Disappearance at Devil's Rock (2016) by Paul Tremblay: In his follow-up to A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay again walks a line between supernatural and natural horror with this story of a missing teen in small-town Massachusetts.
Troubled teen Tommy Sanderson -- introvert, zombie-obsessed -- disappears one night while out with his two best friends. He seems to have disappeared into the (real) Borderland State Park. The questions of 'why' and 'how' and 'where' will occupy the rest of the novel.
His best friends Luis and Josh are clearly hiding something. His sister seems to know something. And his mother is also haunted by memories of his father, who deserted them and then disappeared himself, into death after a single-vehicle accident.
Soon, mysterious apparitions (if they are apparitions) and messages start to appear. The mother has a vision of a gruesomely disfigured Tommy. And they everything seems to focus on a Borderland landmark called Devil's Rock.
Except it isn't really called Devil's Rock -- that's the name Tommy and his friends gave to it, without any real provenance. A story about the Devil lurking in the park since time immemorial also seems to be dubious. But strange things keep happening. And getting Luis and Josh to tell the truth about that night seems to become more and more difficult as Tommy's disappearance stretches on.
Tremblay's novel ends up being as much about the sort of secrets that can devastate families, and the sorts of problems that can snowball into horror for teenagers. There's more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies in some of the revelations towards the end of the novel -- but touches of what may or may not be the supernatural throughout also suggest a certain inevitability to Tommy's narrative.
The novel does a nice job of creating believable human evil, in teens or adults, without giving us anything along the lines of teen psychopaths and bad seeds. The entire enterprise tilts a bit more towards sorrow than horror, though there are several scenes of excruciating awfulness.
Tremblay notes in his afterword that the title and some of the novel's concerns are a nod to Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its mystery surrounding the disappearance of a school teacher and several students in Australia. Tremblay's book is ultimately more concrete than that mysterious film, and somewhat more conventional. Recommended.
The Void (2016): written and directed by Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski; starring Aaron Poole (Officer Carter), Kenneth Welsh (Dr. Powell), Daniel Fathers (The Father), Kathleen Munroe (Allison), Ellen Wong (Kim), Mik Byskov (The Son), Art Hindle (Mitchell), and Grace Munro (Maggie):
Delightful Lovecraftian horror made in Canada -- specifically in and around Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. There are gooshy bits, but they're in service to a story about an invasion from OUTSIDE. Co-writers and co-directors Gillespie and Kostanski have done a nice job of melding the Lovecraftian body horror of "Herbert West - Reanimator" with the more cosmic concerns of H.P. Lovecraft-penned stories that include "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Colour Out of Space."
Canadian acting stalwarts Art Hindle and Kenneth Welsh (probably best known outside Canada as Agent Cooper's nemesis Wyndham Earle in Twin Peaks) 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 seems to offer a visual quote from that cult sf classic The Quiet Earth.
There's a lot of metamorphic body horror for fans of John Carpenter's The Thing and Clive Barker's Hellraiser, complete with a pretty gruesome monster at the end (and monsters throughout). But the focus remains throughout on the idea of an invasion of our world from somewhere outside -- Outside, really. And the filmmakers wisely leave the motivations of whatever is behind this completely unknown. We may understand why the cult followers of the Abyss (as it is called) do the things they do. The Abyss itself remains silent. Fittingly. Highly recommended.
Split (2016): written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan; starring James McAvoy (Kevin Wendell Crumb), Anya Taylor-Joy (Casey Cooke), and Betty Buckley (Dr. Fletcher): AKA, the movie spoiled by its own sequel. Oh, well. To stay spoiler-free, note that Split is something of a return to form for M. Night Shyamalan when it comes to weird suspense involving psychiatrists and psychiatry.
James McAvoy plays a man with a lot of multiple personalities (or 'Alters'), some of them evil, some of them good, and some of them ambiguous. He kidnaps three teen-aged girls because he's going to do Something Awful to them. So begins a battle of wits between the teens and Multiple McAvoy, primarily between him/her/them and Anya Taylor-Joy's depressed outsider with her own horrible secret in her past.
M. Night Shyamalan does a fairly solid job of not getting too mired down in the sadism that usually accompanies such closet dramas, and McAvoy really is very good as most of his personalities (though he hams it up with a broad Brooklyn accent). Taylor-Joy is excellent in a role somewhat similar to her star-making turn in The Witch -- as an outsider discovering her own power when faced by dire circumstances. Recommended.
