Phoenix Forgotten (2017): written by Justin Barber and T.S. Nowlin; directed by Justin Barber; starring Luke Spencer Roberts (Josh), Chelsea Lopez (Ashley), and Justin Matthews (Mark):
Here in the real world, the Phoenix Lights that form the backbone of Phoenix Forgotten were a real thing.
In the movie, a young girl's teen-aged brother disappears along with two friends several days after the Phoenix Lights. Now at the age of 26, 20 years later, the sister and her camera-carrying dogsbody go In Search Of... Lost Brother.
Yes, Phoenix Forgotten is low-budget, found-footage horror. It's an enjoyable, low-key entry in this genre. And it involves UFO's instead of the supernatural, thus making it somewhat unique. The actors for both the 2017 and 1997 narratives are all quite charming.
The panicked flight of the missing teenagers across the rapidly darkening desert, recorded for posterity in its near-entirety because no one ever stops filming in these movies, has some fresh moments of terror. The actors sell panic at things unseen or barely glimpsed.
The makers don't stick the climax, though the coda is unique among these things as filming continues in what's really quite an unusual and, by the end, hilarious situation insofar as, Jesus Christ, that goddam camera can't be destroyed, it can only run out of battery power. Recommended.
The Thing [Unnecessary Prequel] (2011): a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) written by Eric Heisserer and based as was Carpenter's and the Howard Hawks-produced first adaptation The Thing from Another World (1951) on "Who Goes There?" (1938) by John W. Campbell Jr., a novella that owes a lot to H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936); directed by Matthijs van Heijningen; starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the only character the film develops enough for you to care about her fate: It's a lot like John Carpenter's The Thing, only without the grungy, lived-in characters and lived-in monster and lived-in living quarters.
The prequel exhaustively and exhaustingly extrapolates what happened at the Norwegian Antarctic Base back in 1982 when the Norwegians dug up that strange visitor from another planet who had been frozen for 100,000 years.
We assume from our knowledge of the first few minutes of The Thing (1982) that two Norwegians, a dog, and a helicopter will still be around when this movie ends and The Thing (1982) begins. We know a priori what will destroy the Norwegians and their camp if we have seen Carpenter's Thing. And we've seen that aftermath in that camp, as characters in The Thing (1982) visit the Norwegian camp early on in The Thing (1982) and we watch as they alternate shock, horror, and bafflement at what they find there.
So the script of The Thing (2011) does explain how everything and everything we saw in that Norwegian camp in The Thing (1982). Connect the dots! The damn movie is a connect-the-dots exercise!
Only one character is memorable, and it's not the fault of the actors: the movie wastes that big, beefy, red-bearded Wildling we all love in Game of Thrones. It wastes that actor you've loved as Mr. Eko on Lost and probably not recognized as Killer Croc in Suicide Squad. Most of the characters are Norwegian, but there are some American pilots hanging around so that some scenes can plausibly occur in English.
Oh, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, our heroic American ice-paleoarchaeologist, is good and has enough lines and acting chops to make us wish she were in another movie, or maybe just The Thing (1982).
I will unreservedly recommend exactly one scene that involves Winstead, one of the Norwegians, a search for keys in a storage room, a Thing, and the only iteration of the Thing in this movie to be both unexpected and unexpected horrifying. Oh, well. But you've got to locate that scene. Highly recommended for a 2 minute stretch; otherwise not recommended.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008): written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar; directed by Rob Cohen; starring Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Maria Bello (Evelyn O'Connell), Luke Ford (Alex O'Connell), John Hannah (Cheaplaughs Johnson), Jet Li (Wasted), Michelle Yeoh (Also Wasted), and Isabella Leong (2000-year-old Hottie): This attempt to restart The Mummy 'franchise' seven years after The Mummy 2 is pretty dumb. It also steals shameless, almost obsessively, from the Indiana Jones movies rather than its own mediocre franchise self.
Former female lead Rachel Weisz had something better to do in 2007, so Maria Bello, a good actress who neither looks nor sounds like Rachel Weisz, fills in. Set about 15 years after The Mummy 2 so that the son of the characters played by franchise leads Brendan Fraser and (now) Bello can be grown up and possibly continue the franchise for another decade despite the simple fact that the actor playing the son, Luke Ford, is a terrible actor with no charisma. To top things off, we leave good old Egypt because Universal was pioneering the idea of co-financing blockbusters with China.
