David Dubrow's Blog, page 24

Book Review: The Roger Huntington Saga

I reviewed Ryan C Thomas’s The Roger Huntington Saga at The Slaughtered Bird:

The Roger Huntington Saga, a series of three horror novels by Ryan C Thomas, has more than enough spilled blood, severed body parts, and general mutilation for the most bloodthirsty reader. You want rape? It’s in there. Searing flesh? Smell the smoke, baby: it’s barbecue time. Crying and throwing up? In spades. So yeah, it’s got it all.

Click to read the entire review.

Three Brief Science Fiction Reviews

Over the last ten days or so I’ve been dealing with an illness that has taken both antibiotics and steroids to return me to a semblance of health, so during that time I watched a good bit of television (in-between chills, cold sweats, massive headaches, and numerous other symptoms too tedious to describe). In the interest of making my recent unpleasantness a learning experience, I will review what I watched as I lay shivering on the couch.

Travelling Salesman: At the risk of sounding pretentious and lah-di-dah, I will label this movie an “intellectual thriller.” Not that non-intellectual thrillers aren’t entertaining; I liked John Wick and The Accountant, for example. Anyway, what makes Travelling Salesman an intellectual thriller is how much of the film takes place in a single room, focused on a conversation. Sounds boring, right? It’s not. What they’re talking about is an amazing thing they’ve done under contract to the U.S. government: they’ve solved one of the most difficult problems mathematics has available, and now must deal with the repercussions. The mathematician characters all act according to type: the stuffy professor complete with sweater vest, the quirky weirdo, the brilliant slob, and the wunderkind star who did most of the work. Everyone perfectly cast, particularly the government functionary who comes to negotiate the remainder of their contract: a smooth-talking, blandly handsome man who’s obviously over his head yet still tries to hold his own in a room of literal geniuses. Aside from a few incomprehensible bits it’s a great film, one that I enjoyed immensely. 5 out of 5 stars.

The Zero Theorem: It’s a kind of spiritual successor to Terry Gilliam’s earlier film Brazil, though utterly lacking Brazil‘s heart. Sharing the same bizarre, surreal aesthetic, it attempts to handle heavy themes like faith, purpose in life, and existential crisis, but fails to elevate any of them. Christoph Waltz does a good enough job with what he’s been given, making him the only thing in the movie worth watching. Matt Damon, despite his camouflage suits, doesn’t add anything. Everyone else is forgettable, particularly the love interest. I wanted to like it because I loved Brazil, but couldn’t. 2 out of 5 stars.

Travelers: A Netflix series of twelve episodes, it has a familiar premise: people from a future dystopia mentally time-travel to the present day, take over the bodies of people who are about to die, and work like heck to prevent the horrible events of the future from occurring. Been there, done that, right? Yes, but somehow this works. Part of it is the casting: everyone’s very, very good, including Eric McCormack, who pulls off his role with just enough humor and weakness to make himself believable. The stand-out performance is Jared Abrahamson, a teenager taken over by a much older time-traveler who, to his great credit, doesn’t do a George Burns impression from the movie 18 Again!. Even though Travelers doesn’t reveal its secrets until rather late in the series, which gets frustrating, there’s still a lot to like. If we don’t know the stakes, we can’t be depended on to care about what happens; nevertheless, each episode still manages to make itself an entertaining experience. The crew makes the best of a relatively low budget through acting, writing, and heart. And yes, it obviously takes place in Vancouver. It’s okay. You get used to it. 4 out of 5 stars.

Did I spend my sick time wisely? I hope so.

All of Your Favorite Superheroes Suck

My latest piece for The Loftus Party discusses nostalgia and how it chokes the culture:

When it comes to past-their-prime franchises, I left out the oldest and most tiresome of all: our current crop of superheroes. Despite minuscule, temporary alterations in powers, relationships, retconned origin stories, outfits, and even gender, these DC/Marvel science fiction genre titans are unchanged. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Daredevil, Thor, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and all the rest have been static for decades.

They get movies and Netflix series and comic books and network shows and they just won’t die and we keep shelling out money to the same people to tell us the same stories over and over again so we can continue to marinate in nostalgia instead of telling today’s stories with heroes and villains born of today’s travails.

