Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 11
November 11, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY"
I think you would agree that Memory Lane is a place full of wonderful old mansions, of vast villas and rambling estates, in which it is easy to get lost and even easier to remain so. Pop culture nostalgia is a powerful thing, and sometimes, if we are not careful, or if we are feeling a little too keenly a yearning for a particular part of our youth, we can lose ourselves in these spaces, which remain intact and well-maintained despite the passage of years since their cancellation. When one thinks about a show of yesteryear like "Magnum, P.I." or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Frasier," one gets the sense that the lights are still on, the furniture is neatly in place, and while the door hinges may be in need of a dash of oil, the appliances would still work if you cared to use them, and the wine in the cellar would taste agreeably sweet. In short, you would feel very much at home.
But along with the vast edifices we have previously explored, shows which ran for many seasons and had appreciable cultural impact, there are also places which are as small as summer cottages, and upon closer inspection -- once we push past the creepers and vines which have overgrown their decaying wood beams -- we see that the series in question were never even completed during their own lifetimes. What lies beneath the moss and cobwebs is incomplete as well as half lost in the weeds, abandoned before its time. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" (1982 - 1983) is such a show. It existed only briefly, it died an unfair and unnatural death, and its star was retroactively tainted by a scandal which broke decades after the series left the airwaves. In short, it is quite forgotten by all save television historians and those who grew up in the early 80s. Yet it has a place on Memory Lane, however small, because it speaks to something which lies deep within the heart of every small boy, now as then.
I should begin stating flatly that, not only in retrospect but at the time it aired, "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was an easy show to make fun of. It is full of worn-out clichés, embarrassing stereotypes, stupid dialogue, needless narration, bad blue screen effects, cruddy matte paintings, ill-fitting stock footage, archaic costumes, cringeworthy acting, fake sets and utterly preposterous plots. When fans try to defend this series against ridicule or even room-temperature observational criticism, they often begin by pretending as if this isn't so, and thus discredit their own arguments before they can even get going. I would never make the case that "Tales" was great television taken as such. I would actually start by acknowledging that in many ways it was terrible television...and then explain just why that doesn't make a halluva lot of difference.
"Tales" was concieved by the legendary writer-producer Donald P. Bellisario, who, along with Glen Larson and Stephen J. Cannell, is inarguably one of the pillars upon which modern TV rests. He was the brain behind "Magnum, P.I.", "Airwolf," "Quantum Leap," "JAG," and "NCIS" (which is still running after twenty years). Contrary to popular opinion, it was not a slapped-together imitation of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, which exploded onto movie screens in 1981, but an old idea which had been stewing on a back burner called "development" for years before the success of RAIDERS pushed it to the front of the stove. "Tales" is in fact a series which even in 1982 was a rare breed: the action-adventure show, with emphasis on adventure. It recreated a period in history (the last period in history, actually) when vast areas of the Earth were still unconquered, and thus adventure and exploration still possible: the pre-WW2 age of colonial empire. We forget it now, but there was a time within the living memory of some people when a large portion of this planet still slept in the pre-industrial era, and wandering too far off the map could get you eaten by cannibals, devoured by wild beasts, or plunk you down amidst the ruins of a lost city. When men and women who lived on the edge of that map literally straddled the line between civilization and savagery, the known world and the deep blue. It was an era of explorers, treasure-hunters, missionaries, smugglers, sailors, silk-scarfed pilots, drunken storytellers, one-eyed traders, pirate, crooks, spies, unscrupulous businessmen, absinthe-sodden colonial governors, dispossessed tribesmen, and ruthless empire-builders. And that is what "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was all about. That brawling, half-tamed lawless time when half the world was an unknown quantity and wonder was still possible. Think "Magnum P.I." train-wrecked into "Indiana Jones" (with just a little "Land of the Lost" sprinkled on top) and you have "Tales Of The Gold Monkey." It's the chaos and rawness of the Wild West, but with .45s instead of six guns, twin-engined aircraft instead of horses, and palm trees instead of tumbleweed.
The premise of "Tales" was dead simple. An ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins), his drunken, memory-challenged sidekick Corky (Jeff Mackay), and their one-eyed dog Jack (Leo the Dog) operate their seaplane, Cutter's Goose, out of the fictional island of Boragora, somewhere in the Marivellas Islands of the South Pacific, in the last few years before the outbreak of WW2, when a great deal of the world was owned by colonial powers. When our heroes are not flying supplies, mail or passengers to this or that far-flung outpost in the French or Japanese mandates, they are belly-up at the Monkey Bar, which is operated by the island's enigmatic magistrate Bon Chance Louie (Ron Moody in the pilot, Roddy McDowell in the series). In the bar are likely to be found Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O'Heany), a redheaded lounge singer and American spy; the Reverend Willie Tenboom (John Calvin), who is also a spy, albeit for Nazi Germany; and Gushie, a crippled ex-member of the Foreign Legion (Les Jankey). Pushing through the saloon doors every now and again are the villainous but charming Japanese princess Koji (the super-lovely Marta DuBois, staple femme fatale of the 80s and 90s) and her grumpy samurai henchman Todo (the ubiquitous John Fujioka, in full samurai rig), who longs to cut off Jake's head. With a group like this, where nearly everyone is hiding secrets from each other and unknowingly working at cross-purposes, you just know all sorts of wacky adventures are going to ensue, and believe me, they do. Over the course of the season (sadly, the only one the show ever produced), Jake & Co. come up against human traffickers, spies, cultists, boys raised by apes, treasure hunters, giant octopi, rebel insurgents, angry mobs, Japanese Zeroes, Nazis, ancient curses, and pretty much anything else you can think of. (In one memorable episode, samurai warriors battle huge, semi-carniverous monkeys.) It's incredibly silly, cheesy, clichéd and outlandish, ripping off from just about every old movie and Western you can think of, and often looking as if it were shot entirely on dusty old sets on the studio backlot...which in fact it was...but it's also great, great fun. And this is a large part of why it still occupies space, however overgrown and bug-eaten, in Memory Lane.
"Tales" is a show that made up for in heart and good, clean adventure what it lacked in other places. Though it was shot in 1982, it was essentially the product of a much earlier era, the era of the sensational tales written for boys and young men back in pulp magazines the 20s, 30s and 40s, which Bellasario undoubtedly grew up on, and that sense of lighthearted, "fistfights are fun, don't-worry-it's-just-a-flesh-wound" heroics, percolates all throughout the series. When Jake revs up the coughing, smoking motors of Cutter's Goose, we know that just over the glimmering Pacific horizon lies adventure, treasure, good-looking women, and sweaty, squinty-eyed villains of all races who cheat at cards and sell people into slavery. I cannot tell you how much I looked forward to watching this show every week when I was ten years old, or how bitter I was when it failed to be renewed for a second season. All children, especially boys, long for adventure, for dangerous quests in faraway and exotic lands. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" gave me all that, and when it disappeared, a piece of my childhood disappeared with it. I loved Jake Cutter because, like Thomas Magnum, he was a badass under pressure, but rather a dumbass when the pressure was off: he fumbled romances, got thrown through windows, lost at cards, tried in vain to keep Corky sober, and everlastingly argued with his one-eyed dog Jake. He was heroic but relatable, and his fondness for cigars, eye for the ladies and passion for baseball gave him just enough spice to escape the Dudley Doorite dullness that sometimes afflicted 80s-era heroes.
The bitterness of the pill was accentuated by the fact that "Tales" was cancelled not because of low ratings, but due to a pissing contest between Bellisario and ABC network executives: Bellisario wanted the show to stay reasonably grounded, with stories about spying, smuggling, and so forth, while the suits wanted more extreme plotlines that blurred the lines between adventure and fantasy. Bellisario would not budge, so to spite him, the series was relegated to the dustbin, an act that reportedly caused rival networks to literally uncork champagne, since they believed "Tales" was potential mega-hit which would have run as long as seven seasons. Such is Hollywood, then as now, a fact which brings me no comfort...now or then.
So where does that leave us? Does "Tales" have any relevance forty years down the road? Are there lessons to be learned from its brief existence? Can a show that ran a single year have a legacy? Does it deserve one, romanticizing colonialism as it was sometimes accused of doing?
I would argue that "Tales" is actually more relevant and more necessary now, despite all of its early-80s silliness, than it was back then. The age we live in is cynical, and cynicism is the opposite of wonder. Kids nowadays sit in front of first-person shooter video games, Snapchat and Tik Tok with glassed-over eyes, and seldom get a chance to flex the adventure-muscles that are every child's absolute birthright. "Tales" harkens back to a time when the craving for adventure was accepted as a natural function of boyhood and girlhood, as craving for unearned fame and gross material wealth is today. It presupposes that there are realms beyond the border of electric light and air conditioning, where people have to live by their wits or die, something every Western child should consider in this age of flabby keyboard warriors and porn-addicted, basement-dwelling trolls. The fact that it expired after only a year, despite ratings success, serves as a salutary warning about the role of ego in the decision-making process: Bellisario, in my mind, was right to fight for his vision of the show, but naive and silly to let the fight escalate to the point where men obsessed with money were willing to sacrifice hefty future profits just to step on his dream. The very act of bringing a television series into existence is a vast series of painful and occasionally humiliating compromises, conducted for the greater good: it is the painful intersection of the commercial and the artistic, and that intersection is usually littered with blood and wreckage. Bellisario knew this better than anyone. He could have been more strategic, chosen his battles more carefully. In the modern parlance, however, he chose violence, and the people employed by the show, and its many fans, paid the price.
Now we come to the last point. Did "Tales" romanticize colonialism, European or otherwise? The answer, as is so often the case in questions like this, is yes, and no. It is often taken for granted in the series that European colonialism is reasonable or at least justifiable or unquestionable, just as it is taken for granted that Japanese aspirations of this type are inherently sinister. Few of the episodes question the fact that so much of the world was divvied up between a few European powers like so much pie at a Thanksgiving feast. Moreover, native anti-colonialists, though depicted, are not always painted in a good light, but rather as embittered, angry disruptors of the social order; and the whole mystique of mercenaries, smugglers, explorers, spies and and so forth, playing poker in the Monkey Bar beneath clouds of cigar smoke as they plotted their next adventure, is undoubtedly rooted in a deep nostalgia for this era: indeed, as I have said, it is a large part of the show's appeal, just as it is a large part of the appeal of the Indiana Jones films. But it would be unfair to say that "Tales" simply ignored the evils of colonialism. The episode "Shangheid" tackled modern-day slavery, while "Escape from Death Island" chronicled the cruelty of French penal colonies. "Boragora or Bust" centers around the exploitation of mineral rights, while "A Distant Shout of Thunder" directly addresses native hostility and resentment to colonial domination. The writers were not entirely blind to the nature of the world their characters were living.
I don't mean to imply that "Tales" offered sophisticated commentary on this subject or any other; only that it was not completely lacking in nuance (the character of Willy Tenboom, for example, was a German spy, but manifestly not a Nazi; his main interest was bedding nubile island girls, and he often pitched in to help Jake). The show may have romanticized the age and the setting, but its moral compass was firmly in place: right remained right, wrong remained wrong. It was manifestly on the side of the little man against the big man, for individuality and, ultimately, the freedom that comes with living on the edge of the world, where law is more of an idea than a reality, and civilization comes in the form of once-a-month clippers full of mail, cigars, phonograph records and whisky. My ultimate verdict is this: if you're a parent of a youngish kid, "Tales" is as good an antidote for today's world as anything out there. And if you happened to be growing up in the early 80s, it's a fabulous flight down Memory Lane.
But along with the vast edifices we have previously explored, shows which ran for many seasons and had appreciable cultural impact, there are also places which are as small as summer cottages, and upon closer inspection -- once we push past the creepers and vines which have overgrown their decaying wood beams -- we see that the series in question were never even completed during their own lifetimes. What lies beneath the moss and cobwebs is incomplete as well as half lost in the weeds, abandoned before its time. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" (1982 - 1983) is such a show. It existed only briefly, it died an unfair and unnatural death, and its star was retroactively tainted by a scandal which broke decades after the series left the airwaves. In short, it is quite forgotten by all save television historians and those who grew up in the early 80s. Yet it has a place on Memory Lane, however small, because it speaks to something which lies deep within the heart of every small boy, now as then.
I should begin stating flatly that, not only in retrospect but at the time it aired, "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was an easy show to make fun of. It is full of worn-out clichés, embarrassing stereotypes, stupid dialogue, needless narration, bad blue screen effects, cruddy matte paintings, ill-fitting stock footage, archaic costumes, cringeworthy acting, fake sets and utterly preposterous plots. When fans try to defend this series against ridicule or even room-temperature observational criticism, they often begin by pretending as if this isn't so, and thus discredit their own arguments before they can even get going. I would never make the case that "Tales" was great television taken as such. I would actually start by acknowledging that in many ways it was terrible television...and then explain just why that doesn't make a halluva lot of difference.
"Tales" was concieved by the legendary writer-producer Donald P. Bellisario, who, along with Glen Larson and Stephen J. Cannell, is inarguably one of the pillars upon which modern TV rests. He was the brain behind "Magnum, P.I.", "Airwolf," "Quantum Leap," "JAG," and "NCIS" (which is still running after twenty years). Contrary to popular opinion, it was not a slapped-together imitation of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, which exploded onto movie screens in 1981, but an old idea which had been stewing on a back burner called "development" for years before the success of RAIDERS pushed it to the front of the stove. "Tales" is in fact a series which even in 1982 was a rare breed: the action-adventure show, with emphasis on adventure. It recreated a period in history (the last period in history, actually) when vast areas of the Earth were still unconquered, and thus adventure and exploration still possible: the pre-WW2 age of colonial empire. We forget it now, but there was a time within the living memory of some people when a large portion of this planet still slept in the pre-industrial era, and wandering too far off the map could get you eaten by cannibals, devoured by wild beasts, or plunk you down amidst the ruins of a lost city. When men and women who lived on the edge of that map literally straddled the line between civilization and savagery, the known world and the deep blue. It was an era of explorers, treasure-hunters, missionaries, smugglers, sailors, silk-scarfed pilots, drunken storytellers, one-eyed traders, pirate, crooks, spies, unscrupulous businessmen, absinthe-sodden colonial governors, dispossessed tribesmen, and ruthless empire-builders. And that is what "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was all about. That brawling, half-tamed lawless time when half the world was an unknown quantity and wonder was still possible. Think "Magnum P.I." train-wrecked into "Indiana Jones" (with just a little "Land of the Lost" sprinkled on top) and you have "Tales Of The Gold Monkey." It's the chaos and rawness of the Wild West, but with .45s instead of six guns, twin-engined aircraft instead of horses, and palm trees instead of tumbleweed.
The premise of "Tales" was dead simple. An ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins), his drunken, memory-challenged sidekick Corky (Jeff Mackay), and their one-eyed dog Jack (Leo the Dog) operate their seaplane, Cutter's Goose, out of the fictional island of Boragora, somewhere in the Marivellas Islands of the South Pacific, in the last few years before the outbreak of WW2, when a great deal of the world was owned by colonial powers. When our heroes are not flying supplies, mail or passengers to this or that far-flung outpost in the French or Japanese mandates, they are belly-up at the Monkey Bar, which is operated by the island's enigmatic magistrate Bon Chance Louie (Ron Moody in the pilot, Roddy McDowell in the series). In the bar are likely to be found Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O'Heany), a redheaded lounge singer and American spy; the Reverend Willie Tenboom (John Calvin), who is also a spy, albeit for Nazi Germany; and Gushie, a crippled ex-member of the Foreign Legion (Les Jankey). Pushing through the saloon doors every now and again are the villainous but charming Japanese princess Koji (the super-lovely Marta DuBois, staple femme fatale of the 80s and 90s) and her grumpy samurai henchman Todo (the ubiquitous John Fujioka, in full samurai rig), who longs to cut off Jake's head. With a group like this, where nearly everyone is hiding secrets from each other and unknowingly working at cross-purposes, you just know all sorts of wacky adventures are going to ensue, and believe me, they do. Over the course of the season (sadly, the only one the show ever produced), Jake & Co. come up against human traffickers, spies, cultists, boys raised by apes, treasure hunters, giant octopi, rebel insurgents, angry mobs, Japanese Zeroes, Nazis, ancient curses, and pretty much anything else you can think of. (In one memorable episode, samurai warriors battle huge, semi-carniverous monkeys.) It's incredibly silly, cheesy, clichéd and outlandish, ripping off from just about every old movie and Western you can think of, and often looking as if it were shot entirely on dusty old sets on the studio backlot...which in fact it was...but it's also great, great fun. And this is a large part of why it still occupies space, however overgrown and bug-eaten, in Memory Lane.
"Tales" is a show that made up for in heart and good, clean adventure what it lacked in other places. Though it was shot in 1982, it was essentially the product of a much earlier era, the era of the sensational tales written for boys and young men back in pulp magazines the 20s, 30s and 40s, which Bellasario undoubtedly grew up on, and that sense of lighthearted, "fistfights are fun, don't-worry-it's-just-a-flesh-wound" heroics, percolates all throughout the series. When Jake revs up the coughing, smoking motors of Cutter's Goose, we know that just over the glimmering Pacific horizon lies adventure, treasure, good-looking women, and sweaty, squinty-eyed villains of all races who cheat at cards and sell people into slavery. I cannot tell you how much I looked forward to watching this show every week when I was ten years old, or how bitter I was when it failed to be renewed for a second season. All children, especially boys, long for adventure, for dangerous quests in faraway and exotic lands. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" gave me all that, and when it disappeared, a piece of my childhood disappeared with it. I loved Jake Cutter because, like Thomas Magnum, he was a badass under pressure, but rather a dumbass when the pressure was off: he fumbled romances, got thrown through windows, lost at cards, tried in vain to keep Corky sober, and everlastingly argued with his one-eyed dog Jake. He was heroic but relatable, and his fondness for cigars, eye for the ladies and passion for baseball gave him just enough spice to escape the Dudley Doorite dullness that sometimes afflicted 80s-era heroes.
The bitterness of the pill was accentuated by the fact that "Tales" was cancelled not because of low ratings, but due to a pissing contest between Bellisario and ABC network executives: Bellisario wanted the show to stay reasonably grounded, with stories about spying, smuggling, and so forth, while the suits wanted more extreme plotlines that blurred the lines between adventure and fantasy. Bellisario would not budge, so to spite him, the series was relegated to the dustbin, an act that reportedly caused rival networks to literally uncork champagne, since they believed "Tales" was potential mega-hit which would have run as long as seven seasons. Such is Hollywood, then as now, a fact which brings me no comfort...now or then.
