Tag: horror

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.

Review: Twixt

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Once upon a time, Francis Ford Coppola made movies like “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” He also made “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” but that doesn’t eclipse his accomplishments.

But Francis Ford Coppola clearly has entered the “I’m going to do whatever I want, even if it makes no sense” phase in his career. Exhibit A: “Twixt,” a baffling little movie that twines together ghosts, vampire bikers, child murder, Edgar Allen Poe and a big messy knot of subplots that may or may not be real.

I once tried to summarize “Twixt” to an acquaintance, and ended up babbling incoherently about Poe, vampires, ghosts and dead children. But I’ll try to tackle it anyway: Second-string horror author Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) is touring for his latest novel, and ends up in a small town that doesn’t even have a bookstore. That evening, he encounters a strange, ghostly young girl who calls herself “V” (Elle Fanning).

He soon finds that strange things are afoot in this town — time seems to be frozen (none of the clock faces move), there is a gang of bikers who may be vampires camped out on the lakeshore, and the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe visits him in his dreams to reveal half-forgotten secrets. And what does all this have to do with the recently-murdered girl lying in the police station?

It’s really hard to even pass judgement on “Twixt” — it would involve understanding what the director was trying to do… or thinking… or understanding ANYTHING. It feels like Coppola had four or five different ideas for stories (“Vampire bikers! A vampire/ghost orphan! Dream messages from Poe! A failing author with personal issues!”), and so he squashes all of them into one movie.

The result feels like a mad hybrid of Stephen King and David Lynch. The small-town setting, the supernatural threats and the eccentric characters feel somewhat like something King would put in a story… but the way it’s presented is wildly Lynchian, with giant lumps of misty symbolism and blurred borders between fantasy and reality. You could watch this movie a dozen times, and still not be sure what is happening.

For instance, one scene features Baltimore wandering into a blue-lit bar, where he listens to two people who speak in an affected, dreamlike way and occasionally sings “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” After one of them attacks V, they babble some more about how the clocks do not work and time cannot be measured… and Baltimore just leaves. Utterly baffling… and no, it is never referred to again.

I suspect that Val Kilmer was just as baffled, because that’s effectively the performance he gives — total confusion. He does a decent job with Baltimore’s frustration and grief over the problems in his life, but most of the time he’s left staring around in confusion. Elle Fanning isn’t in much of the movie, but she does do a good job as a girl who may be a ghost, a vampire, a dream, or whatever.

But one thing that Coppola does not fail at is making the movie beautiful — it’s a misty, night-hued story that drifts over lakes, through ruined stone walls, through moonlight-dappled forests. Some of the greenscreen is a bit obvious, but it doesn’t distract from the hauntingly lovely, surreal visuals that fill most of the movie.

Francis Ford Coppola has become the elderly winemaking version of people who make amateur horror shorts and put them up on youtube. “Twixt” is utterly baffling and bizarre, but at least it’s a pretty kind of baffling/bizarre.

Review: The Eternal (1998)

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A mummy movie is possibly the easiest kind of horror movie to make — it comes to life and terrorizes the living. Simple, but effective.

And yet “The Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy” (aka “Trance”) has managed to screw that simple formula up. Despite the ever-interesting presence of Christopher Walken and some pretty cinematography, the story itself is a flaccid, flabby mess of plot holes and basic writing errors — including some of the least sympathetic characters I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Nora (Alison Elliott) and Jim (Jared Harris) are a pair of wealthy alcoholics in New York, who have decided to dry out on a visit to her grandmother in Ireland. Yes, they plan to dry out in the land of Guinness, because apparently it doesn’t count as booze. But when they arrive, Nora immediately blacks out and crashes the car.

And it keeps getting better — her grandmother has that highly selected senility you only see in movies, and her weird uncle Bill (Walken) only seems interested in the bog-preserved mummy of a druid witch who murder-suicided in the Iron Age. Of course, the mummy comes back to life… for no reason that’s ever explained… and she looks exactly like Nora. Now she apparently wants to steal Nora’s body… even though her own body seems to be working fine.