Deep in your heart, you know I’m right. Click to read the whole thing!

Excerpt: Zombies and the City

The revised, updated edition of The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse includes content unavailable in the first edition, including more illustrations and a new chapter on surviving a Zombie Apocalypse while in a big city like Chicago or NYC. Here’s an excerpt of that chapter, titled “Zombies and the City”:

In Chapter 5 I said, “The most important rule when trying to survive the Zombie Apocalypse is that you stay away from large cities.” Unfortunately, this isn’t always a viable option for people who call places like Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles home. So this chapter will help the big city apartment dweller who, due to unfortunate circumstance, was unable to leave the city before the Zombie Apocalypse hit. You’ll read preparation tips that will help increase your survival chances early, combat tactics for fighting large crowds of zombies, strategies for getting out of a zombie-overrun city, and much more. For everyone else out there, my original advice still stands: do not enter a major metropolitan area during the Zombie Apocalypse. The dangers far outweigh the benefits.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of developing a Pre-Apocalypse Metropolitan Exit Plan. Practice until it becomes second nature before the first zombie rises to eat its first brain. Your best undead survival strategies are Awareness, Avoidance, and Escape: become Aware of potential zombie threats by watching the news, and Avoid getting trapped in the huge crush of people fleeing the city by Escaping early. The Zombie Apocalypse is very much a worst-case scenario for humanity. Trying to survive the Zombie Apocalypse in a major metropolitan area is the worst case of the worst case, and if you’re in that situation, everything else before that must have gone horribly wrong.

Big city living during the Zombie Apocalypse has a unique set of challenges that make survival a dicey thing for even the most seasoned combat veteran. The three biggest problems you’ll face are:

A Million Against One: In the first several months of the Zombie Apocalypse, major metropolitan areas will be teeming with hungry undead. Densely populated areas will still be densely populated…just with zombies instead of people. Every fight you’re in will involve large numbers of zombies or have the potential to draw large numbers.
Hope You Like Cheetos and Root Beer: Scavenging for supplies in looted convenience stores and abandoned apartments will be the only way you can stay nourished as long as you remain in the big city. There will be no fresh water sources you can trust outside of the bottled kind, any food you eat will come in plastic packages, and every time you leave your Zombie Redoubt to resupply, you run a very large risk of being attacked by bands of wandering ghouls. Oh, and where are you going to dig a latrine in your apartment?
You Can’t Just Get on the Bus, Gus: Leaving the big city on a normal day can be challenging even with a car or public transportation. Once the subway stops running and the streets get choked with hordes of cannibalistic undead, your best options to get around will be on foot or bicycle. The longer you remain outside and visible, the more likely you are to be spotted by zombies. So how are you going to get out?

Despite these challenges, you can survive big city living during the Zombie Apocalypse. Just treat this situation as temporary. Your goal should always be to leave the city and go to less-populated rural or suburban areas as soon as it’s feasible. No matter how much you may love New York, its mean streets will kill you…or worse.

The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse is the only turnkey zombie survival course you’ll ever need, and it’s available right now from Amazon!

Book Review: Agents of Dreamland

Caitlin R Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland is as fun a novella as you’re likely to read about a Lovecraftian apocalypse, especially if you don’t mind the lack of plot or anything actually happening throughout the story.

Much of the novella happens in conversations, reminiscences, and stream-of-consciousness musings from a very unreliable narrator. There’s no action in it to speak of, and the characters are all pretty mysterious. There’s the Signalman, a government agent-type who investigates the kind of bizarre occurrences that trigger the coming apocalypse. There’s also Chloe, a member of a bizarre cult. And there’s Immacolata Sexton, the most enigmatic character of all, who knows what’s going on but tells us little of it.

Part of the fun of the novel involves identifying the various references the author places throughout the text: brain-excised cadavers, strangely-worked cylinders, steps to Deeper Slumber, Slaughterhouse-Five, and more. It helps to know and love Lovecraft’s body of work to understand what’s going on, except when Kiernan goes off-script, like with the character of Immacolata Sexton.

