Mr. Andy Kaufman's Gone Wrestling

Man on the Moon: written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski; directed by Milos Forman; starring Jim Carrey (Andy Kaufman), Danny DeVito (George Shapiro), Paul Giamatti (Bob Zmuda), and Courtney Love (Lynne Margulies) (1999): Terrific biopic of enigmatic, innovative 1970's comic Andy Kaufman, whose often surreal bits helped inspire such acts as Pee Wee Herman and about a thousand others. Jim Carrey shines as Kaufman, though he generally plays the classic Kaufman performances scattered throughout the movie a bit more broadly than Kaufman did as seen in existing recordings.

The movie takes its name -- not to mention its musical lietmotifs -- from the 1992 R.E.M. song "Man on the Moon." The title refers to various conspiracy theories about the lunar landing as an oblique way to comment on conspiracy theories about Kaufman's death in 1984. Because of Kaufman's love of hoaxes and disguises, many believed that he faked his own death as yet another stunt. In an odd way, Kaufman's Hoaxy side put him in a proud American tradition dating all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe, another Hoaxy fellow whose early death seemed (and still seems) like a hoax to many.

At the very least, Carrey deserved an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Looking back at the 1999 Oscars, I find it hard to view Kevin Spacey's Best Actor-winning turn in American Beauty as anything other than ridiculous. It's not just that this is fine work from Carrey -- it's also tremendously funny work. The Academy may undervalue comedy, but in acting, comedy is the hardest thing to do.

Danny De Vito and Paul Giamatti are also great as Kaufman's agent and head writer, respectively. The movie plays a bit fast and loose with the order of events to create a more standard Hollywood narrative. However, the movie also mocks this rewriting of history in Carrey's opening monologue. So there is that. Milos Forman and the writers keep everything both brisk and information-packed. This is a surprisingly informative biopic. Certainly we get a much better grasp of Kaufman's life and work than we did of, say, Stephen Hawking's in The Theory of Everything. 

There's also a refreshing bit near the end that debunks New Agey mystical cures for diseases such as cancer, capping this film with a moment in which a dying Kaufman laughs at accidentally seeing behind the curtain of another performer's hoax. Highly recommended.

Grim Scribin'

Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991/This edition 2015) by Thomas Ligotti, containing the following stories:

• Introduction: Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991): Janus-like, the introduction peers toward pomposity and parody.
• "The Last Feast of Harlequin" (1990): Almost certainly Ligotti's most-reprinted work, a novella that is both somewhat obliquely an homage to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Festival" and its very own thing, a striking, funny, droll, disturbing journey through a small town and its mysterious festival and the narrator who gets pulled into stranger and stranger situations as he investigates the town for anthropological reasons. Ligotti takes a number of horror tropes and makes them seem new and horrible again through the sheer force and inventiveness of his imagination and his narrative POV. One of the all-time great stories of cosmic horror, and perhaps Ligotti's most accessible major work.
• "The Spectacles in the Drawer"  (1987): Quintessential Ligotti in its combination of reality-busting and extraordinarily idiosyncratic characters.
• "Flowers of the Abyss" (1991): Another tale of a polluted reality and its peculiar attraction for people who should probably know better.
• "Nethescurial" (1991): Another oft-reprinted piece of Ligotti's Major Arcana. Vaguely Lovecraftian in tone and content, but distinctly a working-through of these things from Ligotti's assured, unique perspective. Puppet alert.
• "The Dreaming in Nortown" (1991): Reality breaks down in disturbing ways, all narrated by Ligotti's most Poe-esque protagonist.
• "The Mystics of Muelenburg"  (1987): Oblique, bleak reality-bender.
• "In the Shadow of Another World" (1991): Very strange and distinctive tale takes the haunted-house story and utterly scrambles it.
• "The Cocoons" (1991): Very, very horrific piece of absurdism, or at least near-absurdism. One of Ligotti's stories that disturbs without offering anything in the way of an attempt to frame things within a rational explanation.
• "The Night School" (1991): Worst night class ever.
• "The Glamour" (1991): A trip to a movie becomes a nightmarish, inexplicable tour of some peculiar, horrible sights and sounds. One of Ligotti's stories that leaves one shaken without any real way to parse what has happened in the story.
• "The Library of Byzantium" (1988): Sinister drawings, sinister priests, a sinister book, and a surprisingly traditional use of holy water.
• "Miss Plarr" (1991): Nothing really terrible happens in this tale of a boy and his nanny, yet the story defies simple explanation while it constructs a world that alternates between claustrophobic interior spaces and fog-erased exterior spaces.
• "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World" (1990): One of Ligotti's more straightforward stories in terms of its construction of what Evil is and what position it occupies in the universe. Another horror trope (the scary scarecrow) becomes revitalized by Ligotti's imagination. 

