Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (2007)

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.

Invisible Hindu Zombies of the Stratosphere

28 Weeks Later (2007): written by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Enrique Lopez Lavigne, and Jesus Olmo; directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; starring Robert Carlyle (Don), Rose Byrne (Scarlet), Jeremy Renner (Doyle), Imogen Poots (Tammy), and Mackintosh Muggleton (Andy): An astoundingly dumb sequel to an excellent original (28 Days Later). And even though the original film's director (Danny Boyle) and writer (Alex Garland) are credited as executive producers, the makers of this film don't seem to have ever seen 28 Days Later.

In 28 Days Later, the Rage Virus that turns people into murderous "fast zombies" fully dilates the pupils, causing these rage zombies to hide inside during daylight hours and hunt at night. Within five minutes of the start of 28 Weeks Later, Robert Carlyle is fleeing across the sunlit fields of England, pursued by hordes of rage zombies who should by all rights be inside taking a nap.

Along the way we're also told that the Rage Virus can't "jump species," which may surprise viewers who remember it doing just that -- from chimps to humans -- to start the apocalypse in 28 Days Later. OK. It's a scientist who makes this observation (Rose Byrne in a thankless role), so I assume she knows what a species is. Or not. The film-makers don't know how nerve gas works, how long it would take a car battery to die left unused in the open, or when you can push a car to start it, so I'll put the species mistake on them and not the character. 

These problems ultimately pale in comparison to the endless chain of idiocies, improbabilities, and impossibilities that crowd the screen from beginning to end. 28 Weeks Later could be used as a perfect example of Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot: nothing in this movie could happen if everyone wasn't an idiot. It's blazingly stupid and preciously self-important because, like, this is like Iraq, dude! The film-makers also must have really liked it when Roy Batty gouged out Tyrell's eyes in Blade Runner because we get not one but two eye-gouging scenes. Hoo ha! Not recommended.

The Other Side of the Door (2016): written by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera; directed by Johannes Roberts; starring Sarah Wayne Callies (Maria), Jeremy Sisto (Michael), and Suchitra Pillai (Piki): A privileged white American couple get up to shenanigans in India. First their son dies. Then he comes back from the dead thanks to the mother's intentional misapplication of what seems to be intended to be some sort of Hindu ghost-raising ritual. Oh, white people. Is there anywhere and any way you can't cause trouble? 

Only one Indian actor has a role with more than a couple of lines of dialogue. Sarah Wayne Callies does that perpetually constipated look that seems to be her default facial expression. Jeremy Sisto has almost nothing to do. It's an even dumber version of Pet Sematary. The Guardian of the Underworld looks pretty cool, though, and technically she's the heroine of the movie. Just bad enough to be fun.

The Invisible Man (1933): adapted by R.C. Sherriff from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by James Whale; starring Claude Rains (Griffin), Gloria Stuart (Flora), and Henry Travers (Dr. Cranley): The voice of Claude Rains does terrific work as our titular mad, invisible scientist. It's a bit jarring to see Clarence the Guardian Angel (Henry Travers) as a scientist, though. Other than Travers, the supporting cast is surprisingly weak. 

The odd use of English bumpkins as comedy relief in James Whale's Universal horror movies continues here, and is just as unfunny and distracting as its use in his Frankenstein movies. However, the invisible effects hold up, and Whale manages some moments of creepy terror and unease throughout the film. Though given the necessity of the Invisible Man being naked to be completely invisible, he really should consider trying to conquer a country with a more tropical climate. Recommended.

The Hollower (2007) by Mary SanGiovanni

The Hollower (2007) by Mary SanGiovanni:  Gary Braunbeck, Brian Keene, and James A. Moore all give rave blurbs to this first novel from Mary SanGiovanni. And it's a fairly solid piece of supernatural horror. But it also transformed from novel to first part of a trilogy somewhere in the publication and/or sales process, making for yet another ending in which nothing, really, is resolved. I hate that shit. 

Steve Ditko's The Question

The eponymous monster, a supernatural creature created by SanGiovanni, becomes a bit of a Swiss Army Knife by the conclusion of the novel, able to work with both hallucinations and real-world violence, and with a weakness that seems awfully contrived. If you've read comic books, it probably doesn't help that the Hollower's basic form when it's stalking someone is the spitting image of Steve Ditko's The Question. Only in shape-changing monster form. 

SanGiovanni does give the reader an interesting cast of characters, very Stephen-King-like in their weaknesses and (growing) strengths. A climax that goes on and on for about 1/3 of the novel needed trimming and tightening. Lightly recommended.

30 Days of Night (2007)

30 Days of Night (2007): adapted from the Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith comic book by Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie, and Brian Nelson; directed by David Slade; starring Josh Hartnett (Eben), Melissa George (Stella), and Danny Huston (Marlow the Lead Vampire): The Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith comic book had a great concept that would have been a lot greater had the comic book been set in, say, 1930 rather than the late 1990's. 

