Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 51

Snow Days

It’s been a little bit since I posted on here. I know it’s like, the biggest Internet cliche around, but I really do promise to try to post more often. Things have been a little crazy the last couple of weeks, and none of it has been the kind of stuff I generally talk about on here, so I’ve gone a little quiet.

Last weekend, we spent all the money. It started out Thursday night, when my DVD player crapped out in the middle of watching an episode of Xena (which we’ve been revisiting, since it was pretty much Grace’s favorite show ever when she was younger, more on that later probably). I called in to see about getting it fixed, but it would’ve cost more than just buying a new one was, so I bought my first Blu-ray player. It is awesome. Anyway, that started a sort of chain reaction that ended up with us getting a bunch of new stuff that we’d been planning to buy for months but kept putting off, including an unexpected couch and chair set that I am absolutely in love with. (It’s this one.) Between that and some other odds and ends (like curtains, finally) our living room is now pretty much perfect. Once I get my posters up on the wall, I’ll try to put up some pictures. Which I will take using the other thing I got last weekend, which was my first smartphone! It is also awesome.

This weekend, we got snow. Lots of it. Enough so that my work and Grace’s both closed on Thursday. They were open again on Friday, but the city issued a notice asking people not to go out if they didn’t have to, so we stayed in again. Around a foot of snow in about a four hour period. Pretty impressive for around here, and I hear now that we’re going to maybe be getting almost that much again come Monday-Tuesday. We’ll see how that goes. Right now there are big mountains of snow piled up everywhere outside. It’s kind of exciting.

That means two snow days, though I can’t really tell you what I’ve done with them. Not been as productive as I should have been, that’s for sure. I’ve watched a few movies, though not enough to account for the amount of time that I’ve spent, and none of them are terribly worthy of noting. Silent Hill: Revelation is a waste of time, to the surprise of no one. Headhunters was really good, as I’d been told. Hit & Run was weird but cute.

I’ve got some deadlines looming, so tomorrow I’ve got to get some more writing done. Maybe I’ll get lucky and we’ll be trapped in our house next week too, and I can be a little more productive.

All the Print That’s Fit to News

A lot’s been going on, so I figured I should pop in here and mention at least some of it. For starters, I’ll be attending my first H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival this May in Portland. It’ll also be my first convention as a guest, which is pretty exciting, especially since I’ve been wanting to attend an HPLFF for pretty much my entire adult life. More on my schedule when it becomes available.

I’ll also be wandering around the second annual Spectrum Fantastic Art Live later that same month (since it’s here in my own town) and attending the World Horror Convention in New Orleans in June, though I’ll be doing those both just as a… visitor? What is it you are if you’re not a guest? Anyway…

In more immediate news, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings has been out for a few months now, and some reviews for it have sprouted up. Jesse Bullington reviews it for Innsmouth Free Press here, J.T. Glover calls it a “monsterghostoccultapalooza” at his website here, and Justin Steele takes it story by story at The Arkham Digest here. After doing his review, Mr. Steele was kind enough to ask me for an interview, which is available here. Myself notwithstanding, Mr. Steele has some good tastes, and I am in pretty fantastic company when it comes to interview subjects.

There have also been some (very generous) reviews cropping up on the book’s Amazon and Goodreads pages. If you’ve already read it yourself, then a review at either place would be much appreciated. More soon!

A Brief Pause for Station Identification

There are probably people reading this who aren’t terribly familiar with who I am and what I do. This post is for those (possibly imaginary) people. If you’ve been here a while and are already pretty well-versed in what I’m about, or if you could care less and would just like me to get on to the good stuff about goofy old movies or whatever, feel free to skip.

For whoever’s left: My name is Orrin Grey, as you may have gathered. I write stories of the weird, creepy, spooky, supernatural, and occult, and occasionally edit books of same. Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings is my first collection of stories, and it just recently came out from Evileye Books. I also co-edited Fungi with Silvia Moreno-Garcia for Innsmouth Free Press.

