David Dubrow's Blog, page 36

Slaughtered Bird Movie Review: The Horror

I reviewed the independent film The Horror at The Slaughtered Bird:

The independent film The Horror has good things going for it: stark, frozen landscapes; a story that achingly plays itself out through reminiscences in a therapist’s office; a brother-sister relationship that’s almost-but-not-quite creepy.

But is it worth seeing? Click the link to find out!

Western Civilization Won’t Defend Itself

(Trigger warning: this post is likely to upset individuals with fragile psyches, unexamined assumptions, and weak intellectual constitutions. If that post caused you to flap your hands and clutch your pearls, this one will send you into conniptions. You have been warned.)

What we’ve seen in New York City and San Bernardino and Fort Hood and Madrid and London and Paris and Brussels and everywhere in Israel and too many other places to list is that the West is at war with a particular religion, and the more we try to ignore the nature of the conflict, the more innocent people are going to be murdered. The religion we are at war with is radical Islam. The enemy is its adherents and apologists both here and in the Middle East.

This is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the most stupidly promulgated conflict in human history. The current president of the United States refuses to even refer to the term “Islamic terrorism,” despite the fact that the vast, vast, vast majority of terror attacks against Western countries have been perpetrated by radical Muslims, usually from Arab countries. It’s not the least bit racist or Islamophobic to point this out. Nevertheless, it has been labeled so by a particularly loud but small minority who lack the courage to defend Western values as superior to all others. Those values are superior, and it’s not racist to say that, either. And yet fear of being called a racist, Islamophobe, or Nazi by the intellectual adolescents who lack the courage to even verbally defend Western culture has hamstrung our efforts to fight this War of Civilizations. Call it political correctness, call it creeping leftism, call it cultural Marxism, but innocent people have been and continue to be murdered because of this fear of censure by moral imbeciles. We cannot win the war as long as we let the weakest speak the loudest.

Rather than silence these Quislings, these pacifists who would see your child dead before raising a hand against the enemy, the rest of us must speak louder. We used to take it for granted that our fellow Westerners knew that a civilization that put men on the Moon; that built and maintained the internet; that extended the lives and the quality of those lives of millions and millions of people worldwide; that produced the works of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Wyeth, and Hemingway was the greatest this planet has ever known. But we can’t take that for granted anymore. Mass-producing something as simple as a pencil isn’t equal to creating a garment that entirely covers a woman’s body to keep her from being lusted after by other men. These efforts are not comparable, and not only do we need to explain that to our children, but we need to remember it ourselves. We need to say it out loud so it becomes something we consider. Western countries, with their Enlightenment values, technological advancements, and educated populations, are vastly better in all ways than Islamic countries. Islamic countries, particularly those that practice Sharia law, have literally nothing to teach us, and we need to establish a comfort level in acknowledging that.

It’s ludicrous that we, as Westerners, should have to defend Western civilization from both external threats and the very people who live under its umbrella, but we didn’t get here in a vacuum. We assumed that the people who teach our children and manage the bureaucracy and write the books we read and make the movies we watch and command the military and write laws and report the news all share our love and respect for Enlightenment values. It turns out that they don’t, for the most part, and we erred in making that assumption. We got here because we weren’t paying attention. We weren’t being mindful. These are mistakes we mustn’t make twice.

Once we admit to ourselves and each other that the primitive, barbaric culture we’re at war with doesn’t merely hold different opinions about human rights, ethics, and the value of innocent life, but false, wrong, and destructive opinions on these things, we will begin to take this war seriously. And once we take it seriously, we will fight it seriously. And, finally, once we fight it seriously, we will win. There’s no value in empathizing, sympathizing, or acknowledging the grievances of Muslim extremists. As citizens of the greatest civilization on the planet, it’s our responsibility to root this poisonous ideology out wherever it creeps so its backward, stone-age adherents keep it within their own enclaves out of fear of what we will do to them. Nothing less will do.

But until we can say out loud and without fear of censure that Western civilization is not just different, but better in all respects, we will continue to lose innocents. That’s the first step. This isn’t a problem with humanity, or humans, or humankind: it’s a problem with radical Islam and Muslim extremists. Throwing up one’s hands in reaction to terrorism and saying, “Humanity’s bad: we’re all doomed,” is a disgusting form of victim-blaming that refuses to admit who the enemy is, what the enemy does, and who the enemy does it to.

