The Chosen Child by Graham Masterson (1997): Solid and mostly riveting horror-thriller from the prolific and talented Masterson. And you'll learn tons of interesting things about the history of Poland, where the novel is set in the present day! It's like a twofer -- come for the horror, stay for the history of Warsaw.
In the late 1990's, something or someone periodically emerges from the sewers of Warsaw to kill and behead seemingly random victims. The murder as the novel begins threatens to derail the construction of an American hotel group's new Warsaw location, so Sarah Leonard, the Polish-American woman in charge of the hotel's construction, ends up inserting herself into the investigation, led by old-school detective Stefan Rej.
Soon, all hell is breaking out on a number of fronts as corporate and civic corruption, organized crime, and office politics threaten to derail the investigation. And the body count continues to mount both beneath the streets and above them.
The main characters here are surely drawn and sympathetic when they need to be, while the horrors caused by the killer -- dubbed The Executioner by the press -- are evocatively and brutally shown in several setpieces. The revelation of what The Executioner really is may strain one's suspension of disbelief -- it certainly did mine -- but overall Masterson manages a fairly fascinating mix of the police procedural and the supernatural thriller.
Rej is an especially well-drawn character, occasionally mourning the moral clarity of the bygone days of Communism while doggedly continuing his investigation regardless of opposition from above or danger from below. And the history of Warsaw, especially its opposition to the Nazis, really is gripping stuff. With a number of key scenes set in reeking, filth-clogged sewers, The Chosen Child generates a real sense of dread and bodily horror: it's about as cloachally horrible as a thriller can be. Recommended.
Unknown, written by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell, based on the novel Out of My Head by Didier Van Cauwelaert; directed by Jaume Collet-Serra; starring Liam Neeson (Dr. Martin Harris), Diane Kruger (Gina), January Jones (Elizabeth Harris), Aidan Quinn (Martin B), Bruno Ganz (Jurgen), and Frank Langella (Rodney Cole) (2011): Serviceable action-thriller with Liam Neeson as a man who wakes up in a hospital after an accident to discover that no one seems to know who he is -- including his wife. Coincidences and absurdities abound and proliferate, and the whole thing seems to have been Frankenstein-assembled from parts of Total Recall, Regarding Henry and Frantic. Still, mostly competent and enjoyable, with excellent supporting turns from a weathered, mournful Bruno Ganz as a former Stasi investigator turned P.I. and Frank Langella as one of Neeson's university colleagues. Lightly recommended.
The Lincoln Lawyer, written by John Romano, based on the novel of the same name by Michael Connelly; directed by Brad Furman; starring Matthew McConaughey (Mick Haller), Marisa Tomei (Maggie McPherson), Ryan Phillippe (Louis Roulet), William H. Macy (Frank Levin) and Frances Fisher (Mary Windsor) (2011): Solid legal procedural makes excellent use of McConaughhey's somewhat seedy charm, casting him as an ambulance-chasing defence lawyer who finds himself belatedly fighting for actual justice. Director Furman keeps everything moving nicely, and the whole thing feels like a throwback to the 1970's, when thrillers didn't involve massive explosions and giant robots. A talented cast certainly doesn't hurt, with Phillippe, Tomei, and Macy doing superlative supporting work. Recommended.
Limitless, written by Leslie Dixon, based on The Dark Fields by Alan Glyn; directed by Neil Burger; starring Bradley Cooper (Eddie Morra), Robert De Niro (Carl Van Loon), Abbie Cornish (Lindy), and Anna Friel (Melissa) (2011): Failed writer Eddie Morra gets an IQ-boosting pill from an old acquaintance and suddenly turns into a hyperactive super-genius. Director Burger does a solid job of conveying the fast, weird rhythms of Morra's altered state of consciousness, and there are a number of clever setpieces. The ending is far too pat, and a major plot thread never gets resolved. Still, an enjoyable time-waster. Lightly recommended.
The Captains, written and directed by William Shatner; starring William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula and Chris Pine (2011): The A&E interview series Shatner's Raw Nerve revealed something unexpected about the famously self-absorbed William Shatner: he's a very good interviewer. This documentary, co-financed by Canada's Movie Network, takes Shatner on a journey to meet and interview all the captains of Star Trek, up to and including Chris Pine, who played Captain Kirk, the role Shatner originated, in the 2009 movie Star Trek.
Really, the only complaint I've got is that the film, which runs just north of 90 minutes, is too short. And that's not a complaint I make often. What we do see of Shatner and his interaction with the other actors (along with Trek regulars and guest stars that include Christopher Plummer, whose illness while headlining Henry V at Stratford in the mid-1950's gave understudy Shatner his first big break as an actor) is quite fascinating at points. He and Patrick Stewart, Pine, Kate Mulgrew and Scott Bakula really do seem to get along.
