Monthly Archives: August 2021

Folk Horror Inspiration

 

Recently, I stumbled across a YouTube video from The Evolution of Horror exploring the cinematic subgenre of Folk Horror. The video had a very nice overview of the subgenre and presented one filmmaker’s, Adam Scovell, essential elements of folk horror the chain of Rural Setting — Isolated Groups — Skewed Morals or Beliefs — and Supernatural or Violent Happenings. Several of my favorite horror films are often classified as Folk Horror including the original and incredible The Wicker Man and I instantly saw the possibilities of Scovell’s analysis.

This prompted me to ponder could I craft a science-fiction story that followed the chain and landed successfully as a folk horror tale? I mean sure you could grab bag plot and character elements, follow the chain, and produce something that met the criteria but that’s nothing more than copying someone else’s work much like all those terrible slasher movies that followed in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween. I wanted something more than a copy, a paint-by-numbers execution I wanted something that at least spoke to me individually.

Pieces, fragments, began coalescing in my imagination and the unique constituent that would drive the mystery and horror arrived and I knew that had the skeleton framework of a new short story. Everything is not there yet, there are ineffable elements still cooking but for the first time in years I have a short story cooking and it is going to be science-fiction folk horror.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Streaming Review: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

 

This is a movie I haven’t seen since the late 70s when it appeared on HBO and was curious to revisit.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, henceforth referred to as Little Girl, stars a young Jodie Foster, the same year she appeared in Taxi Driver, as 13-year-old Rynn who lives with her curiously hard to meet Father, a commercially successful poet so you already know that we are in a land of fantastic events, in a small isolated, insular, and close New England village. Rynn’s clear brilliance, stubborn independence, and refusal to cowed by adults merely because they are adults provokes suspicion and attracts the attention of the village’s notorious but politically protected pedophile, Frank Hallet, played ably and creepily by Martin Sheen. With nosey neighbors and sexual predators pressing in Rynn’s secrets are soon exposed.

Little Girl is often genre classified as a horror film and horrific events do transpire but lacking any supernatural events and without an ever-escalating body count, not that isn’t one only compared to most horror movies this one’s quite modest, it may be more fitting to place the film within the thriller genre. Given the caliber of performers involved it is of no surprise that the acting to on-point and excellent with Foster displaying the sharp intellect often associated with her characters and Sheen exuding menace with bland conversational dialog. The film is hobbled by a score that at times feels incongruous with the movie’s tone sounding more jazz than suspenseful.

The movie is also disturbing, like Taxi Driver, for its open sexualization of its under-aged character. In addition to the threat of sexual assault from Hallet Rynn is proactively sexually active but viewers can rest assured the one from behind nude scene is of a 21-year-old body double.

With a brief 90-minute running time even with its slow pacing, Little Girl, requires only a small investment of time and is an interest example of contained horror before slashers ruled the coming decade.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is currently streaming on Shudder.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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I’ll Take The Earthquakes

 

My family in Florida often comments that they could never live in California, terrified of the earth suddenly moving under their feet. I’ve ridden out a few earthquakes including one that sent waves rippling along the wall of a Denny’s I was sitting in and they are frightening but not as scary as the governor of Florida and willingness to slaughter the people in his quest to become the next leader of the Turd Reich.

Last year, at the very start of the year, I was planning a trip to Florida to see my family and celebrate the release of my first novel, Vulcan’s Forge. The pandemic killed those plans, my sales, and north of 600,000 Americans. Despite this Florida’s governor not only will not implement the simplest anti-covid measure but actually threatens those who do. California may have vast wildfires and earthquakes but do not elect our deadly disasters.

Yes, my current governor is subject to a specious recall and may be a Nexus 5 Replicant but he is not actively acting to slaughter me and my family.

 

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Series Review: Marvel’s What If …?

 

 

Among the Marvel Cinematic Universe programing produced and released on Disney+, WandaVision, The Falcon and The Winter Solider, and Loki, Marvel’s What If …? is the only animated entry. Centered on alternate version of established characters and stories What If …? is anthology series with each episode a stand-alone and unique entry. Episode one explored an alternate universe where Agent Peggy Carter received the Super Solider treatments instead of Steve Rogers and the next episode brought us a version of The Guardians of the Galaxy where T’Challa (The Black Panther) was abducted as a child instead of Peter Quill creating a very different team of heroes that included a reformed Thanos.

I have been mildly entertained by the series so far but it is the third episode that in my opinion is so far the best. Titled What If .. Earth lost its Mightiest Heroes? the episode focuses on Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD, having a very bad week as an unknown force or assassin murders all of his potential recruits for the yet formed Avengers. Where the preceding two episodes drew nearly all of their entertainment value from the novelty of the changes, Captain Carter instead of Captain America the stories were not that engaging nor that challenging. This episode moves with a proper mystery and a central character that engages the viewer as they struggle to find and requisite answer.

