Sunday, December 31, 2017
Saturday, December 16, 2017
The Void (2016)
Canadian acting stalwarts Art Hindle and Kenneth 'Wyndham Earle' Welsh rub shoulders with relative unknowns in this tale of a stripped-down, soon-to-be-closed rural hospital assaulted from within and without by cult members, monsters, and a terrible FORCE FROM OUTSIDE. Dread and fun combine in productive ways, and the movie even quotes from that cult sf classic The Quiet Earth. Highly recommended.
Get Out (2017)
A zippy, suspenseful horror movie about racial relations. Rod Serling, who did so many allegorical stories on The Twilight Zone, would be proud of Jordan Peele's creepy, satirical story about an extraordinarily bad visit to the country by art photographer Chris (a great Daniel Kaluuya) to meet the parents (creepy Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) of his girlfriend of four months (Alison Williams, perfectly cast).
Peele builds the suspense gradually over the first half, lightening some scenes with comic-relief TSA agent/Chris's best pal Rod on the phone (one of the jokes is that Rod's paranoid fantasies about what rich white people want with black people is neither paranoid nor fantasy). The ending descends into cathartic violence that seems to comment on both current events and the tragic ending of George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead, with its heroic African-American protagonist.
Peele has a nice director's eye, giving us colour-saturated scenes of privileged gentility and night-time scenes of startling horror. The movie also nods to The Wicker Man (the original), Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain" in interesting ways. I think Peele's just-announced Twilight Zone reboot should be a blast. Highly recommended.
Gojira (1954)
There's also a love story, some commentary on atomic bombs and atomic testing, a doomsday weapon called The Oxygen Destroyer (what a band name that would be!), and a lengthy prayer/song sequence. Gojira is all monster here. It's sometimes forgotten that Gojira is naturally 150 feet tall, though the atomic tests that awoke him probably gave him that deadly radioactive fire breath.
Some effects don't work at all, most notably a sequence in which jet fighters engage Gojira with some hilariously inaccurate firecrackers meant to be missiles. Other effects still work, though, especially those involving the devastation of Tokyo and the pitiful fates of those caught on the ground by this new God of the Atomic Age. Where are the heroic Mothra larvae when you need them? Recommended.
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Vampyr (1931) and Eraserhead (1977)
Does our protagonist have a number of dreams, waking or otherwise, during his pursuit of a vampire? What is up with that creepy doll in the corner of that shot? What the Hell is going on with all the shadows doing weird stuff? And so on, and so forth. It's a languorous movie in the best possible way, best watched late at night. Highly recommended.
That terrific, innovative, terrifying miniseries (maxiseries?) echoes with the sounds of Eraserhead. Literally, at certain points, given the sound design of the two projects. Eraserhead is a necessity on its own, of course, a masterpiece of horrors cloachal, bodily, existential, and cosmic. It remains as essential now as it was 40 years ago, one of the crowning moments of 'Art Cinema' and cult horror and WTF movie-making. Highly recommended.
Monday, December 11, 2017
Dark Places (2009) by Gillian Flynn
Dark Places is a dark romp occasionally undercut by its glibness and by an ending that seems aimed at some sequel down the road. Its strengths are its strong though sometimes programmatic characterization, especially of its protagonist, Libby Day.
Day was the sole survivor at age seven of the 1985 massacre of her mother and two sisters in their small Midwestern town. Her 15-year-old brother went to jail for the murders, primarily because of Libby's coached, fictionalized testimony.
24 years later, a bunch of wonky murder hobbyists who debate various solved and unsolved homicides online and at conventions pay Libby to appear at one such convention, where she discovers that the "Kill Club" believes that she lied on the stand and that her brother is innocent.
Libby may have lived a horrid life of depression and mania and seclusion, but the lure of money gets her out of the house. Initially that's because her inheritance is about $500 away from running out. So she negotiates various fees with the Kill Club in exchange for her visiting anyone and everyone who might know something about the murders that the police never investigated. The quest will ultimately involve meeting with her brother in jail after not talking to him in 24 years, as well as a meeting or two with her absent, alcoholic, deranged father.
Libby is a great character -- wounded, acerbic, cynical, self-lacerating, other-lacerating. The novel alternates her first-person, present-day narration with third-person chapters focused on brother Ben and their single mother, depressed and beaten down and poor and about to lose the family farm to the Bank.
Aside from that ending, Dark Places also has a problem more peculiar to Hollywood movies than novels: its mystery is compromised by the novelistic equivalent of a combination of Chekov's Gun and the 'Unmotivated', secretly Motivated Close-up that reveals the identity of the killer or the mole an hour before that character steps on stage (see: the cook in The Hunt For Red October).
One seemingly random bit of conversation early in the novel reveals a major late-novel revelation. It screams for attention because there's no other similar information surrounding it. There might as well be a flashing neon sign pointing to it.
