Tag: horror

Backrooms – The Most Accessible Horror?

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, recommendations, ruminationsLeave a comment

So, I saw the Backrooms movie on the second day of its release, at about eleven in the morning (which is a weird time to be watching a horror movie). I’m usually a few years behind Internet things that people are into, so it’s pleasant to be there before the Backrooms becomes a mainstream thing.

And it probably will, because… this movie is a hit. A huge hit. As I write this, it has been out five days and has amassed $118 million, which is a pretty good showing for any movie, but is phenomenal for a movie that only cost ten million to make, by a first-time director who isn’t even old enough to drink. It’s so massive a success that McDonald’s just rolled out a Backrooms commercial as the movie premiered, which is kind of a gamble, since nobody knew if this would be successful.

I know that a ten-million-dollar movie isn’t the biggest gamble you can find in Hollywood – that would probably have been something like the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. But it is a gamble in the sense that this is a movie that isn’t based on a TV show, book or video game, but on a series of short videos posted on Youtube full of esoteric details, mystery and cryptic clues… based on a creepypasta. And it isn’t an adaptation so much as an addition to the preexisting webseries. To my knowledge, this doesn’t really have a precedent in the movie industry, so I was genuinely very interested in seeing if this very 21st-century phenomenon would turn out well.

I was especially interested in seeing how it would turn out because Kane Pixels/Parsons, the originator of the Backrooms videos, was directing the movie. Hollywood hasn’t done well with creepypastas and Internet lore before this, as seen by the Slenderman movie. If you haven’t seen it, it was just a standard horror movie with nothing distinctly Slenderman about the title character except his appearance, and was clearly made by people who neither knew nor cared about the preexisting lore.

But back to the Backrooms. Honestly, I wonder if the webseries is part of the reason that the movie is doing as well as it is. Specifically, the fact that it’s so accessible to everyone who has a phone or a computer.

I mean, the bar is so low to getting involved in the Backrooms lore and figuring out whether you will want to see the movie or not. All you have to do is go onto Youtube and type in “Backrooms,” and you’ll immediately find Kane Pixels’ channel. No money is needed, and it isn’t hard to access. All you need to do is watch, and you’ll have a pretty solid idea of whether the movie’s brand of eerie dreamlike horror is something that you’d enjoy watching for a whole feature film.

And likewise, understanding the lore is easy as well. If you try to get into the Backrooms lore and are confused, there are countless videos dissecting Kane Pixels’ videos frame by frame, and exploring all the subtle clues, details, messages and timeline of the Backrooms and A-Sync. Once again, all you have to do is go onto Youtube and check out a Wendigoon video or two – long videos, I should add – and you’ll find that most of the legwork has been done for you. It’s practically the easiest thing to get involved in.

Whatever the reason, it’s fantastic that the Backrooms have become a bona fide hit in movie theaters – not just indie horror, but horror that accurately captures the esoteric nature of the material, and which brings a little of the strangeness and darkness of the Internet into the sanitized, mass-produced realm of Hollywood movies.

Have a nice day, and don’t no-clip through any walls.

Zach Creggar’s Resident Evil: A Rant

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

Out of every franchise in the world, the Resident Evil franchise might have the worst track record when it comes to films. There have been seven films made about this bestselling series, six Milla Jovovich fanfics by Paul W. S. Anderson, and one crappy “adaptation” of the first two games that got every character wrong. Capcom needs to really start having a Nintendo-like grip on their IPs so they can get a decent movie made.

And right now we’re facing down the barrel of an eighth movie, by acclaimed horror filmmaker Zach Creggar. Good, right? Good news?

No.

First, he made it pretty clear from the beginning that he’s not going to bother with actual game lore or canon, that this “adaptation” is HIS story that HE wants to tell. He also apparently said that it wouldn’t have many zombies. Resident Evil, without zombies. Even the one with werewolves and vampires still had zombies.

And then a script, allegedly by Creggar, leaked to the Internet. Now, you might be saying, “But there’s no proof the script is real. It could be some random crap generated by a rando online… or worse, by A.I.” And folks, I would normally entertain that argument gladly, if nothing else for the sake of optimism that this movie might still turn out decent. The Internet is full of fake stuff, and fake scripts and spoilers have come up before.

But here’s the problem: a few weeks later, a trailer was released for the movie… and it contained scenes and images straight out of the script. Very striking scenes and images. So it looks like the script was NOT written in response to the trailer… which means that unfortunately, it seems to be the real article.

I say “unfortunately” because this script is bad. Really bad. This movie makes Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City look like Lord of the Rings. This movie makes the Netflix series look like a legitimate Resident Evil story. This movie makes Alice look like the best protagonist ever written, just by virtue of her not being a bumbling selfish idiot. This is what every single person does NOT want to see in a film adaptation.