That concept is that vampires show up in Barrow, Alaska once the sun goes down for its annual 30-day night and slaughter all the inhabitants. Of course, the real Barrow, Alaska isn't much more isolated when the sun goes down that it is when the sun's up -- daily flights continue, and people continue to phone and email their friends and family who are not in Barrow, Alaska. In 30 Days of Night, nightfall brings an end to flights, a mass exodus from Barrow, and apparently a complete lack of people outside Barrow who would wonder why no one has heard from Barrow for weeks.

It just doesn't work in the movie or the comic once one thinks about it for, say, 30 seconds. But we'll give the film-makers their curiously isolated Northern town and look at how the movie works with the concept.

Um, not that well. 30 Days of Night was shot in New Zealand, and it shows -- only rarely does it seem plausible that these people are stranded in the dark and cold with angry vampires. The film-makers only rarely bother showing people's breath, compounding the problem. Giant fires erupt, burning everything around them... but not melting any snow. And so on, and so forth. 

Josh Hartnett and Melissa George, as the estranged couple who are also the only law enforcement that survives the vampire clan's first wild night, are dutiful but that's about it. The townspeople under siege by the vampires are a pretty bloodless lot (Heh heh!), leaving the viewer with no one to care about. The vampires themselves, led by a very good Danny Huston, are somewhat interesting. They speak an invented vampire language all the time, shriek a lot, and have facial prosthetics that make most of them unsettlingly resemble sharks.

The plot lurches from set-piece to set-piece, leaving one to wonder how we got to Day 29 by the end, or how the vampires failed to search that attic or that building for the preceding 28 days. We also have to endure a number of Mythbusters moments, including crude oil that ignites easily by having a match thrown into it and a sun rising in the North. Good times. Not recommended.

The Vanishing (2007) by Bentley Little

The Vanishing (2007) by Bentley Little: This is either a terrible novel by the usually reliable Bentley Little or a terrific parody of a horror novel. The weirdness starts on the cover, where Stephen King proclaims Little "the poet laureate" of modern horror. Really? Because Little's prose is about as anti-poetic as it gets -- sometimes it's barely prose.

Little's strengths have been in his strange ideas and sudden plot twists. And those are certainly in evidence here. This is a novel that twists right at the title, which doesn't seem to have any major relevance to the novel it's the title of. So it goes. Is this too some sort of joke about Little's preference for one and two word titles for his novels?

Rich white men start going crazy and killing people. Children with the heads of animals are being found in various West Coast cities. A flashback narrative follows an early 19th-century wagon train into an American West found on no map. It all seems sort of intriguing.

Buckets of blood will be thrown about. Even vaguely alternate sexual practices will be linked to Evil. Some evil monsters will show up. But those monsters are also, and I quote, "sexy"! People will bang monsters. People will be banged by monsters. An elite force of mercenaries will suddenly show up to help set things right. They will be tempted to bang those monsters, but they will resist!

To summon these monsters people want to bang, one has to go to certain places and yell out at least slightly obscene rhymes. Or as one of the rhymes goes in the novel, "Engine Engine Number Nine, Take me quickly from behind." I'm not making this up. One of the sexy things these monsters do is a sexy dance consisting primarily of stripper-like gyrations. The monsters look like giant hybrids of lizards, people, and other animals, with Giant-Size sexual organs that everyone keeps staring at with lust. I told you they were sexy, and sexy means Big!

At one point, a character thinks the New York skyline at night looks like a bunch of rectangular Christmas trees, while the cars below look like glowing ants. I'm not making that up, either.

The monsters are a sort of quasi-mystical holdover, in a tradition going back in horror to Arthur Machen's malign little people. They live with their human sex-buddies in a magical land hidden in the Pacific Northwest in which a giant mountain of sewage and offal looms over the landscape. Sex and shit. Get it? Cloachal?

A trio of ten-year-old girls get raped by the monsters in a flashback. Women are kept as milking animals by one of the monster's half-human offspring.  Besides reciting some obscene rhyme, people who want to attract the monsters also rub themselves in their own urine and possible feces. Get it? Cloachal! Thank god for that mercenary group. They really come in handy for our protagonists, a reporter haunted by childhood trauma and a socially retarded social worker.

Did I mention that a priest gets raped to death in his church by monsters? Oh, yeah! If nothing else, The Vanishing makes Clive Barker's "Rawhead Rex" look like "The Turn of the Screw" by comparison. Not recommended, or recommended a lot.

The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007) by Laird Barron

The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2007) containing the following stories: Old Virginia (2003); Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001); Procession of the Black Sloth (2007); Bulldozer (2004); Proboscis (2005); Hallucigenia (2006); Parallax (2005); The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006); and The Imago Sequence (2005): 

Not the first, not the second, but the third time I've read this collection in the last four years. So I guess I like it. I'll add only that the third reading allowed the connections among the stories to stand out more in my mind. 

