Monthly Archives: October 2015

Halloween Horror Movies part I

Here’s a quick post about movies I have been watching this week as part of a celebration of the season.

Up first City of the Living Dead (1980)

1-city_living_dead_posterAn Italian Zombie film made after George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead City of the Living Dead occupies a strange place in the zombie landscape. So many films copied Romero’s zombie take over of the world that it quickly became cliche. (Though still popular as seen in the hit tv show The Walking Dead.) City doesn’t go for the traditional Romero zombies not the traditional arc of action. Here there is a clear cause to the undead, a priest committing suicide in a cemetery, and a third act objective to resolve into a ‘happy ending.’ The film was made in Italy but is set in America. The dubbing is adequate and naming the doomed city Dunwich was a nice hat tip to Lovecraft, though nothing that occurs is inspired by his mythos.

Often discussed among fans of zombie movies is the subject which zombies are the worst to deal with. Romero’s original shamblers, Snyder fast runners, O’Bannon’s intelligent and nearly indestructible dead, but this movie presented one that is truly beyond them all. While they feed on the living, and even have a penchant for taking brains out directly through a skull, (the Italian films tend to be more graphic), these living dead unlike any other can teleport and kill you with a look. No crap, people end up very messily dead from zombie staring contests. They are easier to kill. (Impaling seems to be the required technique.) Plus the whole world ending plague can be averted if the right things are done to put king zombie — our transgressive priest – back in his place. Overall, I enjoyed the film but it is not on my buy list. You can stream it on Hulu.

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What’s wrong with the Republican Party?

First off let me set a couple of ground rules if you’re going to comment. 1) If you’re liberal/left/progressive, I am not interested in snarky insulting comments. Insults are not discourse. 2) If you are right/Republican/conservative I’m not interested in ‘Squirrel’ posts where you start pointing a finger at liberals/Democrats and such. This post is about Republicans, not Democrats.

I watching the current primary season and I just can’t fully fathom what if going on with the Republican Party. As I type this the top two leading candidates (Trump and Carson) for president of the united states are polling a combined 48.8 percent and neither is a person who would normally be considered a serious contender for the position.

Setting aside philosophical and policy issues, it perfectly fine to have deep and serious disagreement with many of the stands presented by the Republican Party, heaven knows I do, what going on right now is bonkers.

Look at what has happened already in the race. Two governors, both with re-elections under their belt, were tossed aside, never seriously considered by the general population of the party while a carnival barker and surgeon without any government executive experience rocket to the top. Right now the distance from Carson to the next leading contender (Rubio) is a whopping 13 points. People with real standing and real experience as trailing what should be fringe candidates.

This is not normal. Last presidential cycle we have a parade of not-Romney candidates because the base really did not trust or like Romney. However the establishment backed him, and those not-Romney tended to flame out fairly quickly. That’s not the dynamic this time around.

There is no single candidate that fully has the establishment’s backing, and the summer has evolved into fall with winter coming and Carson and Trump show no signs of crashing. Why?

Has the population of the Republican electorate changed that much? Did younger voters go elsewhere while too many members, like me, left in disgust? Is the field so weak that bombast fills in for seriousness? Have eight years of ‘no compromise’ conditioned an electorate to view anything except rigid purity as unacceptable?

I hold as an article of faith that someone other than Trump or Carson will win the nomination, but I don;t know who or how. In the meantime, I watch as one of America’s two parties thrashes in the throes of madness.

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Bad Movie Review: The Colossus of New York (1958)

I will leave it as an exercise to my few readers to parse if I mean the a review of bad movies or that these reviews are in themselves bad.

1-colossus_of_new_york_xlgA couple of weeks ago Paramount Studios launched a youtube channel the Paramount Vault. On this channel, they present clips from some of their most popular films and for older library titles with sparse home video value the have posted the entire movie. I certainly hope more studios follow suit. By way of this new channel, I watched The Colossus of New York a B SF movie from 1958 than until youtube I was only aware of thanks to Bill Warren’s Book Keep Watching the Skies.

Lots of spoilers ahead, but you really don’t care do you?

 

And here is the film you are brave and true:


The plot is this predictable film is simple. First there is the brilliant scientist, Jeremy ‘Jerry’ Spensser. He’s really really smart. The movie starts with him winning the Nobel prize and this is just a stepping stone. He’s expected to be the salvation of mankind because of his good nature and utter utter brilliance. In fact, his family are geniuses, his father a surgeon unparalleled, and his brother Henry a master of automated machinery. But neither we are told hold a flicker of a candle to Jerry’s intellect.

Well, coming home from the Sweden, Jerry’s son loses his toy airplane to the wind and Jerry, that man with an unmatched mind, chases it into traffic and is hit by a truck.

Father Spensser can’t bear the world losing his saint-like genius son and removed Jerry’s brain, keeping it alive and functioning in a tank. He convinces Henry to build an android body for Jerry. Though henry has reservations about a man without a soul and all that he of course complies. (He also starts an affair with Jerry’s cutie-pie wife, He’s not really a sleaze. He cares about the kid and all that, but you can see where this will end.)