And I’m not just talking about “this movie doesn’t have Leon/Chris/Claire/Jill” or “this isn’t a direct adaptation of any of the games.” The concept of it – a delivery man trying to get through an infected Raccoon City and survive – COULD have worked. It wouldn’t have been a proper adaptation, since it would only be adapting minimal material, but it could have been a good MOVIE. But it isn’t.

Before I go forward with the stuff I hated in it, a warning: this will contain spoilers for the script. I am still very lightly entertaining the possibility that this script isn’t real, but I’ve pretty much concluded that it is. So if it is, and it was used for the final movie, it will contain spoilers for Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil.

  1. First, the plot. There really isn’t one. The entire movie is basically this loser Bryan bumbling into Raccoon City and having multiple encounters with infected people and animals. Not the kind in the games where you make actual progression and new things happen because of the people/things you encounter – the characters he encounters don’t really contribute to the story, and the “progression” is entirely him shambling around seeing new monsters.
  2. Bryan is an idiot. It says a lot about what Hollywood thinks of you and me that the relatable “normal” person they write is a bumbling loser with more thumbs than brain cells. We’re also expected to like and relate to this guy… when he is actually the person in all those other zombie movies who HIDES THAT HE IS INFECTED and thus dooms other people out of his own selfishness.
  3. Marvel humor. Marvel humor does not belong in a Resident Evil movie. There are funny moments in some of the games (I’m thinking of Resident Evil: Village’s “boulder-punching asshole” line) but not Marvel humor. This completely undercuts the horror and tension by turning to the audience constantly and saying, “LOL, this is so weird, right? Woo, look, he’s turning into a zombie but someone’s throwing beakers at him! Funny! Laugh at this horrifying moment!”
  4. “Fuck” and “yo” are approximately 50% of the dialogue. Bryan even says “yo” to himself.
  5. There is also a subplot about abortion and babies. This subplot has literally no reason to exist except to give Bryan a thematic reason to massacre infected babies and small children. It doesn’t lead to anything else, the girlfriend character doesn’t appear for the rest of the movie, and the character development Bryan is supposedly given because of the dilemma ends up… well, I’ll explain more later.
  6. There are no zombies here. Not one. What do they have instead? Well, have you seen The Thing? Because the infection essentially turns them into The Thing, only less intelligent and thus less scary – lots of tentacles and infected corpses merging into larger monster masses.
  7. There’s also no T-virus. Instead we’re told this all stems from some weird attempt to accelerate evolution… because evolving apparently means we’re going to become mindless masses of teeth and tentacles that absorb corpses.
  8. Characters other than Bryan barely have a reason to be in the movie. One character named Pauline seems like she might be important (and give us somebody for Bryan to talk to other than himself), but she’s killed off a few scenes later. The movie also introduces a badass action character named Max… and then he just sort of walks out of the movie and we never even find out what happened to him. I almost wonder if Max was some kind of “take-that” to the characters of Leon Kennedy and Chris Redfield, both of whom are very competent, buttkicking action characters who can get through a game intact and alive. It’s almost like Creggar is saying, “Hey, you want Leon or Chris? You want someone who can kill all the monsters and save the day? Well tough! You get the blithering loser delivery man instead!”
  9. The Resident Evil-ness of the movie is surface-level. Even more surface-level than the Netflix series. Essentially, the only things that it has in common with any Resident Evil story is because the setting is called Raccoon City, and the evil corporation responsible is called Umbrella. Change those names, and there’s nothing Resident Evil about it at all.
  10. The ending. To put it simply, the movie ends with Bryan, who is infected, finally turning into a monster and killing the people who had just formulated a cure. The cure is destroyed, and the human race is doomed, because Bryan is a selfish moron who couldn’t tell them, “I’m infected. I’ll wait outside while you make a cure. Please come out and save me when you’re done.”
  11. Because of that ending… the entire movie, which is about delivering the MacGuffin for the cure, is pointless. Nothing that we saw actually led to anything, and nothing the character of Bryan went through resulted in any kind of character development. It essentially ends with Zach Creggar saying, “I just wasted a few hours of your life. Thanks for the money, suckers.”

I can only assume that Zach Creggar wanted to make a not-zombie movie himself, but probably couldn’t get the funding for it (especially before Weapons came out). So the studio just slapped a few Resident Evil names on Creggar’s script and figured that a recognizable IP will make it profitable.

I don’t know why it is so, so hard to get a decent Resident Evil movie. Each game has a plot and well-developed characters already plotted out for you, so all you need to do is strip out the backtracking, streamline the story a little into a three-act structure, and cast people who kinda look like the characters. That’s it. It’s not difficult. But it’s apparently something that no movie studio can manage today, because even the Resident Evil movie that was closest to the games did it all wrong by cramming two games into one film and getting the characters and casting dramatically wrong. “Soft boi uwu Wesker” is a particular thorn in my side.

