The Night Strangler (1973)

REVIEW

The Night Stalker (1972)

REVIEW

Button, Button: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson (2009)

Button, Button: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson (2009) containing the following stories:

• Button, Button (1970)
• Girl of My Dreams (1963)
• Dying Room Only (1953)
• A Flourish of Strumpets (1956)
• No Such Thing as a Vampire (1959)
• Pattern for Survival (1955)
• Mute (1962)
• The Creeping Terror (1961)
• Shock Wave (1963)
• Clothes Make the Man (1951)
• The Jazz Machine (1962)
• 'Tis the Season to Be Jelly (1963)   

So-so collection of stories by TV, movie, and horror-fiction great Richard Matheson. This volume was quickly re-titled The Box and reissued within the year as a tie-in to the enjoyably weird and sort of dreadful movie The Box, very tenuously based on Matheson's "Button, Button." A story, by the way, about ten pages long. 

Of the other stories, the sexy tee-hee stuff of "A Flourish of Strumpets" really doesn't date well; neither the sincere racial angst of the long poem (!) "The Jazz Machine." They would best have been saved for completists only.

The rest of the stories are solid in their own ways, from the satiric apocalypses of "The Creeping Terror," "'Tis the Season to Be Jelly," and "Pattern for Survival" to the more straightforward mystery-thriller "Dying Room Only." "Mute" is really the stand-out here, a story of telepathy and normal human empathy that shows Matheson in what seems like eerily similar form to Theodore Sturgeon. Overall, lightly recommended.

Shakespeare in Love, The Devil's Bride, and The Woman in Gold

The Devil's Bride (a.k.a. The Devil Rides Out): adapted by Richard Matheson from the Dennis Wheatley novel The Devil Rides Out; directed by Terence Fisher; starring Christopher Lee (Duc de Richleau), Charles Gray (Mocata), Nike Arrighi (Tanith), Leon Greene (Rex), and Patrick Mower (Simon) (1968): Fun, tightly plotted period piece (it's set in England in the 1920's) pits Christopher Lee in a rare heroic turn against the forces of Satan himself as conjured up by Aleister Crowley-esque black magician Mocata.

The great Richard Matheson does solid work turning a novel by the often clunky Dennis Wheatley into a crisply executed occult thriller that clocks in at barely 100 minutes. Lee commands the screen as a reluctant, learning-on-the-fly white magician who must battle the powerful Mocata (a terrifically oily, ingratiating Charles Gray) for the souls of two people who have been pulled into Satanic worship. 

The rites and spells sometimes sound so odd that you'd swear they were lifted from H.P. Lovecraft or William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder series and not from actual occult sources. This Hammer film has a fairly low budget, as Hammer films always did, but the cinematography, direction, and set design mostly make up for it. There are a couple of goofy moments involving visual effects, but a couple of things also work quite well.

The film is at its creepiest when it keeps its demons off-stage, but that's true of virtually all horror movies. Wait for the moment in which a crucifix operates pretty much like the Holy Hand-grenade of Antioch. Reportedly this was Christopher Lee's favourite of his many Hammer Horror Films, partially because he himself suggested they make it and partially, I assume, because he got to be a commanding good guy for once. Recommended.

Woman in Gold: adapted by Alexi Kaye Campbell from the life stories of E. Randal Schoenberg and Maria Altmann; directed by Simon Curtis; starring Helen Mirren (Maria Altmann), Ryan Reynolds (Randy Schoenberg), Tatiana Maslany (Young Maria), and Max Irons (Fritz Altmann) (2015): Fascinating true-life story of the 1990's quest of an Austrian-American Jewish woman who strives to get her family paintings back from the Austrian government more than 50 years after they were stolen after the Nazi occupation of Austria. The kicker is that these aren't just any paintings -- five of them are by Gustav Klimt, and one of those is Portrait of Adele, aka Woman in Gold, Klimt's most famous painting and one valued in the 1990's at over $100 million.

Apparently I found the narrative and the legal manueverings more interesting than 45% of all reviewers. So it goes. Helen Mirren is wonderful as usual, as are the actors playing her character and others in flashback. Ryan Reynolds is surprisingly sturdy as the young Jewish-American lawyer who reluctantly takes on Mirren's case. Perfunctory scenes between Reynolds and Katie Holmes as his initially doubting wife could have been cut from the film. 

As judges, Elizabeth McGovern and Jonathan Pryce steal their only scenes. And I think the film does a laudable job of showing some of the moral horror of the Holocaust, and of anti-Semitism, still hanging on in the modern world: Austria's attitude towards attempts to get stolen art back show a government and a group of people who still regard certain types of people as objects to be eliminated. But there are also "good" Austrians, as the film shows, both past and present. Recommended.