Don’t let the Social Justice Warriors, the cultural Marxists, the Why-Do-They-Hate-Us malcontents set the terms of the conversation and shame you into voicing truths. Think about who you would want at your back in a struggle against a determined enemy, and choose your side: Western culture, or the forces that would actively destroy it.

Friday Links: Riddle Room, The Bat and the Brain, and The Lady Vampire

It’s time for an escape, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than bring you the Friday Links, where we look back at the world of the bizarre, disturbing, and speculative:

At Rely on Horror , Jorge Bocanegra talked about his 20-year relationship with the Resident Evil game franchise: “I first met Resident Evil with the release of Resident Evil 2. It was only after going through Leon and Claire’s scenarios a multitude of times that I finally backtracked all the way to the original game that started it all. As a bowl-haired 10-year old, I was ready to finally experience the horrors briefly glimpsed in Resident Evil 2’s intro (that zombie really scared me!).”
You never know for sure what’s going to happen when you open Zombos’ Closet , but you can be reasonably certain that it’ll be awesome. This Mexican lobby card of the 1971 flick The Blood on Satan’s Claw is no exception.
A murderer in Cape Town claimed that he was possessed by demons : “The case had closed, and nothing demonic had been mentioned throughout the trial. Three psychiatrists and a psychologist had also found no relevant abnormality regarding his mental capacity. Peculiarly, his lawyer then suddenly announced that his client was infested by “demonic forces”. He requested that the court facilitate an exorcism in prison, which he would videotape and show to the judge during argument about sentencing.”
Breakfast in the Ruins talked about a Japanese vampire film released in 1959: “Whilst we’ve already seen some pretty curious mash-ups of Eastern and Western horror tropes in this ‘Nippon horrors’ review thread, you’d be hard-pressed I think to find a more determinedly oddball example of the phenomenon than ‘Onna Kyûketsuki’ (‘The Lady Vampire’), another low budget quickie produced for Shintoho studios by J-horror pioneer Nobuo Nakagawa.”
Nev Murray reviewed Kyle M. Scott’s Consumed Volume 2 at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! : “What you have here are six tales that, at times, could not be more different. You have strippers and clowns and bouncers and babies. You have laughs and sexy stuff and blood and guts. You have more blood and guts. You have tension. A lot of tension. That tension invariably leads to horror.”
Fascination With Fear showed us the art of Amalia Kouvalis: “American artist Amalia Kouvalis captures the world we want to see when we look at old Victorian portraits. In the flash of an imaginary camera she captures ghosts, demons, departing souls, and other things that we can only catch a glimpse of out of the corner of our eye.”
Robert E. Howard’s Western-style Conan story was deconstructed by Sean Eaton at his inimitable R’lyeh Tribune : “But there is a lot more going on in Beyond the Black River than a bloody battle between cowboys and Picts.  Howard applies the geographical history worked out in his The Hyborian Age (1938) to conditions on the ground near the Black River….There is considerable philosophizing about the wisdom of spreading civilization to the undefended edges of a frontier, and a grim conclusion about the nature of humanity and its struggle against barbarism, summarized at the very end by a survivor of the Pictish onslaught.”
The Cathode Ray Mission brought us a series of movie posters from the 1977 film Rabid. “Pray it doesn’t happen to you!”
Killer Fish, an old UHF favorite starring James Franciscus, was the subject of discussion at The Horror!? : “As long-time readers among my imaginary audience might remember, I’m predisposed to like any old crap Italian director in every genre known to Man and some known only to Italian cinema Antonio Margheriti did, so it’ll come as little surprise to these chosen few that I did indeed like, as well as deeply enjoy, this somewhat misbegotten mixture of heist film, post-Jaws something-in-the-water horror, men’s adventure, and disaster movie that mixes so many genres it’s no wonder it can’t do any single one of them terribly well.”
At The Slaughtered Bird , the Blue Took reviewed the bizarre film Decay: “Writer-director Joseph Wartnerchaney’s debut feature, Decay, is fundamentally a character study of a tragically damaged, troubling individual which cleverly takes a subject that would normally serve as an excuse to deliver trashy clichés and injects some interesting concepts; loneliness being the main theme tackled head-on in a way rarely seen, as we follow the trials and tribulations of a man on the outskirts of society harbouring a ghoulish secret.”
Have you heard of the 2016 movie Riddle Room? Neither have I, but Hayes Hudson’s House of Horror reviewed it: “One thing I really liked about this film is it starts out immediately in the middle of the action.   The woman is already kidnapped and locked in the room.  We don’t have any slow parts leading up to this, we just jump in to the immediate action.”
The Horrors of It All uploaded the entirety of the comic book tale The Bat and the Brain for your viewing pleasure.
We learned the two best ways to avoid demonic possession : “Father de Meo, for his part said that he has been leading a school of exorcists for the past 13 years to address the need but his endeavour comes with the blessing of his bishop as handling cases of demonic possession is very sensitive. Still, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure and so he advises that to protect oneself from demonic possession, the best and safest way is to refrain from engaging in occult practices which he feels have grown at an alarming rate in the past years and resulted in a “pastoral emergency.””
Here, I pointed you to a review I wrote of Erik Hofstatter’s Katerina , and told you about the five people you meet on Facebook .

