horror – Page 6

Movie Review: Oculus

January 12, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Oculus was a genuinely scary film that had a heart, characterized by a good script and characters you could relate to. While there were certain familiar elements that sanded off some of the edges that would have made it a great film, it still delivered on its promise. Spoiler-free review follows (I only spoil the mediocre films):

Tim: While the actor playing young Tim had only one expression (a kind of constipated fear, as though he always had to take a shit but was afraid to for some reason), the older Tim pulled off his role well. Despite his recent release from a mental facility, he was the reasonable character and had plausible (if wrong, of course) explanations for the bizarre events. He had the best lines in the film.
Kaylie: An extraordinary performance from both the child actor and the older actor. Obviously unbalanced, obviously holding it together with spit and chewing gum, she made the movie. The young version inspired pathos and the adult version inspired empathy. Her OCD style of insanity was believable and reasonable, considering the circumstances. You didn’t like her, but you understood her. A fine line.
My Eyes Deceive Me: The filmmakers did an excellent job of messing with the viewer’s perceptions, especially near the end of the movie. There was no way to determine what was real from what wasn’t, despite Kaylie’s best efforts. The disorientation was unsettling and one of the mirror’s best weapons.
Yuck: Oculus earned its R-rating through creative, visceral use of gore. There were parts I wanted to look away from. Even when I expected what would happen, I was still grossed out. Two scenes in particular involving eating were particularly hard.
Bros (and Sises) Before ‘Rents: the relationship between brother and sister, especially during the flashback scenes, was very poignant. As awful as it is, at times a sibling relationship is stronger than a parental one, especially when one or both parents is abusive. Kaylie and Tim’s bond in the face of their parents’ destruction provided the necessary heart of the film.

Across the board, Oculus was a very good ghost story, and I’m glad I saw it. 4 out of 5 stars.

So What Just Happened?

December 31, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Overall, 2014 has been quite an extraordinary year. Here are a few highlights:

My Baby: On March 5, 2014, I published my first novel, The Blessed Man and the Witch. So far, the few reactions to it have been very positive to fairly positive. It’s the first book in a trilogy, and I began working on the sequel right after I got feedback from my beta readers. It’s $2.99 to buy, or you can read it free from Amazon Unlimited. If you like the pieces I’ve written here, you’ll love the novel.
What You Are Reading Now: On March 13, 2014, I started this blog.
I Went High-Concept: In June of 2014, I changed the focus of this blog from writing, which nobody other than certain writers want to read about, to other things of interest, including book reviews, movie reviews, personal defense issues, horror in general, and social commentary.
Twittin’ It Up: In August of 2014, I joined Twitter. At times, I wish I hadn’t. Other times, it’s been an interesting experience.
Paying off My Overdue Books: In September 2014, in partnership with the Dunedin Public Library, I began writing a Halloween-themed novella that involved zombies, Lovecraftian horrors, and antediluvian terrors, using local teen volunteers as supporting characters.
An Unpronounceable Name: On October 19, 2014, the novella Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City was published. It’s available for $.99 from Amazon.
Second Place Is Still Losing: In mid-December 2014, my short story Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale was published as the first runner-up in their non-traditional holiday story competition. Losing sucks, but it’s still a great story.

Here on the blog, I’ve written some short stories. Here are the links to a few of them; browse through the blog to find more:

A Pennsylvania Haunting: A ghost story in three parts. In Part One, we are introduced to the ghost. Part Two details the ghost’s malicious mischief, and in Part Three, the ghost story is wrapped up. Disturbing and graphic at times, especially at the end.
Howard Tinkertoy: A man looks through his little boy’s kiddie tablet and his life takes a very sharp turn for the bizarre.
In Angels in the IHOP, we sit in on a conversation between celestial beings.

What’s coming next year? Another short story of mine has been accepted by Liberty Island, to be published in the first quarter of 2015. I should be done the sequel to The Blessed Man and the Witch by then; I’ll reveal the title when I’m finished the first draft. A tangential story to Howard Tinkertoy is also on the way. I may write another Dreadedin Chronicles novella, depending on time constraints. More movie reviews, more book reviews, more content.

Thank you for reading!

Movie Review: The Damned

December 29, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

The Damned is a mildly entertaining movie that started with an interesting idea and fell promptly into familiar horror film tropes until at the end you didn’t care a lot about what happened to anyone. I’m going to spoil the film, so if you’re really burning to see it and be surprised by its charms, read no further. I’M WARNING YOU.

Family Matters: The screenwriter overcomplicated the family relationships between the characters in a failed attempt to add depth to the story. Rather than give us something we can hold onto and appreciate, like a father, mother, and child, we have a widower, his fiancee, his adult teenage daughter, his former sister-in-law (the dead wife’s sister), and the former sister-in-law’s colleague who happens to be the adult teenage daughter’s wannabe boyfriend. There was some strained byplay between these characters, but it never went anywhere. If you’re going to have tension between characters, you have to give us a side to root for, and this film didn’t. The characters just weren’t terribly likable.
The Evil That Men Do: The possessing force (the soul of a bruja/witch) can see into your spirit and know what sorts of evils you’ve committed. From there, she guilts you into feeling worse about them so she can kill you (or force you to kill her so she can possess you. The rule here is that the witch can only possess the person who’s killed the body she’s in, almost-but-not-quite like like Azazel in Fallen). It turns out that the people who wind up freeing her just happen to include someone who pulled the plug on his dying wife early (Peter Facinelli) and a guy who uses teenage girls as drug mules, at least one of whom died during the process (Sebastian Martinez). It seemed too pat, too overt. I’ve known several pieces of human trash who haven’t killed anyone: they’re just bad people. I’m sure most of us know some (or are some). If you want subtlety and complexity, start with human stories we can relate to, not wife murderers and drug dealers.
Character Issues: Peter Facinelli was too young-looking for the role. He did a good job with the material, but he wasn’t convincing as the father of a 19-year-old girl. The old man was okay, but not menacing enough in the beginning and not tragic enough in his death. The cop was very good throughout, and his later appearance boosted the film significantly. I hated to see him go. The female characters weren’t given enough to do, including the little girl, to make them more than disposable cut-outs.
Control Yourself: We learn that the possessing force is a witch, but her only power seems to be to possess people. She can’t control the weather or do anything else we typically associate with witches (it might have been interesting for her to have implied that she’d somehow created the downpour that sent the hapless characters to her hotel prison). Fair enough, but the problem was that she just couldn’t keep it together long enough to get to civilization. She self-sabotaged by having the little girl she’d possessed start acting creepy and dangerous straight off the bat. If her intent was to get out into the wide world, shouldn’t she have just kept up the little kid act until they took her to the city? Then she could have found a new person to possess so she could return to get her revenge on the families that were responsible for her imprisonment.
Location, Location, Location: There was no reason for this to have been set in Colombia. They used very little in the way of Colombian culture or language, which was a shame. With Colombia’s rich myth cycle and folklore to draw from, this could have been a unique story. It was a missed opportunity.

Overall, I rate this movie 3 out of 5 stars. I recommend it, but not strongly.

Movie Review: Mercy

December 15, 2014 by David Dubrow 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.

Horror’s Shifting Moral Center

December 10, 2014 by David Dubrow 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?

Book Review: Graham Masterton’s Ghost Music

December 1, 2014 by David Dubrow 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.