Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 19
November 21, 2022
WORDS MATTER: USE 'EM WISELY
When I was in college, I noted on my bill a rather hefty yearly charge called a "student activities fee." Inquiring as to just what this fee was actually for, I was told it created the slush fund used to hire entertainment acts for the college -- bands, comedians, speakers, and so on. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me until I realized that almost every band, comedian, etc. who came to the school charged admission at the door -- sometimes a very substantial admission. It seemed to me that if we were each paying $200 a year in student activity fees, the slush fund must rake in $800,000 annually. What's more, if the fee were charged each semester, as it may very well have been (I don't recall), the slush fund would actually take in $1.6 million every school year.
Now, I know that my school wasn't bringing in the kind of talent, or even booking the sheer number of events, that would cost 1.6 million bucks -- or 800K bucks, for that matter. A lot of the entertainers who came to my alma mater were of the sort who, frankly, would probably work for a sandwich and a beer. And when you factor in that every legitimate act also required a ticket paid for at the door, I began to realize that the "student activities fee" was simply a method of increasing our tuition under false pretenses. If the school had said, "We're upping tuition by $400/year" people would have been angry; by keeping tuition the same, but tacking on this fee for services not really rendered, they performed one of the oldest dodges in history: using pompous or comforting-sounding words to confuse people as to their real aim.
Politicians, con men, advertising agencies, and so forth all operate on the same principle, to wit: bury them in bullshit.
My father used to joke about how the titles of communist countries were themselves indications that a vast fraud was being perpetrated. East Germany's official title was “the German Democratic Republic,” but East Germany was neither democratic nor a republic, and its population of Germans was so small it was very nearly outnumbered by the millions of Soviet soldiers stationed on its soil. The father of all communist countries was, of course, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but a “soviet” is an elected council of officials (fraud: the elections were rigged), “union” implies a voluntary coming-together of states (fraud: they were held together by force), communism is not socialism (they are related but not identical ideas) and a “republic” invests power in elected representatives (fraud: you can't have a republic with rigged elections). The same held true for all communist lands from Nicaragua to China. Whatever “democratic and republican” titles they slathered upon themselves, always there remained the same yawning abyss between the warmly humane title and the coldly inhuman reality of slave camps, barbed wire, psychiatric prisons and mass graves.
In life, one generally finds that fraud is best carried off when intent is masked. Con men and thieves operate under false pretenses, and so do governments. The thugs who come for you at three in the morning in dictatorships almost always couch their official names in beneficent-sounding terms, using words like “security,” “protection,” or “vigilance” in their title. Often they fall back on the stolid but trusty title of “police,” with whom they have absolutely nothing in common but the penchant for carrying handcuffs. Here in America, where there is still a need for at least lip-service to democratic traditions, we call the massive agency, whose principal task is to circumvent the Constitution, by the cozy-sounding sobriquet of “The Department of Homeland Security,” and dub that organization whose main job is to spy on American citizens with a thoroughness the East German Secret Police could only dream about, the “National Security Agency.”
(Likewise, two laws which many experts bemoaned as assaults on American liberty were were dubbed the “Patriot Act” and the “National Defense Authorization Act.")
Yet even in the harshest totalitarian societies, ones which do not even pretend to be in power for the public good, there is a rigid insistence on euphemisms, some of them quite grotesque, to hide the grisly truth of what the regime is doing. In Cambodia, during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the men involved in mass exterminations that murdered one-third of the country's entire population carried the official title of “Keepers of the Peace.” In Nazi Germany, those arrested by the Gestapo were officially in “protective custody,” while those gassed or shot were subjected to "resettlement" and “special treatment.” This psychology extends even to outright criminal organizations, which have absolutely no claim whatever to legitimacy: the Mafia of Sicily, which traffics in everything from heroin to child pornography to sex slaves, used to refer to itself as “the Society of the Men of Honor.” Presumably it is a question of moral legitimacy: “the Society of Heroin Pushers, Child Pornographers and Sexual Slave Traders” just doesn't have the same ring.
As George Orwell once noted, clarity is the enemy of the lie, just as vagueness is the enemy of truth. Very few people who have evil intent will admit it, and very few institutions who perpetrate evil will give themselves a title which reflects that fact. To do so would not only sap them psychologically – not many people take long-term pleasure in being The Bad Guy – but make it easy for those they wish to rob, oppress and exploit to grasp their true motives and unify against them. If the Galactic Empire of Star Wars were around today, they would, in all likelihood, not refer to their planet-destroying mega-weapon as The Death Star, but rather “The Peacekeeper.”
When one listens to people who are lying or being evasive, which has occurred to me more than most human beings, I expect, having served in both law enforcement and Hollywood, the most outstanding characteristic of their speech is the refusal to speak simply, plainly and directly. Liars are much more likely to spin out a long-winded, discursive answer to a question than to lie more directly with a terse "yes" or "no." When one is operating from a dubious motive, it is not enough for people to evade or dissemble: there seems to be a psychological compulsion to place between liar and lied-to a kind of prism, which takes the light of falsehood and refracts it into something lively, colorful, almost beautiful. The fact that the Ministry of Love in Orwell's 1984 is a simply a gigantic torture chamber is not a subtle piece of writing, but it is entirely apropos for the story.
But you have observed, no doubt, that I wrote "falsehood" there instead of "lie." Have you ever noticed that when one is accused of something in criminal or civil court, their lawyer inevitably describes said charge as "full of falsehoods" instead of simply calling it "a pack of lies?" The urge, especially in formal or semi-formal settings, to be as indirect as possible, to use vague, inflated, pretentious and misleading language, seems to have risen to the level of a reflex, rather like the one that makes your knee jerk when the doctor taps you with the hammer. To call a dirty, disgusting little lie a "falsehood" or a "canard" or a "fabrication" is taken for granted, despite the fact that by doing so, one actually lends credence and power to the accusation, and indeed, one manages to sound guilty as hell in the doing. It's as if we cannot help ourselves but to lacquer the truth, even when it runs contrary to our own interests.
Some might be tempted to dismiss all of this as the mere carping of a writer who is frustrated by the inexactitude or laziness of people with language, but I assure you my issue runs much, much deeper. The truth is a precious thing. It is often a painful thing, but it is also precious, and it must be protected and if necessary, fought for. We live in an age of "alternative truths" and "choose your own reality" thinking. It is perfectly acceptable in many quarters to simply reject any objective fact which runs contrary to one's religious or political worldview. Yet the urge, the need, to justify the lies fitted in place of the missing truths still remains. A person advocating censorship, for example, will never admit they are a censor: through complex and often compelling rhetoric they will try to convince you that they are, in fact, a guardian of truth and virtue. On social media and in countless news threads on every topic imaginable, I have witnessed many truly brilliant and charismatic defenses of things which, if they were described in plain language, would be laughed or cursed off the stage. I have heard passionate arguments against freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, basic bodily freedoms (such as the right to refuse sexual advances) and even freedom of emotion. But these arguments, always and without exception, are couched in such a way that the liar's actual intention or action is disguised or turned upside-down, the motive buried beneath bullshit. And it is not merely the desire to deceive or appear virtuous which drives this behavior: the book-burner is afraid of being called a censor, because he or she knows that labels, by which I mean the words that make up labels, have enormous power. If they did not believe this, they would not want to burn the book.
In a few days it will mark nine months since Putin announced the "special military operation" to "denazify" Ukraine. In Russia, it remains a serious crime to refer to the "special military operation" as a war, despite the fact that 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured in that time, the fighting is actually increasing in ferocity, and there is no end in sight, only further escalation. But hey, don't call it a war, or ask why you're looking for Nazis in a country with a Jewish president. This might make the people angry.
Likewise, the anti-regime protests in Iran, which reflect deep-seated anger and frustration with the corrupt and repressive religious theocracy, are dismissed by those mullahs as being the product of "foreign agents" from America and Israel. Damn, are the CIA and the Mossad getting their money's worth, or what? A handful of "agents" have managed to ignite a massive, sustained protest movement which is now 70 days old. Pity those "agents" don't have the same track record where they actually exist! In any event, so long as the mullahs pretend that "Zionists and Crusaders" are the ones stirring the pot, they don't have to address the actual source of their people's anger.
My point here is that in neither case do the actors admit what they are doing or why they are doing it, for the simple reason that they can't. For Putin or Khameni to speak baldly about their real motives would also destroy their claims to legitimacy, and contrary to what you might think, the more absolute the power a leader possesses, the greater his actual need to claim legitimacy. Absolutism is a demonstratably invalid mode of government. It has been for at least 100 and possibly 200 years. In the absence of divine right, no human can claim absolute power legitimately, and therefore a whole pack of lies must be wrangled together to obfuscate and otherwise cover up the fact that a dictator is, in fact, a dictator. The time has not yet come in human affairs when even the most rapacious, bloodthirsty tyrant is ready to declare himself so and beat his breast while shouting that he wants power for its own sake.
As a writer, I have a great love and respect for words, as well as a healthy understanding of their influence. Because of this, however, I am also aware -- painfully aware -- that, as INXS once sang, "words are weapons, sharper than knives." At the core of nearly every evil action or intent is a stark and simple truth, and this truth is always surrounded by a comforting fabric of lies. The ability of humans to realize when they are being lied to, when words are being used to blind them to events and motives, to justify the unjustifiable and rationalize the evil or the stupid, is perhaps the most valuable skill one can possess in modern civilization. It is a kind of talisman, a cross which we can hold up to drive away the lying vampires that surround us, hungering for our blood. We should be relentless in our insistence on plain, clearly-worded, easily understandable speech from our government and our business leaders, and raise a royal ruckus when we don't get it. And that, folks, is no falsehood.
Now, I know that my school wasn't bringing in the kind of talent, or even booking the sheer number of events, that would cost 1.6 million bucks -- or 800K bucks, for that matter. A lot of the entertainers who came to my alma mater were of the sort who, frankly, would probably work for a sandwich and a beer. And when you factor in that every legitimate act also required a ticket paid for at the door, I began to realize that the "student activities fee" was simply a method of increasing our tuition under false pretenses. If the school had said, "We're upping tuition by $400/year" people would have been angry; by keeping tuition the same, but tacking on this fee for services not really rendered, they performed one of the oldest dodges in history: using pompous or comforting-sounding words to confuse people as to their real aim.
Politicians, con men, advertising agencies, and so forth all operate on the same principle, to wit: bury them in bullshit.
My father used to joke about how the titles of communist countries were themselves indications that a vast fraud was being perpetrated. East Germany's official title was “the German Democratic Republic,” but East Germany was neither democratic nor a republic, and its population of Germans was so small it was very nearly outnumbered by the millions of Soviet soldiers stationed on its soil. The father of all communist countries was, of course, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but a “soviet” is an elected council of officials (fraud: the elections were rigged), “union” implies a voluntary coming-together of states (fraud: they were held together by force), communism is not socialism (they are related but not identical ideas) and a “republic” invests power in elected representatives (fraud: you can't have a republic with rigged elections). The same held true for all communist lands from Nicaragua to China. Whatever “democratic and republican” titles they slathered upon themselves, always there remained the same yawning abyss between the warmly humane title and the coldly inhuman reality of slave camps, barbed wire, psychiatric prisons and mass graves.
In life, one generally finds that fraud is best carried off when intent is masked. Con men and thieves operate under false pretenses, and so do governments. The thugs who come for you at three in the morning in dictatorships almost always couch their official names in beneficent-sounding terms, using words like “security,” “protection,” or “vigilance” in their title. Often they fall back on the stolid but trusty title of “police,” with whom they have absolutely nothing in common but the penchant for carrying handcuffs. Here in America, where there is still a need for at least lip-service to democratic traditions, we call the massive agency, whose principal task is to circumvent the Constitution, by the cozy-sounding sobriquet of “The Department of Homeland Security,” and dub that organization whose main job is to spy on American citizens with a thoroughness the East German Secret Police could only dream about, the “National Security Agency.”
(Likewise, two laws which many experts bemoaned as assaults on American liberty were were dubbed the “Patriot Act” and the “National Defense Authorization Act.")
Yet even in the harshest totalitarian societies, ones which do not even pretend to be in power for the public good, there is a rigid insistence on euphemisms, some of them quite grotesque, to hide the grisly truth of what the regime is doing. In Cambodia, during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the men involved in mass exterminations that murdered one-third of the country's entire population carried the official title of “Keepers of the Peace.” In Nazi Germany, those arrested by the Gestapo were officially in “protective custody,” while those gassed or shot were subjected to "resettlement" and “special treatment.” This psychology extends even to outright criminal organizations, which have absolutely no claim whatever to legitimacy: the Mafia of Sicily, which traffics in everything from heroin to child pornography to sex slaves, used to refer to itself as “the Society of the Men of Honor.” Presumably it is a question of moral legitimacy: “the Society of Heroin Pushers, Child Pornographers and Sexual Slave Traders” just doesn't have the same ring.
As George Orwell once noted, clarity is the enemy of the lie, just as vagueness is the enemy of truth. Very few people who have evil intent will admit it, and very few institutions who perpetrate evil will give themselves a title which reflects that fact. To do so would not only sap them psychologically – not many people take long-term pleasure in being The Bad Guy – but make it easy for those they wish to rob, oppress and exploit to grasp their true motives and unify against them. If the Galactic Empire of Star Wars were around today, they would, in all likelihood, not refer to their planet-destroying mega-weapon as The Death Star, but rather “The Peacekeeper.”
When one listens to people who are lying or being evasive, which has occurred to me more than most human beings, I expect, having served in both law enforcement and Hollywood, the most outstanding characteristic of their speech is the refusal to speak simply, plainly and directly. Liars are much more likely to spin out a long-winded, discursive answer to a question than to lie more directly with a terse "yes" or "no." When one is operating from a dubious motive, it is not enough for people to evade or dissemble: there seems to be a psychological compulsion to place between liar and lied-to a kind of prism, which takes the light of falsehood and refracts it into something lively, colorful, almost beautiful. The fact that the Ministry of Love in Orwell's 1984 is a simply a gigantic torture chamber is not a subtle piece of writing, but it is entirely apropos for the story.
But you have observed, no doubt, that I wrote "falsehood" there instead of "lie." Have you ever noticed that when one is accused of something in criminal or civil court, their lawyer inevitably describes said charge as "full of falsehoods" instead of simply calling it "a pack of lies?" The urge, especially in formal or semi-formal settings, to be as indirect as possible, to use vague, inflated, pretentious and misleading language, seems to have risen to the level of a reflex, rather like the one that makes your knee jerk when the doctor taps you with the hammer. To call a dirty, disgusting little lie a "falsehood" or a "canard" or a "fabrication" is taken for granted, despite the fact that by doing so, one actually lends credence and power to the accusation, and indeed, one manages to sound guilty as hell in the doing. It's as if we cannot help ourselves but to lacquer the truth, even when it runs contrary to our own interests.
Some might be tempted to dismiss all of this as the mere carping of a writer who is frustrated by the inexactitude or laziness of people with language, but I assure you my issue runs much, much deeper. The truth is a precious thing. It is often a painful thing, but it is also precious, and it must be protected and if necessary, fought for. We live in an age of "alternative truths" and "choose your own reality" thinking. It is perfectly acceptable in many quarters to simply reject any objective fact which runs contrary to one's religious or political worldview. Yet the urge, the need, to justify the lies fitted in place of the missing truths still remains. A person advocating censorship, for example, will never admit they are a censor: through complex and often compelling rhetoric they will try to convince you that they are, in fact, a guardian of truth and virtue. On social media and in countless news threads on every topic imaginable, I have witnessed many truly brilliant and charismatic defenses of things which, if they were described in plain language, would be laughed or cursed off the stage. I have heard passionate arguments against freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, basic bodily freedoms (such as the right to refuse sexual advances) and even freedom of emotion. But these arguments, always and without exception, are couched in such a way that the liar's actual intention or action is disguised or turned upside-down, the motive buried beneath bullshit. And it is not merely the desire to deceive or appear virtuous which drives this behavior: the book-burner is afraid of being called a censor, because he or she knows that labels, by which I mean the words that make up labels, have enormous power. If they did not believe this, they would not want to burn the book.
In a few days it will mark nine months since Putin announced the "special military operation" to "denazify" Ukraine. In Russia, it remains a serious crime to refer to the "special military operation" as a war, despite the fact that 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured in that time, the fighting is actually increasing in ferocity, and there is no end in sight, only further escalation. But hey, don't call it a war, or ask why you're looking for Nazis in a country with a Jewish president. This might make the people angry.
Likewise, the anti-regime protests in Iran, which reflect deep-seated anger and frustration with the corrupt and repressive religious theocracy, are dismissed by those mullahs as being the product of "foreign agents" from America and Israel. Damn, are the CIA and the Mossad getting their money's worth, or what? A handful of "agents" have managed to ignite a massive, sustained protest movement which is now 70 days old. Pity those "agents" don't have the same track record where they actually exist! In any event, so long as the mullahs pretend that "Zionists and Crusaders" are the ones stirring the pot, they don't have to address the actual source of their people's anger.
My point here is that in neither case do the actors admit what they are doing or why they are doing it, for the simple reason that they can't. For Putin or Khameni to speak baldly about their real motives would also destroy their claims to legitimacy, and contrary to what you might think, the more absolute the power a leader possesses, the greater his actual need to claim legitimacy. Absolutism is a demonstratably invalid mode of government. It has been for at least 100 and possibly 200 years. In the absence of divine right, no human can claim absolute power legitimately, and therefore a whole pack of lies must be wrangled together to obfuscate and otherwise cover up the fact that a dictator is, in fact, a dictator. The time has not yet come in human affairs when even the most rapacious, bloodthirsty tyrant is ready to declare himself so and beat his breast while shouting that he wants power for its own sake.
As a writer, I have a great love and respect for words, as well as a healthy understanding of their influence. Because of this, however, I am also aware -- painfully aware -- that, as INXS once sang, "words are weapons, sharper than knives." At the core of nearly every evil action or intent is a stark and simple truth, and this truth is always surrounded by a comforting fabric of lies. The ability of humans to realize when they are being lied to, when words are being used to blind them to events and motives, to justify the unjustifiable and rationalize the evil or the stupid, is perhaps the most valuable skill one can possess in modern civilization. It is a kind of talisman, a cross which we can hold up to drive away the lying vampires that surround us, hungering for our blood. We should be relentless in our insistence on plain, clearly-worded, easily understandable speech from our government and our business leaders, and raise a royal ruckus when we don't get it. And that, folks, is no falsehood.
