Edward M. Erdelac's Blog, page 5

The Gymkata Test

What’s your Gymkata Test?

Gymkata, for those who don’t know, is a 1985 Action movie starring Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas as Jonathan Cabot, an Olympic gymnast recruited by the US government to compete in a deadly survival game in the mountainous insular country of Parmistan. Those who win this ancient game, which is a kind of endurance foot race during which competitors must overcome various physical obstacles and navigate a walled village where Parmistan deposits its criminally insane, are allowed one request of the ruling Khan, which he cannot deny. The guvmint wants the Khan’s permission to install a satellite monitoring station. On a more personal level, Jonathan is out to learn what became of one of the Game’s previous competitors, his missing father. To prepare him for the ordeal, he is trained to integrate his natural agility and gymnastic techniques with the martial arts, and thus, as the narrator says in the trailer, “combine the discipline, the timing, and the power of gymnastics with the explosive force of karate, and a new, all-powerful martial art is born – GYMKATA.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mkl9rtttog

Now, what is the Gymkata Test?

Gymkata is my least favorite movie. By that I mean, if I were to make a list of my 100 favorite movies, Gymkata would be at the bottom. It’s goofy and it’s unrealistic and some of the acting is not so great and I love it. I can hum the score. I own it, and have watched it multiple times.

All I ask of any movie I see is that it be as least as entertaining and rewatchable as Gymkata. It’s surprising (mostly to other people) how many movies tend to fall short of this simple, modest measuring stick.

I recognize that this is not a good movie, but it’s entertaining to me…and there is nothing in all of cinema like the Village of The Crazies sequence, which culminates in Kurt Thomas fending off an entire village of knife wielding lunatics whirling around on the back of a cleverly (?) disguised pommel horse. Gymkata is my comfort food.

I wore the hell out of this shirt until it disintegrated.

Combine the reliability, entertainment factor, and the utter uniqueness of this movie, and a new, all-powerful method of judging cinema is born….The Gymkata Test.

So I ask you, what is your Gymkata Test? What is your least favorite movie, the one you can reach for and unabashedly embrace over a movie like say, The English Patient, a distinguished, prestige motion picture laden down with awards and critical accolades, or even a massively popular bit of entertainment that just doesn’t do it for ya personally?

Mindbreaker Is Back In Bond Unknown!

Paperbacks are few and far between, but April Moon has just put Bond Unknown up on Kindle.

Featuring William Meikle’s Into The Green and my own Mindbreaker, Bond Unknown is a mashup of Ian Fleming’s 007 and the Lovecraftian Mythos.

Read an excerpt from Mindbreaker here https://emerdelac.wordpress.com/2017/09/14/mindbreaker-in-bond-unknown-from-april-moon-books/

And pick it up in Kindle here –

Head Like A Jar, Appearing In Call of Poohthulhu from April Moon Books

No it’s not an April Fool’s joke, it’s an April Moon antho.

Yes, my beloved Canadian publisher April Moon Books, who put out my James Bond vs. Cthulhu novel Mindbreaker is back with another inspired and unlikely pairing, this time the roly-poly denizens of Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood and the nameless entities of old H.P.

The Celery at the Threshold by John Linwood Grant

The Very Black Goat by Christine Morgan

Back to the Black Bog by Lee Clark Zumpe

Where Howls the Edgog by Pete Rawlik

In Which We Discover the 101st Acre by Robert Ottone

Eeyore Makes a Friend by Jackson Parker

When She Was Very Tired by Lisa Cunningham

The Statement Of Eeyore Carter by Kevin Wetmore

Acrewood by Jude Reid

And my entry, Head Like A Jar, in which Piglet finds himself pursued by a Heffalump.

In addition, I’m over the moon to know that Carmen Cerra, an extremely talented artist I’ve been trying to get another book off the ground with for a while now, has been brought on board to illustrate. He’s really going to elevate this collection in a way I’m not sure it quite could all on its own.

Art by Carmen Cerra

I’ve had something of a rough couple of years. At first I sort of shook my head at the idea of this book, but I very quickly warmed to the idea of attempting to write a Milne-esque story. I read Winnie The Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner to my eldest daughter Magnolia in the womb, and later reread the stories to each of my kids, so I know them like Edward Bear knows the bottom of a honey pot. They hold a Very Special Place in my heart.

