Life (2017): written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick; directed by Daniel Espinosa; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (David Jordan) and Rebecca Ferguson (Miranda North): A movie riddled with scientific, engineering, logical, and character idiocies -- that's Life!
I'm pretty sure the pitch for this movie was "Gravity meets Alien!" even though Alien was also set in and around space because Life has a lot of zero-G shots and ostensibly takes place in the present day, albeit a present day with radically different laws of physics.
There could easily be a good version of this movie in which a Martian octopus with an eating disorder attacks the International Space Station. Indeed, there have been many good versions of this movie, from both versions of The Thing to Alien to, I don't know, Hitchcock's Lifeboat.
This version, though, is an exercise in grim dumbness, surprisingly from the screenwriters of the jaunty Deadpool. By the end, you will be cheering for the Martian octopus, which is smarter than an entire station filled with astronauts because as we all know from Armageddon and many other movies, astronauts are really stupid when compared to Just Plain Folks. Not recommended.
Southern Gods (2011) by John Hornor Jacobs: An enjoyable, bloody, thoughtful piece of hardboiled Southern Gothic Lovecraftian cosmic horror blues.
In 1951 Tennessee, enforcer Bull Ingram gets loaned by his criminal employer to a record-company owner who has lost one of his employees in Arkansas. The employee was pursuing rumours of a strange bluesman named Ramblin' John Hastur. Yes, Hastur. As in Robert W. Chambers' THE KING IN YELLOW.
Oh oh is right!
Meanwhile, a parallel narrative introduces us to abused wife Sarah and daughter Franny, who have fled her husband back to the old family home in Arkansas. That family home was the site of a mass murder of a family by its young son decades earlier. And the library of that home contains some extremely odd volumes, ones familiar either in name or content to fans of the Cthulhu Mythos and all its tentacular offshoots.
Haunted by his experiences in the Pacific Theatre in World War Two, Bull Ingram is also haunted by an essentially decent nature that has been sublimated so that he can get on with his work collecting loans for his employer. He's an almost quintessential figure for hardboiled fiction, a tarnished knight, a grey man sent into battle against the pitch-black (and bone-white) forces that seek to devour the world. Jacobs also does a nice job of investing Sarah with increasing assurance as the narrative progresses.
Southern Gods is unusually bloody for cosmic horror and unusually cosmic for bloody horror. Jacobs deftly creates a sense of place throughout, especially in the dives and small-town radio stations Bull investigates during his mission. The climax and its aftermath are also rewarding, a rejection of the occasionally easy nihilism of many works of horror without moving into unearned sentimentality. Highly recommended.