On a related note, I recently watched the Japanese movie Exit 8 which is based on a hit indie game that has no plot and no characters. You just walk through the same hallway repeatedly, looking out for “anomalies” and trying to get eight levels right in a row, so you can win and escape the liminal space. Simple, but not easy.

This movie even has the main character facing the same dilemma as Bryan – his recent ex-girlfriend has just told him that she’s pregnant, and neither one of them knows what to do. But rather than just using that as filler that never goes anywhere or leads to anything, it becomes the backbone of the story – the Lost Man’s wanderings become an opportunity for the liminal maze to teach him that he can be a good dad, and to help him grow in courage and self-assurance. His escape becomes wrapped up in his ability to put his good qualities into actions, and his willingness to care for and prioritize a little boy who’s also in the maze.

But it’s obvious that Exit 8 started with the game and cultivated a story to grow around it, while Zach Creggar just had a bunch of gross monster moments he wanted to string together into a movie and then slapped a Resident Evil sticker on it.

So the lesson learned is: Don’t watch Zach Creggar’s movie. Watch Exit 8. Really good movie with simple concept, good characters, good effects, and it makes you feel like something was actually accomplished.

The Crow 2024: Where Are The Good People?

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

So, I just watched The Crow. Not the original Brandon Lee movie, a searingly raw, beautiful tragedy of love, revenge and sorrow that sadly led to the death of its lead actor. I watched the 2024 remake… if you can call it a remake when it has very little connective tissue to the previous movie or its graphic novel origin.

And it is bad.

Now, there are many, many reasons that it’s bad. I could go on for hours about the sucky aspects of it. The acting (FKA Twigs is excruciatingly bad). The writing… so much cringe Tumblr dialogue. The entire romance takes place over the course of a week or so, so it has no feeling of real weight, as opposed to the impending wedding of the original Eric and Shelly. And of course, the change from a purely mortal psychopath and his minions to a… soul-peddling Satanic billionaire in a suit.

But I think the change/development that bothers me the most is that there are no good people in the story.

See, in the original movie, a large part of the tragedy of Eric and Shelly’s deaths was that they were, in fact, good people. Not stereotypical ones – they were both pretty alternative, and they were a little edgy – but good people who tried to help others and protect innocents. Their deaths hurt us because they were senseless horrors that happened to people who didn’t deserve it, people whose hearts were pure. And even though we only see little snippets of their lives in flashback, we believe that their love was real because they were good people.

And they were not the only people. There’s also the little girl they helped care for, with the drug-addicted mother. And there is Ernie Hudson’s cop character, who helps Eric take down the bad guys and process his grief and loss and pain. This is a world that is cruel and sad and brutal, but it has little glimmers of light and love that make it all worth it.

The remake… does not have those things. There is not a single character in it who is a good person. Nobody to admire. Nobody to like. Nobody who isn’t at the very least a selfish a-hole.

This is especially egregious when it comes to Eric and Shelly, because… as I said, the tragedy of their deaths was that they died senselessly, and that it was a bad thing that happened to good people who didn’t deserve it. That was the entire impetus behind the story of the Crow. The story was inspired by the senseless death of the author’s fiancee, and his struggle to deal with the eternal fact that bad things happen to good people, and a lot of the time, it isn’t for any greater reason or consequence.

2024 Eric and Shelly? Well, their deaths are a direct consequence of Shelly being an edgy rebel and hanging out with the aforementioned billionaire, and even doing bad stuff on his behalf. She’s no longer an innocent party, and their deaths somehow feel less tragic because of it.

And even if she hadn’t, both Eric and Shelly have lost the innocent passion that you felt in the original. In this iteration, they’re a pair of self-indulgent drug addicts who make the entire movie feel strangely sleazy and shallow. Their “love” is not a deep passionate romance that is about to culminate in marriage – it’s a post-rehab weekend fling between two junkies who are calling whatever they feel “true love.” And the movie expects us to agree with them, even though there’s nothing to indicate anything deeper than lust or bonding over pills.

I think part of the problem is that the people making the movie do not know the difference between a protagonist and a good person. A lot of bad writers have this problem. We’re expected to like, admire and relate to the main character because they ARE the main character, not because they’re a person who deserves those things. Sadly, this works with some people, as evidenced by the many people who think of Rick Deckard as a good guy instead of, you know, an assassin.