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu’s S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.

The Five People You Meet on Facebook

Ah, social media. To call it a mixed bag is like calling the Rocky Mountains a group of hills. The inconsistent feedback keeps us coming back while the disappointment pushes us away. It satisfies our need for attention the way Cheetos satiate hunger, and is about as nourishing. At times it’s an overflowing, unflushed toilet, and at other times it reconnects old friends across time zones and continents. For every new friend you make, you turn off someone else. There are typically good reasons why people grow apart and lose contact, but social media throws us back together whether we like it or not.

Facebook, the big dog, continues to be a force in our lives, particularly in what we show to the world. Very, very little gets on Facebook by accident. What you post online is hardly an accurate reflection of your true self, but rather a funhouse mirror, distorting not just your own self-image, but what others see of you. Still, Facebook doesn’t create content: you do. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the five people you meet on Facebook.

The Seller: He works for Herbalife. State Farm. Tupperware. Buckeye Jim’s Tractor and Feed. And you know it because he uses Facebook to tell you all about it to the exclusion of everything else. If Herbalife has a sale on Macrobiotic Fish Oil tablets (200 mg, 100 count), you’ll know it. The worst Sellers, however, the people who really get under your skin, are the ones I know best: book authors. You’re nothing but a potential sale to the Seller author: that’s why he friended you in the first place. You Like his stuff but he never Likes yours. The only posts he Likes are those written by popular authors because, let’s face it, he’s a suck-up. His wall is non-stop sales pitches. The universe of social media is out there to make him money. Never mind that it doesn’t work: he’ll make it work or die trying.
The Memeing Mynah: She lives only to Share political/ideological memes, articles, cartoons, and essays written by others. At least twenty a day, obscuring your news feed into a fog of bumper sticker slogans and headlines: PROTESTERS SPOILED A TRUMP RALLY BUT YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, Tweets from God, Lizzy the Lezzy posts, Richard Dawkins destroying Creationists in The Guardian. Never any original content. A profile photo reflecting the current political climate: a Gadsden flag or a grinning Bernie Sanders close-up, depending on the person. Never anything else. Perhaps she might Like your approving comment, but she says nothing herself: she just links and links and links. You imagine that talking to her in person would be like listening to a 300 baud modem screech endlessly into your ear.
The Sad Sack: He makes Eeyore look like Sammy Davis Jr. performing The Candy Man. Everything sucks. Facebook is merely an outlet for his endless cavalcade of complaints, particularly about work. Everyone else is stupid and he has to deal with stupid people all day long and it’s a total drag. No aspect of life fails to disappoint him. He makes you tired just by knowing he exists, but he’s your cousin or co-worker or shared a lab with you in high school so you’re obligated to remain friends with him. He wears his heart on his sleeve, but it’s always broken.
The Drama Empress: When she’s not vaguebooking she’s uttering threats of revenge on unnamed haters. A good burger becomes the best dinner ever, a surly salesperson becomes the Judge of All Her Life’s Choices. Her highs reach the troposphere, her lows the Mariana Trench, and you hear about every single one of them. The transitory, prosaic moments of daily life that better-adjusted adults automatically file away as unimportant get magnified by the Drama Empress to apocalyptic proportions. A Drama Empress gathers enemies like flies on the foist of dogs by dragging innocent people into non-events in one post, and in another post wonders why people don’t like her. She’s very nice, you know. Some people are just jealous. (Men can be Drama Empresses, too, and often are.)
You: And then there’s you. You don’t do these things, do you? Well, except when you do. I’ve mentioned this before, but your perception of others doesn’t make you invisible. You see them and they see you. Maybe you’re the Drama Empress. The Seller. The Sad Sack. Or, or, or…maybe not. Depends on who you talk to. Or who talks about you. You’re not that negative, are you? And you only post work stuff when something new comes out. So it’s okay, right?