Shakespeare in Love: written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard with additional dialogue by William Shakespeare; directed by John Madden; starring Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare), Gwyneth Paltrow (Viola de Lesseps), Colin Firth (Wessex), Judi Dench (Queen Elizabeth), Ben Affleck (Alleyn), Rupert Everett (Christopher Marlowe), Geoffrey Rush (Henslowe), and Tom Wilkinson (Fennyman) (1998): 

Hollywood insiders generally consider Shakespeare in Love to be a masterpiece -- specifically, producer/studio head Harvey Weinstein's masterpiece of lobbying for awards. It took down the heavily favoured Saving Private Ryan for the Oscar for Best Picture of 1998, and garnered six other Oscars besides, including Best Actress for Gwyneth Paltrow and Best Supporting Actress for Judi Dench.

It's a very tight movie, wittily written and ably performed by pretty much everyone. The greatest weakness on the acting side isn't Ben Affleck but Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare -- he makes for a lovable romantic lead, sort of like a puppy dog, but there really isn't a moment where one believes that he has much of an intellect or any artistic ability. Dench's Oscar win now looks like the Academy voting for a showy piece of work in heavy make-up and costume: as Queen Elizabeth, Dench is a prickly, sarcastic lawn ornament.

The movie's bathed for the most part in golden light for the romantic scenes; the rest of the time, it's realistically lighted for the dirty streets and alleys of Elizabethan London. The wit of the screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard can get a bit twee, and there's a self-congratulatory air in the movie's view of the Greatness of Theatre that can get a bit wearing at times. 

Nonetheless, it's funny and at times quite moving, never moreso than in its final few minutes. I don't know that its Oscar win was that much of an upset -- it's certainly better written than Saving Private Ryan, and unlike that film, Shakespeare in Love doesn't have major third-act plot problems. Recommended.

The Plague Master

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954): Matheson's first novel begat Night of the Living Dead which begat pretty much every zombie apocalypse of the last 50 years on TV, in movies, and in print. While I Am Legend has been adapted for the screen three times, no one has ever captured its portrayal of abject loneliness. Humanity may have been devastated by a plague of vampirism, but protagonist Robert Neville's tortured thoughts and actions make the novel special as a work of literature and not just as a massive cultural influence.

The novel may be set in the late 1970's, but Neville is very much a 1950's Everyman figure. He dwells in a suburb of Los Angeles with a wife and a daughter. He carpools to work with a neighbour. He drinks a lot of cocktails. But a vaguely defined war in which Neville himself served overseas may have unleashed the disease that caused all those stories of vampirism in Eastern Europe during the 18th century. In the now of the novel, which we join in media res, Neville is alone but under siege by multitudes of vampires every night. He's turned his house into a fortress. And every day, he drives around pulling vampires out of their hiding places and staking them to death.

For a short novel (maybe 70,000 words soaking wet), I Am Legend is packed with heady goodness. There's the characterization of Neville, who reveals hidden depths as we spend more time with him. There's Neville's scientific approach to understanding just how these vampires work, and what works against them, and why. There's the back-story of the fall of society, with mass graves and an incompetent government and growing paranoia. 

And there are the vampires themselves, split into two groups: living vampires who've been infected and changed, and dead vampires who continue to be animated by the contagion. Both die when you stake them, though the second group occasionally disintegrates. Neville's quest to understand what's going on in a scientific sense helps him to hold off the encroaching loneliness. He's Robinson Crusoe with a microscope and no Man Friday. He doesn't even have a parrot to talk to. But he does have his books and his classical music.

The list of later works with I Am Legend's DNA in them could probably fill a book. From Matheson's succinct glimpses of plague-fueled societal breakdown come World War Z and The Stand and so many others; from the monsters whose origins seem to be scientifically explicable come legions of infected zombies and vampires whose blood teems with bacteria or viral loads instead of magic. It's the loneliness of Neville that hasn't been replicated that often in subsequent works of horror. 

Thankfully, there's also grim humour throughout the novel, much of it supplied by Neville's dead but lively vampire neighbour Cortman (!), who yells endlessly at Neville by night but whose diurnal hiding place Neville searches fruitlessly for by day. Good old Cortman. He never shuts up. Highly recommended.

Shaper of Worlds

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

Throttle by Joe Hill and Stephen King
Recalled by F. Paul Wilson
I Am Legend, Too by Mick Garris
Two Shots from Fly's Photo Gallery by John Shirley
The Diary of Louise Carey by Thomas F. Monteleone
She Screech Like Me by Michael A. Arnzen
Everything of Beauty Taken from You in This Life Remains Forever by Gary A. Braunbeck
The Case of Peggy Ann Lister by John Maclay
Zachry Revisited by William F. Nolan
Comeback by Ed Gorman
An Island Unto Himself by Barry Hoffman
Venturi by Richard Christian Matheson
Quarry by Joe R. Lansdale
Return to Hell House by Nancy A. Collins
Cloud Rider by Whitley Strieber 

Award-winning, enjoyable anthology celebrating the late, great Richard Matheson, whose horror and suspense work in print, in movies, and on TV helped define horror and suspense for two generations of readers and viewers.  Duel; The Shrinking Man; Hell House; I Am Legend; What Dreams May Come; Stir of Echoes; Somewhere in Time; episodes of The Twilight Zone, including the William Shatner-on-a-plane "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" remade with John Lithgow in The Twilight Zone movie; adaptations of Poe for Roger Corman's film studio: these are just some of Matheson's contributions to pop culture. 