In all: a great collection of Ligotti's late 1980's and early 1990's work with all its cosmic, absurdist, horrific, comic, infernal devices. Highly recommended.

Ghoulfriend in a Coma

The Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction: edited and with notes by Robert M. Price (Collected 2008):

Chaosium reprints the Cthulhu Mythos-related short stories of Clark Ashton Smith in three volumes, with this being the one containing stories that aren't set in the distant past when the Book of Eibon was being composed nor those Smith stories that focus on his quasi-tricksterish god Tsathoggua.

Despite the availability of Smith's work in multiple editions, this text is valuable because it reprints several variant versions of Smith's stories that aren't available that easily, along with a long story fragment -- "The Infernal Star" -- that is otherwise out of print.

'Klarkash-Ton' was the nickname H.P. Lovecraft gave Smith in their correspondence in the 1930's. The stories range from straightforward horror to science fiction to science-fiction horror, while Smith's prose style ranges from the relatively plain to the poetically baroque, almost arcane diction that one really either loves or hates. I love it, in part because there's clearly a sense of humour at work behind the occasionally loopy word choices.

One caveat: the stories have been proofread and copy-edited with mind-boggling ineptitude. You may want to grab a pen and correct all the errors for the next person who reads the collection. Think of it as a fun game!

• "The Ghoul" (1934): Smith's ghoul isn't as idiosyncratic as Lovecraft's ghouls, though it sure loves to eat dead people. 
• "A Rendering from the Arabic" (Variant of "The Return of the Sorcerer" [1931]): Slightly different version of the oft-reprinted "The Return of the Sorcerer." Lovecraftian references abound in a story about the walking, shuffling dead.
• "The Hunters from Beyond" (1932): One of those Smith stories that plays with his own multi-talented career as a painter and sculptor as well as a writer of prose and poetry. It does seem a bit derivative of both HPL's "Pickman's Model" and Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos."
• "The Vaults of Abomi" (Variant of "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" [1932/1989]): A few hundred words flesh out the beginning of one of Smith's two or three finest works of science-fictional horror, set on his version of Mars and possessed of imagery and situations that anticipate such later horrors as Alien, The Thing, and The Puppet Masters.
• "The Nameless Offspring" (1932): Well, we get the offstage rape of a woman in a coma by a ghoul, followed by the resultant offspring. One of Smith's most obliquely disturbing works.
• "Ubbo-Sathla (1933)": Much-reprinted reincarnational horror story.
• "The Werewolf of Averoigne"  (Variant of "The Beast of Averoigne") [1931/1984]): The variant is superior to the standard version, preserving as it does Smith's original multi-viewpoint epistolary format.
• "The Eidolon of the Blind" (Variant of "The Dweller in the Gulf" [1933]): Another creepy science-fiction horror story set on Smith's version of Mars, which makes most other early 20th-century writers' versions of Mars seem like a goddam Disneyworld.
• "Vulthoom" (1935): Another Mars story, much lighter on horror and, as Price comments in the notes, not that different from many other contemporary interplanetary stories involving humans and decadent, Orientalist civilizations.
• "The Treader of the Dust" (1935): Excellent, concise horror story with a strikingly creepy evil god or demigod or whatever you want to call it.
• "The Infernal Star" (Fragment) (1935/1989): Fascinating, long fragment of what was to be a novella-length dark fantasy involving reincarnation, atomic 'memory,' and a Sun made, basically, of Evil.

In all: highly recommended, though I do wish for an edition with better copy editing.

The More Things Stay the Same

Reset: written and illustrated  by Peter Bagge (2012-2013): Peter Bagge, that great cartoonist of the distorted, grotesque mundane contemporary world (Buddy, Neat Stuff, Hate)  turns to a piece of near-science fiction in this sharp, often hilarious graphic novel. 

Guy Krause is a washed-up comedian/comic actor who accepts a job testing out a new Virtual Reality set-up. But not all is what it seems. For one, the makers of the VR set-up have exhaustively interviewed even minor, long-ago acquaintances of Krause so that his life from high school onwards can be simulated and manipulated depending on what decisions he makes. For another, this may not be a project meant for entertainment. 

