- IDDQD 2002-04-12 15:17:30 NOT NOW! I'M JUST ABOUT TO BEAT DOOM!
- Let's go out to the lobby.... 2002-04-11 08:22:14 EK: No, 'cause I can't FIND it anywhere. Not at Blockbuster, Best Buy, Suncoast, Tower Records, or any of the comic shops I frequent. Any suggestions as to where to look, or should I just give up and special order it?
-
"...and if I swallow anything evil, / put your fingers down my throat..."
2002-04-10 23:12:55
You know, in my last little exposition, one of the most central points I wanted to make was something along the lines of "of course this is all just secondary to the necessicary fun of the story. If it ain't scary or otherwise enjoyable, it's still just bad." Most central point of the essay and the one I forget to mention. Drat.
Nerd humor approaching. Everyone else stay away.
OK, this was passed on to me by a friend of mine. Apparently it was told for the first time during a late night simulation session in one of the computer labs. At three in the morning it reduced an entire lab of engineering geeks and comp sci majors to hysterics for 15 minutes.
So my friend is trading out various stories with the people in the lab while they wait for some excessively long code to compile, and they get to talking about mind-numbingly boring classes. One of the kids pipes up with a story about a class taught by an absolute genius who, nonetheless, could bore paint off the walls with his monotone presentation and the way he always spoke into the board. It got so bad that the students started having little contests to keep themselves awake during the class and, being math geeks, they decided to see who could memorize the most digits of pi. This went on for a few weeks at which point all but two of the kids dropped out in exasperation as the two titans went at it. One of the kids was really determined to triumph and ended up memorizing around 150 digits of pi. The other kid, however, was some kind of a savant with numbers and ended up memorizing over 500 digits of pi.
At this point, my friend pipes up. "Well they were pretty stupid. Why didn't they just memorize the pattern?"
Hilarity ensued.
If you didn't find that funny, you can relax, your geekyness is still under control.
poolfan: Man, I've got nothing but respect for SA's movie reviews. he delves into stuff that I would carry from the house with the fire tongs. If you ever think the movies I review are bad, go take a look at somethingawful.com. My stuff is a cakewalk in comparison.
Snuck away from the lab for a few hours yesterday and finally got to see Metropolis at the Tara. Nice BIG theater and excellent movie. Reminiscent of a whole lot of other good stuff and an EXTRAORDINARY soundtrack. I'm also on the verge of finishing the final Akira graphic novel (and the sucker's big enough to justify "novel"). However, ya'll aren't going to get a review of either of those two for a day or two. Instead, you get "Children of the Living Dead." This flick was given to my by a friend to whom I lent my copy of "Ginger Snaps." They definititely got the better end of the deal.
Oh my God, this is a bad movie. You know, there are whole different scales of bad. There're movies that are bad because their stupid parts outweigh their good parts. There're movies that are passively bad just through their complete lack of good parts and become instead just a waste of time. There're movies that are actively bad because EVERYTHING about them makes you want to claw your eyes/ears out/off, and then there are movies that are somehow so hideously bad that they come out the other end and start being good again. This is not one of those movies. Movies like this make me wish that MST3K was still on the air because they'd have a field day with it like they haven't had since....oh....I don't know....Robot Monster?
Hoooookay. Where to start. I suppose the first thing I should say is that I can't figure out where they got the money to make such a bad film. Low budget is one thing, but during the course of this torture, they blow up a total of three cars and rent out a helicopter. I suppose I should have been warned when I noticed that the cover said "From AN executive producer of "A Nightmare on Elm Street"." Anyway, the movie starts up in the middle of the action. The zombies are already up and wandering around the fields in broad daylight acting like the walking range targets we all know they are. The townsfolk are out in full force with their huntin' rifles slaughtering the local wild(un)life left and right. Someone's even mounted a machinegun in a helicopter to cut zombies in half from the air. (All of which is reminiscent of the end of "Night of the Living Dead"...although I didn't find out that was done on purpose until the end of the flick. It figures into the backstory. I just figured they stole it.)