The stories include homages, sequels, revisionist takes, and riffs on Mathesonian ideas. "Cloud Rider" by Whitley Strieber is the wildest riff in the anthology, inspired as it is by Matheson's entire Collected Stories. The other stories are a bit more specific.

Standouts include Nancy Collins' novella-length prequel to Hell House, that inspired haunted-house story of the 1960's. Collins shows us the events that preceded those in Matheson's novel, to good effect. Mick Garris also offers a prequel in "I Am Legend, Too," and it also offers a revisionist take on the original Matheson novel's vampire-fighting protagonist from the POV of his vampiric next-door neighbour. "She Screech Like Me" by Michael A. Arnzen effectively extends Matheson's stunning debut story, "Born of Man and Woman," while "The Diary of Louise Carey" by Thomas F. Monteleone retells The Shrinking Man from the viewpoint of his increasingly beleaguered, non-shrinking wife.

The venerable William F. Nolan offers a short, brutal sequel to another Matheson horror story, while Joe Lansdale presents a sequel/sidequel to Matheson's "Prey" -- a.k.a. the Matheson story adapted for the TV movie Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black does battle with a tiny, violent, highly animated African fetish doll in her own apartment. And Stephen King and son Joe Hill (King) collaborate on a story for the first time, a riff on "Duel" that involves a motorcycle gang and a transport truck instead of the original's station-wagon-driving salesman and a monster of a truck.

Overall, this is a fittingly strong anthology to honour such a major figure in the modern history of fantasy. As Ramsey Campbell notes in his introduction, Matheson helped move horror out of Gothic castles and into suburban bedrooms and America's endless blacktop highways. And because Matheson worked in television and movies so much after 1960, his works reached much larger audiences than those generally afforded writers of prose. Recommended.

The Quiet Ones (2012)

The Quiet Ones: written by John Pogue, Oren Moverman, and Craig Rosenberg, based on the screenplay by Tom de Ville; directed by John Pogue; starring Jared Harris (Professor Coupland), Sam Claflin (Brian), Erin Richards (Krissi), Rory Fleck-Byrne (Harry), and Olivia Cooke (Jane) (2012): The 'true events' this movie claims to be based upon took place in Toronto, Ontario and not in and around England's Oxford University, where the movie is set. The events also bear virtually no relation to the movie other than the fact that human beings and seances figure in both. And oxygen, I guess. The planet Earth. The protagonists were directly beneath the Sun at some point.

The Quiet Ones even shows still photographs at the end which one assumes the viewer is supposed to believe are photos of the actual participants. They're not. I actually like this last bit -- it seems like a critique of all those ridiculously fictionalized 'true ghost story' movies. It's the smartest thing about the movie. Or the fakest. 

I can see why The Quiet Ones sat on the shelf for a couple of years before being released by the reconstituted Hammer Films. It's a movie woefully short on the sort of concise and capable characterization needed for the audience to give a crap about what's happening to whom. Alternately, characterization can be replaced by a complicated and interesting story behind a haunting, or by the deployment of some form of fascinating exposition, or by terror itself -- thrills, chills, and spills. The Quiet Ones is thin on all these fronts. It feels like a plot outline rather than an actual script was filmed.

So anyway. The real Toronto experiment involved an attempt to prove that ghosts were really psychic phenomena created by living people, primarily by having a group of people invent a fake ghost and then try to will it into existence. The mostly terrible recent movie The Apparition also spun out from this initial premise. 

The Quiet Ones inverts that premise: an obsessed psychic researcher/Oxford professor (Jared Harris, struggling mightily with his underwritten, unsympathetic, one-note character) and his trio of (grad?) students try to prove that the ghost haunting a poltergeist-plagued orphan is the creation of her psychic talents and not an actual ghost.

If you've seen or read Richard Matheson's terrific novel-into-film Hell House, this will all sound vaguely familiar. If you haven't, then read and watch Hell House (well, the movie's re-titled Legend of Hell House) instead of The Quiet Ones.  Or read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, with its formerly poltergeist-plagued protagonist and its massively haunted house and its team of ghost researchers. Or watch the early 1960's adaptation of Jackson's novel, The Haunting. The Quiet Ones simply isn't very good or very smart. Not recommended.

Truck Monster

Duel: adapted by Richard Matheson from his novella; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Dennis Weaver (David Mann) (1971): The late, great Richard Matheson adapted his own novella for this television movie, one of the first (and best) things ever directed by Steven Spielberg. Hitched to a great script, the young Spielberg pretty much shoots out the lights in this gripping, terse tale of Man vs. Truck(driver). David Mann vs. Truck(driver), actually.

Dennis 'McCloud' Weaver plays David Mann, a frustrated California travelling salesman driving through California's scrub brush and deserts to make an appointment. He's having problems at home, centered around his wife's perception of him as something of a nebbish. Then he innocently passes a slow-moving truck. All hell follows.