When I write, I have two big passions. I want to write about the supernatural as opposed to the paranormal, to bastardize a contemporary parlance. What I mean by that is that I almost always have some kind of supernatural element in my stories, and I try to keep those elements at least a little bit mysterious, not saddled with a lot of well-understood rules. Think Hellboy as opposed to Buffy.

I also want my stories to be, at the end of the day, pretty fun. Which doesn’t mean that I’m writing comedies, or that I shy away from a hard edge here or there. It just means that I’m less interested in scaring people than I am in having a good time. I like the tropes of horror because I have fun with them, and I want my readers to have fun with me. M.R. James once famously described the feeling he was trying to evoke with his stories as “a pleasing terror,” and, as usual, he said it better than I could.

As a reader, I’m drawn to classic ghost stories, and things that remind me of them. Some of my favorite classic writers include H.P. Lovecraft (of course), William Hope Hodgson, the aforementioned M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Fritz Leiber, and others. I’m also a big fan of Dashiell Hammett, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, Roger Zelazny, and way too many contemporary authors to start naming here. If you hang around for long, you’ll learn quickly that Mike Mignola is my biggest hero, and the biggest single influence on the stuff I write.

Outside of writing, my big passion is probably movies, especially horror movies, especially older ones. I write a column on vintage horror cinema (“vintage” here meaning “before 1970″) for Innsmouth Free Press, and I write a lot about other weird and cheesy movies on my website. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes less so, but they’re usually something I love, one way or the other. Again, listing favorites would take too much space, and is better reserved for another post. Hammer films, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, et cetera, et cetera. I love monsters, and I’m likely to watch just about anything that promises to have a monster in it.

I’m sure I left some stuff out of this that I’ll kick myself for five minutes after I post it, but at this point I’ve probably gone on more than long enough, so I’ll wrap this up. Thanks for reading, and we’ll now return you to your regularly scheduled programming!

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

I didn’t see it in IMAX or 3D, but I liked this poster better.

Hey guys, remember the crushing disappointment that was Van Helsing? Tommy Wirkola sure does, and he’s managed to find the exact combination of gore, practical effects, asskicking, and harsh language to actually make that formula work. The result is the ridiculous-sounding (and genuinely ridiculous) Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, which seems to be turning viewers’ (understandably) low expectations into surprised goodwill, at least among the people I’ve been reading, though it’s still got a 13% at Rotten Tomatoes, so maybe the world at large hasn’t yet caught on.

When I first heard about Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, I assumed (perhaps rightly) that it was part of the “monster lit” fad that has previously produced gems like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and about a million trashy novels, chuckled cynically, figured I would see it because at this point I’d watch Jeremy Renner take out his garbage, and then moved on. But when the trailer came out and I started hearing early positive buzz from places I trusted, I got a little more excited. I’d heard good stuff about Tommy Wirkola’s debut film Dead Snow (though I still haven’t seen it) and the trailer looked like exactly what I’d want a movie about monster hunters to be: fun. Also, it was rated R, which was a nice change of pace in the world where seemingly every big popcorn movie nets a bloodless PG13, no matter how many beheadings actually take place in it. Finally, I think the lore of witches is a good, largely untapped source for weird, inhuman monsters, and we don’t get to see that exploited enough, especially in movies, where witches tend to be budget-friendly humans, be they insidious cults or misunderstood mystics.

And my (tempered) enthusiasm proved not to be misplaced. Now, don’t get the wrong impression from this. Hansel & Gretel is schlock. How could it be anything else? But it’s effective schlock, and a blast to watch. Jeremy Renner’s Hansel and Gemma Arterton’s Gretel are a foul-mouthed pair of walking anachronisms who seem like they strode in (in slow motion, of course) from a different movie, armed with all manner of ridiculous weapons like double-crossbows, gatling guns, folding rifles, and a low-tech variant on a taser, to name just a few. They’re badasses, and the movie lets us know it immediately, and repeatedly. I’m used to Jeremy Renner being the best thing in whatever movie I see him in, but here Arterton at least meets if not exceeds him, and both of them are a blast to watch. (Renner provides the opening narration, but pretty much the first words we hear out of Arterton’s mouth are her calling the villagers a bunch of “fucking hillbillies.” That’ll give you an idea.)