Jerry at first rejects his machine life but finally agrees to continue his work on making the Artic into Earth’s newest farmland. Sadly, Henry was right about that soul thing. Without one, just like in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jerry goes evil.

Now, you would think making Jerry a super strong machine man would be enough but apparently henry had to overcompensate in the robot’s design. Jerry can no hypnotize people with his flashing peepers. (Nope this ability is not established at all) Also when he does catch up with his brother on the whole cutie-pie front it turns out those flashing peepers are also a death ray. (Really Henry, what did you think you were designing?)

Manipulating his father Jerry goes to the UN and starts a killing spree. (He takes the high ground and this nasty eye are effective, even if he himself lacks any motivation for such slaughter.) In the end when confronted by the innocence of his son he realized the horror he has become and, because he can’t reach the switch himself, has his son turn him off.

I’ve watched  a lot of bad movies in my bay and this one joins the list.

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Movie Review:Crimson Peak

1-crimson-peak-posterLet say that I have been a fan of Guillermo Del Toro ever since I saw his film Chronos in the theater during its initial release. That is not to say I am a fan of all of Del Toro’s films, the first Hellboy didn’t work for me and the same can be said for Pacific Rim. It a happy circumstance that I can say I truly loved Crimson Peak.

Crimson Peak is under-performing at the box office and if you have a desire to see this on the big screen you should probably move quickly. before I give a non-spoiler review of the film let me tell you what this movie is not.

Crimson Peak is not a horror film and it is not a ghost story. Certainly looking at the trailers, posters, and images you could easily come away thinking it is both those things, but that would be a mistake Crimson Peak best fits the genre Gothic Romance. (That is a genre I am not overly familiar with and I am told that Peak inverts the tropes of that genre. this I have to take on faith.)

The movie is a story about a headstrong, capable woman, confident in herself and her arts suddenly courted and swept up in passion for a tall handsome European noble. (Yes, I did just call and Englishman a European, he can live with it.) She soon is off to be married to the dashing dreamer with a dark soul and a dark sister. The mood of the film is carried off perfectly, the imagery is haunting and like a masterpiece painting, the cast are wonderful and play their characters believably.  Now, I found I did predict the twists and turns of the plot, but I also consider plotting to be one of my strengths as a writer and it is the rare script that can justifiably surprise me in its plotting.

The film is violent, but not gratuitous or exploitive in is depiction or use. This is not a film that insists upon an on-screen death every ten minutes. There are ghosts, but it is not a ghost story. To quote the movie ‘It is not a ghost story; it is a story with ghosts.’ It is not for those easily upset by imagery or violence and it continues with Del toro’s persistent theme that the truly monstrous is the truly human.

If you are a fan of his work such as Pan’s Labyrinth this is worth seeing.

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A Different Approach to School Shootings

So yesterday morning as my sweetie-wife and I were en route to my day I caught a very interesting piece on NPR’s Morning Edition. They were interviewing writer Malcolm Gladwell and he proposed a radical take on the growing phenomenon of mass school shootings. The interview was prompted by a piece Gladwell had written for the current issue of the New Yorker Magazine and can be found here. It’s worth the time to read.

What he says and the sociological theory of riots he applied to school shooters all make sense to me and maps fairly well with what I know about these events. To be clear, these are a very different from workplace shootings and also very different from politically motivated mass killings. Gladwell avoids the simplistic approach of mental illness and looks at a much more frightening mechanism. The mob effect and in my opinion the status seeking motivation.

Particularly upsetting it the idea that traditional mass media is no longer a relevant factor as a status conferring mechanism. The internet drives a lot more of this now. This matches with what I do know about these schools shooters. They often, if not always, obsessed on-line over previous events, often analyze the shooters methods and outcomes, and seek to — for lack of a more apt word — improve on the results.

I have confided privately to a friend that my personal belief is that this wave is going to continue to a generation, perhaps two while our culture deals with the shock waves induced by massive change. (It is not a coincidence that the shooters are nearly always young men. The only except I know is the Brenda Spencer case and that’s more than 40 years old.) My friend if a gun collector and I predicted that it was likely the US would see more and more restrictive gun laws passed and that these would likely have little to minimal effect on the wave. (The laws that are possible, assault weapon bans, background checks, magazine capacity limits, are unlikely to make any serious change to these sorts of killings and a total gun ban is simply unrealistic for this country.)

However, this article sparked an idea. The problem is identifying these gunmen and killers before they act. More and more they have no history of serious mental illness that could be used in a reliably predictive manner. A position I hear repeatedly from psychiatric professionals on this matter. there simply is now way to screen to the vast population of angry young men and sort out the shooters from the non-shooters.

But they may be sending up flags we can use. On-line. If they are obsessing on-line about previous events, sharing information in forums and chatrooms, and leaving a digital trail of their intentions then it should be possible too use that information to identify, isolate, and prevent them from acting on their murderous fixations.

In order words, treat them like the terrorists they are and utilize the full power of the intelligence agencies to deal with this problem.

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