The rest of the mystery seems to be telegraphed about halfway through the book by virtue of several Neon Moments of Fore-shadowing. Oh, well. I guessed the major plot revelation of Gone Girl before watching the movie without ever reading the novel. Flynn maybe needs to work on this. Or not. Certainly a lot of people like her stories just the way they are, ready to hit the screen and partially predigested when it comes to Twists.
In any case, Dark Places is a mostly fun, fast read. Its level of mystery will probably depend on just how many mysteries you've read and seen. Its narrative use of the 1980's Satanic Cult scares that put a lot of innocent people in jail doesn't quite work as commentary because there are actual Satanists in the novel, no matter how puerile. Though that's almost paid off by Libby's discovery that the Satanic teenager of 1985 becomes the feed-store operator of 2009. Recommended.
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Paperbacks from Hell(2017) by Grady Hendrix
Copiously illustrated. Maybe obscenely illustrated! Horror writer Grady Hendrix keeps things zipping along, aided by all the crazy covers from those paperbacks (and discussions of some of the more famous cover artists of the period). A chronological discussion of the era shares space with thematic discussions (Insects! Incest!) and pieces on notable writers of the boom.
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| Nazi leprechauns! |
Hendrix begins the story of his own infatuation with horror paperbacks by discussing his discovery of John Christopher's batshit-crazy novel The Little People, thanks to its batshit-crazy cover art.
Holy moley! I have to buy and read this book!
I noticed a few factual errors (most puzzlingly, the misidentification of the writer of Watership Down). But overall, Grady has an interestingly idiosyncratic take on the Golden Age of Paperback Horror, along with the reasons for its rise and fall. Will Errickson supplies an essay at the back of the book, along with a lot of help Hendrix gleaned from Too Much Horror Fiction. Highly recommended.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
The Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane
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| Even the cover is quiet. Too quiet... |
Filmmakers adapted The Edge of Running Water in 1941 as The Devil Commands, a solid and relatively faithful Boris Karloff movie with a completely anomalous title.
The Edge of Running Water concerns the efforts of a scientist to build a machine that can contact the dead. He's motivated by the death of his wife from pneumonia. He has a strange woman as his helper. And he's called upon an old friend and former student he hasn't seen for years to provide some vital information needed to complete the experiment. Near a small town in the wilds of pre-Stephen-King Maine, the scientist's experiments have already attracted attention and rumour-mongering among that small town's residents.
And periodically, a strange thunder-like sound booms out from the scientist's house, a sound he will not explain to anyone.
The novel is long on mood and gradually-building suspense and somewhat short on actual scares. Sloane's first-person narrator -- that old friend -- can seem a bit glib at times, and perhaps even a little dense. However, that denseness works in the novel's favour when it comes to the cosmic horror that underlies the novel.
Our narrator -- and, indeed, everyone else in the novel -- seems to be blithely unaware of the possibility that the experiment creates something much more disturbing than a telephone line to the dead. A terrible mystery may have been solved by the climax of the novel. But is a mystery solved when no one knows it, or at least admits to its solution?
Yes. Yes it is.
The Edge of Running Water is a quiet book, dominated at one point by an overly lengthy police investigation and throughout by the love story that develops between the narrator and the dead wife's sister, who has also come to find out what her uncle is up to. Recommended.
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
The Devil Commands (1941)
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| No devil appears in the movie. |
Moody, atmospheric horror film with Karloff as a Mad Scientist, or more accurately a sane scientist driven mad by his wife's death and the subsequent revelations about the afterlife as revealed by his investigations into brain function.
Frame narration from Karloff's daughter doesn't really help with suspense, but the movie as a whole is enjoyable. Karloff is more mournful and far less threatening than usual as the increasingly loopy scientist who believes that he can build a machine to communicate with the dead in general and his wife in particular. And what a machine! The final form of his 'Dead Set' really makes the whole movie worthwhile. It's Vacuum-Tube Gothic.
Other elements are perhaps a bit more rote, from the grieving daughter and her boring love interest to the wily sheriff. Karloff's hulking henchman Karl possesses a bit more pathos than most such characters, as we see the accident that 'creates' him. An unscrupulous 'fake' medium who turns out to have real psychic powers (shades of Ghost!) rounds out the major players.