So where does that leave us? Does "Tales" have any relevance forty years down the road? Are there lessons to be learned from its brief existence? Can a show that ran a single year have a legacy? Does it deserve one, romanticizing colonialism as it was sometimes accused of doing?
I would argue that "Tales" is actually more relevant and more necessary now, despite all of its early-80s silliness, than it was back then. The age we live in is cynical, and cynicism is the opposite of wonder. Kids nowadays sit in front of first-person shooter video games, Snapchat and Tik Tok with glassed-over eyes, and seldom get a chance to flex the adventure-muscles that are every child's absolute birthright. "Tales" harkens back to a time when the craving for adventure was accepted as a natural function of boyhood and girlhood, as craving for unearned fame and gross material wealth is today. It presupposes that there are realms beyond the border of electric light and air conditioning, where people have to live by their wits or die, something every Western child should consider in this age of flabby keyboard warriors and porn-addicted, basement-dwelling trolls. The fact that it expired after only a year, despite ratings success, serves as a salutary warning about the role of ego in the decision-making process: Bellisario, in my mind, was right to fight for his vision of the show, but naive and silly to let the fight escalate to the point where men obsessed with money were willing to sacrifice hefty future profits just to step on his dream. The very act of bringing a television series into existence is a vast series of painful and occasionally humiliating compromises, conducted for the greater good: it is the painful intersection of the commercial and the artistic, and that intersection is usually littered with blood and wreckage. Bellisario knew this better than anyone. He could have been more strategic, chosen his battles more carefully. In the modern parlance, however, he chose violence, and the people employed by the show, and its many fans, paid the price.
Now we come to the last point. Did "Tales" romanticize colonialism, European or otherwise? The answer, as is so often the case in questions like this, is yes, and no. It is often taken for granted in the series that European colonialism is reasonable or at least justifiable or unquestionable, just as it is taken for granted that Japanese aspirations of this type are inherently sinister. Few of the episodes question the fact that so much of the world was divvied up between a few European powers like so much pie at a Thanksgiving feast. Moreover, native anti-colonialists, though depicted, are not always painted in a good light, but rather as embittered, angry disruptors of the social order; and the whole mystique of mercenaries, smugglers, explorers, spies and and so forth, playing poker in the Monkey Bar beneath clouds of cigar smoke as they plotted their next adventure, is undoubtedly rooted in a deep nostalgia for this era: indeed, as I have said, it is a large part of the show's appeal, just as it is a large part of the appeal of the Indiana Jones films. But it would be unfair to say that "Tales" simply ignored the evils of colonialism. The episode "Shangheid" tackled modern-day slavery, while "Escape from Death Island" chronicled the cruelty of French penal colonies. "Boragora or Bust" centers around the exploitation of mineral rights, while "A Distant Shout of Thunder" directly addresses native hostility and resentment to colonial domination. The writers were not entirely blind to the nature of the world their characters were living.
I don't mean to imply that "Tales" offered sophisticated commentary on this subject or any other; only that it was not completely lacking in nuance (the character of Willy Tenboom, for example, was a German spy, but manifestly not a Nazi; his main interest was bedding nubile island girls, and he often pitched in to help Jake). The show may have romanticized the age and the setting, but its moral compass was firmly in place: right remained right, wrong remained wrong. It was manifestly on the side of the little man against the big man, for individuality and, ultimately, the freedom that comes with living on the edge of the world, where law is more of an idea than a reality, and civilization comes in the form of once-a-month clippers full of mail, cigars, phonograph records and whisky. My ultimate verdict is this: if you're a parent of a youngish kid, "Tales" is as good an antidote for today's world as anything out there. And if you happened to be growing up in the early 80s, it's a fabulous flight down Memory Lane.
November 8, 2023
THE HOBBIT ON THE ROCKS IS CRYING (A RANT)
FRODO: I'm going to Mordor alone, Sam.
SAM: I know! And I'm coming with you.
Rewatching The Lord of the Rings, now a quarter century old, I was struck by how human these films are, and how universal and timeless their values: friendship, loyalty, courage, duty, honor, sacrifice. There is nothing in the LOTR movies which has aged a day or will not be equally valid a century from now.
Modern movies tend to suck in large part because they are unable to produce memorable dialog or relatable characters we actually care about. They don't instruct; they condescend. They don't make music, they make noise. The bar for storytelling is not low; it is on the ground. Writers who might have once, generously, been allowed to sharpen pencils on a studio lot are now making millions to give us shit that could have been written by AI. And by AI, I mean the sort of AI which once opposed me in a game of "Pong."
In Braveheart, William Wallace tells Robert the Bruce, "Your title gives you claim to the throne of our country; but men don't follow titles, they follow courage." Not only is this a great line, it's also true of Hollywood: the title gives it claim to our attention and money, but people do not follow titles, they follow stories. And good storytelling is dependent on basic principles. Almost every movie I've seen in recent years is...content. Not art. Not even good popcorn entertainment: content. Disposable and forgettable. They differ from the bad movies of yesteryear in that they do not even try to be good. Nor is there any real attempt at originality. I can hardly think of an A-list, theatrical release movie I've seen in recent years which had any new ideas in it at all. On the other hand, I have seen almost every major legacy franchise and many minor ones desecrated out of recognition by reboots, spin-offs, remakes, sequels, prequels, and "re-imaginings" that attempt to "fix" what was never broken in the first place.
Making a great movie is not easy, but the principles that drive great movies are easy to understand. Audiences want to be entertained, sure, but they also want to be inspired and have the deeper values of humankind affirmed...after being put to a harsh test. From Rocky to Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker to Bilbo Baggins, it's all about the journey.
There and back again.
Modern movie writers need to understand why people go to the movies in the first place.
SAM: I know! And I'm coming with you.
Rewatching The Lord of the Rings, now a quarter century old, I was struck by how human these films are, and how universal and timeless their values: friendship, loyalty, courage, duty, honor, sacrifice. There is nothing in the LOTR movies which has aged a day or will not be equally valid a century from now.
Modern movies tend to suck in large part because they are unable to produce memorable dialog or relatable characters we actually care about. They don't instruct; they condescend. They don't make music, they make noise. The bar for storytelling is not low; it is on the ground. Writers who might have once, generously, been allowed to sharpen pencils on a studio lot are now making millions to give us shit that could have been written by AI. And by AI, I mean the sort of AI which once opposed me in a game of "Pong."
In Braveheart, William Wallace tells Robert the Bruce, "Your title gives you claim to the throne of our country; but men don't follow titles, they follow courage." Not only is this a great line, it's also true of Hollywood: the title gives it claim to our attention and money, but people do not follow titles, they follow stories. And good storytelling is dependent on basic principles. Almost every movie I've seen in recent years is...content. Not art. Not even good popcorn entertainment: content. Disposable and forgettable. They differ from the bad movies of yesteryear in that they do not even try to be good. Nor is there any real attempt at originality. I can hardly think of an A-list, theatrical release movie I've seen in recent years which had any new ideas in it at all. On the other hand, I have seen almost every major legacy franchise and many minor ones desecrated out of recognition by reboots, spin-offs, remakes, sequels, prequels, and "re-imaginings" that attempt to "fix" what was never broken in the first place.
Making a great movie is not easy, but the principles that drive great movies are easy to understand. Audiences want to be entertained, sure, but they also want to be inspired and have the deeper values of humankind affirmed...after being put to a harsh test. From Rocky to Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker to Bilbo Baggins, it's all about the journey.
There and back again.
Modern movie writers need to understand why people go to the movies in the first place.
November 5, 2023
PROHIBITION EDITION
George Orwell once made a joke about "the horror of the English Sunday." He was referring to the boredom endured by all Englishmen on this day, due to the fact that all pubs, and nearly all businesses, were forcibly closed by law, leaving the populace with nothing to do except go for long walks...or go to church. Needless to say, it was the Church of England which lay behind these laws: they didn't want competition, and so did everything in their power to eliminate it and make uncomfortable wooden pews, dull sermons and off-key singing more palatable to people who would have preferred a pint and a game of football. It didn't really work, most prohibitions don't, and it merely created boredom and resentment from the people; but it was enforced rigorously for centuries -- indeed, long after the Church lost both its power and its relevancy, the horror of its blue laws persisted.
The need governments, religious groups and so forth feel to bludgeon supposedly free people into doing "what's best for them" is a source of ongoing fascination for me. I first noticed this phenomena when I was attending college in Pennsylvania many years ago. As someone born in Illinois and raised in Maryland, I was unfamiliar with PA blue laws until I ran headfirst into them as an undergraduate with a perpetual thirst for beer. I soon discovered two remarkable facts about the Commonwealth in which I attended school: the first was that Pennsylvanians drink an astonishing amount of alcohol. The second was that every form of legal nuisance had been created in order to separate them from their pints, wine bottles and fifths of whiskey.
You could not, in the Commonwealth of PA, buy liquor or wine anywhere but a state owned liquor store whose hours were designed to make them almost inaccessible to anyone working during normal business hours: they were briefly open on Saturday mornings, but not, of course, on Sundays. You could not buy beer at grocery or conveience stores, and the laws prevented other stores, or bars, from selling six packs unless they also had a food license and did a certain percentage of their business exclusively in food sales. (Beer purchased at these sorts of bars or restaurants was, of course, priced far above market value.) Thus, your only choice was a beer distributor: but these sold only cases or kegs. Simply going out and grabbing a six of brew somewhere was a tedious, complicated, often expensive task, and on Sundays, as often as not, people were forced to drive on down to Maryland to get what they wanted, something feasible only because my college town happened to be 20 miles from the state border. Indeed, those who forgot to stock up for Superbowl Sunday faced a choice of either going dry or on what might have been a very long trip.
In addition to the deliberate and systematic fragmentation of the way alcohol was sold, and not sold, in PA, there was also a continuous petty harassment on alcohol purchasers, conducted by the police and various liquor control entities. They used to set up shop near bars, distributors and liquor stores and try to catch under-age people buying the product, which I suppose is natural enough, except that even when those asked to produce identification did so and were proven to be of age, they were often treated like criminals: one police officer shouted at me and friends of mine because we "weren't much over twenty-one," which prompted my normally meek friend Steve to shout back, "What fucking difference does that make?" Another time during this same era, the proprietor of a bowling alley demanded not only that we produce identification, but that we sign legal paperwork in order to be served his special blend of flat, room-temperature beer. In a third incident, my friend Eddie was threatened with a citation by the Liquor Control Board, not because he was underage, but because he had "given agents the impression that he was hesitant to produce identification proving his age." I could provide reams of additional, anecdotal evidence from this period, including the time my valid passport was rejected as a form of identification in a liquor store, but you get the picture: the purchase of alcohol was made deliberately more difficult than necessary, and virtually impossible on Sundays.
And what was the net result of all this pettifogging, nitpicking, ticket-writing, blue-nosed interference? Pennsylvania was routinely on the list of the ten most drunken states in the Union. Not only college students but poor people, blue collar workers, and middle class folk of every description were forever emptying beer, malt liquor, rum, whiskey, vodka, hard lemonade, spiked sparkling water, mixed drinks and wine down their throats. The bars and nightclubs were jam-packed all night long. After-hours parties raged until three or four in the morning. The beer distributors did rip-roaring trade from Thursday noon to closing time on Saturday night, and the caravans down to the Maryland Line to bring back kegs of beer ran continuously on Sundays. On Monday mornings, the recycling bins and trash cans on my block were overflowing with bottles and cans, and on my way to work in my post-college career, I often saw people sitting on their stoops in all weather, early in the mornings, drinking 22 ounce bottles of Silver Thunder. And it is no use to say, as many do, that it would all have been worse if these barriers had not been put into place, for it is well known that banning things is one of the most effective means of making them attractive and popular to the masses. I was reminded of my grandmother's stories about the Prohibition Era, and how all it seemed to accomplish in Chicago was to make people thirstier.
There is, and always has been, a lively debate about the role of the state in the life of the individual citizen or subject, especially in a democracy, where people are supposed to have freedom of choice. The old Roman doctrine of parens patriae -- "the state is the parent" -- is right up there with the "social contract" theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau for its ability to provoke argument about the rights and obligations of the individual versus the rights and obligations of the group...or the government. The absurdity of entities we the people created for our own benefit making it more difficult for us to do something we desire, is wrapped around the quite logical idea that total freedom is anarchy, and anarchy is not freedom at all; and therefore we must be restrained to a degree if we cannot restrain ourselves. And yet it seems to me that freedom has very little value unless it includes the freedom to make personal choices about one's body and what one does with it. Knowing this, however, governments and religious organizations usually go at what they see as "the problem" (your freedom) sideways. Just as those who want to censor art or speech will never admit what they are doing is censorship, those who want to tell you what to eat, drink, smoke, etc. will very rarley admit they want to control your behavior. And if they do, they will usually say those dreaded parental words, "it's for your own good."
Many would argue this is factually true. Drinking alcohol is not very good for you, especially the way it tends to get consumed in small town Pennsylvania, where people work hard and play harder, and it leads directly to all manner of crimes, from physical and sexual assaults to drunk driving. The tax revenue it brings in is probably offset to a great degree by the vandalism, destruction, and criminality it also produces. And forms of the same argument can also be made about smoking, or eating fast food or junk food: efforts were recently made in various cities to outlaw everything from the Big Gulp to Skittles, because they are so wretchedly unhealthy. But this slope is very slippery indeed. Bacon is profoundly unhealthy, but the average American consumes 18 lbs of it per year. Refined sugar is even worse for you, and every American gets 60 lbs of added sugar in the same time frame, and I don't (yet) hear anyone calling for bans or controls on them.
The extent to which ordinary people can be trusted to live their own lives is at the core of democratic identity. If the state really is the parent, it has the right to set rules within its house: but is the state the parent, and if it is, is it a fit one? How does it draw the line between allowing its children freedom of choice and stepping in to protect them from harm? What is the difference between restraints for the good of the people and tyranny, however petty the tyranny may be? America was founded on the idea that government could not be trusted, that it bent naturally toward absolutism, and had to be restrained by as many checks and balances upon its own power as could be put into place without making it actually impossible to do its job. This idea has lost currency in recent generations, but in a curiously sideways manner: no one really trusts the government anymore, but millions believe it is fit to decide what its citizens can and cannot do...at least when they agree with whatever decision it happens to make in that regard.
The horror of the Pennsylvania Sunday began to slacken some years before I moved back here from California in 2020. The monopoly of the state liquor store was broken, beer and wine are now sold conditionally in grocery stores (and even some convenience stores), and I doubt such of the old Sunday blue laws as are still on the books or enforced prevent anyone from getting as tanked as they please on the Lord's day. This battle, waged so absurdly and bitterly for so many years, has been won and lost -- at least for now. But the larger issue of why institutions created by human beings, so often fight against the wishes of human beings, and whether this is a good thing or an evil one, or falls into some nebulous third category, is a subject which deserves ongoing study.
The need governments, religious groups and so forth feel to bludgeon supposedly free people into doing "what's best for them" is a source of ongoing fascination for me. I first noticed this phenomena when I was attending college in Pennsylvania many years ago. As someone born in Illinois and raised in Maryland, I was unfamiliar with PA blue laws until I ran headfirst into them as an undergraduate with a perpetual thirst for beer. I soon discovered two remarkable facts about the Commonwealth in which I attended school: the first was that Pennsylvanians drink an astonishing amount of alcohol. The second was that every form of legal nuisance had been created in order to separate them from their pints, wine bottles and fifths of whiskey.
You could not, in the Commonwealth of PA, buy liquor or wine anywhere but a state owned liquor store whose hours were designed to make them almost inaccessible to anyone working during normal business hours: they were briefly open on Saturday mornings, but not, of course, on Sundays. You could not buy beer at grocery or conveience stores, and the laws prevented other stores, or bars, from selling six packs unless they also had a food license and did a certain percentage of their business exclusively in food sales. (Beer purchased at these sorts of bars or restaurants was, of course, priced far above market value.) Thus, your only choice was a beer distributor: but these sold only cases or kegs. Simply going out and grabbing a six of brew somewhere was a tedious, complicated, often expensive task, and on Sundays, as often as not, people were forced to drive on down to Maryland to get what they wanted, something feasible only because my college town happened to be 20 miles from the state border. Indeed, those who forgot to stock up for Superbowl Sunday faced a choice of either going dry or on what might have been a very long trip.
In addition to the deliberate and systematic fragmentation of the way alcohol was sold, and not sold, in PA, there was also a continuous petty harassment on alcohol purchasers, conducted by the police and various liquor control entities. They used to set up shop near bars, distributors and liquor stores and try to catch under-age people buying the product, which I suppose is natural enough, except that even when those asked to produce identification did so and were proven to be of age, they were often treated like criminals: one police officer shouted at me and friends of mine because we "weren't much over twenty-one," which prompted my normally meek friend Steve to shout back, "What fucking difference does that make?" Another time during this same era, the proprietor of a bowling alley demanded not only that we produce identification, but that we sign legal paperwork in order to be served his special blend of flat, room-temperature beer. In a third incident, my friend Eddie was threatened with a citation by the Liquor Control Board, not because he was underage, but because he had "given agents the impression that he was hesitant to produce identification proving his age." I could provide reams of additional, anecdotal evidence from this period, including the time my valid passport was rejected as a form of identification in a liquor store, but you get the picture: the purchase of alcohol was made deliberately more difficult than necessary, and virtually impossible on Sundays.
And what was the net result of all this pettifogging, nitpicking, ticket-writing, blue-nosed interference? Pennsylvania was routinely on the list of the ten most drunken states in the Union. Not only college students but poor people, blue collar workers, and middle class folk of every description were forever emptying beer, malt liquor, rum, whiskey, vodka, hard lemonade, spiked sparkling water, mixed drinks and wine down their throats. The bars and nightclubs were jam-packed all night long. After-hours parties raged until three or four in the morning. The beer distributors did rip-roaring trade from Thursday noon to closing time on Saturday night, and the caravans down to the Maryland Line to bring back kegs of beer ran continuously on Sundays. On Monday mornings, the recycling bins and trash cans on my block were overflowing with bottles and cans, and on my way to work in my post-college career, I often saw people sitting on their stoops in all weather, early in the mornings, drinking 22 ounce bottles of Silver Thunder. And it is no use to say, as many do, that it would all have been worse if these barriers had not been put into place, for it is well known that banning things is one of the most effective means of making them attractive and popular to the masses. I was reminded of my grandmother's stories about the Prohibition Era, and how all it seemed to accomplish in Chicago was to make people thirstier.
