Monthly Archives: October 2024

Spooky Season Conclusion: Agatha All Along

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Disney+ released the final two episodes of Agatha All Along Wednesday night completing the series just one day before Halloween.

Agatha All Along continues the story of Agatha Harkness, a witch from colonial times, that attempted to steal the powers of the Scarlet Witch and when best by that former Avenger found herself enchanted to never remember herself and live out her life in the small New Jersey Town of Westview.

Marvel Studios

Agatha opens with Agatha believing herself to be Agnes an overworked homicide detective when a chance encounter with an unnamed teenage boy breaks the spell. Together the Teen and Agatha assemble a coven in order to walk the witch’s road a mystical quest that, if the witch survives, grants the witch what is missing most from their lives. However, there are secrets, betrayals, and unimaginable dangers along the road and before the end truths and unspoken identities will change everything and everyone who treads that dangerous trail.

Created and show run by Jac Shaeffer, who was a principal creative behind WandaVision the preceding series in this storyline, Agatha All Along is a creative, inspired, and entertaining journey. Eschewing, for the most part, massive CGI fueled combat, the battles in Agatha are ones of the soul and of character which the series presents in spades.

Harkness remains a selfish and bitter villain with a flair for the sarcastic cutting remark so ably deployed by actor Kathryn Hahn. Joe Locke as the unnamed Teen pulls off a performance that late in the series shows surprising depth as his secrets are revealed. Rounding out the cast of the series is Aubrey Plaza as Rio a former lover and enemy of Agatha’s, Patti Lupone as an ancient witch possessing a unique relationship with time, Ali Ahn as Alice a witch that specializes in protection magics but suffering under a familial curse, Sasheer Zamata as Jen a potions witch who magic has been taken by an unknown enemy, and Debra Jo Rupp reprising her role from WandaVision.

Agatha All Along is a series that revels in its femininity, its queerness, and its celebration of a ‘superhero’ story that isn’t fixated on masculine muscles. It is well worth the watch.

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Spooky Season: The Fault in the Zombie Apocalypse

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Ever since 1978’s Dawn of the Dead the sequel film a decade after the original Night of the Living Dead the vision of the world overrun with shambling corpses has been the standard for projects using the monsters created by Romero.

But the math just doesn’t work.

For 2022 the mortality rate in the United States was about 982 persons dying each year per 100,000 of population. Even that number is a bit high has it includes excess mortality due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Averaging that out over a standard year, 365.25 days, that a daily mortality rate of 2.69 deaths per day per 100K people.

San Diego county where I live has a population of 3.3 million people which yields a daily death rate of 89 deaths per day.

Modern graves are not simply holes dug into the earth but concrete lined underground structures from which the walking dead could not escape so we only need concern ourselves with the unburied dead.

Most Americans are buried with 7 days of death. Multiply the daily death rate by 7 and we end up with 623 unburied dead to be reactivated into zombies on Zed Day.

623 versus a population of 3.3 million. The entire zombie army is about the size of a largish movie theater audience. Hardly the inescapable horde that can besiege countless building and paralyze all law enforcement and military units.

Before you can have the zombie apocalypse you need a massive die off of the human population that creates fields of corpses to be reactivated,

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Spooky Season Spectacular: Quatermass and The Pit

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One of favorite SF horror films and my favorite Hammer production is Quatermass and the Pit (1967), released in the U.S. as Five Million Years to Earth because American audiences were not familiar with screenwriter Nigel Kneale recurring scientist character Bernard Quatermass.

Hammer Films

Quatermass, (Andrew Keir) leader of the British civilian rochet research group is put out when the Ministry of Defense assigns a Colonel Breen (Julian Glover) to his project as they hope top establish ballistic missile bases on the moon. However before to properly lock horn over that the pair become involved with a strange missile-like device found deep underground while a subway extension is being constructed. While Breen believes it to be an unknown ‘V-Weapon’ from the second world war Quatermass recognizes that is not of the earth. Before long secrets of human evolution are uncovered and a new threat to humanity’s existed rises.

