Four

Stage Fright, written by Whitfield Cook, Alma Reville, James Bridie and Ranald MacDougall, based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson, starring Jane Wyman (Eve Gill), Marlene Dietrich (Charlotte Inwood), Michael Wilding ("Ordinary" Smith), Richard Todd (Jonathan Cooper), Alastair Sim (Commodore Gill), Sybil Thorndike (Mrs. Gill) and Kay Walsh (Nellie Goode) (1950): One of Hitchcock's lesser-known efforts is enjoyable but a bit overlong and draggy. Jane Wyman tries to save ex-boyfriend Richard Todd from being arrested for a murder he says he didn't commit. Shenanigans ensue. The cast -- especially Marlene Dietrich and Alastair "Scrooge" Sim -- is topnotch. Lightly recommended.

White Heat, written by Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts and Virginia Kellogg, directed by Raoul Walsh, starring James Cagney (Cody Jarrett), Virginia Mayo (Verna Jarrett), Edmond O'Brien (Hank Fallon) and Margaret Wycherly (Ma Jarrett) (1949): Classic gangster flick pits undercover cop O'Brien against crazy con James Cagney. And boy, does Cagney's character have mother issues! Some scenes play out like CSI: 1949, as the FBI uses the latest in high-tech tracking devices and crime-solving techniques to find the criminals before they pull off their next big heist. A lot of fun, with great performances by Cagney, O'Brien and Virginia Mayo. Look, Ma, top of the world! Highly recommended.

The Green Hornet, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, based on characters created by George W. Trendle, directed by Michel Gondry, starring Seth Rogen (Britt Reid/The Green Hornet), Jay Chou (Kato), Cameron Diaz (Lenore Case), Tom Wilkinson (James Reid) and Christoph Waltz (Chudnofsky) (2011): Well, I laughed a lot, and I don't give a shit about the original radio-series Green Hornet, so any blasphemies committed upon it by the filmmakers didn't irk me. Seth Rogen makes an unlikely masked hero, but that's sorta the point. Lightly recommended.

30 Days of Night: Dark Days, adapted by Steve Niles and Ben Ketai from the comic book by Niles and Ben Templesmith, directed by Ben Ketai, starring Kiele Sanchez (Stella), Rhys Coiro (Paul), Diora Brand (Amber), Harold Perrineau (Todd), Mia Kirshner (Lilith), Troy Ruptash (Agent Morris) and Ben Cotton (Dane) (2010): This straight-to-DVD sequel to 30 Days of Night contains no original cast members. Good on them. The world's stupidest vampire hunters take on the world's stupidest vampires in Los Angeles. Something's gotta give! The movie may set the record for most aerial shots of L.A. in one movie, or at least in one vampire movie. Mia Kirshner looks sorta cool as vampire-queen Lilith. Not recommended.

Sometimes Dead is Better

Fred Gwynne reacts to his first reading of the screenplay for PET SEMATARY.

Pet Sematary, adapted by Stephen King from his novel of the same name, directed by Mary Lambert, starring Dale Midkiff (Louis Creed), Fred Gwynne (Jud Crandall), Denise Crosby (Rachel Creed) and Brad Greenquist (Victor Pascow) (1989): I'd forgotten what a lousy movie this was until I watched it again for the first time since its release.

Boy, it's a lousy movie.

It's not Graveyard Shift or Maximum Overdrive lousy -- those movies set a bar so low they may never be underpassed in the 'Worst Stephen King Movie Adaptation' competition -- but it's pretty close.

Anyway, stupid parents move to a new house in Maine that's located six inches from a highway down which go barrelling lumber trucks at breakneck speeds every 30 seconds. First the family cat and then Gage, the two-year-old son, get smushed on the highway.

Ah, but idiot neighbour Fred Gwynne knows a secret! Behind the 'Pet Sematary' in which local residents bury their pets (I'm assuming they bury a lot of them because of the aforementioned highway and lumber trucks) is another cemetery...a Micmac cemetery that brings the dead back to life if you bury them there! Hoo ha!

Is a cemetery still a cemetery if everything that gets buried there comes back to life?

Now, Idiot Neighbour knows that what comes out of the cemetery isn't what goes into it, as he explains in a flashback about how his dog came back all crazy and mean and homicidal, as did a local-boy casualty of war. "The ground went sour," he tells us, which explains why the Micmac Indians aren't still immortal.

But he explains this after he's got Idiot Father to bring the cat back. And the cat comes back...crazy and mean and homicidal! Boy, what a great idea that was!

Despite the unholy evilness of the resurrected cat, Idiot Father brings back dead Gage. Dead Gage is crazy and mean and homicidal and possessed of a much larger vocabulary then when he went into the ground, so there is that silver lining: the Micmac burial ground apparently comes pre-loaded with Baby Einstein vocabulary lessons. Gage kills some people. Idiot Father comes to his senses. Or does he? Do I actually care?