Enter the annoying hero who apparently watched "Die Hard" when he was supposed to be watching "NotLD". Actually, that's rather uncharitable. Playing the burly zombie reaver with an infinite arsenal of handguns (all of which run out of ammo repeatedly at key moments) is Tom Savini, perhaps the best known makup man in the buisness. Famous for his ability at piling on the gore, he's worked on "Dawn of the Dead" a Friday the 13th, Creepshow, Monkey Shines, and the second Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as dozens of others all the way down to "Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburg" (I always appreciate when the greats don't consider themselves "above" the cheesier projects). Tom, we all love your work...but get back behind the camera, or even in the director's chair, because.....please....you just can't act. It should tell you something that he's among the best of the actors in the film. You really shouldn't have to use elaborate kung-fu against these shambling monsters, nor should you have to really blow up cars... (#1).
Surprisingly, this exceedingly annoying character who somehow keeps getting surprised and jumped by zombies while in the middle of a FRICKIN' FIELD, DIES in the first scene. He and the local sheriff (an actor who succeeds in making us feel that HE'S a whining simp, not his character) free a bunch of kids from a zombie-infested barn and Tom gets hisself killed when he encounters the head zombie (?) Abbott Costello. I mean Abbott Hayes.
Jump forward 14 years. (Wait, it gets better.) The kids (all but one girl...the love interest) are now rebellious teenagers off to a rock concert. To demonstrate how rebellious they are, they drink beer! While driving! And then they go to a graveyard where they....sorta....stand around awkwardly and fumble their lines. This bad acting makes them all uncomfortable, so they abandon their rebellion and drive out of the marble orchard (heh). On the way out, they're surprised by a decaying figure standing in the road, and compensate by DRIVING OFF A CLIFF! It really is as funny as it sounds. (Car #2) Everyone gets matching caskets, and a 14-year funky Abbott Costello (I mean Hayes) munches on the late-night smorgasboard after everyone leaves, considerately burying his empty plates afterwards.
Jump forward another year. (Wait...) The real-estate of the cemetary has been bought up by an unscrupulous developer, and the developer's son (the hero, believe it or not) has come out to watch over the "relocation" of all the coffins. This leads to a true battle of the titans such as the earth has never seen. Zombie hordes versus used car salesmen. Who are we rooting for again?
The rest of the movie is just horrid predictability and bad acting. The special effects other than the zombie makeup are cheap as hell and, frankly, depressing. Half of the night scenes are under a BLUE moon (having been filmed in daylight with a blue filter), the gunfire is the sort of "oh-yeah, recoil" sort of action, etc. etc. The dialogue is that special brand of bad that no one actually thinks exists ("Of all the places my dad could have picked for his new dealership, he had to pick just down the road from walking dead central"). Even worse is the plot, which consists of a whole bunch of "discoveries that help us not at all." We find out that Abbot Costello (I mean Hayes, dammit.) was a crazy man who killed women (which tells us nothing). That his momma made him crazy by raising him as a girl. (Uh, weird, but why is this important?) That he died in prison and was embalmed before getting up. (Again, no useful info.) That the kid's girlfriend was one of the rescued kids from the first scene (that, surprise, surprise, does NOT turn out to be a plot point). The workmen start digging up empty coffins and even murder victims but decide to completely ignore it. (Then why did you have this in the movie?) That the kid's dad is evil. (Don't matter to the zombies, they eat him anyway.) I swear, there's at least a dozen more points like this. Just filling time with plot holes until the final zombie massacre. In fact, there are so many plot holes that I think the script was thoroughly hacked apart when it was discovered that there were some scenes that didn't suck enough.
The final massacre is also notable, because it's the only time I've ever seen where the townspeople with guns actually OUTNUMBER the zombies. 'Corse, they're stupid enough to make up for it. One of the townsfolk manages to throw a lit stick of dynamite INTO the car he's sitting in. (Car #3)
With all this crap to work with, I suppose it's not surprising that the acting is so bad. Still, the film has the impression of people who memorized their stage directions. ("Let's see, stage right....that's about here...and then back to stage left...OK, then look around...OK, then back to stage right all sneaky-like.") The weird lighting means I never know what time of day it is. The sound is just...odd and tinny all the way through. The actors get trapped in a diner where they're obviously not budgeted to break any of the windows. The Zombies are the least wooden of the actors.