(Note: I am not saying Blade Runner is an example of bad writing. It’s not. I am simply pointing out that many people do not think critically about the protagonists of the media they consume and assume that the main character is a good person who’s in the right, and Rick Deckard is a good example)

Another part of it is… I think the people making this either don’t believe that good people exist, or they literally do not know what a good person is. The former seems supported by the fact that there is nobody in this movie that is actually good; there’s no little girl or Ernie Hudson cop to serve as a counterpoint to the corruption. Even Shelly’s mom is in league with the villains and doesn’t care about her daughter. The latter is supported by the fact that they apparently think that we’re going to be inspired by the “love” of two oppressively cringe, immature addicts who say stuff like, “If I’m ever hard to love, try to love me harder” and actively contribute to their own deaths.

Anyway, I may rant and rave more about the many, many, many ways this movie sucks and how inferior it is to the original, but that is one of my major pet peeves.

Elio Vs. KPop Demon Hunters – What’s In A Name?

On By E. A. SolinasIn ruminationsLeave a comment

So right now, two animated original stories have recently been released. One is Elio, a Pixar movie about a kid who gets abducted by aliens and… well, the plot doesn’t seem to have much more than that. The other is K-Pop Demon Hunters, which… is about K-pop stars who are also secretly demon hunters.

Now, I cannot speak to the quality of these two movies, since I haven’t seen either in full, except to say that the reception I’ve seen to Elio has been very mixed. Some people think it’s great, some people think it sucks. K-Pop Demon Hunters seems to have gotten overall a much more positive reaction despite a very silly premise, and as far as I can tell, that’s due to two things. One, it’s a well-written movie, from the clips I’ve seen. Two, it’s a genuine movie made out of someone’s culture and passions, not a soulless corporate product.

But I think one big contributor to the downfall of Elio and the rise of K-Pop Demon Hunters is the titles.

KPDH has a title that tells you, upfront and openly, what it’s about. It’s a movie about K-pop and demon-hunting. The premise is silly, like I said, but it doesn’t care how silly it sounds. You will probably know right out of the gate if this is a movie you are interested in. Furthermore, the title is eye-catching. It’s bold, it’s brash, it’s unapologetically different from every other title out there – and that makes it both memorable and attractive. It makes you want to know more.

On the other hand… what does “Elio” tell you?

Honestly, to me it sounds like the name of an indie dramedy about an older man (I keep imagining Tom Hanks) whose wife died and he’s been depressed ever since, but then he adopts a stray dog and it teaches him how to live again or something sappy like that. That dramedy would ultimately be trying to get an Oscar, but everybody would have forgotten about it by the time Oscar season rolls around.

That is what the title Elio says to me. It doesn’t say “wacky children’s space adventures with slug aliens.” It doesn’t say ANYTHING about the movie it’s attached to, or what to expect, or WHY you should see the movie. It’s just… a name. The movie could just as easily be called “Wally” or “Sean” or “Jake” or “Mike.” It tells you nothing except that it has a character named “Elio” in it, and that’s… not enough to really attract attention and interest.

And yes, I know that there are some very successful movies that are just the characters’ names – John Wick comes to mind. But there are also ones that definitely weren’t done any favors by their titles, like Salt.

I’m not saying that Pixar has to go full out K-pop Demon Hunters in their titles. But they really need to stop with the really bland, nondescript titles that are either names (like this and Luca), or they show a minimum of effort (like Soul). Their movies have been struggling for the past few years, for varying reasons, but the titles certainly don’t help.

Oh, and ditch the current art style too. The bean-mouth thing is tired.

Review: Exhuma

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

Imagine if your ancestors had the power to curse you for… well, general discomfort after death.

That premise forms the bedrock for the South Korean horror movie “Exhuma,” in which a quartet of shamans, geomancers and morticians join forces to deal with vengeful ghosts. This is a movie that could never be remade in another country – not just because it relies on tension and dread rather than jump scares, but because the historical and cultural backdrop are so uniquely Korean.

Shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her tatted apprentice Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) are summoned to Los Angeles to investigate a newborn baby who has been cursed by one of his ancestors. Hwa-rim makes arrangements with the family patriarch to exhume and cremate the child’s great-grandfather back in South Korea, with the help of her friends: feng-shui geomancer Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and experienced mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin).

But the job turns out to be more complicated than expected. The grave is on a mountaintop near the North Korean border, surrounded by malign omens: foxes, an unmarked stone, rumors of graverobbing, and a snake with a human head. The only way the corpse can be exhumed is with a complex ritual that draws out and dissipates the malignant energies (involving knives, a drum and several dead pigs), so they can dig up and then cremate the unopened coffin. Sounds simple, right?

Not so simple, because some brain donor opens it, unleashing a vengeful spirit that decides he wants to kill his entire family – and our heroes have limited time to save the remaining kin from meeting gruesome ends. But it turns out that ironing out this family debacle is only the beginning of the horrors to come, as another coffin is found buried beneath the first – and dealing with this angry ghost will not be so easy.