Director/writer Michael Almereyda seems to have only a vague idea of how proper storytelling works. Important characters appear without introduction two-thirds of the way through, logic is constantly violated (so Niamh doesn’t realize that a cigarette is ON FIRE, but she knows what whiskey is?), and the awkward climax ends up pretty much making no sense at all.

Worst of all: huge oozing lumps of exposition are constantly thrown at us like lumps of excrement… from people who couldn’t POSSIBLY know what they are talking about. How does Bill know the history of Niamh? Magic, apparently. How does Alice know all about her powers and intentions? Never explained. It becomes infuriating after awhile, especially when you realize that Alice is JUST there to exposit.

Almereyda tries to compensate by draping the movie in a dreamy atmosphere and Ireland’s peaty, raw beauty… but it’s not enough. The movie sludges by at a painfully slow pace, with lots of people wandering around and having the world’s slowest conversations, most of which are pretentious muckity-mystical drivel (“Every day; all the time. You wake up, open your eyes, take a breath, start over: that’s how it is”). And of course, Alice monologues over everything. EVERYTHING.

And rarely do you see a movie that is so padded, yet STILL manages to drag by at a snail’s pace. For instance, several characters fall down the stairs. There’s apparently no symbolic meaning to it — they just fall down the stairs because it eats up a few minutes of screen time and looks dramatic.

It also has a cast where you root for nobody, because nobody is likable. Christopher Walken comes the closest merely by being himself — weird, off-kilter, and utterly unconvincing as a lifelong resident of Ireland. But he sadly exits the movie after only a few scenes, and we’re left with… everyone else.

I kept waiting for a moment to come when we start to like and empathize with the lead characters — a pair of rich, irresponsible alcoholics — only to eventually realize that Almereyda intended for us to like them already. Elliott and Harris are mediocre and charmless here, especially since Elliott has to play the dual role of Nora and Niamh, which she does with slack-jawed dullness worthy of Kristen Stewart.

And the character of Alice is the most naked, blatant “exposition fairy” that I have ever seen in a film. I kept thinking that she was the love child that Nora claimed to have aborted, but it turns out that she is nobody special. Just a source of pseudo-mystical narration… and nothing else.

Watching “The Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy” is like being slowly dragged facedown through Ireland’s mud — it will leave you cold and miserable. And eventually, you’ll want a Guinness to dull the pain.

Recommendation: Decker Shado

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Right now this particular reviewer is getting his butt kicked by the Youtube algorithm, probably because he puts out videos devoted to science fiction, Asian cinema, cult movies and horror rather than… well, I don’t know what does well in the Youtube algorithm, because I don’t watch it.

And of course, Godzilla movies. He’s fun, dramatic and has luscious hair, and seems like a very nice person. So please support him in whatever way you can!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsxn3qKFpbnD-8f1d9F5ipA

Review: Malignant

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Malignant” is one of those movies that is… hard to judge. It’s hard to judge because the intent of it is not entirely clear, and so you’re left unsure whether the filmmaker responsible for it was successful in their ambitions.

Specifically, it’s hard to tell if it was meant to be funny or not.

In the broadest sense, “Malignant” is a horror movie, by the current king of horror, James Wan. And for the first two acts, it serves as a perfectly serviceable buildup to some kind of horrifying revelation, with distinct overtones of the gothic and giallo. Then… the third act happens, and somehow the drama, the absurd action and the bizarreness of it all splatters across the screen like so much CGI blood. It’s absolutely gutsplitting.

When her abusive husband cracks her head against a wall, pregnant Madison Lake (Annabelle Wallis) locks herself in her bedroom. But she’s woken in the night by the murder of her husband – and an attack by a mysterious figure with long hair over his face, which leads to her losing her baby. Detectives Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and Regina Moss (Michole Briana White) investigate, but the only evidence to be found is bizarre and inexplicable, so they suspect Madison.

