David Dubrow

Author

Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale

by Leave a Comment

My hybrid Christmas/Hanukkah story Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale, was published by Liberty Island!

It’s got comedy, pathos, excitement, and the most incisive social commentary you’ll ever see outside of a gas station water cooler conversation.  If you’ve ever been interested in what Judah Maccabee really thinks about the holiday season, then this is the story for you.

There’s a little bit of rough language, some implied intimacy, adult situations, mild violence, and angels.  Which reindeer takes a bullet?  What does Heaven’s VFW post look like?  Where do cat souls come from?  These questions and more are answered in Get the Greek, free to read on Liberty Island!

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Movie Review: Mercy

by Leave a Comment

There was a good deal to like in Mercy, touted as being adapted from Stephen King’s short story Gramma, but the pieces didn’t quite fit together in a way that made for a satisfying film.  Its great strengths were the performances and the short running time; there was a really good movie in there somewhere, but it failed to coalesce.  There will be spoilers here.

  • Acting: Chandler Riggs did an excellent job as George, and the lack of a marshal’s hat on his head didn’t detract from his performance.  He had some difficult things to do, and did them all well.  Shirley Knight as Mercy was appropriately creepy when necessary, but rather bland at other times.  The only other standout was Mark Duplass as Uncle Lanning, and we didn’t see him very much; he used his comedic skills to great effect here.
  • Supporting Roles: The other characters were entirely unnecessary and did nothing to advance the plot.  Dylan McDermott was a waste of time (I’m getting the impression that people like to put him in TV and films so that he can be a name in a list of credits).  They gave George’s brother Buddy nothing to do; his thing about wanting to be a chef provided one vaguely amusing moment with sushi, but that was it.  The mom wasn’t there enough, and when she was, she couldn’t be depended on.
  • Themes: Other than the supernatural themes, there were some elements to the story that were thought-provoking.  Dealing with a parent who’s too old to take care of herself was touched on, but not fleshed out very much.  There were two aspects of parental abuse brought up: Mercy’s abuse of her own children and George’s mom’s abuse of George and Buddy.  It’s a fine point, but I think that it was a form of child abuse to uproot your two non-adult children and make them care for an elderly grandparent who’s not only delusional, but dangerous (at one point Mercy slashed Buddy’s arm open with a letter opener).  I don’t know where Mom’s head was, but she obviously didn’t have her own children’s best interests at heart.
  • I Hastur Go Now: The Lovecraftian promise of Hastur, mentioned early on, didn’t pan out at the end with the movie’s climax.  The monster that came out of Gramma looked more like Swamp Thing than a demon, though I did appreciate the illustration that included the Yellow Sign (blink and you’ll miss it).  The Weeping Book was also pretty neat; a kind of poor man’s Necronomicon, if you will.
  • Thrills: There were a few genuinely shocking and/or horrifying moments in the film: what happens to Buddy after they throw the Weeping Book into the wood chipper, Mercy going bananas with the hypodermic, the last phone call with George’s aunt.  It’s only a shame that there weren’t more moments like it.
  • Ghost Girl: The ghost girl was entirely unnecessary and clouded an already murky plot.  George’s apparent psychic/supernatural abilities didn’t help him to any great degree, and having him see his grandmother’s excised spirit here and there was neither creepy nor poignant.  She should’ve been dropped like Dylan McDermott.
  • Narration: Also unnecessary was George’s narration.  Such things are usually put into a movie because the writer wants to tell you something rather than show it to you, but in this case it just felt extraneous.  If you want us to know that you and your grandmother had a great relationship before she started to die and get possessed by the spirit of a Great Old One, perhaps you should show more scenes of you two spending time together.

3 stars out of 5.  You should watch it on Netflix if you have less than 90 minutes to burn and want to see the kid from The Walking Dead in something other than a horror TV show.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Horror’s Shifting Moral Center

by 2 Comments

A casual observer of supernatural themes in movies, television, and literature could easily conclude that angels are simply enhanced humans with wings, and vampires are merely enhanced (if anemic) humans with fangs.  They’re superheroes.