There is, and always has been, a lively debate about the role of the state in the life of the individual citizen or subject, especially in a democracy, where people are supposed to have freedom of choice. The old Roman doctrine of parens patriae -- "the state is the parent" -- is right up there with the "social contract" theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau for its ability to provoke argument about the rights and obligations of the individual versus the rights and obligations of the group...or the government. The absurdity of entities we the people created for our own benefit making it more difficult for us to do something we desire, is wrapped around the quite logical idea that total freedom is anarchy, and anarchy is not freedom at all; and therefore we must be restrained to a degree if we cannot restrain ourselves. And yet it seems to me that freedom has very little value unless it includes the freedom to make personal choices about one's body and what one does with it. Knowing this, however, governments and religious organizations usually go at what they see as "the problem" (your freedom) sideways. Just as those who want to censor art or speech will never admit what they are doing is censorship, those who want to tell you what to eat, drink, smoke, etc. will very rarley admit they want to control your behavior. And if they do, they will usually say those dreaded parental words, "it's for your own good."
Many would argue this is factually true. Drinking alcohol is not very good for you, especially the way it tends to get consumed in small town Pennsylvania, where people work hard and play harder, and it leads directly to all manner of crimes, from physical and sexual assaults to drunk driving. The tax revenue it brings in is probably offset to a great degree by the vandalism, destruction, and criminality it also produces. And forms of the same argument can also be made about smoking, or eating fast food or junk food: efforts were recently made in various cities to outlaw everything from the Big Gulp to Skittles, because they are so wretchedly unhealthy. But this slope is very slippery indeed. Bacon is profoundly unhealthy, but the average American consumes 18 lbs of it per year. Refined sugar is even worse for you, and every American gets 60 lbs of added sugar in the same time frame, and I don't (yet) hear anyone calling for bans or controls on them.
The extent to which ordinary people can be trusted to live their own lives is at the core of democratic identity. If the state really is the parent, it has the right to set rules within its house: but is the state the parent, and if it is, is it a fit one? How does it draw the line between allowing its children freedom of choice and stepping in to protect them from harm? What is the difference between restraints for the good of the people and tyranny, however petty the tyranny may be? America was founded on the idea that government could not be trusted, that it bent naturally toward absolutism, and had to be restrained by as many checks and balances upon its own power as could be put into place without making it actually impossible to do its job. This idea has lost currency in recent generations, but in a curiously sideways manner: no one really trusts the government anymore, but millions believe it is fit to decide what its citizens can and cannot do...at least when they agree with whatever decision it happens to make in that regard.
The horror of the Pennsylvania Sunday began to slacken some years before I moved back here from California in 2020. The monopoly of the state liquor store was broken, beer and wine are now sold conditionally in grocery stores (and even some convenience stores), and I doubt such of the old Sunday blue laws as are still on the books or enforced prevent anyone from getting as tanked as they please on the Lord's day. This battle, waged so absurdly and bitterly for so many years, has been won and lost -- at least for now. But the larger issue of why institutions created by human beings, so often fight against the wishes of human beings, and whether this is a good thing or an evil one, or falls into some nebulous third category, is a subject which deserves ongoing study.
November 2, 2023
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2023) THE FINAL CHAPTER
Well, here we are in November. The jack o' lanterns have been hauled in, and the orange lights taken down. The candy which hasn't been consumed is beginning the slow process of petrification in jars and plastic bags on cabinet shelves and in desk drawers, and costumes have been returned to stores, stuffed into trunks or simply hurled into the trash. Even pumpkin spice, the joy or bane of millions of North Americans, is disappearing streadily from coffee shops and gas stations everywhere. Halloween, like most big holidays, leaves a kind of hangover in its wake -- a feeling of having overindulged in something silly and artificial, much like the candy which accompanies it. But the guilt is of a pleasurable sort, and as we clean up the debris of pumpkin seeds and cellophane wrappers and beer pull tabs, we also come to this, the last (for 2023) installment of Halloween Horror.
My goal for October this year was the same as last: carve a pumpkin, attend a costume party, and watch 31 horror films I've never seen before in 31 days. With a slight allowance for error, I succeeded, and the time has come for me to finish the list of those movies which I watched, and in some cases, endured, to celebrate the season. I find nothing weird or paradoxical in the fact that I tend to turn October into a form of self-flagellation, because Halloween, being a time for frights, therefore by definition must also include some discomfort. For those who actually care about cinema of this type, some of my opinions will be controversial, but I am always ready to defend them or expand upon them, and indeed, tomorrow I will be making my umpteenth appearance on the LCS Hockey Radio Show to do just that. You may be wondering why a show with thats port in the title cares about such things: all I can do is assure you that the last thing I ever hear on that podcast is anything about hockey. Anyway, here we go....
Get Out (2017). This film was such a huge hit, and made so many "best of" lists, that it was bound to disappoint me, and lo and behold, it did. GET OUT is the story of a (black) man with a (white) girlfriend, who goes to the country to "meet the parents" and discovers something is wrong with his perspective in-laws. Very wrong. Playing on themes of black distrust of white folks, the real motives behind interracial relationships, racism, class privileged, and general paranoia, the first half of this movie is actually very good and does a fine job of slowly building tension. Alas, just when it is firing on all cylinders it changes its tone and dives into comedy and absurdity. Horror comedy is damnably and devilishly difficult to pull off, and GET OUT is undeniably funny, but it's not supposed to be funny: it's supposed to be scary. Jordan Peele's background in sketch comedy betrays him here, and ruins what might have been a fine film.
Don't Breathe (2016). What happens when three amoral burglars decide to rob a blind war veteran of the insurance settlement cash he was awarded following the wrongful death of his only daughter? A morally bankrupt movie. Ripping many pages from the book of Wes Craven's THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, another "home invasion gone wrong" film with overtones about class warfare, DON'T BREATHE finds our singularly loathsome protagonists up against an ex-special forces man whose blindness doesn't stop him from defending his castle against their intrusion. Stephen Lang does a lot with a little as The Blind Man, whose grief has driven him into violent insanity, but it's impossible to sympathize with our heroine, whose sense of entitlement is so colossal that she comes off as worse than he is -- old Blindy at least has the excuse that he's nuts. What's hers? This is a pretty good suspense movie, but its moral compass us wedged firmly in its digestive tract.
Howl (2015). This British werewolf movie is not really scary, but it is entertaining and very well-acted. In essence, it presages TRAIN TO BUSAN in that it's about a midnight train which breaks down in the remote British countryside and is then beset by furry, flesh-eating beasts which force our passengers and crew to find their own inner heroes, or die. Like the other movies here, there are undertones of class warfare and societal commentary, but they are low key and unannoying, and the flick moves at such a swift pace it's as if the editor was trying to cut every extraneous frame: there's no fat here at all, just movement. It also features a blinky cameo from Sean Pertwee in an obvious homage to DOG SOLDIERS, another British werewolf romp (see my previous blog).
Insidious (2010). This movie's sole distinction is that it delivers a large number of effective jump scares and a pretty good performance by Rose Byrne. Aside from that, it's absolute garbage, which isn't surprising, considering it's from the gang that gave us SAW, another hugely overrated movie which failed to live up to its own, superb premise. The story follows the attempts of a husband and wife to rescue their comatose (read: possessed) son from a demonic realm called The Further. This flick falls off the rails with a bang about halfway through, and even tries GET OUT's tone-inconsistent humor to soften the blow of the fall, but every twist is telegraphed so badly I felt as if I'd read the script before I watched the movie. In fact, despite some early-mid promise, almost everything INSIDIOUS does reads like every other possession film you've ever seen. There is nothing new here, just an above-average number of jump scares which peter out all too soon.
Alice Sweet Alice (1976). Some horror movies are scary. Some are just disturbing. ALICE SWEET ALICE is extremely disturbing, one might even say disgusting, but not in a blood 'n guts way. This gritty, low-budget psychological-slasher movie plunges a meat cleaver into every taboo I can think of, from child murder to child sexual molestation to religious blasphemy to animal cruelty. It is the story of Alice, a deeply disturbed young girl whose older sister is murdered on her confirmation day, and who is the suspect in this killing, and a number of other horrible crimes which subsequently plague her apartment building and church. Her dad returns from divorce exile to try and root out the truth, but does he even want it? Is Alice in fact the sadistic, mask-wearing, knife-wielding murderer? I won't answer that, but I will say it doesn't much matter, because the movie never even attempts paint Alice as anything but a burgeoning psychopath. I kinda wanted a shower after this movie, but I can't deny its impact: and if you look real closely, you'll see Brooke Shields making her film debut.
The Pope's Exorcist (2023). Russell Crowe always brings his A-game. Unfortunately, he often brings it to the wrong place. Yet another possession movie, supposedly based on the exploits of the Vatican's actual chief exorcist, Gabrielle Amorth, takes us to Italy, where a visiting American family moves into the wrong house, one occupied by a lively demon. Cue said exorcist, who comes to battle evil with a cross in one hand and a flask in the other. There's nothing here we haven't seen in the original EXORCIST or its sequels, from a foul-mouthed demon with a taste for cruel invective, to possessed people doing the spide-walk on the ceiling, to priests chanting incantations while chaos ensues. Throw in a great deal of noisy CGI and this was a waste of a fine actor doing his best to elevate prosaic material.
Halloween (2007). Rob Zombie was a pretty good heavy metal singer. He should have stuck to that, and not tortured us with his vulgar, tawdry, intellectually and morally bankrupt cinematic pretentions. HALLOWEEN is his take on a classic horror movie, maybe the classic horror movie, John Carpenter's 1978 film of the same name. This version lifts the bad guy, mask, and music, but leaves behind the scares, ingenuity, restraint, and underlying horror -- everything, in fact, that made the first one great. The original HALLOWEEN was essentially the Book of Job set in a small Illinois town: in other words, bad things happening to good people. Carpenter presented Michael Myers, the unspeaking, murderous villain, as a force rather than a person: The Boogeyman, without motive, evil incarnate, existing only to spread pointless suffering. Zombie, in contrast, explains everything, reducing Michael to a mere set of influences. When a director has no real talent, he pushes everything to extremes in the hopes you won't notice this ugly fact. This movie should actually be called ANTI-HALLOWEEN, so thoroughly does it upend what Carpenter did so brilliantly in his original film. Just an endless, foul-mouthed, blood-drenched mess that bludgeons the audience into stupefaction and has nothing new or interesting to say.
Hell Night (1981). Linda Blair, of EXORCIST fame, stars in this quite unscary, but rather fun, slasher set in a supposedly haunted mansion on a fraternity-sorority hell night. And wouldn't you know it? It really is haunted, by a lunatic -- or lunatics -- who don't like intruders one bit. Our pledges are far more interesting than the usual 80s-era slasher fodder, especially Timothy Van Patten as a surfer dude with a yellow streak that turns a heroic gold as the film progresses, and I credit the director for the opening party sequence on Halloween night, which involved hundreds of drunken extras, not one of whom looks at the camera. Blair doesn't light up the screen, but her character is plucky and resourceful without being at all a boring "strong [read: perfect] female character" of the modern sort. While decidedly a B-movie in every way, it has touches of class, such as its decidedly Gothic tone, which give it a sincerity lacking in most movies of this type.
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). Widely derided as one of the worst threatrical release movies of its era, if not all time, this sluggish, utterly incoherent sequel to the immortal classic finds Linda Blair's Reagan McNeil four years older, but facing an old problem: demonic possession. A star-studded cast (Richard Burton, Max von Sydow, Ned Beatty, James Earl Jones, etc., etc.), an up-and-coming director (John Boorman), and an amazing theme song by Ennio Morricone ("Ecstasy and Magic") are wasted on this nonsensical fever-dream, which is full of fantastic imagery but plays out like the script was written by someone who chugged a bottle of Jack Daniels spiked with 30 doses of LSD. I seriously never knew what the hell was happening in this movie and I'm damned sure Richard Burton was too drunk to care.
And with that, I leave my fifty-first Halloween behind me. I managed to make a serious dent in the number of more modern horror films I'd somehow never seen, and picked off a few lingering oldies in the bargain, but the supply seems inexhaustible, and next year, the good gods willing, I'll be back here rambling about all of this again. But for now, I'm sealing up this tomb.
My goal for October this year was the same as last: carve a pumpkin, attend a costume party, and watch 31 horror films I've never seen before in 31 days. With a slight allowance for error, I succeeded, and the time has come for me to finish the list of those movies which I watched, and in some cases, endured, to celebrate the season. I find nothing weird or paradoxical in the fact that I tend to turn October into a form of self-flagellation, because Halloween, being a time for frights, therefore by definition must also include some discomfort. For those who actually care about cinema of this type, some of my opinions will be controversial, but I am always ready to defend them or expand upon them, and indeed, tomorrow I will be making my umpteenth appearance on the LCS Hockey Radio Show to do just that. You may be wondering why a show with thats port in the title cares about such things: all I can do is assure you that the last thing I ever hear on that podcast is anything about hockey. Anyway, here we go....
Get Out (2017). This film was such a huge hit, and made so many "best of" lists, that it was bound to disappoint me, and lo and behold, it did. GET OUT is the story of a (black) man with a (white) girlfriend, who goes to the country to "meet the parents" and discovers something is wrong with his perspective in-laws. Very wrong. Playing on themes of black distrust of white folks, the real motives behind interracial relationships, racism, class privileged, and general paranoia, the first half of this movie is actually very good and does a fine job of slowly building tension. Alas, just when it is firing on all cylinders it changes its tone and dives into comedy and absurdity. Horror comedy is damnably and devilishly difficult to pull off, and GET OUT is undeniably funny, but it's not supposed to be funny: it's supposed to be scary. Jordan Peele's background in sketch comedy betrays him here, and ruins what might have been a fine film.
Don't Breathe (2016). What happens when three amoral burglars decide to rob a blind war veteran of the insurance settlement cash he was awarded following the wrongful death of his only daughter? A morally bankrupt movie. Ripping many pages from the book of Wes Craven's THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, another "home invasion gone wrong" film with overtones about class warfare, DON'T BREATHE finds our singularly loathsome protagonists up against an ex-special forces man whose blindness doesn't stop him from defending his castle against their intrusion. Stephen Lang does a lot with a little as The Blind Man, whose grief has driven him into violent insanity, but it's impossible to sympathize with our heroine, whose sense of entitlement is so colossal that she comes off as worse than he is -- old Blindy at least has the excuse that he's nuts. What's hers? This is a pretty good suspense movie, but its moral compass us wedged firmly in its digestive tract.
Howl (2015). This British werewolf movie is not really scary, but it is entertaining and very well-acted. In essence, it presages TRAIN TO BUSAN in that it's about a midnight train which breaks down in the remote British countryside and is then beset by furry, flesh-eating beasts which force our passengers and crew to find their own inner heroes, or die. Like the other movies here, there are undertones of class warfare and societal commentary, but they are low key and unannoying, and the flick moves at such a swift pace it's as if the editor was trying to cut every extraneous frame: there's no fat here at all, just movement. It also features a blinky cameo from Sean Pertwee in an obvious homage to DOG SOLDIERS, another British werewolf romp (see my previous blog).
Insidious (2010). This movie's sole distinction is that it delivers a large number of effective jump scares and a pretty good performance by Rose Byrne. Aside from that, it's absolute garbage, which isn't surprising, considering it's from the gang that gave us SAW, another hugely overrated movie which failed to live up to its own, superb premise. The story follows the attempts of a husband and wife to rescue their comatose (read: possessed) son from a demonic realm called The Further. This flick falls off the rails with a bang about halfway through, and even tries GET OUT's tone-inconsistent humor to soften the blow of the fall, but every twist is telegraphed so badly I felt as if I'd read the script before I watched the movie. In fact, despite some early-mid promise, almost everything INSIDIOUS does reads like every other possession film you've ever seen. There is nothing new here, just an above-average number of jump scares which peter out all too soon.
Alice Sweet Alice (1976). Some horror movies are scary. Some are just disturbing. ALICE SWEET ALICE is extremely disturbing, one might even say disgusting, but not in a blood 'n guts way. This gritty, low-budget psychological-slasher movie plunges a meat cleaver into every taboo I can think of, from child murder to child sexual molestation to religious blasphemy to animal cruelty. It is the story of Alice, a deeply disturbed young girl whose older sister is murdered on her confirmation day, and who is the suspect in this killing, and a number of other horrible crimes which subsequently plague her apartment building and church. Her dad returns from divorce exile to try and root out the truth, but does he even want it? Is Alice in fact the sadistic, mask-wearing, knife-wielding murderer? I won't answer that, but I will say it doesn't much matter, because the movie never even attempts paint Alice as anything but a burgeoning psychopath. I kinda wanted a shower after this movie, but I can't deny its impact: and if you look real closely, you'll see Brooke Shields making her film debut.
The Pope's Exorcist (2023). Russell Crowe always brings his A-game. Unfortunately, he often brings it to the wrong place. Yet another possession movie, supposedly based on the exploits of the Vatican's actual chief exorcist, Gabrielle Amorth, takes us to Italy, where a visiting American family moves into the wrong house, one occupied by a lively demon. Cue said exorcist, who comes to battle evil with a cross in one hand and a flask in the other. There's nothing here we haven't seen in the original EXORCIST or its sequels, from a foul-mouthed demon with a taste for cruel invective, to possessed people doing the spide-walk on the ceiling, to priests chanting incantations while chaos ensues. Throw in a great deal of noisy CGI and this was a waste of a fine actor doing his best to elevate prosaic material.