Writing this story was sheer joy and went a signifcant way towards alleviating some of the real-life burdens I’ve been feeling late. Gave me my happy back for a bit, and broke through an annoyingly long spate of writer’s block I’d been allowing myself to butt up against. I hope readers will glean something useful from this silly little story, at the very least enjoyment, just as I hope my children will one day pick it up and get a smile from it, knowing their father as they do.

Here’s an excerpt….a brief one, because I don’t want to give too much away.

Piglet tumbled head-over-heels down from the top of the Forest, over the close set grass, and didn’t stop tumbling until one of the sixty something trees that surrounded the clearing kindly stepped in his way.

He lay that way for a little bit, looking up and waiting for the grass and the darkening sky to decide which was on top. The sky was very cloudy and cross, so eventually it won out. The grass stooped and apologized for having given offense. Then the sky cracked a bit of strange, red lightning like a coach whip which told Piglet he had better get on his way. So he did, though he wasn’t sure just where he was going.

It got very stormy and dark, like a spilled inkpot spreading across a sky blue sheet, but it did not rain. That was something, at least.

As he scurried along through the spinneys Piglet heard a Very Loud Sound behind him, like a large animal Sniffling and Snuffling. He remembered just then that he had been going Away, and so he continued going there with all haste.

Piglet could not recall a Dark So Total in the Forest, though admittedly he spent most nights fast asleep, dreaming of what he would do the next day or what he had done the previous day, or things he might never do however many days he had. He wished he were dreaming now in his warm bed instead of running through the trees, for he had quite forgotten the way and it was getting so very dark it was hard to see by.

If he could not be asleep, then he wished at least that he were not Alone.

Eventually he came to a place he half-recognized, though it was not a place he frequented and not the one he had been wishing to get to, it being particularly Gloomy and wet here. However, it was Away from the Very Loud Sound, and so he supposed he musn’t be ungrateful.

“Hullo, who is that?” came a sad voice that he knew somehow belonged to this place (or was it the other way around?).

“P-p-piglet,” Piglet answered, hugging himself because being Alone there was no one else to hold onto.

“Good morning P-p-piglet,” said the voice, belonging to a low gray something standing with its neck bowed in the gloom. “If it is a good morning, or morning at all, which I doubt.”

Piglet thought hard. It was as if the Dark So Total had leaked into his thinker, and he had to strike a match to see his own memories by, and the match was all wet and soggy.

“Eeyore!” he said at last, and toddled over to find the gray donkey standing to up his knees in the bog, nosing at a thistle. “Oh Eeyore!” Piglet said, and threw his arms excitedly around Eeyore’s neck. “I am so happy to see you!”

“You are?”

“Yes!”

“Me, Eeyore?”

“Yes! I was so scared, running through the Forest. I was just wishing I could find anybody at all.”

“Oh. Well. I suppose being anybody is better than being nobody.”

“Eeyore, there’s a Very Loud Sound back there,” Piglet said, nervously pointing back the way he’d come.

“What sort of a sound?” Eeyore said, cocking one of his ears in the direction Piglet had pointed.

“It’s like a sort of…Sniffling and Snuffling. I don’t want to stay here.”

“Not many do.”

“I mean, it’s so Very Loud, it hurts my ears. I’m trying to get Away, do you understand?”

“I understand wanting to be Away. Some can afford the luxury. Some can’t. But there it is.”

“There what is?”

Eeyore sighed, very long and very loud.

“Nothing. I think I hear your Sound, Little Piglet. It’s coming closer. My, all this Unexpected Company in the middle of the night.”

“I thought it was the middle of the morning,” said Piglet, nervously looking back the way he’d come.

“It may be,” said Eeyore, considering it. “One middle can look much like the other in a Dark So Total….”

Are We There Yet? Appearing In Horror On Holiday from Golden Goblin Press

Oscar Rios and editor Brian Sammons are bringing out a new Lovecraftian anthology from Golden Goblin Press called Horror On Holiday via Kickstarter, so head on over there and kick a buck –

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/golden-goblin-press/horror-on-holiday-tales-of-vacations-taking-very-dark-turns?ref=ksr_email_user_watched_project_launched

Peep the lineup –

A Gilded Butterfly by Glynn Owen Barrass
You Take It With You by Helen Gould
In Light Accessible by John Linwood Grant
Geneaology by William Meikle
A Palette of Honey and Amber by Andi Newton
Castles In The Sand by Peter Rawlik and Sal Ciano
Thin Ice by Oscar Rios
A Kingdom of Magic by Brian S. Sammons
The Isle of Ma’an Du by Sam Stone
The Fun Fair by Tim Waggoner
The Family In The Wood by Helen Yau
Summoning My Soul To Endless Sleep by Lee Clarke Zumpe

My own offering Are We There Yet? concerns a beleaguered father on an extended road trip with his family. They pull into a lonely gas station where the elderly attendant passes a brochure for a chintzy roadside attraction to his excitable son. As the boy becomes more and more obsessed with seeing the dubious wonders promised in the brochure, the father notices the compulsion spreading to the other members of the family, and finally to himself, as a series of increasingly insistent advertisements guide them further and further off their intended route.