The movie absolutely revels in its R rating, dropping f-bombs and body parts left and right. There’s even a brief bit of nudity. The kills are all very gooey, in grand splatter film tradition, and it’s surprisingly satisfying to see such over-the-top bloodshed in a big popcorn movie like this. (The consensus over at Rotten Tomatoes calls it “alternately bloody and silly,” as though that’s a bad thing, and as though those two things can’t be synonymous.)

While Hansel and Gretel and their goofy arsenal are straight out of a cranked-to-eleven Van Helsing, the rest of the movie has a Sam Raimi-ish vibe, especially in the witches themselves, who are nicely inhuman, particularly toward the end when we get to see a massive sabbath of witches from all over the world, who are all kinds of crazy. I’m only sad that we don’t get to see them longer (probably due to budgetary constraints). There’s also a troll, in case a bunch of witches aren’t enough monster for you. And a supporting cast that includes Peter Stormare as a meddling sheriff and Famke Janssen as the head bad witch. If you’re not sold yet, you probably shouldn’t see this movie.

Hopefully I’m not over-hyping this thing. It’s not a perfect movie. It’s not even a perfect trashy movie. It’s too sloppy, and too formulaic, and there’s not enough of a singular vision attached to it to make it really shine. (The aesthetics and the music, for example, are very Raimi, but Raimi’s command of camera angles and timing is lacking.) But it’s a lot of gory, monster-killing fun, and better than a movie called Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters has any right to be.

I saw this in 2D because the last three movies I saw were in 3D, and I was getting tired of it. It seemed like it might be fun in 3D, though, in the “lots of goofy crap flying out of the screen at you” kind of way. I also saw it at the Alamo, and, as usual, one of the best parts was the themed pre-show stuff they were running, including a terrible-looking trailer for the actually really great Hammer film The Witches, under its alternate title The Devil’s Own, which totally made me think of Gemma Files and her recent column about that movie.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Undead (2009)

I’ve been waiting to see this one for years now, because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is one of my favorite things that has ever been written down, and adding vampires to it is kind of guaranteed to ruin it completely, but whatever, I was excited, because I am just exactly that kind of stupid.

It finally got released on DVD with no notable fanfare some time back, and I finally noticed and got around to picking it up from the library. Unfortunately, the finished product doesn’t really have much to do with R&G are Dead except for one fairly lame joke, and to riff on the title. It’s more like what would have happened if early-era Kevin Smith decided to jump on board the monster lit phenomenon with a low-rent movie about a bunch of theatre nerds doing Hamlet (now with added vampires!).

That’s not exactly bad, and it’s about what I expected, though not exactly what I was secretly hoping for in my heart of hearts. It looks and feels about like you’d expect, and the supporting cast consists of people like the Karate Kid himself, Jeremy Sisto, , and the dude who played Tomax/Xamot in The Ballad of G.I. Joe. The main characters are all vapid and inane in the Scott Pilgrim mold, and the indie quirkiness and low production values work against it sometimes, and in its favor sometimes, depending. Notable instances of the latter include, but are not necessarily limited to, the budget-friendly vampire death scenes, which literally did make me laugh out loud the first time one happened, and Joey Kern’s character, for all the four minutes he’s probably on screen.

Bonus points for working the Rosicrucians in there.

The Boring Stuff

This isn’t really the sort of thing I like to post about. I normally try to keep this ‘blog for talking about writing and movies and monsters, but every now and then something like this creeps in, so I’ll try to keep it brief: My dad is sick. He has lupus and diabetes and a whole pile of other things, and he’s on dialysis.

He was diagnosed with lupus when I was less than a year old, and the doctors told him then that he wouldn’t live another year, and if he did he’d be bedfast. That was over thirty years ago, so this is something that’s been coming on for literally my entire life, but in the last year or so, he’s gotten precipitously worse. A few days ago, he went into the hospital again. My mom called me, and Grace and I drove down to see them. By the time we got there, he was doing really well. Better, honestly, than I’d seen him in months. They tell me he had pneumonia and the flu, but I guess the antibiotics they were giving him really worked.