Nightrunners (2016): written and directed by Rowan Nielsen; starring Grace Glowicki (Jessica), Mandi Nicholson (Isobel), Esther Asinga (Mama Achupa), Mary Etuku (Mama Esther), Christopher Oketch (Giggly), Sam Okudo (Chief), and Neville Misati (Michael):
This solid, low-budget film seems like it's going to be about some sort of monsters given the title and the first half-hour of set-up. But it goes off on an interesting tangent, without necessarily invalidating the idea that there are weird monsters out there, outside the camera's field of vision.
I will note that the film has nothing to do with Joe R. Lansdale's classic splatterpunk novel The Nightrunners.
Nightrunners follows two 20-something American women who've traveled to a remote Kenyan island to do charitable things and record them for a film project. The Kenyans are friendly. The women are accepted easily into the community. But they're told to never leave their compound at night. And at night, strange sounds and cries begin.
Then there's a mysterious death. And the woman who films everything starts to see things that don't show up on any camera. All this while her friend starts to forge close connections with the Kenyans, especially the affable Michael.
The film plays 'fair' throughout in straddling the line between 'real' and hallucinated events, between the supernatural and the delusional. It also offers a subtle critique of White People Bearing Gifts, culture shock, and the toll secrets can take on individuals, especially when they begin to surface without any conscious control.
And it manages some creepy moments in which the viewer (well, if the viewer is Caucasian) must question why one is creeped out in the first place. There's an interrogation of unconscious racism here, and quite an effective one. Recommended.
Tales from the Miskatonic University Library (2016): edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Jon Ashmead, containing the following stories:
Slowly Ticking Time Bomb by Don Webb
The Third Movement by Adrian Cole
To Be in Ulthar on a Summer Afternoon by Dirk Flinthart
Interlibrary Loan by Harry Turtledove
A Trillion Young by Will Murray
The Paradox Collection by A. C. Wise
The Way to a Man's Heart by Marilyn 'Mattie' Brahen
The White Door by Douglas Wynne
One Small Change by P. D. Cacek
Recall Notice by Alex Shvartsman
The Children's Collection by James Van Pelt
Not in the Card Catalog by Darrell Schweitzer
The Bonfire of the Blasphemies by Robert M. Price
Solid, enjoyable anthology of stories either related to the demon-haunted Special Collection library at Miskatonic University or fictional, forbidden tomes and their dangerous presence on this Earth or any other. Some stories are comic: "Recall Notice" by Alex Shvartsman and "The Way to a Man's Heart" by Marilyn 'Mattie' Brahen are the two most comic-satiric of these.
Some take what initially seems like a comic premise (say, what if H.P. Lovecraft's forbidden uber-tome The Necronomicon were digitized and put on-line?) and exploit it for horrifying rather than comic consequences. The sancrosanct nature of the Interlibrary Loan comes into comic, horrific play; so, too, the problems of hanging onto volumes that don't always feel like being confined to one shelf or one library. And "The Children's Collection" by James Van Pelt strikes a strikingly poignant note about the responsibilities of a librarian in Lovecraft's unusual Massachusetts coastal town of Innsmouth. In all, a lot of fun. Recommended.
Black Wings of Cthulhu 5 (2016) edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories:
- Plenty of Irem by Jonathan Thomas
- Diary of a Sane Man by Nicole Cushing
- The Woman in the Attic by Robert H. Waugh
- Far from Any Shore by CaitlÃn R. Kiernan
- In Blackness Etched, My Name by W. H. Pugmire
- Snakeladder by Cody Goodfellow
- The Walker in the Night by Jason C. Eckhardt
- In Bloom by Lynne Jamneck
- The Black Abbess by John Reppion
- The Quest by Mollie L. Burleson
- A Question of Blood by David Hambling
- Red Walls by Mark Howard Jones
- The Organ of Chaos by Donald Tyson
- Seed of the Gods by Donald R. Burleson
- Fire Breeders by Sunni K Brock
- Casting Fractals by Sam Gafford
- The Red Witch of Chorazin by Darrell Schweitzer
- The Oldies by Nancy Kilpatrick
- Voodoo by Stephen Woodworth
- Lore by Wade German
Another year, another superior Black Wings anthology of cosmic horror from editor S.T. Joshi. The 'of Cthulhu' is added to the trade paperback editions of these anthologies for commercial considerations, by the way. The hardcovers, per the originating H.P. Lovecraft quote, are simply Black Wings.
As is usual for Joshi anthologies, the stories range from good to excellent. Familiar names that include Caitlin Kiernan, W.H. Pugmire, and Darrell Schweitzer offer up superior tales of dark gods and that menacing, indifferent universe of cosmic dread. Sunni Brock offers a fresh take on Innsmouth, complete with what seems like a nod to the Japanese horror story that would become the American movie Dark Water (that story being "Floating Water" by Koji Suzuki). Schweitzer offers an ambitiously circular mise en abyme. Kiernan's background in paleontology informs the unfortunate findings of her characters.
