Hammer Times

Sleepy Hollow: adapted by Kevin Yagher and Andrew Kevin Walker from the Washington Irving short story; directed by Tim Burton; starring Johnny Depp (Ichabod Crane), Christina Ricci (Katrina), Miranda Richardson (Lady Van Tassel), and Christopher Walken (The Horseman) (1999):

Tim Burton's homage to the Hammer horror films of the 1950's and 1960's looks terrific -- it's a triumph of muted cinematography, if nothing else. And after another 13 years of macho heroes, Johnny Depp's perennially frightened Ichabod Crane seems a lot more palatable than he did in 1999. He's another twitchy Depp freakshow, but he's at least plausibly freaky and refreshingly low on testosterone.

The film turns the old Washington Irving tale into a somewhat creaky supernatural detective story without much mystery -- you may figure out who's behind everything in the first 15 minutes or so. And that's OK. It's really a movie about fog and darkness and creepy things.

Burton, as usual, goes too far at a couple of points with the visual effects. An homage to his own Beetlejuice is especially annoying. And the McGuffin is almost laughably banal. However, the cast is terrific, and Christina Ricci is both lovely and, as a heroine, has actual important things to do other than screaming. Recommended.

Wild Child of the Atom

The Wolverine: written by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, based on the miniseries by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller; starring Hugh Jackman (Logan), Tao Okamoto (Mariko), Rila Fukushima (Yukio) and Svetlana Khodchenkova (Viper) (2013): As a case study in pitching Hollywood blockbusters to the Asian market, The Wolverine is terrific. Other than Australian Hugh Jackman as Canadian Logan/Wolverine, almost the entire cast is Japanese, and much of the film is set in Japan.

That's in keeping with the Chris Claremont-written, Frank Miller-illustrated 1982 comic-book miniseries that the film draws upon. I think the writers do something smart with that miniseries, which somewhat implausibly inserted an entire Japan-obsessed backstory into Wolverine's history.

Here, while Wolverine has previously been in Japan, he doesn't know much about its culture. I'd argue that makes way more sense, especially given Logan's eternal memory problems. Even if he was an expert once, he isn't any more. This also allows for exposition that isn't delivered, as in the miniseries, by Wolverine's narration.

Other than that cleverness and some nicely staged recreations of moments from the comic, though, this is awfully thin superhero gruel. As it's a set-up for the next X-Men movie, we get a lot of references to the last (and least) of the original three X-Men films. I don't think it's ever a good idea to make anyone think about director Brett Ratner's crappy third X-Men film.

We also get one good mutant, one bad mutant, and one mystery villain in a giant cybernetic suit of armor. Also a really draggy twenty minutes in the middle, characters hiding in the most obvious place available to them, and some inadvertantly hilarious 'footage' of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which was apparently accomplished by a bomber flying 1000 feet above the ground at about 100 miles an hour.

Hugh Jackman is good as usual, and improbably ripped -- he looks like all 300 Spartans superimposed upon one another. But his Wolverine has been written as something of a bumbling boob when it comes to fighting strategy and tactics. It's a good thing the villains are so kindly disposed to keeping him alive and filling him in on their plans. Lightly recommended.

Pacific Rocket Punch

Pacific Rim: written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Burn Gorman (Gottlieb), Charlie Day (Geiszler), and Ron Perlman (Hannibal Chau) (2013): Pacific Rim is a hoot, an expensive homage to every Japanese movie and cartoon that gave us gigantic, city-destroying monsters and/or giant, man-shaped, world-saving robots and cyborgs. There's even a rocket punch, and monsters that could clearly beat the crap out of Leonard Maltin AND Sydney Poitier. But not Robert Smith!!!

The movie even mostly hangs together as a thought experiment, though it overcomplicates the plot in a couple of ways. The most problematic overcomplication is the movie's premise that humanity has stopped making Jaegers -- the giant human-run robots that are the only effective defense against the monstrous Kaiju that periodically come striding out of a dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean floor -- and instead turned to building a giant, and soon-to-be-proven useless, wall around the Pacific (!!!!!!!!). It would have been a lot simpler to note that the defense program is temporaily short on Jaegers due to the increase in period and frequency of Kaiju attacks, and move on.

Other than that, though, the movie is a lot of fun, with an emphasis on teamwork over individuality, and a multi-national cast that may have hindered its box-office performance in the United States. Either that, or they should have just titled it Transformers: Pacific Rim, even though the robots don't actually transform.

