Evil Dead (2013): based on the original film written by Sam Raimi, written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues; directed by Fede Alvarez; starring Jane Levy (Mia), Shiloh Fernandez (David), Lou Taylor Pucci (Eric), Jessica Lucas (Olivia) and Elizabeth Blackmore (Natalie):
Made with the participation of original [The] Evil Dead (1981) writer/director Sam Raimi, this Evil Dead makes some smart changes to the low-budget 1980's horror film that launched the careers of Raimi, his brother Ted, and star Bruce Campbell.
The first is to come up with a weirdly plausible new reason for the inevitable trip to a cabin in the woods: four of the five characters are staging an Intervention/Drug DeTox for the fifth, Mia, who appears to have a heroin problem.
The second is to alter the tone to one of more seriousness, or at least more angst, for the first two-thirds of the film. The Evil Dead is far less loopy than sequels Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness, but next to this Evil Dead, it looks like a Warner Brothers cartoon.
Are there problems? Of course. The addition of a dog to the cast of probably doomed characters goes nowhere, possibly because the filmmakers shied away from graphic violence involving a dog as either victim or perpetrator. The characters are a little shrill at points, though this may be intentional -- certainly, the issues of the various characters are intentional, as is at least one resolution to those issues. The angst tends to overwhelm any attempts at witty or blackly comic dialogue, though. Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer's Body) was brought on as a script doctor to add such wit, but it isn't all that apparent what her contributions are.
Gore and violence come in increasingly rapid, escalating waves as the film progresses. Nail guns (an homage to Raimi's Darkman?) and electric knives do some terrible stuff. Several characters take levels of physical punishment that would have made Bruce Campbell's Ash proud. If you're going to be a character in an Evil Dead movie, you've got to be able to take a beating and keep on punching back. The film bounces ideas from all three previous installments around, sometimes in newly effective ways, though I wish they'd worked the overwrought tape recording of the archaeologist into something other than the closing credits. I love that guy.
Through it all, the Book of the Dead remains indestructible and weirdly attractive to otherwise intelligent characters in search of bathroom reading. Even barbed-wire wrapping and annotated warnings from some previous reader of the tome can't stop the high-school teacher from reading an incantation out loud. Stupid teachers!
The filmmakers finally jettison most of the serious dramatic tone for the final twenty minutes, cutting loose in a manner more consistent with the series as a whole. Frankly, it's a relief. And the identity of the survivor or survivors comes as something of a surprise. Recommended.
Mayhem (2013) by Sarah Pinborough: Several of the characters in Mayhem were real 1880's Victorians, chief among them primary vocalizer (seriously) Dr. Thomas Bond, who worked for Scotland Yard in the 1880's and 1890's. Unlike most crime novels set in Victorian London circa 1888-89, Mayhem does not focus on Jack the Ripper.
Instead, Mayhem sends Bond and two others on a quest to discover the identity of a real, never-identified murderer who operated contemporaneously with the Ripper -- The Thames Torso Murderer. He or she got that name for dropping disassembled bodies into the Thames, the heads never to be found. The killer's most brazen act was dumping one body at the construction site of New Scotland Yard!
Sarah Pinborough does a nice job evoking the squalor and sorrow of the poor sections of London, setting them against the more refined social circles in which Bond moves in his civilian life. His work on the Ripper murders has already caused Bond to seek out opium as a relief as the novel opens. Things are going to get worse. Much worse. The Ripper is only a symptom of something in London -- the Thames Torso murderer is the cause. As skeptical as Bond may be of the supernatural, he will nonetheless have to face it before the novel ends.
Mayhem is sympathetic not only to Bond but to the female murder victims of the killer, some of whom receive chapters devoted, third-person, to their plight and to their fears and hopes. Pinborough also turns one of the unlikeliest suspects in the Ripper murders into a sympathetic, haunted figure essential to find the Torso killer. In all, a solid novel of crime and the macabre. Recommended.