Here’s the opening lines –

——————————-

Greg Trezvant signaled his exit.

Between Lisa’s shrill screaming over the kids’ cacophony in the backseat and a growing, paranoid suspicion that the GPS was somehow lying to him, the green turnoff sign that promised Gas-Food (probably in the wrong order, Greg reflected) looked like the emerald leaves of a shimmering oasis in an endless desert dotted with No Facilities cacti.

His seven year old, Robert, was pinching himself through his sweatpants and wailing for a toilet in a tone so high and resonating Greg was this close to bleeding out of his ears. A year ago they had had trouble keeping the kid from taking a leak in the bushes in front of the house, but Lisa had discouraged his habit of pissing in the open so effectively Robert was now unable to even fathom jumping out of the car and going in a ditch. Greg had pulled over and physically removed him from the vehicle at one point and yanked down his trousers only to watch his son dance in place screaming until Lisa had loudly demanded they both get back in and stop wasting time.

Jainey was exacerbating things, hollering for her little brother to shut up, presumably so she could hear every minute intonation of whatever was thumping in her earbuds. She was eleven and had apparently outgrown empathy somewhere around her last birthday.

Lindsey’s Filling Station was exactly that. Not a proper gas station, but a throwback to the days of yesteryear when mechanics would answer the ringing of the Milton bell and come swarming over your car to check the fluids and tires. The rusted old Pepsi Cola gas pump had no POS pad in sight, just a handwritten sign that said “Please Pay Inside Before You Pump!”

Inside looked a bit dubious. The building was as old as the gas pump, with thick, dusty glass. There was no chain fast food joint or ice cream place adjoining, but another exclamatory handwritten sign promised “Best Homemade Jerky On The Interstate!”

It was the restroom Robert was interested in, and he and Lisa hit the ground running like a couple of Green Berets disembarking from a Huey. They rushed in, jangling the sleigh bells over the door as it banged open, Lisa yelling, “Bathrooooom?”

Greg saw a gnarled finger on a liver spotted hand reach out and point through the doorway, and his wife and son wheeled and charged down that direction.

He cut the engine with deliberate slowness and turned in his seat, tapping Jainey on the knee to alert her that he was exiting the vehicle.

“Why’re we stopping here?” she shouted.

“Come on. You know why.”

“What?”

He tapped his earlobe and she rolled her eyes and turned down her music.

“I said you know why. Come on. Get out and stretch your legs, hit the toilet. I don’t know when we’ll see another one.”

“Why don’t we ever stop anywhere interesting?” Jainey whined.

Inside, the shelves of the little gas station were packed with crap; dusty quarts of oil, chintzy souvenir keychains and postcards, heaps of salty, sugary snacks. Crap, crap, and made-to-be crap. Jainey drifted in, sweeping the shelves with her bored eyes like a shark bloated from killing but still ostensibly in the market for a stray mackerel.

Behind the register, a long faced old man with a head of wavy, buttercream white hair grinned toothily. He was dressed in bib overalls and a red flannel shirt and a fisherman’s vest covered with a myriad of eccentric pins with pithy, folksy sayings like “Bless Your Heart,” “Southern Pride,” and “Fine ‘N Dandy.” A slat-eyed cartoon goat grinned at him from one of the pins.

“You the fella owns that thunderstorm that swept through here a minute ago?” the old man asked.

Greg held up his hands sheepishly.

“I just hope he didn’t drop any rain between here and your restroom.”

There was a loud industrial flush from a back hall.

“No, no, I think he made it alright,” the old man said with a laugh.

A door rattled open and Robert came skipping out as if nothing had ever been the matter. Lisa was in tow, looking haggard.

“Where you all headed?”

“Buckingham,” Greg said, fumbling for his wallet, figuring he’d fill up while everybody else drained.

“Vacation?”