The narrative is stuffed to the gills with description, which is what turns a short story like this into a novella. Some of it’s disturbing, some simply there. There’s no beginning, middle, or end to it, a fact that the author herself mentions near the last chapter of the book. So if you’re looking for a linear, meat-and-potatoes story, you will be disappointed.

Overall, I liked it. Lacking expectations, I had little to be disappointed by, and the writing was clear when it wanted to be and opaque when it served the narrative.

Movie Review: Attacked on Set

I reviewed the movie Attacked on Set at The Slaughtered Bird:

The story is simple, lampooning not just low-budget moviemaking, but moviemaking in general: a crew gets together to shoot a horror film, and one by one everyone gets killed. That’s that. There’s also a ludicrous subplot featuring an environmental activist trying to save the endangered passenger parrot from horrible land developers. It doesn’t advance the story, but is absolutely necessary for the laughs.

Is this a must-see masterpiece of indie cinema, a movie to run far away from, or does it squat somewhere in the middle? Click to find out!

Movie Review: Trancers 5: Sudden Deth

(Interested readers can see my review of Trancers here, my review of Trancers II here, my review of Trancers III here, and my review of Trancers 4 here.)

It’s been a bit of a slog these last few weeks, particularly getting through Trancers 4: Jack of Swords. As terrible as that film was, Trancers 5: Sudden Deth is an improvement. Is it a good movie? No. But it’s better than both the third and fourth films, and makes it worth sticking it out through the whole series. (I understand that there’s a Trancers 6 out there, but I’m going to give that one a miss. Lacking Tim Thomerson, it’s not a proper Trancers film.)

The movie begins with an execrable voice-over introduction to remind you of all the horrible stuff from the previous movie. As it’s only been a week since I saw Trancers 4, I didn’t need it. Its value is in identifying all the various Shakespearean names they gave to the world and characters: Prospero, Caliban (from The Tempest), Oberon, etc. I don’t know why they gave the squeaky-voiced warrior-woman character the name Shaleen; it didn’t quite fit.

This film is about Jack Deth trying to go home to Earth, while Caliban, self-resurrected through his inexpertly-painted portrait, seeks to take over not just the world, but all of time and space. Jack needs to go to the Castle of Unrelenting Terror to retrieve the Tiamond (yes, with a “T”), which will send him to his proper universe. So it’s a traditional fantasy-style quest, complete with horses, brigands, and battle scenes.

Said battle scenes in this movie are far better than in the previous, which is weird because they obviously filmed the movies back-to-back. Nevertheless, I’ll take the improvement. Caliban displays remarkable telekinetic abilities, not unlike Force-telekinesis, though fifty times lamer. It looked like they just didn’t have the energy/budget to have the actors physically fight Caliban. A sub-plot with Lyra becoming a seer played out, though it didn’t advance the story. Prospero the good Trancer tried to get Jack Deth to recognize that all Trancers aren’t evil, making it seem as if Jack is some kind of a Trancer-racist (instead of someone who’s had everything taken from him by Trancers; go figure).

The dialogue was a lot funnier in this movie than the previous, and the tone lighter. This helped immensely, because it allowed Thomerson to once again make use of his skills as a straight man in a crazy world. One exchange I particularly liked:

Prospero: Killing is not always the answer.

Jack: It’s usually a pretty good guess.

That worked, as well as a number of other clever lines. Why didn’t we get this in the previous film?

If you’re looking for unrelenting terror in the Castle of Unrelenting Terror, you won’t find it. It was a missed opportunity for the characters not to comment upon this.

Anyway, the saga’s over. I’m glad it went out on a more quality note than #4, but it still didn’t quite match the first or second in fun. Still, if you’re in the mood to watch a movie about a dimension-hopping, time-traveling zombie-killer named Deth, you could do a lot worse than Trancers 5.

Book Review: Tough Guys by Adrian Cole

I reviewed Adrian Cole’s Tough Guys at The Slaughtered Bird:

The publisher, Parallel Universe Publications, cleverly selected the best novella in the collection to be the first: Wait for the Ricochet. It describes the travails of Nick Nightmare, a private eye whose cases deal with the occult in its most sinister aspects. While the Urban Fantasy genre is stuffed to the gills with such stories, Wait for the Ricochet blows them out of the water in sheer thrills; this is a fully thought-out world, one that we only get a glimpse of in this all-too-short tale. I don’t dare give any more away.