Director Edward Dmytryk is better at mood and atmospherics than he is pacing -- the whole thing drags a bit, which shouldn't really happen with a 65-minute movie. Nonetheless, a grim and surprisingly downbeat movie for its time. Recommended.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Cthulhu's Reign (2010): edited by Darrell Schweitzer
Cthulhu's Reign (2010): edited by Darrell Schweitzer:
- The Walker in the Cemetery by Ian Watson
- Sanctuary by Don Webb
- Her Acres of Pastoral Playground by Mike Allen
- Spherical Trigonometry by 朝松健 [as by Ken Asamatsu]
- What Brings the Void by Will Murray
- The New Pauline Corpus by Matt Cardin
- Ghost Dancing by Darrell Schweitzer
- This Is How the World Ends by John R. Fultz
- The Shallows by John Langan
- Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names by Jay Lake
- The Seals of New R'lyeh by Gregory Frost
- The Holocaust of Ecstasy by Brian Stableford
- Vastation by Laird Barron
- Nothing Personal by Richard A. Lupoff
- Remnants by Fred Chappell
Entertaining anthology goes with the depressing scenario 'What happens AFTER H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones return to reclaim the Earth?' and runs with it in enjoyable albeit often oppressively depressing ways. But some of the stories contain faint hope, and the overall selection ranges broadly from Heist Comedy ("The Seals of New R'lyeh" by Gregory Frost) to hard science fiction ("Nothing Personal" by Richard A. Lupoff) to post-modern stream-of-consciousness ("Vastation" by Laird Barron).
Along the way, stories attempt to portray what the world post-Cthulhu would look like. A writhing mass of endless screaming meat? A patchwork of broken reality? A maze haunted by sadistic smaller versions of Cthulhu? A world in the process of being changed to suit its new masters, the Moon already transformed into a red and glaring five-pointed star in the squirming heavens? A seemingly normal neighbourhood that gets less normal the closer one looks? A baleful orb of anti-matter?
Yes, all this and more!
The stories are all at least competent. Many are inspired. "The Shallows" by John Langan is a modern classic, I think, counterpointing the mundane and the weird both in setting and in the (one-sided) conversation a survivor of the rise of Cthulhu tells to, well, an unusually crabby house-guest. Fred Chappell's "Remnants" offers a slice of hope in what sometimes seems like the first part of an epic, hard-science-fiction series. Recommended.
The Dunwich Horror (1970), or Gidget Goes To Dunwich
H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" (published 1929) is one of the central stories in what would be dubbed by other the Cthulhu Mythos. This movie... whew. Well, at least there's nudity. And the producers add a character played by Sandra (Gidget) Dee to... well, get raped by an extra-dimensional entity.
It doesn't help that Dee has to play the world's dumbest academic librarian who is immediately (albeit with some magical prompting, also not in the story) smitten with Dean Stockwell playing a shaggy-haired hipster-Lothario who wants to summon the Lovecraftian god Yog-Sothoth to Earth. The story's version of Stockwell's character is an eight-foot-tall monstrosity with a lot of alien limbs and tentacles hidden under his shirt. Oh, well. At least Stockwell has some bitchin' torso tattoos...
Lloyd Bochner and Ed Begley (Sr.) soldier on as the forces of Good, trying to halt the apocalypse. Sam Jaffe wanders through occasionally, looking for his paycheck. Sandra Dee looks baffled. Dean Stockwell does what he can, which is very little. And The Godfather and Rocky's Talia Shire has a brief role under her birth name, Talia Coppola. And Curtis Hanson, who would go on to direct L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, and 8 Mile, shares screen-writing credit. Hoo boy.
The filmmakers wisely keep the monster of the story invisible for the most part, as in the story. We do occasionally get some exciting monster POV shots! Great stuff! It's the same sort of colour-flipping that cloaked Igor while he was dancing on Hilarious House of Frightenstein!
In terms of film history, The Dunwich Horror does feature the most-ever utterances of the word 'Yog-Sothoth.' And when he's casting some of his spells, Stockwell occasionally puts his hands to either side of his face and seemingly imitates a puffer fish. He's also got some crazy moves with his knife.
The Dunwich Horror would be more fun if it were a bit zippier -- somehow, with all the craziness and a 90-minute running time, it often drags. Still, it can be entertaining. I imagine on pot it's probably hilarious. On LSD, you would probably die.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
In the past, we watch the characters played by Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal meet, get married, and fall apart. In the present, Amy Adams works as one of the directors of a very high-end, pretentious Manhattan art gallery. And in the novel that Jake Gyllenhaal sends Adams, a man's family is abducted by hooting rednecks along a lonely stretch of desert highway. Gyllenhaal also plays the protagonist in scenes from that novel as imagined by Adams while she reads it.
Production design and cinematography separate the three strands of the narrative, beautifully (or grungily) dividing the dirty world of the novel from the naturalistic scenes from the past and the high-contrast colours of the artificial present. Adams and her cohorts at the gallery wear often hilarious outfits. A meeting of the gallery's directors, shot against stark white backgrounds, looks like what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick shot a talking-head ad for Chanel in the late 1980's.
Gyllenhaal and Adams are terrific, as is Michael Shannon as the vengeful cop of the novel. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is unrecognizable, and terrific, as the monstrous leader of the murderous thugs. He's got a scene on a toilet that's... startling. So, too, the opening few minutes of the movie, which depict a very... startling gallery installation.
This is an accomplished, witty, horrifying movie. I hope Ford doesn't wait 8 more years before doing another. He's already a better director than the vast majority of directors out there with many more films on their CVs. Highly recommended.