Yes, we go to China. The movie completely wastes Jet Li as the Emperor and Michelle Yeoh as his ancient witchy karate nemesis. It stretches the concept of 'mummy' to include 'terracotta warriors' and 'evil Emperor trapped alive inside a regenerating clay exoskeleton' and 'strangely unrotted people buried under the Great Wall of China for hundreds of years without any mummification procedure being intentionally tried on them.'
Honestly, a bunch of British bog-men could be the features of some nightmarishly goofy fourth movie, though this movie ends ominously with a brief bit about Peruvian mummies. Thankfully, The Mummy: Fitzcarraldo the Right Thing has never appeared.
There are some Yetis here, good guys for once. Some CGI stuff happens, none of it convincingly. The bad living people are transparent stand-ins for the right-wing, post-war Chinese Nationalists (it's 1947), though no mention is made of the Communists or Mao or really anything in actual Chinese history around the time of the 'War of Revolution.' The lead human villain does look an awful lot like Chiang Kai-Shek, though. Tom Cruise can be seen waiting in the shadows waiting for the Curse of the Mummy to fall upon him. Not recommended.
Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg:
Handling the Undead is John Ajvide Lindqvist's second novel after the great, and marvelously adapted for Swedish film, Let the Right One In (2004). The first time around, Lindqvist looked at vampires with a fresh perspective. This time around it's zombies to not quite the same level of excellence as Let the Right One In. There's no shame in failing to match the earlier novel -- Let the Right One In is a truly great horror novel.
Handling the Undead presents zombies in a new light. All the recently dead in a specific part of Stockholm at a specific time one day come back to life. This is not a zombie apocalypse. There are perhaps 1500 of them, and they don't try to eat the living. They just try to get home if they can. Those that are buried have a hard time of this until the authorities figure out the parameters of the Resurrection and dig up those graves that should have the living dead in them.
The novel does concern itself with Why and How this event has happened. But it's more focused on three families handling their undead.
Father David and son Magnus must deal with the return of the horribly disfigured Eva. She's David's wife and Magnus' mother, and she died in a car crash that occured almost simultaneously with the Resurrection. Of all the undead, Eva is the most intelligent and able to answer question, albeit vaguely.
Grandmother Elvy and granddaughter Flora have to deal with Elvy's undead husband who died a few days before the Resurrection after a decade of Alzheimer's. Oh, and Elvy and Flora are telepathic. And Elvy believes a mysterious spirit has told her that the Biblical Apocalypse is about to happen.
Reporter and grieving grandfather Mahler and his daughter Anna have to deal with the return of Anna's two-months-dead son Elias, who died soon after his sixth birthday from a fall from a window.
Meanwhile, lots of stuff happens in Sweden. Or at least Stockholm. The authorities round the dead up. Weird psychic phenomena start to happen. The undead that are extremely decayed cease to function. Is the Apocalypse at hand? And are these zombies ever going to eat someone?
Well, read it and see, I guess. Handling the Undead is a much shorter, less detailed, quieter novel than Let the Right One In. Too quiet, really, and the explanation for what has happened, when it comes, is just a little too goofy to be satisfying.
As with the fantastic revelations at the end of Lindqvist's later Harbour, those in Handling the Undead don't so much satisfy as they undermine all the suspense and world-building that has come before. Despite all the uses of a very Stephen King-like "This isn't what was really there but only what the human mind can translate," the end sputters out in a most unsatisfying way. What has come before was pretty solid, but perhaps not enough to lift Handling the Undead above a Lightly Recommended.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2009) by Thomas Ligotti: Whew! Great writer of visionary horror Thomas Ligotti checks in with his first non-fiction tome, a philosophical exploration of horror fiction and the need for the human race to cease to exist. It's the feel-good book of 2009!
Is it non-fiction, though? Throughout, Ligotti refers to lectures by Professor Nobody, a Ligotti stand-in. And the philosophical arguments made by Ligotti dovetail with the fictional horrors he's been visiting upon us for decades. One can never underestimate Ligotti's sense of humour.
Regardless, it's an interesting book. And a depressing one. Without giving too much away, the "conspiracy" of the title is the fact that humans possess self-awareness and an Ego. This means that we suffer more than anything else in creation, so much so that having a child is an atrocity: parents unleash children into a world where that child's suffering will always outweigh its joy.