November 13, 2022
AS I PLEASE X
Before I resume blogs which devote themselves to a single question -- such as rating the HALLOWEEN films in order, discussing the abject failure of the promised Red Wave, ranting about how much I hate wokeism, or discussing mental health in an insane world -- the time has come once more for me to empty my head of accumulated thoughts. I'm a fellow who thinks constantly, more constantly than he would wish, and while many of my thoughts may be nonsense and objectively silly or stupid, once in awhile I come up with something worth mentioning. Or at least something I think is worth mentioning. Hence "As I Please."
* I just spent a half an hour reading at-the-time criticisms made of the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Debussey, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Words like unbearable, smug, evil, vague, meaningless, ponderous, dull, and hideous were used. Among the things their music was likened to were: cow shit, bombs falling on music factories, a musical score smeared while the ink was still wet, and my own personal favorite, the observation that "there can be music that stinks to the ear." Something to remember when the critics don't like your work.
* I miss Instant Messaging. There was something special, and something uniquely exciting in a consciously child-like, silly way, about hearing the little musical charm on your PC from the next room, knowing it meant someone you wanted to hear from wanted to hear from you. In that sense I also miss e-mail. I can vividly remember a time when seeing five e-mails in my Inbox meant five human beings had actually written me messages, sometimes longform messages of surprising interest, humor, sadness or beauty. This of course was before I discovered spam, or rather before spam discovered me; also before e-mail began to give way to other forms of communication. Opening my e-mail accounts now means sifting through an descending avalanche of phishing scams, erectile dysfunction ads, and class action lawsuit notifications, and like as not if I find a human-composed message, it's of a professional nature. There's very little exictement in that.
* Learning to cook is an empowering experience. I've always had knowledge of the basics of cooking, but the higher combinations, i.e. actually following recipes and doing multiple tasks at once, timed to culminate perfectly in a “dinner is served!” moment, have always eluded me – until now. For the last two weeks, I have been using a meal delivery service which necessitates doing things like making sauces, baking, frying and chopping, all more or less simultaneously. I'm not only enjoying the process of learning and the much better food I'm eating as a result of my newfound knowledge, I find that actually handling all those ingredients does something to my brain, in much the same way handling soil does: there's a release of endorphins, a connection to reality, a feeling that we were really meant to be getting our hands dirty rather than fondling iPhones seven hours a day.
* I just said “I've always had knowledge--” That is a lie. When I was 18 years old I was so completely helpless in the kitchen that I could not even use a hot plate. The first time I tried to make Ramen noodles in college, I was left with a bubbling puddle of goo which was hideous to behold. People joke that they can't boil water: I literally couldn't make soup.
* I recently purchased a (used) Kindle because several books that I wanted to read were either too expensive to purchase in hardcover/paperback or simply unavilable in that medium. It's a nifty little device, but it just reaffirms the feeling I had when I got the original version of the iPad years ago: a book read electronically has no resonance. It has no substance. Reading it in that format lacks the tactile pleasure of reading it in physical form. As Rupert Giles once remarked on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: ”Books smell. Musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer, it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible, it should be...smelly.”
* On my Kindle, I just finished The Border Wolves by “Damion Hunter” a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell. This book may set a record for the most-delayed sequel in the history of anything. Cockrell wrote the first book in this historical fiction series, The Centurions, in 1981; Barbarian Princess in 1982; The Emperor's Games in 1984; and The Border Wolves in...2021. The total distance between Book 3 and Book 4 is therefore 37 years. I grew up reading the original trilogy, which was in my father's library, and I tip my hat to Hunter/Cockrell for managing, in large part, to recapture both the spirit and the essence of her earlier novels in this, the (supposedly) final book in the series. If you're a fan of historical fiction, especially the sort that is written with romance and adventure in mind, The Centurions series is worth your while.
* So far this year I am (as usual) behind on my reading list. Aside from The Border Wolves I've also read Fire and Blood, War as an Inward Experience, Johnny Carson, Now & Then, The Life and Death of Trotsky, The Life and Death of Lenin, Mine Were Of Trouble, and Passchendaele and the Somme: A Diary of 1917. I am currently reading American Nightingale. I mention this mainly because it's remarkable that I, a novelist, read so few novels anymore: of the ten books mentioned, only one is fiction. Also because I'm supposed to read 15 books this Year of our Lord 2022, and I've completed only nine. But I'll hit fifteen come hell or high water: I can't face the shame of failing (yet again) to complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge.
* Why don't I read more fiction? Because so much of it is poorly-written crap. That in itself, however, bothers me a great deal less than the inability of critics and readers to understand that fiction generally, whether in novelistic or screenplay/telepay form, is in a very bad way. George Orwell once lamented that we lived in an age where people had been fed poorly for so long they now preferred powdered milk and canned peaches to the genuine articles: I lament that the general decline in craft, discipline, artistry, boldness, and imagination has led to audiences who cannot distinguish between, so to speak, filet mignon and a McDonald's hamburger. There are definite reasons why artistry has been debased into mere commodity, and why modern writers cannot tell a story, or create memorable characters, or write convincing dialog; but for now it is enough to understand that this is the case. Good writing is on the downgrade, and the sooner this is accepted as fact, the sooner we can remedy the condition.
* I just watched the Netflix-produced, German language version of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. It is a remarkable film in the literal sense, in that there is much to discuss about it. It's brutal, graphic, grisly, depressing, well-acted, and extremely well-crafted. It is also curiously distant from its subjects. Unlike the 1979 film starring Richard Thomas, which hews closely to the source material, this movie takes some distinct POV liberties, injects extra anti-militarist sentiments (as if there weren't enough in a story widely regarded as the most ferocious antiwar novel of all time), and yet, with one or two exceptions, does not really let us get to know its characters. The previous cinematic version of this tale spent a lot of its energy making sure we, the audience, felt the full humanity of Paul, Tjaden, Kat, etc., etc., so that their deaths would hit home. This one invests in but one or two fo the characters, with the result that their futile ends mean much less to the viewer. It was a curious choice in an otherwise arresting film.
* Speaking of Germans and war, the present conflict in Ukraine, which has already killed 100,000+ people, has caused within Germany a sudden, unwanted, unwelcome, but entirely necessary understanding that pacifism is really only tenable provided there is someone else available to do your fighting for you. Since 1991, most of non-Russian Europe has been steadily disarming, smug in their belief the United States would come to their aid if it somehow became necessary, with the result that in 2014, Ukraine could not even resist the seizure of the Crimea by Russia. Now, watching Putin bomb defenseless cities, massacre civilians, launch systematic attacks against infrastructure with winter coming, and in short, do his best to imitate both Stalin and Hitler, modern Germans are waking up to the cruel reality that sometimes, in order to be free, one must fight, and one cannot fight without an army. God knows war ought to be the last resort of any nation under any circumstance, but the idea that it can be done away with simply by wishing it gone is childish nonsense. As Herman Wouk put it in The Winds of War, those who turn their swords into ploughshares will have their arms cut off by those who kept their swords.
And that is it for this evening. Next week I will sink my pen into something deeper. Perhaps I will even discuss my quest to obtain proper journalistic credentials so I can go to Ukraine. Until then, just remember that Christmas music really has no place on the airwaves before November 25.
* I just spent a half an hour reading at-the-time criticisms made of the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Debussey, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Words like unbearable, smug, evil, vague, meaningless, ponderous, dull, and hideous were used. Among the things their music was likened to were: cow shit, bombs falling on music factories, a musical score smeared while the ink was still wet, and my own personal favorite, the observation that "there can be music that stinks to the ear." Something to remember when the critics don't like your work.
* I miss Instant Messaging. There was something special, and something uniquely exciting in a consciously child-like, silly way, about hearing the little musical charm on your PC from the next room, knowing it meant someone you wanted to hear from wanted to hear from you. In that sense I also miss e-mail. I can vividly remember a time when seeing five e-mails in my Inbox meant five human beings had actually written me messages, sometimes longform messages of surprising interest, humor, sadness or beauty. This of course was before I discovered spam, or rather before spam discovered me; also before e-mail began to give way to other forms of communication. Opening my e-mail accounts now means sifting through an descending avalanche of phishing scams, erectile dysfunction ads, and class action lawsuit notifications, and like as not if I find a human-composed message, it's of a professional nature. There's very little exictement in that.
* Learning to cook is an empowering experience. I've always had knowledge of the basics of cooking, but the higher combinations, i.e. actually following recipes and doing multiple tasks at once, timed to culminate perfectly in a “dinner is served!” moment, have always eluded me – until now. For the last two weeks, I have been using a meal delivery service which necessitates doing things like making sauces, baking, frying and chopping, all more or less simultaneously. I'm not only enjoying the process of learning and the much better food I'm eating as a result of my newfound knowledge, I find that actually handling all those ingredients does something to my brain, in much the same way handling soil does: there's a release of endorphins, a connection to reality, a feeling that we were really meant to be getting our hands dirty rather than fondling iPhones seven hours a day.
* I just said “I've always had knowledge--” That is a lie. When I was 18 years old I was so completely helpless in the kitchen that I could not even use a hot plate. The first time I tried to make Ramen noodles in college, I was left with a bubbling puddle of goo which was hideous to behold. People joke that they can't boil water: I literally couldn't make soup.
* I recently purchased a (used) Kindle because several books that I wanted to read were either too expensive to purchase in hardcover/paperback or simply unavilable in that medium. It's a nifty little device, but it just reaffirms the feeling I had when I got the original version of the iPad years ago: a book read electronically has no resonance. It has no substance. Reading it in that format lacks the tactile pleasure of reading it in physical form. As Rupert Giles once remarked on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: ”Books smell. Musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer, it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible, it should be...smelly.”
* On my Kindle, I just finished The Border Wolves by “Damion Hunter” a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell. This book may set a record for the most-delayed sequel in the history of anything. Cockrell wrote the first book in this historical fiction series, The Centurions, in 1981; Barbarian Princess in 1982; The Emperor's Games in 1984; and The Border Wolves in...2021. The total distance between Book 3 and Book 4 is therefore 37 years. I grew up reading the original trilogy, which was in my father's library, and I tip my hat to Hunter/Cockrell for managing, in large part, to recapture both the spirit and the essence of her earlier novels in this, the (supposedly) final book in the series. If you're a fan of historical fiction, especially the sort that is written with romance and adventure in mind, The Centurions series is worth your while.
* So far this year I am (as usual) behind on my reading list. Aside from The Border Wolves I've also read Fire and Blood, War as an Inward Experience, Johnny Carson, Now & Then, The Life and Death of Trotsky, The Life and Death of Lenin, Mine Were Of Trouble, and Passchendaele and the Somme: A Diary of 1917. I am currently reading American Nightingale. I mention this mainly because it's remarkable that I, a novelist, read so few novels anymore: of the ten books mentioned, only one is fiction. Also because I'm supposed to read 15 books this Year of our Lord 2022, and I've completed only nine. But I'll hit fifteen come hell or high water: I can't face the shame of failing (yet again) to complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge.
* Why don't I read more fiction? Because so much of it is poorly-written crap. That in itself, however, bothers me a great deal less than the inability of critics and readers to understand that fiction generally, whether in novelistic or screenplay/telepay form, is in a very bad way. George Orwell once lamented that we lived in an age where people had been fed poorly for so long they now preferred powdered milk and canned peaches to the genuine articles: I lament that the general decline in craft, discipline, artistry, boldness, and imagination has led to audiences who cannot distinguish between, so to speak, filet mignon and a McDonald's hamburger. There are definite reasons why artistry has been debased into mere commodity, and why modern writers cannot tell a story, or create memorable characters, or write convincing dialog; but for now it is enough to understand that this is the case. Good writing is on the downgrade, and the sooner this is accepted as fact, the sooner we can remedy the condition.
* I just watched the Netflix-produced, German language version of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. It is a remarkable film in the literal sense, in that there is much to discuss about it. It's brutal, graphic, grisly, depressing, well-acted, and extremely well-crafted. It is also curiously distant from its subjects. Unlike the 1979 film starring Richard Thomas, which hews closely to the source material, this movie takes some distinct POV liberties, injects extra anti-militarist sentiments (as if there weren't enough in a story widely regarded as the most ferocious antiwar novel of all time), and yet, with one or two exceptions, does not really let us get to know its characters. The previous cinematic version of this tale spent a lot of its energy making sure we, the audience, felt the full humanity of Paul, Tjaden, Kat, etc., etc., so that their deaths would hit home. This one invests in but one or two fo the characters, with the result that their futile ends mean much less to the viewer. It was a curious choice in an otherwise arresting film.
* Speaking of Germans and war, the present conflict in Ukraine, which has already killed 100,000+ people, has caused within Germany a sudden, unwanted, unwelcome, but entirely necessary understanding that pacifism is really only tenable provided there is someone else available to do your fighting for you. Since 1991, most of non-Russian Europe has been steadily disarming, smug in their belief the United States would come to their aid if it somehow became necessary, with the result that in 2014, Ukraine could not even resist the seizure of the Crimea by Russia. Now, watching Putin bomb defenseless cities, massacre civilians, launch systematic attacks against infrastructure with winter coming, and in short, do his best to imitate both Stalin and Hitler, modern Germans are waking up to the cruel reality that sometimes, in order to be free, one must fight, and one cannot fight without an army. God knows war ought to be the last resort of any nation under any circumstance, but the idea that it can be done away with simply by wishing it gone is childish nonsense. As Herman Wouk put it in The Winds of War, those who turn their swords into ploughshares will have their arms cut off by those who kept their swords.
And that is it for this evening. Next week I will sink my pen into something deeper. Perhaps I will even discuss my quest to obtain proper journalistic credentials so I can go to Ukraine. Until then, just remember that Christmas music really has no place on the airwaves before November 25.
November 7, 2022
YOUR SISTER'S A WEREWOLF: OR, WHY HOLLYWOOD DOESN'T CARE ITS FILMS SUCK
You gotta be fuckin' kidding me. -- Palmer, "The Thing"
I am a sucker for really bad movies. I don't mean the sort that are merely bad and therefore unpleasant to watch, but those which are so epically, fantastically, God-awfully terrible that they transcend their own shittiness and rise to the level of art. Movies which are objectively abysmal and yet eminently watchable, even enjoyable, for the sheer level of entertainment they unintentionally provide. Now, it is important to note here that to make the cut for a good-bad movie, there is one criteria which is truly crucial, and that is the fact that the film must take itself seriously even if no one else does. It cannot be tongue-in-cheek, or deliberately campy or show the slightest bit of comic self-awareness: it cannot wink at its audience, but must stare steadily at it, convinced that it is delivering legitimate cinema and not a steaming pile of elephant crap. Today I examine such a pile, THE HOWLING 2: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF.
A film with a title like this might, in your mind, disqualify itself from the category of good-bad, for the simple reason that it is utterly fucking absurd and therefore hints at the comedic self-awareness of which I just spoke. It is therefore important that you understand that the first film in this series, THE HOWLING (1981), was a legitimate horror film which has gone on to be regarded as a minor classic of the genre. Directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles and Terrence Winkless, it is that rarest of creatures: a really good werewolf movie, one which has an unforgettably creepy opening in which an investigative reporter, wearing a wire, confronts a suspected serial killer in a sleazy porno shop in downtown L.A. Combining cutting-edge practical effects, good actors delivering credible performances, some social comentary and even a little comedy, the original HOWLING did what a werewolf movie is supposed to do but usually does not: explore the beast within us all.
When THE HOWLING 2 debuted in 1985, it was expected that it would deliver on the promise of the first film. News that it would star none other than horror legend Christopher Lee undoubtedly bolstered fan expectations, as did the casting of Sybil Danning, whose blatant sexual allure was entirely in keeping with the werewolf theme of repressed sexuality -- bursting out, one might say, like 38DDDs out of a training bra. What's more, the film promised to take the audience to the darkest heart of Europe, where werewolf legends originated. The hints given by the previous movie, of a vast underground network of beings who walked as humans by day and wolves by night would be traced back to their twisted Old Country roots. What could go wrong?
Well, for starters, everything. Absolutely everything.
THE HOWLING 2 begins in Los Angeles, which, an insert title conveiently informs us, is "the city of angels." Karen White, the heroine of the previous film, is being laid to rest as her brother, Ben (Reb Brown), and her former co-worker, Jenny (Annie McEnroe), look on. After the funeral they meet Stefan (Lee), an "occult investigator" who tells Ben that, well, his sister was a werewolf, and died proving that werewolves were real and a menace to society. Oddly enough, Ben, a hard-headed cop from Montana, isn't buying this shit, but Jenny isn't so sure.
Cut to Transylvania, where werewolf queen Stirba (Danning), an aged hag living in castle, devours a beautiful young girl's life essence to regain her youth and beauty -- as well as a penchant for tearing off some or all of her clothes. No objections here, though the background nudity, and the S & M style clothing worn by her somewhat less attractive minions, begins to make the audience wonder just what the hell kind of movie this is going to be.
Cut to a punk club in downtown L.A., where Stefan has tracked Mariana (Marsha Hunt), a black female werewolf on the prowl for fresh meat. She finds it in a gang of extremely stupid punks, who she lures to a warehouse and slaughters, but not before an absolutely hilarious sequence in which her fellow werewolves smash bottles and boards over the punks' heads...because werewolves, as we all know, not only feast on human flesh, they like to chuck shit at their victims first. And speaking of victims, why the fuck does Stefan let Mariana lure the punks away from the club when he knows perfectly well they will all be butchered? Does he hate their music that much? His entire presence in the scene is pointless, though Lee looks terrific in punk sunglasses.
In the meantime, Ben returns to the crypt that night, anxious to prevent Stefan from desecrating his sister's corpse, only to witness her rise from the grave. After blasting a few werewolves who were there to remove her from consecrated ground, and seeing Stefan stick a silver spike in his sister's heart, Ben is finally convinced. Stefan tells Ben and Jenny about the werewolves and Stirba, and they had best kill her before the next full moon, because at that point, all werewolves everywhere will be revealed. Why this presents a particular danger I'm not sure, because it seems to me that a werewolf is much more dangerous if you don't know he or she IS a werewolf until they want you to (feeding time), but as The Critical Drinker likes to say, "the script needs the plot to happen," so off our trio goes to Transylvania.
There are some interludes here with Stirba that do nothing for the plot but exist mainly to get Sybil Danning to take off the rest of her clothes.
The queen of werewolves is a teenage masturbatory fantasy, who is generally either naked or wearing a sexy rock star outfit of supreme impractibility while waiting for her nemesis Stefan to show up so she can eat him. During the waiting period she holds orgies, which would be appealing if she didn't turn all fangy and furry in the process. It is truly degrading to see the actors howling like wolves as they pretend to have sex with each other while wearing furs and leather.