The reasons for this are simple, but unfortunate: these characters are not part of a universe where there’s a God who intervenes in human events.  Going there in a narrative sense is icky.  It gets into religion, and who wants to get involved in that?  Too often religion is equated with judgment (as though using one’s intellect and ethics to determine what’s proper from what isn’t is a bad thing), and we can’t have judgment in our fiction.  We can’t have a supreme moral arbiter, especially when that hot angel over there is about to knock boots with the wisecracking-but-gold-hearted cambion detective protagonist.  It spoils the fantasy.
One of my most favorite parts of F. Paul Wilson’s novel The Keep was when the scholar character talks with the vampire Molasar and learns that the crosses embedded into the eponymous keep are part of what is imprisoning him. The cross is indeed a symbol of power and that, as a Jew, the scholar has had it all wrong: Jesus Christ was the Messiah.  He found this to be deeply disturbing news, as would any Jewish person (including myself).  Later on, we learn that it’s not a cross, but the figure of a sword hilt, but the crisis was still very poignant and meaningful.

Today’s vampires aren’t forced back by crosses and holy water; to have that, you’d have to include the whole raft of Judeo-Christian mythology.  Because we’ve lost our sense of proportion, it would be considered proselytizing, and that’s just evil.  It wasn’t long ago that Fright Night came out, and with it a vampire that suffered injury from symbols of holiness (the way vampires used to).  Before that, we had The Exorcist, where Catholic priests were the good guys who used the power of God to exorcize a demon.  Try to find a sympathetic portrayal of a priest in mainstream television, literature, or cinema these days, where it’s still considered brave to create a priest character who molests children or does something equally horrible.

In Supernatural, mumbled pseudo-Latin and nonsense-inscribed pentagrams are sufficient to exorcize or trap most demons, and the angels, as charming as some can be, are no different morally than the inhabitants of the infernal realms.  What’s interesting in the Supernatural universe is that demonic possession can be cured through the use of sanctified blood, and holy water burns the possessed.  In an early scene in the episode Soul Survivor, we even see a Catholic priest, rosary and all, blessing bags of blood at a blood bank.  Where did he get the power to sanctify the blood?  It’s never explored.  They have to gloss over it.  If angels can’t bless things, how can priests do it?  Got me.  Ask the writers.

Modern media’s deliberate avoidance, if not outright shunning of Judeo-Christian ethics as expressed in the Bible has altered the landscape of horror, shifting its moral center to nihilism.  Torture porn like the Hostel series, ultra-violent mumblegore like You’re Next, dystopian zombie melodramas like The Walking Dead, and any of the ghost stories produced in the last fifteen years prove this out.  Ethics are derived from expediency, with no ultimate moral arbiter.

Horror’s big enough to contain all these things and still scare you, and you don’t need the God of the Bible to tell you right from wrong.  Nevertheless, what we’re seeing is the horror genre reflecting today’s cultural norms in ways that, it can be argued, dilute its unique power.  If vampires, angels, and demons are just more powerful humans, why not make them aliens instead?  Or X-Men?

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Movie Review: Nightbreed – The Director’s Cut

by Leave a Comment

When I learned that Netflix released Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut for streaming, I couldn’t wait to see it.  It was one of my favorite movies in the early 90’s, and I was eager to see if it had the same magic and if the additional footage added anything other than minutes to the run time.

Overall, the film is still vital to the horror oeuvre, and overcomes its flaws…but just barely.  The Director’s Cut improves the film a little bit.

