Rabid (1977): written and directed by David Cronenberg: [Cast and Crew]: Early David Cronenberg film features a fetching and sympathetic soft-core-porn actress Marilyn Chambers (topless a lot here) as a motorcycle crash victim who gets turned into a vampire by plastic surgery gone insanely wrong. And what a vampire!
Chambers feeds on people with what is essentially a sharp-toothed penis that pops out of her armpit. Phallic mother, anyone? All that, and the penis turns its victims (sort of) rabid. Hence the title!
Low-key and creepy in that patented Cronenberg manner, full of body horror galore and a semi-apocalyptic finale set in and around Montreal. Everyone speaks flat Ontario English, though, to a weird extent at times -- filmed in Quebec, the movie nonetheless feels like it's set in Cronenberg's Toronto.
Extremely enjoyable, and with a last twenty minutes that expands upon and deepens the sadness of the fate of the last survivor of George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead. Highly recommended.
House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski: Danielewski's ambitious first novel spawned a sort of cult following that is itself metafictional, given that the text within the text spawns a sort of cult following.
And that text is a lengthy examination of a movie that doesn't seem to actually exist within the world of the text, supplemented by lengthy, autobiographical footnotes from the man who found and assembled the examination of the movie after discovering it in the apartment of a recently deceased, blind writer.
Who himself also supplied lengthy footnotes to supplement the text he had spent decades writing. A text about a documentary about the House of Leaves. A documentary that doesn't seem to have ever existed. Got all that?
House of Leaves is postmodern and experimental and avant-garde and All That Jazz. It's a horror novel about a house that grows room upon room within itself, within which lurks, perhaps, a monster. Or perhaps the monster is simply the house itself. It does at times appear to be intelligent. It's a love story about a man and his lost, mentally ill mother. It's a satire of academic writing. It's a satire of epics, epic catalogues, epic odysseys. It's an epic itself.
It even turns into a concrete poem for a few dozen pages.
And oh, those footnotes!
The movie at the heart of the narrative is a documentary about attempts to explore and understand those hidden, ever-shifting rooms. The family who owns the house consists of a revered photojournalist, a former model, and two children. One day, when they return from a holiday, their house has somehow acquired a new hallway. And things get weirder from there.
If there's a flaw here, it's the tendency of the text to draw every woman other than the mentally ill mother and, for the most part, the former model as sexy, sexy sex objects. But all those sexy 'librarians' and strippers are part of the frame narrative, the footnote narrative, written by an increasingly unstable 24-year-old man. Are any of these women real? As the sex scenes involving these women all read like Penthouse Forum wish fulfillment, I'd say a conditional 'No.' Or at least I hope not.
However, House of Leaves is otherwise a fine piece of work. A horror story, a love story, a description of a documentary, a family drama, a mystery, an epic. And a convincing portrait of mental illness, if your interpretation goes that way. If your interpretation goes a long way, that way, the whole text is a delivery from a fictional writer who's suffered a monumental break with reality. Or it really is a cosmic horror piece, and so on, and so forth. It can support a whole bag of overlapping interpretations. It has many mansions.
Set aside time to read it. It's a marvelous piece of work. Highly recommended.
Black Kiss 2 (2014): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin: Once upon a time in the late 1980's, comic-book great Howard Chaykin wrote and illustrated a then-controversial piece of erotic horror-noir called Black Kiss. A quarter-century later he returned to that world with a prequel/sequel/sidequel. It can be read and understood without knowing the original story. It's a propulsive, compulsive, nightmare-vision of a book. It's sexually graphic, bleakly funny, and violent as Hell. It's also great comics. NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH OR EASILY OFFENDED !!! Highly recommended.
Blue World: written by Robert R. McCammon: containing "Yellowjacket Summer", "Makeup", "Doom City", "Nightcrawlers", "Yellachile's Cage", "I Scream Man!", "He'll Come Knocking at Your Door", "Chico", "Night Calls the Green Falcon", "Pin", "The Red House", "Something Passed by" and "Blue World" (1981-89; collected 1989): Superior collection of Robert McCammon's 1980's non-novel-length work (though the title story is nearly the length of a short novel). The collection encompasses psychological, science-fictional, and supernatural horror, along with two works of suspense ("Blue World" and "Night Calls the Green Falcon").
One of the standouts is "Nightcrawlers," filmed for an episode of the 1980's Twilight Zone revival. A Viet Nam veteran walks into a highway diner, and bad things happen. It's an excellent bit of science-fictional horror, and also seems to be the precursor to a novel that never materialized.
Many of the other stories are set in McCammon's home-state of Alabama, generally in small towns you really don't want to visit ("Yellowjacket Summer," "He'll Come Knocking at Your Door," and "Something Passed By."). The latter is an extremely effective bit of Cthulhuesque cosmic horror that dwells on the effects of a dimensional incursion without worrying about the how, why, or who.
"Night Calls the Green Falcon" is another stand-out that would make a terrific movie. An aging, forgotten, and psychologically damaged former star of a children's superhero serial about crimefighter the Green Falcon finds himself dropped into a real-life mystery that he initially has no real desire to tackle.
But tackle it he does, sometimes literally, dressed in the faded remnants of his movie costume. The story strikes a nice balance between the childish idealism of the superhero and the realities of the real world that's much more heart-breaking (and ultimately heart-warming) than the vast majority of adult superhero comics of the last thirty years.
Finally, there's the title novella, a plunge into a hard-boiled world of porn, sex, and serial killers with a Roman Catholic priest and a strangely innocent female porn star as its two protagonists. It verges on hard-core at points, but it's ultimately a story about conventional and unconventional morality set in San Francisco's famous Tenderloin district. McCammon's deft third-person narration is really on display here as the narrative moves seamlessly from the thoughts and actions of one character to another and another and then back again. Recommended.