“Exhuma” is the kind of movie that horror needs. No jump scares, even when something shocking and unexpected happens. This is a movie that slowly builds up a sense of pervasive, eerie dread, filling every shadowy corner until it suddenly flows with splattered blood and soaring fire. It’s also a uniquely Korean movie – without revealing some of the plot twists, the story relies heavily on both Korean history and Korean folklore, so it couldn’t really be told anywhere else.

Director/writer Jang Jae-hyun slowly layers mysteries and atmosphere (so many foxes!) on top of each other, then slowly peels away those layers like an onion. Some of the scenes in the second and third acts of the movie are deeply disturbing, especially when Bong-gil speaks for the angry ghosts. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that it feels a little weird that we go through the entire cycle of dealing with the cursed family… and then, suddenly, that plot Trojan-horses an entirely unrelated evil ghost for the third act. It’s kind of odd. Not bad, exactly, but disorienting.

The actors are all uniformly quite good: Kim Go-eun is cool and collected as an intelligent, businesslike shaman, which makes it all the more unnerving when the character is stricken with bone-chilling fear in the third act. Lee Do-hyun plays a secondary role to her throughout most of the movie, but gets to show his acting chops when Bong-gil gets possessed a few times. And Choi Min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin have delightful chemistry as a couple of old buddies who specialize in exhuming and reburying troublesome dead people, swinging between easy camaraderie to harrowing battles against the supernatural.

“Exhuma” has a slightly odd plot structure, but that doesn’t keep it from being a harrowing, suspenseful movie that slowly builds its way up to the blood’n’fire. Definitely worth watching for those who appreciate atmosphere in their horror.

Review: Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023)

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

Even if you’re not a gamer, you’ve probably heard of “Five Nights At Freddy’s.” Scott Cawthon’s hit video game franchise is about employees (and occasionally children) being pursued by anthropomorphic ghost-robot animals. Also, serial killers.

And it’s not surprising that the “Five Nights At Freddy’s” movie shines the brightest when it dives into mascot horror and the lore of the franchise. It’s substantially weaker when it focuses on the human characters’s familial conflicts and internal turmoil, which means that it rebounds solidly in the final act when the various loosely-wound plot threads are finally tied together. Still, did we need custody drama?

Michael (Josh Hutcherson) is a young mall security guard obsessed with the abduction of his little brother when he was a child. But then he loses his job, and faces the possibility of losing custody of his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) to his vicious aunt. So he takes the only new career path available: a night security guard at the arcade/pizza restaurant known as Freddy Fazbear’s, where he’s mostly there to guard the animatronics. He also encounters Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a friendly cop who seems to be very well-informed about the place.

But he soon realizes that the animatronics are actually “alive,” possessed by the spirits of children murdered many years ago – and they seem to have a special bond with Abby. Unbeknownst to him, they also kill people who break in. As he tries to enlist their help to find out who abducted and murdered his little brother, Michael soon discovers that the animatronics are far more dangerous than he ever expected – and they aren’t alone.

“Five Nights At Freddy’s” is easily at its best when it sticks to being “Five Nights At Freddy’s.” The most gripping and engaging parts of the story are when the animatronics are prowling around chewing people’s faces off or biting them in half. It’s not too bloody or graphic, considering this is a Blumhouse movie (it’s actually rather tame for a horror movie) but it does capture some sense of dread and creepiness, especially in the unnaturalness of the animatronics’ movements.

Unfortunately, you also have to wade through a lot of Michael’s personal problems to reach the “Five Nights”-ness, and… they’re not terribly interesting. Obviously some kind of personal stuff is required for the security guard, but the movie needed fewer custody fights and more spooky nighttime conflicts with the killer animatronics. We also didn’t need a scene where the animatronics build a giant blanket fort with Abby, which was just… awkward.

Fortunately, things improve drastically when the third act rolls around, when the animatronics go back to being homicidal, and the backstory behind their deaths is finally explored. There’s a real sense of dread at the thought of dead children brainwashed into amnesiac killers who don’t even remember what they are, so that you both pity them and want to run away from them at top speed. As for the mastermind of the whole scenario, his arrival gives the story an extra jolt of fizzing energy, and I honestly couldn’t get enough of his villainy.

While Hutcherson’s character spends too much time on non-“Freddy” stuff, he gives a very good performance as a young man who has been fundamentally damaged by loss and guilt. Mary Stuart Masterson and Elizabeth Lail also give solid if uncomplicated performances, and Piper Rubio’s performance is pretty good, even though her character seems like she was written to be several years younger than the actress. Matthew Lillard has little screen time, but he absolutely dominates the screen and has just the right amount of scenery chewing. Chef’s kiss.

“Five Nights At Freddy’s” is weaker when it tries to incorporate more original elements, but is at its best when it sticks to what “Five Nights At Freddy’s” is all about. For those who enjoy tales of killer animatronics and serial killers, it’s a mixed bag but one still worth seeing.