Your best bet is to spend as little time on Facebook as you can get away with. Don’t you just feel better when you don’t need it?

Katerina at The Slaughtered Bird

At The Slaughtered Bird, I reviewed Erik Hofstatter’s Katerina:

The protagonist Kamil begins the story as a Travis Bickle-type right out of Taxi Driver, passing silent judgment on the neighborhood hookers through an internal dialogue that mingles loathing and lust in equal amounts. For reasons that seem at odds with his personal history and disgust for the profession, he picks up a streetwalker calling herself Ginny, and I can’t say any more without spoiling the story for you.

Check out the full review to see if it’s your cup of tea!

Friday Links: The Town Manager, Darkest Dungeon, and the Ghost of Winston Churchill

There’s quite a bit of good stuff that’s happened this week in the world of the weird, the horrific, the speculative. As always, drop me a line if you’d like to be included in next week’s Friday Links, but for now, here’s the 411 on the bizarre:

At Nev Murray’s Confessions of a Reviewer!! , writer Pembroke Sinclair confessed her past, present, and future: “My current reading list is a bit more eclectic than it used to be when I was younger. When I went to college, rarely did I have time to read for enjoyment, but as an English major, I was exposed to the classics.  And I loved the vast majority of them.  Every so often, I will pull Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and reread it.  Milton’s Paradise Lost helped shape the themes I explore in my own stories, and I am forever grateful to my professors for helping me learn to look at the world critically.”
The ghost of Winston Churchill is apparently haunting the London Underground: “‘I’m a big believer in stuff like this but I have never ever seen anything like this before.’ The photograph, which was taken last summer, has since been showed to a number of mediums and ghost hunters, with many agreeing with Mr Cooper. The coach driver said: ‘I have since heard stories about people who have seen the ghost of Churchill down there.”
Ruined Head reviewed the horror/action video game Darkest Dungeon: “The twist here is that the characters suffer mental as well as physical damage, picking up a variety of afflictions—described as Paranoid, Selfish, Abusive, Masochistic—that impact gameplay, requiring a variety of treatments back on the surface. Sometimes, if the stress level becomes high enough, characters simply die of a heart attack before being able to retreat from battle.”
A pressbook from the 1952 Buster Crabbe film King of the Congo fell out of Zombos’ Closet . It includes a coloring sheet for the little ones, so it’s not to be missed.
Things went from bad to worse at the trenchant, incisive R’lyeh Tribune when Sean Eaton analyzed Thomas Ligotti’s The Town Manager: “In The Town Manager the work of this appointed official seems pointless and inconsequential.  He and his predecessors are typically seen napping at their desks.  Why should his disappearance cause much alarm?  What does the town manager actually do? What does it mean for the town to lose its town manager, or be given a new one?  And yet the town manager appears to have nearly god-like power.”
Vintage Everyday brought us 25 photos of vintage costumes that are simply…inexplicable.
John Kenneth Muir , a master at deconstructing old, supposedly bad films and rehabilitating them, defended Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: “The “nuke the fridge” moment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is absolutely no more ludicrous than that inflatable raft scene in Temple of Doom.   Yet audience tastes have changed dramatically, and modern audiences don’t buy the “nuke the fridge” set-piece in the way that viewers in 1984 accepted the raft cliffhanger.  Nor do they buy “aliens” in an adventure film, or a geriatric hero defeating bad guys.  “Realism” is not served by these creative choices, and so these choices are, widely in some cases, derided.”