Halloween (2007). Rob Zombie was a pretty good heavy metal singer. He should have stuck to that, and not tortured us with his vulgar, tawdry, intellectually and morally bankrupt cinematic pretentions. HALLOWEEN is his take on a classic horror movie, maybe the classic horror movie, John Carpenter's 1978 film of the same name. This version lifts the bad guy, mask, and music, but leaves behind the scares, ingenuity, restraint, and underlying horror -- everything, in fact, that made the first one great. The original HALLOWEEN was essentially the Book of Job set in a small Illinois town: in other words, bad things happening to good people. Carpenter presented Michael Myers, the unspeaking, murderous villain, as a force rather than a person: The Boogeyman, without motive, evil incarnate, existing only to spread pointless suffering. Zombie, in contrast, explains everything, reducing Michael to a mere set of influences. When a director has no real talent, he pushes everything to extremes in the hopes you won't notice this ugly fact. This movie should actually be called ANTI-HALLOWEEN, so thoroughly does it upend what Carpenter did so brilliantly in his original film. Just an endless, foul-mouthed, blood-drenched mess that bludgeons the audience into stupefaction and has nothing new or interesting to say.
Hell Night (1981). Linda Blair, of EXORCIST fame, stars in this quite unscary, but rather fun, slasher set in a supposedly haunted mansion on a fraternity-sorority hell night. And wouldn't you know it? It really is haunted, by a lunatic -- or lunatics -- who don't like intruders one bit. Our pledges are far more interesting than the usual 80s-era slasher fodder, especially Timothy Van Patten as a surfer dude with a yellow streak that turns a heroic gold as the film progresses, and I credit the director for the opening party sequence on Halloween night, which involved hundreds of drunken extras, not one of whom looks at the camera. Blair doesn't light up the screen, but her character is plucky and resourceful without being at all a boring "strong [read: perfect] female character" of the modern sort. While decidedly a B-movie in every way, it has touches of class, such as its decidedly Gothic tone, which give it a sincerity lacking in most movies of this type.
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). Widely derided as one of the worst threatrical release movies of its era, if not all time, this sluggish, utterly incoherent sequel to the immortal classic finds Linda Blair's Reagan McNeil four years older, but facing an old problem: demonic possession. A star-studded cast (Richard Burton, Max von Sydow, Ned Beatty, James Earl Jones, etc., etc.), an up-and-coming director (John Boorman), and an amazing theme song by Ennio Morricone ("Ecstasy and Magic") are wasted on this nonsensical fever-dream, which is full of fantastic imagery but plays out like the script was written by someone who chugged a bottle of Jack Daniels spiked with 30 doses of LSD. I seriously never knew what the hell was happening in this movie and I'm damned sure Richard Burton was too drunk to care.
And with that, I leave my fifty-first Halloween behind me. I managed to make a serious dent in the number of more modern horror films I'd somehow never seen, and picked off a few lingering oldies in the bargain, but the supply seems inexhaustible, and next year, the good gods willing, I'll be back here rambling about all of this again. But for now, I'm sealing up this tomb.
October 28, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "QUINCY"
You can scare me, but you can't stop me. -- Quincy
Everything in existence has a point of origin, but sometimes it is damnably difficult to find. This is true even in television, a medium which is not even a century old and by its nature is extraordinarily well documented. The effective origin of the forensic or medical detective show was QUINCY, M.E., which ran from 1976 to 1983 on the NBC network. It is remembered as "the first drama series to regularly feature detailed forensic investigations" [Google] and is thus the Big Bang of this particular genre of television. A search I conducted on reality and scripted medical detective series turned up 96 in English speaking countries alone, and this list only ran from the early 1990s. It does not include a number of series which came in the intervening decade between '93 and '92, including DA VINCI'S INQUEST, CORONER, HOUSE or even PROFILER, which wobbled on the borderline of this genre but probably falls within its reach.
I could a tale unfold about the history of this genre and what I truly feel precipitated its explosion in popularity, but let us stick to cases -- the case of Quincy, the crime-fighting coroner from Los Angles with the big nose, big mouth, and big heart, whose absence is felt as keenly, in my own heart anyway, as his once-overwhelming presence.
QUINCY was originally envisioned by legendary TV producer-writer Glen Larson as a series of TV movies in which a crusty, hot-tempered, skirt-chasing L.A. County coroner would utilize his knowledge of forensic pathology to solve seemingly impenetrable murder mysteries. At the time, the "holy trinity" of TV was composed of doctor shows, lawyer shows and cop shows: QUINCY offered something different: a doctor show in which all the "patients" were already dead, combined with a cop show in which the coroner outhustled and outhought the police. Hell, it even threw in a fair amount of legalese, and thus seemed to cover every base, at least partially. Cast in the starring role was a reluctant and combative Jack Klugman, co-star of THE ODD COUPLE, who didn't see himself in such a role and had little patience for the sort of weak, by-the-numbers storytelling which abounded on TV (then as now). Indeed, Klugman's determination to bring something "more than just screeching tires" to the boob tube led to the more orthodox-thinking Larson being elbowed out of his own show, and Klugman became, in effect, not merely QUINCY's star, but his own executive producer, showrunner and executive story editor. This act of aggressive egotism was to have profound consequences for the whole history of television.
Why? Because the ratings success of the four QUINCY TV movies led the show to be bumped unexpectedly to a weekly episodic series, and Klugman, who had a ferocious temper and was legendary for his screaming fits and stinging insults ("There are a lot of people in Hollywood who can type," he once remarked acidly. "There aren't many writers."), forced the ever-changing writers' room to bring him scripts which were actually about something. This led QUINCY to develop a unique identity as "the show with a cause."
Actually, "the with causes" would have been a better description, for although there are many QUINCY episodes which are simply forensic murder mysteries without societal commentary, every season devoted a hefty number of stories to questions of social justice. The way these topics were approached was by dressing them up as mere murder mysteries, and then -- usually by the second commercial at the latest -- revealing the underlying societal evil the producers wished to address, combat and correct. Without consulting the internet, I can think of dozens of causes the show dragged into the light of day for discussion: a random sampling would include autism, alcoholism, industrial waste, fad diets, orphan drugs, illegal immigration, airline safety, Tourette's Syndrome, PTSD, affirmative action, bureacracy, gun control, illiteracy, big pharma, pollution, the federal grand jury system, DUI laws, juvenile crime, incest, domestic violence, elder abuse, mental health, drug culture, child pornography and human trafficking, drug use in sports, medical insurance, Down's syndrome, abortion, vigilantism, PCP, holistic medicine, ghost surgery, and numerous issues within the medical community itself, such as incompetence, negligence, ethics, and addiction. Some topics were visited several times from different angles. What is particularly striking about this sampling is how timely most of the causes remain, even viewed through a distance of half a century. If ever we needed a reminder that some social problems are always with us, watching QUINCY rage, in 1978 or so, about topics we see in the 2023 headlines on a weekly basis, will surely fill the perscription. I myself have noted in my professional life as an advocate for victims of crime how ahead of the curve QUINCY was about lax drunk driving laws, or the loopholes the criminally insane or sex offenders used to wreak yet more havoc. In the case of so-called orphan drugs -- drugs developed to fight extremely rare diseases, which are therefore not profitable to manufacture -- QUINCY was actually instrumental in getting laws changed. It was a case of life consciously choosing to imitate art.
Klugman's performance as the crusading coroner deserves especial mention. While some of the dialog defeated his acting abilities, and his own acting range was not especially wide, his passion for the role generally overflowed even the weaker scripts and more hastily-constructed storylines. He is one of those performers who is just a joy to watch, as much for his flinty charisma as for his actual thespianism. The heavy New York accent ("coffee" is pronounced "cawfee") only adds flavor to a delivery already spiced by his deep, raspy voice. He is of that category of actor whose acting is less important than his presence -- and that he has in spades.
Quincy the character was given very little background. We never even learned his first name, not in eight years and 156 episodes ("I have one," he informs his soon-to-be-wife in the final season, "but nobody ever seems to use it.") We only knew that he was a surgeon who chucked his practice following the death of his wife from a brain tumor; that he lived on a boat and did not own a car; that had devoted his life to forensic pathology; that he was a womanizing workaholic with a fiery temper and a restless social conscience; and that his penchant for liberal muckraking belied a naive belief that we fight the fights that need fighting and that one man can make a difference if he pushes hard enough. QUINCY, the show, was at its heart a harsh civics lesson using forensic medicine as a kind of sugar-coating: beneath the sophisticated jargon and flashy science and the curiosity about whodunnit, it ceaselessly and shamelessly preached the need to get involved, to petition, to protest, to vote, to march, to meet, and to treat democracy as a cranky pull-motor that needed a lot of elbow grease and forehead sweat to get going. Quincy the character hated injustice and cruelty, fought for the little man against the big man, and preached a never-ceasing sermon against apathy; he believed the truth was holy.
Quincy was supported by, and often fought with, his good natured but long-suffering assistant Sam Fujiyama (Robert Ito); his equally long-suffering boss, the paper-pushing but principled Dr. Robert Asten (John S. Ragin); fiesty homicide detective Lt. Frank Monohan (Garry Walberg) and his sidekick Sgt Brill (Joe Roman); and sarcastic ex-con Danny Tovo (Sal Bisoglio), whose dockside restaurant was Quincy's favorite hangout. These co-stars were archetypes frozen in personality, changing not a whit over the course of eight years, but their very stolidity buttressed the show's theme that right and wrong, while not oversimple concepts, were fixed and not situational. Aside from the transition from periodic TV movies to series, only really atomic change in the show was Quincy's marriage to Emily Hanover (Anita Gillette) in the final season, but even this was more a nod to the fact that the story needed an ending than a desire to acknowledge the passage of time.
QUINCY reflected the spirit of its age, the 1970s, which was a curious mixture of post-Vietnam exuberance, post-Watergate cynicism, and Cold War nihilism. It had a tendency toward naivete in dialog and often tacked on unrealistically happy endings onto stories, though this was certainly not the case in episodes like "Scream to the Skies," "Headhunter," "Guns Don't Die," or "Into the Murdering Mind," to cite just a few examples. Its sense of humor was quite lively and stinging, though it could often be cringe-inducing and silly. Some of the funnier running gags were Sam's inability to keep dates because of Quincy forcing him to work late hours, Quincy bitterly railing about the taste of the office coffee, Asten's merciless penny-pinching, Quincy insisting on parking the coroner's meatwagon outside Danny's restaurant, and Danny's jokes, which were almost 100% at Quincy's expense. Though its politics were generally left of center, it generally gave at least lip service to critics of the "causes" in question, and while it took some pains to actually reflect the racial and cultural diversity of Los Angeles, by today's standards, a lot of the humor at Sam's expense was flat-out racist. Additionally, it sometimes saw boogeymen where none were present: its most notorious episode "Next Stop, Nowhere" memorably and laughably presented the extended musical belch that was punk rock movement as an imminent societal threat. Other "causes" such as look-alike drugs and midwifery, did not stand the test of time. But in the last analysis, QUINCY had an almost eerie sense of timeliness, of prescience. It -- by which I mean Klugman and his producers and such writers as survived his temper and his purges -- had a remakable ability to sense which headlines really mattered, which evils needed to be fought and defeated. The speech Quincy gives railing against big pharma's effect on society -- From birth, children are told by newspapers, by radio, television commercials that they needn't put up with one moment of mental anguish, that relief is just a short reach away to the nearest bottle of pills. It's become a form of escape and a form of recreation. -- is more relevant now, in 2023, than when it was given, in 1979. And it is but one of many which have remained relevant, despite the feeling, when one watches an episode now, that one is looking into an unrecognizably distant past.
So where does that leave QUINCY after an interval of almost fifty years? Does the show still matter in this age of unremitting cynicism? What is its legacy?
As I said above, QUINCY feels enormously dated, more because of the heavy-handed way it presents its stories rather than because of the stories themselves: it tends toward naivete or at least a fairly shiny idealism, towards a belief that despite every manner of villainy, the universe bends toward justice. It can be terribly, almost irredeemably cheesy, especially when it insists on unrealistic happily ever afters. And yet, if one can get past the thick, stale layers of this pasteurized product, one cuts through to a heart which is still powerfully beating. I have often praised the tendency of older television shows to come down on the side of decency, chivalry, honor, etc. rather than cyncism and moral ambiguity: QUINCY is a mighty spear-carrier for this cause, but it carries its spear in a more mature way than you might expect. It insists, shrilly and insistently, that people have to get off their ass if they want to live in the world they actually desire, rather than the shitty one they actually inhabit. It pokes the chest of its audience like an ill-tempered ethics teacher trying to get a stoned, cheetoh-eating teenager to vote. It underscores, with a large red marker, the fact that democracy is everybody's job. In the age of Trump, of Putin and Netanyahu, this is more important than ever.
QUINCY went off the air forty years ago, but if you want to see its practical legacy, you have only to look at the monkey-branch of forensic and medical detective shows that have proliferated since it went off the air. QUINCY is not solely responsible for them -- Thomas Harris, who wrote Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs is probably the real culprit, and QUINCY was predated and probably heavily influenced by WOJECK, a Canadian forensics show from the late 1960s which also embrace "causes" -- but it is the series which brought forensic pathology to the broad masses, and in a way that made science approachable and even sexy. Quincy didn't beat people up; he outthought them. His weapons were a microscope, a scalpel, the scientific method, and a belief in "civility," meaning not merely politeness or nonviolence, but an abiding faith in human civilization. SEINFELD was once aptly described as "a show about nothing." QUINCY was a show about decency -- how hard it can be to achieve, and how impossible it is to live without.
Everything in existence has a point of origin, but sometimes it is damnably difficult to find. This is true even in television, a medium which is not even a century old and by its nature is extraordinarily well documented. The effective origin of the forensic or medical detective show was QUINCY, M.E., which ran from 1976 to 1983 on the NBC network. It is remembered as "the first drama series to regularly feature detailed forensic investigations" [Google] and is thus the Big Bang of this particular genre of television. A search I conducted on reality and scripted medical detective series turned up 96 in English speaking countries alone, and this list only ran from the early 1990s. It does not include a number of series which came in the intervening decade between '93 and '92, including DA VINCI'S INQUEST, CORONER, HOUSE or even PROFILER, which wobbled on the borderline of this genre but probably falls within its reach.
I could a tale unfold about the history of this genre and what I truly feel precipitated its explosion in popularity, but let us stick to cases -- the case of Quincy, the crime-fighting coroner from Los Angles with the big nose, big mouth, and big heart, whose absence is felt as keenly, in my own heart anyway, as his once-overwhelming presence.
QUINCY was originally envisioned by legendary TV producer-writer Glen Larson as a series of TV movies in which a crusty, hot-tempered, skirt-chasing L.A. County coroner would utilize his knowledge of forensic pathology to solve seemingly impenetrable murder mysteries. At the time, the "holy trinity" of TV was composed of doctor shows, lawyer shows and cop shows: QUINCY offered something different: a doctor show in which all the "patients" were already dead, combined with a cop show in which the coroner outhustled and outhought the police. Hell, it even threw in a fair amount of legalese, and thus seemed to cover every base, at least partially. Cast in the starring role was a reluctant and combative Jack Klugman, co-star of THE ODD COUPLE, who didn't see himself in such a role and had little patience for the sort of weak, by-the-numbers storytelling which abounded on TV (then as now). Indeed, Klugman's determination to bring something "more than just screeching tires" to the boob tube led to the more orthodox-thinking Larson being elbowed out of his own show, and Klugman became, in effect, not merely QUINCY's star, but his own executive producer, showrunner and executive story editor. This act of aggressive egotism was to have profound consequences for the whole history of television.
Why? Because the ratings success of the four QUINCY TV movies led the show to be bumped unexpectedly to a weekly episodic series, and Klugman, who had a ferocious temper and was legendary for his screaming fits and stinging insults ("There are a lot of people in Hollywood who can type," he once remarked acidly. "There aren't many writers."), forced the ever-changing writers' room to bring him scripts which were actually about something. This led QUINCY to develop a unique identity as "the show with a cause."
Actually, "the with causes" would have been a better description, for although there are many QUINCY episodes which are simply forensic murder mysteries without societal commentary, every season devoted a hefty number of stories to questions of social justice. The way these topics were approached was by dressing them up as mere murder mysteries, and then -- usually by the second commercial at the latest -- revealing the underlying societal evil the producers wished to address, combat and correct. Without consulting the internet, I can think of dozens of causes the show dragged into the light of day for discussion: a random sampling would include autism, alcoholism, industrial waste, fad diets, orphan drugs, illegal immigration, airline safety, Tourette's Syndrome, PTSD, affirmative action, bureacracy, gun control, illiteracy, big pharma, pollution, the federal grand jury system, DUI laws, juvenile crime, incest, domestic violence, elder abuse, mental health, drug culture, child pornography and human trafficking, drug use in sports, medical insurance, Down's syndrome, abortion, vigilantism, PCP, holistic medicine, ghost surgery, and numerous issues within the medical community itself, such as incompetence, negligence, ethics, and addiction. Some topics were visited several times from different angles. What is particularly striking about this sampling is how timely most of the causes remain, even viewed through a distance of half a century. If ever we needed a reminder that some social problems are always with us, watching QUINCY rage, in 1978 or so, about topics we see in the 2023 headlines on a weekly basis, will surely fill the perscription. I myself have noted in my professional life as an advocate for victims of crime how ahead of the curve QUINCY was about lax drunk driving laws, or the loopholes the criminally insane or sex offenders used to wreak yet more havoc. In the case of so-called orphan drugs -- drugs developed to fight extremely rare diseases, which are therefore not profitable to manufacture -- QUINCY was actually instrumental in getting laws changed. It was a case of life consciously choosing to imitate art.
Klugman's performance as the crusading coroner deserves especial mention. While some of the dialog defeated his acting abilities, and his own acting range was not especially wide, his passion for the role generally overflowed even the weaker scripts and more hastily-constructed storylines. He is one of those performers who is just a joy to watch, as much for his flinty charisma as for his actual thespianism. The heavy New York accent ("coffee" is pronounced "cawfee") only adds flavor to a delivery already spiced by his deep, raspy voice. He is of that category of actor whose acting is less important than his presence -- and that he has in spades.
Quincy the character was given very little background. We never even learned his first name, not in eight years and 156 episodes ("I have one," he informs his soon-to-be-wife in the final season, "but nobody ever seems to use it.") We only knew that he was a surgeon who chucked his practice following the death of his wife from a brain tumor; that he lived on a boat and did not own a car; that had devoted his life to forensic pathology; that he was a womanizing workaholic with a fiery temper and a restless social conscience; and that his penchant for liberal muckraking belied a naive belief that we fight the fights that need fighting and that one man can make a difference if he pushes hard enough. QUINCY, the show, was at its heart a harsh civics lesson using forensic medicine as a kind of sugar-coating: beneath the sophisticated jargon and flashy science and the curiosity about whodunnit, it ceaselessly and shamelessly preached the need to get involved, to petition, to protest, to vote, to march, to meet, and to treat democracy as a cranky pull-motor that needed a lot of elbow grease and forehead sweat to get going. Quincy the character hated injustice and cruelty, fought for the little man against the big man, and preached a never-ceasing sermon against apathy; he believed the truth was holy.