Review: The Kingdom of Sweets by Erika Johansen

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

“The Kingdom of Sweets” is a lot like its protagonist: difficult to love.

In fact, the standalone novel based very loosely on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story/Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet is genuinely hard to read for the first two-thirds of its length. This dark fantasy tinged with horror is expertly put together and cleverly weaves together fantasy with Russian history, but is also graced with characters who are uniformly unlikable.

As newborns, Clara and Natasha were blessed/cursed by the sorcerer Drosselmeyer – Clara was declared “light” and Natasha “dark.” And they grew up accordingly: Clara was beautiful and beloved by everyone, while Natasha was unattractive and ignored, taking her solace in a world of books. Then, at the Christmas party that marks their seventeenth birthday, it’s announced that newly-pregnant Clara is marrying the wealthy boy that Natasha is infatuated with – and both girls are given strange living toys by Drosselmeyer.

Soon Clara is whisked away into a magical Kingdom of Sweets, and Natasha follows her doggedly. But she soon senses that there is something profoundly wrong about this strange sugar-coated dimension, which is ruled over by the Sugarplum Fairy.

And as a bitter, jealous Natasha discovers the depths of her sister’s betrayal, she is offered a Faustian bargain by the Fairy – if she helps the Fairy destroy Drosselmeyer, the Fairy will let her kill Clara and take her appearance and her life. But the life that Clara seizes for herself isn’t as sweet as she hoped it would be – and as the years go by, she discovers that she can’t escape the sins of her own actions. Her only hope is to uncover the ancient magic that Drosselmeyer coveted, which may be her only escape.

Let’s be upfront about this: for the first two-thirds of “Tbe Kingdom of Sweets,” there are absolutely no likable characters. At all. Everybody without exception is a terrible person of one stripe or another, whether they’re a cold unfeeling parent, a murderous sorcerer, sadistic socialites or a shallow selfish sister. This includes Natasha herself, who is a bitter, hate-consumed person who has a heavy dose of Not Like Other Girls Syndrome, and deludes herself into thinking she is smarter and more insightful than everybody else. She would fit in well on social media.

As a result, I had to struggle to get through the first two-thirds of the book, despite Erika Johansen’s skillful writing and some well-written interlacing of Hoffman’s tale with actual Russian history from the turn of the 20th century. It just wasn’t enjoyable to be in Natasha’s head because I was so repulsed by the character, especially since the narrative doesn’t really hint at future growth, and I couldn’t really bring myself to care much about whatever ironic punishment she suffered as a result of her own actions.

However, things started to turn around when Clara reenters the story; the story becomes more streamlined and organic, and Natasha is forced to face the evil that has been brewing inside her for so long. It makes that last third of the book more poignant, more gripping, and more suspenseful as Natasha has to find a way to, if not undo what she’s done, then at least try to make amends while defeating the Fairy. It becomes more a story about redemption and forgiveness, which softens Natasha’s harsh, prickly worldview and how she looks at others, such as the priest.

But to get to that solid final third, you have to slog through the first two-thirds, which are simply not enjoyable to read. If you don’t mind that, then “The Kingdom of Sweets” is a solid dark’n’twisted version of the Nutcracker story.

Review: The Forest Grimm by Kathryn Purdie

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

Disclaimer: I received an advance copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Outside the town of Grimm’s Hollow is the Forest Grimm – a magical place twisted by a malevolent curse that draws bespelled people into its depths and is slowly killing the surrounding farmland.

And as you could probably guess by the name of the forest, “The Forest Grimm” by Kathryn Purdie wraps itself in a cloak of glittering fairy tales. But these aren’t the sanitized, Disneyfied stories you might know, where all you need to fix things is true love’s kiss. Instead, her elegant, winding fantasy tale delves into the dark, distorted versions of these familiar tales, with a seemingly doomed heroine as perhaps the only chance of breaking the curse.

For her entire life, the cards telling Clara’s fortune have said only one thing – she will die young, as a result of a “fanged creature.” Despite this dismal future, she is determined to enter the hostile Forest Grimm and find her beloved mother, who was the very first person to be lost there – and if she can’t find her mother directly, then she wants to find a missing magical book, the Sortes Fortunae, to end the curse once and for all.

Then she discovers something shocking: the forest will allow a person to enter it if they have red rampion. And before she vanished, Clara’s mother made her a hooded cloak dyed with rampion flowers – which she takes as a sign that she’s destined to enter the Forest Grimm and change the fate of everyone in the forest and the town. She’s accompanied in her quest by Axel, a strikingly handsome young man whose fiancee Ella vanished into the forest, and her best friend Henni, who also happens to be Ella’s sister.