Upon returning to her home, Madison begins having visions of the killer hunting down and murdering other people – and it turns out that yes, her visions are coming true. The problem is, it’s all tied up in Madison’s mysterious childhood, before she was adopted by her parents… and she can’t remember that. To find out who “Gabriel” is, and how to stop him before he murders again, Madison will have to uncover a horrifying truth about herself.

I’m going to be blunt about this – “Malignant” is not a good movie. It has plot holes up the wazoo, a massive plot twist that can be easily figured out in the first ten minutes, and countless unanswered questions. For instance, why doesn’t Madison have a scar? How is Gabriel able to control electricity? Why does he wear a leather coat? Why does he have superhuman agility? All of these questions will not be answered, because the plot comes unraveled like a cheap sweater when you think about it for more than a few minutes!

But at the same time, there’s something strangely lovable about the movie. It has the innate drama and striking, haunting visual artistry seen in old giallo movies, right down to the copious gore, mingled with a kind of bad 1990s horror-movie aesthetic that just isn’t seen anymore. The opening sequence alone is a block of pure cheese, and it’s beautiful.

This gives the movie a rather inconsistent tone – during most of the police work and Madison’s daily life, we’re given a fairly realistic, subdued directorial style from Wan. Then Gabriel appears, and suddenly everything is crashing lightning, gothic castle-hospitals, and medical awards being used to brutally stab people to death. And of course, there’s the third act, where everything is dialed up to eleven – the sentimentality, the cheese, the bizarre plot twists.

This includes a scene that seems like it was made to be hilarious, but I honestly can’t tell if it was – a scene in which “Gabriel” carves his way through the police station, with superhuman acrobatics, snapped spines and rivers of gore… all performed backwards. James Wan, what exactly was your intent here?

Annabelle Wallis is merely passable as Madison – she’s okay when the role demands she be scared, and her crazy-eyes stare is pretty solid, but most other emotions just make her look like she has a stomachache. Maddie Hasson gives a pretty good performance as Madison’s younger sister, and Young has a striking presence as the police detective who looks beneath the veneer of the obvious to find out what is happening.

If nothing else, be glad that James Wan got the chance to make “Malignant” – an original horror movie that isn’t part of a glossy franchise, and which wears its niche influences like a badge of honor. It’s not a good movie, but it is an entertaining and memorable one.

Review: Hellboy (2019)

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From its very first opening moments, the 2019 reboot “Hellboy” shows us exactly the kind of movie that it is – with a bird eating the liquefied eyeball of a rotten corpse, and Ian McShane throwing a gratuitous F-bomb.

Specifically, it’s the kind of movie that a 13-year-old who thinks he’s edgy would make – lots of swearing, lots of characters being obnoxious, lots of extremely graphic violence shown in lovingly-framed detail, and so on. “Hellboy” seems to aspire to be kind of like “Deadpool” in its mixture of comedy and bloody violence, but the meandering, overstuffed storyline and unlikable lead characters make it a chore to sit through.

After killing a B.P.R.D. agent who had been vampirized, Hellboy (David Harbour) angsts about his status as a monster, and what that means to an organization dedicated to stamping them out. He’s then sent to help the Osiris Club in England with exterminating a trio of giants… only for the Club to try to kill him because he’s destined to bring about the apocalypse. If you’re wondering what all this has to do with the main plot, the answer is: very little.

The actual villain of the piece is Nimue (Milla Jovovich), the legendary sorceress, who was chopped into six pieces by King Arthur and sent to six different parts of England. Not the world. Not Europe. Just England. Now the pig-fae Gruagach (Stephen Graham) is reuniting her various body parts – and if she is fully restored, she will bring down an apocalyptic plague across the entire world, wiping out humanity.

Hellboy is soon called on to stop Nimue, along with ghost-punching medium Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) and surly B.P.R.D. agent Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim). But Nimue quickly decides that she wants Hellboy as her king, since she knows of his apocalyptic destiny and wants him her to rule over a new world at her side. Unfortunately for the current world, Hellboy seems quite tempted by the offer.