As I mentioned this is a favorite of mine and I own an import UK Blu-Ray disc of the feature as for the longest time no such Blu-ray had been released in this country. However, I had never seen the film on the big screen.

Until yesterday.

The New Beverly Cinema, owned by filmmaker and cinephile Quintin Tarantino, exhibited a copy project from a technicolor print and that was not something I was going to miss. So, I drove 3 hours there and 2.5 hours back to watch this beloved film the way it had been intended to be seen.

I was not disappointed.

From a show of hands before the screening I would guess about a third of those attending had never seen the film at all. It was well received. Oh, there were a few giggles when some of the effects showed their age but in general the audience sat rapt, silent, and engrossed in Kneale’s vivid screenplay bursting with fantastic ideas.

One scene displayed Kneale’s gift of prophesy. Quatermass asks an archeologist what he thinks humanity would do if it discovered, perhaps due to some climate catastrophe that the Earth was doomed? Roney answers, “Nothing. We’d just continue squabbling.” Ironic laughter filled the theater after that bit of foresight.

The screening was paired with John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness another film I thoroughly enjoyed, but having seen that on its original run and despairing at the thought of not getting home until past 2 am, I bailed on the second feature.

Quatermass and the Pit remains a wonderful bit of cinema and well worth 5 hours behind the wheel of my car to see in its original technicolor glory.

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Spooky Season: The Church (1989)

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Co-written and produced by horror icon Dario Argento The Church was originally slated to be part of his Demons franchise, but the director wanted it to be more of a standalone project and elements tying to the earlier films were excised from the script.

ADC

A new librarian comes of a German cathedral built on the site of a massacre of witches with the mass grave beneath to the building and along with an artist restoring artwork with the church stumble upon its ancient secrets releasing the evil it has suppressed.

Despite the re-write at the insistence of director Michele Soavi The Church bears many of the hallmarks of an Argento story. Events follow one another in a sequence but there is actually little cause and effect to the unfolding story creating the sense that things ‘just happen.’ It takes the movie quite a while to get going with much of the front half a dreary slog that neither establishes mood no explores or illuminates character. The second half is a succession of lesser characters facing and dying in strange and inexplicable manners as the evil forces from beneath the church grow.

The Church, for a religiously themed horror, lacks any real sense of morality or even message. The massacre in the opening makes the knights seem quite sadistic and evil but the power from the witches is equally brutal without cause or reason. In this manner the movie much like Argento’s work in general, set-up for elaborate ‘kills’ but lacking in a cohesive plot or narrative.

I have yet to find an Argento guided project that really works for me and The Church is simply another piece that mostly bored me.

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I am Falling Behind

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The writing of my folk/cosmic horror has fallen a little behind the schedule. Just 3 or 4 thousand words shy of where I want to be by the end of October. Still, the novel might be completed by the end of the calendar year, particularly if it ends up between 80k and 90k words.

Right now, I am at the most challenging part of my novel writing process. I am more than halfway through the first draft and the sensation that I haven’t a clue how to make the whole piece work is quite strong. This mid-plot doldrum and uncertainty occurs even with a carefully outlined book and seems more intense with this work which I am writing without the safety net of a prepared outline.

Still, there are aspect of this manuscript that have me very happy. My three point of view characters have strong distinct voices, and I have confidence in the material even if I don’t have that for myself.

This weekend is likely to be rejuvenating for me. We have a small local convention to lift my spirits and on Monday I am driving to Hollywood to see Quatermass and the Pit one of my favorite films projected from a technicolor print.

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Spooky Season: Night of the Living Dead (1990)

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In 1968 when George A. Romero released the extinction level event movie Night of the Living Dead and altered the cinematic landscape forever an editing mistake when the titles were changed dropped the film into the public domain robbing him of his justified rewards for such an original creation.

21st Century Film Corporation

In the late 80s, working with his original producer John Russo and his talented make-up special effects artist Tom Savini he produced a remake of the film in hopes of pulling the original back into copyright. Romero failed to achieve his legal goal but did release in 1990 the newly envisioned Night of the Living Dead.