A lot more nonsense follows, during which we are treated to such scenes as a dwarf attacking an Uzi-toting werewolf with a Medieval mace, and a priest being murdered by a ridiculous foam-latex prop which I think was meant to be some kind of demon. There is even a scene where a guy's eyeballs explode because Stirba is like, singing at him or something. He dies because, as he screams theatrically when it happens, "I LOST MY EARPLUUUUUUGS!"
Jenny, who is as stupid as she is functionally useless to the story, is soon captured by a horny werewolf and taken to Stirba's castle, which of course prompts Stefan and Ben to go rescue her. To do this they have to shoot their way past an army of werewolves, and employ, quite literally, a holy hand grenade, which gives Lee an excuse to break into Latin. They then split up, with Ben rescuing Jenny and killing Mariana, and Stefan confronting and killing Stirba, though he himself is immolated in the process. Some other shit happens, but by this point even I, who have seen the movie at least 25 times, couldn't explain what it is or why it was filmed. And then the movie ends.
THE HOWLING 2 is remarkable for many reasons. First and foremost is the fact that the writers fucked up the lore from beginning to end: from the stakes through the heart to the garlic wielded by Jenny to the Transvylvanian setting, it is obvious that this began as a vampire script, but the lazy-ass producers, eager to cash in on the HOLWING name without doing any actual work, simply crossed out that word wherever they found it and subbed "werewolf" instead. Second is the atrocious acting. Both Brown and McEnroe are so appalling bad in their roles that Christopher Lee can actually be seen shaking his head in disgust, indeed almost in physical pain, while they deliver their lines, and the director later admitted he seemed to be "wishing himself away" when not on set. Reb Brown at least has charimsa of a sort -- he's sort of a poor man's Ryan O'Neal, though Ryan O'Neal was fairly poor to begin with -- but McEnroe might be the most annoying, shrill, talentless actress I have ever seen on film. Her voice is like a screech owl and without meaning to be cruel or sexist, having her disrobe in the same film as Danning is like racing Secretariat against a milkwagon nag. Third is the dialogue. A script with lines like, "You will die...but first you will know the love of a werewolf!" is one you can safely bet never had a second draft. Fourth is, well...everything else. Take Mariana, for instance. We are told at the beginning of the movie that she is a very special kind of werwolf who is immune to silver bullets and can only be killed by...titanium. Huh? What? How the fuck do you know this? Did someone once shoot a werewolf with a silver bullet and, when that failed to do the trick, bombard it with the periodic table of the elements until it finally dropped? How many bullets of copper, lead, gold, nickel, iron, aluminum, etc. were fired at baffled werewolves before titanium did the trick? Since Stefan has titanium weapons handy, her immunity ultimately makes no difference and it's baffling why they even added this to the story.
And that's really what gets me about the movie. It's absolutely nonsensical from first to final frame. The plot is basically an excuse for carnage and nudity to happen (sometimes at the same time), there is a complete absence of internal logic, and many scenes are either unnecessary or inexplicable. The only really intriguing part of the story is the fact that Stefan and Stirba turn out to be brother and sister, but since this relationship is never explained or defined or given any backstory, it's irrelevant, just like the titanium nonsense. And everything the script tells us simply leads to obvious and unanswered questions: Why should we care if all werewolves suddenly reveal themselves? Wouldn't it actually be easier to exterminate them if they came out in the open? Why did Stefan wait until Stirba was about to turn 10,000 years old before he tried to kill her? For that matter, why do Stirba's minions just let Stefan walk past them over and over again instead of killing him?
I suppose pointing out the flaws in a movie like this is as productive as counting crap in a sewer, but it brings me to my main point, which is the needless awfulness of the movie. There are obviously countless instances in which films tried and failed to be good. They failed because of restricted budgets, unforeseen logistical problems, script issues, inexperienced directors, miscast actors, unfilled plot holes, poor editing, and many other reasons. With slightly different luck, more time or more money, they may have reached their objective. This is not one of those instances. THE HOWLING 2 is a cash-grab of the worst sort, the kind that doesn't even try to be good, make sense, or even assert a clear right to exist. It's laughable, moronic trash, worth watching only as unintentional comedy. But beneath the chuckles there is a serious issue at hand, an issue that has plagued Hollywood for decades: a stubborn, self-destructive, mean-spirited, arrogant insistence that the goal in any situation is simply to exploit. Let me explain.
As I said before, THE HOWLING was a respectable hit, and rightly so. It's a good movie. The script is sharp and witty, the performances are strong, the practical effects are fantastic, and the direction is assured without being obstrusive. Nor does it make either the error of taking its material too seriously nor allowing itself to deteriorate into farce. When humor is called for, there's humor; when horror is called for, there's horror. It does its job and entertains.
This having been the case, the powers that be in Hollywood could have put the same effort into THE HOWLING 2. Nowhere is it written that a sequel must be inferior to the original. There are a number of cases where sequels match or even improve on their progenitors: STAR TREK II is worlds better than STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. THE GODFATHER PART II and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY both stand confidently near the movies that spawned them. And THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, #2 in the original Star Wars trilogy, is almost universally regarded as being both slightly better than STAR WARS and markedly better than RETURN OF THE JEDI. So it can be done. And yet in the vast majority of instances, sequels grow markedly worse with each iteration. Hollywood execs will tell you it's the actors' fault: they want more money each movie, which cuts into the operating budget. The real reason is that the studio model is and always has been one of parasitical exploitation, and this applies to everything they do and everything they see. The mentality of Hollywood is that of a professional con man or ponzi scam artist, perpetually trolling for new victims. When one of them encounters a hot screenwriter, or an existing franchise, or even a good idea, he does not think, "How can I nurture this, build on this, so I can create something magnificent and lasting?" God, no. His sole thought is to wring it dry in such a way to make the most possible profit in the fastest way, and then to discard the husk and make good his escape. A studio executive doesn't care if his product is good, he just wants it to sell: the fact that making a good product will actually improve its chances of selling is entirely lost upon him. His mentality is a actually criminal mentality: every relationship is transactional and every transaction is rigged in his favor. Like a strain of virus, he sucks the host cell absolutely dry and then moves on to the next one, never sparing the previous victim a thought. Given this worldview, the fact that any good movies are made at all, much less good sequels, is actually a miracle in itself.
The tragedy of this pimp-like mindset is that many executives actually seem to regard the very idea of trying to make a good movie as unnecessary and even ridiculous. Like the con man, the thrill for these bastards is not in the process of moviemaking or even turning a profit per se, but in getting people to pay to see garbage. The joy is in the suckering, in the grift, in the con. John Landis discovered this the hard way a few years back when he was approached about a potential sequel to his seminal horror movie "An American Werewolf in London." The perspective producers told him their business model was to make a cheap, shitty film that would cash in on the name of the classic film, make its money back the first weekend before bad word of mouth could kill it, and then move on. Landis asked why they didn't simply try to make a good movie on the same budget. The producers reply was essentially, "Why bother?" The extra effort required -- not money, mind you, just effort -- was simply not worth it to them. And this brings me back to my main point:
THE HOWLING 2 is not just a terrible film, it is a pointlessly terrible one. Hollywood is awash with enormously talented writers, aspiring directors full of burning ambition, and would-be producers with just the right tough, crafty, scrappy personalities to get $10 performance out of a nickel's worth of expenditure. Employing such people on this project would not have increased the budget of this movie, but it would have led to a better one being made. And yet it wasn't done, because "why bother?" A franchise was available to be exploited, so they exploited it, thus ensuring that said franchise, far from producing a string of hits, collapsed into (arguably) the worst series of movies ever made under a single banner.
And even the sight of Sybil Danning naked can't made up for that.
I am a sucker for really bad movies. I don't mean the sort that are merely bad and therefore unpleasant to watch, but those which are so epically, fantastically, God-awfully terrible that they transcend their own shittiness and rise to the level of art. Movies which are objectively abysmal and yet eminently watchable, even enjoyable, for the sheer level of entertainment they unintentionally provide. Now, it is important to note here that to make the cut for a good-bad movie, there is one criteria which is truly crucial, and that is the fact that the film must take itself seriously even if no one else does. It cannot be tongue-in-cheek, or deliberately campy or show the slightest bit of comic self-awareness: it cannot wink at its audience, but must stare steadily at it, convinced that it is delivering legitimate cinema and not a steaming pile of elephant crap. Today I examine such a pile, THE HOWLING 2: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF.
A film with a title like this might, in your mind, disqualify itself from the category of good-bad, for the simple reason that it is utterly fucking absurd and therefore hints at the comedic self-awareness of which I just spoke. It is therefore important that you understand that the first film in this series, THE HOWLING (1981), was a legitimate horror film which has gone on to be regarded as a minor classic of the genre. Directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles and Terrence Winkless, it is that rarest of creatures: a really good werewolf movie, one which has an unforgettably creepy opening in which an investigative reporter, wearing a wire, confronts a suspected serial killer in a sleazy porno shop in downtown L.A. Combining cutting-edge practical effects, good actors delivering credible performances, some social comentary and even a little comedy, the original HOWLING did what a werewolf movie is supposed to do but usually does not: explore the beast within us all.
When THE HOWLING 2 debuted in 1985, it was expected that it would deliver on the promise of the first film. News that it would star none other than horror legend Christopher Lee undoubtedly bolstered fan expectations, as did the casting of Sybil Danning, whose blatant sexual allure was entirely in keeping with the werewolf theme of repressed sexuality -- bursting out, one might say, like 38DDDs out of a training bra. What's more, the film promised to take the audience to the darkest heart of Europe, where werewolf legends originated. The hints given by the previous movie, of a vast underground network of beings who walked as humans by day and wolves by night would be traced back to their twisted Old Country roots. What could go wrong?
Well, for starters, everything. Absolutely everything.
THE HOWLING 2 begins in Los Angeles, which, an insert title conveiently informs us, is "the city of angels." Karen White, the heroine of the previous film, is being laid to rest as her brother, Ben (Reb Brown), and her former co-worker, Jenny (Annie McEnroe), look on. After the funeral they meet Stefan (Lee), an "occult investigator" who tells Ben that, well, his sister was a werewolf, and died proving that werewolves were real and a menace to society. Oddly enough, Ben, a hard-headed cop from Montana, isn't buying this shit, but Jenny isn't so sure.
Cut to Transylvania, where werewolf queen Stirba (Danning), an aged hag living in castle, devours a beautiful young girl's life essence to regain her youth and beauty -- as well as a penchant for tearing off some or all of her clothes. No objections here, though the background nudity, and the S & M style clothing worn by her somewhat less attractive minions, begins to make the audience wonder just what the hell kind of movie this is going to be.
Cut to a punk club in downtown L.A., where Stefan has tracked Mariana (Marsha Hunt), a black female werewolf on the prowl for fresh meat. She finds it in a gang of extremely stupid punks, who she lures to a warehouse and slaughters, but not before an absolutely hilarious sequence in which her fellow werewolves smash bottles and boards over the punks' heads...because werewolves, as we all know, not only feast on human flesh, they like to chuck shit at their victims first. And speaking of victims, why the fuck does Stefan let Mariana lure the punks away from the club when he knows perfectly well they will all be butchered? Does he hate their music that much? His entire presence in the scene is pointless, though Lee looks terrific in punk sunglasses.
In the meantime, Ben returns to the crypt that night, anxious to prevent Stefan from desecrating his sister's corpse, only to witness her rise from the grave. After blasting a few werewolves who were there to remove her from consecrated ground, and seeing Stefan stick a silver spike in his sister's heart, Ben is finally convinced. Stefan tells Ben and Jenny about the werewolves and Stirba, and they had best kill her before the next full moon, because at that point, all werewolves everywhere will be revealed. Why this presents a particular danger I'm not sure, because it seems to me that a werewolf is much more dangerous if you don't know he or she IS a werewolf until they want you to (feeding time), but as The Critical Drinker likes to say, "the script needs the plot to happen," so off our trio goes to Transylvania.
There are some interludes here with Stirba that do nothing for the plot but exist mainly to get Sybil Danning to take off the rest of her clothes.
The queen of werewolves is a teenage masturbatory fantasy, who is generally either naked or wearing a sexy rock star outfit of supreme impractibility while waiting for her nemesis Stefan to show up so she can eat him. During the waiting period she holds orgies, which would be appealing if she didn't turn all fangy and furry in the process. It is truly degrading to see the actors howling like wolves as they pretend to have sex with each other while wearing furs and leather.
A lot more nonsense follows, during which we are treated to such scenes as a dwarf attacking an Uzi-toting werewolf with a Medieval mace, and a priest being murdered by a ridiculous foam-latex prop which I think was meant to be some kind of demon. There is even a scene where a guy's eyeballs explode because Stirba is like, singing at him or something. He dies because, as he screams theatrically when it happens, "I LOST MY EARPLUUUUUUGS!"
Jenny, who is as stupid as she is functionally useless to the story, is soon captured by a horny werewolf and taken to Stirba's castle, which of course prompts Stefan and Ben to go rescue her. To do this they have to shoot their way past an army of werewolves, and employ, quite literally, a holy hand grenade, which gives Lee an excuse to break into Latin. They then split up, with Ben rescuing Jenny and killing Mariana, and Stefan confronting and killing Stirba, though he himself is immolated in the process. Some other shit happens, but by this point even I, who have seen the movie at least 25 times, couldn't explain what it is or why it was filmed. And then the movie ends.
THE HOWLING 2 is remarkable for many reasons. First and foremost is the fact that the writers fucked up the lore from beginning to end: from the stakes through the heart to the garlic wielded by Jenny to the Transvylvanian setting, it is obvious that this began as a vampire script, but the lazy-ass producers, eager to cash in on the HOLWING name without doing any actual work, simply crossed out that word wherever they found it and subbed "werewolf" instead. Second is the atrocious acting. Both Brown and McEnroe are so appalling bad in their roles that Christopher Lee can actually be seen shaking his head in disgust, indeed almost in physical pain, while they deliver their lines, and the director later admitted he seemed to be "wishing himself away" when not on set. Reb Brown at least has charimsa of a sort -- he's sort of a poor man's Ryan O'Neal, though Ryan O'Neal was fairly poor to begin with -- but McEnroe might be the most annoying, shrill, talentless actress I have ever seen on film. Her voice is like a screech owl and without meaning to be cruel or sexist, having her disrobe in the same film as Danning is like racing Secretariat against a milkwagon nag. Third is the dialogue. A script with lines like, "You will die...but first you will know the love of a werewolf!" is one you can safely bet never had a second draft. Fourth is, well...everything else. Take Mariana, for instance. We are told at the beginning of the movie that she is a very special kind of werwolf who is immune to silver bullets and can only be killed by...titanium. Huh? What? How the fuck do you know this? Did someone once shoot a werewolf with a silver bullet and, when that failed to do the trick, bombard it with the periodic table of the elements until it finally dropped? How many bullets of copper, lead, gold, nickel, iron, aluminum, etc. were fired at baffled werewolves before titanium did the trick? Since Stefan has titanium weapons handy, her immunity ultimately makes no difference and it's baffling why they even added this to the story.
And that's really what gets me about the movie. It's absolutely nonsensical from first to final frame. The plot is basically an excuse for carnage and nudity to happen (sometimes at the same time), there is a complete absence of internal logic, and many scenes are either unnecessary or inexplicable. The only really intriguing part of the story is the fact that Stefan and Stirba turn out to be brother and sister, but since this relationship is never explained or defined or given any backstory, it's irrelevant, just like the titanium nonsense. And everything the script tells us simply leads to obvious and unanswered questions: Why should we care if all werewolves suddenly reveal themselves? Wouldn't it actually be easier to exterminate them if they came out in the open? Why did Stefan wait until Stirba was about to turn 10,000 years old before he tried to kill her? For that matter, why do Stirba's minions just let Stefan walk past them over and over again instead of killing him?
I suppose pointing out the flaws in a movie like this is as productive as counting crap in a sewer, but it brings me to my main point, which is the needless awfulness of the movie. There are obviously countless instances in which films tried and failed to be good. They failed because of restricted budgets, unforeseen logistical problems, script issues, inexperienced directors, miscast actors, unfilled plot holes, poor editing, and many other reasons. With slightly different luck, more time or more money, they may have reached their objective. This is not one of those instances. THE HOWLING 2 is a cash-grab of the worst sort, the kind that doesn't even try to be good, make sense, or even assert a clear right to exist. It's laughable, moronic trash, worth watching only as unintentional comedy. But beneath the chuckles there is a serious issue at hand, an issue that has plagued Hollywood for decades: a stubborn, self-destructive, mean-spirited, arrogant insistence that the goal in any situation is simply to exploit. Let me explain.
As I said before, THE HOWLING was a respectable hit, and rightly so. It's a good movie. The script is sharp and witty, the performances are strong, the practical effects are fantastic, and the direction is assured without being obstrusive. Nor does it make either the error of taking its material too seriously nor allowing itself to deteriorate into farce. When humor is called for, there's humor; when horror is called for, there's horror. It does its job and entertains.
This having been the case, the powers that be in Hollywood could have put the same effort into THE HOWLING 2. Nowhere is it written that a sequel must be inferior to the original. There are a number of cases where sequels match or even improve on their progenitors: STAR TREK II is worlds better than STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. THE GODFATHER PART II and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY both stand confidently near the movies that spawned them. And THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, #2 in the original Star Wars trilogy, is almost universally regarded as being both slightly better than STAR WARS and markedly better than RETURN OF THE JEDI. So it can be done. And yet in the vast majority of instances, sequels grow markedly worse with each iteration. Hollywood execs will tell you it's the actors' fault: they want more money each movie, which cuts into the operating budget. The real reason is that the studio model is and always has been one of parasitical exploitation, and this applies to everything they do and everything they see. The mentality of Hollywood is that of a professional con man or ponzi scam artist, perpetually trolling for new victims. When one of them encounters a hot screenwriter, or an existing franchise, or even a good idea, he does not think, "How can I nurture this, build on this, so I can create something magnificent and lasting?" God, no. His sole thought is to wring it dry in such a way to make the most possible profit in the fastest way, and then to discard the husk and make good his escape. A studio executive doesn't care if his product is good, he just wants it to sell: the fact that making a good product will actually improve its chances of selling is entirely lost upon him. His mentality is a actually criminal mentality: every relationship is transactional and every transaction is rigged in his favor. Like a strain of virus, he sucks the host cell absolutely dry and then moves on to the next one, never sparing the previous victim a thought. Given this worldview, the fact that any good movies are made at all, much less good sequels, is actually a miracle in itself.