Bryan Stumpf interviewed writer/director David Munz-Maire at The Slaughtered Bird : “Born to expats, my formative years were spent living around our globe, and I find myself extremely fortunate to have been able to sample dozens of cultures through this cosmopolitan upbringing. The communal aspect of the filmmaking is one of my favorite parts of the business, and my worldly perspective has allowed me to be better adept at working with people from all walks of life, more open minded when confronted with new ideas, and generally more inventive when tackling creative problem solving.”
You do wear your seat belt whenever you’re in a car, right? Well, if you don’t, this Supergirl comic book from Jon’s Random Acts of Geekery will convince you otherwise.
Can you believe that it’s been 35 years since the movie Porky’s was made? The House of Self-Indulgence can, and it brought us the highlights: “In fact, the film’s two funniest scenes both involve Doug McGrath failing miserably when it came to stifling his laughter. The first one, like I’ve already mentioned, involves him trying not to laugh when he hears Kim Cattrall being screwed upstairs. And the second one has him unsuccessfully trying not to laugh as he listens to Miss Balbricker () explain to the school’s prudish principal that she wants put out an all-points bulletin for the teenage boy-penis she saw (and grabbed onto for a spell) in the girl’s shower.”
Father Cipriano de Meo, a longtime exorcist, told us how to tell if someone has been demonically possessed : “The key to telling the difference, he said, is through discernment in prayer on the part of the exorcist and the possessed – and in the potentially possessed person’s reaction to the exorcist himself and the prayers being said. The exorcist will typically say “(a) prolonged prayer to the point where if the Adversary is present, there’s a reaction,” he said. “A possessed person has various general attitudes towards an exorcist, who is seen by the Adversary as an enemy ready to fight him.””
In honor of yesterday’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Ghost Hunting Theories did an overview of forgotten races of little people: “Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “Hobbit,” was found in Jakarta, Indonesia and aged at about 17,000 years ago. His brain was the size of a chimp, his body 3 feet long, but his feet strangely long and flat at 7-1/2 inches. The assumption by his very flat feet is that he was unable to run like we do, but could walk. In fact, though he was a hominin, he did not seem to have feet that were anything like our own evolutionary process.”
Taliesin Meets the Vampires reviewed the segment of the 1964 Japanese movie Kwaidan titled, The Woman of the Snow: “This was a beautifully shot segment, the painted backdrops during the snow storm segment was nothing short of gorgeous and added an eerie, overworldly aspect to the scene.”
Here, I pointed you to Valicity Garris’s review of my novel The Nephilim and the False Prophet, and told you why you should watch the 2013 miniseries The Bible .

Illustration by Earl Geier for Call of Cthulhu’s At Your Door supplement.

Why You Should Watch 2013’s The Bible

The Mark Burnett-produced 2013 TV miniseries The Bible is far from the best television you’ll ever see, but if you find Western culture to be at all relevant to your daily life, you have to watch it. Like it or not, the Bible and its teachings undergird much of the West’s laws, mores, and ethics, and even if you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to see it dramatized, even imperfectly.

Burnett’s miniseries doesn’t hide the fact that much of the Bible concerns Jews: how we (As a Jew myself, I get to use that pronoun) were chosen by God, the deeds and misdeeds of our greatest leaders and prophets, the various cultures that tried to destroy us, and why we resisted Jesus’s claims of being the Messiah. The Passover holiday figures strongly in both the story of Moses (Exodus) and centuries later, when the Sanhedrin (a Jewish council of leaders) worked with the Romans to rid Jerusalem of Jesus before Passover.

Nevertheless, the miniseries gives the Old Testament short shrift compared to the New Testament. Perhaps that’s to be understood, given that the producers are Christians and they’d naturally want to focus on what they see as the most important part of the Bible. Unfortunately, this made the earlier episodes the weakest: too many events were shoehorned into too little time, and the first half of the program suffered as a result.