  • Special Effects: Uneven.  A few stop-motion pieces were salted in but should have been left out, and several of the Nightbreed monsters were somewhat redundant.  The glowing effects on Baphomet and during the transformation from person to monster should have never been included: they looked cheap.  Despite that, some of the ‘Breed were truly disturbing: the woman with half her face flensed to the muscle, the blobby-looking thing with its face by its crotch, some others.
  • Acting: Good.  David Cronenberg was very, very creepy as Decker, but pulled off a weird sort of mildness that worked for the character.  They didn’t do enough with Peloquin, who should have his own movie.  The stand-out was, of course, Hugh Ross as Narcisse.  Stole every scene he was in, and wrung the best out of some clumsy lines, making them his own.
  • Script: Inconsistent.  The humor worked in some places, and didn’t in others.  Decker interrogating the old man at the gas station was bizarre enough to be funny, but some of the laugh-lines delivered in Midian among the ‘Breed just came off as lame.  Shoehorning in jokes doesn’t work, even if they’re funny.  Narcisse was the only worthwhile comic relief in the movie.  Best lines: “I love a coward!” and “Run, while you’ve still got legs!”
  • Sets: Extraordinary.  Barker’s inimitable artistic style was prevalent throughout, and provided an aesthetic that worked perfectly for the subject matter: semi-primitive, visceral, stunning.  From the malformations of the ‘Breed to the cave paintings, it was extremely well done.
  • Pacing: Flat.  The film tried too hard to be epic, and unfortunately failed.  Even with the additonal footage, it wasn’t long enough to weave the film’s various antagonists into a coherent enemy or provide a feeling of grandiosity: first Decker was the bad guy, then Peloquin, then Eigermann, then the rednecks, then the priest.  I understand that the ‘Breed are beleaguered, but these elements didn’t coalesce.  The flashback scene with Babette and Lori was interesting, but clumsy.  The efforts made to portray the passage of time didn’t work: too many abrupt scene changes.  The ending of the Director’s Cut, with the additional footage, rounded it out better and laid the groundwork for an extension of the story which won’t likely ever come to print or celluloid.
  • Additional Footage: Necessary.  The additional footage improved the film overall, though a few scenes weren’t necessary.  The love scene in the underwear didn’t work.  The press conference was interesting.  The armory scene with the guy close to ejaculating in his trousers over shotguns and piano wire garrotes was funny, if a bit excessive.  The end, where Lori begs Boone to make her a ‘Breed and later forces the issue was very good, but we unfortunately didn’t get to see what sort of monster Lori would become as a walking dead Nightbreed.

It’s been stated many times by far more perspicacious media critics than I that Nightbreed is, at its heart, a metaphor for homosexuality.  Boone is forced back into the closet by Decker, his psychiatrist, but ends up running away to be with people who are also gay.  They have to live in a secret place, deep underground (once again, in the closet), or else they’d be killed.  They’re hounded by religious forces, (the priest) redneck gay-bashers, and a physician who wants to end their “curse” by killing them.  We learn that gays have been hounded for centuries by the church.  In the end, they have to hide until they can find a new haven where they can just be themselves.  Perhaps this worked in 1990, but in today’s culture, it’s a bit too overwrought.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Book Review: Graham Masterton’s Ghost Music

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been a huge fan of Graham Masterton since the early 1990’s.  Two of his novels, Night Warriors and Flesh and Blood, occupy prized spots on my dresser, so I can see them every day.  Like most writers who’ve had long, successful careers, some of his books have been great, some good, and some not so good.

Unfortunately, Ghost Music wasn’t so good.  This is why I didn’t enjoy it:

  • Graham’s American Problem: There’s a persistent problem with the novels Masterton sets in the U.S.: they’re self-evidently written by someone unfamiliar with American idiom, customs, and culture.  He’s typically got very snappy, witty dialogue, which is great, but occasionally English expressions like “Who’s X when he’s at home?” pop in when Americans speak to each other, and it takes you out of the story and reminds you who’s writing it.  His attempts to immerse the reader in American culture simply fail most of the time, because when he’s not trying too hard, he’s not trying enough.  I just wish he’d stop it.  American horror fans will buy books set in Poland and the U.K. if he writes them.  This problem was very much evident in Ghost Music.
  • Stupid Protagonist: Another major criticism of the novel is that the protagonist was an absolute idiot from start to finish.  While I understand that authors who work through traditional publishers often don’t get to choose the titles of their novels, it makes for a frustrating reading experience to read about a man who’s obviously seeing ghosts everywhere but has no idea that he’s seeing ghosts.  He’s even screwing one who has the uncanny ability to shatter glass with her screams of delight at climax.  It’s only near the end that he figures out that the people who appear and disappear, are dead one day and alive the next, are actually…wait for it…ghosts.  The protagonist also makes a number of very strange decisions, all of which make no sense but are vital to move the plot forward.  This is sloppy writing.  It shows a lack of respect for the reader.
  • Bad Bad Guys: There was needless brutality in the way certain people met their end: a boy has his eyes glued shut as part of the torture he endures before dying, and a young girl is literally sewed to a mattress that is later sunk into the sea (we’ll ignore how the latter can possibly be done for the purposes of storytelling).  The impetus for this brutality involves a hastily thrown-together denouement with illegal organ harvesting in the Third World and a mafia-like antagonist.

Across the board not one of his best, but I did finish it.  Two stars.

Final note: When he’s on his game, Graham Masterton is extraordinary.  I’ll take him over Stephen King any day. Don’t take this one review as indicative of his entire oeuvre.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

A Trio of Brief Horror Movie Reviews

by Leave a Comment

Yesterday I was struck down with norovirus.  Every terrible symptom that comes with this illness played havoc with my body in ways Tomás de Torquemada would learn from (and be disgusted by).  So, when wracked with agonies, what can you do except watch horror movies on Netflix?

These reviews have spoilers in them.

The first one I watched was Dead Snow.  It’s a testament to how desensitized I’ve become watching horror films that the unbelievable amounts of gore in it did not cause me to run to the bathroom, vomiting down my shirtfront.  I was doing that anyway.  Despite that it was subtitled, a lot of the dialogue worked.  There were some memorable moments: Erlend’s end, the one guy whose name I never learned sewing his spurting neck wound closed, rappelling with intestines, and Martin getting his peepee bitten by a nuthunting zombie after having sawed his own arm off to prevent infection.  If you like gory, foreign, funny zombie films with people named Vegard, Turgåer, and Erlend in them, this is the movie for you.  4 out of 5 stars.

After an attempt at a nap during a particularly bad wave of nausea, I turned on The Taking of Deborah Logan, mostly because it was the first movie recommended in the list and I felt too awful to think about picking something different.  Overall, it wasn’t bad, but it had little to recommend it.  The problem with this film and the one I watched after it was the same: the characters were mostly unlikable from the beginning to the end and I didn’t care what happened to them.  Except for the kid, because, well, it was a kid.  With cancer.  The creepy bit with Deborah Logan sort of opening her face near the end and swallowing the kid’s head was effective.  The old lady T-and-A was unusual.  I’m trying to find things to say about this movie, but can’t, which shows you how unmemorable it was.  It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either.  2 out of 5 stars.

Terrorphoria’s post on the movie You’re Next had intrigued me, so as I lay on the sofa, trying not to writhe in agony from muscle cramps and gut spasms, I put it on.  People who know about movies, especially horror movies, call it “mumblegore” and I don’t give enough of a damn to Google the term to find out what mumblegore is or what other films exist in the mumblegore oeuvre.  I assume it has nothing to do with Harry Potter.  In it, a bunch of people who are absolute putzes get attacked by men in animal masks.  One person has the wherewithal to fight back, and she does, killing all the bad guys because that’s just what women do in violent situations: they use their brawn, innate brutality, and hardcore fighting skills to defeat trained soldiers in hand-to-hand combat.  Yes, I know she spent time on a survivalist compound, whatever that means.  In any event, there were some funny moments to it, and some disturbing ones, but the filmmakers didn’t care enough about the viewers to put forth enough effort to make us care about what was happening.  It was just an exercise in brutality.  3 out of 5 stars.  One of those stars is because Barbara Crampton was in it.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail