Hellraising !!!

Hellraiser: Inferno [Hellraiser 5] (2000): written by Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Craig Sheffer (Det. Thorn), Nicholas Turturro (Det. Nenonen), James Remar (Dr. Gregory), and Doug Bradey (Pinhead): 

Straight-to-video entry in the Hellraiser series is a competent bit of low-budget horror starring Craig Sheffer as a dirty, hard-boiled cop who runs afoul of Pinhead and the Cenobites, who are as akin to the three spirits of A Christmas Carol in this as they are to their normally fetishy, hyperviolent selves. 

Writer-director Scott Derrickson would go on to helm Marvel's first Dr. Strange movie. Sheffer is competent. The movie itself was an original script into which Dimension Films (the genre offshoot of Miramax) inserted characters and situations from the Hellraiser universe. It's not terrible, and its dreamier/more nightmarish sections certainly do point towards the mystical shenanigans of Dr. Strange. Lightly recommended.

Hellraiser: Hellworld [Hellraiser 8](2005): written by Joel Soisson and Carl Dupre; directed by Rick Bota; starring Lance Henriksen (The Host), Katheryn Winnick (Chelsea), Christpher Jacot (Jake), Henry Cavill (Mike), and Doug Bradley (Pinhead): An original story into which Dimension Films (the genre offshoot of Miramax) inserted characters and situations from the Hellraiser universe. Katheryn Winnick (Vikings), Lance Henriksen (everything) and Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) headline the cast, though only Henriksen was a known quantity at the time. 

This time around, the Hellraiser universe figures in a massively popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Several years after their friend committed suicide 'because of' the game, five friends find themselves with invitations to the annual Hellworld convention, held at some creepy giant house in Los Angeles. Hellraiser is just a game in this movie. Or is it? So of course the remaining friends go to the convention. And everything goes fine!

Of course not. This is a relatively clever entry in the Hellraiser series, even if Henry Cavill's British accent seems to be present in the first scene and absent for the rest of the film. The movie isn't anti-video-games (smart move!). It also wisely, given its low budget, avoids actually showing footage of the fictional game. 

Katheryn Winnick is fetching and competent as a character who is intermittently kick-ass. The other four gamers are pretty annoying, which is no fault of the actors. Lance Henriksen exudes morbid, sardonic menace throughout regardless of how goofy his lines get. Surprisingly enjoyable. The last Hellraiser with Doug Bradley as Pinhead. Recommended.

Gorgo Loves His Mama

Ditko Monsters: Gorgo: edited by Craig Yoe; written by Joe Gill and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko and others (1961-64; reprinted 2013): This grand, tabloid-sized volume reprints all of comic-book legend Steve (Spider-man, Dr. Strange) Ditko's work on the Charlton Comics adaptation and continuation of the giant-monster movie Gorgo.

Gorgo was a British attempt in the early 1960's to match the success of Toho Studios' Japanese giant-monster movies, especially Godzilla (nee Gojira). Thus was born Gorgo, a giant monster with an even more giant mother. Like King Kong, Gorgo gets captured and exhibited by some remarkably stupid showmen. Unlike King Kong, Gorgo has a mother who seems to be several hundred feet tall. England takes a beating.

After adapting the movie, Charlton continued the adventures of Gorgo and Mama Gorgo. Ditko and his long-time collaborator at Charlton, writer Joe Gill, combined on several issues of the title over a three-year period, with Ditko also providing several covers to issues he didn't otherwise illustrate.

This volume really highlights Ditko's two almost paradoxically opposite skills as a comic-book artist. He's great at drawing really weird things, and he's great at drawing people and settings that look far more normal and believeable than that of any other mainstream American comic-book artist in history. Giant monsters and ordinary people: it's the Robert Redford/Godzilla movie you always wanted!

In between depopulating the ocean for their out-sized caloric requirements (Gorgo's mother can gulp down sperm whales whole), Gorgo and his mother sleep on the ocean floor and occasionally get into adventures. They're not the villains of the series -- far from it. Instead, they end the Cuban Missile Crisis (I'm not joking), save Earth from an alien invasion, rescue an American nuclear submarine from the ocean floor, and inspire men and women to get married wherever they go (again, not kidding). For giant, destructive monsters, they sure are swell.