The first episode, featuring Abraham, touched on many themes but didn’t delve into any of them: Sarah’s yearning for a child, her jealousy of Hagar, Abraham’s love for Ishmael, Abraham’s agony at God’s command to sacrifice Isaac. The angels were neat, but we didn’t need to see them slice and dice their way through Sodom to get Lot’s family out. I wanted more pathos and less blood.
The story of Moses took up the second episode, but there was little to recommend it: you’d be better off watching The Ten Commandments or even Prince of Egypt .
In the third episode, we saw the Jews, led by Joshua, fighting to claim the land God promised them, which was quite a lot of fun. It was paired with a terrible depiction of the story of Samson, which lacked any semblance of relevance. I liked the casting choices, particularly the ones that made Samson and his family black, but Delilah’s betrayal felt pro-forma and his revenge on the Philistines lacked punch.
Saul was decently slimy in the fourth episode, though he couldn’t hold a candle to Edward Woodward’s performance in King David . This was another ho-hum episode that simply went by the numbers. I did feel bad for Uriah, though.
The Old Testament wrapped up with Daniel in the fifth episode, which wasn’t bad. They didn’t include the writing on the wall, which is one of my favorite Bible stories.
Episodes six through ten focused on the story of Jesus, and this is where the series hit its stride. Herod was a horrible, disgusting figure, thoroughly evil. The Satan character was kind of unnecessary, creeping around on the periphery, but Pilate’s businesslike menace made up for it. Diogo Morgado made a smiling, if decent-enough Jesus, though the cheap make-up effects didn’t do the production any good with the extreme close-ups of His agonies on the Cross. (Max von Sydow is still my favorite, though a close second is Jim Caviezel.) The apostles were mostly forgettable but for Thomas (go figure). The martyrdom of the disciples in the last episode showed us that early Christianity was in great danger of being stamped out, much as Christians are right now being murdered in the Middle East. The machinations of the Sanhedrin and the Romans added depth to the presentation that the earlier episodes lacked.

What The Bible presents is not a story of individuals, but the story of us as a people, a culture. And that’s where it shines brightest. Take a look.

New Review of The Nephilim and the False Prophet

Author, youth pastor, and book reviewer Valicity Garris reviewed The Nephilim and the False Prophet at her site The Rebel Christian:

The mayhem is real in this book, definitely a notch up from the first book. If you thought the violence and the intensity had died down, I’m sorry but you’re dead wrong. I praise Dubrow on his imagination and the command of the English language with his description and detail. I don’t normally enjoy reading about guts, explosions, and bloody death but I strangely find it something to look forward to when I crack open a book from the Armageddon series.

It’s a spoiler-free review, so read the whole thing!

Interested readers can check out the first book in my Armageddon series, The Blessed Man and the Witch, right here.

Friday Links: Charley One-Eye, the Windsor Hum, and When Worlds Collide

Some people call it a link roundup, I call it the Friday Links, mmmmm hm. Ah do like them french-fried taters, as well as all the stuff what’s happened in the world of the weird, the unusual, even the horrific all week, so let’s get on it.