The main cast of Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, and Idris Elba is tremendously likeable; the twitchy scientists played by Burn Gorman and Charlie Day are intermittently amusing and ultimately heroic; the Kaiju organlegger played by Ron Perlman is a welcome jolt of energy. The robots look great, as do the Kaiju, though I wish the filmmakers had spent a bit more on visual effects and given us one extended Jaeger vs. Kaiju battle staged entirely in the day-time. The murkiness of the night battles and the undersea battles sometimes gets a bit annoying.

The best Kaiju sequence, as if from a postmodern fairytale, involves one of the gargantuan monsters -- this one vaguely crab-like -- chasing a little girl through the streets of Tokyo. It's scary and funny, and better than pretty much any visual effects sequence from any other blockbuster this summer. Highly recommended.

Rats and Wyrms

Death Drives a Semi by Edo van Belkom, containing the following stories: The Rug; But Somebody's Got to Do It; Death Drives a Semi; The Basement; Mother and Child; Mark of the Beast; Scream String; S.P.S.; The Cold; Blood Count; Ice Bridge; No Kids Allowed; The Piano Player Has No Fingers; And Injustice for Some; Roadkill; Lip-O-Suction; Afterlife; Family Ties; Rat Food (with David Nickle); and Baseball Memories (Collected 1998): Prolific Canadian writer Edo van Belkom's first collection of short stories is terrific, a fine assortment of horror stories from the first ten years of his writing career.

Robert Sawyer's introduction strains a bit in its attempt to compare van Belkom to too many disparate writers. The range of stories here, in terms of style and approach, probably most resembles the early stories of Richard Matheson, or Robert Bloch after his initial Lovecraftian pastiche stage, or even New England horror writer Joseph Payne Brennan. Van Belkom is very much plot-oriented, and very much a writer in the plain style favoured by so many genre authors.

Van Belkom has a droll, black sense of humour that suits some of the stories, and his attempts to breathe new life (or unlife) into tired horror tropes such as the Vampire reflect that sense-of-humour, as we encounter vampires in the professional wrestling circuit and in the weight-reduction business. While many of the stories are gruesomely graphic, others are more traditional suspense ("Ice Bridge"), science fiction ("S.P.S."), or plain-style Bradburiana ("The Basement") with a touch of the gentler Twilight Zone episodes.

Some stories would make fine tales in the old E.C. horror comics of the 1950's, centered as they are around ironic supernatural revenge ("The Rug", "Roadkill"). Three of the best stories -- "The Rug," "The Basement," and the award-winning "Rat Food" -- sympathetically portray the plight of the elderly. "Rat Food" is one of those horror stories that may not be horror at all: I guess it depends on one's tolerance for rats crawling all over one's body. In summation, a collection that any serious reader of horror fiction really should pick up. Highly recommended.

　

　

The Wyrm by Stephen Laws (1987): Page-turner of a horror novel in which a terrible Something (the eponymous "Wyrm") escapes from centuries of imprisonment to takes it vengeance on the small Northern English bordertown whose residents defeated it in the early 17th century.

While The Wyrm doesn't have the depth or complexity of similar novels of the 1980's that include Stephen King's It and Ramsey Campbell's The Hungry Moon, the novel nonetheless kept me reading quickly through to the end. The characters are sympathetic if a bit flatly drawn at times.

The Wyrm itself is an interesting creation, though as with other such super-monsters (such as Pennywise in It), it talks too much and the novel reveals too many of its thoughts, making it less terrifying than a more silent creature might have been. Still, a worthwhile light read. Recommended.

Dragon Nipples

Savage Dragon Archives Volume 2, written and illustrated by Erik Larsen (Collected 2007): Fun collection of superhero cop Dragon's mid-1990's adventures trying to keep Chicago and the world safe from a wide variety of supervillains and superfreaks. Creator/writer/artist Larsen had really become adept at drawing interesting superhero battles by this time in his career, and often opens up the action into one- and two-page spreads to good effect.

That, and there are a lot of pictures of women with enormous breasts tipped with enormous erect nipples.

The series also more confidently moves into realms of homage and parody this time around, as Larsen riffs on Jack Kirby's New Gods, superhero weddings, and the Mighty Thor. There are also crossovers galore, as Savage Dragon teams up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hellboy, and fights off the Martians of Mars Attacks! Recommended.