You really need to click through and read the whole review. You’ll find out why soon, I promise.

Movie Review: Trancers 4: Jack of Swords

(Interested readers can see my review of Trancers here, my review of Trancers II here, and my review of Trancers III here.)

It’s safe to say that the Trancers franchise has not just gone off the rails with Trancers 4: Jack of Swords, but has raced over a cliff, fallen down a ravine, and smashed itself to bits on the jagged rocks below. Everything that made the original Trancers movies so entertaining has been left behind in this fourth offering, including the intensity, awareness of its own silliness, and anything resembling a decent performance.

Jack Deth, portrayed with wooden unease by Tim Thomerson, has become a chrononaut (a term I borrowed from Michael Moorcock) for the Council. The horrible, Trancer-led dystopia has apparently not come to pass (presumably as a result of the efforts of the previous films), so Jack time-travels to various eras to fix the streams of history, or some such. After some needlessly hostile exchanges with a beautiful scientist, his time machine crashes in an alternate universe that’s stuck in medieval times. While there isn’t a language barrier, there are Trancers, which behave more like energy vampires from Buck Rogers than the Trancers we’ve all come to know and love. In fact, I don’t know why they’re called Trancers at all.

The dialogue in the film is a mix of modern idiom and pseudo-English-accented mystic-speak, which doesn’t help the viewer take the events seriously. Everyone who isn’t overacting obviously doesn’t want to be there. The overall tenor of the film was uneven: Jack’s Long Second watch malfunctions in the worst way possible, but Thomerson’s subsequent comedic stylings felt out of place in the general, dreadful seriousness of everything else. The main bad guy, played by martial artist Clabe Hartley, almost but not quite saves the film. He moves well, speaks his lines clearly, and has a good presence throughout. Another relative stand-out was the first Trancer in the film, who didn’t last long: Borgia. Menacing, evil, with some dry humor. A shame he didn’t make it. I’d rather watch a Borgia film than another Jack Deth movie, at this rate.

In terms of swordfights, the film had several, and they were all terrible. People swinging swords at other people’s swords, for example, instead of giving you the impression that they were actually trying to hit each other. (Hitting swords edge on edge is a terribly bad idea if you want to keep your sword after the fight: they tend to get horribly notched. Real swordsmen don’t fight that way.) One guy had a katana, which was out of place among the European-style long swords. A few people held their swords with the blades backward, as though reverse-grip swordfighting was a thing. (It isn’t.) The Trancer vampires, all of whom were supposed to be big, strong, and tough, died easily at the hands of ignorant peasants. How did they become the rulers of the world if they were such wimps?

Through an incomprehensible bootstrapping paradox from a future-seeing wizard who draws pictures of his visions, Jack Deth saves the day and defeats the Trancers. But he’s stuck in this alternate medieval dimension, his time travel device is broken, and he’s universes away from a nice bathroom with a flush toilet. How will he survive?

We’ll just have to see in the fifth movie.

Celebrate March Madness With The Blessed Man and the Witch!

The first novel in my Armageddon series, The Blessed Man and the Witch, is available for free on Amazon from March 1 through March 4!

If you’re a fan of films like The Exorcist and The Omen, where good people struggle against the forces of Hell, this is the novel for you. From the blurb:

How can you possibly prepare for the end of the world? The end of everything? Armageddon is right around the corner, and there’s no guarantee that Heaven’s going to be the victor. Hell is real, it’s clawing at the edges of the Pit, and its demonically possessed servants are right now gathering powerful artifacts as weapons of war. The End Times are coming. Are you ready?

Hector Shaw isn’t. A former soldier suffering from PTSD, he’s been recruited to work for a clandestine security company under strange circumstances. What do they really want him for? Siobhan Dempsey isn’t, either. She’s only just gotten her life together when she finds that she can do magick. Real magick. Why now, and why her?

Connecting multiple characters and building to a shattering climax, this is the first novel in a trilogy focusing on themes of supernatural horror, western occultism, and Biblical apocalypse.

The beginning of an epic story of the end of the world, and it’s available free of charge from March 1 through March 4. This is the good read you’ve been waiting for!