“Hellboy” was already facing an uphill battle, given that the character’s previous appearances were directed by the beloved Guillermo del Toro. But even if one appreciates it entirely on its own merits, the movie is still pretty terrible – and only part of that is due to the relentless swearing and hyper-graphic gore, which feel like a teen boy’s idea of what an R-rated movie should be like.

One of the big problems is that the story is an overstuffed mess, with subplots unrelated to the main plot. Whole chunks of the narrative could have been easily streamlined out, such as Hellboy’s fight with the giants, which feels like a side-quest in a video game. The cinematography is pretty ugly and grimy, the special effects range from acceptable to “how did this get released in theaters?”, and the dialogue is bad more often than not (“But it’s not going to work, you know, cause I’m a Capricorn and you’re f***ing nuts!”).

It also has a wealth of characters who exist entirely to vomit exposition. Baba Yaga, for instance, is a character who exists entirely to tell people to go places, rather than having any real impact on the plot. Or consider the blind woman with precognitive powers, who is just there to recount baby’s Hellboy’s entry into our world, a bizarre scene that is somehow sidetracked by the appearance of Lobster Johnson. “Who?” you may be asking. The answer: nobody who matters to the plot, so it doesn’t matter.

Of course, the main characters aren’t much better. It’s worth noting that no criticism should fall upon David Harbour, who gives as good a performance as anyone could possibly give. The movie fails him, not the other way around.

Specifically, it fails him by making Hellboy a whiny, passive-aggressive brat who is easily swayed by Nimue and gripes about his father constantly. His angst over monsters not getting to live in the open seems rather hollow as well, considering that we see virtually no monsters who aren’t actively harmful to humans… and since Hellboy himself is hardly a secret, since he goes on a days-long bender in a Mexican bar.

The other characters aren’t particularly likable either – Alice tends towards being smugly annoying, and Daimio seems to be stuck in a combatively bad mood with no particular reason or resolution. No, being revealed as a werejaguar does not count as an arc. The closest to a character who actually feels three-dimensional is Ian McShane’s Professor Broom, although even he isn’t a terribly likable person.

The 2019 reboot of “Hellboy” stumbles badly in its attempt to give us a darker, grittier portrait of our demonic hero – mainly because of the sloppy plot and painfully clumsy script. Stick with the comics or the earlier films.

The Mummy 2017 and Sexism

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

One of the many changes made to Mummy lore in the Tom Cruise movie The Mummy is that it focused on a female mummy rather than the traditional male ones. Despite Twitter’s beliefs that all gender/race flips are greeted with sexist racist fanboy hatred, the viewing public did not have a problem with gender-flipping the mummy, especially since she was played by the wonderful Sofia Boutella, who gives the character a real sense of wiry, acrobatic physicality.

Unfortunately, the movie sucked for myriad reasons. Among the reasons: the crushing lack of research, the lack of Egypt, Tom Cruise’s midlife crisis, the need to shoehorn a S.H.I.E.L.D.-like organization into the story, the script full of holes, the blatant ripping off of An American Werewolf In London, and so forth. It’s not a good movie, and I didn’t enjoy it.

But the thing that really stuck out to me is that despite deciding to make the mummy female… the movie is actually rather sexist towards her. This is best highlighted when you compare the 2017 mummy, Ahmanet, to her male counterpart in the 1999 movie, Imhotep. And two things really stuck out at me.

One, Ahmanet is weak. I don’t mean she’s weakly characterized – although she is – but that she’s not very powerful for an undead mummy powered by divine sponsorship. About midway through the movie, she’s captured by the troops of Prodigium (the monster-hunting equivalent of S.H.I.E.L.D.). Do they use magical tools and amulets? Do they somehow neutralize the power of Set, rendering her helpless? Do they use centuries of research and knowledge and technology and the supernatural to overwhelm this godlike figure’s godlike powers?

Nope. They use ropes and hooks to catch her, then chain her up with a mercury drip. It isn’t even hard for them.

If that doesn’t sound weak, stop for a moment and remember Imhotep from the 1999 movie. Imhotep was powerful. Ridiculously so. He had his weaknesses (like kitties), but it’s hard to imagine him being completely incapacitated by some guys with ropes. Yet the female mummy is weak and gets taken down almost effortlessly.