When We Was Weird

More Weird Tales edited by Peter Haining (Collected 1975) containing the following stories, poems, and essays:

The Valley Was Still (1939) by Manly Wade Wellman; A Weird Prophecy [It Happened to Me] by Ken Gary; Winter Night [It Happened to Me] by Alice Olsen; San Francisco [It Happened to Me] (1940) by Caroline Evans; Heart of Atlantan (1940) by Nictzin Dyalhis; The Phantom Slayer (1942) by Fritz Leiber; The Beasts of Barsac (1944) by Robert Bloch; Bang! You're Dead! (1944) by Ray Bradbury; Cellmate (1947) by Theodore Sturgeon; The Familiars by H. P. Lovecraft; The Pigeon-Flyers (1943) by H. P. Lovecraft; Roman Remains (1948) by Algernon Blackwood; Displaced Person (1948) by Eric Frank Russell; To the Chimera (1924) by Clark Ashton Smith; From the Vasty Deep (1949) by H. Russell Wakefield; The Shot-Tower Ghost (1949) by Mary Elizabeth Counselman; Take the Z-Train (1950) by Allison V. Harding; The Little Red Owl (1951) by Margaret St. Clair; Ooze (1923) by Anthony M. Rud.

Peter Haining probably edited about a thousand anthologies in his lifetime. This, the second half of a hardcover collecting stories from pulp magazine Weird Tales' first iteration, which ran from 1923 to the early 1950's, is a very good one.

Weird Tales was the first true American pulp magazine devoted to fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Its heyday was the 1920's and early 1930's, but it still offered a viable market for short-story writers right up until its death during The Great Dying of the pulps in the late 1940's and early 1950's.

Haining does a nice job of finding stories from female writers, of which Weird Tales had more than a few, and of offering reprints of some of the non-fiction features of the magazine (It Happened to Me and the letters column The Eyrie), along with some decent poems from writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (who really was a good poet), and Conan creator Robert E. Howard.

Haining also seemed to have an eye on what had been collected before, as the Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury selections are relatively little-known. Leiber's "The Phantom Slayer" is the strongest from one of those four stalwarts, an urban nightmare that characterizes Leiber's reimagining of the horror genre in the 1940's as something set in urban landscapes bleak and otherwise, where people try and sometimes fail to connect with one another.

Among the lesser known writers, the improbably named Nictzin Dyalhis offers an enjoyable lost-world story much in the vein of Clark Ashton Smith and A. Merrit. Margaret St. Clair, a fairly well-known genre author of the 1940's and 1950's, impresses with the childhood fantasy nightmare "The Little Red Owl," which essentially pits a psychopathic uncle against a fictional character. The anthology finishes with a story from the first issue of Weird Tales, "Ooze," a fun story of amoebas gone wrong. Or is that amobae? Recommended.

Prime Numbers

Superman: Secret Identity: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Stuart Immonen (2004): Busiek takes a decidely Meta concept inspired by a Superman comic book of the 1980's and extrapolates it into a moving tale about the Man of Steel. In a weird way, OUR Man of Steel.

The Superman team-up series DC Comics Presents offered an odd story towards the end of its run in the 1980's. In it, the Superman of DC's main Earth, Earth-1, met the Superboy of Earth-Prime. But the thing was, Earth-Prime was, in DC's multiverse, 'our' Earth, one without superheroes, one upon which all of DC's heroes were simply characters in comic books. That included Superboy and Superman. So Superboy of Earth-Prime found himself with superpowers on an Earth where he was already a fictional character.

Borges, eat your heart out!

Busiek takes this initial concept and, not in a situation to write an ongoing, in-continuity series about Superboy-Prime, instead writes a non-continuity story that follows a Superboy from a world where he's a fictional character through the course of the super-powered portion of his lifetime.

This Superboy has been teased for years because his parents thought it would be cool to name a male baby with the last name Kent who hails from a small town in Kansas (Pickettsville, not Smallville)...Clark. And one night, when he's 13, Clark suddenly wakes up with a pretty fair approximation of all of Superman's powers.

What follows is a really charming story which allows Busiek to explore the aging of a superhero. Most 'adult' superhero books explore either the beginning or the end of their hero's career. Busiek's best work lies here in exploring the middle -- adulthood, parenthood, grandparenthood. His Superman, who consciously adopts the classic costume in part because it means people who see him won't be believed, operates in secrecy, leery of a U.S. government that apparently wants to dissect him.

But as a fundamentally decent person, Clark continues to help people, despite the risk of being followed home. His powers aren't great enough to always protect him from being knocked unconscious, but he keeps going anyway. And perhaps the government will eventually decide that he's not a threat -- or develop superheroes of its own.

Busiek and artists Immonen, who's never done better work than he does here, do a lovely job of pointing out the ways in which it would be great to be Superman, both through the soaring, two-page vistas that periodically appear to show the world as Superman sees it, and through the little things that he takes for normal, such as being able to go to any restaurant in the world whenever he wants to. It's a great take on Superman, wonderfully told, with expressive character work by Immonen. Recommended.

Contusions of a Dragonslayer

Smax: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Zander Cannon, Andrew Currie, and Richard Friend (2003): Moore and Cannon send big, blue, nigh-indestructible Smax and techno-whiz partner Robyn ("Toybox"), two of the super-powered cops of Moore, Gene Ha, and Cannon's Top 10, to Smax's alternate Earth for the funeral of Smax's uncle, after the events of Top 10 issue 12. Well, adopted uncle, as he was a dwarf and Smax is...well, the book explains his origins.

Jeff Smax's Earth is one on which fairy tales, legends, and myths have all happened, sort of. There are dragons, elves, ghosts, and about a zillion other things, many of them appearing in the background. Cannon's art often emulates the crowded panels of Mad magazine -- here a Troll, there Harry Potter, and over in that corner, Stewie Griffin holding a gun to Maggie Simpson's head.

In the midst of the violent yet comic shenanigans comes the dragon Morningbright, unfinished business from Smax's mysterious past as a dragonslayer who failed to earn his last 30% commission for killing Morningbright because he ended up running away right off his own Earth and onto Earth-10, where he eventually got a job as a cop with Precinct 10. While he's not bright, Smax isn't a coward: Morningbright was a debacle he doesn't want to think about.

Somewhat like the dragon of John Gardner's Grendel, Morningbright can see the future, or at least enough of it to be a real problem. That his powers make him nearly omnipotent is another problem. That Smax has to somehow figure out how to kill him to fulfill a prophecy -- which on a magic-driven Earth is somewhat binding -- is another problem. That Smax and Toybox have to assemble a heroic group while meeting affirmative action quotas is also a problem. There are a lot of problems here. But years before Robyn ever came to Smax's Earth, Morningbright gave Smax a message for her, apparently intended to spook her. Why?

Simultaneously zippy and dense, Smax is a lot of fun -- and the dragon is a fascinating creation both in the writing and in Cannon's depiction of it. Morningbright is super-creepy, especially once the specific nature of his hoard of gold finally becomes clear. Recommended.

Popeye vs. the NSA

The Bourne Legacy: based on characters created by Robert Ludlum; written by Tony and Dan Gilroy; directed by Tony Gilroy; starring Jeremy Renner (Aaron Cross), Rachel Weisz (Dr. Marta Shearer), Edward Norton (Eric Byer), Scott Glenn (Ezra Kramer), Stacy Keach (Admiral Turso) and Joan Allen (Pam Landy) (2012): The Bourne Legacy could conceivably have been pitched as Captain America meets Three Days of the Condor. It's an enjoyable addition to the Bourne saga, and while Matt Damon is nowhere to be found, squinty-eyed Jeremy Renner, here a post-modern Popeye, convinces as another rogue super-spy on the run from the U.S. government.

Hey, forget that pitch. The super-spies of what could have been called the Bourne 2.0 program have been enhanced through genetic manipulation of brain and body. As Renner had suffered grievous brain damage as a soldier, his life will basically stop if he can't keep getting his meds -- or find a way to make the modifications permanent. It's Flowers for Algernon with car chases and parkour!

The Bourne movies are a mirror image to the James Bond movies, with the protagonists repeatedly battling their own spy agencies rather than enemies foreign and domestic. It certainly has suited our paranoid times for the last decade or so. Much of the danger in the Bourne movies arises from government agencies cleaning up their own messes, a repeatedly ruthless procedure that generally involves killing everybody expendable in a particular covert government program. Imagine if all civil servants had to face these sorts of cutbacks!

Acclaimed writer-director Tony Gilroy takes the reins here, and does a nice job of keeping a complicated plot moving. The supporting cast is solid, and Rachel Weisz is good as the geneticist Renner has to save in order to save himself before his stash runs out. Geez, it's a bit like a Cheech and Chong movie, too. Recommended.