You can view this a great thriller with a sub-text that deals with a modern man's battle with his own feelings of inadequacy and emasculation. You can view this as a thriller of paranoia and terror, as the early stages of Mann's battle with the truck-driver (never fully glimpsed at any point during the movie) repeatedly put Mann in situations in which no one believes that he's in a duel to the death with a crazy person.

Weaver is flat-out terrific, sympathetic and squirmy. Screenwriters aspiring or otherwise should look at this film as a model of how to effectively use voiceover narration in a movie. We're privy to Mann's internal dialogue at points, and it's beautifully done. The scenery is suitably deserted. The truck, as much a character as Weaver, is about as sinister a vehicle as one could want, grimy and menacing and way, way too fast for its weight class.

Duel taps into very specific fears related to driving, and driving around large trucks. But it's also rich and wide-ranging in its use of fear and suspense. There are moments that have the quality of a nightmare, and suspense scenes that Spielberg would never surpass in all his later years of film-making.

In a way, this is a companion piece to two of Matheson's great 1950's novels that were adapted into movies, The Shrinking Man and I am Legend. Both dealt with self-doubting masculinity left virtually alone to confront some mounting horror. Taken together, they form a triptych, though I am Legend has never received a satisfactory film adaptation in the way the other two have. Highly recommended.

Hello, Walls!

The Legend of Hell House: adapted by Richard Matheson from his own novel; starring Roddy McDowall (Ben Fischer), Pamela Franklin (Florence Tanner), Clive Revill (Dr. Barrett), Gayle Hunnicutt (Ann Barrett) and Michael Gough (Belasco) (1973): The late, great Richard Matheson adapts his own haunted-house novel here in effective fashion, especially given what couldn't be shown in a movie of the time. The whole thing even manages to make an impossible-not-to-laugh cat-attack scene work without the benefit of CGI.

Where Matheson's I Am Legend gave vampires a scientific rationale for existing, The Legend of Hell House offers a quasi-scientific exploration of an extraordinarily dangerous haunted house. There's certainly a tip of the cap to Shirley Jackson's monumental haunted-house novel The Haunting of Hill House starting with the title and the four-person psychic investigation team.

But whereas Jackson's novel offered no real antagonist other than the house itself, Matheson's work gives us a malign human -- Emeric Belasco, builder of the house and a Satanic presence who would have made Aleister Crowley look like the Church Lady.

Back in the 1920's, Belasco built the house and then sealed it away from the outside world with its two-dozen or so inhabitants inside. When the house was opened, everyone was dead and Belasco had vanished. One of the subtle drolleries of Hell House is that the most haunted house in the world is less than 50 years old: it was built to be haunted.

Teams investigating the house have been devastated by Something, to the extent that the only one of a dozen previous investigators to survive both physically and mentally is Roddy McDowall's Ben Fischer. Fischer was a teen-aged medium when he entered Hell House with the last group to investigate it before the events of the novel. Now, he's the middle-aged Voice of Doom with a new team which ultimately aims to use technology to dissipate Hell House's restless spirits. Good luck with that.

The performances here are all fine, and suspense builds to a satisfying conclusion. McDowall is especially fine as the withdrawn and wounded Fischer. The book fleshed out Fischer's personality by describing his thoughts and experiences. Here, McDowall has to build his wounded psychic without the benefit of voice-overs. I think he succeeds admirably, as does the movie itself. Highly recommended.

Shrink, Shrank, Shrunk

 

The Incredible Shrinking Man: adapted by Richard Matheson from his novel The Shrinking Man; directed by Jack Arnold; starring Grant Williams (Scott Carey), Randy Stuart (Louise Carey), April Kent (Clarice) and Paul Langton (Charlie Carey) (1957): The only thing bad about this movie is its title, the studio having decided to add an awfully unnecessary 'Incredible' to the original title of Richard Matheson's novel. Did a competing studio have a film called The Mundane Shrinking Man in production?

Matheson, whose career in print, television, and movies now spans 60 years, is always the best adaptor of his own work, as The Omega Man or the Will Smith I am Legend prove through Matheson's absence. Pretty much everything Spielberg put on the screen in Duel was already there in Matheson's novella, which Matheson adapted for Spielberg's career-starting television movie.

Here, Matheson gives us an improbable tale that works because the hero's concerns can be applied to any number of real-world situations without losing the specificity and unique weirdness of the hero's plight. Scott Carey gets doused with some combination of insecticide and radiation. He starts shrinking. And he doesn't stop. Questions of masculinity, identity, and existence itself come into play. A media circus gathers outside Carey's door. And then there's that damned cat...and later, a very hungry spider.

A voiceover added to the end of the movie to make things a bit clearer (or at least more clearly hopeful and redemptive) doesn't damage the film too much, though that concluding sequence really could have remained mostly silent. There may be deep thoughts here, but Matheson keeps things moving, keeps things light at points, and writes several terrific action sequences. The visual effects are very good for their time or really any time. And remember, kids -- check your water heater regularly. Highly recommended.