So, this time he was okay. This wasn’t the call. Which is a relief, of course. But that call will come one of these days, as it does eventually for us all. And this was another reminder of that.

I’m not really going anywhere particular with this. I don’t have any witty insights to offer, not much left to say on the subject. Just that this weekend wasn’t easy. I’m slowly catching back up on things, returning to normal, getting back into the swing, but it’s taking some time.

2012: The Year in Creatures

[Spoilers here, for Cabin in the Woods, mostly, so heads up.]

If I live to be a hundred, publish ten-thousand bestsellers, and cure cancer, one of my proudest achievements will still and always be that John Langan once referred to me as “the monster guy.” I love monsters (it’s right there in my bio), and I love movies about them, and it’s always been my intention to have a sort of unofficial award for Best Movie Monster of the Year every year, though I’ve never managed it. This is me, trying that again.

There are an almost unprecedented number of monsters in the movies these days. If I were ten years old right now, my head would probably explode. Except that somehow the monsters in the movies these days don’t really feel much like the monsters that were in movies back when I was ten years old and in love with monsters. Maybe it’s their very ubiquity that makes them feel different, maybe it’s the fact that CG monsters, no matter how good, will probably never feel quite as “real” as practical ones did. Or maybe it’s that most of the monsters these days aren’t really in “monster movies.” The majority of monsters I can think of on film in 2012 are in movies like The Hobbit (which was chock-a-block with creatures large and small and mostly large) or Men in Black 3 or Snow White and the Huntsman or even Prometheus, which is closer to a monster movie than the others, anyway. There are even the aliens in The Avengers, along with their giant flying prehistoric fish creatures. Basically, almost every big-budget action movie of the year had some kind of monster or another. And none of that’s taking into account kids’ movies like ParaNorman, Hotel Transylvania, or Frankenweenie (of which I’ve only seen ParaNorman).

[ETA: Shit, John Carter came out this year too? There's another one for the list of big budget action adventure movies that were packed to the gills with monsters.]

Of all those monsters, though, none of them really stand out for me, none of them have the kind of personality that I’m looking for in a Monster of the Year. So this year, the award is going to go, not to any one specific monster, but to all the monsters in one particular movie: Cabin in the Woods, specifically to one particular sequence, one that anyone who’s seen the movie will instantly be able to identify, which is basically everything I’ve been waiting for my entire life. A representative segment is embedded below, but, and I cannot possibly stress this strongly enough, do not, under any circumstances, watch it if you haven’t seen Cabin in the Woods. It will ruin the shit out of it.

There are, of course, movies that had a chance of being in the running that I just haven’t gotten around to watching yet. Off the top of my head, I can think of the aforementioned Frankenweenie and Hotel Transylvania, as well as the (terrible, I’m told) sequel to Silent Hill. If I’ve made any startling or distressing omissions, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Is that really the poster? No wonder nobody likes this movie.

Beginning as I mean to go on…

It is de rigueur to call Ghosts of Mars John Carpenter’s worst movie. But I’m here to tell you that it’s just not so. Ghosts of Mars isn’t his best movie, by any means. Nor in the top five. In fact, it’s probably in the bottom five. It’s really not great. But I kind of sort of almost like it (now there’s a recommendation!) and it edges out much of Carpenter’s other lesser fare–like Village of the Damned and probably Memoirs of an Invisible Man (which I’ve never seen), and even the disappointing The Ward–by being pure Carpenter. Though all the skillful handling of the material may be missing, Carpenter’s fingerprints are all over Ghosts of Mars, unlike the workmanlike Ward or the lifeless Village of the Damned. In fact, there are maybe too many of his fingerprints, as Ghosts often feels like a lesser retread of some of his earlier films. I’ve seen it described as “Assault on Precinct 13 on Mars,” but there’s also shades of Escape from New York/L.A. and even maybe a tiny bit of Prince of Darkness or The Thing in here.