Bagge's linework is superb as always, as is his satiric but probing and sensitive writing. Like most of Bagge's protagonists, Krause is both annoying and sympathetic, as are the various supporting characters. Recommended.

Sandman Presents: The Furies: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by John Bolton (2003): Mike Carey and John Bolton bring some closure to the saga of Lyta Hall as seen in Neil Gaiman's Sandman in the 1980's and 1990's. Hall, a second-generation superhero, became a pawn in Desire's plot to kill Dream because Hall herself was a descendant/avatar of the Greek Furies -- the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, tasked by the universe with punishing those guilty of killing blood relatives. To make a long story short, Desire succeeded. Sort of. The then-current Dream did indeed die, but Dream itself cannot die: Lyta's infant son, born in The Dreaming, became the new Dream. 

Hall's memories of what happened while she pursued vengeance have become vague and cloudy as The Furies begins. She's still suffering from PTSD three years after the events seen in the concluding issues of The Sandman. An attempt to restart her life by taking a job as an interpreter for an American theatre troupe headed to a Greek drama festival seems like a good idea at the time.

It isn't, of course, because gods and monsters and spirits of vengeance just can't leave Lyta Hall alone. Carey's prose fleshes out Hall's character poignantly -- despite her super-strength, she's an aimless wreck because of what the supernatural has done to her life. She's allowed herself to be acted upon again and again. The Furies sees her attempt to seize Agency in her own life even as the supernatural comes pouring back in looking for her to play the pawn once again in a Game of Gods.

I'm not a fan of artist John Bolton's incorporation of retouched photos in his art since computer technology allowed him to do this sort of thing -- there are points that The Furies feels like the least amusing fumetti ever. There's a point to the mix of photos and fantastic drawings -- a juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane -- that comes through at some points and fails at others. Hermes looks especially ridiculous in quasi-photo-realistic form. 

As an admirer of Bolton's earlier comics work, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the art here. Only the fully drawn sections bear comparison with his fine 1980's and 1990's work, some of it for the original Sandman and its older sister John Constantine Hellblazer (the latter in a splendid Annual about the 'original' Constantine, the Emperor, and his ties to our cynical modern-day magician). It's really Carey's fine writing, with its bursts of sympathy and its unnerving moments in which the supernatural breaks through, hideous and inhuman, that does much of the heavy lifting. Recommended.

Topsy Turvy: written and illustrated by Peter Kuper (1997-2000/Collected 2000): Collection of the terrific Kuper's political cartoons from the late 1990's demonstrates that the more things change, yadda yadda yadda: many of the strips lampoon Donald Trump's presidential ambitions while others lament America's love affair with guns and the NRA's love affair with gun-loving Americans. Yes, it's the American Treadmill to Oblivion. All aboard! Recommended.

Pseudolovecraft mythosia

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.


I think this anthology, which consists of 16 new stories and 4 reprints, is the award-winning, veteran editor Datlow's finest anthology. It's not all killer, but there is no filler. Many of the stories that first appeared in this anthology have already been anthologized several more times since Lovecraft Unbound appeared in 2008. Highly recommended overall.