The tragedy of this pimp-like mindset is that many executives actually seem to regard the very idea of trying to make a good movie as unnecessary and even ridiculous. Like the con man, the thrill for these bastards is not in the process of moviemaking or even turning a profit per se, but in getting people to pay to see garbage. The joy is in the suckering, in the grift, in the con. John Landis discovered this the hard way a few years back when he was approached about a potential sequel to his seminal horror movie "An American Werewolf in London." The perspective producers told him their business model was to make a cheap, shitty film that would cash in on the name of the classic film, make its money back the first weekend before bad word of mouth could kill it, and then move on. Landis asked why they didn't simply try to make a good movie on the same budget. The producers reply was essentially, "Why bother?" The extra effort required -- not money, mind you, just effort -- was simply not worth it to them. And this brings me back to my main point:
THE HOWLING 2 is not just a terrible film, it is a pointlessly terrible one. Hollywood is awash with enormously talented writers, aspiring directors full of burning ambition, and would-be producers with just the right tough, crafty, scrappy personalities to get $10 performance out of a nickel's worth of expenditure. Employing such people on this project would not have increased the budget of this movie, but it would have led to a better one being made. And yet it wasn't done, because "why bother?" A franchise was available to be exploited, so they exploited it, thus ensuring that said franchise, far from producing a string of hits, collapsed into (arguably) the worst series of movies ever made under a single banner.
And even the sight of Sybil Danning naked can't made up for that.
October 31, 2022
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2022) - THE FINAL CHAPTER
If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. -- Douglas Coupland
Well, I did it, folks. I gave myself a goal and stuck to it: 31 horror movies in 31 days. And not just that. There was also gourd-buying, pumpkin-carving, and costume-wearing. I even nipped outside to watch a few minutes of the local parade. It's been many years since I kept the spirit of Halloween within me for this long and at this level of intensity, and I'm not gonna lie: it felt pretty good. A return to childhood, minus the candy-induced sugar crash. On the other hand, watching all these cinematic slaughters, these movie massacres, occasionally messed with my head. The idea that what happens on TV stays on TV and doesn't enter your thoughts and dreams is rubbish. See enough stage blood splatter, and some of it will get on you...metaphorically speaking. On more than one occasion I awakened in the middle of the night and had to check the locks on my front door. And this brings me to the sole point I wish to make before I reel off the remaining films on my list.
When I was a kid, I assumed adults outgrew the fears that routinely terrorized me and my fellows: monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, monsters in the woods. When I think back, childhood is the most imaginative time of one's life. Even your humble correspondent, a novelist screen- and short-story writer, is not necessarily more or even as imaginative now as I was at the age of five, or eight, or ten. Children -- at least from my era, the pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-social media era -- largely existed in two worlds simultaneously: the actual, physical world, and the world of make-believe and misunderstanding. To a child, the imagined and misunderstood world is as real as the "real" one, and in many ways actually more substantive, immediate and important. A child's imagination is a kind of blaze which burns so bright it drowns out logic, reason and the evidence of one's senses. This overpowered imaginative faculty, the actual inability to discriminate between reality and fantasy, is perhaps what truly defines a child, and as the noted horror director Dario Argento once noted, no real horror is possible without imagination. This, as much as normal human instincts such as fear of the dark, sudden loud noises, being surprised or followed, etc., is why children are so often frightened out of their wits by the smallest of things. Yet even as a child, I understood that my parents and to some extent my (four years) older brother appeared decidedly unfrightened of that which terrorized me. On some level I believe I understood that certain fears were shed with age. And this is true. But it is also untrue. I am now fifty years old, and while my fears are decidedly more grounded in reality than they were at the age of, say, nine, I would simply be lying if I said that there were times when, after a night of scary films, I didn't feel a certain reluctance to get into the shower, or even to go to sleep. Nights when I had to make sure the doors were double locked to inhibit the non-existent lunatic killer from gaining entry. Nights when I made sure my feet were fully covered by the blankets so the non-existent monster could not grab them, because everybody -- every kid, I mean -- knows that blankets are 100% monster-proof. It's silly, it's undignified, it's even ridiculous, but it's also curiously wonderful. George Orwell once remarked that human beings do not die when their heart stops beating; they die when they lose the capacity to accept new ideas, and become ghosts endlessly living in a vanished past. I would add to this, and say that human beings do not grow old from mere chronological age: they grow old when they can no longer hear the inner call of the children they used to be. When they lose their power to be afraid of things that don't exist. When, in short, they lose their imagination and exist solely in the world of concrete objects. A body is little without a spirit, and it seems to me the function of a good horror movie is to remind us that we are all haunted -- in a good way -- by the child within us.
With all that said, and meant, I will now reel off the second half of my journey into unexplored horror territory:
Salem's Lot (2004): This miniseries was something like six hours long, so it counts as two movies, dammit. A more modern take on the 1979 TV movie starring David Soul I mentioned previously, this one stars Rob Lowe as a writer with a mysterious past who ends up confronting a voracious vampire in his own hometown. It's modestly entertaining and well-acted -- Donald Sutherland is particularly perfect -- but like the older version, and like the novel from which it sprang, it's poorly structured, has flabby internal logic and several sub-plots that go nowhere. The ending also lacks much in the way of sense. I enjoyed it...but not enough to watch twice.
Pontypool: This low-budget Canadian indie was a surprisingly refreshing take on the "sudden zombie outbreak" genre. With a small cast and taking place almost entirely within an isolated radio station, it follows our crusty, burned out shock-jock of a protagonist as he tries to cope with a flood of bad, panicky news that sounds like the beginning of the end of the world. The ending was too weird for my taste, but the first half really had my stomach in knots. Guerilla filmmakers would do well to use this as a masterclass in low-budget cinema.
The Lost Boys: To my surprise, I realized that despite seeing most of it a dozen times, I'd never actually sat down and watched this entire film from opening frame to closing credits. So I did. There's not much to say here except it's a hugely fun, rightfully iconic vamp romp which never takes itself too seriously but also manages to surefootedly avoid pure camp. Corey Haim is surprisingly good, and Keifer Sutherland is a natural as a vampire. (Read into that what you will.)
Prophecy: This 70s eco-horror flick is a cheese-fest but undeniably entertaining, featuring strong performances from Robert Foxworthy, Armand Assante and Talia Shire, among others. The monster looks like a bear with no skin, and one of the kills is unintentionally so funny I nearly blacked out laughing, but the environmental message, and the strong subplot about Native American rights, is even more timely today than when it was shot.
The Burning: This is a modestly entertaining, fairly well put together early-80s camp slasher, most notable for having Jason Alexander with a full head of hair, and Harvey Weinstein as a co-writer. The fact that its putative protag is a sleazy, geeky weirdo who creeps on girls in the shower -- and is also a coward -- makes a lot of sense when you think about what kind of person Weinstein actually was. A lot of his future sins are implied in the way men treat women in this flick. But it's not a bad slasher despite its flaws.
Quarantine: An American remake of the Spanish flick "Rec," this is a relentless exercise in mounting terror and tension, as a film crew, two firefighters and a pair of cops are trapped inside an apartment building full of people with a weaponized, fast-acting, easy-spreading form of rabies. After a sluggish start it picks up speed and keeps going until it crashes into a hellaciously brutal finish. American remakes of foreign horror movies almost always disappoint: this one delivers.
Triangle: When a storm capiszes their sailboat in the Bermuda Triangle, the survivors take refuge on a luxury liner only to find it abandoned -- save for one evidently psychopathic killer. And as it turns out, that is actually the least of their troubles. Triangle is a thoughtful, troubling, rather sad horror movie with a snappy pace, plenty of violence and strong, affecting performances. This is the sort of film that turns out to be something quite different than it appears to be, and probably needs to be watched twice to be fully appreciated.
Messiah of Evil: A woman goes looking for her missing artist father in an isolated seaside community, only to find a town seemingly controlled by the living dead. Despite the presence of the lovely Marianna Hill, and a few very charismatic set-ups for character deaths, this 1973 zombie film is too slow and far, far too weird to be very enjoyable.
House of Wax (1953): Vincent Price excels as a disfigured lunatic whose house of wax exhibits the corpses of his murdered victims to an unsuspecting public. Price's performance is lovely as the charming sculptor turned bloodthirsty madman. This is a fun, old-school classic originally shown in 3D, and features a very young Charles Bronson as a deaf-mute sculptor.
House of Wax (2005): A group of somewhat obnoxious teens comes upon a small town whose main attraction, a wax museum, is somewhat more sinister than it appears, and before you know it, they're fighting for their lives. A slick, better-than-average slasher of the "small town as killing jar" with a lot of familiar faces in it, it is not scary, but it is entertaining, and is now best remembered for letting the audience vicariously enjoy the gruesome death of Paris Hilton.
Hush: This is an excellent thriller-horror flick in which a deaf-mute novelist living in isolation deep in the woods is terrorized by a sadistic psychopath. Toyed with unrelentingly by her tormentor, our heroine must dig extremely deep -- in all ways -- if she wants to survive. While not mind-blowing and a touch implausible in more than one area, it's a refreshing take on the subject matter and full of tension and dread.
Storm of the Century: Stephen King's written-for-the-TV miniseries about a small island town isolated by a killer storm, and then tormented by the arrival of an evil man with supernatural powers, will probably hold your interest for its four-hour length, but it's nothing very special. The main issue is an overpowered villain: Colm Feore is a great baddie, but the material he has to work with here is above-average at its very best.
Halloween Kills: The second of the three new Halloween films is an incoherent, hyper-violent mess, featuring some of the very worst dialog I have ever heard in a major-release movie, and makes almost no use of its titular star, Jamie Lee Curtis. That having been said, this flick is so brutal, and Michael Myers depicted as such a relentless, unstoppable murder machine, breaking humans apart the way you'd crack a stick of fresh celery, that it's hard not to emerge from it slightly shaken. Some bad movies have a kind of charisma, a sort of gutty resonance, that produces a similar effect in viewers to an actually good movie. "Halloween Kills" may be one of these.
I am withholding "Halloween Ends" for a few days because, well, Halloween hasn't ended yet and I'm sure many people still haven't seen this (supposedly) final chapter in a franchise which has been slashing away in one iteration or another since 1979. What I propose to do a few days from now when the candy-corn settles is actually to rate all of the dozen or so of these flicks which have graced, and sometimes disgraced, silver screens, for most of my life. I'll begin with Carpenter's original, unassailable classic and finish with Green's controversial trilogy.
And with that slight cop out, I bid farewell to the season for 2022. It's been fun, in an extremely thorough sort of way. Just remember, as Sheriff Brackett once unironically quipped in the original movie of the same name: "It's Halloween. Everyone's entitled to one good scare."
Well, I did it, folks. I gave myself a goal and stuck to it: 31 horror movies in 31 days. And not just that. There was also gourd-buying, pumpkin-carving, and costume-wearing. I even nipped outside to watch a few minutes of the local parade. It's been many years since I kept the spirit of Halloween within me for this long and at this level of intensity, and I'm not gonna lie: it felt pretty good. A return to childhood, minus the candy-induced sugar crash. On the other hand, watching all these cinematic slaughters, these movie massacres, occasionally messed with my head. The idea that what happens on TV stays on TV and doesn't enter your thoughts and dreams is rubbish. See enough stage blood splatter, and some of it will get on you...metaphorically speaking. On more than one occasion I awakened in the middle of the night and had to check the locks on my front door. And this brings me to the sole point I wish to make before I reel off the remaining films on my list.
When I was a kid, I assumed adults outgrew the fears that routinely terrorized me and my fellows: monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, monsters in the woods. When I think back, childhood is the most imaginative time of one's life. Even your humble correspondent, a novelist screen- and short-story writer, is not necessarily more or even as imaginative now as I was at the age of five, or eight, or ten. Children -- at least from my era, the pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-social media era -- largely existed in two worlds simultaneously: the actual, physical world, and the world of make-believe and misunderstanding. To a child, the imagined and misunderstood world is as real as the "real" one, and in many ways actually more substantive, immediate and important. A child's imagination is a kind of blaze which burns so bright it drowns out logic, reason and the evidence of one's senses. This overpowered imaginative faculty, the actual inability to discriminate between reality and fantasy, is perhaps what truly defines a child, and as the noted horror director Dario Argento once noted, no real horror is possible without imagination. This, as much as normal human instincts such as fear of the dark, sudden loud noises, being surprised or followed, etc., is why children are so often frightened out of their wits by the smallest of things. Yet even as a child, I understood that my parents and to some extent my (four years) older brother appeared decidedly unfrightened of that which terrorized me. On some level I believe I understood that certain fears were shed with age. And this is true. But it is also untrue. I am now fifty years old, and while my fears are decidedly more grounded in reality than they were at the age of, say, nine, I would simply be lying if I said that there were times when, after a night of scary films, I didn't feel a certain reluctance to get into the shower, or even to go to sleep. Nights when I had to make sure the doors were double locked to inhibit the non-existent lunatic killer from gaining entry. Nights when I made sure my feet were fully covered by the blankets so the non-existent monster could not grab them, because everybody -- every kid, I mean -- knows that blankets are 100% monster-proof. It's silly, it's undignified, it's even ridiculous, but it's also curiously wonderful. George Orwell once remarked that human beings do not die when their heart stops beating; they die when they lose the capacity to accept new ideas, and become ghosts endlessly living in a vanished past. I would add to this, and say that human beings do not grow old from mere chronological age: they grow old when they can no longer hear the inner call of the children they used to be. When they lose their power to be afraid of things that don't exist. When, in short, they lose their imagination and exist solely in the world of concrete objects. A body is little without a spirit, and it seems to me the function of a good horror movie is to remind us that we are all haunted -- in a good way -- by the child within us.
With all that said, and meant, I will now reel off the second half of my journey into unexplored horror territory:
Salem's Lot (2004): This miniseries was something like six hours long, so it counts as two movies, dammit. A more modern take on the 1979 TV movie starring David Soul I mentioned previously, this one stars Rob Lowe as a writer with a mysterious past who ends up confronting a voracious vampire in his own hometown. It's modestly entertaining and well-acted -- Donald Sutherland is particularly perfect -- but like the older version, and like the novel from which it sprang, it's poorly structured, has flabby internal logic and several sub-plots that go nowhere. The ending also lacks much in the way of sense. I enjoyed it...but not enough to watch twice.
Pontypool: This low-budget Canadian indie was a surprisingly refreshing take on the "sudden zombie outbreak" genre. With a small cast and taking place almost entirely within an isolated radio station, it follows our crusty, burned out shock-jock of a protagonist as he tries to cope with a flood of bad, panicky news that sounds like the beginning of the end of the world. The ending was too weird for my taste, but the first half really had my stomach in knots. Guerilla filmmakers would do well to use this as a masterclass in low-budget cinema.
The Lost Boys: To my surprise, I realized that despite seeing most of it a dozen times, I'd never actually sat down and watched this entire film from opening frame to closing credits. So I did. There's not much to say here except it's a hugely fun, rightfully iconic vamp romp which never takes itself too seriously but also manages to surefootedly avoid pure camp. Corey Haim is surprisingly good, and Keifer Sutherland is a natural as a vampire. (Read into that what you will.)
Prophecy: This 70s eco-horror flick is a cheese-fest but undeniably entertaining, featuring strong performances from Robert Foxworthy, Armand Assante and Talia Shire, among others. The monster looks like a bear with no skin, and one of the kills is unintentionally so funny I nearly blacked out laughing, but the environmental message, and the strong subplot about Native American rights, is even more timely today than when it was shot.
The Burning: This is a modestly entertaining, fairly well put together early-80s camp slasher, most notable for having Jason Alexander with a full head of hair, and Harvey Weinstein as a co-writer. The fact that its putative protag is a sleazy, geeky weirdo who creeps on girls in the shower -- and is also a coward -- makes a lot of sense when you think about what kind of person Weinstein actually was. A lot of his future sins are implied in the way men treat women in this flick. But it's not a bad slasher despite its flaws.
Quarantine: An American remake of the Spanish flick "Rec," this is a relentless exercise in mounting terror and tension, as a film crew, two firefighters and a pair of cops are trapped inside an apartment building full of people with a weaponized, fast-acting, easy-spreading form of rabies. After a sluggish start it picks up speed and keeps going until it crashes into a hellaciously brutal finish. American remakes of foreign horror movies almost always disappoint: this one delivers.
Triangle: When a storm capiszes their sailboat in the Bermuda Triangle, the survivors take refuge on a luxury liner only to find it abandoned -- save for one evidently psychopathic killer. And as it turns out, that is actually the least of their troubles. Triangle is a thoughtful, troubling, rather sad horror movie with a snappy pace, plenty of violence and strong, affecting performances. This is the sort of film that turns out to be something quite different than it appears to be, and probably needs to be watched twice to be fully appreciated.
Messiah of Evil: A woman goes looking for her missing artist father in an isolated seaside community, only to find a town seemingly controlled by the living dead. Despite the presence of the lovely Marianna Hill, and a few very charismatic set-ups for character deaths, this 1973 zombie film is too slow and far, far too weird to be very enjoyable.
House of Wax (1953): Vincent Price excels as a disfigured lunatic whose house of wax exhibits the corpses of his murdered victims to an unsuspecting public. Price's performance is lovely as the charming sculptor turned bloodthirsty madman. This is a fun, old-school classic originally shown in 3D, and features a very young Charles Bronson as a deaf-mute sculptor.
House of Wax (2005): A group of somewhat obnoxious teens comes upon a small town whose main attraction, a wax museum, is somewhat more sinister than it appears, and before you know it, they're fighting for their lives. A slick, better-than-average slasher of the "small town as killing jar" with a lot of familiar faces in it, it is not scary, but it is entertaining, and is now best remembered for letting the audience vicariously enjoy the gruesome death of Paris Hilton.
Hush: This is an excellent thriller-horror flick in which a deaf-mute novelist living in isolation deep in the woods is terrorized by a sadistic psychopath. Toyed with unrelentingly by her tormentor, our heroine must dig extremely deep -- in all ways -- if she wants to survive. While not mind-blowing and a touch implausible in more than one area, it's a refreshing take on the subject matter and full of tension and dread.
Storm of the Century: Stephen King's written-for-the-TV miniseries about a small island town isolated by a killer storm, and then tormented by the arrival of an evil man with supernatural powers, will probably hold your interest for its four-hour length, but it's nothing very special. The main issue is an overpowered villain: Colm Feore is a great baddie, but the material he has to work with here is above-average at its very best.
Halloween Kills: The second of the three new Halloween films is an incoherent, hyper-violent mess, featuring some of the very worst dialog I have ever heard in a major-release movie, and makes almost no use of its titular star, Jamie Lee Curtis. That having been said, this flick is so brutal, and Michael Myers depicted as such a relentless, unstoppable murder machine, breaking humans apart the way you'd crack a stick of fresh celery, that it's hard not to emerge from it slightly shaken. Some bad movies have a kind of charisma, a sort of gutty resonance, that produces a similar effect in viewers to an actually good movie. "Halloween Kills" may be one of these.
I am withholding "Halloween Ends" for a few days because, well, Halloween hasn't ended yet and I'm sure many people still haven't seen this (supposedly) final chapter in a franchise which has been slashing away in one iteration or another since 1979. What I propose to do a few days from now when the candy-corn settles is actually to rate all of the dozen or so of these flicks which have graced, and sometimes disgraced, silver screens, for most of my life. I'll begin with Carpenter's original, unassailable classic and finish with Green's controversial trilogy.
And with that slight cop out, I bid farewell to the season for 2022. It's been fun, in an extremely thorough sort of way. Just remember, as Sheriff Brackett once unironically quipped in the original movie of the same name: "It's Halloween. Everyone's entitled to one good scare."
October 17, 2022
AS I PLEASE IX
Before I resume Halloween Horror 2022, I thought I'd empty this bucket I call a brain into an As I Please column. It does touch upon horror movies so it's not cheating.
* While hiking yesterday I reaped the humorous benefits of my horror-movie bingewatching. I was at the part of the Lake Williams branch of the Old Field trail which crosses the stream, listening to an old-time radio program on my headphones, when a gut-wrenching cry seemed to blast out of the woods. It was so savage, so full of animalistic and almost insane fury, that I jumped like I'd been stung by a scorpion and half-expected to see some celluloid maniac burst out of the woods wielding a chainsaw. The actual culprit of this terrible noise, this deafening drawn-out dirge, was a white crane flapping overhead. I have been around cranes for many years, they frequent the C & O canal in Maryland where I basically grew up, and yet I have never once heard their cry. Believe me, once is enough. Curiously, they strongly resemble pterodactyls. Probably they are descended from them. At any rate, it was easy to picture the ancient ancestor of this flying fiend as the last thing many a large animal saw before it was whisked off its feet to be eaten alive in a bone-littered nest somewhere.
* My temper is never improved by malfunctioning smoke alarms. Especially if there are two in such close proximity I can't tell which one is making the eardrum-piercing chirp. Especially if one of them is twelve feet off the ground and even on a step-stool and using an instrument and standing on tippy-toes I can't reach it. Especially when I finally do work the battery out and it still chirps. Especially when I finally manage to dislodge the thing so it's hanging on wires and it's still out of reach. Especially when somehow I pull it off without breaking it and now the chirp is clearly coming from the other alarm. Especially when I pull the battery from the other alarm and it still chirps. Especially when I replace the battery with the battery from the apparently fully functional alarm and it chirps a final time as I'm putting the stool away, simply as a fuck you.
* Speaking of fuck yous, many years ago, in this same apartment building, I was aggravated to the point of violence by a similarly unreachable alarm which decided to shriek and stay shrieking in the middle of the afternoon. I tried every civilized method of switching it off to no avail. Finally, in a rage, I seized a broom and proceeded to beat it from the ceiling, destroying it completely. Bellowing villainous laughter, I kicked the now-shattered alarm all over the apartment and then gleefully dropped it into the trash. The very next day -- the very next day my landlord slipped a note beneath my door informing me that the city fire marshal was coming "the day after tomorrow" to inspect each and every smoke detector in the building. No longer smiling, I went to three different home improvement stores before I found a smoke alarm that matched the original, and with considerable difficulty (because of my very high ceilings), managed to get it screwed into place and functioning. I was feeling smug again when the marshal arrived, looked at the alarm, and said, "That's an outdated model. Better swap it for a new one." The landlord's handyman immediately produced said new one from a bag, removed the "old," and promptly fired it down the nearest garbage chute. There went $27.50.
* I am now twenty films into my "31 horror films in 30 days" Halloween extravaganza, and therefore ahead of schedule. I cannot deny, however, that watching all of this scary shit in such amount and close proximity hasn't had its effect. Aside from jumping out of my skin because of the afformentioned crane, after about the fifteenth movie in less than two weeks, I was feeling jumpy before bed and had troubling dreams. Having worked in the make up effects industry for many years, I should be more immune than most to stage blood and screaming actors, and I admit I am no longer as vulnerable to scary movies as I used to be, but neither am I immune. In the long run it's probably not psychologically healthy to watch so much carnage on the tube, even when it's fake. That having been said, the news is full of carnage, too, and despite what you've been told, it's real.
* My fourth novel, and most recent release, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER has now won a second trophy, specifically the Pinnacle Book Achivement Award for Summer 2022. Why am I telling you now, in the fall? Because my notice ended up in a spam folder and not my e-mail inbox. The goddamned congratulations message with all of its links and bells and whistles was hung up like a fly in a spiderweb for almost 45 days before I accidentally stumbled upon it. Notwithstanding the fact a congratulatory phone call would have been nice, Gmail can kiss my ass. It's back to my 1998-era MSN address for me.
* G4TV, once the most famous and influential show devoted to the gaming industry, has officially gone out of business as of today. I care about this in the sense that I was a part of that industry from 2011 to 2020, during which time I worked at no less than seven different trailer houses, helping to make game trailers for some of the biggest brands in the industry. G4TV was once funny, sexy, irreverent and innovative. Later it was rebooted to be wokeist, political, and decidedly antigamer, to the point of hiring a contentious talking head called Frosk who boasted she did not even play video games. As incredible as it seems, G4TVs post-reboot content was deliberately calculated to anger and insult its own audience. Even more incredibly, this is now a trend with studios. Not incredibly, it doesn't work very well: G4TV 2.0 went out of business. I have a great deal to say about how wokeism represents a clear and present danger to every form of artistic content regardless of one's political beliefs, but for now it will be sufficient for me to repeat the mantra "go woke, go broke."
* My novella THE NUMBERS GAME got a positively lovely review from beautys.library on Instagram. It opens with, "Oh man… This was intense. This was my second story by Watson going into this, so I knew to expect something morbid. And this did not disappoint." I am not going to lie, I laughed pretty damned hard at that.
Tomorrow I resume my horror-movie orgy, which I intend to climax on Halloween night with, appropriately enough, HALLOWEEN ENDS.
* While hiking yesterday I reaped the humorous benefits of my horror-movie bingewatching. I was at the part of the Lake Williams branch of the Old Field trail which crosses the stream, listening to an old-time radio program on my headphones, when a gut-wrenching cry seemed to blast out of the woods. It was so savage, so full of animalistic and almost insane fury, that I jumped like I'd been stung by a scorpion and half-expected to see some celluloid maniac burst out of the woods wielding a chainsaw. The actual culprit of this terrible noise, this deafening drawn-out dirge, was a white crane flapping overhead. I have been around cranes for many years, they frequent the C & O canal in Maryland where I basically grew up, and yet I have never once heard their cry. Believe me, once is enough. Curiously, they strongly resemble pterodactyls. Probably they are descended from them. At any rate, it was easy to picture the ancient ancestor of this flying fiend as the last thing many a large animal saw before it was whisked off its feet to be eaten alive in a bone-littered nest somewhere.
* My temper is never improved by malfunctioning smoke alarms. Especially if there are two in such close proximity I can't tell which one is making the eardrum-piercing chirp. Especially if one of them is twelve feet off the ground and even on a step-stool and using an instrument and standing on tippy-toes I can't reach it. Especially when I finally do work the battery out and it still chirps. Especially when I finally manage to dislodge the thing so it's hanging on wires and it's still out of reach. Especially when somehow I pull it off without breaking it and now the chirp is clearly coming from the other alarm. Especially when I pull the battery from the other alarm and it still chirps. Especially when I replace the battery with the battery from the apparently fully functional alarm and it chirps a final time as I'm putting the stool away, simply as a fuck you.
* Speaking of fuck yous, many years ago, in this same apartment building, I was aggravated to the point of violence by a similarly unreachable alarm which decided to shriek and stay shrieking in the middle of the afternoon. I tried every civilized method of switching it off to no avail. Finally, in a rage, I seized a broom and proceeded to beat it from the ceiling, destroying it completely. Bellowing villainous laughter, I kicked the now-shattered alarm all over the apartment and then gleefully dropped it into the trash. The very next day -- the very next day my landlord slipped a note beneath my door informing me that the city fire marshal was coming "the day after tomorrow" to inspect each and every smoke detector in the building. No longer smiling, I went to three different home improvement stores before I found a smoke alarm that matched the original, and with considerable difficulty (because of my very high ceilings), managed to get it screwed into place and functioning. I was feeling smug again when the marshal arrived, looked at the alarm, and said, "That's an outdated model. Better swap it for a new one." The landlord's handyman immediately produced said new one from a bag, removed the "old," and promptly fired it down the nearest garbage chute. There went $27.50.
* I am now twenty films into my "31 horror films in 30 days" Halloween extravaganza, and therefore ahead of schedule. I cannot deny, however, that watching all of this scary shit in such amount and close proximity hasn't had its effect. Aside from jumping out of my skin because of the afformentioned crane, after about the fifteenth movie in less than two weeks, I was feeling jumpy before bed and had troubling dreams. Having worked in the make up effects industry for many years, I should be more immune than most to stage blood and screaming actors, and I admit I am no longer as vulnerable to scary movies as I used to be, but neither am I immune. In the long run it's probably not psychologically healthy to watch so much carnage on the tube, even when it's fake. That having been said, the news is full of carnage, too, and despite what you've been told, it's real.
* My fourth novel, and most recent release, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER has now won a second trophy, specifically the Pinnacle Book Achivement Award for Summer 2022. Why am I telling you now, in the fall? Because my notice ended up in a spam folder and not my e-mail inbox. The goddamned congratulations message with all of its links and bells and whistles was hung up like a fly in a spiderweb for almost 45 days before I accidentally stumbled upon it. Notwithstanding the fact a congratulatory phone call would have been nice, Gmail can kiss my ass. It's back to my 1998-era MSN address for me.
* G4TV, once the most famous and influential show devoted to the gaming industry, has officially gone out of business as of today. I care about this in the sense that I was a part of that industry from 2011 to 2020, during which time I worked at no less than seven different trailer houses, helping to make game trailers for some of the biggest brands in the industry. G4TV was once funny, sexy, irreverent and innovative. Later it was rebooted to be wokeist, political, and decidedly antigamer, to the point of hiring a contentious talking head called Frosk who boasted she did not even play video games. As incredible as it seems, G4TVs post-reboot content was deliberately calculated to anger and insult its own audience. Even more incredibly, this is now a trend with studios. Not incredibly, it doesn't work very well: G4TV 2.0 went out of business. I have a great deal to say about how wokeism represents a clear and present danger to every form of artistic content regardless of one's political beliefs, but for now it will be sufficient for me to repeat the mantra "go woke, go broke."
* My novella THE NUMBERS GAME got a positively lovely review from beautys.library on Instagram. It opens with, "Oh man… This was intense. This was my second story by Watson going into this, so I knew to expect something morbid. And this did not disappoint." I am not going to lie, I laughed pretty damned hard at that.
Tomorrow I resume my horror-movie orgy, which I intend to climax on Halloween night with, appropriately enough, HALLOWEEN ENDS.
October 9, 2022
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2022)
Ah, the suffering. The sweet, sweet suffering. -- Pinhead, "Hellbound: Hellraiser II"
When I first began Stone Cold Prose in 2016, I wrote a series of blogs which showcased my love of all things Halloween: I discussed horror movies, horror soundtracks, even my favorite villains. For some reason or another, as time went on I abandoned this practice: I can't remember the last time I even discussed cinema, much less horror movies. Well, as of today, October 9, 2022, I am abandoning my abandonment, and devoting much of the rest of October to the spirit of the season.
My love of Halloween is paradoxical. On the one hand, I think most adults (with souls, anyway) have nostalgia and affection for that time of life when dressing up in costume and trolling the neighborhood for candy was an integral part of life, perhaps even more important (and certainly more actively fun) than Christmas. I could a tale unfold about the many Halloweens I spent happily frolicing (rampaging might be a better word) around the block on sharp late October nights, accompanied by friends, classmates, parents, the Glen Echo Fire Company and the Walt Whitman High School band. The adrenaline rush was real, and in its way unique to the holiday. Nothing else quite matched the mixture of silliness, spookiness, greed for sugar, and the concominant sugar-high which lasted for days afterward. Samhain, the pagan festival upon which Halloween is based, was the time when the barriers between the spirit world and physical reality came down: and in my mind, as tacky and commercialized as Halloween has become, it still carries a strong hint of that magic. It's a night when kids can throw aside the civilized masks they are forced to wear by parents and teachers and be what they are: lawless, thrill-seeking monsters.
On the other hand, Halloween is a time of fright, and being an ex-coward who still nurses a yellow streak when it comes to certain subjects, images and concepts, I am often baffled by my own desire to scare the shit out of myself by paying -- paying! -- for the privilege of laying sleepless in my bed after watching what are usually good and decent people get terrorized by demons, ghosts, or chainsaw-wielding cannibals. Stephen King has explored, quite brilliantly, the need humans have to release stored-up fear through inventive tale-telling, and I am not qualified to expand on his thesis. I will say that what it boils down to is the humanistic urge to play with fire, open the forbidden door, and peek under the bandage. It's dumb as shit, but we have to do it.
This having been said, I will now reveal another of my many flaws. I do not like new things. A great deal of what I do in life is actually re-doing: I re-watch television shows and movies, re-read books, re-play videogames, re-tell stories. I'm told that anxious people do this because they find knowing the outcome of an activity to be soothing, and that makes sense to me. In effect, however, it means I only slowly and grudgingly encounter films, books and games which everyone else got to years ago. I often joke that I am a generation behind any trend, and while this is a strength as a writer, it leads me to forever make lame excuses about why I still haven't seen The Crying Game after 30 years. ("I'll get to it. It's in my Netflix queue.")
In hopes of breaking out of this habit for awhile, and also of stepping away from the now- exhausted collection of classic horror films I break out every Halloween without fail, I decided this year to watch 31 horror movies in October, one for each day of the month, culminating in a final flick, or flicks, on Halloween proper. The only criteria is that I must never have seen all of them before. That's it.
So far I am running ahead of schedule. As of Octover 9, I have seen thirteen (boo!) "new" horror flicks. The fact that I haven't seen some of these may astonish you, considering my claims to love horror movies, but again I reference my anxiety and the fact that, after spending my first twenty-odd years practically living in movie houses I seem to have gotten legally separated from cinema at some point in the late 1990s. It wasn't quite a divorce, but there have been entire years -- even before the advent of streaming services -- where I doubt I crossed the threshhold of a movie theater. Why this happened is a separate subject, but suffice to say that I am trying now to backfill a huge order of movies which have come out in the last 20+ years, and not just horror movies, either.
And so, without further adieu, here is where I'm at as of tonight, with a short review of each flicktoon:
The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2022). I am generally not a fan of horror-comedies: they usually fail to be either scary or funny, and the opening of "The Wolf of Snow Hollow" is sufficiently at cross-purposes with itself that I was tempted to yawn it off. I'm glad I didn't. While not exactly scary even at its darkest, this black comedy about an almost terminally tense small town sheriff trying to puzzle out a series of grisly murders while navigating his rage issues, alcoholism and disintegrating relationship with his teenage daughter, is surprisingly engaging and even touching. Jim Cummings does a great job as the very-nearly-mad sheriff, and Robert Forster, in his final role before he himself passed away, is touching as the old sheriff trying to come to terms with deteriorating health.
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). Considered a B movie classic, "Kingdom" pits William Shatner against a horde of venomous, carniverous tarantulas which swarm suddenly over his isolated Arizona town. If this sounds terminally dumb, the film actually does a fine job of walking the greasy tightrope between seriousness and camp, while working in all the usual monster-movie tropes: bumbling sheriff, disbelieving mayor, good-looking scientist sidekick. If you hate spiders, you'll freak seeing real tarantulas swarming over shrieking townsfolk and generally causing mayhem everywhere, even aircraft. The climax of this film is sufficiently eyebrow-lifting to linger with you for a good while.
Grizzly (1976). A "Jaws" ripoff down to individual story beats and even its climactic scene, this movie about a killer Grizzly bear working his way through campers in a state park, is stupid and silly, but actually succeeds in holding your interest for most of its length. The keys to its success are an above-average cast, including Andrew Prine, who shows up in another movie on this list, and a rapid pace: that damned bear is no sooner disembowelling one camper than its off to do in another. Does it even eat its victims? Again with the tropes of both horror, monster and disaster flicks, the park supervisor is a cold-blooded jerk who does everything he can to frustrate the hero's quest for the rogue bear. This movie also features one of the more unexpected and cruel deaths of a hero-sidekick around: one guy is mauled and buried alive, then digs free only to find the bear waiting for him for round two. Not a good day to be a sidekick.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976). This cult classic, told in semi-documentary and slightly "meta" style, is a somewhat fanciful retelling of the very real Texarkana Sundown Murders of 1946, in which that city was terrorized by a sadistic psychopath in a burlap mask who emerged after dark to wreak havoc. "Sundown" follows the efforts of a local sheriff (Prine) and a Texas ranger to hunt the elusive killer. The kill sequences are quite brutal and graphic, and to my surprise Dawn Wells (a.k.a. Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island") is one of the more fortunate of the victims. The film's evil tone is badly undermined by the bumbling antics of a cop named Spark Plug who can't do anything right, but it still hits a few genuinely nasty notes, especially since "The Phantom" was never caught.
Death Line (1972). A bizarre but haunting movie laden with sarcastic social allegory, "Death Line" begins with the disappearance of a high-ranking member of the British government in a London tube station. An eccentric detective (Donald Pleasance) is brought in on the case, but is hampered by MI6 (in the person of Christopher Lee). The real perpetrator is, of course, not a terrorist or a spurned lover but a vicious cannibal lurking beneath the tube. Alternatively funny, head-scratching, weird and gruesome, this flick's central message seems to be that allowing the existence of neglected, forgotten, abandoned people will eventually come back to haunt you.