There's a sarcastic cheekiness to Nancy Kilpatrick's "The Oldies" that doesn't undermine the horror of its collision of Old Gods and traumatized people. As flies to wanton boys, and all that jazz. Jonathan Thomas (The Color Over Occam) offers a wry visit to Lovecraft's Kingsport that nods to the odd festival held there, and its odder participants, in a story whose droll tone resembles that of a vintage Clark Ashton Smith story like "The Seven Geases" or "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros."
A couple of stories -- John Reppion's "The Black Abbess" and David Hambling's "A Question of Blood" specifically -- don't quite stick their landings as they embrace a little too much lack of closure. Still, they're worth reading, as the anthology is as a whole. And Wade German's concluding poem is a nice touch, especially given Lovecraft's embrace of weird poetry. Highly recommended.
The Ballad Of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle: There's an ongoing battle in horror circles over just how much emphasis should be placed on H.P. Lovecraft's well-documented racism.
It's well-documented mainly because he documented it himself in his thousands upon thousands of letters. The Ballad Of Black Tom arrived in 2016 as the argument began to pick up steam among HPL's supporters and detractors and all those caught in-between.
Victor LaValle has written a very good novella here, perhaps somewhat overpraised because it's a revisionist Cthulhu Mythos work by an African-American writer. Perhaps somewhat overdamned from the other side, too. It's pretty good. It's not the blistering, lacerating work of greatness I expected from some reviews nor the unmitigated cock-up I feared from other reviews.
LaValle retells Lovecraft's early 1920's New York-set story "The Horror At Red Hook" while adding one major new character to it, our protagonist, dubbed Black Tom once he sets certain supernatural events into motion but born and raised Thomas Tester. LaValle portrays the plight of African-Americans in 1920's New York with a clinical matter-of-factness that turns to passionate horror as non-supernatural horrors push Thomas into the role of Black Tom in order to gain both personal and racial vengeance on the white power structure.
Do you need to be familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos to fully enjoy the story? Oh, probably. The cosmic horror of the story is almost entirely a matter of this prior knowledge. The more visceral horrors, supernatural and natural, are described; the cosmic are told too much and not shown in particularly horrifying terms.
This may be intentional -- LaValle foregrounds the horrors of racism here, in part by pushing the cosmic to the background. It does mute the ending, however, which seems as if it's supposed to cause some final culmination of horror and instead seems pretty obvious and frankly just a bit lame.
Obviously, the major revision to "The Horror At Red Hook" is the addition of a whole new character to it, right? Well, maybe not. For one, "The Horror At Red Hook" never specifically refers to anything in the then-amorphous Cthulhu Mythos. It isn't a Mythos tale. The Ballad of Black Tom is a Mythos tale, chosen by LaValle, I assume, because it's HPL's most racist, non-ghost-written major story*, obsessively detailing how New York went to Hell when all those swarthy foreigners arrived. And Italians! HPL had it in for the Italians.
LaValle drastically recasts the conclusion of "The Horror At Red Hook." He pretty much has to, as a brief foray through a magical doorway grants Thomas magical superpowers that allow him to do anything the plot requires. Is this a Mary Sue moment? Oh, probably. Adding a bit more nuance to Thomas' powers and abilities would ground the work more. As is, it all seems a bit fanboyish. Actually, very fanboyish, which I'm pretty sure is not what LaValle was aiming for.
Still and all, this is a worthy addition to the Cthulhu Mythos, which has been criticizing and self-evaluating itself for decades in the works of its finest writers. The text even manages to get subverted by an attempt at subversion and criticism. LaValle alters Malone's physical appearance from HPL's source text so as to make him resemble HPL himself. He also introduces a horrifyingly racist character who's clearly a parody of HPL pen pal and Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard (the first clue is that the character is named Mr. Howard; the second is that he's from Texas).
But HPL and his pen-friends were introducing characters based on one another in their Mythos work from the late 1920's onwards, generally to kill them off in horrible ways. The fates of Howard and Malone seem somewhat tame compared to how, say, HPL killed off his version of Robert Bloch (in "The Haunter Of the Dark"), how Bloch killed off HPL (in "The Shambler From the Stars"), how Frank Belknap Long killed off HPL (in "The Space-Eaters"), and so on, and so forth. Basically, as friends, Lovecraft and his circle were way better at killing one another off than LaValle is at killing them off. Oh, well. Recommended.