The Real Monster Homes of Maine

Hell House by Richard Matheson (1970): Matheson's great ghost story pays homage to Shirley Jackson's earlier, great haunted-house novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in many of its attributes. As in Jackson's novel, Hell House gives us a quartet of psychic investigators led by an academic and weighed down by personal issues who've been brought together to stay in an extremely haunted house for several days.

Matheson's novel focuses on the always fuzzy world of "psychic research" far more than Jackson's did. The psychosexual issues are much more overt. And unlike Hill House, where the haunting seemed to be a matter of a Bad Place rather than individual Bad Ghosts, Hell House appears to be the domain of the ghost of Emeric Belasco. Matheson loosely bases Belasco on Aleister Crowley, black magician and self-proclaimed "wickedest man in the world." Belaso is much wickeder: his remote Maine mansion was the site of mass murder, suicide, and worse. But when the authorities finally broke into the mansion in the 1920's, Belasco was nowhere to be found among the dead.

Hell House is set in 1970. Two previous attempts to probe the mysteries of Hell House, the last in 1940, ended in the deaths or institutionalization of all those involved but one. And that one, a then-16-year-old boy judged to be one of the greatest psychics ever, is along for this expedition. Why? Because a dying millionaire is paying him and the others $100,000 each to try to figure out from the evidence of Hell House whether the human soul survives death.

As with his great, rational vampire novel I am Legend, Matheson herein sails the edge between the supernatural and the scientific. The physics professor who leads the expedition believes that ghosts are a product of human minds interacting with a charged psychic environment left behind by traumatic events in a specific location. There is no life after death except as an amorphous energy field subject to the fears and hopes of the living. The academic's wife isn't so sure. And the two psychics know that there's something more than that going on. But what?

Matheson doesn't write 'long.' Hell House is fairly brief and to-the-point, and its structure is as much mystery novel as horror novel. But the horrors are quite potent, and the characters sympathetically drawn even as they wrestle with their fears and their failings. Highly recommended.

Sexual-Harassment Gargoyle

Burn, Witch, Burn (aka Night of the Eagle): adapted by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson from the novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber; directed by Sidney Hayers; starring Peter Wyngarde (Norman Taylor), Janet Blair (Tansy Taylor), and Maragret Johnson (Flora Carr) (1962): It's an all-star writing team-up as genre greats Richard Matheson (Duel, Hell House, a lot of Twilight Zone episodes) and Charles Beaumont (a lot of Twilight Zone episodes) adapt Science-fiction-and-fantasy Grandmaster Fritz Leiber's terrific 1940's fantasy novel Conjure Wife for the big screen.

The action is moved to England and compressed in time, doing some violence to the original, but the result is still an enjoyable, fast-paced bit of modern horror-fantasy set in the cut-throat world of academia. Yes, academia. Professor Norman Taylor seems to have led a charmed life both personally and professionally. And he has. But he's about to find out the cost. And witchcraft is involved. And possibly Sexual-Harassment Panda.

Two bits of goofiness mar the very beginning and the very end, seemingly added by a nervous studio. But they're minor. This story of modern witchcraft has some real thrills and horrors awaiting, along with one pissed-off eagle-shaped gargoyle. The film-makers do a nice job of suggesting as much as possible, a necessity given the budget and visual effects limitations of the time. The most chilling scene relies on no visual effects whatsoever -- just Tarot cards, a match, and an increasingly panicked Norman Taylor.

My main beef with the movie would be that the scariest line of the novel -- and the events that flow forwards from it -- have been replaced here by a more conventional ending in which our protagonists are quite a bit less intelligent than they are in the book. Oh, well. Still a superior tale of magic and its discontents. Recommended.

Duets

21 Jump Street: based on the television series created by Stephen J. Cannell and Patrick Hasburgh, written by Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill; directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; starring Jonah Hill (Schmidt), Channing Tatum (Jenko), Brie Larson (Mollie), Dave Franco (Eric), Rob Riggle (Mr. Walters) and Ice Cube (Captain Dickson) (2012): Hilarious comedy reboot of the not-so-good 1980's TV series that introduced Johnny Depp and Richard Grieco to the world. Cops pretend to be teenagers and bust crimes at a high school. What could go wrong?

Almost obsessively filthy-mouthed, the movie makes good use of Jonah Hill's weirdly earnest nebbish personality by setting it off against Channing Tatum's seemingly dumb but well-meaning jock. They weren't friends in high school, but they become so in police academy. And now they're assigned to take down the suppliers of a dangerous new super-drug at a local high school. Will they also purge the demons that have haunted them since senior year?

Ice Cube swears and fulminates as the captain. Dave Franco stirs up echoes of the early, burn-out charm of his older brother James. Actors from the TV series make surprise cameos. Hill again shows his gift for slapstick, but Tatum also demonstrates comic timing and physical prowess. Who knew he was funny? Oh, and a guy gets his dick shot off. Also, Korean Jesus. Recommended.