The Windsor Hum has returned to Ontario, and nobody’s happy about it: “Mike Provost, a resident on Windsor’s Hillcrest Boulevard, has kept records of the hums heard throughout his neighborhood, he told the newspaper. He noted a particular blast on Saturday, Feb. 27, that “shook everything … like a pounding on the wall. Some people complain about dishes rattling, windows rattling,” Provost told the Star. “It can get real disturbing.””
LastBoneStands reviewed the ghost-thriller A Haunting in Cawdor at The Slaughtered Bird : “Putting together the pieces of the puzzle is the best thing about this film. Everyone loves a mystery and trying to figure out what is going on is the fun part. Unfortunately, sometimes, when all the pieces are finally put together and the mystery is solved, the end product is not something we are entirely happy with.”
A Mexican lobby card for the 1951 film When Worlds Collide fell out of Zombos’ Closet . Seeing the futuristic Hefty bags they wore as uniforms is more than worth the price of admission.
The pavement in Italy is breathing , freaking everybody out: “The paved floor moves up and down like a chest inhaling and exhaling. Filmed by passerby in Cadimare, the sight left many unnerved.”
John Kenneth Muir had some interesting things to say about Hellbound: Hellraiser II: “This is about me, as much as the film, a reader might conclude. I want my horror movies to do more than just scare me a little, like I’m on a roller coaster ride. I want the movie to concern or reflect something important; something that makes me think about the world, myself, and my relationships. So I miss Clive Barker’s facility for visual symbolism in Tony Randel’s Hellbound, but I still like the sequel for what it is (a rip-roaring, gory horror movie), even if, at times, the movie looks to be held together by little more than spit and polish.”
Nev Murray reviewed J.G. Faherty’s novella Death Do Us Part at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! : “It’s the good old someone dies in mysterious way-comes back from the dead for revenge-everyone better run very very fast-how do we actually kill this thing and live happily ever after – type scenario. The perfect recipe for the horror from the seventies and eighties.”
Cool Ass Cinema reviewed the 1973 western Charley One-Eye in a must-read piece: “CHARLEY-ONE-EYE is one of the damned weirdest westerns you’re ever likely to see. An obscure entry in the filth style of oater that rode into movie theaters back in the 1970s, the atmosphere is so realistically grimy(aided immeasurably by the near-constant sound of buzzing flies), you can almost smell the aroma of body odor emanating off the screen. The virtually non-existent plot paints everybody as ugly, cruel, or crippled.”
At his invaluable, incredible R’lyeh Tribune , Sean Eaton tacked the twin themes of necromancy and low self-esteem: “In The Colossus of Ylourgne, all of the necromancers in Averoigne, and the sorcerer Nathaire in particular, have suffered greatly “during a year of unusual inquisitory zeal”. Nathaire is described as “thrice-infamous”, but as villains go, he is also depicted as one worthy of at least some sympathy:  he is a dwarf, lamed by an earlier stoning, and is considered ugly and repulsive.  Furthermore, he is suffering through the last stages of a terrible chronic disease.”
Breakfast in the Ruins brought us a celebration of covers from the publisher named Pan: “With their preference for colourful oil paintings bluntly depicting events within the book, Pan’s old-fashioned approach to cover illustration was the polar opposite of the modernist, design-based aesthetic of their rivals at Penguin, seemingly reflecting the fact that they tended to publish a far higher quantity of war stories, British Empire yarns and other such ‘square’ subjects, with just the occasional revered author or hot-headed literary turk thrown in for good measure.”
Here, I pointed you to a review I wrote of Barbie Wilde’s short story collection Voices of the Damned, and told you about my forbidden archives , the reviews I wrote for Ginger Nuts of Horror that Jim Mcleod deleted because he found out I had different opinions from him about things that have nothing to do with horror.

Illustration by Earl Geier for Call of Cthulhu’s Blood Brothers 2 supplement.

David Dubrow’s Forbidden Archives Now Available!

When Jim Mcleod kicked me off the staff of Ginger Nuts of Horror for expressing, in my own space, opinions that millions and millions and millions of other people share, he also deleted all the book reviews I wrote for the site. That does a disservice to the authors whose hard work I promoted, but Social Justice Warriors like Jim Mcleod don’t care about the quality of your content; they care about your opinions, and if those opinions aren’t the right opinions, you’ve got to go. (I also rewrote the Ginger Nuts of Horror About page for him some time ago; it’s possible that he hasn’t gotten around to deleting that yet. Someone should let him know.)

Reader Judge Deadd was kind enough to find Google-cached pages of those deleted reviews, and he went through the effort of gathering them onto one page on Archive.org. Anyone interested in reading those reviews can go over and start clicking. Thank you very much, Judge Deadd!

I’ve included this Facebook screenshot to prove that despite my purging from the site, I did write there once and my contributions were valued. But that was before Jim Mcleod learned that I had different opinions about things that had nothing to do with horror, and subsequently called me, a Jewish man, a Nazi (despite his dishonest claims to the contrary).

Thanks again to Judge Deadd for making my Forbidden Archives so easily available! Now interested readers and the writers whose books I reviewed can find them once again. It’s a shame that Jim Mcleod didn’t respect the book authors who sent him review requests enough to keep those reviews on the site, but at least they’re somewhere now.