• "The Crevasse" by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey: Antarctic setting recalls HPL's At the Mountains of Madness, but this effective and low-key (in a supernatural sense) story also riffs on "Who Goes There?," the basis for The Thing movies.
• "The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes: Never order the Necronomicon on an Inter-Library Loan. Just don't.
• "Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour: Elliptical tale of fictional myths attached to... The Petrified Forest? Yes. Unusual and very enjoyable.
• "The Din of Celestial Birds" (1997) by Brian Evenson: Interesting but a bit too murky for my tastes.
• "The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum: Writers really get entranced by the idea of making HPL's ghouls into a fully realized society. Not a bad story, but crippled by those tricky ghouls, who have frustrated many a writer.
• "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane: Moody, low-key riff on HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time."
• "Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips: Very science fictiony and of-the-moment as Global Warming releases monsters. Nebulous, Swiss-Army-Knife monsters when it comes to their skill-sets, which are too vast and ill-defined to allow me to suspend disbelief beyond page 3.
• "Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer: Another entry in Spencer's often serio-comic explorations of Lovecraftian themes and variations as seen in the terrific novels Resume with Monsters and Irrational Fears.
• "Houses Under the Sea" (2006) by Caitlin R. Kiernan: A solid mix of first-person narration and pseudo-documentary collage dissipates with the big reveal, which is amazingly underwhelming.
• "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco: Creepy bit of philosophical horror; slight but solid.
• "Leng" by Marc Laidlaw: Skirts the very edge of parody in its visit to Lovecraft's famous, infamous Plateau of Leng, which is not a place you want to visit. Hold the mushrooms.
• "In the Black Mill" (1997) by Michael Chabon: Chabon's story hammers on obvious parody during its first half, which is rife with winky, coy,  obvious shout-outs to various Lovecraftian names and places (a woman named Brown-Jenkin? Really?). The spell of HPL seems to overcome Chabon in the second half, as the story suddenly plays everything straight -- but the parody undoes any ability to take the story seriously while also being obvious and awfully thudding in its humour.
• "One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar: Oblique, mysterious bit of cosmic horror involving a forbidden book.
• "Commencement" (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates: Deceptively light-hearted narration darkens throughout in a story that feels an awful lot like Oates doing a riff on Thomas Ligotti, who does this particular sort of thing better.
• "Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth: Relationship horror with a sorrowful cosmic twist.
• "The Recruiter" by Michael Shea: Light black comedy with serious undertones ties in to several other Shea stories involving Lovecraftian beings.
• "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files: Files nails the documentary aspect of Lovecraftian horror while offering an interesting geopolitical setting for a tale of a buried church that should have remained buried.
• "Mongoose" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette: Unusual space opera plays with Lovecraftian names while being tonally and thematically so far from HPL that the story (one of a series) could probably do without its space-traevling Arkhamites and reconfigured Hounds of Tindalos (now complete with Linnaean taxonomy -- Pseudocanis tindalosi).
• "Catch Hell" by Laird Barron: Oddly, one of Barron's least cosmic, least Lovecraftian stories. Good for Barron would be great for almost anyone else.
• "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas: Low-key, purposefully mundane slice-of-life from the days after the Great Old Ones rose to destroy humanity and reclaim Earth. 

Kitschy Kitschy Cool

Big Eyes: written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski; directed by Tim Burton; starring Amy Adams (Margaret Keane), Christoph Waltz (Walter Keane), Danny Huston (Dick Nolan), Krysten Ritter (DeeAnn), Jason Schwartzman (Ruben), Terence Stamp (John Canaday), and Jon Polito (Enrico Banducci) (2014): Tim Burton goes low-key in this movie based on the true story behind the Keane paintings (and prints, posters, postcards...) that dominated many a living-room or rec-room in the 1950's, 60's, and 70's. You know the images when you see them: sad-looking children with gigantic eyes staring straight out at the viewer.

The story behind the paintings was interesting enough that this is a remarkably faithful-to-life movie. Amy Adams is terrific as Margaret Keane, who painted the paintings but allowed her husband, played by an equally terrific Christoph Waltz, to take credit for them for a decade while she churned them out. It's a remarkable story, and Burton hasn't been this controlled and considered as a film-maker since Ed Wood: he lets the story tell the story, keeping camera fanciness and baroque flourishes absent from the movie. He also gets terrific performances from everyone. Highly recommended.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch: written by Nigel Kneale, John Carpenter, and Tommy Lee Wallace; directed by Tommy Lee Wallace; starring Tom Atkins (Dr. Daniel Challis), Stacey Nelkin (Ellie Grimbridge), Dan O'Herlihy (Conal Cochran), and Wendy Wessberg (Teddy) (1982): Ah, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which I've managed to miss despite wanting to see it since it came out in 1982.

Far and away the most hated Halloween movie, possibly because it's not really part of the series -- the original Halloween's Michael Myers does show up on TV in the movie, because the first two Halloween movies are indeed just movies in the universe of Halloween III.

Nigel Kneale of the great British Quatermass series wrote the original screenplay. He asked to have his name taken off  Halloween III: Season of the Witch because he thought the finished product, rewritten by producer John Carpenter and director Tommy Lee Wallace, was too violent -- but it's still recognizably Kneale at points: quite enjoyable, often clever. 

It's dazzlingly cheap looking in a way specific to films of the 1970's and early 1980's, to the extent that it almost looks as if it were shot on videotape. And the bizarre plot, which involves evil robots, malign mass-produced Halloween masks, and a magically apocalyptic use of Stonehenge, ultimately makes the whole thing seem like a Philip Hinchcliffe-era Doctor Who serial in which Doctor Who fails to appear. 