Everyone knows the places where Ghosts falls down on the job. And there are many. In my notes from watching it there’s a scratched out line about them apparently not having the technology for hand-held radios in the 22nd century, but later on they do have radios, meaning that earlier in the movie I guess they just forgot to use them. The biggest problem that Ghosts has is that there’s no real suspense ever, just a lot of dull fight scenes and some lackluster gore (people possessed by Martian ghosts can apparently huck sawblades hard enough to sever limbs and heads). The characters are all pretty one-note, and any real exploration of the pseudo-colonial guilt/western-in-space plotline (with ghost Martians filling in the role of Indians) is mostly relegated to the backburner.

But there’s also more to like in Ghosts of Mars than its general reputation and lack of adroitness would lead you to believe. I mean, who doesn’t like an action/horror movie in which Mars is ruled by a matriarchy, boasting a cast that includes, but is not limited to, Pam Grier, Jason Statham, and the guy in the Merman suit from Cabin in the Woods playing “Big Daddy Mars?” The women are mostly at least as badass as the guys, and the two main characters are Ice Cube and the lady from Species. You won’t see that in a movie every day. Also, in this movie, John Carpenter basically invented Reavers a year before Firefly hit the airwaves. So there’s that. (Also, this really came out just a year before Firefly? Man, my perception of time is messed up.)

Carpenter is one of my favorite directors of all time, and when he hits he does it better than almost anyone else before or since. Ghosts of Mars isn’t a hit, but it’s also by no means the most egregious miss in his weird, uneven filmography. I’ll save that title for Village of the Damned, until I get around to seeing Memoirs of an Invisible Man and it proves me wrong.

We’ll Send Him Cheesy Movies

I really enjoy talking about movies. (I know, right? Stop the presses!) Not writing reviews of them, per se, though I’ve done my share of that over the years too. Just sort of reacting to them, talking them over afterward, telling people who haven’t seen them about how awesome or awful or fucked up or funny they were, commiserating (or the happy version of same) with people who have seen them about all of the above.

I like talking about books, too, but somehow it’s not the same. I don’t know if it’s because I know fewer people who’ve read the same books as me, or if it’s because books seem like an even more personal, subjective experience than movies, or what. But when I go to writing conventions, we almost always all end up sitting around the dinner table talking about The Howling III. (Okay, that only happened once, but you get the idea.)

Anyway, there was a time when I used to write up reviews of just about every movie I saw, but over the years I’ve moved away from that, and now I mostly only write real, actual reviews when I’m asked to for one reason or another. Part of it is that I’ve tried to take the stance of not saying anything at all if I don’t have anything nice to say, and part of it is simply a sea change in my approach to blogging. But this has left me with something of a void to fill because, as I mentioned above, I really like talking about movies, and it’s not fair that only my wife and those friends who live close by me should have to suffer for this failing.

So I’m planning a sort of regular feature here on my ‘blog where I’ll talk, at whatever length and in whatever depth I’m able and inclined, about whichever movies should strike my fancy. They’ll probably be genre pictures, mostly horror and things with monsters in them, and they’ll probably mostly either be things I’ve never seen, or haven’t watched in years. They’ll also probably be from the 70s or later, since I’ll mostly save earlier stuff for my Vault of Secrets column over at Innsmouth Free Press. I’ll tag them with “we’ll send him cheesy movies,” and you’ll be able to read all of them by heading to that link, or following that category (under taxonomy, to the right).

In spite of the implications of that phrase, my previous resolve to do things like avoid calling people war criminals still holds, so while I’ll probably occasionally ‘blog about a movie that’s a dud, I’ll usually talk about movies I liked. And even when I talk about movies I didn’t care for, I’ll focus mostly on the stuff that I found interesting, whatever the hell that was. And now you’ve got way more information than anyone ever wanted about the reasoning behind this new category on my website. If anyone’s still reading, feel free to check back sometime in the next day or so, when there’ll maybe be an actual post under this tag, rather than just this thing.