Squirrels in Collision

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris, illustrated by Ian Falconer (2010): Fairly short, illustrated book of very skewed modern fables involving talking animals. I suppose the model is Aesop's Fables super-collided with Beatrix Potter and the Just-So stories and more than a hint of Animal Farm, though these stories really aren't for children.

Nonetheless, they do obliquely teach lessons about hypocrisy, political correctness, societal expectations, sexual identity, anal leeches in hippos, and the importance of not letting your kids dress the gerbil in a skin-tight bikini.

I enjoyed it a lot, and the illustrations by Ian Falconer are pretty swell. As in both the animal and human kingdoms, there's a certain amount of death and disfigurement, though of course such things also happen in the aforementioned 'talking animals' predecessors to Sedaris. A sharp, short read. Recommended.

Security Blanket

Ted: written by Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, and Wellesley Wild; directed by Seth MacFarlane; starring Mark Wahlberg (John Bennett), Mila Kunis (Lori Collins), Seth MacFarlane (Voice of Ted), and Giovanni Ribisi (Donny) (2012): Watching Ted for the second time, this time on TV, it's visual crumminess is less apparent, though still noticeable. I'm sure Seth MacFarlane doesn't care. Either that or he was trying to make Kevin Smith look like Ingmar Bergman. And it does. Ted makes Clerks look like Wild Strawberries.

Nonetheless, it's still a funny movie, with that Airplane vibe of throwing jokes at the screen as fast as possible so as to overcome the failure of any one joke. The Giovanni Ribisi subplot that takes over the final third of the movie is still crap, the movie is still at least 20 minutes too long, and MacFarlane's sudden turn into sentimentality towards the end of the film would get him kicked out of the Airplane/Mel Brooks School of Film Comedy, if such a thing existed.

Maybe the funniest thing about the film isn't in the film. See, Ted focuses on its protagonists' love of the awful 1980 sf/action/comic-strip-movie Flash Gordon, which starred Sam Jones, who would soon never be seen again. Until Ted, in which the characters actually get to meet with (and party with) Jones. But in real life, Jones now runs a high-profile security firm. How could MacFarlane not have made this a plot point? Such a missed opportunity to not have a talking, walking teddy bear and Mark Wahlberg working security for Amanda Bynes or Lindsay Lohan! Alas. Recommended.

Canada in a Thong

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls: Essays Etc. by David Sedaris (2013): Funny, incisive and occasionally poignant set of globe-trotting essays and short-short pieces from New Yorker and NPR (and Craig Ferguson) regular David Sedaris. Sedaris got his big break relatively late in life when he started reading his anecdotal essays on National Public Radio.

Sedaris is witty and occasionally highbrow, from middle-class Greek-American roots, and with a healthy level of self-criticism. Perhaps we learn a bit too much about his gum disease. Really, that's my main caveat.

Otherwise, the observations on politics and society are slipped effortlessly in with the observations about China (Sedaris hates going there because it's incredibly dirty), Australia ("Canada in a thong"), his father (a bit of a dick but still going strong at 89), roadside litter (what do the people who roll up a candy bar wrapper and then stuff it into an empty pop bottle which they then throw pout their car window think they're accomplishing?), drug and alcohol abuse, the difference between diaries and journals, and a wide assortment of other things. Recommended.

The Black Druid and Other Stories by Frank Belknap Long,

The Black Druid and Other Stories by Frank Belknap Long (1924-1944; collected 1975), containing the following stories: "Death-Waters", "The Ocean-Leech", "The Space-Eaters", "The Black Druid", "The Flame Midget", "Dark Vision", "The Elemental", "Fisherman's Luck", "Step Into My Garden", "It Will Come To You", and "The Peeper" : 

Technically, this is the second half of an Arkham House collection of stories from the first 20 years of Frank Belknap Long's lengthy writing career (it stretched until his death in the 1980's).

Long was a long-time correspondent with horror master H.P. Lovecraft, and that influence shows most noticeably in stories from the 1920's until Lovecraft's death in 1937. By the time Long was contributing to the legendary, short-lived Unknown magazine in the early 1940's, his writing style had experienced a marked jump in quality -- stories collected herein from the Unknown period include "The Elemental" and "It Will Come to You", and they're definitely in the Unknown mode of horror or fantasy presented in a contemporary and often serio-comic setting.