* "Medusa's Coil" is HPL's most racist story. It's a heavily ghost-rewritten version of Zealia Bishop's story.
Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver: It's 1935. Upper-class British twits throng the unconquerable places of the globe seeking to conquer them. The poles have been penetrated. Only a handful of mountains remain upon which to plant the Union Jack. All a group of British mountain-climbers need to reach the summit of the third-highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas, is fortitude and a small army of Sherpas and other native supply-carriers.
To Kangchenjunga come Stephen and 'Kits' Pearce and several others. The Pearces are semi-estranged upper-class brothers, older 'Kits' the adventurer and Stephen the doctor the expedition now requires, its previous doctor having fallen ill. Stephen wants to prove himself. 'Kits' just wants to emulate the heroes he spent his boyhood reading about. When it comes to Kangchenjunga, that hero was Edmund Lyell.
Lyell led an ill-fated, high-casualty expedition up Kangchenjunga in 1906. Then he grew rich and famous on his account of that expedition and the fame and adulation it brought to him. Lyell is now dead. On their way to Kangchenjunga, the Brits visit Charles Tennant, the last survivor. He lives close enough to Kangchenjunga to see it out his study window in the distance. But when Stephen questions him as to what really happened on that disastrous, lucrative foray into old and darkness, Tennant throws him out. Old nerves?
Well, we'll find out.
Michelle Paver does a marvelous job evoking so many things in this novel, from the privation of high-altitude mountain climbing to the petty bickerings of sibling animosity to the casual racism and classism of the typical upper-class Brit in 1935. It's made even more marvelous by her attention to brevity. Thin Air is almost a novella in length; all one wants at the end is more, even as one admires the skill required to tell a ghost story in short, sure strokes.
Or is it a ghost story? As in many ghost stories, Thin Air suggests human frailty and guilt as possible explanations for the seemingly supernatural at certain points of the narrative. That doesn't mean either/or -- the ghosts inside and the ghosts outside jostle for primacy in many of the greatest tales of the supernatural. Paver has written something at novel length here that can stand beside great ghost stories by Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and Robert Aickman, all with a piquant taste of post-colonial cultural criticism. Highly recommended.
Under a Watchful Eye (2016) by Adam Nevill: Best-selling horror writer Seb Logan has writer's block. Thankfully, a friend and mentor from his days in college returns to give him inspiration.
Ha!
Ewan is that friend -- unbathed, unkempt, drunk, and intrusive. Supernaturally intrusive. Ewan appears to have tapped into some underlying supernatural reality, one that he's pulled Seb into because Ewan wants a publishing deal. And someone to make his strange, scrawled manifesto publishable.
It's sort of the nightmare version of all those stories writers tell about people coming up to them at parties and saying, "I've got an idea for a story. You write it and we'll split the profits 50-50!"
Sen and Ewan's unpleasant reunion is only the beginning of Seb's forced plunge into a supernatural underworld of increasing malevolence. However, Ewan isn't the Prime Mover in these experiences. Who is, and why, starts to become apparent about a third of the way into the novel.
Under a Watchful Eye gradually builds one of the more unusual occult conspiracies I can think of in a horror novel or movie. The comedy may be bleak and black, but it's undeniably there, as Seb becomes aware. Once upon a time, a con-man and occasional horror writer created a psychic cult. The cult seems to have become defunct with the author's death in the early 1980's. But as Lovecraft might say, "That is not dead that can eternal lie..."
Nevill's recurring interest in portraying human suffering is a little muted here -- Seb's privation is more of a slow drip than a case of being repeatedly beaten about the head by a giant monster. It's still there, though. Stretches in the supernatural world are imaginatively constructed. So too many of the creatures lurking there, especially an awful, formerly human thing dubbed Thin Ned.
Nevill trades here in something close to the visionary horrors of Arthur Machen (referenced in the novel) and some of Algernon Blackwood's more rarified stories. There are horrifying sights and sounds in that underworld, have no doubt. But the overall arc is of a psychic, visionary quest that Seb is forced into by his human tormentors. His salvation, if salvation does indeed come, lies in understanding the rules of the supernatural better than his enemies understand them. And they've got a 30-year head-start.
Seb's chances for survival, though, rest on the novel's deflation of the trope of the all-powerful conspiracy, occult or otherwise. This is the chief delight of the novel's final third. What if that conspiracy was maybe, I don't know, run by idiots? Highly recommended.
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012): written by Christopher Landon and Chad Feehan; directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman; starring Kathryn Newton (Alex), Katie Featherston (Katie), Matt Shively (Ben), Aiden Lovekamp (Wyatt), and Brady Allen (Robbie): Jesus, there are two more Paranormal Activity movies after this one. The Law of Diminishing Returns will not stop this franchise!