You know, in the final analysis, this would have made a great MST3K. I suppose I could reccommend it in that capacity, but as a legitimate film it is REALLY REALLY bad. It has officially (finally) burned me out on zombie flicks. Kind of a pity, as the only living dead flick left in the pile was "Return of the Living Dead 3".
On the other hand, the trailer for this film was actually an order of magnitude better than the film itself. Buncha' other good trailers on the DVD too. In fact, rent the DVD, watch all the trailers, and return it. OK, that's it. I can't talk about this movie anymore. -
"You're making us look stupid again! Read a BOOK!"
2002-04-07 17:32:03
Quu: Your decision to do the trick with designating entries "private" to keep them out of the most recent category also means that when your entry comes up in my buddy-list, by the time you un-privatize, the entry is already green and I think I've already read it. I wouldn't worry about spill-over from bored readers. I estimate I get about 15 hits from people just reading my entries because they happen to pop up in the "recent entries" column, and I figure that into my "readership." (Frankly, I doubt that those bother to read my journal, considering it's excessive length. Ah well.)
sixstop: Thanks for those posts to the amv list. I'd forgotten that I hadn't announced the rules being up at the awa page in all the nooks and crannies that they needed to be announced. Feel free to make further announcements anywhere else I've forgotten.
Not a great deal going on today. I'll limit my comments in recognition of the work I really should be doing for class. (You can only read so much about single molecule microscopy before dozing off.) Yesterday was somewhat longer than I thought in that our weekly game stretched until 4:30 in the morning....and THEN we jumped forward an hour, so I'm running on a sleep schedule a bit more out of synch than I intended. Also haven't had a chance to watch the film I mentioned in my previous "next time" entry, so I'm putting the lie to that once again. Instead, I'll review something in a more stationary format....a book!
No, it ain't the CoC D20 book either. "Dark Masques" (J.N. Williamson) was a Christmas gift from some out of state relatives. I've kept it at my bedside for a story or two before conking out every night. It's sort of a meta-collection. "Masques" was a series of four books that came out between 1984 and 1991. They were short horror and supernatural story collections, that, in my impression, were a cut or two above the more standard collections. I picked up the second and third of the set in a used bookstore about six years ago and bought the fourth one new. The first one has been out of print for a very long time now, and I managed to duly impress my English major roommate when my search for the first book turned up the only "we don't know where the hell you could get a copy" (effectively) response from amazon.com that he'd ever seen. For such a relatively short and far-between book series, they attracted a surprising pool of talent including a real break in the form of a short from Stephen King called "Popsy." A boon like that could drive a publisher through a couple more books on it's own. Even in their first issue (the one I've never seen) they picked up an unpublished story from (the late) Charles Beaumont, F. Paul Wilson's "Soft", William F. Nolan, and a poem from Ray Bradbury. Later editions included the work of Ray Russel, Robert Bloch, and Richard Matheson. The contribution of such luminaries gave the series something of a status, well known by a lot of horror fans as an example of what a good compilation should be. "Dark Masques" is actually a collection of the best stories from these four books. Understandably, having owned three of the compilations from which this derives, I was a bit underwhelmed when I first received it. However, more than a quarter of the stories in the collection come from the difficult-to-acquire first book, and the rest are excerpts of the very best stories from the other collections (with a few notable exceptions) so I didn't mind re-reading those and skipping over the ones I knew I wouldn't like.
Tangent: It's often occurred to me that horror was really only built for the short-story format. All of the most classically recognized horror writers all dabbled solely with the devil in the short-short to novella-length stories. Edgar Allen Poe's magnificent contributions to the genre (he did write some humor, you know) are all of the sort-story format, as are disappeared-writer Ambrose Bierce's works, and the pulp-writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. If you think about it, this only makes sense. The desire of a horror story is to evoke a feeling of fear or dread within the audience to provide a momentary shock or thrill to the system. People generally find this enjoyable for short periods of time. However, unlike most every other genre, attempts to extend this thrill often fall flat. The thrill is in momentary discovery and the shock of realization...the trigger of fear or dread, and as such is an instantaneous emotional reaction. Mystery stories, though similarly exulting in such an instantaneous emotion at the revelation of the culprit, also derives much of their worth from the thought processes the audience goes through as they attempt to work out the events before the characters in the story do (never mind that they never manage it with the good writers, the sensation is in the attempt). People really aren't wired for extended moments of fear or horror. By necessity of our "fight or flight" response and it's desire to "SOLVE THE PROBLEM, NOW!" as it interprets danger for you, the horror must, and can only, occur for short periods of time, measured from seconds to hours. Ever walk out of an excessively-tense horror-thriller movie and find yourself exhausted from being on the edge of your seat? Imagine trying to keep that up for the full length of time it would take to read a novel. This isn't to say, of course, that exceptionally talented authors haven't managed it in the past, but the techniques of the horror used there must mix in aspects of other genres, be they soap opera-esque, dramatic, comedic (dangerously difficult to control in horror), suspenseful in the manner of Hitchcock, or any of a dozen other genres. (I will recognize several incidents where it was managed successfully without resorting to other genres, but those were done by the most exceptional of authors and shouldn't be attempted by amateurs like myself.) There it is the MOMENTS or the select INCIDENCES of the books that could be called horror. Essential to the story and development of the concept, yes, but not horrific in and of themselves. Thus we get the extended dramas and romance of the Vampire Chronicles, punctuated by moments of sheer horror and repugnance (think of the stage play in the first book, surrounded previously with the daily events of the vampire's lives), the extended treatise of small-town life from Stephen King's Castle Rock books, or the extended flights of fantasy in any of the numerous dark fantasy novels. Attempts to extend the horror itself have always struck me as singularly ludicrous. This is how we end up with a twenty-page passage of a knife-fight between two little old ladies trying to disembowel one another on a street corner (King). How pornographically descriptive segments of gore make it into goth novels. Stories that wander in cycles trying to best what was done in the last chapter. No, I like to think that the very best the genre has to offer comes in the form of the short story. The essential nature of much of horror is based on surprise. Revelation. Turnabout. The shortened nature of the short story means, out of necessity, not everything is told to us. Characters are minimally developed (except for specific points which we are instructed to pay attention to). Incidents are broadly described (except...ibid). In short (heh) SPACE is left for things to happen which we do not expect. The author can more carefully place his house of cards to construct the walls of the world he wants you to live in for a short time, and need not worry in his placement about the necessity of support for "upper levels" (maintaining believability around a central revelation without becoming convoluted in his attempts to keep from "tipping his hand" and blowing the surprise) before revealing that there is no floor and the cards stand in mid-air. To maintain such a prenominal surprise clear to the end of a full novel would be maddeningly difficult to construct or read.
Further, the very length of a short story opens one up to the possibility of experimentation. As the audience today has become immured to the standard tropes of horror for catching one off-guard (of course the cop is the killer....duh!) expeditions to more experimental writing styles can be adopted to circumvent the expectations, and the audience is likely to tolerate it because...hey, it's only 8 pages. (For a confirming counterpoint, has anyone here ever heard of the experimental "cut-up novels"? I think they were the "nova" trilogy by William F. Gibson.)
The ability of horror to come at one suddenly with the strength of a bulldozer also derives from these (and other) aspects. One of the better contributions that horror has made to society and culture at large is through a metaphorical or even more literal violent questioning of values and priorities in our modern life. (Questioning of the dangers involved with misuse of science, essential immorality in the human nature of one's moral guides, the dangers of immaleable moral or social strictures, etc. Think of the multiple stories involving the equivalence of blind conformity with zombies, robots, drugged stupor, etc.) The problem with such invasive questioning, however, is that the people you really want to direct these questions towards are the ones who are least likely to read them. Short horror stories will often, however, pack all of this message, accusation, assertion, and reproach into their final passage. Having pulled the reader all the way along for twelve pages, who's going to back out at the last paragraph? Thus the foundations of the oppositional thinkers are suddenly given a rather unpleasant shake, entirely at their own volition. (See the reaction of regular newspaper readers to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery.") I have an uncle who was an avid hunter and picked up one of my short story collections ("100 Terrifying Horror stories" I think,) flipped to a story called "The Hunt" (he's an avid hunter) and then sought me out to explain it. Now, seven years later, he still remembers that story, despite absolutely despising it. (I think, I'm not sure if he ever settled on how he felt about it.) Unfortunately, for the less tolerant, this leads to a lot of assertions that the genre as a whole is bigoted, immoral, pornographic, illegal, what have you.
So many of these aspects just don't extend out to novel length. People won't tolerate reading an entire novel assaulting the things they value. Attempting multiple revelations of the card-house variety would reach further and further past the point of credulity with each revelation. Presentation with a horrific idea (I've turned into a blood-sucking fiend!) will loose it's shock fairly quickly (Off to hunt the cattle of the night once more! Keep a light on!) and must be "stepped up" for further shocks (Oh no! A bloodsucking fiend who feeds on other bloodsucking fiends!) in a DBZ method that eventually just becomes ludicrously over-extended (A god of bloodsucking fiends?) and may even break through to the level of humor. (A god of bloodsucking fiend's gods?) (I really don't harbor this much antipathy towards Vampire stories, they're just the easiest example.)
The remarkable, and fortunate for horror fans, aspect of all this is that the length of time the events in a short-short to novella-length story occupy matches surprisingly to the amount of time covered by a 2-hour movie. There's some give and take, but much of the aspects unique to the short story format are also unique to the feature-length film. House of cards, abrupt reversal, revelation, willing to sit through, etc. TV Series-length tends to stretch the boundaries of the defined story. Even TV's Buffy, ignoring the soap-opera and (hilarious) comedic aspects, is showing the wear and tear of over-extension. First season: The Master. Next: Spike and Drusilla (who've managed to kill three slayers between them). Next: Evil Angel (one-shot trick, can't do that again). Next: Giant Demon-snake-worm. Next: A dispossessed God. Ramping up a bit too much? (Now they've gone into a new direction with the geek squad. I'll reserve judgement until I see how it turns out.
Thus: conclusion, horror, as a genre, has some remarkable advantages in it's conversion to movie format.
Long way for just that, hunh?
Anyway, the book:
Going through and hitting some of the highs and lows...
Several of the stories, IMHO, are chosen just for the strength of their author's names. "Soft" for all the times I've seen it reprinted, just struck me as depressing. A bone-degenerative epidemic is sweeping the world and we follow its effects on the everyday life of a few hapless souls. "Nightcrawlers" by Robert R. McMammon was made into a Twilight Zone episode...and if it's the one I think it is, it rightly outshone this story. Classic example of "shove too many little extraneous things and too much mood into one story." "Popsy", King's contribution is a short, excessively simple story that kind dissolves into excessive...stuff by the end and stops on a joke. One issue I have with King is the excessive amount of damage his characters can take. (Remember the guy who got hit with an axe in the "Shining" movie? In the book he gets up and drives a snowmobile later.) That shows up here. Anyway, a white slave trader discovers he's picked up a little more than he can handle. Robert Bloch's contribution was a bit more original, about a man's excessive...uh...obsession over a mannequin. He also has the interesting "The New Season" about isolationism of stars from their audience. "My Grandmother's Japonicas" by Charles Beaumont is an excellent little maybe-semi-autobiographical story, but is probably included as a status symbol for the book (it's acquisition something of a coup) as it isn't really horror. Similarly with Ray Bradbury's "Long after Ecclesiastes" poem. Richard Matheson demonstrates his uncanny mastery of the form with two extremely short and well crafted, but inscrutable (in their entirety) stories "The Near Departed" and "Buried Talents". These two really impressed me, but any description would be nearly as long as the stories themselves. Ramsey Campbell offers the perfect "House of Cards" story in "Second Sight" as he yanks the table out from under us.