The Raven: written by Richard Matheson, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe; directed by Roger Corman; starring Vincent Price (Craven), Peter Lorre (Bedlo), Boris Karloff (Scarabus), Jack Nicholson (Rexford Bedlo), Hazel Court (Lenore) and Olive Sturgess (Estelle Craven) (1963): Screenwriter Richard Matheson is an American treasure for his short stories, novels, and screenplay work, pretty much all in the thriller, horror, and fantasy genres. You can look him up.

Here, he takes Edgar Allan Poe's poem and turns it into a horror-comedy about dueling wizards (Karloff and Price), a snivelling second banana (Lorre), and a shockingly young Jack NIcholson as a young romantic lead. The wizard's duel is witty and surprisingly good-looking given the technical and budgetary limitations the film faced. Roger Corman's direction is relatively sharp. The acting is pretty much all first-rate, with Karloff uncharcteristically loose and funny as the nefarious Scarabus.

Price is great as he usually was. Holy crap, though, The Raven really highlights his height -- Price, an uncharacteristic-for-Hollywood 6'4" towers over 5'11" Karloff and dwarfs the 5'5" Lorre. Everyone seems to be having a good time, and Matheson even sneaks in a reference to The Day the Earth Stood Still, a movie he had nothing to do with. The only creepy moments involve the really nice make-up design on a couple of corpses. And by 'nice', I mean 'grotesque.' Recommended.

Rocky the Robot

Real Steel: adapted by John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, and Jeremy Leven from the short story "Steel" by Richard Matheson; directed by Shawn Levy; starring Hugh Jackman (Charlie Kenton), Dakota Goyo (Max Kenton), Evangeline Lilly), and Kevin Durand (Ricky) (2011): Surprisingly pleasant, oddly low-key CGI-laden movie about, um, robot boxing.

This one falls into the category of 'unannounced alternate history movie,' as by 2014 robot boxing technology was already capable of making the robot star of our film, Atom, and dropping him into an environment in which there was already some sort of robot boxing circuit. This seems unlikely to happen in the next 2 years.

Set some time in the 2020's, Real Steel is also Bradburyesque in that the one altered technological detail doesn't seem to have had any effect on anything else and, indeed, seems to have propelled history backwards to some occasionally bucolic 1950's America. Of course, there's also urban robot boxing and, at one point, robot boxing in an abandoned zoo inhabited by kinder, gentler extras from the Mad Max movies.

Anyway, washed-up real boxer Hugh Jackman is also washed up as a robot boxer. Then a former girlfriend dies. Jackman's 11-year-old son shows up. The kid's aunt and uncle want him. But the uncle doesn't want him until after their Italian holiday. Kid reluctantly goes with Hugh, who accepts money to relinquish all parental rights to the kid. Kid gets enthralled by robot boxing. Kid accidentally discovers a second-generation robot boxer, whom he names Atom, buried in a robot boxing junkyard.

Man, a lot of this alternate Earth's economy seems to be built on robot boxing!

Jackman and the kid learn some life lessons. Much robot boxing ensues.

In the manner of a lot of contemporary movies, Real Steel is too loud, too frenetic, and feels the need to hammer home every character moment with all the subtlety of a robot punch to the groin. I'd expect nothing less from Shawn Levy, director of the equally frenetic Night in the Museum movies. Really, several robot punches to the groin. Still, there's something weirdly charming about Hugh Jackman playing this dumb (his character makes Wolverine look like a brain surgeon) and a movie with this many effects having absolutely nothing to do with saving the world, the universe, or even a continent.

The whole thing is very loosely based on the early 1950's short story "Steel" by Richard Matheson, whom you may remember from other such recent loosely based films as The Box and I Am Legend, along with earlier, more faithfully adapted films that include The Incredible Shrinking Man (itself loosely re-adapted as The Incredible Shrinking Woman), The Legend of Hell House, and Spielberg's brilliant, ultra-faithful Duel. Of course, most of the faithful adaptations had screenplays written by Matheson.

For the record, Real Steel uses the idea of robot boxing and a down-on-his-luck robot trainer, and nothing else. The story was earlier adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone. I'm starting to think Matheson's work may outsurvive almost everyone else's in one form or another. Lightly recommended.

Catching Up Is Hard To Do

Shock Rock (1992), edited by Jeff Gelb; containing

Stephen King - You Know They've Got a Hell Of A Band
F. Paul Wilson - Bob Dylan, Troy Jonson, and The Speed Queen
David J. Schow - Odeed
Nancy A. Collins - Vargr Rule
Ronald Kelly - Blood Suede Shoes
Don D'Ammassa - The Dead Beat Society
Graham Masterton - Voodoo Child
Paul Dale Anderson - Rites Of Spring
Michael E. Garrett - Dedicated To The One I Loathe
Brian J. Hodge - Requiem
R. Patrick Gates - Heavy Metal
Rex Miller - Bunky
Bill Mumy & Peter David - The Black '59
Richard Christian Matheson - Groupies
Michael Newton - Reunion
Mark Verheiden - Bootleg
Ray Garton - Weird Gig
John L. Byrne - Hide In Plain Sight
Thomas Tessier - Addicted To Love
John Shirley - Flaming Telepaths

　

Very uneven original anthology of rock-and-roll horror stories from the early 1990's. I've always liked King's contribution, an ultimately nihilistic story from the 'We stumbled across a weird town' sub-genre of horror. John Shirley's story cleverly inverts the stereotypes that too many of the other stories play straight with (specifically, 'Rock-and-roll is the Devil's music!'), as does Ray Garton's "Weird Gig." The Wilson, Tessier, Verheiden, Masterson, and Schow stories are also solid work. The graphic sex and violence in a couple of the stories manages to be unpleasant without really being horrifying (or terrifying, for that matter). Lightly recommended.
　