Quincy was supported by, and often fought with, his good natured but long-suffering assistant Sam Fujiyama (Robert Ito); his equally long-suffering boss, the paper-pushing but principled Dr. Robert Asten (John S. Ragin); fiesty homicide detective Lt. Frank Monohan (Garry Walberg) and his sidekick Sgt Brill (Joe Roman); and sarcastic ex-con Danny Tovo (Sal Bisoglio), whose dockside restaurant was Quincy's favorite hangout. These co-stars were archetypes frozen in personality, changing not a whit over the course of eight years, but their very stolidity buttressed the show's theme that right and wrong, while not oversimple concepts, were fixed and not situational. Aside from the transition from periodic TV movies to series, only really atomic change in the show was Quincy's marriage to Emily Hanover (Anita Gillette) in the final season, but even this was more a nod to the fact that the story needed an ending than a desire to acknowledge the passage of time.
QUINCY reflected the spirit of its age, the 1970s, which was a curious mixture of post-Vietnam exuberance, post-Watergate cynicism, and Cold War nihilism. It had a tendency toward naivete in dialog and often tacked on unrealistically happy endings onto stories, though this was certainly not the case in episodes like "Scream to the Skies," "Headhunter," "Guns Don't Die," or "Into the Murdering Mind," to cite just a few examples. Its sense of humor was quite lively and stinging, though it could often be cringe-inducing and silly. Some of the funnier running gags were Sam's inability to keep dates because of Quincy forcing him to work late hours, Quincy bitterly railing about the taste of the office coffee, Asten's merciless penny-pinching, Quincy insisting on parking the coroner's meatwagon outside Danny's restaurant, and Danny's jokes, which were almost 100% at Quincy's expense. Though its politics were generally left of center, it generally gave at least lip service to critics of the "causes" in question, and while it took some pains to actually reflect the racial and cultural diversity of Los Angeles, by today's standards, a lot of the humor at Sam's expense was flat-out racist. Additionally, it sometimes saw boogeymen where none were present: its most notorious episode "Next Stop, Nowhere" memorably and laughably presented the extended musical belch that was punk rock movement as an imminent societal threat. Other "causes" such as look-alike drugs and midwifery, did not stand the test of time. But in the last analysis, QUINCY had an almost eerie sense of timeliness, of prescience. It -- by which I mean Klugman and his producers and such writers as survived his temper and his purges -- had a remakable ability to sense which headlines really mattered, which evils needed to be fought and defeated. The speech Quincy gives railing against big pharma's effect on society -- From birth, children are told by newspapers, by radio, television commercials that they needn't put up with one moment of mental anguish, that relief is just a short reach away to the nearest bottle of pills. It's become a form of escape and a form of recreation. -- is more relevant now, in 2023, than when it was given, in 1979. And it is but one of many which have remained relevant, despite the feeling, when one watches an episode now, that one is looking into an unrecognizably distant past.
So where does that leave QUINCY after an interval of almost fifty years? Does the show still matter in this age of unremitting cynicism? What is its legacy?
As I said above, QUINCY feels enormously dated, more because of the heavy-handed way it presents its stories rather than because of the stories themselves: it tends toward naivete or at least a fairly shiny idealism, towards a belief that despite every manner of villainy, the universe bends toward justice. It can be terribly, almost irredeemably cheesy, especially when it insists on unrealistic happily ever afters. And yet, if one can get past the thick, stale layers of this pasteurized product, one cuts through to a heart which is still powerfully beating. I have often praised the tendency of older television shows to come down on the side of decency, chivalry, honor, etc. rather than cyncism and moral ambiguity: QUINCY is a mighty spear-carrier for this cause, but it carries its spear in a more mature way than you might expect. It insists, shrilly and insistently, that people have to get off their ass if they want to live in the world they actually desire, rather than the shitty one they actually inhabit. It pokes the chest of its audience like an ill-tempered ethics teacher trying to get a stoned, cheetoh-eating teenager to vote. It underscores, with a large red marker, the fact that democracy is everybody's job. In the age of Trump, of Putin and Netanyahu, this is more important than ever.
QUINCY went off the air forty years ago, but if you want to see its practical legacy, you have only to look at the monkey-branch of forensic and medical detective shows that have proliferated since it went off the air. QUINCY is not solely responsible for them -- Thomas Harris, who wrote Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs is probably the real culprit, and QUINCY was predated and probably heavily influenced by WOJECK, a Canadian forensics show from the late 1960s which also embrace "causes" -- but it is the series which brought forensic pathology to the broad masses, and in a way that made science approachable and even sexy. Quincy didn't beat people up; he outthought them. His weapons were a microscope, a scalpel, the scientific method, and a belief in "civility," meaning not merely politeness or nonviolence, but an abiding faith in human civilization. SEINFELD was once aptly described as "a show about nothing." QUINCY was a show about decency -- how hard it can be to achieve, and how impossible it is to live without.
October 25, 2023
MIDDLE AGE AND EMBRACING THE SUCK
Yesterday I went to my barber, Olivia, for my tri-weekly haircut. I estimate the hair I have was perhaps a half-inch long at the most, but it was too much: a few swipes of the electric razor later, it was nothing but stubble. Marine recruits have more hair. Before I left, I decided to come back not in three but two weeks: I don't want even that barely half inch. Just Kojack me.
To anyone who knew me in college, the idea of me rocking a nearly bald dome would be beyond belief. I was famous for my luxurious head of hair, which I modeled after James Dean and Mickey Rourke and Luke Perry, and infamous for my vanity about it. My college dorm-mates laughed at the sight of my "preening bucket" -- the bucket I took to the showers each morning which contained a brush, a blow-drier, gel, mousse, a comb, and God knows what else. I quite enjoyed this mockery. I enjoyed the jokes about me doubling for Vanilla Ice. I was proud of my heavy brown locks and was more than willing to endure some ribbing about it.
I remember the day when it finally sank in that I was losing that hair. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and I compared the driver's license picture from my final year of college with the one just snapped. It struck me then that I had a lot more forehead. A lot more. I don't mean I was bald. I wasn't even what is generally referring to as balding. I just had...more forehead.
I began to sweat. As ridiculous as it sounds, a good deal of my identity had been invested in those follicles. They were part of my look, which was part of my vanity, which was part of my personality. I went into a state of denial, and after denial eroded in the face of the slowly growing forehead, I engaged in a bitter struggle to find hairstyles that worked. This struggle lasted almost twenty years, and the later half of it was very ugly indeed. Sometimes I'd go a whole year, or more, without a haircut, in hopes of compensating for fewer follicles. (This worked the first time, but never again.) Sometimes I'd rock the classic Caesar cut, which worked wonders until the quarter-sized bald spot on the back of my head grew to fifty-cent-piece, silver dollar, and finally teacup circumference. Sometimes, at the behest of my barber in Burbank, I'd powder the bald spot and grow out the front. Later, I grew out the front for almost two years and slicked it back, which bared yet more forehead but covered the growing desert in the back. I always congratulated myself on the success of these camouflage manuevers until I realized, usually through photography, that I was fooling no one but myself.
Not too long ago, I marched into the barber shop I've been utilizing here in York for several years, and told my cutter to let fly with those clippers. Just buzz the whole goddamn dome. I believe the number I selected was a No. 2. This looked pretty good to me, but it grew back all too quickly -- the central irony of baldness is that the hair you have grows like weeds -- so I returned and asked for a No. 1.5, and then a No. 1, which is the afformentioned Marine recruit buzz.
I'm like that: I will do everything humanly possible to avoid a decision I don't want to make, but when I finally make it, I run headlong at it like Sgt. Rock at the German lines, yelling "You wanna live forever?" between bursts of Tommy gun fire and hurling hand grenades. I do what folks in the military call "embracing the suck." Embracing the suck, I'm told, consists of not merely accepting that you are in a shitty situation, but opening your arms to it, and even learning how to enjoy it, whether on a philosophical or ironic level. It is, after all, unavoidable, so why bother crying and moaning?
Middle age is a damned strange business. Physically, I don't feel any different now than I did at thirty: I'm actually stronger, more muscular and probably a little more flexible. I've noticed no decline in stamina. Creatively, I'm doing better than ever, so there has been no cognitive decline. It's harder for me to lose weight, for sure, but I can still lose it, as I have documented on these very pages. Sexually I'm not twenty-one anymore, but show me a fifty year old man who is without having a Viagra I.V. The only real decline I can think of has been in terms of the quality of my sleep, but I've found ways to improve even that. And yet, according to the United Nations, old age begins at sixty. For me, that is nine years away. So I'd say you're only as old as you feel...but then I look in the mirror and remember I used to have James Dean hair, and I feel, well, kinda long in the tooth. Kinda gray in the muzzle. Kinda silver in the back. And I say to myself, "This is what it is, and you have to accept it. You have to embrace the suck."
It isn't easy. Not for me, anyway. I want to cry. I want to moan. The vanity of my youth persists in my mind like a poltergeist, and like a poltergeist gives me no rest on the days when a photograph or a video forces me to accept the 25 or 30 year old man I expect to see in the mirror is gone and ain't coming back. This happened to me recently, and at an inopportune time: celebrating the loss of almost fifteen pounds, I was sent nightly news footage of myself at a charity event...and I saw a bald, beefy, tired-looking guy who looked like he needed to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, easily. It was tough to take. I didn't get what I wanted after a lot of hard work. But rather than run to the nearest hair transplant center by way of a plastic surgeon specializing in liposuction, I just took a deep breath, sulked for the rest of the night, and then went back to the grind of shaving an ounce here, and an ounce there...and my head, now every two weeks.
Kierkegaard said that life was lived forward but understood backwards. He was more right than he knew. The more progress I make toward my real life goals, the further I get from my own physical ideal, and more I realize that the old me, the one which is evaporating, sloughing off, flaking away, is not going quietly or easily. I may be embracing the suck, but he is not. This poltergeist ain't getting exorcised quietly. He's gonna smash plates, up-end tables, spill drinks, blow out candles, and knock pictures off the wall. He's gonna crack windows and make thumping noises at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. Vanity is a bitch and doesn't want to be dumped. Who knows? Maybe this is a bit of a good thing. Maybe wanting to be young physically forces me to be as young, physically, as a fifty-one year old man can be. But chasing youth is a dangerous business, ultimately futile, and contains a note of tragic absurdity. The line between fighting the good fight and the cost-loss fallacy is fine, and middle-aged men don't always have the clearest or sharpest vision. It is, however, a little easier to see if you shave your head: at least the hair won't get in your eyes.
To anyone who knew me in college, the idea of me rocking a nearly bald dome would be beyond belief. I was famous for my luxurious head of hair, which I modeled after James Dean and Mickey Rourke and Luke Perry, and infamous for my vanity about it. My college dorm-mates laughed at the sight of my "preening bucket" -- the bucket I took to the showers each morning which contained a brush, a blow-drier, gel, mousse, a comb, and God knows what else. I quite enjoyed this mockery. I enjoyed the jokes about me doubling for Vanilla Ice. I was proud of my heavy brown locks and was more than willing to endure some ribbing about it.
I remember the day when it finally sank in that I was losing that hair. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and I compared the driver's license picture from my final year of college with the one just snapped. It struck me then that I had a lot more forehead. A lot more. I don't mean I was bald. I wasn't even what is generally referring to as balding. I just had...more forehead.
I began to sweat. As ridiculous as it sounds, a good deal of my identity had been invested in those follicles. They were part of my look, which was part of my vanity, which was part of my personality. I went into a state of denial, and after denial eroded in the face of the slowly growing forehead, I engaged in a bitter struggle to find hairstyles that worked. This struggle lasted almost twenty years, and the later half of it was very ugly indeed. Sometimes I'd go a whole year, or more, without a haircut, in hopes of compensating for fewer follicles. (This worked the first time, but never again.) Sometimes I'd rock the classic Caesar cut, which worked wonders until the quarter-sized bald spot on the back of my head grew to fifty-cent-piece, silver dollar, and finally teacup circumference. Sometimes, at the behest of my barber in Burbank, I'd powder the bald spot and grow out the front. Later, I grew out the front for almost two years and slicked it back, which bared yet more forehead but covered the growing desert in the back. I always congratulated myself on the success of these camouflage manuevers until I realized, usually through photography, that I was fooling no one but myself.
Not too long ago, I marched into the barber shop I've been utilizing here in York for several years, and told my cutter to let fly with those clippers. Just buzz the whole goddamn dome. I believe the number I selected was a No. 2. This looked pretty good to me, but it grew back all too quickly -- the central irony of baldness is that the hair you have grows like weeds -- so I returned and asked for a No. 1.5, and then a No. 1, which is the afformentioned Marine recruit buzz.
I'm like that: I will do everything humanly possible to avoid a decision I don't want to make, but when I finally make it, I run headlong at it like Sgt. Rock at the German lines, yelling "You wanna live forever?" between bursts of Tommy gun fire and hurling hand grenades. I do what folks in the military call "embracing the suck." Embracing the suck, I'm told, consists of not merely accepting that you are in a shitty situation, but opening your arms to it, and even learning how to enjoy it, whether on a philosophical or ironic level. It is, after all, unavoidable, so why bother crying and moaning?
Middle age is a damned strange business. Physically, I don't feel any different now than I did at thirty: I'm actually stronger, more muscular and probably a little more flexible. I've noticed no decline in stamina. Creatively, I'm doing better than ever, so there has been no cognitive decline. It's harder for me to lose weight, for sure, but I can still lose it, as I have documented on these very pages. Sexually I'm not twenty-one anymore, but show me a fifty year old man who is without having a Viagra I.V. The only real decline I can think of has been in terms of the quality of my sleep, but I've found ways to improve even that. And yet, according to the United Nations, old age begins at sixty. For me, that is nine years away. So I'd say you're only as old as you feel...but then I look in the mirror and remember I used to have James Dean hair, and I feel, well, kinda long in the tooth. Kinda gray in the muzzle. Kinda silver in the back. And I say to myself, "This is what it is, and you have to accept it. You have to embrace the suck."
It isn't easy. Not for me, anyway. I want to cry. I want to moan. The vanity of my youth persists in my mind like a poltergeist, and like a poltergeist gives me no rest on the days when a photograph or a video forces me to accept the 25 or 30 year old man I expect to see in the mirror is gone and ain't coming back. This happened to me recently, and at an inopportune time: celebrating the loss of almost fifteen pounds, I was sent nightly news footage of myself at a charity event...and I saw a bald, beefy, tired-looking guy who looked like he needed to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, easily. It was tough to take. I didn't get what I wanted after a lot of hard work. But rather than run to the nearest hair transplant center by way of a plastic surgeon specializing in liposuction, I just took a deep breath, sulked for the rest of the night, and then went back to the grind of shaving an ounce here, and an ounce there...and my head, now every two weeks.
Kierkegaard said that life was lived forward but understood backwards. He was more right than he knew. The more progress I make toward my real life goals, the further I get from my own physical ideal, and more I realize that the old me, the one which is evaporating, sloughing off, flaking away, is not going quietly or easily. I may be embracing the suck, but he is not. This poltergeist ain't getting exorcised quietly. He's gonna smash plates, up-end tables, spill drinks, blow out candles, and knock pictures off the wall. He's gonna crack windows and make thumping noises at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. Vanity is a bitch and doesn't want to be dumped. Who knows? Maybe this is a bit of a good thing. Maybe wanting to be young physically forces me to be as young, physically, as a fifty-one year old man can be. But chasing youth is a dangerous business, ultimately futile, and contains a note of tragic absurdity. The line between fighting the good fight and the cost-loss fallacy is fine, and middle-aged men don't always have the clearest or sharpest vision. It is, however, a little easier to see if you shave your head: at least the hair won't get in your eyes.
October 21, 2023
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2023) PART II
Hullo folks. It's 11:45 PM on Saturday night, I have just returned from a costume party, and since I am endeavoring to maintain the Wednesday - Saturday blogging schedule, I thought I'd pop in to regale you with my further explorations into the world of horror movies. As you know, I have vowed to watch one for every day in October, and right now I am precisely on schedule. So without further ado, here is what I've seen since last we met:
Final Prayer a.k.a The Borderlands (2013). I normally detest "found footage" films, but this small cast British movie about a small team of Vatican experts sent to a rural church to investigate, and in fact debunk, purported "miracles" is well-acted, offbeat, and comes to a thoroughly disturbing climax which is all the more disturbing for having been foreshadowed, albeit in very subtle ways. Gordon Kennedy is exceptional as an disillusioned, burned-out priest with a quick temper and a drinking problem.
Host (2020). Along with "mockumentaries" and "found footage" movies, there are now "screenlife" films which take place entirely in online formats. "Host" is just such a film. A large group of female friends, bored by Covid quarantine, hire a psychic to guide them through an online seance on Zoom, only to discover the spirit they have summoned has a definite taste for blood. I confess this was a much better film than I was expecting: it's lean, it's mean, the performances are good, and I have to respect the cleverness of the approach.
The Ritual (2017). This is a prime example of a movie which is well-made, well-acted, and has a simple but intriguing premise, yet ultimately fails to deliver. "The Ritual" is the story of four British lads who go on a hiking tour of northern Sweden, only to discover there is something in the woods hunting them, something very old and driven by a peculiar need. Seldom have I watched a horror movie this well-crafted and thoughtful, yet the payoff is lacking: it would have been more interesting had it stuck to its early explorations of friendship, grief, cowardice and courage.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). This is a movie drawn out of a single, terrifying chapter of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," specifically the part where Dracula systematically murders the crew of the transport ship he is using to take himself from Transylvania to England. It's well crafted, and boasts the mighty Liam Cunningham in its cast, but after a fairly promising start, it runs head-first into every problem modern moviemaking throws at us: over-reliance on CGI, disrespect for the source material, wokeist themes. In the hands of a better writer and director, it could have been a kind of 19th century "Alien," but it ends up just another example of how modern writers cannot create anything, but only desecrate the work of their betters.