If you're scoring at home, the linear chronology of the Paranormal Activity movies goes 3, 2, 1, 4, 5, and 6.
There are a couple of good moments in Paranormal Activity 4. There might have been more had the movie been made five years later, when smart-phone video technology was better. Why do I say this? Because teenaged girl protagonist (Supernatural's Kathryn Newton, aka the angry, monster-fighting daughter of Castiel's human host) spends about a third of the movie carrying a goddamned laptop around so she can talk to her boyfriend and film supernatural incidents at the same time. Yeah, that isn't... awkward.
Anyway, the demons and ghosts are now nigh-omnipotent, which means that the movie soporifically muddles towards pretty much the same ending as the first three. Newton does what she can, but she's adrift in a sea of nihilistic found-footage nonsense. Not recommended, and really no fun at all.
The Darkness (2016): written by Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong, and Shane Krause; directed by Greg McLean; starring Kevin Bacon (Peter Taylor), Radha Mitchell (Bronny Taylor), David Mazouz (Michael Taylor), Lucy Fry (Stephanie Taylor), Paul Reiser (Peter's Boss), Ilza Ponko (Gloria Ortega), and Alma Martinez (Teresa Morales): The Darkness isn't a good movie, but it's at least a better remake of Poltergeist (1982) than Poltergeist (2015).
The Taylor family (Mom Radha Mitchell, Dad Kevin Bacon, bulimic teenaged daughter Lucy Fry and autistic son David 'Bruce Wayne' Mazouz) vacations at the Grand Canyon. However, autistic son Mikey walks off with five stones from a secret Anasazi chamber. Removing the stones from the chamber frees five demons from imprisonment in the Phantom Zone. Well, whatever.
As it apparently takes months for these demons to power up, the Taylor family gets bedevilled at an ever-increasing rate by water taps that turn themselves on, bulimia, potential marital infidelity, and loud bumps in the night. Mikey now has an imaginary friend he calls 'Jenny.'
So a bunch of stuff happens that's a lot like Poltergeist, only with nods to the mysterious Anasazi civilization rather than Indian burial grounds. Mikey is enamored of his demonic friends. No one else is. Thankfully, the Internet is quite authoritative on the subject of Anasazi demons! Though based on the screenshots we see, Mom and Pop get all their information from the same web page.
Director Greg McLean made his name with Wolf Creek and also directed the underwhelming Belko Experiment. He achieves some nice horror effects here. He also seems to forget what establishing shots are at key moments. Oh, well. There's a wise Hispanic psychic and her wise psychic grand-daughter to help straighten things out with the help of some sort of demonic diving rod made out of coat-hangers.
The portrayal of autism in The Darkness isn't exactly offensive. It just seems... undercooked. Mikey is either robotically gormless or suddenly HUMAN. David Mazouz does what he can with the character, but you really start to hate Mikey, which I don't think was the intention. Lucy Fry is much better than she needs to be in the role of bulimic sister/demonic punching bag. Radha Mitchell is also fine in a somewhat underwritten part.
And Kevin Bacon! He's quite convincing as a sleazy, affair-prone, distracted white-collar (he's an architect) Dad and somewhat less convincing as Good, Self-Sacrificing Dad. His hair is crazy, though not unjustified -- he looks like a 50-year-old guy trying to look young and failing miserably when he remembers his pomade and failing really, really miserably when he forgets his pomade and his hair looks like a toupee made of badly-dyed straw.
I mean, it's really a bad movie, but it's an enjoyable bad movie. Recommended.
The Void (2016): written and directed by Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski; starring Aaron Poole (Officer Carter), Kenneth Welsh (Dr. Powell), Daniel Fathers (The Father), Kathleen Munroe (Allison), Ellen Wong (Kim), Mik Byskov (The Son), Art Hindle (Mitchell), and Grace Munro (Maggie): Delightful Lovecraftian horror made in Canada -- specifically in and around Sault Ste. Marie. There are gooshy bits, but they're in service to a story about an invasion from OUTSIDE.
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.
Nocturnal Animals (2016): adapted by Tom Ford from the novel by Austin Wright; directed by Tom Ford; starring Amy Adams (Susan Morrow), Jake Gyllenhaal (Edward Sheffield/ Tony Hastings), Michael Shannon (Bobby Andes), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ray Marcus), and Armie Hammer (Hutton Morrow): Fashion designer Tom Ford previously directed the Colin-Firth-starring A Single Man several years ago. That film prepares one in absolutely no way for the weird magnificence that is Nocturnal Animals.