“Yeah mainly, trying to get these guys out to see the sights. Get a little bit of nature. But you know kids. Everything’s boring. They hardly look out the car window.” He slid a twenty across the counter.

“Buckingham don’t hardly seem much of a vacation spot,” said the old man.

“Well, I’m headed over to the historical society there. Got an appointment with the curator.”

“You interested in history, huh?”

“Guilty,” said Greg. “This is actually family history. I had a great great grandfather, fought in the Civil War, went missing in action somewhere around here. At least, to me. See, I know what outfit he was in, that he was around here, but don’t know what happened to him. Thought it’d be fun to do some digging.”

“Fun,” said the old man, a little dubiously, doling out angel wings on the cash register. “For you. But how about them? Ya want my advice, don’t forget the ‘family’ in family vacation. Kids need to have their interests courted. Wife too,” he added, nodding to Lisa, who was perusing the magazine rack with the same dull expression as Jainey. “Got to appeal to the whole family unit or it ain’t really a family vacation….”

Map of Delirium Tremens, Arizona

Here’s a map I did for a PBEM (Play By Email) RPG (Roleplaying Game – it was Champions, a system I don’t really care for) wayyy back in 2001 or 2002 that I wound up using as a reference in a number of stories I’ve written since (and became the basis for the name of this blog). It’s a dinky little Arizona town with a population of about 180 in Cochise County on the eastern edge of the Huachuca Mountains. The geography and some of the names have changed slightly as needed.

If memory serves, Delirium Tremens has shown up in –

The Merkabah Rider series (novels) – The first and last books take place partially in the town, with the Todos Mis Amigos (named for Mickey Rourke’s catchphrase in the movie Barfly) Cantina, El Moderado, and Chains Are Broken Ministry (which I named after a little church I used to see through the train window off the Kensington stop in Chicago on the way to school every day) all feature prominently.
The Akeldama Dig (short story) – I changed the name from Bald Pate Hill Cemetery to Akeldama because it made for a snappier title. The Busthead Saloon also features prominently.
In Thunder’s Shadow (short story) – Mentioned only.
The Blood Bay (short story) – Centers on Famous Horses and Fitzsimmons’ Leather and Saddlery (and I think the grocer’s).
The Threefold Reckoning (unpublished short story) – Mainly centered on The Gone Green Saloon. Faustus Montague from Merkabah Rider shows up too.
The Chilibean Joss (unpublished wuxia/western novel) -Takes place almost entirely in the town and explores too many locations to list here. If the dang thing ever gets published I’ll come back and do it.
Meaner Than Hell (my 2009 western film) – The climax occurs in Delirium Tremens (played by Bodie, a ghost town here in California). The church steps are meant to be the steps of The Church of The Redeemer.

It’ll probably show up again.

Delirium Tremens, Arizona Territory circa 1880

DT Moviehouse Reviews: The Black Hole

Time to blow the dust off my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. I was previously doing this alphabetically but decided, since I was watching some of these anyway, to review them out of order. Today I take a look at 1979’s very much maligned Disney sci-fi horror movie, THE BLACK HOLE.

Directed by Gary Nelson

Screenplay by Gerry Day and Jeb Rosebrook

Tagline: A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends

What It’s About:
The crew of the deep space exploration vessel USS Palomino comes across the largest black hole ever recorded, and discovers a long lost ship, The Cygnus, once commanded by the brilliant Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximillian Schell), poised impossibly at the rim of it.

Why I Bought It:

Because I’m not entirely sure which year I saw Star Wars, I believe The Black Hole may have been the first live action movie I saw in a theater. 

As a kid I only remember loving the robots V.I.N.Cent and B.O.B. and digging the villainous Maximillian and the double blaster wielding S.T.A.R. and his pseudo-stormtrooper droids (that looked a lot like illegitimate children of Darth Vader). I also vaguely remember a sense of existential Roman Catholic dread at the apocalyptic heaven-and-hell ending when the characters pass through the black hole and experience their just desserts/punishments as warranted.

In my adult years I grew to appreciate the technicality of the models. I adore the design of the Cygnus, essentially a massive haunted house in space. It’s one of my favorite fictional spaceships. It reminds me of Chicago’s Sears Tower (sorry, Willis Tower), a monolithic skyscraper in space, replete with suspension girders and antennae. Totally black and apparently abandoned when first encountered, the lights coming on in response to the diminutive Palomino’s trespassing has the ominous effect of a single light coming on in the upstairs window of a remote battlement. Welp, they know we’re here….