However, despite that improvement (though Long struggles throughout his career with smooth transitioning -- I'll often find myself wondering if an entire sentence, or even paragraph, has been lost in the typesetting process), it's Long's Lovecraft-period material that will probably make him immortal. Herein appears "The Space-Eaters", one of those stories by a Lovecraft comrade in which a thinly veiled version of Lovecraft meets a dire end.

Lovecraft would occasionally return the favour, though not to Long (and it seems to me that the elderly writer who narrates T.E.D. Klein's terrific early 1980's Cthulhu Mythos story, "Black Man with a Horn", is himself a thinly veiled homage to Long).

Many of the stories Long wrote during Lovecraft's lifetime are heavily, almost overwhelmingly, expositional in nature. They read as if two people had been having a spirited dialogue about some arcane thought-experiment. This sort of exposition isn't generally recommended to writers beginning or otherwise, but in Long's best early work it comes across as a bizarre, darkly fantastic sub-genre of the novel (or story) of ideas. It's just that the ideas only apply to the fictional universe of the story. I hope.

"The Space-Eaters" contains pages and pages of the stuff, in what almost seems like a sub-sub-genre in which Long has collided the story of ideas with the deus ex machina. Just talking about some arcane idea causes it to happen. And when that arcane idea involves extra-dimensional entities scooping out pieces of brain from living humans and then playing with the pieces, and even accidentally dropping one piece on the narrator...well, one is really in a weird, weird narrative world. And what I just described is just the first couple of pages. Recommended.

Best New Horror Volume 1 (1989)

Best New Horror Volume 1 (1989) (Collected 1990): edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories: "Pin" by Robert R. McCammon; "The House on Cemetery Street" by Cherry Wilder; "The Horn" by Stephen Gallagher; "Breaking Up" by Alex Quiroba; "It Helps If You Sing" by Ramsey Campbell; "Closed Circuit" by Laurence Staig; "Carnal House" by Steve Rasnic Tem; "Twitch Technicolor" by Kim Newman; "Lizaveta" by Gregory Frost; "Snow Cancellations" by Donald R. Burleson; "Archway" by Nicholas Royle; "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" by Thomas Ligotti; "...To Feel Another's Woe" by Chet Williamson; "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux" by Robert Westall; "No Sharks in the Med" by Brian Lumley; "Mort au Monde" by D. F. Lewis; "Blanca" by Thomas Tessier; "The Eye of the Ayatollah" by Ian Watson; "At First Just Ghostly" by Karl Edward Wagner; and "Bad News" by Richard Laymon :

The first of the still-running Best New Horror anthologies is mostly excellent and manages to look at a broad slice of horror sub-genres. Cherry Wilder's Holocaust-tinged "The House on Cemetery Street" is literally and figuratively haunting, as is Thomas Tessier's Central American nightmare "Blanca." "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux" by Robert Westall does a terrific job of homaging the style and content of M.R. James in a more modern context, while the Thomas Ligotti piece included here is an emblematic bit of WTF? embodying Ligotti's unnerving fictional universe.

Ian Watson's piece is a black-comic horror-satire dealing with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Ramsey Campbell's story also satirizes religious fundamentalism, in this case against the backdrop of a world-wide zombie apocalypse, while Kim Newman's tale visits death and destruction on people who colourize movies (sort of). Only the Karl Edward Wagner tale is a bummer from a formerly great talent on his tragic way down, an unscary, unfunny homage to TV's The Avengers that features yet another alcoholic, self-loathing, sexually charismatic Wagner protagonist. Recommended.

Action Songs for Orphaned Children

Pitch Perfect: adapted by Kay Cannon from the novel by Mickey Rapkin; directed by Jason Moore; starring Anna Kendrick (Beca), Skylar Astin (Jesse), Ben Platt (Benji), Brittany Snow (Chloe), Anna Camp (Aubrey) and Rebel Wilson (Fat Amy) (2012): Surprisingly witty sleeper about college a cappela groups that's already become a cult hit

There's a certain amount of slightly subversive humour -- unlike Glee, the movie takes many of its comedy cues from Animal House -- in this, along with an awful lot of people in their late 20's and early 30's playing students ten years younger. Rebel Wilson steals most of her scenes as Fat Amy. Recommended.