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.
Population Zero (2016): written by Jeff Staranchuk; directed by Julian T. Pinder and Adam Levins; starring Julian T. Pinder (Director): Approach this documentary as I did, knowing nothing about it, and enjoy it. Or look it up and enjoy it differently. Either way, this is a masterful job by the Canadian film-makers. That's all I'm saying. Highly recommended.
A Cure for Wellness (2016): written by Justin Haythe and Gore Verbinski; directed by Gore Verbinski; starring Dane DeHaan (Lockhart), Jason Isaacs (Volmer), and Mia Goth (Hannah): Who knew Gore Verbinski had so much Poe in him? Edgar Allan Poe, that is, whose shadow looms over the work done by co-writers Verbinski and Justin Haythe and director Verbinski.
I'm glad I watched A Cure for Wellness at home, broken up over three nights. It's a slow movie. Almost a languorous movie. Poe's great horror short stories often had this same feeling, a slowness, a creeping that was at odds with their brevity. There were whole worlds there being revealed in a slow pan.
Dane DeHaan plays a young American stockbroker sent by his firm to retrieve a colleague from a mysterious wellness clinic located in the Swiss Alps. Needless to say, nothing goes as planned.
Instead, a parade of horrors results, counterpointed by a critique of capitalism and its modern discontents. There's a mysterious young woman played by the aptly named Mia Goth (seriously, is that her real name?). And there's the soothing, reasonable, yet menacing head of the clinic as played by Jason Isaacs in a mode of subtle dread.
Production design makes the clinic foreboding from the beginning, but also realistically dated in its colour schemes and appearance -- it looks like a hospital from the 1940's. Below the ground, it looks like a hospital from the 1540's. Or a castle's dungeons.
Terrible things await Dehaan and Ms. Goth. There are subtle moments and gross-out moments and a repeated use of the reliably nightmarish 'My teeth are falling out!' trope. DeHaan, who looks oddly wormy at the best of times, is perfectly cast as the protagonist. He looks like a Poe protagonist. How odd that this perfect casting should come in the same year as his most perfect miscasting as the jaunty hero of Valerian.
Verbinski is relatively fearless when it comes to those moments when the horror stops creeping and starts leaping. It's fascinating to see a director best known for bringing adaptations of modern Japanese horror to North America and for that Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy plumb the depths of good old Gothic body horror, incest horror, and monstrous secrets from the cloachal depths. I'd love to see him tackle a Poe anthology next. Highly recommended.
The Boy (2016): written by Stacey Menear; directed by William Brent Bell; starring Lauren Cohan (Greta), Rupert Evans (Malcolm), and Ben Robson (Cole): Who names their son Brahms? Oh, well. Lauren Cohan plays an American hired as a nanny/au pair by an elderly English couple. She's there to take care of their eight-year-old son while they go on vacation. The son is a life-sized doll. OK!
The Walking Dead's Cohan carries much of the film's best moments, as improbable as they often seem. And the movie plays fair until the epilogue, which one could argue is as much an imagined nightmare as the 'hand shots' that appear near the ends of Carrie and Deliverance. Rupert Evans brings a muted affability to the thankless role of New English Love Interest. The doll is pretty creepy.
The director whiffs several times on disguising the fact that the movie was shot in and around Victoria, British Columbia rather than England. Either that or The Boy takes place in an alternate universe in which England has redwood trees. Lightly recommended.
The Girl With All the Gifts (2016): adapted by Mike Carey from his own novel; directed by Colm McCarthy; starring Gemma Arterton (Helen), Glenn Close (Dr. Caldwell), Sennia Nanua (Melanie), Fisayo Akinade (Kieran), and Paddy Considine (Sgt. Parks): Tight, taut, thoughtful zombie movie adapted by the great novelist and comic-book writer Mike Carey (Lucifer, The Unwritten, the Felix Castor series) from his own novel.
Barely released in North America, The Girl With All the Gifts presents a world several years into a plague of zombies unleashed by a fungal strain that attacks the human brain. But second-generation 'zombie' children seem to be sentient and 'human' so long as they don't get hungry -- or get triggered to be hungry. Why?
While biologist Glenn Close tries to cure the disease, Gemma Arterton's school-zombie teacher tries to keep the most tractable and intelligent of the child-zombies happy and educated and non-lethally inclined. A very interesting piece of work, though a lot of the military stuff needed some serious consulting. Or me on the set to yell, "There's no way they'd put a plate-glass window there." Recommended.