And you may be thinking, “Well, it’s to show how amazing Prodigium is! They’re so capable and strong that they can stop a god-powered mummy!”

But no, that isn’t the case. Because that is the second time that Ahmanet is taken down by mere mortal schlubs – the first time was in ancient Egypt right after she murdered her family, and she was newly juiced-up with Set’s power. Not only were the people who caught her ordinary people, but they didn’t have technology, centuries of organized study and gathered magical power. They were just people. Not only did they catch her, but they successfully mummified her alive (which is not possible, incidentally) and transported her to another country before properly imprisoning her in a neutralizing element. That is, for a mummy, quite weak.

For the record, Imhotep also was caught and buried alive by ordinary humans… but that was before he had most of his powers. So it made sense that the Medjai could catch him!

The other part of Ahmanet that struck me as sexist is her ultimate goal. Her initial goal seems to be to rule Egypt, because she apparently was raised with the belief that she would be the queen regnant when her father died, but then his wife had a baby boy so she was knocked out of the succession. For the record, pharoahs had many wives, so the chances of a pharoah having only two children in twenty years is… very unlikely. That’s a more medieval-European trope.

Anyway, she was so upset about not becoming queen that she summoned the god Set, and he gave her… skin text and four pupils, and a knife. So she wandered off and killed her entire family, baby included, and then decides to bring Set into a mortal man’s body because she’s in love with him. When she revives in the present, her motive does not change – she wants Set to incarnate in Tom Cruise’s body.

Now, let’s again compare her to Imhotep.

Imhotep also had romantic love as the centerpiece of his quest. He was the secret lover of the pharoah’s mistress (why not a lesser wife or concubine? Again, very medieval-European!), until she committed suicide so that the Medjai wouldn’t capture Imhotep. So his goal was to bring her back to life. He was captured and sealed away under a magic spell, and when he is revived as a mummy, his ultimate goal is also unchanged – once he has his body restored, he wants to bring his lover’s soul back in Rachel Weisz’s body.

Similar motives, similar goals, similar story progression, yes?

Well, no. Like I mentioned before, Ahmanet’s goal is to revive an evil god, so he can rule the world. She wants to be his queen, not a queen regnant. She even explicitly says this, and she acts like a lovesick fangirl for most of the story.

Imhotep, on the other hand, never gives the impression that he’s going to be subservient to any person, and at no point do you imagine that his lover is going to be the one sitting up on the throne while he’s just the arm candy.

I don’t know much about the production of this movie, but I will say that this motivation feels a little like it was shoved in there. It may be bad writing giving the character inconsistent or poorly-explained motives… or it may be the obviously-insecure-about-his-age Tom Cruise insisting that all women in the movie must be dazzled by his toothy charm. I don’t know.

But either way, the handling of the female mummy was not good, and they should have simply followed this rule: if it isn’t something you can see Imhotep doing, leave it out.

Recommendation: Ghost Hunt

On By E. A. SolinasIn recommendationsLeave a comment

Like many people, I like anime. I’m not one of those people into super-obscure or niche stuff, but I enjoy anime like My Hero Academia, Bleach, Inuyasha, Fruits Basket, Fairy Tail, etc. I used to be into Naruto and Dragonball, until I realized that both of them were ass-numbingly long and I didn’t really like the characters very much.

And one of the lesser-known anime I love is Ghost Hunt, a series that adds a more professional, sometimes more factual aspect to the usual supernatural shenanigans of Japanese urban fantasy. It gets a little silly towards the end (one of the final episodes has a Catholic priest PUNCHING GHOSTS), but it’s an overall enjoyable series that mingles urban fantasy, horror, and a hint of romance.

