Over at my new favorite arena, GeekyDomain, I got the chance to dive deep into one of the great literary mysteries in fandom, the Shaver Mystery stories published in postwar Amazing Stories magazine. At first, it seems like the tale of a harmless nut who happened to be able to turn his hallucinations into a good story. But it grows into something baffling and just a little bit unsettling. Lemuria isn’t the only place with monsters roaming the landscape, it turns out, but the demons in our collective consciousness might be the scariest of all!
It’s come to this: I’m so busy working for other people’s sites that I can’t get the chance to blog on my own, so I have to do digests. Probably for the best. I’m on three posts per week at Geeky Domain now, so the pace is getting spunky.
“If You Liked The Witcher, You Might Also Like…” explores the genre of the occult detective. Revisit Kolchak, The X-Files, and a cameo from Vincent Price because I’ll take any opportunity to insert him.
You see in the banner on that image that for a goof, I compared the “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” song to “Bravely Bold Sir Robin…” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Right after that, we lost Terry Jones, who co-directed same for the Python troupe. Sad loss, and another Python down.
“Five Sci-Fi Novels Just Waiting To Be Adapted To Film” is a nerdrage rant about how Hollywood isn’t adapting anything quality anymore, get off ma’ lawn and all. But each of those five sci-fi classics I picked are all works with a strong argument for being potential box-office champions. We can do that or we can try to retread Spider-Man for another Uncle Ben death scene. Your call, Hollywood!
“Time is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans!” — John Lennon
The scoop: Over at my long-standing 366WeirdMovies gig, I undertook my own side challenge to figure out the best / weirdest Kurt Vonnegut film adaptation.
So far, the score is settled at Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) as the best, but maybe second-weirdest. A strong case is to be made for the utterly bonkers Slapstick of Another Kind (1982), but it is a terrible movie, almost painful despite its all-star comedy cast. Last and definitely least is Breakfast of Champions (1999), which is not only bad, but damn near a war crime and a deliberate sabotage of Vonnegut’s work by a director with nothing but hatred and ugliness in his heart, Alan Rudolph.
I have seen Mother Night (1996) too, and while it is very good, I didn’t recall it being a contender for weirdness.
In my continuing self-indulgence as a soapboxing manga fan, I got the opportunity to rave about the works of Junji Ito, the horror mangaka behind The Enigma of Amigara Fault, Uzumaki, and many other groundbreaking horror manga classic works.
I capture video interviews with Ito himself, links to discussions of his work, and much more. Some say Junji Ito is more silly than scary, but I actually see a balance in the man’s work. It really is like a far-east capture of the spirit of western horror anthology comics, such as EC Comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear) & company.
So apparently, the late H.P. Lovecraft has gained new-found popularity with younger generations, even though he was about as politically correct as Archie Bunker. Over at Suggested Reads, a new site for discovering quality literature, I had the opportunity to at last dive into the works of Lovecraft and ink out a map for the first-time Arkham tourist.
Iowa thunderstorm season always puts me in the mood for catching up on my horror reading. Call it Pavlovian conditioning from all the years watching mad scientists in castle laboratories working during a thunderstorm. So pawing through my bookshelf, it occurred to me that there’s one horror genre not born of literature, but film.
Zombies, to wit. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, serial killers, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, and Cthulhu, they all came from the pages of literature first, then got adapted to film second under the loving guidance of Universal, Hammer, Amicus, and company. But zombies formed on the silver screen, and they took a few decades to catch on there. And only then did they start showing up in literature in the same form.
Sure, technically speaking, the first zombie movie, 1932’s White Zombie, was based on William Seabrook’s 1929 novel The Magic Island. But these were early prototypes, still steeped in voodoo medicine (inaccurate, by the way). What we mean when we say “zombie” now is owed to George Romero, full stop, and then the genre had to drift into literature.
So, here’s a great reading list of zombie apocalypse novels over at Suggested Reads. Oh, yes, they’re all very modern. Quite a few of those have seen their own film adaptation, circulus vitae, including Patient Zero and The Girl With All The Gifts.
But this subject got me to wondering: What is it about zombie apocalypses that make them such a self-contained stock scenario? Their popularity stems from what TVTropes calls the “Cozy Catastrophe.” The apocalypse always just so happens to leave a few lucky middle-class folk who, in between fighting off the brain-hungry hordes, is having a smashing time having the world to loot to themselves.
No more boring office job for me! I’m going Mad-Maxing!
A few of my reviews whirled by over at 366 Weird Movies while I was too busy with other things (week off for Father’s Day and all that). To catch up:
CAPSULE: AGAINST THE CLOCK (2019) – A messy mish-mosh of cyberpunk spy thriller themes, as half-baked as the sloppy CGI fractals and hyperactive jump cuts that frame this abortion of a film.
CAPSULE: KEOMA (1976) – Could have been a contender for the last great spaghetti western, but is ruined by the Soundtrack From Hell. Yes, you heard right, and you’ll wish you’d never heard. You’re asking of course, how bad can this possibly be? Here’s a sample. Now imagine that crotch-splitting abomination going on for the ENTIRE MOVIE. That’s right, it never shuts up, a continuous Greek chorus obliterating every serious moment for the 105 minute run-time.
CAPSULE: HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987) – A harmless descendant of Miami Vice, with lots of booby cheesecake and a loose story that has something impenetrable to do with a snake, a toilet, a blow-up doll, a skateboard, and a razor-edged Frisbee.
We are not living in a dystopia. We are not approaching a dystopia. We are not just around the corner from approaching anything like a dystopia. You can tell you’re not living in a dystopia if you’re able to read this, and you’re well-fed, clothed, warm, relatively safe at the moment, and free to reply with whatever babbling pops into your head.
In the herein linked post, I debunk Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (I refuse to express it numerically) and all the other dystopian literature along with it. Let us stop the paranoia and focus on the real world problems right in front of us for a change.
ADDENDUM: It’s an election year coming up in the states, so the dystopian mob frenzy is boiling over on the web more than usual. This post allegedly by Aldous Huxley is making the rounds lately:
Now that we have that out of the way: This bit of text is a perfect example of a logical fallacy. It tells you that you are always living in a dictatorship no matter what. Even if you are perfectly happy with no problems anywhere, by this quote’s circular reasoning, that’s all the more reason why you’re “enslaved.” No one can postulate any state of being outside of open anarchy (which can also be defined as a “prison without walls”) that does not match this quote’s definition of a dictatorship. If you have walls, open shutdown of democracy, and do dream of escaping, that’s a dictatorship too.
