Know what's fun? Finding a new author who knocks you out of your seat with the raw power of his storytelling craft.
I stumbled across Jeremy Robert Johnson's We Live Inside You on Amazon.com by accident, but with a title like that I couldn't not investigate more closely. I bought the kindle version of the book while my intrigue was still running high, and less than a minute later was reading about a man who got infested with a creepy parasite hivemind that not only took over his body but, increasingly, took over his entire personality. Even the tone of the story shifted in tone as the narrator became more and more proud of the fact that he was no longer merely a meat body but thousands of bodies. His joy in being able to share this bliss with the rest of the world, starting with the occupants of a movie theater who unknowingly began breathing in his microscopic airborne larvae, was really really really unsettling.
There's actually several stories about creepy parasites in the book. My favorite, hands down, was not the aforementioned "When Sussurus Stirs" but in fact the incredible "Cathedral Mother," in which a woman, driven to the extremes of eco-terrorisim in her pursuit of preserving the old growth redwoods of Northern California, stumbles upon a parasitic danger high in the canopies of the very trees she's trying to save.
Not all the stories in We Live Inside You are about parasites, though. There's actually a wide range of stories in here—stories about the end of the world caused by a devastating chant, of ghostly vengeance from beyond the grave, of strange drugs and stranger cults, gritty noir dramas and CDC horror stories, patricide, dead kids, and so much more.
By the time I finished, I was eager for more, and so I zipped back online and a few moments later, Angel Dust Apocalypse was on my kindle. More parasite stories awaited within this book, much to my delight, along with stories about the apocalypse itself that were both sublmine and over the top. You've got a story about a man making a suit out of cockroaches in order to survive in a radioactive wasteland. Or a story about a society where body modification is more than just mainstream, it's the route to fame. Or a story about a bitter young man who hates having to take care of his mentally challenged younger brother. Or how one woman reacts to the news that her husband may have been decapitated in a car crash and she needs to drive north to ID the body by a tattoo. Or of a particularly horrific Native American curse. Or a story that starts off with: "You could bite Todd's nose off."
The stories are raw, visceral, grisly when needed, and powerful. Jeremy Robert Johnson's the type of author who can set you on edge merely with his titles—especially once you're familiar with his writing style. I had to pause in dread and anticipation before continuing the book once I got to the story called "Priapsim," for example... We Live Inside You / Angel Dust Apocalypse...
One of the things that kind of bugs me is when I'm reading a novel that's part of a series, and I've read the previous installments of said series, but then the novelist spends too much time reminding you of what happened before, as if said novelist doesn't trust that you've read the previous stories.
That's certainly not a problem with Justin Cronin's The Twelve, the second book in his vampire apocalypse saga. I was VERY impressed with the first in the series, The Passage, and eagerly tore into this one. As with The Passage, the first significant portion of the book functions as a sort of prequel, detailing events during the events that brought about the end of the world, introducing us to several really cool characters as we follow their efforts to survive in a world where vampirisim is taking over.
The bulk of the novel, of course, takes place about 100 years after that, focusing on most of the same characters from the first novel. They're no longer naive young adults, now, though; they've had a harrowing time in their journey, and they're now pretty rough around the edges. And if anything, some of the things they go through in this one are among the more harrowing ordeals I've read recently... not because of the violent or horrifying nature of their ordeals so much as because by the time things really start going bad, you're really invested in the characters. Cronin does a great job making you care about the characters, and the way he almost casually reveals near the start of the novel that some of the previous novel's survivors have died in the time between the two novels, it's really unsettling and distressing.
And that brings me back to the start of the review. There's a spoiler-free Dramatis Personae at the back of the book... but it's SO spoiler-free that it kinda doesn't help. I really should have done what I do whenever a new Song of Ice and Fire book comes out—read up the Wikipedia pages for the previous books to get reminded about where things were at when last we left our heroes and villains behind.
The book itself, though? It's excellent. Cronin does a brilliant job at presenting the vampires as creatures of science but also creatures of supernatural mystery. In fact, the science is so prevalent near the first half of the book that as things that are more and more unexplainable by science happen, they really do feel spooky and frightening in a way they wouldn't had the vampires had blatantly supernatural powers from the very beginning.
Looking forward eagerly to the next in the series!
... isn't afraid to kill off characters you've come to like, nor is it afraid to bring back characters you thought were killed off!
... faces the reader with some difficult truths, in that it casts sympathetic characters in the role of suicide bombers, and manages to make you understand why such tactics might be the only choice, which is kinda disturbing.
... has a somewhat frustrating habit of skipping some of the more exciting action scenes and revealing what happens only after the fact, but certainly doesn't skip away from the hard to read parts about some pretty vile stuff.
... raised some pretty interesting questions that I hope will be explored in the third and final book—not the least of which is what's going on beyond the USA 100 years in the future!
Found footage movies aren't my only cinematic weakness. Another such vulnerability would be the good old-fashioned monster movie. These can run the gamut from incredibly excellent (such as The Host or Alien) to excellently terrible (C.H.U.D. anyone?).
Storage 24 is somewhere right down the middle. It's a pretty modest movie that starts with a bang. A serious one. I thought for a moment that I'd broken my speakers when the movie gets going! The movie itself is standard monster movie plot #1—a group of people are stranded in an enclosed location with a monster on the loose. In this case, the enclosed location is a vast storage unit facility, and the monster is a semi-humanoid semi-reptilian semi-insect all-brute creature that's actually really quite well-designed and realized on screen, with a fair amount of actual practical effects and puppetry at work. The monster even has a personality beyond RARRRRGH KILL THEM ALL and makes a few mistakes along the road to eating all humans. Or if not eating them, ripping out their hearts and then letting the poor victim watch while the monster crushes said heart in its big hand like it was an empty beer can. Can't fix that! You're done.
Not what you want to see when you open that mysterious storage locker!
... is what happens when you mix Super-8, Alien, and Storage Wars up in a blender.
... has some REALLY refreshing developments along the lines of a certain
obnoxious movie cliche. You know the one—the token minority is the first
to die. Not so much the case in this movie. It's refreshing to see a
horror movie avoid that cliche.
... is another one of those movies I actually kinda liked that got a lower than I'd expect rating on IMDB.
... makes me wonder how many people actually DO live inside their storage units.
... has the standard "our cell phones don't have a signal and so we're cut off from help!" element... but there's a pretty dang good reason for it!
It always kinda weirds me out when I see a movie that I actually quite enjoy, then head on over to IMDB for my post-viewing "would you like to know more" surfing, and then see that the movie's gotten terrible reviews. That happened recently with The Frankenstein Theory.
Now, granted, it's a found footage movie, and that means that it's super-effective against me. And on top of that... some of the acting is a bit dodgy. But some of the acting is really quite good (particularly Timothy V. Murphy as rugged local guide Karl), and the landscapes of the deep wild of northern Canada are never anything less than beautiful.
The movie itself has a pretty interesting plot—what if Frankenstein, the original story, wasn't fiction... what if it was based on a series of real-world experiments, and what if the real monster was really created and is still up there, lurking in the arctic wastes? It's a pretty cool concept. The movie even flirts with shifting from found footage over to mockumentary (an equally compelling style of movie making), but never quite decides to make that shift entirely.
In the end, there IS a lot of people walking around in the dark or the wilds continuing to film things even as they fall apart. People who don't like found footage will certainly find no shortage of things to be annoyed by in the movie. But if you like the genre, and you like movies about isolation and arctic survival, check it out!
... isn't nearly as bad as the internet thinks it is.
...would have been better had it embraced the mockumentary angle instead of the found footage angle, I think.
... would also have been better had Karl been in the entire movie from the start.
... kinda spoils the end of the movie in the trailer, so be warned if you watch the following link! Or if you DO watch and want to avoid the spoiler, stop watching at about 1 minute and 20 seconds in. You'll get the idea for the movie by then anyway.
Whew... been a busy month! With the Gen Con crunch taking over pretty much everything over the past several weeks, I've not really had a chance to see many movies or read much aside from what's gonna be published by Paizo between now and August. And then there was a week of recovery.
That said, I did see a few movies and read a few books, so I'm gonna post pretty short reviews of them so I can get all caught up!
First off? Oblivion!
This was never a boring movie to look at; the effects and the cinematography and the art design was really excellent. It doesn't hurt that I'm a sucker for postapocalyptic movies, of course... but what DID hurt were all the logic flaws and plot holes in the script (for example... if a thing can control the atmosphere in an enclosed area, why does it need to wait for flying robots to come kill intruders... why can't said thing simply turn the atmosphere back off to deal with the pesky human interlopers?), and even worse, the fact that the best parts of the movie... in fact... MOST parts of the movie... were more or less lifted from other movies.
If you've never seen a science fiction movie before, you might be blown away by Oblivion.
Huh... you're right! I can see like 11 other movies from here!
... has obviously seen The Matrix, 2001, Planet of the Apes, Wall-E, Star Wars, I Am Legend, A.I., Independance Day, Lifeforce, Inception, War of the Worlds, and more. It hopes YOU haven't seen them, though!
... has also obviously HEARD Inception. I wonder what movie trailers would sound like today without having had Inception's awesome and easily mimicked low bass thrums?
... has some unsettling undercurrents of misogyny.
... has laser weaponry that turns bit actors into ashes but only makes main characters apparently lose their breath.
... is nonetheless never honestly dull, but neither is it a movie one ever needs to see more than once.
... is a MUCH better video game than it is a movie.
Sometimes, monsters are scary because they have a horrific shape. Spider faces, demonic visages, twisted bodies, mutant limbs, and more are classic monster parts. But sometimes, the scariest monster is the one without a shape at all. I'm not sure if it was a broadcast of "The Blob" on Creature Features or merely the discovery of amoebas in a science book that introduced me first to the idea that monsters without shapes at all could be plenty scary. Come to think of it... it was probably my dad who introduced me to the concept.
As a kid, I'd take a sheet of paper, then draw a line down the middle and then three lines across, dividing the sheet into eight smaller squares. I'd then bring the sheet of squares to my dad and ask him to draw me 8 monsters in the squares. He never failed to dream up great monsters, but now and then he'd draw a blob. He'd explain how it works—it grabs you and eats you alive, basically—and in hindsight I can't help but wonder if he chose blobs now and then because they were an easy monster to draw when your kid's asking you to draw 8 of them. I remember in particular a giant sea amoeba creeping up on a guy who was bent over a tidepool rock reaching for an abalone... even as the man reached, the blob was reaching for HIM.
"The Blob" is, of course the movie most folks think about when you mention shapeless slime monsters, but as fun as that movie is... it's not the best of its kind. The remake was surprisingly good (and just as surprisingly, a horror movie that came to the Point Arena theater), bu there's also movies like "X the Unknown" and "The Quatermass Xperiment" that feature some pretty creepy shapeless horrors. Interesting how both those two have the letter "X" in their names!
In literature, of course, blobs are all over the place, particularly in Lovecraft's writings. Shoggoths, after all, are the quintessential blobs—workhorses invented by an alien race who managed to become intelligent and rebel against their one-time masters. Hopefully Guillarmo del Toro will be able to get his version of "At the Mountains of Madness" on film some day and we'll have one more blob to ogle!
I remember the first time I saw The Evil Dead quite clearly. My dad, my best friend, and I were at the Point Arena General Store back in the mid-80s. It was a Friday afternoon, and we were looking for a movie to pick out and rent and watch that night; my dad told my friend and I to pick out one. I wanted to rent Movie A, while my friend wanted to rent Movie B. We argued about which one to get long enough that my dad was getting frustrated, and then one of us (I like to think it was me) saw a third movie. Something called "The Evil Dead" that had a blurb from Stephen King on the cover and showed a half-naked woman being pulled into the ground by a zombie hand. We decided to rent that one.
Later that night, after the movie finished, I was thunderstruck. I'd seen plenty of horror movies already, but I'd never seen one quite like The Evil Dead. Its over the top gore combined with its over the top energy made me an instant fan... even if my dad hated it. He likes movies where the good guys win.
A few years later, I was at a DIFFERENT store (Rollerville Junction, near the Point Arena Lighthouse) looking for a movie to rent, and I saw something that I couldn't believe. A sequel? To Evil Dead? Yes please! And then in college, I remember seeing Evil Dead 2 in the theater despite being sick as a dog, and seeing Army of Darkness in the theater where no one but my friends and I seemed to realize it was a comedy.
So yeah. I'm one of those Evil Dead fans who's been waiting for decades for a new installment in the series, and who was watching nervously as word of the remake became confirmed. It wasn't until the red-band trailer that I started to let myself hope.
Evil Dead is not the same movie as "The Evil Dead" or "Evil Dead 2." It is not better than those two movies.
That said, it probably comes as close as possible to being as good as those two movies as you can get.
Breaking Bad is no longer the holder of the "Most Horrifying Box Cutter Scene" trophy.
In fact, in some areas, it exceeds the original. The music's better. The effects are better. And I frankly think that the setup for the storyline is better. But it's lacking the final magic spark of Sam Raimi directing and Bruce Campbell acting.
That said, it's also a drop-dead serious movie. There's no comedy in Evil Dead, just as there wasn't any in the original. The movie knows you've seen the original, and while it throws in some delightful touchstones (a necklace making a skull shape on the ground... a line of dialogue here and there... a chainsaw in a woodshed...), there's quite a few significant changes from the original's plot that are actually quite welcome and cool.
The effects, in particular, are worth mentioning. I can't remember the last time I saw a horror movie where pretty much every single gore effect was done practically—there's no CGI gore in this movie. There's barely any CGI in the movie at all, in fact. And with the physical effects done so well... it's kind of like a wake up slap-in-the-face as to how visceral and powerful movie magic can be. CGI is well and good, but you know how they do it. There's some effects in this movie that I simply do not know how they pulled them off without killing some people.
And one last thing. While I kind of wish they'd gone a bit farther and a bit more over the top with some of the effects and story elements... I have to admit. I'm flabbergasted that this movie ONLY got an R-rating. It's easily one of the goriest movies I've seen in theaters in a long, long time. Evil Dead...
... has the best soundtrack of the year so far, and it's gonna be a hard one to beat.
... is, apparently, not a remake or reboot as much as it is an actual sequel. They're working on Evil Dead 2 already, as well as Army of Darkness 2, and plan to do Evil Dead 3... and supposedly Evil Dead 4 will bridge the remakes and the original into a single storyline!
... had one day where they used 50,000 gallons of blood in one scene. It's pretty obvious which scene that is when it happens, trust me.
... has real vomit in it.
... features Sam Raimi's car, so you KNOW it's legit!
... is not "The Most Terrifying Film I Will Ever Experience." That honor probably goes to Martyrs or Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project or Frontier(s) for me... probably Martyrs, since the fear has faded for the other three for me somewhat.
... has a cute little stinger at the very end of the credits, so make sure you stay to see it!
Grade: A
(And if the above trailer wasn't gory enough... check out the red band trailer below, but don't say I didn't warn you!)