Throughout, Ditko juxtaposes the mundane and the fantastic with the same sort of skill he exhibited on his far more famous work on Spider-man and Dr. Strange, two characters he was drawing for Marvel pretty much simultaneously with several of the stories in this volume. Ditko enjoyed working for Charlton, pretty much the cheapest of the comic-book publishers to survive through the 1960's and 1970's, because he had pretty much carte blanche. Charlton was too cheap to exert editorial control, which meant Ditko didn't have to tailor his style to the publisher or have his stories micro-managed by an editor.

It's all a lot of over-sized fun on over-sized pages. This is Ditko near the height of his mainstream artistic powers. The scripts by Joe Gill are loopy in that Silver-Age science-fictiony way. The historical material contextualizes both the movie and the comics. Really, a fine piece of work. Gorgo loves his mama! Highly recommended.

Strange Spiders

Spider-man/Dr. Strange: Fever: written and illustrated by Brendan McCarthy with an additional story written by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and illustrated by Steve Ditko (2010/1965; collected 2010): Enjoyable, wonky, slight and psychedelic team-up of Marvel's two biggest heroes co-created by the occasionally trippy pen of Steve Ditko.

That Ditko was amazingly good at conjuring up the weird magical vistas of sorcerer Dr. Strange always seemed a bit paradoxical, as Ditko's other strength lay in making his characters look realistically proportioned -- and New York realistically lived-in. Nonetheless, Ditko made magic look somehow effortless and cool and disquietingly surreal, and forty years of other Dr. Strange artists have struggled to approach the surreal-yet-grounded vistas and creatures of Ditko's realms of magic and mystery.

McCarthy has earned a name as a somewhat surreal comic-book artist, often more for his cover painting for books like Shade, The Changing Man (itself a revival of a trippy 1970's Ditko creation for DC Comics). Here, he grounds his magical dimensions in Australian aboriginal art, among other things, in this tale of Dr. Strange and Spider-man fighting spider-demons in another dimension.

McCarthy wisely keeps Strange and Spider-man believably human-proportioned and muscled, and some of the effects he achieves are quite lovely and strange. He's no Ditko, as the bonus reprint of the first Ditko-plotted-and-drawn Spider-man/Dr. Strange team-up shows, but he's definitely not your average 21st-century comic-book artist. Recommended.

When Adults Attack

Book:


Blood Crazy by Simon Clark: This novel is a dandy apocalyptic thriller, equal parts Stephen King and John Wyndham with a little New Agey cuckoobanana psychology thrown in. One fine day, everyone everywhere over the age of 18 starts trying to kill everyone 18 and younger. Yikes! The narrative follows protagonist Nick Aten as he first tries just to survive, and then tries to figure out what's going on and why.

The problems of organizing teenagers into viable survival groups allow for some Lord of the Flies-style shenanigans, while the travails of various survival groups in combatting the increasingly organized but ant-like adults also allows for much angst and action. The explanation for the situation reminds me a lot of group and mass psychology tropes from 60's science fiction, especially Dune, Quatermass and the Pit, and a Doctor Who serial called "The Daemons." All in all, a dandy, compulsively readable novel from Clark, whom I grow more fond of with each new novel.


Comics Collection:


Essential Doctor Strange Volume 4 by Roger Stern, Chris Claremont, Gene Colan, Marshall Rogers and several other writers and artists (c.1976-1981, Collected 2009): The relatively brief Stern/Rogers run on Doctor Strange was one of the good Doctor's career highlights. Well, actually anything written by Stern is a career highlight -- he's Doc's second-best writer after Stan Lee. Claremont (long-time X-Men writer) takes Doc a bit too far into the realms of self-pity, but Stern gets him back again.

My only real complaint about the volume (other than the non-ending to the year-long Dweller in Darkness story, caused, I assume, by Stern being replaced by Claremont for a couple of years) is that it features the semi-famous Marvel House Ad from 1981 that promised us Frank Miller taking over the art chores on the book. Now there's a fascinating 'What if?' scenario, as Miller never did make it over to Dr. Strange.