It follows a young girl named Mai, who accidentally runs into a supernatural detective agency who are investigating a supposedly-haunted building at the school she attends. She accidentally wrecks some of their equipment and injures the assistant, so she ends up working for the paranormal investigator Kazuya Shibuya, whom she nicknames “Naru” because she thinks he’s a narcissist. There are also three other exorcists called in: the not-very-monkly Buddhist monk Hosho, the rarely-successful Shinto shrine maiden Ayako, and the perpetually mellow Catholic priest John Brown. Oh, and there’s a TV medium named Masako, who’s condescending and nasty and can’t take a hint that a man is disinterested in her, and Naru’s assistant Lin, who’s kind of weird and distant from Mai.

As a group, they investigate a number of paranormal cases, including a haunted doll and a child being terrorized, the seemingly-haunted school, a strict school where a girl threatened to curse people, a school game with potentially deadly consequences, a labyrinthine house, and a family being haunted by ancient spirits. There are also some slightly lighter stories, one of them about a child’s spirit possessing Mai, and a ghost that splashes water on couples. The last one is more funny than spooky.

Be forewarned: this series is in fact quite horrific at times, ranging from merely being uncomfortably eerie to having bloody ghosts emerging from walls in a cursed mansion. It’s also a slow-burner for most of its run, with long stretches of talking about equipment, psychic phenomena (and sometimes the fakery of it), psychology, Japanese folk magic, and so on. It’s not boring – there are strange occurrences fairly frequently, and the banter between the characters keeps the energy moving – but it’s not a big splashy anime. It takes its time, as it is a mystery show of sorts.

A paeon to Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil

On By E. A. SolinasIn recommendationsLeave a comment

WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

For some reason, horror movies seem to be particularly susceptible to parody and tongue-in-cheek deconstruction. I haven’t seen as many parodies of action movies or romances. Even sci-fi movies haven’t had as many parodies or deconstructions as horror. Maybe it’s because there’s tension both in horror and comedy, leading to sudden releases.

And people might point to Cabin in the Woods (Joss Whedon is an overrated ass) as a primo example, or the Scary Movie movies, or Young Frankenstein for a classic… but in my opinion, one of the greatest is Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. This is a parody of slasher-killer/killer-hillbilly movies that also just happens to be a really good movie.

The reversal of the hero/villain dynamic is the most obvious way of lampooning the genre — in this, the protagonists are the hapless hillbillies who just want to go hang out at their decayed vacation house, catch some fish, and fix their new place up. Tucker and Dale could not be more amiable and down-to-earth, and the only reason they ever come across as creepy to anyone is A) Dale’s social awkwardness, and B) the college kids’ preconceptions of hillbillies as dangerous, disgusting and amoral.

Conversely, the college kids — usually depicted as hapless victims in horror — are mostly morons who accidentally kill themselves by doing things like leaping into wood chippers or splashing paint thinner on a fire. The antagonist, however, is one of these college kids, a psychotic hater of hillbillies who decides to declare war on Tucker and Dale after the two rescue the girl he’s hoping to molest.

So the subversion of horror is pretty well handled in its own right — it takes the stuff we’re familiar with and flips it on its head. But the movie wouldn’t be as excellent as it is if it were just “haw haw, it’s funny because they’re dying due to their own stupidity rather than because of killer hillbillies! It is funny because that usually doesn’t happen in horror movies!”

Because… the characters are almost all really good and well-handled, and everything that happens more or less organically flowers from who those people are. Even the less developed characters (such as the various college kids) have fairly consistent and sensibly-drawn characters (despite the blonde girl who’s dressed very badly for a woodland camp-out). Except for the psychotic guy, they all behave like… real people. Sometimes not very smart real people, but real people. For instance, one guy decides “screw this, I’m finding the police” and does just that. It doesn’t turn out well, but he does do the sensible thing.

And there are character arcs (Dale having to develop self-confidence and strength), developed character relationships (both romantic and platonic), several Chekhov’s guns (I won’t mention what they are, because some are spoilers), and it ramps up the tension gradually, punctuated by some hilarious accidental deaths.

I won’t go into too much detail about Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, but I will say that I really don’t think it would be as effective a horror-comedy/deconstruction/parody if it didn’t have such well-developed characters and such a solid plot.

Oh, and it’s insanely funny as well.