The Pretence (2013) by Ramsey Campbell: According to a New Age cult dubbed 'The Finalists,' tonight is the last night of the world. But that won't stop Paul Slater from flying home from his ailing mother's rest home to see wife Melanie and children Amy and Tom. And the world isn't going to end just because a cult says it is. And Paul does make it home.
While the philosophical backbone of this novella is the nature of belief, it's the increasingly fragile and desperate hold Paul Slater has on his family life that supplies the emotional engine of the whole thing. There are explanations for what happens as the story proceeds, but none of them could be considered authoritative.
The enigmatic nature of the narrative echoes some of Robert Aickman's more mysterious stories, though with some decidedly contemporary imagery. Cell phones and texting assume a great amount of importance as the novella proceeds; so too do Slater's musings on the nature of digital information as a reduction of the mediated universe to a fragile and infinitely malleable storm of bits. Love may keep a person grounded, but what happens when the idea of ground gives way? Recommended.
House of Small Shadows (2013) by Adam Nevill: Adam Nevill explores the shadowlands between mental illness and the supernatural in disturbingly effective ways in this horror novel that also involves a whole lot of taxidermy and a battalion of creepy dolls and marionettes and puppets and old people.
Catherine is a 38-year-old antiques appraiser with a history of mental problems dating back to childhood when she was abandoned at birth, adopted, and then narrowly avoided being abducted. Or perhaps "spirited away" would be more accurate. After a violent meltdown in London, she's found some peace working for an eccentric antiques dealer and reconnecting with a long-lost boyfriend.
Alas, things will begin to go horribly wrong on the day her boss sends her to a preliminary meeting with ancient Edith, who owns The Red House, near Hereford. Nothing sinister in that name, is there?
The Red House contains the life's work of post-WWI taxidermist and puppet-maker M.H. Mason: massive, exquisitely detailed tableaux of animals recreating WWI battlefields, strange dolls, and child-sized puppets of unusual design. None of it has ever been sold. If sold, the collection could bring in millions, though Catherine believes that perhaps the material should go to museums instead.
However, once Catherine enters the world of the Red House, Edith, and her laconic housekeeper Maude, events start to get a little odd. And progress towards greater oddity and horror.
Catherine believes her mental state to be precarious, fragile, easily disturbed. As strange things begin to happen, and as the fugue states of her childhood and early teenage years suddenly return, she believes that the cause is interior to herself. To survive the mental barrage, she believes she must acknowledge that her problems are the problems of a diseased mind and cling thus to reality.
Of course, if these things are not the products of a diseased mind... well, that could be a problem for someone who fears the consequences of believing in many of the things she's experienced since she was a little girl, in Hereford... disturbingly close to The Red House for a couple traumatic years of childhood, she soon realizes.
Neville's portrayal of a mind besieged from within and without by the seemingly impossible reminds me a lot of many horror stories and novels by genre great Ramsey Campbell. An extended sequence in which Catherine attends a puppet show in the small village near the Red House is the most Campbell-like thing in the novel, a masterpiece of horror achieved through environmental description and the accumulation of disquieting details, partially glimpsed.
The character of Catherine has been a problem for some reviewers of this novel. I find her a compelling figure. Her mental problems are sympathetically and convincingly portrayed, as is her lonely battle to remain sane in an increasingly tilted and sinister world. Also, those goddam puppets are terrifying. Highly recommended.
The Green Inferno (2013/ Released 2015): written by Eli Roth and Guillermo Amoedo; directed by Eli Roth; starring Eli Roth's wife: Eli Roth's homage to the cult horror film Cannibal Holocaust does the unthinkable: it makes cannibals boring. A bunch of college students protesting the destruction of the Peruvian rain forest get captured by a cannibal tribe. Gustatory hilarity ensues. Well, not really -- this is a boring bad movie, not a fun bad movie.