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 Mammoth Book of Cthulhu (2016) edited by Paula Guran, containing the following stories:
- “In Syllables of Elder Seas” by Lisa L. Hannett
- “The Peddler’s Tale, or, Isobel’s Revenge” by CaitlÃn R. Kiernan
- “It’s All the Same Road in the End” by Brian Hodge
- “Caro in Carno” by Helen Marshall
- “The Cthulhu Navy Wife” by Sandra McDonald
- “Those Who Watch” by Ruthanna Emrys
- “A Clutch” by Laird Barron
- “Just Beyond the Trailer Park” by John Shirley
- “The Sea Inside” by Amanda Downum
- “Outside the House, Watching for the Crows” by John Langan
- “Alexandra Lost” by Simon Strantzas
- “Falcon-and-Sparrows” by Yoon Ha Lee
- “A Shadow of Thine Own Design” by W. H. Pugmire
- “Backbite” by Norman Partridge
- “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” by Usman T. Malik
- “Legacy of Salt” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- “I Do Not Count the Hours” by Michael Wehunt
- “An Open Letter to Mister Edgar Allan Poe, from a Fervent Admirer” by Michael Shea
- “I Dress My Lover in Yellow” by A. C. Wise
- “Deep Eden” by Richard Gavin
- “The Future Eats Everything” by Don Webb
- “I Believe That We Will Win” by Nadia Bulkin
- “In the Sacred Cave” by Lois H. Gresh
- “Umbilicus” by Damien Angelica Walters
- “Variations on Lovecraftian Themes” by Veronica Schanoes
The Mammoth Book of Occasionally Lovercraftian Horror, Occasionally Written by People Who Despise H.P. Lovecraft would have been more accurate. In her sloppy, poorly researched introduction, editor Paula Guran admits that the title is a bait-and-switch: “This anthology has little to do specifically with Cthulhu and everything to do with ‘new Lovecraftian fiction.’ ” Why call it The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu? Because Cthulhu sells, now more than ever.
There are a few stand-outs. OK, one. “Outside the House, Watching for the Crows” by John Langan is excellent, evoking fear and cosmic horror in the seemingly most mundane of situations. “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” by Usman T. Malik is also a solid piece, though it fails to stick the landing. Admittedly, HPL occasionally failed to stick the landing. But Malik may be a writer to watch.
Caitlin Kiernan, W.H. Pugmire, and Brian Hodge deliver solid work, none of it all that related to the Cthulhu Mythos (Kiernan riffs on HPL's Dunsanian period; Pugmire is, well, Pugmire, and God bless him for it; and Hodge's story is a solid one with unusual elements that goes on about five pages too long). Norman Partridge riffs on HPL's pre-Cthulhu "The Hound" to decent effect, albeit with a dud of an ending. Laird Barron seems to have had an homage to Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance sitting on his desk when the call for submissions came in -- or at least that's what his atypical, mildly diverting "The Clutch" reads like.
That's about it. Looking at the titles of the stories, I note that I can't remember what most of them were about. I think HPL got accused of misogyny in Paula Guran's introduction, which is actually a very difficult case to make. However, Guran doesn't give the impression of having read much about HPL in that introduction. Honestly, it's possible she's never read any HPL. That could explain how one gets an anthology with Cthulhu in the title and pretty much no Cthulhu in the stories.
The final piece, a biographical attack on HPL's racism and anti-Semitism that we're apparently supposed to believe is a story, is a hell of a way to end the anthology. It's easy to score points off HPL's racism. Writing a great story that deals with that racism -- a story like David Drake's "Than Curse the Darkness" or Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" -- requires talent, something the writer of the concluding 'story' does not seem to possess.
It didn't help that the writer quotes a racist outburst about New York by then-Atlanta Braves reliever John Rocker near the beginning of her 'story.' The quote dates from 1999. How long was this shitty essay... sorry, 'story'... sitting in a drawer? Why resurrect the words of a now-forgotten relief pitcher in a screed... sorry, 'story'... about H.P. Lovecraft? Oh, well. Hidey ho. So it goes.
Anyway, save your money. If you're going to buy a new anthology of Lovecraftian-themed stories, look for S.T. Joshi and avoid Paula Guran. Avoid this book in particular. It's a waste of money.
Blair Witch (2016): written by Simon Barrett, based on characters and situations created by Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard; directed by Adam Wingard; starring James Allen McCune (James), Callie Hernandez (Lisa), Corbin Reid (Ashley), Brandon Scott (Peter), Wes Robinson (Lane), and Valorie Curry (Talia):
Why a sequel? The financial success of a jillion found-footage horror movies since the unexpected +$100 million of The Blair Witch Project back in 1999 suggests that you don't need name recognition to sell these things. You'd also think that the horrible bomb that was Blair Witch: Book of Shadows would have warned the studio off.