Crucible of Terror (1971). I confess my dumb ass found this by mistake. I was looking for the movie below, and by the time I'd figured out my blunder was too invested, timewise, to stop watching. "Terror" is a gritty, low-budget flick about a British artist who makes sculptures out of his subjects -- literally. Although not without some memorable moments and boasting some credible actors, it comes off as cheap and amateurish, a kind of sleazy knock-off of Hammer Horror, and its general air of cheesy weirdness doesn't help.
Crucible of Horror (1971). Also known simply as "The Corpse," this is a much better British flick shot in the same year which stars the normally cuddly Michael Gough as the stuffy, sadistic, misogynistic patriarch of an upper middle-class family. His long-suffering wife and daughter decide to murder him, but discover that this is a hell of a lot easier said than done. An often surreal movie full of cruel symbolism and very definite things to say about sexual and spiritual repression and their effects on the mind and soul, it resembles "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"...but with a corpse. Gough is superb as a man who clips roses, in more ways than one.
The Quiet Place (2018). While I wasn't enamored of this movie nearly as much as I expected to be given all the hype surrounding it, I found the story of a silent post-apocalyptic world where monsters hunt surviving humans by sound alone, engaging and quite well made. John Krasinski continues to show us that he can do a lot more than play Jim on "The Office," and in this film has to do it with almost no dialog at all, a challenge he accepts, and overcomes. The troublesome insistence on CGI over practical effects is increasingly tiresome to me, but in this case it's not much more than annoying.
Dog Soldiers (2002). Yet another British movie pits a squad of soldiers against a pack of slavering werewolves who have ambushed them deep in the Scottish wilderness. A fast, cleverly written, homage-laden action-horror piece with strong performances by Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee and Liam Cunningham, it retains a profane sense of humor throughout, but never slides too far into comedic territory to let audiences breathe easy. It's not at all scary, but damn, is it entertaining.
And that is as far as I've gotten, lads. I have ten more movies to go before Halloween night, but I have to say that with a few exceptions, the quality of the films I've seen lately is, overall, much better than those I watched last year. I make a point of mixing old ones with contemporary, and foreign flicks with American, but I never know just what the hell I'm going to encounter. And that, of course, is the essence of horror.
Final Prayer a.k.a The Borderlands (2013). I normally detest "found footage" films, but this small cast British movie about a small team of Vatican experts sent to a rural church to investigate, and in fact debunk, purported "miracles" is well-acted, offbeat, and comes to a thoroughly disturbing climax which is all the more disturbing for having been foreshadowed, albeit in very subtle ways. Gordon Kennedy is exceptional as an disillusioned, burned-out priest with a quick temper and a drinking problem.
Host (2020). Along with "mockumentaries" and "found footage" movies, there are now "screenlife" films which take place entirely in online formats. "Host" is just such a film. A large group of female friends, bored by Covid quarantine, hire a psychic to guide them through an online seance on Zoom, only to discover the spirit they have summoned has a definite taste for blood. I confess this was a much better film than I was expecting: it's lean, it's mean, the performances are good, and I have to respect the cleverness of the approach.
The Ritual (2017). This is a prime example of a movie which is well-made, well-acted, and has a simple but intriguing premise, yet ultimately fails to deliver. "The Ritual" is the story of four British lads who go on a hiking tour of northern Sweden, only to discover there is something in the woods hunting them, something very old and driven by a peculiar need. Seldom have I watched a horror movie this well-crafted and thoughtful, yet the payoff is lacking: it would have been more interesting had it stuck to its early explorations of friendship, grief, cowardice and courage.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). This is a movie drawn out of a single, terrifying chapter of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," specifically the part where Dracula systematically murders the crew of the transport ship he is using to take himself from Transylvania to England. It's well crafted, and boasts the mighty Liam Cunningham in its cast, but after a fairly promising start, it runs head-first into every problem modern moviemaking throws at us: over-reliance on CGI, disrespect for the source material, wokeist themes. In the hands of a better writer and director, it could have been a kind of 19th century "Alien," but it ends up just another example of how modern writers cannot create anything, but only desecrate the work of their betters.
Crucible of Terror (1971). I confess my dumb ass found this by mistake. I was looking for the movie below, and by the time I'd figured out my blunder was too invested, timewise, to stop watching. "Terror" is a gritty, low-budget flick about a British artist who makes sculptures out of his subjects -- literally. Although not without some memorable moments and boasting some credible actors, it comes off as cheap and amateurish, a kind of sleazy knock-off of Hammer Horror, and its general air of cheesy weirdness doesn't help.
Crucible of Horror (1971). Also known simply as "The Corpse," this is a much better British flick shot in the same year which stars the normally cuddly Michael Gough as the stuffy, sadistic, misogynistic patriarch of an upper middle-class family. His long-suffering wife and daughter decide to murder him, but discover that this is a hell of a lot easier said than done. An often surreal movie full of cruel symbolism and very definite things to say about sexual and spiritual repression and their effects on the mind and soul, it resembles "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"...but with a corpse. Gough is superb as a man who clips roses, in more ways than one.
The Quiet Place (2018). While I wasn't enamored of this movie nearly as much as I expected to be given all the hype surrounding it, I found the story of a silent post-apocalyptic world where monsters hunt surviving humans by sound alone, engaging and quite well made. John Krasinski continues to show us that he can do a lot more than play Jim on "The Office," and in this film has to do it with almost no dialog at all, a challenge he accepts, and overcomes. The troublesome insistence on CGI over practical effects is increasingly tiresome to me, but in this case it's not much more than annoying.
Dog Soldiers (2002). Yet another British movie pits a squad of soldiers against a pack of slavering werewolves who have ambushed them deep in the Scottish wilderness. A fast, cleverly written, homage-laden action-horror piece with strong performances by Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee and Liam Cunningham, it retains a profane sense of humor throughout, but never slides too far into comedic territory to let audiences breathe easy. It's not at all scary, but damn, is it entertaining.
And that is as far as I've gotten, lads. I have ten more movies to go before Halloween night, but I have to say that with a few exceptions, the quality of the films I've seen lately is, overall, much better than those I watched last year. I make a point of mixing old ones with contemporary, and foreign flicks with American, but I never know just what the hell I'm going to encounter. And that, of course, is the essence of horror.
October 18, 2023
MY CATALOG AS A WRITER
At the beginning of this year I made some...predictions...about what I would accomplish this year (we all know I don't make resolutions). One of them was to make an effort to partially transition into traditional, mainstream publishing. I say "partially" because my fiction covers so many genres that I cannot possibly publish all of it under my own name using the traditional methods. Publishers, understandably, want to brand their authors with a simple, clearly understandable label -- mystery, horror, techno-thriller, fantasy, whatever -- and once branded, it is damnably hard for said authors to branch out without using a pseudonym. I am proud of my name, and proud of the work I do under it, and would prefer to avoid nom de plumes except under very specific, necessary circumstances. But at any rate, and without getting into details, I'm doing what I set out to do: I haven't succeeded, but important steps have been taken and good progress has been made. Whether the deal will be sealed is another matter entirely: you don't spend twelve and a half years slogging away in Hollywood and count any chickens -- and I mean any chickens -- before they hatch. I mention this because I'm not sure if I've ever actually sat down and discussed, with the few thousand people who read this regularly, everything that I have published to date, mostly through the microimprint One Nine Books, directly to Amazon. I am not talking about short stories I've had published in print magazines. Nor am I talking about the short stories I've made available for purchase on Amazon. Longer forms only.
So, here goes:
NOVELS
CAGE LIFE (Cage Life Series #1). This is my first novel, the story of a New York-based MMA fighter who slugs the wrong guy in a barroom brawl and ends up owing the local Mafia his physical services as a means of paying his "debt." As a former parole officer with a background in martial arts, I was able to bring a lot of personal experience, knowledge and research into this novel that made both the criminal sequences and the fight scenes pass the tests thrown at them by, well, the actual criminals, cops and fighters who actually read it. This novel is like Film Noir minus most of the moral ambiguity, and there's a love story in there, too, as my hero, Mick, struggles with temptations of the criminal life and the violence it brings, and tries to find his way back to "normal" life. CAGE LIFE was Zealot Script Magazine's "Book of the Year" in 2016 and won the Best Indie Book Award.
KNUCKLE DOWN (Cage Life Series #2). The second book in the CAGE LIFE series finds Mick returning to New York to investigate threats made against the life of his ex-girlfriend...who is now engaged to his worst enemy. Battling with his feelings for her as he delves back into the underworld he escaped, he's also embroiled in an old-school fighting tournament with a million-dollar prize. The first book was a crime thriller; this one combines thrills with a mystery which Mick must solve if he wants to save the life of his estranged beloved, and delves into the dark intersection between big business and transnational crime. KNUCKLE DOWN won the Best Indie Book Award in 2019 and was a Writer's Digest Honorable Mention.
SINNER'S CROSS (Sinner's Cross Series #1). I've studied the Second World War since I was a small boy. I have a degree in history. I've read hundreds of books on the subject (in English and German), interviewed WW2 veterans, obtained boxes' worth of original documents, the Nuremberg Trials documents, etc., etc. SINNER'S CROSS is a WW2 novel told from both the American and the German points of view, describing their lives as they fight for a worthless crossroads on the Belgian-German border during the final months of 1944. It is not a story about strategy or technology. It is a study of human beings under the most extreme psychological and physical pressures men can experience. It is a deliberate, systematic attempt to avoid cliche, propaganda, and the sort of nationalistic feelings and "greatest generation" hero worship that abound in most stories of this type. Nobody has ever told me this was an easy book to read: the violence is relentless and extreme, and I play no favorites with the characters. But SINNER'S CROSS is a hit with critics. It has won the Book Excellence Award, the Literary Titan Gold Medal, the Best Indie Book Award, and the Reader's Favorite Gold Medal, among other accolades.
THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER (Sinner's Cross Series #2). This novel picks up where SINNER'S CROSS left off; it follows the surviving characters from the Battle of the Huertgen Forest into the opening stage of the Battle of the Bulge, i.e. the Ardennes Campaign of 1944 - 1945. It retains the split perspective of Americans and Germans, but like its predecessor, intersects and weaves the fates of these men closely together in a kind of violent 6-Degrees-of-Separation-meets-the-Butterfly Effect. It also highlights a part of the famous campaign which is little known -- the Battle of the Snow Eifel, an American catastrophe. THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER has won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, the Literary Titan Gold Medal, Book Excellence Award Finalist, and is a Reader's Favorite Five Star.
COLLECTIONS
DEVILS YOU KNOW. This is a collection of thirteen short stories I wrote over a 26 year period, covering subjects as diverse as grief, the devil, Nazism, gangterism, the Civil War, dystopia, and so on; but the unifying theme is horror. A few were previously published in literary magazines, but most were purpose-built for the collection, which -- as the name implies -- explores some of the darker aspects of human motivation and existence. There is some humor, too, though it tends toward the midnight black variety. If you by some chance have an interest as to how a writer's style develops over a quarter of a century at the keys, this is also for you.
COMING SOON
EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS (Magnus Chronicles II). My novella DEUS EX (see below) explored the idea of a dictator's downfall and attempt to escape from justice while proving -- to himself -- that he had been right all along. In writing the novella, I developed not only the world he occupied, but within my mind, the one he had destroyed in order to take power. In EXILES I explored this barely hinted-at world at length in full novel form, through the eyes of two protagonists at odds with the aspiring Tyrant. I have never had so much fun writing a book as this one, or written it as easily or in such a short time. This is part alternative history, part adventure, and part thriller. While reading DEUS EX might make the experience more enjoyable, it is not necessary, as I am not telling the story of Magnus in order, and indeed, the first entry in the series is actually its end. So spoilers are impossible. This novel will be released either later this year or early in 2024.
NOVELLAS
NOSFERATU. A non-supernatural horror story set in WW2 on the Eastern Front, it chronicles the experiences of a courageous, principled, but morally blind German officer who, after being wounded in battle, discovers the sinister origins of the means used to save his life. Winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award.
SHADOWS AND GLORY. Another WW2 tale from the German perspective, it is the story of a naive, brainwashed young boy who idolizes his U-boat commander father, only to discover his hero has ideological feet of clay.
SEELENMORD. A nonmagical fantasy set in an ancient land, SEELENMORD tells of the arrival into a peaceful, pagan village of a mysterious stranger preaching a sinister new religion.
THE NUMBERS GAME. Yet another WW2 tale, from the British perspective and told in the black comic style of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson, it is the story of a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain whose passion for numbers, statistics and probabilities leads him to the inescapable conclusion that he can predict the exact moment of his death. A Pinnacle Book Achivement Award winner.
DEUS EX. Magnus Antonius Magnus once ruled a quarter of the Earth and was worshiped by millions as a god; now he is fleeing the ruins of his capital as his enemies close in from all sides. What went wrong? Can he escape justice? And if he does, has he learned anything from his downfall? (Alternative history)
WOLF WEATHER. A dark fantasy set in the wastes of the frozen north, finds the hero the sole survivor of an isolated fort, beset on all sides by werewolves whose plan for him is far worse than death. An exploration of what happens when wild savagery collides with iron discipline.
And that, friends and neighbors, is my catalog as of today, 10/18/23. There is, of course, more coming: if I do one thing correctly (an arguable assertion) it is get the ideas in my head onto paper. Feel free to explore all of them (save EXILES) via the links below.
October 14, 2023
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2023)
Well, here we are again in October, the day after Friday the 13th, and the time seems nigh for me to resume my habit of annoying the shit out of you by talking about horror movies again. As you may remember, last October I watched thirty-one horror movies in thirty-one days, the sole criteria being that I had never watched them before, or had watched them so long in the past I didn't remember them. I am doing this again in 2023, and as of today I am just over the halfway mark.
Why do I do this? Well, I have a childhood fondness for Halloween and all of its pomps and rituals that has lasted into adulthood, but that's not the whole answer by any means. The fact is that like many people, I am both attracted to and repelled by fright flicks, and my insistence on watching them comes partly because I am fascinated by this paradox, this emotional push-pull, and I wish to explore it. On a more practical level, as a writer, the ability to evoke emotion is very high on the list of a storyteller's necessary abilities, and while it is easy to disgust people, to frighten them, to horrify or terrify them, takes a different level of skill. When I see this done properly -- and by properly I mean by doing more than throwing stage blood around by the gallon -- it is a thing of beauty, even if the subject matter itself is unpleasant or even traumatizing. I am always looking to add tools to my literary toolbox, and a good, inspirational horror movie is as fine a way as any of the many available to do this.
Now, I should qualify this by saying that I do discriminate when it comes to horror: I am absolutely not interested in "torture porn" or anything that comes close to the definition of same. Such movies are unworthy of my time or my ink, pitched as they are to the very lowest level of human behavior, sadism, and the very lowest level of storytelling, the gross-out. So you won't be finding any of that shit on my list or any future (or past) list...unless of course I came upon it accidentally and felt compelled to drop a review in its aftermath.
The following is what I have seen so far this month. Each film is accompanied by a brief, SPOILER FREE review, just in case y'all are looking for horror movies to watch as Halloween approaches, and are tired of recycling the same old fare (now that I think of it, I actually began this practice because I had grown tired of doing just exactly that).
Caveat (2020). "Dreadful" is a much-misused word. It isn't supposed to mean awful in quality, but rather the quality of causing dread in others, and by that metric, Caveat works very well indeed. The tale of a man recuperating from a traumatic brain injury who is talked into taking care of a crazy woman in an isolated house in the English countryside, this offbeat, small-cast flick combines the mystery element of Memento with what's either a murder mystery, or a ghost story, or both. While the second half doesn't match the relentlessly building tension of the first hour, this is a thoughtful, gore-free horror movie definitely worth your time.
Halloween Ends (2022). David Gordon Green helmed all three of the (latest) new Halloween movies, intended as direct and linear sequels to the original 1978 John Carpenter classic. The first was watchable but utterly forgettable, the second viscerally violent but featuring some of the worst dialog I've ever heard in a major motion picture, and the last...well, this movie was just plain stupid. A sloppy mash-up of Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers and Friday the 13th: Part 5 (both arguably movies that should never have been made in the first place), it barely features its titular character, concentrating instead on hugely unrealistic teen drama, possession, and boring murders. While I was happy to see Jamie Lee Curtis back in harness as Laurie Strode, this series should have been handled by a better writer and director, or simply not made at all. I really hope this is the end of Halloween...but I know better.
Session 9 (2001). This low-budget, small-cast film set in an abandoned New England insane asylum was disturbing, unsettling, engaging, and has very definite things to say about the relationship between economic woe, marital dischord, spontaneous violence, unbearable grief and regret so intense it leads to madness. A small crew of asbestos removers has zero time to clean up a huge old building, but the place's disturbing history, and their own personal problems, get in the way. I'm not a fan of David Caruso generally, but I'm damned if he didn't absolutely deliver in this movie as the deteriorating protagonist's gruff-tuff best friend. The film's last line, "I live in the weak and the wounded," is an equally eloquent comment on the murderer within all of us.
Prom Night (2008). The original Prom Night was a boring horror movie remembered mainly for helping Jamie Lee Curtis build her Scream Queen resume, but otherwise utterly forgettable. The remake is more boring and even more forgettable. Idris Elba is a cliched cop trying to prevent an escaped psycho from having his way with a prom queen at her coronation, but he sucks at his job, and well, a boring villain carves up boring slasher fodder in a hotel for a couple of hours...that's all I can remember.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022). How many times are they going to try and rev up this rusty old power tool, anyway? The original was in 1974! Actually, this bloodbath is better than it has any right to be. Not good, mind you: just nowhere near as awful and stupid as I expected. The plot is meager: Some not terribly likeable twentysomethings arrive in a Texas ghost town to look at property, but piss off the wrong lunatic. Though it eschews the cannibalistic aspect that helped make the original so unsettling, it growls along at a pretty frenetic pace before it flies apart in a welter of pointless gore and dumb storytelling, and I appreciated that the female actors looked like real people and not supermodels on a rustic-themed photoshoot.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). A psychological horror movie without violence, Picnic is an early Peter Weir movie set in Australia early in the 20th century. The stern headmistress of a struggling girls' school takes her ladies for a picnic in a remote area, and when three of them go missing, the ensuing panic, rumors, and backbiting have even worse consequences for the survivors. As much an exercise in social-societal commentary as anything else, harping on class differences, frustrated female sexuality and repression generally, the movie is slow and surreal and leaves many unanswered questions, but is curiously haunting all the same.