In recent years, I’ve seen almost nothing good written about this movie. Perennial joykiller Neil DeGrasse-Tyson famously ripped into its scientific inaccuracies, and aside from my friend John Kenneth Muir’s thoughtful review, I been kind of amazed at the almost universal ridicule this movie seems to elicit.

I did a recent rewatch and felt compelled to resurrect my long comatose blog feature solely to add my voice to John’s in championing it.

As an adult and with only a little fog of nostalgia, I think this is a hell of a cool movie. The relentless, nightmarish opening theme by John Barry playing over the wheeling gridlines as they form the diagram of an inescapable funnel against a cavernous star field sets the stage for the mystery and madness to come, giving one the sense of hurtling through the endless void with a broken tether.

The movie boasts a nearly all-star cast, with the late great Robert Forster captaining the Palomino, Roddy McDowall as an erudite R2D2, Anthony Perkins as a breathlessly optimistic scientist, Ernest Borgnine playing a self-centered journalist, and Slim Pickens as a winsome, folksy older model bot. I’m not too familiar with Yvette Mimieux (wait – she was Weena in The Time Machine!), but she does a fine turn as a telepathic scientist (who unfortunately delivers one of the movies’ oft-mocked lines about “discovering habitable life in outer space” – I swear in forty years of rewatching this movie I never noticed it. That’s how science-minded I am I guess.). Joseph Bottoms is admittedly a bit bland as Lt. Pizer, but with Forster’s Captain Holland there, he’s a little bit redundant.

Maximillian Schell is arresting as the megalomaniacal, Nemo-esque Dr. Reinhardt, a Kurtz-like psychopath who has not only refused his recall orders in dogged pursuit of his own ends, but technologically cannibalized his mutinous crew, literally lashing them to the controls of his derelict Flying Dutchman with the help of his crowning robotic achievement, Maximillian.

There is so much going on between the lines of this movie, that it appalls me how many people casually dismiss it as hoaky or boring.

The Black Hole (1979)
Directed by Gary Nelson
Shown: Maximilian Schell

Why is Dr. McCrae able to telepathically communicate with V.I.N.C.E.N.T? Is he really a robot or some kind of cyborg? He claims to hate the company of robots. Yet B.O.B. alludes to the two of them being a ‘series’ so are they post-singularity, conscious A.I.? V.I.N.C.E.N.T.’s thoughts can be heard among the rest of the crew when they pass through the black hole at the end. Even S.T.A.R. (actually portrayed by Tom McLoughlin, who went on to direct my favorite Friday The 13th entry, Part 6: Jason Lives) seems to be really emotional for a ‘bot too, displaying pride, frustration, and jealousy.

And for that matter, what is going on with the red mystery monster Maximillian? Is Reinhardt in control of the Cygnus, or is he? Schell portrays him with a furtive distractedness. Is he never quite there in the moment because he’s preoccupied with his grand purpose, or because Maximilian is influencing him? At one point, Reinhardt pleads to Kate, “Protect me from Maximillian!” What?! Wow!  One gets the sense that Reinhardt’s genius creations have gotten away from him. Maybe he built Maximilian as an enforcer to lead the Vader-bots against the mutinous crew….or maybe some strange cosmic force from the black hole itself is at work in the big red ‘bot (and in Reinhardt’s miraculous energy source ‘cygnum’ which somehow allows the ship to resist the pull of the black hole), considering it not only subsumes Reinhardt in the weird confines of the hole at the end, but also appears to stand and rule over some hellscape within. Did an ineffable intelligence call to Reinhardt from the hole, urge him to kill his crew and build Maximilian and then join it? “Some cause must have created all this….,” Reinhardt muses, when confronted by his macabre crimes, “but what caused the cause?”

I understand the tendency of less patient viewers to roll their eyes at the sometimes dated FX and action, and I accept the reticence of modern audiences to embrace the quasi-religious ending, where the good and the bad are quite literally separated into infernal and celestial cosmic experiences, though I don’t personally agree. Has everyone died at the end? Dr. Kate muses early on that black holes could possibly one day consume the universe – again, I don’t speak to the scientific accuracy of that, but it makes for a great death metaphor. But, putting aside its bizarre ending, what you have in The Black Hole, Disney’s first PG film, is a neat little sci-fi horror movie with an excellent sense of building dread, some gorgeous sets and FX (the meteor storm sequence is fantastic, as is the running laser battle through the greenhouse as it’s occurring), and some interesting subtext worth reconsidering.