Unfortunately, the Forest Grimm has bigger dangers than vicious trees and a constantly-shifting landscape. It doesn’t just take the people of Grimm’s Hollow – it changes and twists them, and its dark, malevolent magic is channeled through them. Also, a giant wolf is following Clara, and she’s pretty sure it’s the fanged creature destined to kill her. But fate may have something else in mind, if Clara can stay alive long enough.

“The Forest Grimm” is one of those fantasy stories that trips lightly on the edge of horror, especially the gruesome whimsy found in old-timey fairy tales. The fairy tale figures here are not sweet-natured princesses in pretty dresses – they are cruel, maddened and extremely dangerous, whether they are using a vast web of prehensile hair, tree roots or some well-timed magic mushrooms. And yes, it’s THAT kind of magic mushrooms.

And Kathryn Purdie weaves the entire tale together with elegance and skill. Her writing has a timeless quality reminiscent of the fairy tales she twines into her original tale, except for a few more modern-sounding descriptions of how attractive Axel is. And alongside her dark fairy-tale trappings, she also dips into some fairly heavy thematic material about whether a person can change their fate, and whether your fate is necessarily what you think it is.

It helps that Clara is one of the most likable and engaging heroines I’ve read about in years – she’s earnest and unselfish, resourceful and determined. Believing that she has no future, she tries to ensure a future for other people, even if it hurts her in the process. Axel is a thoroughly wholesome male lead alongside her, and their budding relationship is a tentative, sweet one… if they can get past issues with obligation, guilt and loneliness.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about “The Forest Grimm” is finishing it, and realizing that the story is not actually over – meaning that I now have to wait for Kathryn Purdie to publish the sequel before I can find out what’s next for Clara, Axel and Henni. In the meantime, it’s a richly-imagined, shadows-and-tatters homage to Grimm’s fairy tales.

Fifty Authors I Will Not Read

On By E. A. SolinasIn ruminationsLeave a comment

I think most people have authors they won’t read, even if other people love their books. I have quite a few. Some are authors I tried in the past and have no desire to revisit, and some are authors I refuse to read on principle.

So for instance…

  1. Philip Pullman
  2. Mercedes Lackey
  3. John Norman
  4. James Joyce
  5. E.L. James
  6. Dan Brown
  7. Victor Hugo
  8. William Faulkner
  9. Ayn Rand
  10. Bernard Cornwell
  11. Richard Dawkins
  12. Tim LaHaye/Jerry Jenkins
  13. Jean M. Auel
  14. Margaret Mitchell
  15. Nicholas Sparks
  16. Marion Zimmer Bradley
  17. Candace Bushnell
  18. Friedrich Nietzsche
  19. Blanka Lipinska
  20. Peter David
  21. Clive Barker
  22. Diana Gabaldon
  23. Anne McCaffrey
  24. Junji Ito
  25. Alice Oseman
  26. Warren Ellis
  27. Barbara Kingsolver
  28. R.F. Kuang
  29. Ernest Cline
  30. Chuck Palahniuk
  31. John Steinbeck
  32. Ernest Hemingway
  33. Anne Bishop
  34. Dan Simmons
  35. Isabel Allende
  36. Scarlett St. Clair
  37. Herman Melville
  38. Michael Moorcock
  39. J. D. Robb
  40. Chuck Wendig
  41. Joe Haldeman
  42. Glen Cook
  43. Franz Kafka
  44. Brian Herbert
  45. Jodi Picoult
  46. R. A. Salvatore
  47. Kevin J. Anderson
  48. James Patterson
  49. John Updike
  50. John Ringo

I think I’ve got a pretty diverse listing of books I refuse to read – science fiction, fantasy, classic fiction, modern fiction, mystery, romance, comics, etc. The one thing they have in common is that I have zero desire to read them, even ironically or to explore/review how bad they are (which is why L. Ron Hubbard is conspicuously absent from the list, even though he wrote the worst book I have ever seen in my life – and I have seen some crappy books).

There are also pretty diverse reasons why I refuse to read these books. A lot of these authors bore or annoy me, for instance. Kevin J. Anderson, for instance, is like eating a diet of only white bread to me – it’s boring, it’s unmemorable, and I immediately start craving something with flavor and meatiness. Another is Herman Melville, whose magnum opus is about six thousand pages of whaling minutiae. Or James Joyce, because… James Joyce. Or R. A. Salvatore, who has been writing basically the same pap for decades.

Another large category is authors who are bigots. Typically, bigots against me and people like me. I don’t try to force anyone to boycott artists who disagree with them, like many do. But I reserve the right to criticize, to call out and to make it clear that these people are bigots. For instance, Philip Pullman, who wrote an entire fantasy trilogy about how much he hates Christianity. He’s not getting my money, because he’s a bigot filled with hate, and anyone who claims to be against hate better also be against him.