Creature from Black Lake (1976). I watched this largely forgotten B-movie for the hell of it. It's dumb, it's silly, it's poorly paced and more comedic than anything else, but for all that, I kind of enjoyed the saga of two collegiate morons from Chicago who head to the Lousiana bayous to investigate whether Bigfoot actually exists, and find out that, yes, indeed, he does, and -- figure this -- he's not very nice. Neither is the local sheriff, who is irked at Yankees stirring up trouble and trying to bang his nubile daughter. I question why this movie was even made, but the answer seems to be, "For fun!" and fun it is: dumb fun.
Psycho II (1983). Psycho is regarded as such a sacred horror classic that this sequel was treated with violent derision before it even hit the theater. Actually, this movie ain't half bad. Shot entirely on the Universal backlot (I recognize almost every location), Psycho II is a low-budget but high-craft B-movie in which Anthony Perkins reprises Norman Bates, the knife-wielding, dress-wearing, Mom-loving murderer from Hitchcock's original film. Except Norman has been cured by psychiatrists after years in a padded cell, and is now free again to resume managing the Bates Hotel. The problem is, someone is messing with his head, and if Norman doesn't find out who it is, he may just resume his stabby, shower-intruding ways. I was quite engaged by this movie, which suffers some script and acting issues but is fast-paced, enjoyable and has some very respectable twists, along with a surprisingly deep cast which includes Robert Loggia, Vera Miles and Dennis Franz.
Dust Devil (1992). Australian films like to make use of the sheer size, wildness, and desolation of their landscape: Dust Devil was shot in Namibia, but it follows the same principle. The story of a wandering demon in human form who ritually murders his victims in hopes of escaping the curse of his fleshly existence, it is a beautifully shot, somewhat surreal movie with a strong undertone of African racial, ethnic, and societal politics: a world-weary black lawman, enforcing the white man's laws but reluctantly using black magic, hunts a (literal) white devil, albeit one with more complex motives than murder and mayhem. It's not a great movie, not even a particularly good one, and some of what happens seems completely pointless, but it is memorable and somewhat haunting, and some of the narration is beautifully written.
Crawl (2019). Barry Pepper and Kayla Scoledario star as a disgruntled father and his estranged swimmer daughter, caught beneath their Florida house during a hurricane, and besieged by large, hungry alligators freed from their swamp by the resulting flood. There's nothing special about this movie, it's utterly predictable, the writing is mediocre, our heroes sustain wounds which would easily kill them, and aside from a couple of jump scares it's forgettable: but it held my interest while it was running. That's the best, and the worst, I can say about it.
Devil (2010). Four strangers are trapped in an elevator. All four of them harbor dark secrets, and as frantic efforts to rescue them continue to fail, tensions rise, as do suspicions one of them is a murderer...or possibly Satan himself. I confess this movie caught me agreeably by surprise. There is some unnecessary cheesiness and heavy-handedness, as there always is in anything M. Night Shamylan touches even slightly, and the ending could have been better and more satisfying, but while it lasted, it was a tense, paranoid, fast-paced exercise in locked-room mystery-horror, with more than a touch of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.
The Burrowers (2008). This horror movie set in the Old West really had my interest...for a moment: the cast was good, the acting was good, the film felt period-accurate, and the premise wasn't bad at all: but the execution sucked. Mysterious "forces" are kidnapping settlers in the West, and a local posse, naturally assuming Indians are to blame, rides into the badlands to get some justice, only to find out what did the kidnapping is much worse than the Souix or Ute natives. The pacing of this movie is terrible, nothing happens for way too long, and it seems much less interested in the story than in dragging us through the numerous social and racial injustices of the 1880s. What's more, the premise is not as cool as Tremors, a more modern Western movie it was clearly imitating to a certain degree. A similarly themed film, Bone Tomahawk, did a far superior job in 2015. It's too bad: this could have been a winner.
The Resurrected (1991). H.P. Lovecraft is often called one of the more unadaptable writers of all time. His stories relied heavily on withholding imagery, implying rather than showing horrors, and intimating there were enormous, destructive, evil forces just out of eyeshot which would drive us mad if he described them. None of this lends itself readily to screenwriters looking for easy concepts to sell to dim-witted movie executives. The Resurrected is a spirited B-movie attempt to break this curse and put one of his stories on said screen in an appealing way. It doesn't succeed, but the attempt is so spirited, so earnest, so honest and determined, that it's hard to pick over the film's many, many faults. Basically, it's the tale of an upscale gumshoe hired by a distraught wife who wants to know why her husband is always off conducting "experiments" in the guest house of their isolated New England home. The gumshoe's investigation reveals nothing serious: just that the guy is trying to bring back the dead and, well, eat the living. Mayhem ensues. If you happened to actually like Hellraiser II: Hellbound then this is for you. But not many people can say that.
Midnight Movie (2008). A spirited, almost frantic, attempt to clamp electrical leads onto the withered, blistered, burned, utterly lifeless cadaver of slasher movies. The corpse did not convert, but it did jump off the table a few times. This is a film-within-a-film about a group of people trapped in a movie theater with a homicidal maniac, whose point of view is playing up on the silver screen before them, interwoven with a 70s-style splatter flick directed by the killer himself. If that sounds like a lot, it is. The creators of the movie threw absolutely everything they could think of at the wall in hopes that something would stick: comedy, meta references, direct and indirect “homages” to other horror movies (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, Popcorn, Halloween Night, etc.) escalating violence, unexpected deaths, and all manner of horror movie tropes and clichés. Some of it works. Most of it doesn't. It's like some overflowing, spluttering play written by a caffeine-addicted, hypertensive college student with more enthusiasm and energy than talent or imagination. Slashers are, let's face it, a dead subgenre; they have been dead since Scream debuted in 1996. The whole idea of self-awareness and “meta” in horror was ultimately fatal to everything it touched. But hey, these guys tried.
Ghostwatch (1992). A British TV movie made by the BBC, this is a "mockumentary" about a TV crew sent out on Halloween night to document a poltergeist supposedly haunting a suburban London home for live audiences. Meanwhile, back at the studio, a credulous parapsychologist and a dry-witted, disbelieving show host spar over the existence of the supernatural while observing the doings of the remote crew on their monitors. Shot during the heyday of sleazy live TV gimmicks like "The Secrets of Al Capone's Vault," it starts in that exact vein, with the producers of "Ghostwatch" clearly trying to exploit a long-suffering single mum and her traumatized children for the sake of Halloween night ratings. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the ghost haunting Foxhill Drive is very real, very nasty, and has very big plans for his "audience." Ghostwatch is a very, very slow burn and requires patience and concentration, but damn, when it starts to get going, it goes. Every one of the "found footage" films that deluged us from 1999 onwards owes a heavy debt to this movie, just as it owes a debt to Orson Welles live broadcast of War of the Worlds, which also scared the shit out of millions of people who didn't know it was just make believe.
As I have often observed, it is difficult to binge watch, or even methodically examine, horror movies without wading through a considerable about of Thames mudbutter. On the other hand, this yearly orgy (somehow orgies seem more appropriate on Halloween) does introduce me to a number of flicks I have never seen which are actually decent or even pretty darn good, and given my dislike of trying new things, forcing myself to watch all this previously unseen stuff is good for my brain, even if watching people get skewered, eaten alive, and set on fire is not. In the meantime, the countdown to Halloween, when I will review the second half of my watch list, continues.
Why do I do this? Well, I have a childhood fondness for Halloween and all of its pomps and rituals that has lasted into adulthood, but that's not the whole answer by any means. The fact is that like many people, I am both attracted to and repelled by fright flicks, and my insistence on watching them comes partly because I am fascinated by this paradox, this emotional push-pull, and I wish to explore it. On a more practical level, as a writer, the ability to evoke emotion is very high on the list of a storyteller's necessary abilities, and while it is easy to disgust people, to frighten them, to horrify or terrify them, takes a different level of skill. When I see this done properly -- and by properly I mean by doing more than throwing stage blood around by the gallon -- it is a thing of beauty, even if the subject matter itself is unpleasant or even traumatizing. I am always looking to add tools to my literary toolbox, and a good, inspirational horror movie is as fine a way as any of the many available to do this.
Now, I should qualify this by saying that I do discriminate when it comes to horror: I am absolutely not interested in "torture porn" or anything that comes close to the definition of same. Such movies are unworthy of my time or my ink, pitched as they are to the very lowest level of human behavior, sadism, and the very lowest level of storytelling, the gross-out. So you won't be finding any of that shit on my list or any future (or past) list...unless of course I came upon it accidentally and felt compelled to drop a review in its aftermath.
The following is what I have seen so far this month. Each film is accompanied by a brief, SPOILER FREE review, just in case y'all are looking for horror movies to watch as Halloween approaches, and are tired of recycling the same old fare (now that I think of it, I actually began this practice because I had grown tired of doing just exactly that).
Caveat (2020). "Dreadful" is a much-misused word. It isn't supposed to mean awful in quality, but rather the quality of causing dread in others, and by that metric, Caveat works very well indeed. The tale of a man recuperating from a traumatic brain injury who is talked into taking care of a crazy woman in an isolated house in the English countryside, this offbeat, small-cast flick combines the mystery element of Memento with what's either a murder mystery, or a ghost story, or both. While the second half doesn't match the relentlessly building tension of the first hour, this is a thoughtful, gore-free horror movie definitely worth your time.
Halloween Ends (2022). David Gordon Green helmed all three of the (latest) new Halloween movies, intended as direct and linear sequels to the original 1978 John Carpenter classic. The first was watchable but utterly forgettable, the second viscerally violent but featuring some of the worst dialog I've ever heard in a major motion picture, and the last...well, this movie was just plain stupid. A sloppy mash-up of Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers and Friday the 13th: Part 5 (both arguably movies that should never have been made in the first place), it barely features its titular character, concentrating instead on hugely unrealistic teen drama, possession, and boring murders. While I was happy to see Jamie Lee Curtis back in harness as Laurie Strode, this series should have been handled by a better writer and director, or simply not made at all. I really hope this is the end of Halloween...but I know better.
Session 9 (2001). This low-budget, small-cast film set in an abandoned New England insane asylum was disturbing, unsettling, engaging, and has very definite things to say about the relationship between economic woe, marital dischord, spontaneous violence, unbearable grief and regret so intense it leads to madness. A small crew of asbestos removers has zero time to clean up a huge old building, but the place's disturbing history, and their own personal problems, get in the way. I'm not a fan of David Caruso generally, but I'm damned if he didn't absolutely deliver in this movie as the deteriorating protagonist's gruff-tuff best friend. The film's last line, "I live in the weak and the wounded," is an equally eloquent comment on the murderer within all of us.
Prom Night (2008). The original Prom Night was a boring horror movie remembered mainly for helping Jamie Lee Curtis build her Scream Queen resume, but otherwise utterly forgettable. The remake is more boring and even more forgettable. Idris Elba is a cliched cop trying to prevent an escaped psycho from having his way with a prom queen at her coronation, but he sucks at his job, and well, a boring villain carves up boring slasher fodder in a hotel for a couple of hours...that's all I can remember.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022). How many times are they going to try and rev up this rusty old power tool, anyway? The original was in 1974! Actually, this bloodbath is better than it has any right to be. Not good, mind you: just nowhere near as awful and stupid as I expected. The plot is meager: Some not terribly likeable twentysomethings arrive in a Texas ghost town to look at property, but piss off the wrong lunatic. Though it eschews the cannibalistic aspect that helped make the original so unsettling, it growls along at a pretty frenetic pace before it flies apart in a welter of pointless gore and dumb storytelling, and I appreciated that the female actors looked like real people and not supermodels on a rustic-themed photoshoot.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). A psychological horror movie without violence, Picnic is an early Peter Weir movie set in Australia early in the 20th century. The stern headmistress of a struggling girls' school takes her ladies for a picnic in a remote area, and when three of them go missing, the ensuing panic, rumors, and backbiting have even worse consequences for the survivors. As much an exercise in social-societal commentary as anything else, harping on class differences, frustrated female sexuality and repression generally, the movie is slow and surreal and leaves many unanswered questions, but is curiously haunting all the same.
Creature from Black Lake (1976). I watched this largely forgotten B-movie for the hell of it. It's dumb, it's silly, it's poorly paced and more comedic than anything else, but for all that, I kind of enjoyed the saga of two collegiate morons from Chicago who head to the Lousiana bayous to investigate whether Bigfoot actually exists, and find out that, yes, indeed, he does, and -- figure this -- he's not very nice. Neither is the local sheriff, who is irked at Yankees stirring up trouble and trying to bang his nubile daughter. I question why this movie was even made, but the answer seems to be, "For fun!" and fun it is: dumb fun.
Psycho II (1983). Psycho is regarded as such a sacred horror classic that this sequel was treated with violent derision before it even hit the theater. Actually, this movie ain't half bad. Shot entirely on the Universal backlot (I recognize almost every location), Psycho II is a low-budget but high-craft B-movie in which Anthony Perkins reprises Norman Bates, the knife-wielding, dress-wearing, Mom-loving murderer from Hitchcock's original film. Except Norman has been cured by psychiatrists after years in a padded cell, and is now free again to resume managing the Bates Hotel. The problem is, someone is messing with his head, and if Norman doesn't find out who it is, he may just resume his stabby, shower-intruding ways. I was quite engaged by this movie, which suffers some script and acting issues but is fast-paced, enjoyable and has some very respectable twists, along with a surprisingly deep cast which includes Robert Loggia, Vera Miles and Dennis Franz.
Dust Devil (1992). Australian films like to make use of the sheer size, wildness, and desolation of their landscape: Dust Devil was shot in Namibia, but it follows the same principle. The story of a wandering demon in human form who ritually murders his victims in hopes of escaping the curse of his fleshly existence, it is a beautifully shot, somewhat surreal movie with a strong undertone of African racial, ethnic, and societal politics: a world-weary black lawman, enforcing the white man's laws but reluctantly using black magic, hunts a (literal) white devil, albeit one with more complex motives than murder and mayhem. It's not a great movie, not even a particularly good one, and some of what happens seems completely pointless, but it is memorable and somewhat haunting, and some of the narration is beautifully written.
Crawl (2019). Barry Pepper and Kayla Scoledario star as a disgruntled father and his estranged swimmer daughter, caught beneath their Florida house during a hurricane, and besieged by large, hungry alligators freed from their swamp by the resulting flood. There's nothing special about this movie, it's utterly predictable, the writing is mediocre, our heroes sustain wounds which would easily kill them, and aside from a couple of jump scares it's forgettable: but it held my interest while it was running. That's the best, and the worst, I can say about it.
Devil (2010). Four strangers are trapped in an elevator. All four of them harbor dark secrets, and as frantic efforts to rescue them continue to fail, tensions rise, as do suspicions one of them is a murderer...or possibly Satan himself. I confess this movie caught me agreeably by surprise. There is some unnecessary cheesiness and heavy-handedness, as there always is in anything M. Night Shamylan touches even slightly, and the ending could have been better and more satisfying, but while it lasted, it was a tense, paranoid, fast-paced exercise in locked-room mystery-horror, with more than a touch of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.
The Burrowers (2008). This horror movie set in the Old West really had my interest...for a moment: the cast was good, the acting was good, the film felt period-accurate, and the premise wasn't bad at all: but the execution sucked. Mysterious "forces" are kidnapping settlers in the West, and a local posse, naturally assuming Indians are to blame, rides into the badlands to get some justice, only to find out what did the kidnapping is much worse than the Souix or Ute natives. The pacing of this movie is terrible, nothing happens for way too long, and it seems much less interested in the story than in dragging us through the numerous social and racial injustices of the 1880s. What's more, the premise is not as cool as Tremors, a more modern Western movie it was clearly imitating to a certain degree. A similarly themed film, Bone Tomahawk, did a far superior job in 2015. It's too bad: this could have been a winner.
The Resurrected (1991). H.P. Lovecraft is often called one of the more unadaptable writers of all time. His stories relied heavily on withholding imagery, implying rather than showing horrors, and intimating there were enormous, destructive, evil forces just out of eyeshot which would drive us mad if he described them. None of this lends itself readily to screenwriters looking for easy concepts to sell to dim-witted movie executives. The Resurrected is a spirited B-movie attempt to break this curse and put one of his stories on said screen in an appealing way. It doesn't succeed, but the attempt is so spirited, so earnest, so honest and determined, that it's hard to pick over the film's many, many faults. Basically, it's the tale of an upscale gumshoe hired by a distraught wife who wants to know why her husband is always off conducting "experiments" in the guest house of their isolated New England home. The gumshoe's investigation reveals nothing serious: just that the guy is trying to bring back the dead and, well, eat the living. Mayhem ensues. If you happened to actually like Hellraiser II: Hellbound then this is for you. But not many people can say that.
Midnight Movie (2008). A spirited, almost frantic, attempt to clamp electrical leads onto the withered, blistered, burned, utterly lifeless cadaver of slasher movies. The corpse did not convert, but it did jump off the table a few times. This is a film-within-a-film about a group of people trapped in a movie theater with a homicidal maniac, whose point of view is playing up on the silver screen before them, interwoven with a 70s-style splatter flick directed by the killer himself. If that sounds like a lot, it is. The creators of the movie threw absolutely everything they could think of at the wall in hopes that something would stick: comedy, meta references, direct and indirect “homages” to other horror movies (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, Popcorn, Halloween Night, etc.) escalating violence, unexpected deaths, and all manner of horror movie tropes and clichés. Some of it works. Most of it doesn't. It's like some overflowing, spluttering play written by a caffeine-addicted, hypertensive college student with more enthusiasm and energy than talent or imagination. Slashers are, let's face it, a dead subgenre; they have been dead since Scream debuted in 1996. The whole idea of self-awareness and “meta” in horror was ultimately fatal to everything it touched. But hey, these guys tried.