Marvel’s What If …? utilizes as voice talent many of the stars from the MCU, Samuel L. Jackson reprising his role as Nick Fury, Clark Gregg as fan favorite Phil Coulson, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, but some of the beloved actors are conspicuous in their absence with the replacement voice talent quite obvious. I do not know animation well enough to say exactly what style the series is produced in but the animation loos great and has a consistent style across episodes.

While I doubt Marvel’s What If …? is likely to become anyone’s favorite element of the vast MCU it does make for a pleasant and enjoyable half-hour of relaxed television viewing.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Odds and Ends

 

Here’s a potpourri of thoughts for this Wednesday morning.

1) I’m Bummed: I had been so looking forward to attending in person 2021’s Horrible Imaginings Film Festival but with Orange County’s COVID-19 positivity rate above 20%, the theater instituting a quite reasonable mask mandate, and my own somewhat compromised immune system due to arthritis medications it just doesn’t make sense to go in person. So just like last year I will be watching the films virtually.

2) The Face-Eating-Leopards that in the GOP Base is beyond control. It is both ironic and terrifying that the former guy himself, the Turd that stained our democracy and attempted to overthrow a fair and free election, was booed by his own crowd for suggesting that people get vaccinated. I am horrified that things are going to get worse before they get better.

3) I am now experimenting with greater post processing of the pictures I am taking with my DSLR. Here’s a color pushed and modified photo of a trip to the shore I took last year.

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Movie Review: The Night House

There are lots of different types of horror movies. Giant Kaiju monsters may stomp, fly, and smash their way through cities, aliens may menace earthbound and space travelers alike, demonic possession may turn a young girl in specter of degradation, the recently dead may stalk the land consuming the living, or masked and disfigured killer may stalk promiscuous teens, but my favorite form of a horror movie is the ghost story, like The Night House.

In the story Rebecca Hall’s character Beth struggles to accept the sudden and inexplicable suicide of her beloved and apparently devoted husband Owen. Attempting to power through her grief and refusing to recognize it Beth tries to carry own with her life, going to work as a public-school teacher, having drink with her co-workers, but alone in the lakeside house that she and Owen built, strange visitations and events intrude on her solitude. Investigating these strange occurrences leads Beth to discover that Owen had secrets and bring them to light reveals truths she is unwilling to confront.

The Night House is a slow-burn ambiguous ghost story of a horror film. This is not the type of horror movie that presents the audience with an elaborate special make-effects ‘kill’ every fifteen minutes but rather one that lives in the liminal spaces between what is clearly happening and what may be happening. Like Robert Wise’s The Haunting it is a film that can be interpreted as the work of malevolent spirits or the hallucinations of a troubled mind. For my money there is a single two shot sequence that lands the project on the it really happened interpretation, but your mileage may vary.

Rebecca Hall, who also acted as one of the final executive producers, carries the entire film. The story is told solely through her viewpoint with only a couple of sequences in the final moments breaking this convention to give as another characters view of the scene. I have been a fan of Hall’s performances since I first saw in in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and here as the center of The Night House she doesn’t disappoint. The direction by David Bruckner is solid and executed with a firm hand on the ambiguity needed for this production. Elisha Christian’s cinematography is lush shifting comfortably between daylight scenes of peaceful tranquility to the night’s deep and dark shadows filled with unseen dread. Screenwriting team Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski have crafted a tale of grief and depression’s ability to drown us that utilizes horror as a method of exploration those themes. The Night House’s development of those themes of loss and what it does to us is reminiscent of 2014’s The Babadook without being derivative but rather so complimentary that the pair would make a most excellent double-feature.

The Night House is currently playing theatrically.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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The Baron of Arizona: A Disappointment Years in the Making

 

Some years ago, in the before time when streaming wasn’t a common way to locate and see film I chanced upon a fragment of a broadcast of 1950’s The Baron of Arizona, a western starring horror icon Vincent Price.

The film’s central plot, loosely adapted from a historical event, is how James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price) with forged documents nearly swindled the government of the United States out of almost all of the territory of Arizona.

That idea is so grand and so daring that I really wanted to see the film adaptation of it, particularly since it starred Vincent Price and was written and directed by Samuel Fuller. This month The Baron of Arizona is streaming on The Criterion Channel, and I have finally watched it.

It’s hard to remember an anticipated film that disappointed me more than this one. The film about a swindle of nearly unimaginable scale is told with dull plodding voice over and all the excitement of long boring day at work on a Monday. We follow Reavis as he takes the steps to work his forgery and swindle, a globe-trotting series of events that includes infiltrating a monastery to gain access to ancient Spanish records and manipulating a Roma Tribe to gain access to a noble’s library. After putting the grift into operation Reavis faces angry ranchers and locals who look less than kindly upon the man now calling himself their Baron and demanding rent for lands that thought they had own. but even when the plot escalates into action with hurled sticks of dynamite and federal government sending forgery experts to investigate the pace remains glacial and not even Price’s magnetic screen presence can make the movie interesting or compelling.