Best Dialogue/Line:

“The word ‘impossible,’ Mr. Booth, is only found in the dictionary of fools.”

Best Scene:

I can’t stress enough what a killer reveal it is when Anthony Perkins finally lifts the mirror-face shell off one of the purportedly robot crew to discover the slack, black-eyed human face beneath. It’s genuinely chilling and a well-earned payoff after Forrester’s exploration of the abandoned crew quarters, the limping gardener, the robot funeral, and the explanation of what actually went down by B.O.B.

Would I Buy It Again?

Yes. A classic, and as what might have been my first live action viewing experience, personally seminal.

Star Wars Insider Fiction Collection Volume 2: Featuring Hammer

Today Titan has released the second hardcover collection of Star Wars Insider fiction, which includes my story Hammer, about a pair of Jedi scouts who discover an ancient Sith artifact during the last days of the Clone Wars.

This story originally featured in Star Wars Insider #147 and was accompanied by art from Joe Corroney and Brian Miller.

I went indepth on the inspirations behind it back in 2014 when it was originally published here.

https://emerdelac.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/hammer-time-star-wars-insider-148/

This was a fun bit of work and a highpoint in my career. The characters were intended to return and I actually had a novel pitch underway featuring the villain, Malleus, (who is, I think, the first ethnically black Sith villain in Star Wars) at Del Rey, but….it was in the early days of the Disney takeover and all this stuff was relegated to Legend status.

If you wanna read it, give it a look.

Pan Returns in Perennial! Out Now!

A number of years ago I sold a superhero novel that the publisher decided to release under a different title, put together with a couple other authors in a shared world. They folded soon after and the book went unnoticed, so I’ve ripped out the shared world stuff, updated it a bit, and brought it out again under its own title, including a related short story called Wide Awake, partly developed by my daughter Magnolia, about a bullied girl oon the verge of enacting a school shooting who discovers an alien artifact that grants her super powers.

The main story is about a teen idol on a wildly popular TV show who discovers his producer is involved in a child exploitation ring and is ‘killed’ by a bomb when he attempts to expose it. In actuality the explosion triggers his latent superpowers, giving him the power of flight and arresting his aging process. Allowing the world to believe he’s dead, he takes to the streets of a fictional Los Angeles as Pan, a costumed vigilante who hunts those who prey upon children.

But, when he stops the attack of a powerful supervillain on live TV, an obsessed madman from his past draws him out, enlisting a small army of supervillains to take an entire high-rise hostage.

It’s sort of Die Hard with superheroes.

Anyway it’s out today, with design by the intimatable Shawn King and a brilliant cover by artist Russel Marks. I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you thought.

My Halloween Movie Repertoire Has Risen From Its Grave!

Black cats pause in their crossing to arch their ebon backs and hiss. Leaves expire and drift to earth. Pumpkins sprout grins of leering fire and the swollen moon is slashed by the passage of witches’ brooms. Yep, it’s my favorite time of year once again, when the sands bear the scars of mummies’ wrappings dragged from yawning tombs and the howls that pierce the countryside are not the cries of mere wolves. Halloween!

Regular followers will know every year I embark on a quest to watch as many horror movies as I can (used to be 31 movies for 31 days, but that began to feel like a paltry number). They have to be first time watches but they can come from any era.

So without further ado, let’s kick it off!

Day #1 – Malignant – After her abusive husband wangs the back of Madison’s (Annabelle Wallis) favorite head against the bedroom wall, he becomes the first victim of a malevolent entity sharing a bizarre psychic connection with her which allows her to see and experience its increasingly grisly murderous escapades. I typically enjoy James Wan’s movies, and this was no exception…as a matter of fact, I think it may be my favorite. It goes so far off the rails (intentionally?) I was grinning and laughing at its gonzo absurdities….yet thoroughly enjoying myself. The reveal has been likened to Basket Case, and I get that, but in feel, it reminded me of the Argento movie Phenomena with its so crazy it’s amazing climax. That jail scene with Zoe Bell is so eye-popping and unique! A strong start to the marathon.

Bloody Good Reads!

Mark Goddard hosts the Bloody Good Reads podcast, where he talks to authors about their careers and influences and asks them for three recommended horror reads. He was kind enough to let me talk his ear off about Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, Robert E. Howard’s Trails In Darkness collection, and a big influence on my young self, James Howe’s The Celery Stalks At Midnight.

Give a listen > HERE.