Dead & Buried (1981). An extremely well-made and well-acted film I'd never really heard of, or heard of but never bothered to see, finds the idyllic seaside town of Potters Bluff suddenly visited with outbursts of savage, gruesome violence -- especially to strangers just "passing through." The local sheriff is baffled, but does he really want to know the answer, when signs begin to point at his loving and beautiful wife? This is one of those movies that uses the red herring technique in a very clever way, letting you see the twists from far away, but not the twists behind the twists. The end of this film tends to haunt. Throw in an appearance by a young Robert Englund and this one is a keeper.
Salem's Lot (1979). It's rare that a film is better than the book it's based on, and in the case of Salem's Lot that's not saying much, but this old TV movie is actually pretty decent for much of its 3 hour length: decent, but not decent enough. King's retelling of the Dracula story in a contemporary New England town pits a writer (David Soul) against a vampire named Barlow and his suave assistant, Straker (James Mason). The vamp makeup is striking, especially for the time, there are a few creeps and jump scares, and it papers over some of the dumber aspects of the novel, but this one hasn't aged all that well: the ending(s) are just too predictable to satisfy.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014). This is not a remake of the older cult classic, but a totally ficticious sequel, set in contemporary Texarkana, which makes frequent references to the original and even uses it as part of the plot. After a hiatus of 75 years, the brutal Sundown murders resume, complete with hooded killer, and a traumatized teen must solve the mystery of "why" before she becomes his next victim. While beautifully shot and credibly acted, this slasher fails to do more than deliver a jump scare or two despite all the screams, blood and mystery boxes. Even a hard twist at the end can't elevate the material. Ultimately it's shiny but hollow, like a Christmas ornament.
Sinister (2015). Ethan Hawke is a once-hot true crime author whose career is now circling the drain. Desperate to regain his status on the NY Times bestseller list, he moves his fam into the house where a horrible series of murders occurred a few years before, hoping this "immersive" research will score him another hit. Instead, it draws him into a supernatural mystery involving the deaths of five other families under different but equally horrible circumstances. Are he and his next? Like "Sundown," "Sinister" is a shiny object, with a creepy score and shadowy lighting: unlike "Dread" it has something to say and a rather new way in which to say it. Hawke is excellent as the whiskey-suckling writer, who is neither a very good nor a very bad man, but rather one obsessed to the point of destructiveness. The film's final line, "Don't worry, I'll make you famous again," is a truly nasty piece of work.
Blood Quantum (2019). Tired of zombie apocalypse stories? So am I. And this one is not good enough to reinvent the genre. However, it does come at the problem from a very different angle. When the usual zombie outbreak occurs on a Red Crow indian reservation in Canada, the survivors discover the flesh-eaters are much less dangerous than the living. I was much less interested in this as a zombie movie than I was as an examination of the challenges of life on an Indian reserve, and frankly the flick was at its strongest when it was simply First Nations people trying to puzzle out the pending apocalypse. It's still worth a watch, though, and for once I actually enjoyed the social commentary (the Indians have to decide if they are going to protect the rather useless white townsfolk).
Mister. Frost (1990). In this hard-to-find little gem, Jeff Goldblum plays a suave serial killer named Frost who tries to convince his psychiatrist that he is the devil. More a psychological tug-of-war than a splatter film, Goldblum is marvelous in his slow deconstruction of his doctor, who he insists will murder him by the end of their "session." While the idea of the devil struggling to find purpose and meaning in the post-religious age was not new even in 1990 (I tackled it myself in my story "The Devil You Know"), the screenplay attacks the problem as a practical one: Frost must force his atheist doctor into an act of faith to be reborn. This is worth watching just for Goldblum's mischievious, slightly nasty performance, which flirts with over-the-top but never descends into camp.
Last Train From Busan (2016). Zombie movies. As you may have guessed, not really a fan. So few are done well, including many of those revered as classics. "Busan" may not be a classic, but it is a pretty damned good movie, one which quite rightly uses the usual zombie outbreak as a mere pretext for a study of ordinary people under extraordinary pressure in a pressure-cooker setting: a high speed train. The hero is a Korean version of the usual blunted Wall Street parasite, who is taking his estranged daughter to his estranged wife on the kid's birthday. When the crisis hits, he must overcome his selfishness not just to survive, but win back his daughter's love. In a story with plenty of sarcastic social messaging about greed, money-privilege and bad government, this remains just a tale mostly about love: even the human villain, a psychopathically selfish corporate CEO, sobs at the end that he just wants to get home to his mother. The look of compassion in the hero's eyes at that moment, despite having nearly been killed by this goon a half-dozen times, speaks volumes about that most neglected of storytelling tools, the moral compass.
Paranormal Activity (2007). Yes, it's true: I never saw this fucking thing before tonight. I was decidedly not a fan of "The Blair Witch Project" and keen to avoid anything that involved low-budget found footage ever again. I did see one of the sequels a few years ago and was surprised to find it engaging enough for what it was, so I finally gave this 'un a try. I'm happy to say it that after a boring start during which I almost turned it off, it gradually establishes a mounting sense of dread and helplessness which culminates in a predictable ending which is not less jarring for being predictable. I can't say the couple in question was overly likeable, but I sympathized with their plight. Sometimes the most effective horror stories are the ones that show the least, and I partially credit this film's success for helping bury the torture porn trend which briefly hijacked horror in the early-mid 00s.
And that, my friends, is it for tonight. I still have eighteen films to go, and much to choose from. Hollywood has such sights to show me.
When I first began Stone Cold Prose in 2016, I wrote a series of blogs which showcased my love of all things Halloween: I discussed horror movies, horror soundtracks, even my favorite villains. For some reason or another, as time went on I abandoned this practice: I can't remember the last time I even discussed cinema, much less horror movies. Well, as of today, October 9, 2022, I am abandoning my abandonment, and devoting much of the rest of October to the spirit of the season.
My love of Halloween is paradoxical. On the one hand, I think most adults (with souls, anyway) have nostalgia and affection for that time of life when dressing up in costume and trolling the neighborhood for candy was an integral part of life, perhaps even more important (and certainly more actively fun) than Christmas. I could a tale unfold about the many Halloweens I spent happily frolicing (rampaging might be a better word) around the block on sharp late October nights, accompanied by friends, classmates, parents, the Glen Echo Fire Company and the Walt Whitman High School band. The adrenaline rush was real, and in its way unique to the holiday. Nothing else quite matched the mixture of silliness, spookiness, greed for sugar, and the concominant sugar-high which lasted for days afterward. Samhain, the pagan festival upon which Halloween is based, was the time when the barriers between the spirit world and physical reality came down: and in my mind, as tacky and commercialized as Halloween has become, it still carries a strong hint of that magic. It's a night when kids can throw aside the civilized masks they are forced to wear by parents and teachers and be what they are: lawless, thrill-seeking monsters.
On the other hand, Halloween is a time of fright, and being an ex-coward who still nurses a yellow streak when it comes to certain subjects, images and concepts, I am often baffled by my own desire to scare the shit out of myself by paying -- paying! -- for the privilege of laying sleepless in my bed after watching what are usually good and decent people get terrorized by demons, ghosts, or chainsaw-wielding cannibals. Stephen King has explored, quite brilliantly, the need humans have to release stored-up fear through inventive tale-telling, and I am not qualified to expand on his thesis. I will say that what it boils down to is the humanistic urge to play with fire, open the forbidden door, and peek under the bandage. It's dumb as shit, but we have to do it.
This having been said, I will now reveal another of my many flaws. I do not like new things. A great deal of what I do in life is actually re-doing: I re-watch television shows and movies, re-read books, re-play videogames, re-tell stories. I'm told that anxious people do this because they find knowing the outcome of an activity to be soothing, and that makes sense to me. In effect, however, it means I only slowly and grudgingly encounter films, books and games which everyone else got to years ago. I often joke that I am a generation behind any trend, and while this is a strength as a writer, it leads me to forever make lame excuses about why I still haven't seen The Crying Game after 30 years. ("I'll get to it. It's in my Netflix queue.")
In hopes of breaking out of this habit for awhile, and also of stepping away from the now- exhausted collection of classic horror films I break out every Halloween without fail, I decided this year to watch 31 horror movies in October, one for each day of the month, culminating in a final flick, or flicks, on Halloween proper. The only criteria is that I must never have seen all of them before. That's it.
So far I am running ahead of schedule. As of Octover 9, I have seen thirteen (boo!) "new" horror flicks. The fact that I haven't seen some of these may astonish you, considering my claims to love horror movies, but again I reference my anxiety and the fact that, after spending my first twenty-odd years practically living in movie houses I seem to have gotten legally separated from cinema at some point in the late 1990s. It wasn't quite a divorce, but there have been entire years -- even before the advent of streaming services -- where I doubt I crossed the threshhold of a movie theater. Why this happened is a separate subject, but suffice to say that I am trying now to backfill a huge order of movies which have come out in the last 20+ years, and not just horror movies, either.
And so, without further adieu, here is where I'm at as of tonight, with a short review of each flicktoon:
The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2022). I am generally not a fan of horror-comedies: they usually fail to be either scary or funny, and the opening of "The Wolf of Snow Hollow" is sufficiently at cross-purposes with itself that I was tempted to yawn it off. I'm glad I didn't. While not exactly scary even at its darkest, this black comedy about an almost terminally tense small town sheriff trying to puzzle out a series of grisly murders while navigating his rage issues, alcoholism and disintegrating relationship with his teenage daughter, is surprisingly engaging and even touching. Jim Cummings does a great job as the very-nearly-mad sheriff, and Robert Forster, in his final role before he himself passed away, is touching as the old sheriff trying to come to terms with deteriorating health.
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). Considered a B movie classic, "Kingdom" pits William Shatner against a horde of venomous, carniverous tarantulas which swarm suddenly over his isolated Arizona town. If this sounds terminally dumb, the film actually does a fine job of walking the greasy tightrope between seriousness and camp, while working in all the usual monster-movie tropes: bumbling sheriff, disbelieving mayor, good-looking scientist sidekick. If you hate spiders, you'll freak seeing real tarantulas swarming over shrieking townsfolk and generally causing mayhem everywhere, even aircraft. The climax of this film is sufficiently eyebrow-lifting to linger with you for a good while.
Grizzly (1976). A "Jaws" ripoff down to individual story beats and even its climactic scene, this movie about a killer Grizzly bear working his way through campers in a state park, is stupid and silly, but actually succeeds in holding your interest for most of its length. The keys to its success are an above-average cast, including Andrew Prine, who shows up in another movie on this list, and a rapid pace: that damned bear is no sooner disembowelling one camper than its off to do in another. Does it even eat its victims? Again with the tropes of both horror, monster and disaster flicks, the park supervisor is a cold-blooded jerk who does everything he can to frustrate the hero's quest for the rogue bear. This movie also features one of the more unexpected and cruel deaths of a hero-sidekick around: one guy is mauled and buried alive, then digs free only to find the bear waiting for him for round two. Not a good day to be a sidekick.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976). This cult classic, told in semi-documentary and slightly "meta" style, is a somewhat fanciful retelling of the very real Texarkana Sundown Murders of 1946, in which that city was terrorized by a sadistic psychopath in a burlap mask who emerged after dark to wreak havoc. "Sundown" follows the efforts of a local sheriff (Prine) and a Texas ranger to hunt the elusive killer. The kill sequences are quite brutal and graphic, and to my surprise Dawn Wells (a.k.a. Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island") is one of the more fortunate of the victims. The film's evil tone is badly undermined by the bumbling antics of a cop named Spark Plug who can't do anything right, but it still hits a few genuinely nasty notes, especially since "The Phantom" was never caught.
Death Line (1972). A bizarre but haunting movie laden with sarcastic social allegory, "Death Line" begins with the disappearance of a high-ranking member of the British government in a London tube station. An eccentric detective (Donald Pleasance) is brought in on the case, but is hampered by MI6 (in the person of Christopher Lee). The real perpetrator is, of course, not a terrorist or a spurned lover but a vicious cannibal lurking beneath the tube. Alternatively funny, head-scratching, weird and gruesome, this flick's central message seems to be that allowing the existence of neglected, forgotten, abandoned people will eventually come back to haunt you.
Dead & Buried (1981). An extremely well-made and well-acted film I'd never really heard of, or heard of but never bothered to see, finds the idyllic seaside town of Potters Bluff suddenly visited with outbursts of savage, gruesome violence -- especially to strangers just "passing through." The local sheriff is baffled, but does he really want to know the answer, when signs begin to point at his loving and beautiful wife? This is one of those movies that uses the red herring technique in a very clever way, letting you see the twists from far away, but not the twists behind the twists. The end of this film tends to haunt. Throw in an appearance by a young Robert Englund and this one is a keeper.
Salem's Lot (1979). It's rare that a film is better than the book it's based on, and in the case of Salem's Lot that's not saying much, but this old TV movie is actually pretty decent for much of its 3 hour length: decent, but not decent enough. King's retelling of the Dracula story in a contemporary New England town pits a writer (David Soul) against a vampire named Barlow and his suave assistant, Straker (James Mason). The vamp makeup is striking, especially for the time, there are a few creeps and jump scares, and it papers over some of the dumber aspects of the novel, but this one hasn't aged all that well: the ending(s) are just too predictable to satisfy.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014). This is not a remake of the older cult classic, but a totally ficticious sequel, set in contemporary Texarkana, which makes frequent references to the original and even uses it as part of the plot. After a hiatus of 75 years, the brutal Sundown murders resume, complete with hooded killer, and a traumatized teen must solve the mystery of "why" before she becomes his next victim. While beautifully shot and credibly acted, this slasher fails to do more than deliver a jump scare or two despite all the screams, blood and mystery boxes. Even a hard twist at the end can't elevate the material. Ultimately it's shiny but hollow, like a Christmas ornament.
Sinister (2015). Ethan Hawke is a once-hot true crime author whose career is now circling the drain. Desperate to regain his status on the NY Times bestseller list, he moves his fam into the house where a horrible series of murders occurred a few years before, hoping this "immersive" research will score him another hit. Instead, it draws him into a supernatural mystery involving the deaths of five other families under different but equally horrible circumstances. Are he and his next? Like "Sundown," "Sinister" is a shiny object, with a creepy score and shadowy lighting: unlike "Dread" it has something to say and a rather new way in which to say it. Hawke is excellent as the whiskey-suckling writer, who is neither a very good nor a very bad man, but rather one obsessed to the point of destructiveness. The film's final line, "Don't worry, I'll make you famous again," is a truly nasty piece of work.
Blood Quantum (2019). Tired of zombie apocalypse stories? So am I. And this one is not good enough to reinvent the genre. However, it does come at the problem from a very different angle. When the usual zombie outbreak occurs on a Red Crow indian reservation in Canada, the survivors discover the flesh-eaters are much less dangerous than the living. I was much less interested in this as a zombie movie than I was as an examination of the challenges of life on an Indian reserve, and frankly the flick was at its strongest when it was simply First Nations people trying to puzzle out the pending apocalypse. It's still worth a watch, though, and for once I actually enjoyed the social commentary (the Indians have to decide if they are going to protect the rather useless white townsfolk).
Mister. Frost (1990). In this hard-to-find little gem, Jeff Goldblum plays a suave serial killer named Frost who tries to convince his psychiatrist that he is the devil. More a psychological tug-of-war than a splatter film, Goldblum is marvelous in his slow deconstruction of his doctor, who he insists will murder him by the end of their "session." While the idea of the devil struggling to find purpose and meaning in the post-religious age was not new even in 1990 (I tackled it myself in my story "The Devil You Know"), the screenplay attacks the problem as a practical one: Frost must force his atheist doctor into an act of faith to be reborn. This is worth watching just for Goldblum's mischievious, slightly nasty performance, which flirts with over-the-top but never descends into camp.
Last Train From Busan (2016). Zombie movies. As you may have guessed, not really a fan. So few are done well, including many of those revered as classics. "Busan" may not be a classic, but it is a pretty damned good movie, one which quite rightly uses the usual zombie outbreak as a mere pretext for a study of ordinary people under extraordinary pressure in a pressure-cooker setting: a high speed train. The hero is a Korean version of the usual blunted Wall Street parasite, who is taking his estranged daughter to his estranged wife on the kid's birthday. When the crisis hits, he must overcome his selfishness not just to survive, but win back his daughter's love. In a story with plenty of sarcastic social messaging about greed, money-privilege and bad government, this remains just a tale mostly about love: even the human villain, a psychopathically selfish corporate CEO, sobs at the end that he just wants to get home to his mother. The look of compassion in the hero's eyes at that moment, despite having nearly been killed by this goon a half-dozen times, speaks volumes about that most neglected of storytelling tools, the moral compass.
Paranormal Activity (2007). Yes, it's true: I never saw this fucking thing before tonight. I was decidedly not a fan of "The Blair Witch Project" and keen to avoid anything that involved low-budget found footage ever again. I did see one of the sequels a few years ago and was surprised to find it engaging enough for what it was, so I finally gave this 'un a try. I'm happy to say it that after a boring start during which I almost turned it off, it gradually establishes a mounting sense of dread and helplessness which culminates in a predictable ending which is not less jarring for being predictable. I can't say the couple in question was overly likeable, but I sympathized with their plight. Sometimes the most effective horror stories are the ones that show the least, and I partially credit this film's success for helping bury the torture porn trend which briefly hijacked horror in the early-mid 00s.
And that, my friends, is it for tonight. I still have eighteen films to go, and much to choose from. Hollywood has such sights to show me.
October 3, 2022
PUTIN AND THE GHOST OF MUSSOLINI
Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. -- Scrooge
Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. – Pericles
The most curious thing about world news is how easy it is to ignore. Under ordinary circumstances it is perfectly possible for an American to pretend as if most of the rest of the planet doesn't exist -- or exists in a fictional sort of way, like the happenings of Middle Earth. We share only two borders, and one of those is with Canada, a nation which (Quebec notwithstanding) is so much like our own that going there hardly even seems like leaving the country. Between us and almost everyone else, there are huge oceans or vast distances, or both. We are vaguely aware that what happens in Europe, or Asia, can effect us financially, but we don't really understand how, and even if we did understand, we probably wouldn't care. Broadly speaking, our focus is us.