　

The Kid: written and directed by Charles Chaplin; starring Charles Chaplin (The Tramp), Jackie Coogan (The Child), and Edna Purviance (The Woman) (1921): Chaplin's first self-written, self-directed feature made him the world's biggest box-office star. And it holds up today, with winning performances by Chaplin and then-6-year-old Jackie Coogan, who would go one from this to be one of the biggest child stars of the 1920's.

There's even a very odd dream sequence towards the end of the film, along with a lightning-quick wrap-up that pretty much encapsulates how quickly filmmakers ended their movies in the Good Old Days. And even if you don't like it, it's only an hour long! Highly recommended.

　

The Expendables 2: written by Richard Wenk, Ken Kaufman, David Agosto, Dave Callaham, and Sylvester Stallone; directed by Simon West; starring Sylvester Stallone (Barney Ross), Jason Statham (Lee Christmas), Dolph Lundgren (Gunnar Jensen), Jean-Claude Van Damme (Vilain), Terry Crews (Hale Caesar), Randy Couture (Toll Road), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Trench), Bruce Willis (Church), Jet Li (Yin Yang), Nan Yu (Maggie), Liam Hemsworth (Billy the Kid), and Chuck Norris (Booker) (2012): The classic 1980's action vibe starts to get drowned out about midway through this second Expendables movie by a seemingly endless series of unfunny metafictional guest appearances and comments.

It's not that one expects the movie to play things straight. But if you're going to drop jokes about the action movies the various actors have previously appeared in, it would be nice if they were funnier jokes. A Chuck Norris appearance isn't inherently funny. Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis crowded together in a SmartCar is funny, but the joke vanishes in the obligatory, overly long climax, which involves a lot of shooting and a lesson on why one doesn't bring a knife to a chain fight. Lightly recommended for action-movie fans; everyone else should steer clear.

Horrors Real and Imagined

The Shapes of Midnight by Joseph Payne Brennan, introduced by Stephen King, containing the following stories: "Diary of a Werewolf" (1960); "Disappearance" (1959); "The Corpse of Charlie Rull" (1959); "Canavan's Back Yard" (1958); "The Pavillion" (1959); "House of Memory" (1967); "The Willow Platform" (1973); "Who Was He?" (1969); "The Horror at Chilton Castle" (1963); "The Impulse to Kill" (1959); "The House on Hazel Street" (1961); and "Slime" (1953) (Collected 1980):

Veteran dark-fantasy and suspense writer Joseph Payne Brennan, whose name sounds English but who was actually rural New English, penned about a hundred short stories over his career. Maybe more. Stephen King liked him a lot, which explains the generous King introduction to this, one of Brennan's few mass-market collections.

This constitutes a 'Best of' collection, bringing together most of Brennan's finest short stories and novellas. His style is mostly unornamented but flexible -- the best story here, "Canavan's Back Yard," echoes M.R. James, while other stories function quite thoroughly in the rural horror vein of someone like Manly Wade Wellman, only with a New England setting and reserve that King himself seems to have occasionally tried to emulate.

There are also a couple of fairly gentle bits of whimsy in the tradition of Ray Bradbury, "The House on Hazel Street" and "House of Memory," and one bit of rural Lovecraftiana, "The Willow Platform," which by the end seems like a much sharper and better written version of an August Derleth pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft.

The three best stories are often anthologized, with the aforementioned "Canavan's Back Yard" being a true and deservedly praised gem of gradually accumulating horror. "Slime" is a terrific bit of science-fictional horror, giving us one of the more disturbing visitors from the Briny Deep in horror history.

"The Horror at Chilton Castle" is also a delight, a bit of an homage to the English Gothic tale. Sharp and enjoyable, these stories suggest that Brennan deserves a wider readership now -- those who admire Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch would probably be most gratified by this collection. Highly recommended.


Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie (The Gonzo Papers Volume 4) by Hunter S. Thompson (1994): Scattershot but enjoyable chronicle of the 1992 U.S. Presidential election from Gonzo journalist Thompson, who by this time was more eminence grise than enfant terrible when it came to political reporting.

There's the usual mix of reality, speculation, and confabulation one expects from Thompson, though the book is surprisingly thin -- illustrations and copies of notes and memos pad out the length, and it ain't that long to begin with.

Some sections bring that old Fear and Loathing magic, though, including a bizarre Arkansas bar experience with Bill Clinton campaign manager James Carville and an even more bizarre lunch with Bill Clinton at the height of the campaign. And a description of George H.W. Bush as being some Lovecraftian leftover afterbirth from Reagan's 1980 win is terrific, and apt.