There’s a lot of bigots on that list. Some very big names. Nobody is too famous to call out.

A much smaller category would be ones that I have political or religious disagreement with. I am willing to listen to people of various political or religious persuasions, although I am obviously not going to entertain and agree with all viewpoints. Only idiots do that. But someone like Ayn Rand simply doesn’t make any sense in the real world, and promotes a hideous way of thinking mixed with childish self-worship, which we already have too much of in the world. And guys like John Ringo and John Norman are just… blech. Their attitudes towards women are hideous.

I also don’t think that authors should necessarily be expected to be any better than any other person; having skeletons in their closet, addictions or bad stuff in their past is not a reason to avoid someone’s work. However, I am not going to read books by Marion Zimmer Bradley – not just because she was a pedophile, but because her work is so suffused in her spiritual corruption that it is literally painful for me to read, and it was painful long before I learned what she was.

This is kind of tied into the bigot and political/religious thing, but some of these authors are simply awful people, and it’s unpleasant to put your mind in their playground.

The smallest listing of all – only two people, actually – is people I don’t want to read because they do their job too well. That is the only reason Junji Ito is on it, so… if you’re a fan of his, you can unclench. Being listed on here is actually a compliment.

I’ll probably come up with more authors I refuse to read in the future, but for now, fifty is plenty.

Review: Jujutsu Kaisen Volume 1: Ryomen Sukuna

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

There are a lot of ways that shonen manga heroes get their powers or abilities… but I don’t think anyone before Yuji Itadori gained them by swallowing a decayed finger.

But it definitely allows “Jujutsu Kaisen Volume 1: Ryomen Sukuna” to stand apart from the pack. Gege Akutami’s breakout fantasy/horror manga series doesn’t stray too far from shonen tropes here, but it does distinguish itself with some nimble humor, a likable protagonist, an intriguing villain, and a promising supernatural world of curses to explore.

Supernatural occurrences in our world are caused by curses (which look like weird, very imaginative monsters) manifested by cursed energy. The most powerful of these was the malevolent Ryomen Sukuna, whose twenty fingers are capable of causing all kinds of chaos. The only ones who can destroy these curses are jujutsu sorcerers, who use their own cursed energy to exorcise harmful curses.

Which brings us to Yuji Itadori. When his friends accidentally unwrap one of Sukuna’s fingers, they’re attacked by powerful curses that first-year jujutsu sorcerer Megumi is unable to deal with. To save his friends, Yuji swallows the finger. Not his brightest moment. But surprisingly, he turns out to be one of the rare people who can control Sukuna, rather than being killed or possessed.

So the eccentric Gojo manages to get a deal for Yuji: the jujutsu sorcerers will allow him to live until he consumes all twenty fingers, which will allow them to kill Sukuna once and for all. Yuji transfers to the Tokyo Prefectural Jujutsu High School, where he’s in the same class as Megumi and the pushy Nobara. But none of them are prepared for just how nasty things are about to get.

“Jujutsu Kaisen Volume 1” has various familiar tropes of an urban-fantasy shonen series – you have the secret magical organization that fights evil stuff, various monsters needing to be slain, an eccentric but powerful teacher, a tough but big-hearted teenage hero and his complementary friends, and so on. None of this is bad, mind – it’s more important for a story to be good than to be wholly original, and Gege Akutami’s opening chapters are pretty solid work.

Of course, the introductory chapters are a little rough, but still very effective, and Akutami has a knack for tugging the heartstrings, comedy (the punching stuffed animals) and bloody fight scenes. He has a real talent for generating creatures that are grotesque and unnerving, such as the grinning fish-man or the stretched-face creature asking about receipts. Whenever a curse appears, even a weak one, there’s a sense of grinding dread that can only be dispelled by its exorcism.

The art is similar to the writing – it’s a little rough, but effective. Akutami’s style is lanky and angular, with lots of detail and greater realism given to his fight scenes and monsters. The guy has talent, and it should be rewarding to see how his art evolves over the course of the series.

Yuji Itadori is a pretty classic shonen hero – he’s a teenage boy who isn’t the brightest, but is ridiculously strong and has a will of iron. He’s also given a personal goal (to make sure people have good deaths), but isn’t unchallenged in his goals: one of his fights has him freaking out and lamenting that he doesn’t want to die, which is painfully relatable. The rest of the main cast is also pretty solid – Megumi is reserved and uptight, but has a more compassionate side; Nobara is brash and capable; Gojo is the weird and cheerful mentor figure.

For those who have enjoyed series like “Bleach” or “Kekkaishi,” “Jujutsu Kaisen Volume 1: Ryomen Sukuna” is a solid beginning to the hit series, leaving you hungry for the next volume.