Poor Fred Gwynne does what he can with his role as Idiot Neighbour. In one scene, he repeats the phrase "Sometimes dead is better" so many times that I don't know how he kept a straight face during the filming. Dale Midkiff looks blank, as he did in pretty much every role he ever played, and Denise Crosby looks like she's reading from cue cards in most scenes.

Besides the plot stupidity and the awful acting from Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby as the idiot parents, the direction and cinematography stink. This is a lousy looking movie. Frankly it looks like it was shot on videotape. There is one, count 'em, one startling shot which would never appear in a horror movie today, involving the immolation of a child. That's it. The moral of the movie is, don't listen to your stupid neighbour. Not recommended.

End of Dazed and Confused

Promethea Book 5, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia (2003-2005; collected 2006): Promethea, the 1600-year-old demi-goddess whose current host/personality is young college student Sophie Bangs, will end the world if Bangs allows her to manifest again. So Bangs hides from the government and from herself in New York under an assumed name.

But the paranoid, increasingly militaristic U.S. government has recruited science-hero Tom Strong to track Promethea down because Strong knew one of Promethea's previous avatars back in the 1950's. Strong reluctantly agrees, but he doesn't believe that Promethea really means to end the world.

But she does. She has to. That's her job.

And so the end comes to the Earth of Moore's America's Best Comics imprint, ushered in by the unstoppable Promethea despite the best efforts of Tom Strong and the rest of that world's heroes. From the realms of fiction and poetry and magic and gods descends judgment on everything. But what does the end of the world actually look like?

Well, it doesn't look like the end of the world in Moore's Watchmen. Promethea is a much different bringer of catastrophe than Ozymandias. And violence is not a solution or a means to a solution.

Moore's 32-issue exegesis on magic and the nature of reality comes to a stunning end here, beautifully imagined by both Moore and his artistic collaborators J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia. This may be one of the most visually beautiful comic books ever created, and one of the most visually complex. It's not for everybody -- this is a didactic essay about Moore's actual beliefs ever since he decided to become a practicing magician (!) in the 1990's.

Images and iterations of the Kabbalah, the Tarot Deck, various occultists and pretty much every religion under the sun get combined and recombined within Moore's apocalyptic vision -- with the caveat that 'apocalypse' derives from the Greek word for "revelation" or "lifting of the veil."

Never has Aleister Crowley made so many appearances in a comic-book series not named Aleister Crowley. Hurry down doomsday! Highly recommended.

Rural Rout

Hellboy Volume 10: The Crooked Man and Others, written by Mike Mignola and Joshua Dysart, illustrated by Mike Mignola, Richard Corben, Jason Shawn Alexander, and Duncan Fegredo (2007-2008; collected 2009): Giving Hellboy several decades worth of adventures to draw upon allows Mike Mignola to offer new readers a "jumping-on" point with miniseries that stand (mostly) apart from the ongoing "contemporary", epic Hellboy narrative. We get four such adventures here, most notably the title three-parter.

Mignola pays homage to American supernatural-fiction great Manly Wade Wellman with an adventure in the American Appalachians of the 1950's, Wellman's setting for the first few stories of supernatural battler John the Balladeer (Who Fears the Devil?, The Hanging Stones). It's a lovely, respectful homage to the singular Wellman's tales of rural good and evil.

Hellboy and a young man whose personality and background (but not his name) suggest those of John before his adventures began fight witches and devils in backwoods country, to pleasing and disturbing effect. Richard Corben's art has never been better, at least from a horror standpoint -- the Crooked Man himself is a truly creepy creation, as are many of the monsters and ghosts and bizarre insect things which assault Hellboy and company. As Wellman did, Mignola skillfully blurs the line between invented terrors and terrors derived from actual Appalachian folklore and myth.

The rest of the volume sees Hellboy and Abe Sapien take on Blackbeard's ghost (well, skull) in a story penned by Joshua Dysart, and a confrontation with the ancient, child-eating god Moloch in Spain, the latter in a story with conscious echoes of Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" and J. Sheridan LeFanu's "Green Tea." Oh, and Hellboy plays cards with some ghosts and worries over a suspicious-looking mole on his hand. Highly recommended.

Two-Fisted Ghouls

More Macabre, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, contains "Mother by Protest" by Richard Matheson; "The Wheel" by H. Warner Munn; "The Yellow Wall Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; "The Cookie Lady" by Philip K. Dick; "The Spider" by Hanns Heinz Ewers; "The Curse Kiss" by Theodore Roscoe; "Fungus Isle" by Philip M. Fisher; and "The Copper Bowl" by George Fielding Eliot. (1961): Nifty little paperback anthology from the dawn of American paperback horror collections. Wollheim would go on to have an entire imprint named after him (DAW Books, natch).

　
The value of this, for me, is the inclusion of horror stories from the early days of Weird Tales and other American horror/fantasy pulp magazines. I loved "Fungus Isle" with its great title and icky mushroom horrors and gradual development of the uncanny. "The Spider" is a startlingly original what-was-it? story of possession or ghosts or, unh, I'm not sure. And that's good: repeat after me, "Explanation is the death of horror." Too much explanation, anyway.

　
The early Phil Dick story is also fun, a poisoned bit that echoes Ray Bradbury before Bradbury got soft and fuzzy-poetic in the 1960's. It's also one of a small number of Dick stories about the horrors of childhood. And overeating. Its final image echoes a similar, disturbing revelation in Dick's horror masterpiece "The Father Thing", one of my nominees for some mythical "100 Best Horror Stories Ever" List that I keep meaning to draw up.

　
The Matheson story is also a lot of fun, with a concluding line that apparently stuck in my mind ever since I read it first 30 years ago. One of the interesting things about More Macabre is its focus on"adventure-horror", a staple of the pulps that isn't seen that much any more, as explorers and colonial have rousing adventures while also facing some scabrous demon horror. Or in the case of the awkwardly titled "The Curse Kiss," a character from the Old Testament. Or in the case of the Rube Goldbergian Grand Guignol of "The Wheel", vengeance from beyond the grave of...The Spanish Inquisition!!!

　
Two vastly different, often reprinted classic round out the collection, the always enjoyable psychological, proto-feminist piece "The Yellow Wall Paper" and the gruesome tale of French colonialism in China, "The Copper Bowl." For $5 or$6, this is well worth picking up. Recommended.

Magnetic Fields Forever

The One, written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1985-86; this edition 2003): Veitch's satiric look at superheroes in a quasi-realistic (though blackly comic) setting predated such better-known, similar offerings like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns by several months in the mid-1980's. It's an unjustly neglected entry in this sub-sub-genre of comic books, alternately funny and heart-felt.

"Itchy" Itch, a leprous parody of Richie Rich all grown up, starts World War Three as a means to make a lot of money and hopefully seize control of pretty much all the world's financial markets. But things aft gang agley. He doesn't expect a nuclear exchange between the USSR and USA, and he really doesn't expect nuclear explosions to be neutralized -- and perhaps transformed -- by...something.

Traumatized by their inability to properly wage war, the USSR and the USA unleash their super-secret superheroes on the world. But why did a portion of the world's population fall asleep at the moment the bombs were supposed to go off? Who is the mysterious figure known as The One? And who or what is The Other?

The One fires away at such targets as mutually assured destruction and realpolitik, American consumerism and Soviet hypocrisy, greed and the will to power. It does so with a fair amount of humour, not all of it black, and an ending that manages to combine catastrophe and eucatastrophe into a pleasing, thought-provoking mix. Like the battles in Alan Moore's Miracleman/Marvelman, the conflict between the American and Soviet superbeings causes mass death and destruction: when gods cry 'War', humans suffer.

But humanity's hope lies in its own superiority to these clashing behemoths, its own ability to change or die.

Exhilarating and off-beat, The One suffers only from typos and annoying substitutions for swear words that remain from when it was originally published by Epic Comics, an adult division of Marvel that nonetheless discouraged strong language (but not violence or nudity -- What the H?). If I never read another character saying 'Mothershuking!', it will be too soon. Nonetheless, that's a quibble. Highly recommended.

Bogart Becoming Bogart

All Through the Night, written by Leonard Spigelgass, Edwin Gilbert and Leo Rosten, directed by Vincent Sherman, starring Humphrey Bogart ("Gloves" Donahue), Conrad Veidt (Ebbing), Kaaren Verne (Leda), Jane Darwell (Mrs. Donahue), Peter Lorre (Pepi), Judith Anderson (Madame), William Demarest (Sunshine), Phil Silvers (Waiter), Jackie Gleason (Starchie) and Frank McHugh (Barney) (1941): Released five days before Pearl Harbour, this movie's jokey tone and somewhat light take on foreign saboteurs didn't sit well with audiences once America entered World War Two.

Still, this is a jolly and involving comic-drama that sometimes seems way, way ahead of its time in its combination of action and comedy.

Bogart, on the cusp of superstardom (High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon came out earlier in 1941, while Across the Pacific and Casablanca would be out within the following 13 months), plays "Gloves" Donahue, a loveable gang leader in New York. He's from the Damon Runyon school of loveable gangsters, and comes complete with a loveable, interfering Irish mother played by Jane Darwell, who'd recently won an Oscar for playing loveable Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.

Gloves and his men stumble across a Nazi spy ring, and soon only Bogart and the daughter of a concentration-camp prisoner stand between New York and Nazi saboteurs, partially because the police are idiots. Boy, are the police idiots.

It's all played breezily and, if you've watched a lot of classic television, you'll note that a lot of supporting actors would go on to rewarding television careers, most notably Jackie Gleason (The Honeymooners), Phil Silvers (Sgt. Bilko) and William Demarest (the grandfather in My Three Sons). Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt -- both of whom would reteam with Bogart in Casablanca -- and Dame Judith Anderson round out a surprisingly high-powered cast. Blink and you'll miss a miniature Nazi dachschund getting blown up. Recommended.