This Was 2012

So, it’s now been 2013 for a little over twelve hours here. I slept most of those, and spent the others watching Castle, though we did ring in the new year last night with a handful of friends from college, all of whom are now paired up, even though at least one pair didn’t get together until years after we’d all graduated. That was very pleasant, and seems thematically appropriate for auld lang syne in a way that didn’t occur to me until I sat down to type this. So thanks everyone for coming over, and making a very nice new year for us. I’m glad that we’re all still friends, after all these years and, in at least one case, all these miles of separation.

Now is the time of year when a young man’s fancies turn to year-end recaps and best-of lists, so that’s what this post is going to be all about. 2012 was a big year for me, as anyone reading this probably already knows. My first two books both came out this year, one as author and one as editor.  Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings is my first collection of weird, spooky, and supernatural tales, and Fungi is the anthology of fungal stories that I co-edited with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I’m extremely proud of both of them, and I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. You’ve already heard a lot about them, and you’ll hear more in the coming year.

In addition, I had a few short story sales this year, the biggest one of which was my reprint appearance of “Black Hill” (originally from Historical Lovecraft) in Ross Lockhart’s The Book of Cthulhu 2. I also got asked to write an introduction to a forthcoming Valancourt Books reissue of J.B. Priestley’s Benighted, which I’m extremely excited about both because it’ll be my first time writing an introduction and because I’m very excited about the release itself.

This year saw some major changes in my daily life, as I changed positions at my day job (a couple of times, actually) and we did some work on the downstairs floor of our house, which resulted in me having a fairly nice office, from which I’m typing this right now. There’s still a little work left to go on the office, but expect pictures when everything is done.

But that’s enough news about me, now it’s time for the obligatory year-end lists. I’m not going to do top tens or fives or whatever, in no small part because there’s too much stuff that I wanted to get to that didn’t happen, but I’ll mention a few high points, and apologies in advance for anything and everything that I leave out. Starting with movies, 2012 was a good year for me and the cinema. I saw a pile of good stuff in theatres, with a few of my favorites (in no particular order) being Avengers, Cabin in the Woods, Looper, and Skyfall. I was also surprised to really enjoy Men in Black 3, which I saw on DVD, and which was actually better than either of its predecessors. (Also, that makes two movies featuring time travel in the main plot that I saw this year and really liked. Mark it down, because it is unlikely to happen again.) I also saw The Innkeepers in theatres back at the beginning of the year. Though it technically came out in 2011, it might just be my favorite of the whole bunch, so I’m making it a point to mention it here.

As good as 2012 was for movies, it was even better for books. I read a pile of great books in 2012, an unprecedented number of which actually came out during the year. My top reads (from books released in 2012) were Molly Tanzer’s bizarre debut A Pretty Mouth and Ian Rogers’ superlative collection Every House is Haunted, along with the aforementioned Book of Cthulhu 2 and the latest book in Holly Black’s Curse Worker series. 2012 was also the year that I was introduced to the crime writings of Dashiell Hammett for the first time, and I’ve devoured pretty much all of them in the course of the year, and loved them all.

As many great books as I read in 2012, though, there were more that I didn’t get the chance to crack open yet. Chief amongst them Richard Gavin’s latest collection At Fear’s Altar, Jesse Bullington’s The Folly of the World, Ross Lockhart’s Chick Bassist, and Stephen Graham Jones’ Last Final Girl. 2013 is looking just as impressive (and damaging to my bank account), with a plethora of exciting releases on the horizon, including a new collection by Laird Barron, a long-overdue debut collection from Nathan Ballingrud, a YA novel from John Hornor Jacobs, and a brand new book by Holly Black. There’s also a new collection by John Langan on the way, entitled The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies, which I don’t have a way to link to yet, but am very eagerly awaiting. And that’s all just off the top of my head.

I have high hopes for 2013, and while I’m not really a resolutions kind of person, I think that as close as I have to one this year is to remember that what I’m getting to do is pretty awesome, and to behave accordingly. Thanks to everyone reading this, to everyone who picked up a copy of either of my books, to everyone who left a review somewhere or sent me some kind words, to all my friends and everyone who helped make 2012 a pretty great year. Here’s to hoping that 2013 is even better, for all of us. Soupy twist!