Eli Roth's great dramatic trick is to lock the students up in a cage for about half the film's interminable 100 minutes. Yay. The blood and gore never seem convincing, possibly because I don't give a crap about any of the characters. The funniest moment comes when we hear a loon cry amongst the background noises. Man, that is one out-of-place loon! Not recommended.
Poppet (2013) by Mo Hayder: Mo Hayder's troubled, brilliant DCI Jack Caffery continues his Major Crimes work in Bristol in this satisfying horror-procedural. Caffery again and again finds himself investigating cases that seem to be just this side of the supernatural, and Poppet keeps that going. Caffery also has a couple of problems to deal with from previous novels, but these are explained well enough that one need never have read a Caffery novel to understand everything that goes on in this one.
Hayder gives us multiple third-person limited narrative focuses for Poppet. The narrative is handled deftly (though Boy, are some of the chapters short!), with Caffery and mental-institution worker AJ being the main protagonists. AJ calls Caffery in when events at his privately funded institution seem to get dangerously weird. And they are dangerously weird, and have been intermittently for years.
Poppet does a number of things tremendously well. Foremost is its sensitive treatment of catastrophic mental-health issues both through the sympathetic, haunted AJ's interactions with his patients, and partially through Poppet's plot, which does not go where it seems to be going. Hayder should get some sort of prize for not giving us the same old mentally ill boogeymen and women, or for ot simply dressing up yet another impossible Joker and unleashing him on her novel.
Terrible things do happen, and marvelous things, some of the latter verging on the supernatural without necessarily getting there. Throughout it all, Caffery -- isolated, alcoholic, workaholic -- holds himself together as he also strives to follow the labyrinthine thread to the truth. Highly recommended.
Holes for Faces (2013) by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:
"Passing Through Peacehaven" (2011) "Peep" (2007)
"Getting It Wrong" (2011)
"The Room Beyond" (2011)
"Holes for Faces" (2013)
"The Rounds" (2010)
"The Decorations" (2005)
"The Address" (2012)
"Recently Used" (2011)
"Chucky Comes to Liverpool" (2010)
"With the Angels" (2010)
"Behind the Doors" (2013)
"Holding the Light" (2011)
"The Long Way" (2008)
Excellent collection of horror stories from the 21st century, with the venerable Ramsey Campbell -- first published in the early 1960's by Arkham House -- demonstrating that he's still a master of both terror and poignance. Many of these stories deal with the effects of childhood trauma as remembered and re-experienced by an adult. Sometimes the antagonist is a supernatural menace, though in many of the stories, the problem could actually be a delusion. Throughout the stories, Campbell's often near-hallucinatory descriptions of people, things, and events keep the level of unease high.
The stories also deal with children facing supernatural and non-supernatural terrors, perhaps none more acutely than the increasingly confused 13-year-old protagonist of "Chucky Comes to Liverpool." Here, his mother's involvement in a community campaign against horror movies -- and her obsessive 'protection' of him from all evil media influences -- causes major psychological problems. It's a fine story that works even better if one has read Campbell's essays on some of the censorship 'debates' he attended during various English campaigns against horror movies, including those focused on the Chucky movies..
The effects of old age are the focus of several stories, sometimes aggravated by those recurring childhood traumas, sometimes twinned with a separate character facing new childhood trauma. There are parents inflicting psychological traumas on their children. And there are trains and train stations. Seriously.
Sometimes the train is the problem, sometimes the station, sometimes both... and sometimes not being able to find a train station leads one into dire supernatural peril. Given the focus on (as the back cover says) "Youth and age," the emphasis on trains and train stations, on arrivals and departures, seems only natural. There may be non-human and formerly human monsters throughout the collection, but they're mostly seen only in vague half-glimpses of terrible import. Their occasional complete manifestations, when they come, can be shocking, but it's the reactions of the various characters to the supernatural, or the seeming supernatural, that makes the stories so strong. We may not all meet ghosts, but we all know guilt and fear and regret. Or a hatred of Physical Education classes. Highly recommended.