The bones of the original are the bones of the remake. A disparate collection of characters take refuge in an isolated farmhouse as a mass of undead reanimated corpses lay siege seeking to devour their living flesh.

Led by Patricia Tallman as Barbara and Tony Todd as Ben the plot and for all intents and purposes the characters are the same as the ’68 version. Mr. Cooper remains the principal human antagonist with his wife Helen more of a placeholder than a character and their injured daughter Sarah the ticking undead bomb within the building. Tommy and Judy, the young couple caught in the disaster have a little more to do this time around, though Judy’s (Katie Finneran) high pitched screams grew tiresome quite quickly and she was unconvincing as someone who supposedly knew their way around a truck and its operation.

Patricia Tallman’s Barbara unlike the progenitor character is not a woman incapacitated with grief and trauma but rather, once she recovers from the shock and horror of the events, the voice of reason and rationality as the men bicker, fighter, and lose their sense of proportion and objective with their overly emotional manner.

The most irritating aspect of this film was not the lackluster cast, excepting Tallman and Todd, but rather the unmotivated and pointless repeated fade to black between shots.

Film has a grammar. Dissolving between shots shows an intense connection between the subject of the two shots. Hence when Vader and Luke are communicating telepathically in The Empire Strikes Back fast dissolves indicate that for these two it is as if the space in between doesn’t exist. Fading to black at the end of a shot is most often used to denote a passage of time. It can be minutes, hours, days, years, centuries are any appreciable jump in time for the story. In the 1990Night of the Living Dead someone, either director Tom Savini or editor Tom Dubensky decided fade to black between shots when no change in time had passed. Barbara stays downstairs, Ben goes up to search. Fade to black. Fade up on Ben reaching the top of the stairs. That should have been a straight cut to not a fade. The first time it happened I thought that they were forced into by having missing coverage that would have made the edit jumpy and abrupt, but it was a stylistic choice that persisted throughout the film and proved to be a great irritation.

The 1990 version modifies the ending significantly and proposes a different theme than the original. Overall, the film is effective if flawed but frankly the original is the version to watch.

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Spooky Season: Rumours

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So, not the classic album from Fleetwood Mac but rather the black comedy/satire film starring Cate Blanchett.

Elevation Pictures

Written and Directed by the team if Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, Rumours is set during a working dinner for the G7 leaders, the chief executives, Presidents and Prime Ministers, of the leading democratic economies, as they attempt to draft a provisional statement concerning some crisis left by the script undefined. Dur the course of the dinner, which takes place in a gazebo, the supporting staff vanish, and the world leaders are left to their own inept devices while confront by undead bog bodies and mysterious giant forest brains.

With haunting cinematography from Stefan Ciupek and a striking color pallet the film has an impressive look to it and is further enhanced by a cast is excellent actors including Charles Dance as an American president with a wholly unexplained strong British accent.

The script provides numerous humorous incidents and character studies and yet for me failed to land fully. The target of the satire, ineffectual leaders providing only rehashed, recycled, and generic observations on problems facing the world is sharp enough the point of the satire seemed to have passed me by entirely. It was clear that the filmmakers have little regard or respect for world leaders but provided no other path or course of action.

The film doesn’t go as far as to live wholly within a realm of ‘dream logic’ like something from David Lynch yet and it is beyond our own sense of reality. (The lack of any ‘protective services’ is simply never addressed. In the film’s world the U.S. President, not to mention the others, simply have no one guarding them day and night.)

What enjoyment I derived from viewing this film lays entirely with the cast and their performances, particularly with Cate Blanchett who simply commanded my attention every moment she existed on the screen.

I honestly am glad I took the time to see this in the theaters, but I also cannot recommend this film as anyone reaction is likely to be so idiosyncratic as to make recommendations pointless.

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Spooky Season: My Best Halloween Prank

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I really do not do pranks as a general rule but this one from my youth worked out rather well.

