' John Hastur. Yes, Hastur. As in Robert W. Chambers' THE KING IN YELLOW.
Oh oh is right!
Meanwhile, a parallel narrative introduces us to abused wife Sarah and daughter Franny, who have fled her husband back to the old family home in Arkansas. That family home was the site of a mass murder of a family by its young son decades earlier. And the library of that home contains some extremely odd volumes, ones familiar either in name or content to fans of the Cthulhu Mythos and all its tentacular offshoots.
Haunted by his experiences in the Pacific Theatre in World War Two, Bull Ingram is also haunted by an essentially decent nature that has been sublimated so that he can get on with his work collecting loans for his employer. He's an almost quintessential figure for hardboiled fiction, a tarnished knight, a grey man sent into battle against the pitch-black (and bone-white) forces that seek to devour the world. Jacobs also does a nice job of investing Sarah with increasing assurance as the narrative progresses.
Southern Gods is unusually bloody for cosmic horror and unusually cosmic for bloody horror. Jacobs deftly creates a sense of place throughout, especially in the dives and small-town radio stations Bull investigates during his mission. The climax and its aftermath are also rewarding, a rejection of the occasionally easy nihilism of many works of horror without moving into unearned sentimentality. Highly recommended.