In order to defeat suffering, humanity must cease to procreate. But it won't because humans have been programmed to have children. And they've been programmed to believe that their suffering will be lifted from them. Or isn't that bad.
Fun times, right? Ligotti goes into a number of areas in his relentlessly downbeat argument. Horror fiction, Ligotti notes, is the one branch of the Arts that faces the overwhelming suffering in a useful way: we are, in a way, all those characters in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft who learn that humanity's existence has neither hope nor meaning, and that we are all self-aware, suffering ants in a meaningless cosmos of suffering.
I've simplified and left out a lot of stuff. Look, read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Or don't. It just doesn't matter. Highly recommended.
Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows:
Alan Moore called Providence a version of his own Watchmen for the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. I think he's wrong. It's much more like his terrific Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. There's a wealth of factual material especially as related to HPL's own life here, along with an almost encyclopedic tour through all of Lovecraft's fiction. The deadly Boston molasses flood shows up in one issue. That was a real thing !!! The ghouls who got sugar-coated corpses because of it, maybe not so real. I hope.
Technically, Providence is simply named for HPL's beloved home town in Rhode Island. The title accretes other meanings as the story proceeds.
For the first ten issues, we follow the adventures of Robert Black during the year 1920. He's a closeted gay man who has left his New York reporting job after the death of his lover to research various elements of New England legends and folklore.
Black's name riffs on Lovecraft pen-pal Robert Bloch, who would create Psycho, among other things. Like Bloch, Black originally hails from Wisconsin. Black's homosexuality plays on that of several other Lovecraft 'disciples,' some of whom (all of whom?) appear at least briefly in Providence.
The graphic novel rewards multiple readings and punishes the short attention span. Like Watchmen, Providence increases the density of its narrative by including lengthy prose pieces at the back of the comic book. This is Moore's densest comic-book work since From Hell with its 100+pages of appendices.
All one really needs to know is, um, all of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, no. Indeed, it would be interesting to tackle HPL's work AFTER reading Providence. Be sure to tell me how that goes if you try it!
The world of Providence isn't meant to be ours. One of the fascinating metafictional herein is Moore's use of the work of Robert W. Chambers, one of the acknowledged precursors to HPL in American horror. In the world of Providence there is no Chambers because elements of Chambers' stories exist in the real world -- most notably, state-sanctioned suicide booths.
But Lovecraft himself exists, and is a writer. And he's about to start writing that crazy Cthulhu Mythos stuff after apprenticing with Poe-influenced horror and works inspired by the wide-ranging whimsies of Lord Dunsany (who also appears as a character).
William S. Burroughs also briefly appears. The anecdote connecting Burroughs and one of HPL's disciples? That's totally true!
Moore's approach to the story privileges psychological and bodily horrors over those of the cosmic. This is a very cloachal approach to HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. The starkest moments of horror, three of them spaced throughout the book, deal with rape as the defining sin of cosmic horror. Providence is not for the squeamish. But the rape scenes are justified, and there's nothing risible about them. They're deeply horrifying.
One of the key structural elements of Providence is the format (and the idea) of the Commonplace Book. Robert Black keeps one on his journeys, containing both things he finds along the way (including a hilarious church newsletter) and his own musings. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. And Providence combines fact, fiction, comics, written sections, and an overwhelming array of different covers to give the work some flavour of the Commonplace. Make of all of this what you will. Providence rewards patient study.
To tell much more would be to give something away. Technically, Providence is both prequel and sequel to Moore and Burrows' The Courtyard and Neonomicon. Search them out!
As to Burrows' art -- it's perfectly suited to Moore's cold, clinical eye in Providence. It's a horror equivalent of Dave Gibbons' straightforward, subtle art on Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Burrows can draw horrible imaginings with great skill, but he's at his best throughout Providence giving the reader the creeps by being matter-of-fact and (seemingly) representational.
Oh, and the ghouls. Moore and Burrows' ghouls are unlike their forebears in HPL's own work. They're a terrific, funny, strangely lovable creation. Not that you would ever, ever want to meet them, in a subway station or a graveyard or in your own living room. In all, Providence is horrifying, sad, funny, satirical, scathing work from one of comic-book-writing's Grandmasters. Highest recommendation.