　

Shatner Rules by William Shatner and Chris Regan (2012): What seems like Shatner's umpteenth non-fiction book goes down as smoothly as a Romulan Ale Smoothie. More anecdotes, more self-promotion, more pointed comments about George Takei's Shatner obsession, and so on, and so forth. Recommended.

　

Hellboy: House of the Living Dead, written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Richard Corben (2011): Fun original graphic novel set during Hellboy's "lost months" while on a bender in Mexico during the 1950's, during which time he professionally wrestled and fought various supernatural menaces, generally while either drunk or severely hung over. Forced to kill a young wrestling, monster-fighting ally after vampires turned the young man into a bat-headed monstrosity, Hellboy went on a blackout-inducing bender, the end of which we see here.

Richard Corben's art combines the grotesque and the voluptuous in a variety of fun, pleasing ways, while Mignola's script strikes the right balance between humour and heartbreak. Hellboy has to face his guilt before he can get out of Mexico, but the whole voyage of self-discovery avoids the usual rote, Afterschool Special platitudes and lessons we often see in such a story. Recommended.

　

　

Fright Night, written and directed by Todd Holland, starring William Ragsdale (Charlie Brewster), Chris Sarandon (Jerry Dandridge), Amanda Bearse (Amy Peterson), Roddy McDowall (Peter Vincent) and Stephen Geoffreys (Evil Ed) (1985): About as good as I remembered it, which is to say spotty but with a great performance by Roddy McDowall as a horror-movie actor turned late-night horror-movie television host.

　

A vampire moves in next door to high-school student Charlie. With remarkably little set-up, Charlie is soon battling for his life and the lives of friends, family, and everyone else with a neck and a pulse against 1980's fashion-victim vampire Chris Sarandon. For a vampire, Sarandon eats an awful lot of fruit. The movie picks up once McDowall comes on the scene as a vain, failed actor who is nonetheless the only vampire hunter Charlie has access to.

　

80's-style cheese gets smeared across the lens by the soundtrack (mostly awful) and some awful 'sexy' scenes between Chris Sarandon and Charlie's girlfriend Amy. There's also full-frontal nudity and lots of swearing, two things that are probably missing from the 2011 remake, along with Roddy McDowall. Writer-director Todd Holland seems to have lifted all his vampire lore directly from Stephen King's Salem's Lot. Retro fun. Recommended.
　

　

Twilight Zone: The Movie, written by John Landis, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, Melissa Mathison, Jerome Bixby, and Robert Garland, based on the TV series created by Rod Serling; directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller; starring Vic Morrow, Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, Scatman Crothers, John Lithgow, Kathleen Quinlan, Kevin McCarthy, Nancy Cartwright, Donna Dixon, Abbe Lane, Dick Miller, and Bill Mumy (1983): Veteran TV actor Vic Morrow and two children died while filming the John Landis segment of this movie when a helicopter blade decapitated them thanks to a special-effects explosion that should never have been green-lighted but was because John Landis is a big fucking idiot. That the segment, a ham-fisted bit about prejudice, is awful only adds a last insult to the injury.

　

This Hollywood tribute to that mostly unHollywoodish writer-producer Rod Serling and his 1960's TV series is pretty uneven. Well, the Landis segment and the Spielberg segment stink on ice. The Joe Dante sequence and the George Miller sequence are good, owing a lot of that goodness to veteran TZ screenwriter Richard Matheson's screenplays.

　

Dante remakes the famous "It's a Good Life" episode of TZ with a lot less menace and realism but a lot more visual effects zing, while Miller directs a remake of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", a great TZ episode starring William Shatner as an airplane passenger who sees something walking on the wing of the plane...at 20,000 feet.

Lithgow's screaming, sweating performance makes Shatner's original turn look restrained by comparison -- the 1980's version now seems much more campy than the original, though it remains fun. Recommended if you skip the first two segments. The Albert Brooks/Dan Aykroyd frame story is pointless, probably because it, too, was written and directed by John Landis, who as I mentioned before is a big fucking idiot.
　

　

Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol, written by Josh Applebaum and Andre Nemec, based on the series created by Bruce Geller; directed by Brad Bird; starring Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Jeremy Renner (Brandt), Simon Pegg (Benji), Paula Patton (Jane), and Michael Nyqvist (Hendricks) (2012): Pretty much every Mission: Impossible movie involves the Impossible Mission Force being disgraced, framed, discarded, and/or hunted by its own employers while nonetheless tracking down the real miscreants.

　
And that's the plot of this movie.

　
The globe-trotting seems more James Bondian than ever, and animation director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant) makes a nice transition to live-action directing, especially in several snazzy, convoluted action sequences. The movie does invoke Hudson Hawk in its utopian vision of the life-saving power of airbags. And no, that's not how ballistic missiles work during the descent stage. Extra marks for blowing up a landmark I haven't seen blown up in a spy-thriller before. Recommended.

The Mighty Matheson

The Shores of Space by Richard Matheson, containing "Being," "Pattern For Survival," "Steel," "The Test," "Clothes Make The Man," "Blood Son," "Trespass," "When Day Is Dun," "The Curious Child," "The Funeral," "The Last Day," "Little Girl Lost," and "The Doll That Does Everything" (1957): Thanks to his own television and movie work, and adaptations of his stories for those media by him and others, and all the parodies and homages and outright steals of his ideas by the makers of movies and TV shows, Richard Matheson has become one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century when it comes to popular culture. And he's still alive. It's a remarkable career, but it all started with the printed page, and an astonishing and prolific run of stories and novels in the 1950's and early 1960's, a time period from which this collection hails.

　
I suppose Matheson's closest 'lookalike' is Robert Bloch, about ten years older but with a similar pedigree in several media. Bloch's most famous achievement was writing the novel from which Alfred Hitchcock adapted Psycho. Matheson's biggest moment is a bit harder to pin down. The panicky airline passenger played by William Shatner in the Twilight Zone series and John Lithgow in the 1983 TZ movie? That's Matheson's creation. Recent movies based in whole or in part on Matheson's stories and novels include I am Legend, Real Steel, and The Box.

　
His novella "Duel" supplied pretty much a shot-by-shot blueprint for his own screenplay for Steven Spielberg's TV-movie breakthrough of the same name; his story "Little Girl Lost", adapted for Rod Serling's Night Gallery, supplied Spielberg's Poltergeist with its girl who vanished in her own living room. His novel The Shrinking Man spawned two adaptations; the novel I am Legend spawned three official ones and at least one acknowledged unofficial one (Night of the Living Dead) making Matheson the grandfather of the entire zombie genre and of the scientifically plausible vampire sub-genre).

　
The stories here show Matheson in solid, genre-crossing form. Science-fictional horror occurs in "Being" and "Trespass"; nuclear apocalypse spawns both satire ("When Day is Dun", "Pattern for Survival") and elegy ("The Last Day"); at least four stories here would be adapted at least once for television and/or movies ("Steel", "Blood Son" (itself suggesting an unacknowledged source for George Romero's vampire film Martin), "The Funeral" and "Little Girl Lost."

Matheson established his plain prose style, shot through with startling images and turns of phrase, pretty early, but it was his ability to find new horrors, and new combinations of horrors, thrills and genre concepts, that made him so invaluable -- he helped firmly establish the American supernatural tale both in terms of pure science fiction and in terms of finding new ways to present old horrors such as vampires and werewolves and haunted houses. And he could be funny, as he is here in "When Day is Dun", "Pattern For Survival" and "The Funeral." A brilliant, influential writer caught at the prolific beginning of a half-century career. Highly recommended.

SFH

Science Fiction Terror Tales, edited by Groff Conklin, containing "Punishment Without Crime" by Ray Bradbury, "Arena" by Fredric Brown, "The Leech" by Robert Sheckley, "Through Channels" by Richard Matheson, "Lost Memory" by Peter Phillips, "Memorial" by Theodore Sturgeon, "Prott" by Margaret St. Clair, "Flies" by Isaac Asimov, "The Microscopic Giants" by Paul Ernst, "The Other Inauguration" by Anthony Boucher, "Nightmare Brother" by Alan E. Nourse, "Pipeline to Pluto" by Murray Leinster, "Impostor" by Philip K. Dick, "They" by Robert A. Heinlein and "Let Me Live in a House" by Chad Oliver (Collected 1955):

Conklin was one of the kings of mid-to-late-20th-century science-fiction anthologies, primarily of the reprint variety. As one of the first editors to get a chance to present science fiction to the growing market for paperbacks, Conklin introduced a lot of readers to both early and contemporary science-fiction greats.

Conklin claims that this is the first general anthology to present the mixed genre of science-fiction horror stories, and I can't see any reason to dispute him. Several of the stories would go on to become acknowledged classics, with "Arena" supplying a plot for a similar Star Trek: TOS episode and Dick's "Impostor" being turned into a lousy movie with Gary Sinise.

Paranoia, always a major trope of science fiction, and especially American science fiction, dominates the proceedings in disturbing tales like "They" and "Let Me Live in a House", while various alien invasions and infiltrations occur in several other stories. Boucher -- better known as the early editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -- contributes a 1953 tale of U.S. politics that wouldn't seem out-of-place if it were published now. All in all, a solid collection. Recommended.