Thompson is, if anything, angrier and more cynical than ever about the American political process. He backs Clinton because he views George Bush as a dissembling monster, but he doesn't much like Clinton either, whom he views as a man without a sense of humour. More relevant to our present-day situation, Thompson now views all presidential candidates as essentially hollow men in the pursuit of power.

At least Nixon, as Thompson notes in the epilogue penned after his nemesis's death, was truly evil. Bush and Clinton (and third-party candiate Ross Perot) are vacuous power-seekers who will do anything to get and retain power but have no real underlying structure to what they want to do with power. Nixon, of course, wanted power so he could destroy all his enemies, real and imagined. Recommended.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Man of Steel: written by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan; based on characters created by Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and others; directed by Zack Snyder; starring Henry Cavill (Clark Kent/Superman), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Michael Shannon (General Zod), Russell Crowe (Jor-El), Diane Lane (Martha Kent), Kevin Costner (Jonathan Kent), Ayelet Zurer (Lara), Christopher Meloni (Colonel Hardy), Antje Traue (Faora), and Laurence Fishburne (Perry White) (2013):

The sequel to Man of Steel is more interesting to think about than Man of Steel. The North American opening weekend and the international take will guarantee that sequel; the massive North American second-weekend box-office drop and the often-terrible reviews may mean some sort of shake-up in the trio (Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer, and Zack Snyder) primarily responsible for Man of Steel. Let the betting begin. I'd put money on Nolan's brother Jonathan being brought on in some writing capacity while Goyer and Snyder may be pushed into executive producer credits.

Man of Steel manages to be both heavy-handed, especially in its Superman-as-Christ imagery, and remarkably slapdash in its execution. The plot and mythology are complicated in that off-putting Green Lantern way, with ideas from 75 years of Superman stories shovelled into what should be a relatively simple origin story, along with some truly wonky additions by the film-makers.

One of these additions is worth mentioning because it's a great example of how bad writers create problems for themselves and then try to solve them with more bad writing. Here, for the first time in Superman's history, he's depowered by exposure to Krypton's atmosphere. As the movie had earlier established, quasi-canonically*, that his powers derive from Earth's lower-than-Krypton gravity and its yellow sun, this seems like gilding the lily.

But Snyder and company have put Lois Lane on the Kryptonian ship, a decision that apparently made it difficult for them to figure out how NOT to have Lois crushed by artificial Kryptonian gravity. But adding 'atmosphere' to Superman's list of weaknesses and putting a breathing mask on her -- that's easy. If you're stupid that day, anyway. Would Superman have gotten his powers back if he'd held his breath?

They've also given us a Pa Kent who's apparently a sociopath, another new twist, and such a great idea. Kevin Costner is mostly wasted as Pa Kent, and when he's not wasted, he's morally odious. Diane Lane has one good scene and then plays a spokesmodel for Sears. International House of Pancakes also plays a supporting role, as does Budweiser and, in a nod to Superman's Canadian origins, Alexander Keith's Pale Ale.

Michael Shannon and Russell Crowe might have been better switching roles -- Crowe, as Superman's father Jor-El, can act big even in this vacuum, while Shannon seems too reserved and weirdly shrill for a world-threatening villain. He's not going to make anyone forget Terence Stamp as Zod in Superman 2, anyway. Crowe, meanwhile, occasionally seems to be playing Jor-El as he's been written: as Obi-Wan Kenobi, young and old. Mostly he's dead and giving advice, but he even gets a Kenobi-esque swimming sequence that quotes directly from Revenge of the Sith. What is up with that?

As a director, Snyder has exactly one stylistic touch that seems to be his -- a love of visual effects in which people and objects are floated into the air and then smashed into the ground. He did it in Watchmen and he does it here in the Metropolis-smashing finale. I can only see this as symbolic of what he does to an audience.

The rest of the time, we get a lot of Superman-as-Christ poses, along with visual quotes from Avatar, Alien, The Matrix trilogy, and even Apocalypse Now. The destruction of Smallville and Metropolis during the interminably action-packed final hour make me think Snyder would probably make a good Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla director. But he really shouldn't be allowed near movies with people in them. Nor should (credited) lead writer Goyer, though on a project this big, there may have been many, many script doctors. Recommended if you're a masochist.

* Quasi-canonically in the sense that Siegel and Shuster originally posited that all Kryptonians had superpowers wherever they were, including Krypton, because they were 'more evolved' than humans.