Ghostwatch (1992). A British TV movie made by the BBC, this is a "mockumentary" about a TV crew sent out on Halloween night to document a poltergeist supposedly haunting a suburban London home for live audiences. Meanwhile, back at the studio, a credulous parapsychologist and a dry-witted, disbelieving show host spar over the existence of the supernatural while observing the doings of the remote crew on their monitors. Shot during the heyday of sleazy live TV gimmicks like "The Secrets of Al Capone's Vault," it starts in that exact vein, with the producers of "Ghostwatch" clearly trying to exploit a long-suffering single mum and her traumatized children for the sake of Halloween night ratings. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the ghost haunting Foxhill Drive is very real, very nasty, and has very big plans for his "audience." Ghostwatch is a very, very slow burn and requires patience and concentration, but damn, when it starts to get going, it goes. Every one of the "found footage" films that deluged us from 1999 onwards owes a heavy debt to this movie, just as it owes a debt to Orson Welles live broadcast of War of the Worlds, which also scared the shit out of millions of people who didn't know it was just make believe.
As I have often observed, it is difficult to binge watch, or even methodically examine, horror movies without wading through a considerable about of Thames mudbutter. On the other hand, this yearly orgy (somehow orgies seem more appropriate on Halloween) does introduce me to a number of flicks I have never seen which are actually decent or even pretty darn good, and given my dislike of trying new things, forcing myself to watch all this previously unseen stuff is good for my brain, even if watching people get skewered, eaten alive, and set on fire is not. In the meantime, the countdown to Halloween, when I will review the second half of my watch list, continues.
October 9, 2023
DRESSING THE PART
This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon...never his mind on where he was, what he was doing. -- Yoda
Today is Columbus Day, a holiday for government drudges like myself. Until recently, I would have slept in, lounged around my apartment drinking coffee and pottering around the internet until restlessness and caffeine forced me into some form of exercise, bathed, and then returned to lounging, probably dressed in a sophomoric T-shirt and jeans, or even sweats, and worn-out sneakers. At some point I'd have ordered Chinese food, or gotten a take-out pizza, and bought a six pack of beer as well. Anyone encountering me on the street would have seen an unshaven, slightly out of shape middle-aged man dressed like a college student or working-class drone, who was slicking back his diminishing wisps over his bald spot in a vain attempt to look younger. Someone easy to dismiss, or to ignore. Not a loser per se, but certainly a mediocrity. Whatever my inward level of intelligence and confidence, whatever my past accomplishments or present goals, the image I projected was unimpressive, faded, ordinary.
My ordinary circumstances have, however, changed. Today, the first thing I did was go hiking, drinking my coffee as I trampled the still, silent woods with a gallon jug of water strapped to my back. When I came home, I allowed myself a small amount of food, mostly protein, and then took a shower, shaved, and donned a fitted sweater, a suede blazer, jeans, casual dress shoes, my flashiest watch, a silver link bracelt and a silver ring with a great amber stone. I walked to the coffee shop with Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age and read for two hours over a mocha. I was not trying to look cool, whatever cool looks like, or pick up a woman. Nope. I was simply allowing my outward appearance to match my accomplishments, my ambitions...and my age.
Like most writers, I have been a Bohemian for most of my life. I have always dressed the way I pleased and not according to fashion trends -- when I conformed to a trend (good or bad) it was because it corresponded to my own existing aesthetic, not because it was "now." I have always been impulsive, irresponsible, disorganized, impractical, hot-tempered, creative, apathetic, easily bored, and alternated between periods of furious, almost manic activity and utter, sloth-like apathy and laziness. Financially I have alternated between disaster and mediocrity. In relationships I have always struggled with commitment and therefore, longevity. The future? Making plans for todayexhausted me and left me with faint feelings of resentment, even if the plans were entirely in my own best interests.
Recently, however, I began to understand that a small, tectonic shift had occurred within my mind, or perhaps my soul. A sea change had taken place almost without me realizing it. I desired, actively, to increase my value. I do not merely mean my income; I mean my value. I wanted to raise the level, the frequency, upon which I operate on a daily basis. This included my income, but it also included a whole slew of other life aspects, including my weight, my fitness, my craft, my productivity, and my appearance. It is on this last point I wish mostly to expound, because I have come to understand why appearance is important to those who wish to change for the better.
In my life, I have always equated the "need" for expensive clothing, watches, shoes, etc. with vanity and shallowness and materialism. The men I knew, even in college, who dressed more sharply and "adultly," always struck me as either comical or pompous. I have always wanted to look good, but only for the purpose of attracting women, which of course is a form of shallowness in itself: and because like most Bohemians I have a Peter Pan complex, and because I prize masculinity and toughness, I always favored either a collegiate or a "street" style: leather jackets, t-shirts, jeans, sneakers or work-type boots. And just at the time I might have taken a different course, when I was 34 years old, I moved to California, where t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops are normal wear for all ages, and "dressing up" means a polo shirt and khakis, maybe a blazer if you're at some reallyspecial event. I found validation in an adopted culture, took refuge from incipient middle age by living in the land of the Endless Summer.
There is, however, some old Army wisdom which goes, "Know your job and know the job of your immediate superior, because you may be called upon to do that job at any moment." In civilian-speak this translates as "Dress for the job you have," or, even more broadly, "Dress for the life you want." And as I entered my 40s, and then my mid-40s, I increasingly began to despair that the life I wanted would ever materialize. The last few years I spent in California were endlessly difficult and bitter. The older I got, the more it seemed as if I had failed, missed the mark, fiddled while Rome burned and was now doomed to live among its ashes. I was experiencing torschlusspanik, the fear that the gates have shut and I was on the wrong side of them when the lock clanked into place. The truth was that I had allowed myself to become infantilized: I was living the life of a surf bum (minus most of the surf) and amazed that, well, this was yielding a surf-bum's results. Women didn't take me seriously. Employers didn't take me seriously. Perspective agents, publishers, partners, and executives didn't take me seriously. And like Gordon Comstock, the hilariously self-defeating protagonist of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I adapted to my failure by making failure a virtue. I was not a loser: I was holding on to my integrity. I was the classic starving artist who, from his dirty, depressing garret on the Left Bank, feebly shouted, "You're all a bunch of sell-outs!" to everyone with more money than himself.
The equation of failure, or at least poverty and rejection of societal norms, to success and integrity, is something I first noticed in the punk movement in the late 70s/early 80s when I was growing up. I was never a punk myself, but I was friendly with them and perhaps their outlook rubbed off on me a bit: I think it more likely that I was merely in sympathy with it by virtue of my own nature. In any event, this was a time when I and many others also equated bodybuilding specifically and athleticism generally with stupidity: you were either a hulking beast with huge biceps but no brain, or a scrawny Poindexter with Coke-bottle glasses and a 4.2 grade point average: There was no in-between, and the idea of the Renaissance man was taken as more of a joke than as something to aspire to. I mention this because it shows how easy it is to buy into syllogistic, either/or thinking: either you're a financial success or you have personal and creative integrity. Either you're fit or you're smart. Either you're this or you're that. No in-betweens, no gray areas. And a large part of me accepted this simplistic thinking, or at least never bothered to challenge it with my actions.
A man can evolve unconsciously, however, or rather semi-consciously. When I moved back East in 2020, I did so with the stated purpose of wanting a more fully human life and a more consequential job than Hollywood could afford. Put more simply, I wanted to feel like a grown man: I wanted to put on a suit and tie and carry a briefcase and deal with important matters. And doing this every day did wonders for my self-esteem, and consequentially but not expectedly, for my creativity. But it is only in the last year that I have discovered that I want more even than this. It is no longer enough for me to simply work an important job and to dress my age between 8 and 430, Monday to Friday. I want to act my age at all times, and in the best possible way: I want to abandon the Bohemian rake image in favor of something more refined, more elegant, more stylish. I want to organize my time better. I want to manage my weight and fitness more actively and precisely. I want to calibrate my finances and act upon those calibrations. And this is exactly what I'm doing: building the ideal version of myself and giving him to the world. One brick at a time.
It isn't always easy. When you've lived life like a fratboy (which I am, as it happens), grown up life can be daunting and bewildering. Financial responsibility alone is a brutal struggle. However, I just purchased U.S. Treasury bonds, the first forward-thinking act upon those lines I have ever undertaken: what's more, I have set up a schedule to purchase fifty more over the next fifteen months. I am shortly going to buy some notes and securities and set up an IRA to supplement my 401K, too. I just fielded a second book proposal offer and am in talks with a major agent about the first one: potentially big sources of fresh income. And I intend to publicize and if possible, to monetize my trip to Miami in November, when I will accept the Reader's Digest Gold Medal: at the very least I want to do some serious networking. In short, I am trying, with some difficulty and with many minor setbacks (mostly but not entirely self-inflicted), to increase my value in the materialistic, professional and various other senses of the word. I realize that I am very long in the fang and gray in the muzzle to begin such a quest, but we all learn at different speeds, and I truly believe my tae kwon do master's adage that "when the student is ready, the master will appear."
I don't suppose I will ever entirely reconcile myself to the demands of a world that places so much import on appearance, and on materialism generally, but I am continually reminded of the words of an older fraternity brother of mine who joined the NYPD when I was still in college. He said that, while he disagreed, philosophically, with judging books by their covers, he nevertheless did it on the job, because he had to play the percentages: the guy in the business suit and briefcase was, in his experience, less likely than the punk with the spiked pink hair and jangling chains to want to take a swing at him over a traffic ticket. When I meet with an agent, or attend a convention or an expo, or even go down the street to have coffee and read Tales from the Jazz Age, I want to be consistent throughout myself, from the inner core of my thoughts and feelings, to my outward appearance, and not have the two in a self-defeating, self-limiting conflict. I want to embrace the total man, the fullness of my potentiality. I know it will be a journey fraught with every form of obstacle and that many of those obstacles will be found inside myself: we are all our own worst enemies, after all. But we are also our own best friends, our own wisest counselors, our own mentors and saviours. And for me, anyway, it's time to start savin'. I opened this essay with a quote from Yoda, who as you will remember, criticized Luke for never paying attention to the moment but rather dreaming of the future. And with all respect to the old master, I think he was only half right. It is possible to be in the moment and still keep an eye on the horizon: because the horizon, over the horizon, where we ultimately wish to be.
Today is Columbus Day, a holiday for government drudges like myself. Until recently, I would have slept in, lounged around my apartment drinking coffee and pottering around the internet until restlessness and caffeine forced me into some form of exercise, bathed, and then returned to lounging, probably dressed in a sophomoric T-shirt and jeans, or even sweats, and worn-out sneakers. At some point I'd have ordered Chinese food, or gotten a take-out pizza, and bought a six pack of beer as well. Anyone encountering me on the street would have seen an unshaven, slightly out of shape middle-aged man dressed like a college student or working-class drone, who was slicking back his diminishing wisps over his bald spot in a vain attempt to look younger. Someone easy to dismiss, or to ignore. Not a loser per se, but certainly a mediocrity. Whatever my inward level of intelligence and confidence, whatever my past accomplishments or present goals, the image I projected was unimpressive, faded, ordinary.
My ordinary circumstances have, however, changed. Today, the first thing I did was go hiking, drinking my coffee as I trampled the still, silent woods with a gallon jug of water strapped to my back. When I came home, I allowed myself a small amount of food, mostly protein, and then took a shower, shaved, and donned a fitted sweater, a suede blazer, jeans, casual dress shoes, my flashiest watch, a silver link bracelt and a silver ring with a great amber stone. I walked to the coffee shop with Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age and read for two hours over a mocha. I was not trying to look cool, whatever cool looks like, or pick up a woman. Nope. I was simply allowing my outward appearance to match my accomplishments, my ambitions...and my age.
Like most writers, I have been a Bohemian for most of my life. I have always dressed the way I pleased and not according to fashion trends -- when I conformed to a trend (good or bad) it was because it corresponded to my own existing aesthetic, not because it was "now." I have always been impulsive, irresponsible, disorganized, impractical, hot-tempered, creative, apathetic, easily bored, and alternated between periods of furious, almost manic activity and utter, sloth-like apathy and laziness. Financially I have alternated between disaster and mediocrity. In relationships I have always struggled with commitment and therefore, longevity. The future? Making plans for todayexhausted me and left me with faint feelings of resentment, even if the plans were entirely in my own best interests.
Recently, however, I began to understand that a small, tectonic shift had occurred within my mind, or perhaps my soul. A sea change had taken place almost without me realizing it. I desired, actively, to increase my value. I do not merely mean my income; I mean my value. I wanted to raise the level, the frequency, upon which I operate on a daily basis. This included my income, but it also included a whole slew of other life aspects, including my weight, my fitness, my craft, my productivity, and my appearance. It is on this last point I wish mostly to expound, because I have come to understand why appearance is important to those who wish to change for the better.
In my life, I have always equated the "need" for expensive clothing, watches, shoes, etc. with vanity and shallowness and materialism. The men I knew, even in college, who dressed more sharply and "adultly," always struck me as either comical or pompous. I have always wanted to look good, but only for the purpose of attracting women, which of course is a form of shallowness in itself: and because like most Bohemians I have a Peter Pan complex, and because I prize masculinity and toughness, I always favored either a collegiate or a "street" style: leather jackets, t-shirts, jeans, sneakers or work-type boots. And just at the time I might have taken a different course, when I was 34 years old, I moved to California, where t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops are normal wear for all ages, and "dressing up" means a polo shirt and khakis, maybe a blazer if you're at some reallyspecial event. I found validation in an adopted culture, took refuge from incipient middle age by living in the land of the Endless Summer.
There is, however, some old Army wisdom which goes, "Know your job and know the job of your immediate superior, because you may be called upon to do that job at any moment." In civilian-speak this translates as "Dress for the job you have," or, even more broadly, "Dress for the life you want." And as I entered my 40s, and then my mid-40s, I increasingly began to despair that the life I wanted would ever materialize. The last few years I spent in California were endlessly difficult and bitter. The older I got, the more it seemed as if I had failed, missed the mark, fiddled while Rome burned and was now doomed to live among its ashes. I was experiencing torschlusspanik, the fear that the gates have shut and I was on the wrong side of them when the lock clanked into place. The truth was that I had allowed myself to become infantilized: I was living the life of a surf bum (minus most of the surf) and amazed that, well, this was yielding a surf-bum's results. Women didn't take me seriously. Employers didn't take me seriously. Perspective agents, publishers, partners, and executives didn't take me seriously. And like Gordon Comstock, the hilariously self-defeating protagonist of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I adapted to my failure by making failure a virtue. I was not a loser: I was holding on to my integrity. I was the classic starving artist who, from his dirty, depressing garret on the Left Bank, feebly shouted, "You're all a bunch of sell-outs!" to everyone with more money than himself.
The equation of failure, or at least poverty and rejection of societal norms, to success and integrity, is something I first noticed in the punk movement in the late 70s/early 80s when I was growing up. I was never a punk myself, but I was friendly with them and perhaps their outlook rubbed off on me a bit: I think it more likely that I was merely in sympathy with it by virtue of my own nature. In any event, this was a time when I and many others also equated bodybuilding specifically and athleticism generally with stupidity: you were either a hulking beast with huge biceps but no brain, or a scrawny Poindexter with Coke-bottle glasses and a 4.2 grade point average: There was no in-between, and the idea of the Renaissance man was taken as more of a joke than as something to aspire to. I mention this because it shows how easy it is to buy into syllogistic, either/or thinking: either you're a financial success or you have personal and creative integrity. Either you're fit or you're smart. Either you're this or you're that. No in-betweens, no gray areas. And a large part of me accepted this simplistic thinking, or at least never bothered to challenge it with my actions.
A man can evolve unconsciously, however, or rather semi-consciously. When I moved back East in 2020, I did so with the stated purpose of wanting a more fully human life and a more consequential job than Hollywood could afford. Put more simply, I wanted to feel like a grown man: I wanted to put on a suit and tie and carry a briefcase and deal with important matters. And doing this every day did wonders for my self-esteem, and consequentially but not expectedly, for my creativity. But it is only in the last year that I have discovered that I want more even than this. It is no longer enough for me to simply work an important job and to dress my age between 8 and 430, Monday to Friday. I want to act my age at all times, and in the best possible way: I want to abandon the Bohemian rake image in favor of something more refined, more elegant, more stylish. I want to organize my time better. I want to manage my weight and fitness more actively and precisely. I want to calibrate my finances and act upon those calibrations. And this is exactly what I'm doing: building the ideal version of myself and giving him to the world. One brick at a time.
It isn't always easy. When you've lived life like a fratboy (which I am, as it happens), grown up life can be daunting and bewildering. Financial responsibility alone is a brutal struggle. However, I just purchased U.S. Treasury bonds, the first forward-thinking act upon those lines I have ever undertaken: what's more, I have set up a schedule to purchase fifty more over the next fifteen months. I am shortly going to buy some notes and securities and set up an IRA to supplement my 401K, too. I just fielded a second book proposal offer and am in talks with a major agent about the first one: potentially big sources of fresh income. And I intend to publicize and if possible, to monetize my trip to Miami in November, when I will accept the Reader's Digest Gold Medal: at the very least I want to do some serious networking. In short, I am trying, with some difficulty and with many minor setbacks (mostly but not entirely self-inflicted), to increase my value in the materialistic, professional and various other senses of the word. I realize that I am very long in the fang and gray in the muzzle to begin such a quest, but we all learn at different speeds, and I truly believe my tae kwon do master's adage that "when the student is ready, the master will appear."
I don't suppose I will ever entirely reconcile myself to the demands of a world that places so much import on appearance, and on materialism generally, but I am continually reminded of the words of an older fraternity brother of mine who joined the NYPD when I was still in college. He said that, while he disagreed, philosophically, with judging books by their covers, he nevertheless did it on the job, because he had to play the percentages: the guy in the business suit and briefcase was, in his experience, less likely than the punk with the spiked pink hair and jangling chains to want to take a swing at him over a traffic ticket. When I meet with an agent, or attend a convention or an expo, or even go down the street to have coffee and read Tales from the Jazz Age, I want to be consistent throughout myself, from the inner core of my thoughts and feelings, to my outward appearance, and not have the two in a self-defeating, self-limiting conflict. I want to embrace the total man, the fullness of my potentiality. I know it will be a journey fraught with every form of obstacle and that many of those obstacles will be found inside myself: we are all our own worst enemies, after all. But we are also our own best friends, our own wisest counselors, our own mentors and saviours. And for me, anyway, it's time to start savin'. I opened this essay with a quote from Yoda, who as you will remember, criticized Luke for never paying attention to the moment but rather dreaming of the future. And with all respect to the old master, I think he was only half right. It is possible to be in the moment and still keep an eye on the horizon: because the horizon, over the horizon, where we ultimately wish to be.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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