And Barron's generally-doomed tough-guy protagonists sometimes bring to mind some of Jim Thompson's characters along the same lines, though Thompson's characters didn't have to deal with screamingly awful occult menaces. I sort of wish Barron would write a story in which one of his tough, morally dubious protagonists beats a Shoggoth to death with a shovel. That would be awesome. Highly recommended.

The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons

The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons: If there's a preset figure for the number of pages one can read in a lifetime, The Terror ate up 760 pages of that total without giving much back. But being one of those people who will almost always finish a novel, I finished it.

I think I may actually have skipped about 50 pages total in my rush to the end, but I finished it. The whole mess makes Stephen King's extended version of The Stand look like a model of narrative economy by comparison.

The Terror is about the doomed Franklin expedition of the 1840's which set out to find the Northwest Passage with two ships -- the Terror and the Erebus -- and ended with everyone dead. Well, so far as we know. Pack ice and fire destroyed the two ships, and only scattered bodies and camp sites and sledges give any indication of what happened to the expedition, and why.

Historically, the expedition fell prey to two years of being stuck in the ice off King William Island; its own lack of knowledge about how to survive north of the Arctic Circle; the complete lack of a Northwest Passage through the ice; and food poisoning brought on by tinned food prepared for the expedition by a really low bidder. Technically speaking, it's probably the last thing that really ensured the death of everyone involved before any attempt at rescue could get close to the two ships -- inadequate canning and cooking probably more-than-halved the expedition's food supply, which was enough to last for seven years. Botulism, lead poisoning from the lead solder used to seal the cans, and putrid food helped seal the deal.

In the novel, however, a magical polar-bear demon-god-thingie picks off members of the expedition by ones and twos as they sit stuck in the ice pack by King William Island. Starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning, botulism and mutiny take care of the rest. The captain of the Terror, Francis Crozier, alone survives to become a sort of shaman in a legion of Inuit shaman entrusted with the job of keeping the bear-demon from coming too far south. They basically do this by entertaining the bear-demon. Crozier marries an Inuit woman-shaman much younger than himself and goes off to have magical adventures in the far North. The polar bear demon will eventually sicken and die from eating white souls, which are poisonous to it, and the demon's death will cause global warming to begin. The End.

The worst thing about the novel was the repeated regurgitation of research (doesn't that sound like a Stan Lee line?). I knew I was in trouble when one of the Ice Masters shows up for the sole purpose of demonstrating that Simmons has read up on the various Royal Navy terms for ice circa 1847. Or the various scenes (especially funerals) when the book gives us the full name and rank of everyone there. Again and again and again and again and again. Or the number of times the novel sees fit to tell us the same information about a character again and again. I was relieved when John Franklin got killed around page 300 because it meant that I wouldn't be told at length every 20 pages that Franklin was a fanatical teetotaler.

Oh, and the bear demon not only can't be killed by conventional or magical means, it can't even be hurt. Imagine a nineteen-hour version of Jaws in which the shark has a force field around it and you've pretty much imagined The Terror, only with more nautical history and research than three Moby Dick's folded into the mix, all rendered in a serviceable prose style that starts to plod about 200 pages in. Attempts at the poetic and the sublime tend to get derailed into the mundane and the ridiculous by this sort of plain style. The overall effect is that of Moby Dick as reimagined by a pompous newspaper writer.

I also despise the cliched right turn the novel takes in the last 100 pages as it suddenly becomes the story of how a white man 'became' a Native American (well, technically in this case, a Native Canadian). This is not a fruitful literary sub-genre, and is generally the stuff of melodrama (see: Dances with Wolves, A Man Called Horse, even The Last of the Mohicans). Large swathes of American and Canadian literature have been derailed by the narratives of white people who Learn Better and "become" native people.

Of the magical polar bear, the less said, the better. Ramsey Campbell noted in an essay that "Explanation is the death of horror", and even though it's necessary sometimes, the sudden introduction of Inuit mythology via telepathy 600 pages into the novel was jarring. Campbell does a similar thing structurally in The Hungry Moon, but a lot more interestingly and without providing any clear and definitive answer as to 'what' the long-leggedy beasty of that novel is, while imbuing the telepathic discovery of that knowledge with wonder and terror.

Here, it's like Captain Crozier just got front row tickets to the Encyclopedia of Inuit Mythology. Yippee!

And as I noted earlier, the monster can't be killed, so there's really no point to the whole struggle. Can't even be hurt. But it can be poisoned by the craptastic souls of white people, and when it dies, Global Warming will begin. Hahaha! That is fucking ridiculous!

If you want to read a good Dan Simmons novel, I'd recommend either Summer of Night or Song of Kali. If you want to read a supernatural horror story about the polar regions, go with HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness or John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" or Ramsey Campbell's Midnight Sun. Rent John Carpenter The Thing. Watch the first-season X-Files episode "Ice." Get really drunk and then try to find a cab in London, Ontario on New Year's Eve. But leave The Terror alone. NOT RECOMMENDED.