 

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A Few Thoughts on Afghanistan

 

What is transpiring in the graveyard of empire is a terrible crime against humanity that women, girls, LGBTQ, non-believers, and other will bear the horrid costs of.

That said going into Afghanistan on a nation building project was in all likelihood a fool’s errand. Before the invasion but following the attacks of 9/11, the United States gave the Taliban leadership of that country an option to avoid invasion, surrender the terrorists to us. They rejected that offer and we invaded to get those that had killed 3000 of our own. (And now one of own political institutions shares culpability in killing 200 hundred times as many Americans.)

Our goal should have been getting al-Qaeda and then leaving. But that is don and the past cannot be changed. What to do now?

We should get every translator and their kin out of the country that wants to leave. If you have no loyalty you have nothing.

This should not extend in any manner to senior Afghani politicians scooping money into their pockets. Those who used the occupation as an excuse to fleece the country we owe no loyalty to; I have no issues leaving them on their own and closing our doors in their faces.

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The GOP Do Over 2: Electric Boogaloo

 

18 years ago, following the dot-com implosion and rolling blackouts across the state cause my politics and not by infrastructure issues crippled California a Republican spearheaded recall election removed the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, from office. At the time and to this day I refer to this as the GOP do-over. In 2002 Davis ran and won re-election against Republican Bill Simon. It should be noted that the California GOP has last held the Governorship with Pete Wilson in the 1990 and after the anti-immigrant and arguably racist drive to pass Proposition 187 denying services to undocumented persons the Republicans have failed to win statewide offices. Simon was a particularly bad campaigner. The economic crisis of the dotcom bust, the horrid electrical supply failures, and a deeply unpopular increase in automobile registration fee gave the GOP the tools and leverage to initiate and succeed at a recall campaign. If they were unable to win a popular vote in a statewide campaign, they could possibly take the office with a mere plurality of votes in a special election. That’s exactly what happened, 55% of the voters who showed up voted for the recall, turning Davis out of office, but only 48.6% voted for the man who replaced him, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The GOP, having now even further right than before and without Arnold’s moderate stances and celebrity status they have been driven again from statewide offices, are using the COVID-19 pandemic as the crisis in their attempts to recall Governor Gavin Newsom. I have no deep well of affection for either Davis or Newsom and Newsom’s handed his political enemies numerous PR knives with which to stab him but he, nor Davis before him, has committed and abuse of office or malfeasance that warrants a recall from office. This is once again the Republicans, too far too the right to gain a majority of votes from the population, trying to secure an office that are unable to win in any general election. Reflecting the national GOP, California Republicans instead of moderating their policies and positions seek to ‘rule lawyer’ their way into power and damn the will of the people.

I urge everyone in this state to do as I am doing and voting ‘No’ on this recall.

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Movie Review: Free Guy

 

Free Guy is the story of how a background non-player character, Guy, played with able comic chops by Ryan Reynolds, in an open-world video game, with decidedly strong Grand Theft Auto vibes, becomes self-aware while learning that his world is nothing but a sandbox for sociopathic players unleashing carnage and cruelty.

Free Guy is also the story of two brilliant computer/software geniuses, Mille, played by Killing Eve’s award-winning actor Jodie Comer, and Keys, played by Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, as they struggle to prove that the original code for the massively successful and profitable game that acts as Guy’s world, was stolen from them by cartoonishly villain Antwan, played by the brilliant Kiwi Taika Waititi.

The twin plotlines intersect when Millie’s avatar in the game world, Molotov Girl, intersects with Guy hurtling them on a collision course that ultimately will decide everyone’s, virtual and otherwise, fate.

The trailers and promotion sell Free Guy as an action/comedy and they much is very true. The tone and style of the humor is very much in keeping with Ryan’s Deadpool, though here toned down for a PG-13 rating, and with the gags referencing other properties held off until the film’s final act when we are reminded that Disney owns everything.

But, beyond the gags, jabs, and cameos from the real world of on-line game and streaming, Free Guy also has a theme that we are the architects of our lives and routines can be non-living. The movie doesn’t descend into full ‘message’ mode, but neither is it particularly subtle with its theme, striking instead the right balance between the two poles.

There are plenty of great visual gag and surprisingly cameos. (Do not visit IMDB before seeing this, let the surprise arrive and please you.) While Free Guy will never be counted among the great films of cinema’s canon it is fun, entertaining, and full or unironic heart making it well worth seeing. If you are vaccinated and comfortable heading out into public do see this in a theater.

Final observation, I do not know if this was an effect from the pandemic but two of the trailers before the movie, The House of Gucci and The Last Duel were both directed by Ridley Scott and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the same director pop up twice, as director, in the same trailer block.

Also remember that my SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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