Now that the super-stars are out of the way, some of the best contributions are from people little known to me. Experimentalism in the form shows up in David Etchinson's "Somebody like you" to merely confusing effect, and to much better execution in Douglas E. Winter's "Splatter, A cautionary tale" wherein the habits of censors are equated to those of the walking dead. ("Brains...brains...") The confusion sets in again, however, with Stanley Wiater's spoken-in-a-final-breath stream-of-consciousness story "Moist Dreams." "Lake George in High August" by John Robert Besink adds a little bit of the experimental to flavor his own tragic story. Gene Wolf offers up "Redbeard" as an interesting analysis of the public eye's unwillingness to let anything die...even after the perpetrator has. Ray Russel gives a distinctly-EC flavored example of divine retribution in "Czadek," while Dennis Hamilton gives a more adult-flavored version for a more severe transgressor in "The Alteration." Charles L. Grant tells us that what "The Old Men Know" might better be left unexplored and Dennis Hamilton in "Fish Story" tells us not to trust them anyway, while Gayhan Wilson in "The Substitute" tells a fantastical story about how a sixth-grade class saved the world from invasion. G. Wayne Miller tells us how "Wiping the Slate Clean" doesn't always lead to a fresh start, especially if that isn't what's desired. I don't like thinking about James Kishner's "The Litter" as I'm a cat person, and frankly I skipped right over it this time through. For the exact same reason I skipped over James Herbert's "Maurice and Mog" this time around, detailing two trapped prisoners in a bomb shelter after the big one goes up. Ray Russel's "American Gothic" would be more in place in a Penthouse publication, although the end is rather horrid. "If you take my hand, my son" tells of betrayal from beyond the grave. "In the Tank" and "Hidey Hole" (Aradath Mayhar, Steve Rasinic Tem) will both do nothing to cure your claustrophobia, while "The Night is Freezing Fast" warns against driving through snowstorms, you never know who you might pick up.
Of course, there's always a few stinkers. An original idea badly executed leaves you with Richard Christian Matheson's "Third Wind", summed up in six words: "a man who can't stop running." "The turn of time" (David B. Silvia) and "Trust not a man" (William F. Nolan) both do their best to make us think plants are scary, but fail utterly. "The First Day of Spring" (David Knoles) tells "The turn of time" with a different species. "Ice Sculptures" by David B. Silvia did a whole lot of building up, and then left us built for EVER before GETTING TO THE POINT. The final story, "The boy who came back" by Alan Rogers, has a similar point, though better written. (Besides, the dead being raised by aliens comes WAY too close to "Plan 9 from Outer Space" to take seriously.)
The real gems for me, though, resemble Richard Matheson's contributions. "Down by the Sea Near the Great Big Rock" (5 pages) and "Dog, Cat, and Baby" (3 pages) both by Joe R. Lansdale pick up a rock and shatter our preconceptions after the household pets have a "disagreement" and a family outing becomes decidedly less than a bonding experience.
My favorite story, though, is "The Man Who Drowned Puppies" by a hidden master of the craft, Thomas Sullivan, who never put out much in the way of volume, and thus isn't widely noticed outside of the writer's circles themselves. His single offering here I put down in my top ten favorite short stories of all time. It's rare that an author can pack all the horror and surprise of a story into the final WORD, but he pulls it off. The story tells us of the outing of the local "deathman," (sort of a combination of exterminator, executioner, mortician, and knacker's (butcher for sick animals) in a rural setting), and the sorrow of a young child who tags along to witness the death of the family pet. Highly, HIGHLY recommended.
In summary, an excellent collection, if a bit colored in quality by an attempt to pack lesser offerings from big-name authors in.
Whew. Longer than I thought. -
Oh I-in-I-ay, oh I-in-I-ay, oh I-in-I-in-I-ay....
2002-04-06 10:19:12
sixstop: About thirty....that's all.
You know, what with the D20 CoC, the last (I think...) Akira volume and the next Lone Wolf and cub volume coming out this week, I dropped nearly $90 on my hobbies! Damn, I may hold off on going to see Blade II for a while. Looks like Queen of the Dammned made it out of theaters before I caught it, too. Bleh. I'll see it eventually, I've just got that brand of sick curiosity.
May not be any reviews or entries for a bit, as my only class has finally decided to dump the entire workload of the semester on us in the last three weeks of class, plus my TA work finally picked up and I have some AWA AMV stuff to get to work on.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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