The war in Europe, between Russia and Ukraine, is not something which occupies the hourly thoughts of the ordinary Yank. Most Americans are probably only vaguely aware of it, even though it periodically dominates the headlines. Nevertheless, it is getting increasingly hard to ignore. In 1914, a general war broke out in Europe which eventually dragged in the United States and cost us 100,000 dead. In 1939, another war broke out, and the U.S. was once again sucked into the maelstrom: this time the price was much higher, 300,000 dead in Europe alone. In 1947, the Cold War began, and dragged on until 1991: total deaths were fewer, but the stakes were higher: global annihilation. When it ended, America, with the greatest sigh of relief, let go of the idea of ever having to put a fighting army in Europe again. Our once-mighty military forces there dwindled to a kind of token, meant more for the psychological comfort of Europeans than practical use. Some openly questioned the need for any American military in presence there at all. And yet, just two years after an anti-NATO Trump presidency, here we are once again, being dragged toward a European war. It seems that America is once again learning that it cannot extricate itself from its place on the world stage: that in the age of a global economy, in which no nation is actually self-sufficient, what effects one large area of the earth must naturally effect others.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set in motion a whole chain of events which have, in turn, brought the world to the edge of total catastrophe. There is no way to gloss this over or to sugar-coat it. As Orwell said in 1940, "We are in the soup, full fathom five." Anyone who says differently is lying to you. Both your retirement fund and your life are at risk. On the other hand, neither panic nor anxiety is productive, and both can generally be kept at bay by possessing a clear understanding of what the hell is going on. Possession of this is best obtained by an understanding not of Vladimir Putin, but Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini is in my estimation the historical figure most analagous to Putin. In certain very distinct ways their careers, outlooks and ambitions follow the same general courses, and since courses foreshadow ends, it may be that in the grisly fate of Mussolini we see the most likely end to the life of Putin.
Mussolini is today regarded as something of a joke: even the Italians refer to him as the "Sawdust Caesar." It is easy to forget that until 1939, Mussolini was regarded as one of the great figures of modern history. Following a brief, tumultuous career as a politician after service in WWI, he rose to power in 1922 at the head of his self-created Fascist Party. Shrewdly cutting deals with the Italian Crown and the Vatican, he secured himself near-absolute power, and then embarked on a quest to restore Italy's former Roman Imperial glory. First, in 1930, came the "pacification" of Libya, which Italy had conquered 20 years before. This was carried out ruthlessly and with great cruelty. Then, in 1936, Italy conquered East Africa, a huge area which today comprises all of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, as well as other territories. This conquest was even more savage than the Libyan "pacification," with Italian forces employing poison gas against a native population which had no defense against it. Mussolini's desire for empire was not merely an expression of hunger for dominion: he needed a foreign war to distract Italians from the effects of the Great Depression, and also to give him an excuse to further radicalize his domestic social agenda and increase his own personal power.
In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Mussolini threw the full weight of his military behind Fransisco Franco, head of the quasi-fascist Falangist Party fighting in rebellion against the elected government. The Italians were by far the greatest contributor of men and equipment to the nationalist cause, and Mussolini could be counted as a fellow victor when Franco emerged victorious from the war in 1939.
In '39, Mussolini invaded and swiftly conquered the small nation of Albania, which put him in a position to attack Greece and strengthened his hold on the Adriatic. At this point he had been in power for 18 years, won a series of conflicts, expanded Italian power, reach and prestiege, and yet was still seen -- accurately -- as eager to prevent a second world war. Had he retired or died then, he would have been regarded quite differently by history, and certainly seen as a success, if a badly bloodstained one. But here Mussolini, unlike Franco, made a fatal error. Having spent his career slaughtering African tribesmen and the second or third-rate armies of European nations, he decided, in 1940, to enter the Second World War on Hitler's side. This event cost him first his empire and then his life.
For much of his career, Mussolini's strengths largely rested upon his sense of practicality. He understood the limitations of Italian military power, the Italian economy, and the Italian people themselves, and only operated within the boundaries of the possible, never pushing his machine past its design limits. Even as a bully-politician in the 20s, he was careful in his estimations of what the Italian public would and would not tolerate. But in 1940, vicariously drunk on Hitler's successes and previous instances of Allied cowardice, he decided a general war could be fought, and won, without much in the way of cost. He was wrong. The French easily repulsed his attacks into their southeast border. The British swiftly conquered the whole of Italian East Africa, and his army in Libya was so badly mauled he had to plead with Hitler for military assistance to prevent losing North Africa as well. In late 1940, conscious of his damaged prestiege, he launched an invasion of Greece which failed so miserably he actually lost part of Albania too, again requiring Hitler's intervention to save him. In 1941, determined to be a part of the war in Russia, he sent a large army there, only to see it almost annihilated in the Stalingrad campaign. And by 1943, Hitler's star now waning itself, North Africa fell to the Allies, collapsing all of his African ambitions and destroying any lingering confidence the Italian people may have possessed in him. The Allied invasion of Sicily toppled his government, and only Hitler -- once again! -- was able to save him, sending commandos to rescue him from imprisonment, and then placing him ahead of a puppet government in northern Italy. The last two years of Mussolini's life were joyless farce: a mere figurehead without any real power, without any popular support, he "governed" over the north of Italy while the Germans ruled the country, and the Allies gobbled not only the last of his Balkan conquests but gradually worked their way up the Italian peninsula. In the spring of 1945, when the Axis finally collapsed, he was captured by anti-fascist partisans while trying to flee northward, possibly to Switzerland. These partisans were part of a huge guerilla movement which had opposed both the Germans and the Fascists: they hated Mussolini and were gleeful to have captured him. This article from Ranker picks up the narrative:
"After the partisans seized Mussolini and [his mistress Claretta] Petacci, they hid them in a remote northern Italian farmhouse for a night. From there, they took them to a village near Lake Como where the two were placed in front of a stone wall and executed. Afterwards, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and 14 others were driven to a central square in Milan where vast crowds awaited their chance to channel their rage...The bodies were stoned, beaten, hit with vegetables, used for target practice, and eventually strung up at a gas station on one side of the square. By the end of the day – when it could finally be taken to the morgue – Mussolini's body was unrecognizable."
Such was the end of a man who, at his height, controlled nearly a million square miles of territory in Europe and Africa, and who, but for a single terrible decision, might have died in bed in the 1970s like Franco did. But the difference between rule or ruin is often a single bad decision, and the more powerful the man, the more terrible the consequences when a gamble craps out. Which brings us back to Vladimir Putin.
Putin, like Mussolini, enjoyed a highly improbable rise to power. In a brief span of time, Putin went from being an obscure KGB officer to the presidency of Russia. Once there, he gradually but systematically eroded, weakened, ameliorated and finally destroyed all barriers to his personal power, using intimidation and violence against his political opposition. He then embarked on a string of foreign adventures in places like Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, all of which were ultimately successful despite embarrassing setbacks and failures along the way. In doing so, he raised the prestige of the Russian army, which became regarded as "the second best in the world" behind the United States. Wary of fatiguing his people with conflict, he only engaged in small wars, and brokered economic deals that temporarily fattened the Russian economy, giving his autocratic, corrupt rule a modicum of popularity. Like Mussolini, he tapped, or tried to tap, into nationalistic fervor to motivate the populace, and to keep them distracted from their increasing lack of freedoms. In 2014, he took a huge but calculated risk, and seized almost without bloodshed a huge swath of Ukrainian territory, a "land grab" of the Hitler-Mussolini style. He then legitimized the theft by organizing elections which voted the stolen territories into Russia. This near-bloodless conquest carried his domestic popularity to its highest levels, and he endured the Western sanctions which followed without weakening his grip on power.
Like Mussolini in 1939-1940, Putin was now at a crossroads in his career. His capture of the Crimea from Ukraine was a fait accompli, and his army was still respected and feared in Europe. He also had economic cards to play with his near-monopoly on natural gas, upon which Europe was and is largely dependent. He was in effective control of Belarus, which was basically a Russian vassal-state. A wise course would have been to sit back, make consoling diplomatic noises, and let the West gradually acclimate itself to his Ukraine adventure. Instead, he came to the conclusion that between Donald Trump's avowed desire to divorce America from NATO (and Europe), and Ukraine's seeming inability to defend itself, he could conquer Ukraine in a Blitzkrieg attack, install a puppet government, and then once again sit back and ride out the sanctions. Like Mussolini (and Hitler), he let himself be seduced by a vision of his place in history and by an over-identification of his own imperial ambitions with the good of his people. And ike both Mussolini and Hitler, he failed to grasp that democratic nations, while generally cowardly and short-sighted when initially confronted with military aggression, are capable of tremendous unity and ferocity once they realize there is no choice but battle. The Ukraine of 2014 was like the France of 1939; the Ukraine of 2022 was like the Britain of 1940: full of defiance and determination to win at all costs.
There is no need to go into the military situation in Ukraine in detail, except to say that seven months into the war, Putin is roughly where Mussolini was in 1941-1942: a dictator who has discovered his army is inadequate to fighting the war which he started; whose domestic popularity has cratered in tandem with his international standing; whose economy is crumbling; whose authoritarianism is growing in proportion to public hostility to the war; whose young men are fleeing military service by the tens of thousands; who is beset by powerful enemies and has no clear (or even blurry) pathway to peace without humiliating himself and surrendering all hopes of empire. The critical difference is, of course, the existence of nuclear weapons. Mussolini had none. When his armies were beaten, his fleets sunk, his air force shot out of the sky, he had no recourses, no way to save himself. Putin, on the other hand, still has a radioactive ace up his sleeve. And history shows us that tyrants, especially those whose egos have swollen to the point where they see themselves as the living embodiment of their own nations, will happily see those nations burn rather than admit defeat. The very act of placing nation above self is antithetical to the mentality of a dictator, and even if it were not, no dictator can step down and expect anything but a hangman's noose. The crimes they commit to obtain and maintain power mark them for death should they surrender it.
In my novella "Deus Ex," I explored the psychology of a defeated dictator who, having lost a bloody global war he himself initiated, flees his capital in a hypersonic jet, leaving behind a ticking nuclear bomb for both his enemies and his former supporters, many of whom are still completely loyal to him. Magnus, my fictional tyrant, does not even trouble to justify this horrific act: in his mind it is the logical outcome of any scenario in which he is not the winner. I do not, at this point, believe Putin will employ even a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine: he is not yet far gone enough in the head to believe this will prolong his life or grip on power, which are in fact bound up. My fear is that when and if he comes to believe he cannot salvage the situation through conventional warfare or diplomacy, he may turn to this method in the same way a child kicks over a gameboard when he realizes the game is lost. It is not a last attempt to win: it is an assurance that everyone else loses.
Someday, if we all live to see a someday, historians may look back on the present era and take note of the selfishness, narcissism and egotism which have marked politics in both East and West in recent years: the insistence that the power and privilege of an individual, or a small coterie of individuals, outweigh the rights and even the lives of the masses they supposedly lead. Until then we are stuck with men like Putin. And the ghost of Mussolini.
Deus Ex
Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. – Pericles
The most curious thing about world news is how easy it is to ignore. Under ordinary circumstances it is perfectly possible for an American to pretend as if most of the rest of the planet doesn't exist -- or exists in a fictional sort of way, like the happenings of Middle Earth. We share only two borders, and one of those is with Canada, a nation which (Quebec notwithstanding) is so much like our own that going there hardly even seems like leaving the country. Between us and almost everyone else, there are huge oceans or vast distances, or both. We are vaguely aware that what happens in Europe, or Asia, can effect us financially, but we don't really understand how, and even if we did understand, we probably wouldn't care. Broadly speaking, our focus is us.
The war in Europe, between Russia and Ukraine, is not something which occupies the hourly thoughts of the ordinary Yank. Most Americans are probably only vaguely aware of it, even though it periodically dominates the headlines. Nevertheless, it is getting increasingly hard to ignore. In 1914, a general war broke out in Europe which eventually dragged in the United States and cost us 100,000 dead. In 1939, another war broke out, and the U.S. was once again sucked into the maelstrom: this time the price was much higher, 300,000 dead in Europe alone. In 1947, the Cold War began, and dragged on until 1991: total deaths were fewer, but the stakes were higher: global annihilation. When it ended, America, with the greatest sigh of relief, let go of the idea of ever having to put a fighting army in Europe again. Our once-mighty military forces there dwindled to a kind of token, meant more for the psychological comfort of Europeans than practical use. Some openly questioned the need for any American military in presence there at all. And yet, just two years after an anti-NATO Trump presidency, here we are once again, being dragged toward a European war. It seems that America is once again learning that it cannot extricate itself from its place on the world stage: that in the age of a global economy, in which no nation is actually self-sufficient, what effects one large area of the earth must naturally effect others.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set in motion a whole chain of events which have, in turn, brought the world to the edge of total catastrophe. There is no way to gloss this over or to sugar-coat it. As Orwell said in 1940, "We are in the soup, full fathom five." Anyone who says differently is lying to you. Both your retirement fund and your life are at risk. On the other hand, neither panic nor anxiety is productive, and both can generally be kept at bay by possessing a clear understanding of what the hell is going on. Possession of this is best obtained by an understanding not of Vladimir Putin, but Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini is in my estimation the historical figure most analagous to Putin. In certain very distinct ways their careers, outlooks and ambitions follow the same general courses, and since courses foreshadow ends, it may be that in the grisly fate of Mussolini we see the most likely end to the life of Putin.
Mussolini is today regarded as something of a joke: even the Italians refer to him as the "Sawdust Caesar." It is easy to forget that until 1939, Mussolini was regarded as one of the great figures of modern history. Following a brief, tumultuous career as a politician after service in WWI, he rose to power in 1922 at the head of his self-created Fascist Party. Shrewdly cutting deals with the Italian Crown and the Vatican, he secured himself near-absolute power, and then embarked on a quest to restore Italy's former Roman Imperial glory. First, in 1930, came the "pacification" of Libya, which Italy had conquered 20 years before. This was carried out ruthlessly and with great cruelty. Then, in 1936, Italy conquered East Africa, a huge area which today comprises all of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, as well as other territories. This conquest was even more savage than the Libyan "pacification," with Italian forces employing poison gas against a native population which had no defense against it. Mussolini's desire for empire was not merely an expression of hunger for dominion: he needed a foreign war to distract Italians from the effects of the Great Depression, and also to give him an excuse to further radicalize his domestic social agenda and increase his own personal power.
In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Mussolini threw the full weight of his military behind Fransisco Franco, head of the quasi-fascist Falangist Party fighting in rebellion against the elected government. The Italians were by far the greatest contributor of men and equipment to the nationalist cause, and Mussolini could be counted as a fellow victor when Franco emerged victorious from the war in 1939.
In '39, Mussolini invaded and swiftly conquered the small nation of Albania, which put him in a position to attack Greece and strengthened his hold on the Adriatic. At this point he had been in power for 18 years, won a series of conflicts, expanded Italian power, reach and prestiege, and yet was still seen -- accurately -- as eager to prevent a second world war. Had he retired or died then, he would have been regarded quite differently by history, and certainly seen as a success, if a badly bloodstained one. But here Mussolini, unlike Franco, made a fatal error. Having spent his career slaughtering African tribesmen and the second or third-rate armies of European nations, he decided, in 1940, to enter the Second World War on Hitler's side. This event cost him first his empire and then his life.
For much of his career, Mussolini's strengths largely rested upon his sense of practicality. He understood the limitations of Italian military power, the Italian economy, and the Italian people themselves, and only operated within the boundaries of the possible, never pushing his machine past its design limits. Even as a bully-politician in the 20s, he was careful in his estimations of what the Italian public would and would not tolerate. But in 1940, vicariously drunk on Hitler's successes and previous instances of Allied cowardice, he decided a general war could be fought, and won, without much in the way of cost. He was wrong. The French easily repulsed his attacks into their southeast border. The British swiftly conquered the whole of Italian East Africa, and his army in Libya was so badly mauled he had to plead with Hitler for military assistance to prevent losing North Africa as well. In late 1940, conscious of his damaged prestiege, he launched an invasion of Greece which failed so miserably he actually lost part of Albania too, again requiring Hitler's intervention to save him. In 1941, determined to be a part of the war in Russia, he sent a large army there, only to see it almost annihilated in the Stalingrad campaign. And by 1943, Hitler's star now waning itself, North Africa fell to the Allies, collapsing all of his African ambitions and destroying any lingering confidence the Italian people may have possessed in him. The Allied invasion of Sicily toppled his government, and only Hitler -- once again! -- was able to save him, sending commandos to rescue him from imprisonment, and then placing him ahead of a puppet government in northern Italy. The last two years of Mussolini's life were joyless farce: a mere figurehead without any real power, without any popular support, he "governed" over the north of Italy while the Germans ruled the country, and the Allies gobbled not only the last of his Balkan conquests but gradually worked their way up the Italian peninsula. In the spring of 1945, when the Axis finally collapsed, he was captured by anti-fascist partisans while trying to flee northward, possibly to Switzerland. These partisans were part of a huge guerilla movement which had opposed both the Germans and the Fascists: they hated Mussolini and were gleeful to have captured him. This article from Ranker picks up the narrative:
"After the partisans seized Mussolini and [his mistress Claretta] Petacci, they hid them in a remote northern Italian farmhouse for a night. From there, they took them to a village near Lake Como where the two were placed in front of a stone wall and executed. Afterwards, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and 14 others were driven to a central square in Milan where vast crowds awaited their chance to channel their rage...The bodies were stoned, beaten, hit with vegetables, used for target practice, and eventually strung up at a gas station on one side of the square. By the end of the day – when it could finally be taken to the morgue – Mussolini's body was unrecognizable."
Such was the end of a man who, at his height, controlled nearly a million square miles of territory in Europe and Africa, and who, but for a single terrible decision, might have died in bed in the 1970s like Franco did. But the difference between rule or ruin is often a single bad decision, and the more powerful the man, the more terrible the consequences when a gamble craps out. Which brings us back to Vladimir Putin.
Putin, like Mussolini, enjoyed a highly improbable rise to power. In a brief span of time, Putin went from being an obscure KGB officer to the presidency of Russia. Once there, he gradually but systematically eroded, weakened, ameliorated and finally destroyed all barriers to his personal power, using intimidation and violence against his political opposition. He then embarked on a string of foreign adventures in places like Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, all of which were ultimately successful despite embarrassing setbacks and failures along the way. In doing so, he raised the prestige of the Russian army, which became regarded as "the second best in the world" behind the United States. Wary of fatiguing his people with conflict, he only engaged in small wars, and brokered economic deals that temporarily fattened the Russian economy, giving his autocratic, corrupt rule a modicum of popularity. Like Mussolini, he tapped, or tried to tap, into nationalistic fervor to motivate the populace, and to keep them distracted from their increasing lack of freedoms. In 2014, he took a huge but calculated risk, and seized almost without bloodshed a huge swath of Ukrainian territory, a "land grab" of the Hitler-Mussolini style. He then legitimized the theft by organizing elections which voted the stolen territories into Russia. This near-bloodless conquest carried his domestic popularity to its highest levels, and he endured the Western sanctions which followed without weakening his grip on power.