And then there's Avery Brooks. They seem to get along too, but Brooks (Captain Sisko of Deep Space Nine), as Shatner jokes at an appearance in Las Vegas, is really out there. Really, really, really, really out there. Brooks doesn't act much any more, preferring to teach from his faculty spot at Rutgers. I'd love to see what a class with him looks like because he frankly comes across as somewhat demented, though in a fascinating way.
Shatner gets in a bit of soul-searching along the way, gazing wistfully at ducks and geese and swans on the water in Stratford, Ontario before kibbitzing with Plummer. And his camera people follow him as he zips around the convention floor, surprising people at every turn. Some of his questions are a bit off the beaten track for this type of documentary ('What happens after we die?' being the most bizarre, albeit occasionally illuminating in the answers and non-answers it elicits).
If you don't enjoy Star Trek in at least one of its many incarnations, I don't imagine this movie will change your opinion. If you do at least like Star Trek, this will probably be enjoyable and all too brief. Recommended.
Quarantine 2: Terminal, written and directed by John Pogue, based on Quarantine, written by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle, which was based on REC, written by Jaume Balaguero, Luiso Berdejo and Paco Plaza; starring Mercedes Masohn (Jenny), Josh Cooke (Henry), and Mattie Liptak (George) (2011): Straight-to-DVD sequel to solid scarer Quarantine, which was itself a remake of the excellent Spanish horror movie REC.
This sequel abandons the first-person, found-footage approach of both Quarantine and the Spanish original for a more conventional narrative approach, one that's familiar whether you've seen it in Alien (1979) or Stagecoach (1939): a group of disparate strangers are trapped together in an enclosed space by menacing forces, in this case fellow travellers infected by the genetically engineered super-rabies of the first film.
The super-rabies spreads fast and makes its victims tremendously anti-social, much like texting. Who will survive and what will be left of them? The answer shades way more to the high-body-count Alien end of the dynamic than the Stagecoach end, where almost everyone survives. Like Alien, this one also involves a cat as one of the threatened.
A mid-sized passenger jet flight out of L.A. has unwanted passengers of both the rat and human variety. Hilarity ensues, as the super-rabies of the first movie makes its appearance while the plane is in the air, ultimately forcing an emergency landing in Kansas City. There, the plane is...quarantined!!! At a terminal!!!
Hence the title!!!
Much monstrous mayhem ensues. This isn't a great movie, but it delivers some scares and shocks and a couple of clever action-horror setpieces. The monsters are of the fast-zombie variety seen in the first, better Quarantine, though they're a lot easier to kill this time around. That's unfortunate, as the Pythonesque Black Knight quality of the original monsters was one of the more effective and horrific things in that film. Oh, well. Not great, but certainly an adequate time-waster, and superior to a lot of higher-budget horror movies of the last ten years. Lightly recommended.
The Last Voice They Hear by Ramsey Campbell (1998): Geoff and Gail Davenport are the proud parents of three-year-old Paul and co-workers on a British news show called The Goods, which exposes corruption and abuse at schools, workplaces and other venues. They live in London, England, though Gail is originally from San Francisco and Geoff from Liverpool. Gail's parents are about to visit.
And Paul is about to get a phonecall from someone he hasn't talked to in twenty years -- his estranged, older half-brother Ben, the product of terrible emotional and physical abuse from Ben's step-father (Geoff's father), Ben and Geoff's mother, and their grandparents.
And that phonecall means the end to domestic bliss, as Campbell puts another happy family through Hell.
When they were children, Geoff tried to shield Ben from their parents' wrath whenever he could. But he was a kid, and he failed. A lot. And now Ben blames him as much or more for his woes than he does their late parents and late grandparents. But there's more. Over the last seven years, someone has been killing elderly couples in a particularly gruesome way, staging the bodies to make a comment about...something.
Now Ben tells Geoff that he's the killer, and that Geoff has to play an even worse version of a bad childhood 'game' Ben cooked up in order to divine Ben's new identity, stop the killings -- and protect young Paul, in whom Ben is inordinately interested. And so we're off.
Ben's ability to operate freely, at least for awhile, is bought by threats against Geoff's wife and child -- terrible things are promised should Geoff bring the police into the loop -- but also by Geoff's own empathy and sense of guilt for Ben, empathy and guilt Ben has been using to emotionally leverage Geoff since childhood.
The novel doesn't waste much space hiding Ben's new identity from the reader. The Last Voice They Hear is a mystery about how people become the way they are, not who they are. Ben's treatment as a child and as a teenager is indeed awful -- but the mystery of why he blames Geoff more than anyone else informs much of the narrative.
Campbell deftly uses multiple third-person limited POVs to jump between first two and then three threads of the story to maintain suspense until shrinking the narrative back down at the end to one tense, focused final chase. Ben isn't sympathetic, but one feels pity for him throughout.