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is also a product of its time in that the lead, Tom Atkins, would never be the lead in a movie today, even if he shaved off his adorable cop mustache. But he's very likable, never moreso than when the filmmakers have him running around in a too-tight windbreaker that keeps riding up on his stomach. You may best remember Atkins as the father in the frame narrative for Creepshow, though he's done tons of film and TV work.

Next to an awful lot of horror movies, Halloween III: Season of the Witch seems unfairly maligned. Recommended.

Close Encounters of the Cthulhu Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: written by Paul Schrader and Steven Spielberg; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Richard Dreyfus (Roy Neary), Francois Truffaut (Lacombe), Melinda Dillon (Jillian Guiler), Bob Balaban (Laughlin), and Teri Garr (Ronnie Neary( (1977): It's amazing how much Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays like a horror movie for much of its length -- indeed, like an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu." The film moves from location to location to show various strange events and mysteries that occur across the planet. There's a documentary feel to the location work and the narrative structure, as mysterious U.N. investigators led by Francois Truffaut and Bob Balaban travel the Earth to investigate UFO-related incidents. 

In the purposefully mundane domestic sequences that focus on dissatisfied husband and father Richard Dreyfus and single mother Melinda Dillon, we see Spielberg and uncredited screenwriter Paul Schrader ground the movie in the day-to-day life of working-class Americans. And then the UFO's show up and gradually change everything. And as with many of the characters in "The Call of Cthulhu," Dillon and Dreyfus are tormented by nightmares and visions as the alien arrival on Earth approaches.

I don't know that either Schrader or Spielberg ever read "The Call of Cthulhu." It has such a sturdy narrative approach to the creation of globe-spanning cosmic horror that it's more of a surprise that more film-makers haven't stumbled upon the approach before. The main difference here being that the story is ultimately about the arrival on Earth of friendly aliens and not all-conquering alien monsters. But the aliens do enough odd things along the way that a certain measure of fear recurs throughout the movie, most notably when aliens kidnap Dillon's young son for reasons that are as murky as anything else when it comes to possible alien motivation.

The arrival of the UFO's at the conclusion of the film stands as a high point of practical, non-CGI visual effects. It's a showcase of model work, cloud tanks, mattes, and an assortment of other 'tricks' honed to near-perfection during the non-CGI years. It's also a beautiful-looking climax, with its glowing alien spacecraft set off against the night sky and the looming stump of the mountainous Devil's Tower.

The Lovecraftian melding of documentary-style attention to detail and the unfolding of revelations to increasingly weirded-out protagonists serve Spielberg's vision well. The acting is solid throughout and, in the case of Truffaut's visionary, quite charming. What the aliens are doing doesn't necessarily make much sense, and there are some groaners in the dialogue towards the end (an exchange about Einstein is especially dumb). But overall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is still a splendid movie, and one that probably would never be made in today's marketplace. Highly recommended.

The Call of Cthulhu: adapted by Sean Branney from the story by H.P. Lovecraft; directed by Andrew Leman; starring Matt Foyer (Narrator), Ralph Lucas (Professor Angell), Patrick O'Day (Johansen), and David Mersault (Inspector Legrasse) (2005): The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS)'s first long-form foray into film-making is now 10 years old and still dandy. An amateur film made for a pittance, it outshines most professional horror movies with far larger budgets both in its faithfulness to its source material and in its aesthetic pleasures.

Lovecraft's seminal Cthulhu Mythos novella saw publication in 1926. HPLHS adapted the novella under the conceit that it had been adapted for film in its publication year. Thus, The Call of Cthulhu is a silent movie that looks and acts like a silent movie, right down to the occasional defects in the viewing experience (dig that hair on the lens in the early going!). 

We do get an excellent musical score, so one can either assume that one is in a 1926 film theatre with live music or that The Call of Cthulhu has had a score added for its 'modern' release. Whatever suspends your disbelief. But The Call of Cthulhu isn't simply an homage to the film-making tropes of the late Silent Era: it's a compelling horror movie in its own right. 

Clever visual riffs on Van Gogh and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem appropriate to the subject matter; the stop-motion Cthulhu we see towards the end of the film is a terrific use of period-appropriate visual effects that actually manages to be disquieting as it lurches across the screen. Model and prop work are also beautiful throughout the movie, with a couple of different yet equally disquieting Cthulhu idols and a terrific approximation of Cthulhu's home/prison R'lyeh, risen from the waves for a brief moment.

It's a worthwhile expenditure of an hour to watch The Call of Cthulhu. Would that big-budget horror and fantasy movies showed this level of skill and artistry. Highly recommended.