Nope.
Set in 2014, Blair Witch tells the tale of lost documentarian Heather's brother, four years old when she disappeared, now leading his own documentary crew into the Maryland woods (now played quite noticeably by British Columbia). A piece of footage on the Internet has convinced him that Heather is still alive, though how he figures this out from the ghoulish face caught on tape leaves me flabbergasted. Oh, well.
So another group of twentysomethings goes into the woods. In a nod to 'More is better!' there are now six of them rather than three. Things go poorly.
Director Adam Wingard noted in an interview that Blair Witch is "about getting chased" and not about "getting lost in the woods" as in the first movie. Boy, do they get chased! Loud sound effects crash and thunder, trees are hurled around, and massive structures are built over night. The Blair Witch is back, and she brought a bulldozer and a construction crew!
Somehow, even the advent of wearable recording technology doesn't make this sequel's characters any more plausible than the loyally camera-toting crew of the original. It does increase the chance of getting nausea from all the fast-twitch camera spins, though. This must have been Barf-Bag City in a goddamned theatre.
Unlike the original, Blair Witch has entirely scripted dialogue rather than partially improvised dialogue. Somehow, this dialogue is way stupider and more irritating than anything in the original. And there's no character here to worry about, even slightly. In doubling the number of major characters, the filmmakers also manage to eliminate any empathy the viewer might feel for them. They've become the anonymous victims in a slasher movie.
Do we actually see the Blair Witch in this movie? I'll leave it to you to research that answer. No, actually I won't. The director says, "No." That yellow, long-armed zombie glimpsed on several occasions is a victim of the witch, not the witch herself. OK. That's tremendous.
I'll leave you to discover the awesome excitement of a person with a severely injured foot trying to get a drone out of a tree. Or the sudden appearance of on-screen sympathetic magic of a pretty high order. Or the baffling late scene in which bright lights seen from inside a house (that house!) cause a character to ask, "What the Hell was that?" and me to reply, "I think the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is here to save you. Get out there!"
There's a brief moment of genuine near-horror that could have made for a better movie. At one point, two of the group who've been separated from the others for about 12 hours reappear, talking about being lost in the woods for days in a world where the Sun never comes up. This brief run of dialogue delivers the only frisson of horror this ham-fisted crapfest manages. Then it's back to throwing trees at people.
Alas, those two old guys fishing in three inches of water don't reappear in this sequel. I'm guessing they read the script and said, "Hey, we may have been improbably fishing in three inches of water in the original, but at least we didn't suck."
In the spirit of the original's horror-deflating fishing sequence, this movie offers us an ominous early shot of insects on the ground. But the insects are bumblebees, the least scary and most endearing stinging insect in the world. This is not a portent. This is a shot of lovable bumblebees trying to fly out of the shot so they don't have to be in this awful movie. Go, bumblebees, go! Not recommended.
SiREN (2016): Based on the segment 'Amateur Night' from V/H/S (2012); written by Nicholas Tecosky, Luke Piotrowski, Ben Collins, and David Bruckner; directed by Gregg Bishop; starring Chase Williamson (Jonah), Hannah Fierman (Lily/ The Lilith/Siren), Justin Welborn (Nyx), Hayes Mercure (Rand), Michael Aaron Milligan (Mac), Randy McDowell (Elliott), Brittany Hall (Bartender), and Lindsey Garrett (Eva): Spun off from a segment of the original V/H/S anthology film, SiREN is really good once you get beyond that silly title. A bachelor party goes extraordinarily awry when a stripper at a private (and very odd) club turns out to be one of the mythical Sirens. Or maybe a "Lilith," which is what the club's proprietor keeps calling her (hence the name "Lily").
The result is a fairly taut 80 minutes with so much female nudity I started wondering halfway through if this movie had been made in the Go-Go 70's. Nope. The film-makers handle the scares and the grotesque with a grungy, occasionally startling style -- the 'true' appearance of the Siren comes as a nice reveal. The bachelor party members are not impressively delineated as individuals, but the characterization is passable and the performances fairly naturalistic.
The Siren's club is a nicely handled conceit -- the supernatural bar that you should never have entered. Its owner, occultist Nyx, bears a weird resemblance to Paul Williams. There are some solid, fantastic bits involving memories, magic, and Medusa. The film also shows us brief glimpses of all the supernatural events going on at the club without going into them, making the glimpses that much more effective at inspiring unease. Overall, an enjoyable horror movie on a limited budget from Universal's Chiller Films brand. Recommended.