Like Mussolini in 1939-1940, Putin was now at a crossroads in his career. His capture of the Crimea from Ukraine was a fait accompli, and his army was still respected and feared in Europe. He also had economic cards to play with his near-monopoly on natural gas, upon which Europe was and is largely dependent. He was in effective control of Belarus, which was basically a Russian vassal-state. A wise course would have been to sit back, make consoling diplomatic noises, and let the West gradually acclimate itself to his Ukraine adventure. Instead, he came to the conclusion that between Donald Trump's avowed desire to divorce America from NATO (and Europe), and Ukraine's seeming inability to defend itself, he could conquer Ukraine in a Blitzkrieg attack, install a puppet government, and then once again sit back and ride out the sanctions. Like Mussolini (and Hitler), he let himself be seduced by a vision of his place in history and by an over-identification of his own imperial ambitions with the good of his people. And ike both Mussolini and Hitler, he failed to grasp that democratic nations, while generally cowardly and short-sighted when initially confronted with military aggression, are capable of tremendous unity and ferocity once they realize there is no choice but battle. The Ukraine of 2014 was like the France of 1939; the Ukraine of 2022 was like the Britain of 1940: full of defiance and determination to win at all costs.
There is no need to go into the military situation in Ukraine in detail, except to say that seven months into the war, Putin is roughly where Mussolini was in 1941-1942: a dictator who has discovered his army is inadequate to fighting the war which he started; whose domestic popularity has cratered in tandem with his international standing; whose economy is crumbling; whose authoritarianism is growing in proportion to public hostility to the war; whose young men are fleeing military service by the tens of thousands; who is beset by powerful enemies and has no clear (or even blurry) pathway to peace without humiliating himself and surrendering all hopes of empire. The critical difference is, of course, the existence of nuclear weapons. Mussolini had none. When his armies were beaten, his fleets sunk, his air force shot out of the sky, he had no recourses, no way to save himself. Putin, on the other hand, still has a radioactive ace up his sleeve. And history shows us that tyrants, especially those whose egos have swollen to the point where they see themselves as the living embodiment of their own nations, will happily see those nations burn rather than admit defeat. The very act of placing nation above self is antithetical to the mentality of a dictator, and even if it were not, no dictator can step down and expect anything but a hangman's noose. The crimes they commit to obtain and maintain power mark them for death should they surrender it.
In my novella "Deus Ex," I explored the psychology of a defeated dictator who, having lost a bloody global war he himself initiated, flees his capital in a hypersonic jet, leaving behind a ticking nuclear bomb for both his enemies and his former supporters, many of whom are still completely loyal to him. Magnus, my fictional tyrant, does not even trouble to justify this horrific act: in his mind it is the logical outcome of any scenario in which he is not the winner. I do not, at this point, believe Putin will employ even a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine: he is not yet far gone enough in the head to believe this will prolong his life or grip on power, which are in fact bound up. My fear is that when and if he comes to believe he cannot salvage the situation through conventional warfare or diplomacy, he may turn to this method in the same way a child kicks over a gameboard when he realizes the game is lost. It is not a last attempt to win: it is an assurance that everyone else loses.
Someday, if we all live to see a someday, historians may look back on the present era and take note of the selfishness, narcissism and egotism which have marked politics in both East and West in recent years: the insistence that the power and privilege of an individual, or a small coterie of individuals, outweigh the rights and even the lives of the masses they supposedly lead. Until then we are stuck with men like Putin. And the ghost of Mussolini.
Deus Ex
September 6, 2022
THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER IS A GOLD MEDALIST
I am pleased to announce that THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL has won the Literary Titan Gold Book Award for Historical Fiction. Some of you may remember that the previous entry in the series, SINNER'S CROSS (2019) also took this award. I hope in the months to come that I will be able to make more posts of this nature, but this time around I'm more interested in sales and publicity than literary awards. I like a well-stocked trophy case the same as the next boxer, bowler, or bass-fisherman, but so far as I am aware, no landlord accepts trophies in lieu of rent.
I conducted a brief interview with Literary Titan about this book which can be found at this link:
https://literarytitan.com/2022/08/31/...
Granted, I always sound like a jackass in interviews, a cross between Frasier Crane and Hunter Thompson: but I defy anyone not to sound like a jackass in an interview.
THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER is the second of what I hope will be seven novels in this series.
It is an epic yet intimate look at the final year of the Second World War as seen through the eyes of the men who had to fight it. It is a story of soldiers under extreme pressure, rising to challenges or falling before them, a saga of courage and cowardice, heroism and hate, which -- I hope and trust -- will haunt readers for years to come.
In this multi-novel series you will meet unforgettable characters from both sides of the conflict: Halleck, the tough-as-nails Texan who drives men like cattle; Breese, the pretty-boy poseur who finds out the hard way war is not like the movies; McDermott, the former artist hiding a dangerous personal secret; Lucas, the mixed-race sergeant whose rage against the world threatens everyone around him; Miller, the nurse whose passion for saving lives may cost her her own; Fox, the Jewish general whose hatred for the Germans clouds his judgment; McGraw, the former Missouri lawman who traded a sheriff's star for a colonel's eagles; Villin, the English officer who fights for a way of life which victory cannot save; and Cuffle, the private from Joliet whose choices may take him from military prison to a firing squad.
You will also meet the Germans: Zenger, the legendary paratrooper whose resolve to continue the fight is beginning to waver; Cramm, the aristocratic staff officer mutilated by the bomb meant to kill Hitler; Vondra, the professional Nazi who has ceased to believe in any cause except his own survival; Reinscheid, the newly-minted general who finds his fanaticism is no substitute for skill; Christgau, an old-school officer whose intrigues against the regime come back to haunt him; and Prulick, once the darling of German cinema, now sent to the front as a private.
Because women were an integral part of the war, we will also meet Pamela Street-Smith, the beautiful British intelligence officer who may or may not be a traitor; Ursula Wolf, a brilliant German physician whose desire to serve is frustrated by Nazi attitudes about women; and Marjorie Miller, an American nurse who toils just behind the front lines. These characters' lives -- and their deaths -- will intersect at the place called SINNER'S CROSS.
I hope to see you there.
I conducted a brief interview with Literary Titan about this book which can be found at this link:
https://literarytitan.com/2022/08/31/...
Granted, I always sound like a jackass in interviews, a cross between Frasier Crane and Hunter Thompson: but I defy anyone not to sound like a jackass in an interview.
THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER is the second of what I hope will be seven novels in this series.
It is an epic yet intimate look at the final year of the Second World War as seen through the eyes of the men who had to fight it. It is a story of soldiers under extreme pressure, rising to challenges or falling before them, a saga of courage and cowardice, heroism and hate, which -- I hope and trust -- will haunt readers for years to come.
In this multi-novel series you will meet unforgettable characters from both sides of the conflict: Halleck, the tough-as-nails Texan who drives men like cattle; Breese, the pretty-boy poseur who finds out the hard way war is not like the movies; McDermott, the former artist hiding a dangerous personal secret; Lucas, the mixed-race sergeant whose rage against the world threatens everyone around him; Miller, the nurse whose passion for saving lives may cost her her own; Fox, the Jewish general whose hatred for the Germans clouds his judgment; McGraw, the former Missouri lawman who traded a sheriff's star for a colonel's eagles; Villin, the English officer who fights for a way of life which victory cannot save; and Cuffle, the private from Joliet whose choices may take him from military prison to a firing squad.
You will also meet the Germans: Zenger, the legendary paratrooper whose resolve to continue the fight is beginning to waver; Cramm, the aristocratic staff officer mutilated by the bomb meant to kill Hitler; Vondra, the professional Nazi who has ceased to believe in any cause except his own survival; Reinscheid, the newly-minted general who finds his fanaticism is no substitute for skill; Christgau, an old-school officer whose intrigues against the regime come back to haunt him; and Prulick, once the darling of German cinema, now sent to the front as a private.
Because women were an integral part of the war, we will also meet Pamela Street-Smith, the beautiful British intelligence officer who may or may not be a traitor; Ursula Wolf, a brilliant German physician whose desire to serve is frustrated by Nazi attitudes about women; and Marjorie Miller, an American nurse who toils just behind the front lines. These characters' lives -- and their deaths -- will intersect at the place called SINNER'S CROSS.
I hope to see you there.
August 23, 2022
DEVILS YOU KNOW -- THE BOOK THAT WON'T DIE
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666. -- Revelation 13:17
Way back in the gentle year of 2016, I published Devils You Know, a collection of horror-themed short stories I had written over the course of my lifetime. When I released this book, I did so with the full knowledge that collections by unknown authors do not sell, and I wasn't disappointed. From a financial standpoint, it barely moved the needle. However, it collected a certain amount of critical acclaim and was a Hoffer Award Finalist -- an honor I wasn't expecting and still take great pride in (even though "finalist" is another word for "you didn't win.")
2016 was obviously a long time ago, and I have done much since, both personally and professionally, so it would be fair to say that Devils slipped off my radar. I viewed it as a necessary, noble, and fully intended failure, a grand and well-intentioned gesture rather than an actual, material accomplishment. Every now and again, however, I made some feeble, niggling effort to do something with it, to get it a slightly larger audience, a slightly wider hearing. I succeeded only in more than doubling the number of the book's reviews, which sounds like a big deal until you consider it didn't have all that many to begin with.
Now, I am not a huge fan of book giveaways, but I ultimately decided to list it on Amazon for free. Not permanently, not even for a long while: just five days. Since it never made me any money to speak of anyway, I literally had nothing to lose, and much to gain in terms of a wider audience: the more people read a book, the higher the proportion of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and the more new, paying readers ultimately come along. So I bit the proverbial bullet and gave it away.
For the first few days there was a mere trickle of downloads. Many, many people put out free content on Amazon, and it's always hit or miss as to whether you will find any of those intrigued enough to click the mouse, or no. Today, however, and to my very great surprise, I saw the fabled, mythical, also proverbial needle rouse itself from its dusty place on the floor of the dial, and rise swiftly and surely until it pegged itself at maximum. As of today, Devils You Know is ranked:
#1 in Horror Anthologies (Kindle Store)
#1 in Horror Short Stories
#2 in Horror Comedy
The really interesting part is this. Out of the top 1,000 free books on the platform, its Amazon Best Sellers Rank is...no kidding...666. When I saw this, I didn't know whether to laugh or cross myself. I mean, it's not a collection of cozy mysteries or comedy stories. The devil is literally in the book. Who knows? Maybe someone is trying to tell me something.
In a day or two, possibly as soon as tomorrow morning, these numbers will fall and Devils will slink back into its crypt, all thirteen stories of it. Before it goes, however, I'd like to encourage you to go to Amazon and give it a try while it's still free. You have nothing to lose but your soul.
Way back in the gentle year of 2016, I published Devils You Know, a collection of horror-themed short stories I had written over the course of my lifetime. When I released this book, I did so with the full knowledge that collections by unknown authors do not sell, and I wasn't disappointed. From a financial standpoint, it barely moved the needle. However, it collected a certain amount of critical acclaim and was a Hoffer Award Finalist -- an honor I wasn't expecting and still take great pride in (even though "finalist" is another word for "you didn't win.")
2016 was obviously a long time ago, and I have done much since, both personally and professionally, so it would be fair to say that Devils slipped off my radar. I viewed it as a necessary, noble, and fully intended failure, a grand and well-intentioned gesture rather than an actual, material accomplishment. Every now and again, however, I made some feeble, niggling effort to do something with it, to get it a slightly larger audience, a slightly wider hearing. I succeeded only in more than doubling the number of the book's reviews, which sounds like a big deal until you consider it didn't have all that many to begin with.
Now, I am not a huge fan of book giveaways, but I ultimately decided to list it on Amazon for free. Not permanently, not even for a long while: just five days. Since it never made me any money to speak of anyway, I literally had nothing to lose, and much to gain in terms of a wider audience: the more people read a book, the higher the proportion of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and the more new, paying readers ultimately come along. So I bit the proverbial bullet and gave it away.
For the first few days there was a mere trickle of downloads. Many, many people put out free content on Amazon, and it's always hit or miss as to whether you will find any of those intrigued enough to click the mouse, or no. Today, however, and to my very great surprise, I saw the fabled, mythical, also proverbial needle rouse itself from its dusty place on the floor of the dial, and rise swiftly and surely until it pegged itself at maximum. As of today, Devils You Know is ranked:
#1 in Horror Anthologies (Kindle Store)
#1 in Horror Short Stories
#2 in Horror Comedy
The really interesting part is this. Out of the top 1,000 free books on the platform, its Amazon Best Sellers Rank is...no kidding...666. When I saw this, I didn't know whether to laugh or cross myself. I mean, it's not a collection of cozy mysteries or comedy stories. The devil is literally in the book. Who knows? Maybe someone is trying to tell me something.
In a day or two, possibly as soon as tomorrow morning, these numbers will fall and Devils will slink back into its crypt, all thirteen stories of it. Before it goes, however, I'd like to encourage you to go to Amazon and give it a try while it's still free. You have nothing to lose but your soul.
August 22, 2022
PRAISE FOR THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER
There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary. -- Brendan Behan
You may have noticed I am never shy about publicizing my writing, but perhaps I can be forgiven this rather venal sin. Independent authors have to cling to praise and awards like Scrooge clung to coins. I would therefore like to announce that Literary Titan is the first reviewer to weigh in on my new novel, The Very Dead of Winter: A Sinner's Cross Novel. , and their verdict is as follows:
"The Very Dead Of Winter by Miles Watson is a work of historical fiction revolving around the Battle of the Bulge and is set during World War II. This interesting story centers around the three main characters with intermingled storylines, Halleck, Breese, and Cramm.
"In The Very Dead of Winter, Miles Watson explores the very concept of war. The author addresses how war affects the mind, morality, and the relationships of the soldiers involved, in addition to the cruelty and horror of the subject matter in which enemies actively murder each other in an effort to advance their personal cause.
"Each of the main characters in this book is complex, and we see in his writing how Watson brings each to life in the pages. Though the characters are different war officers, Watson portrays them in such a way that they are convicted by their morality, each one striving to do the right thing.
"Watson has written a book that is sobering but intriguing. If you are looking for a book with rich characters, an enticing story, and significant historical context, this book is for you. It will make you think, empathize, and put yourself in the shoes of those men and women in the military, specifically those in active combat. This book is well worth the read and will give readers a brand new perspective. I highly recommend it.
"The Very Dead Of Winter is a complex and thought-provoking historical war fiction novel. This captivating book can unmask the stereotypical idea of what the average citizen thinks a soldier looks like. The author’s storytelling abilities allow readers to get to the heart of the matter in distinguishing the humanity and moral choices people in the armed forces make in their daily decisions. FIVE STARS."
As first blushes go, this ain't bad. I am certainly very proud of the book, and God knows it had one of the most lengthy drafting processes I have ever undergone. I'm looking forward to the critical reactions to come, even if they should prove less sanguine than this one: Sinner's Cross, viewed from an awards/acclaim standpoint, is certainly not an easy act for me to follow. Every writer knows when he's fouled or bunted, but he also knows when he's hit one out of the park. This second book in the series will have to sweat hard to escape its progenitor's shadow.
Ultimately, my objective with these novels is not to build temples to "Greatest Generation" worship, nor to cater to war movie stereotypes, nor to produce one of those novels so slavishly faithful to actual history that you may as well ditch it for a book by Cornelius Ryan, but to do what I feel that I do best: create a highly atmospheric story that immerses the reader not only in the physical sensations of war, but the emotional pressures and their ultimate effects on my characters. In short, books that try to take you there. I trust that I have succeeded, but whether I succeeded or not, that was my aim, my working ideal.
So if you haven't already, give the series a try, or at least a look. You may not like what you read, but I guarantee you will never forget it.
You may have noticed I am never shy about publicizing my writing, but perhaps I can be forgiven this rather venal sin. Independent authors have to cling to praise and awards like Scrooge clung to coins. I would therefore like to announce that Literary Titan is the first reviewer to weigh in on my new novel, The Very Dead of Winter: A Sinner's Cross Novel. , and their verdict is as follows:
"The Very Dead Of Winter by Miles Watson is a work of historical fiction revolving around the Battle of the Bulge and is set during World War II. This interesting story centers around the three main characters with intermingled storylines, Halleck, Breese, and Cramm.
"In The Very Dead of Winter, Miles Watson explores the very concept of war. The author addresses how war affects the mind, morality, and the relationships of the soldiers involved, in addition to the cruelty and horror of the subject matter in which enemies actively murder each other in an effort to advance their personal cause.
"Each of the main characters in this book is complex, and we see in his writing how Watson brings each to life in the pages. Though the characters are different war officers, Watson portrays them in such a way that they are convicted by their morality, each one striving to do the right thing.
"Watson has written a book that is sobering but intriguing. If you are looking for a book with rich characters, an enticing story, and significant historical context, this book is for you. It will make you think, empathize, and put yourself in the shoes of those men and women in the military, specifically those in active combat. This book is well worth the read and will give readers a brand new perspective. I highly recommend it.
"The Very Dead Of Winter is a complex and thought-provoking historical war fiction novel. This captivating book can unmask the stereotypical idea of what the average citizen thinks a soldier looks like. The author’s storytelling abilities allow readers to get to the heart of the matter in distinguishing the humanity and moral choices people in the armed forces make in their daily decisions. FIVE STARS."
As first blushes go, this ain't bad. I am certainly very proud of the book, and God knows it had one of the most lengthy drafting processes I have ever undergone. I'm looking forward to the critical reactions to come, even if they should prove less sanguine than this one: Sinner's Cross, viewed from an awards/acclaim standpoint, is certainly not an easy act for me to follow. Every writer knows when he's fouled or bunted, but he also knows when he's hit one out of the park. This second book in the series will have to sweat hard to escape its progenitor's shadow.
Ultimately, my objective with these novels is not to build temples to "Greatest Generation" worship, nor to cater to war movie stereotypes, nor to produce one of those novels so slavishly faithful to actual history that you may as well ditch it for a book by Cornelius Ryan, but to do what I feel that I do best: create a highly atmospheric story that immerses the reader not only in the physical sensations of war, but the emotional pressures and their ultimate effects on my characters. In short, books that try to take you there. I trust that I have succeeded, but whether I succeeded or not, that was my aim, my working ideal.
So if you haven't already, give the series a try, or at least a look. You may not like what you read, but I guarantee you will never forget it.
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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