More importantly, while the novel shows Ben to be an extremely bright and competent killer, he's never shown to be a Lecter-style Superman. He has flaws, and his competence is ultimately as much a part of his psychic scarring as are his more pitiable traits. Geoff, as the nominal hero, may not be as interesting, but he's also flawed and almost fatally compromised by his desire to protect his family -- his entire family. It's his most decent, humane qualities that just might get everyone killed. Just as Ben wants it. Highly recommended.
Boogeyman, written by Eric Kripke, Juliet Snowden and Stiles White; directed by Stephen Kay; starring Barry Watson (Tim), Emily Deschanel (Kate), Skye McCole Bartusiak (Franny), Tory Mussett (Jessica), Lucy Lawless (Tim's Mother) and Charles Mesure (Tim's Father) (2005): Somewhat blah horror film with a screen story and partial screenplay credit for Supernatural TV series creator Eric Kripke. Childhood boogeyman kidnaps young Tim's father and, as it turns out, dozens of other people over the intervening years until Tim returns home upon the death of his mother to finally confront the creature that's made him afraid of closets for the last 15 years.
There are some solid scare moments here that don't simply rely on Old Reliable 'something jumps out at you!!!', but not enough of them. Barry Watson is curiously bland as the protagonist, while the decision to have two female leads (played by Tory Mussett and Bones's Emily Deschanel) means that neither of them has enough lines to make much of an impact, though it is nice to see Deschanel in a role that doesn't require her to speak like a human computer.
The ending, apparently much-hated by everyone on the Internet, actually goes somewhere interesting, though a greater fleshing out of how and why Tim finally turns the tables on the boogeyman might have helped things. Nonetheless, it's a use of logical magic, and may have signalled what was to come in Supernatural. Well, if Kripke actually wrote the ending. Somehow they followed this with two sequels. Not recommended.
Showcase Presents: The Trial of the Flash, written by Cary Bates and Joey Cavalieri, illustrated by Carmine Infantino, Dennis Jensen, Frank McLaughlin, Klaus Janson and others (1983-85; collected 2011): I can't think of a major superhero who became tragedy's punching bag more than DC's Flash did in the late 1970's and early 1980's. And I'm not sure why this was allowed to happen. But happen it did. His greatest villain killed his wife, and that was just the beginning. A couple of years later that same villain -- 25th-century speedster Professor Zoom, aka The Reverse-Flash -- tried to kill the Flash's fiancee on their wedding day. In the ensuing super-speed struggle, the Flash breaks Zoom's neck, killing him.
And so begins one of the longest storylines ever contained in a single DC title, The Trial of the Flash, which would ultimately span nearly three years and end with the cancellation of that title. It was a story so long that several peripheral issues of the title are omitted here to allow the collection (still the longest in the Showcase reprint series) to avoid requiring two volumes. It's still enough, and maybe too much.
By 1985, DC had decided to reboot its entire line of superheroes, beginning with a massive crossover event/line-wide reboot and purge called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Flash would play a pivotal but heroically self-sacrificing role in that event. After the Crisis, his nephew Wally West would take over as the Flash in the brave new post-Crisis world. Ultimately, this is The Last Flash Story But One. Sort of. To paraphrase Algis Budrys, in comic books death is always conditional.
The Barry Allen version of the Flash helped usher in DC's Silver Age in the 1950's, as new characters were given the names of cancelled heroes of the 1940's, most prominently the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman. They apparently lived on a different Earth than their 1940's forebears (in the first appearance of the Barry Allen Flash, Barry is seen reading a comic-book issue of the 1940's Flash from whom, after gaining his super-speed powers, Barry ultimately takes his superhero name).
Writer John Broome and penciller Carmine Infantino made the Flash a zippy, fun, quasi-super-scientific thrill ride over the character's first decade. (In-story 'Flash Facts' gave explanations of certain speed and scientific effects seen in the story, such as how a boomerang works). In The Trial of the Flash, Infantino has returned to the character after nearly 20 years away, staying with him to the end with pencils that are much more stylized and 'loose' than his Silver Age work, but still often possessed of a quality of speed and quickness and time-bending simultaneity that most other Flash artists have lacked.
Longtime Flash writer Cary Bates puts the Scarlet Speedster through quite a wringer here, as various parties try to wipe out the Flash's defense lawyers, kill him before the trial, or just do the usual super-villain thing of mayhem and thievery. It's a surprisingly harrowing and often downbeat ride, though it does have a conditional happy ending -- conditional because the Flash's fate in Crisis will supercede any ending in his own title and, indeed, that fate had already been published before the storyline herein ended.
It would take more than 20 years for the Barry Allen Flash to return from the dead -- several eternities in superhero comics -- and his history has recently been purged and restarted once again. There are some absurdities here, and one major annoyance (that would be the frankly ridiculous mental health issues of Flash's fiancee Fiona), but overall this is a lot of melodramatic fun. It would have been interesting to see what occasional cover inker Klaus Janson (so integral to Frank Miller's art on Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns) could have done with Infantino's interior pencils -- the Infantino covers Janson inks are terrific -- but the interior art remains solid and sometimes startling. Recommended.