My sister lived on a corner plot of land with a paved street running alongside. From the street, which saw many trick & treaters on Halloween night, her house would be on your right, her backyard directly in front of you, and a garage with peaked roof on your left. The far side of the peaked roof was shaded by citrus and fruit trees.

I ran a monofilament line from the trees down to the base of the house, passing over the downslope of the garage’s roof and across the back yard. On this I placed two coat hangers at right angles draped with a sheet for a simple and classic ‘ghost.’ A second monofilament line allowed me to let the ghost slide down the line, matching the slope of the roof, or pull it back up toward the top.

When dusk and evening came the lines were impossible to see and as trick & treaters patrolled the neighborhood for candy, I let the ghost ‘walk’ down the garage roof.

Now, my penchant to be on that roof was well know and people simply assumed that we me in a sheet proving a little holiday spirit. As people passed, they noticed the ‘ghost’ and stopped to watch, enjoying the spirit of the performance.

Hidden on the reverse slope of the roof, I let the device slide to the very edge of the roof and for a moment it stayed there, as if I had walked to the edge.

With everyone convinced it was just me in a sheet, I let it take one more ‘step’ off the roof, hovering in the air.

People gasped and then laughed loudly as they realized the gag.

That moment, when what you think you know, a person is there in a sheet, turns into something you didn’t expect and don’t understand is the essence of both horror and comedy. A rule has been broken and it can either be shockingly funny or shockingly horrifying.

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Spooky Season The Return of Godzilla

Toho Studios

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Toho studios celebrated 30 years of the King of the Monsters, Godzilla, in 1984 with The Return of Godzilla. A re-edited version with clumsy inserted scene featuring Raymond Burr, much like how the original was treated, was released in the US the next year as Godzilla 1985.

Eschewing all of the continuity since 1954 Godzilla Returns places itself as the direct sequel to the original film with the kaiju once again raising from the seas and raining disaster upon Japan.

As is typical of this eras approach to the franchise the human story, one of dedicated military men, scientist, lost and found relatives, all are secondary to the spectacle of the massive monster trashing urban Japan. One does not watch these movies for deep exploration of the human condition and soul. (That you will find excellently done in Godzilla minus one.)

I watched Godzilla 1985 on its theatrical run, enjoyed it, but there little doubt that the inserted American scenes detract from the film and it is best to watch the original version with its original dialog track.

The Return of Godzilla is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

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Spooky Season: Zombies and Vampires

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While ghosts and ghostly stories remain the top of my preferred horror sub-genre listing there have been a few Zombie and Vampires entries that I enjoyed.

When you speak of zombies the mind nearly always flies to the modern incarnation of that revenant created by George A Romero for his film Night of the Living Dead. Few people think of the interpretation taken from a bastardized understanding of voodoo. However, both species of zombies have given us interesting and compelling films. Of the mindless hordes out to consume living flesh I think the best film is Train to Busan and of the voodoo variety I’ll admit a real liking of Sugar Hillwhere a woman takes vengeance of the mob with zombies.

Vampires feel related to the modern zombie. Corpses revivified by some means now feasting on the living. While the zombie seems to symbolize massed humanity and the fear we harbor of being in its crosshairs the vampire, particularly since Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has come to be a stand in for unique individuality. The persistence of personality over death and time. So much so that the idea of the terrifying vampire seems to be as lost as the voodoo inspired undead slave.

I think the domestication of the vampire from terrifying monster stalking you for your precious blood into hot (even if they are actually room temperature) and engaging lovers has a lot to do with the stripping away of the mystic and magic of these creatures.

Take blood. A vampire requires blood for its continued existence. In folklore when the vampire is discovered in its lair it is not pristine and lovely but rather fat and gorged on blood like a tick. Today however the movies and stories and books are likely to have heroic vampires that live off the blood stolen from banks or cast off from slaughtered cattle. The blood has been stripped of its magical nature as the life force coursing in your veins to simply being a nutrient, as though the vampire metabolizes it into energy like we do with sugars and carbs. This mundane reinvention stripped away the supernatural and with it the horror.

I have hope that this Christmas we might get a proper vampire and not a rock and roll one with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.

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