The Sacrifice of the Holy Fool

Edward Woodward died on Monday at the age of 79. He had many movie roles, including two authentic classics in Breaker Morant and The Wicker Man, but will be remembered primarily as one of the most prolific British TV actors ever. Most Americans probably remember him best from the 80's TV hit The Equalizer, as a retired secret agent using his deadly skills and barely repressed righteous fury to defend the weak and downtrodden.

To genre fans though, he will always be remembered as Sergeant Neil Howie of the West Highlands Constabulary, stolid, priggish and utterly dedicated to his Christian duty.

The Wicker Man was made in 1973 (For the love of God avoid the disastrous remake starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Neil LaBute, a misogynist hack and the most over-rated film-maker ever.) it tells the tale of a dedicated police officer who comes to a remote Scottish Isle searching for a missing child and discovers mystery, sensuality and a jovial yet sinister population who all seem to be in on a joke that he is left out of.

The joke, of course, is on him.

Despite the delightfully malevolent presence of Christopher Lee as the mysterious Laird of Summerisle and the pulchritudinous unclothed charms of a young Britt Ekland, the movie depends above all on the performance of Edward Woodward.

He doesn't disappoint. The rigidly self-righteous Sgt. Howie shouldn't be as likable as he is with his dour and disapproving Christianity and his quivering tight lipped fury at the sin and debauchery he encounters at every turn on an island where Christianity has long since been supplanted by a much older faith.

Woodward doesn't play Sgt Howie, he becomes him, and after multiple viewings you can still find yourself hoping against hope that he'll get back in his police seaplane and leave the dark mysteries of Summerisle behind. But events unfold with as they must, bringing him inexorably to a windy seaside cliff and his unavoidable destiny.

The movie is a study in bizarre tonal shifts and discordant atmosphere. It's a mystery, a comedy, a horror movie and a character study. Sprightly traditional folk songs contrast with a steadily building menace. Audience expectations are toyed with expertly - particularly via a sudden shift to a traditional action movie chase sequence late in the game that suddenly becomes a cruel jest on both protagonist and audience.

I can't recommend The Wicker Man highly enough. Its a great way to remember an actor's actor who brought a commitment to every role he took inhabiting the skin of baffled angry men with just enough self knowledge to make them tragically flawed icons of victimized everyman.

It's in the Blood

Vampirism is almost as flexible a metaphor as Zombies can be. Vampires have represented teen alienation, addiction, class elitism and of course sex. Most recently legions of enthralled teenage girls have utterly internalized getting bit by a vampire as corresponding exactly with 'losing it' in a series of rather dim novels and now movies.

But the correlation at the heart of the myth and implicit in Dracula, the Ur text of the genre, is vampirism as disease.

In Stoker's Dracula, Vampirism is a blood born taint being fought by science. The supernatural element is of course present, but as others have observed its really a book about Syphilis. In Victorian England before antibiotics drove a stake into it, Syphilis was what AIDS was until recently; an incurable, barely treatable blood disease. Nice people didn't talk about it, it was spread by 'beastly' behavior and the sufferers would die slowly and grotesquely being marred with ugly stigmatizing sores and wasting away and going mad as the disease ate at their brains.

In that context, Bram Stoker's Dracula with its emphasis on blood borne evil and modern (for the time) medical methods like transfusions becomes a very different beast than it is to modern readers.

Nosferatu the first unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's tale made the disease metaphor explicit. The vampire is a horrific deformed creature with rat like teeth bringing plague and swarms of vermin with him as he invades the comfortable reality of modern Hamburg.

And now film-maker Guillermo Del Toro and co-author Chuck Hogan make the disease metaphor explicit again with the first in their new trilogy of novels The Strain.

The hero is a doctor for the Center for Disease Control brought in to investigate a mysterious plague that has wiped out an entire airplane full of passengers - or has it? The medical mystery element is played well, but the underlying monstrous evil of the vampire begins to unfurl as the story goes on. Disease becomes unearthly evil gradually but utterly.

In this age of SARS and H1N1 and the world wide unease that we are due for something makes The Strain as timely and unsettling as any horror novel you've ever read. The fact is that a deadly killer flu strain seems to hit the world every 4 decades or so - and the last one hit us in the 60's. If SARS or H1N1 aren't it that doesn't mean it isn't coming.

The airplane opening in The Strain is a reminder that in our modern globalized world, the next killer virus could be burning in the bloodstreams of the worlds capitals for days or weeks before we even realized what was happening to us. This is a modern unease that The Strain captures very well.

Del Toro, of course, is the film-maker responsible for Pans Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone and the Hellboy movies among others. He's currently in New Zealand working on the Hobbit with Peter Jackson. If you've seen and enjoyed any of these films - and enjoying them pretty much goes hand in hand with seeing them - then you will love The Strain. I'm looking forward avidly to the next book in the series, and after reading it I think you will be too.

Steal from the best

So I'm watching the new episode of Supernatural. It's not a spectacular show but its entertaining enough and it hooked me when it had an episode with the title 'Criss Angel is a douche-bag'.

That's a great title, man.

Tonight's episode (I believe the children are the future - another great title.), spoilers of course, is about a little boy named Jesse who is extremely powerful without knowing it. Anything he believes comes true in a radius of several miles around him. So if he believes joy-buzzers really do electrocute you they do, if he believes the tooth fairy is a leering biker in a Tutu that's who will show up and yank out all your teeth.

Turns out he's the Antichrist, but is actually a really nice kid with no desire to destroy the world.

This is, of course also the plot of the novel Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

Let's be charitable and call it a tribute.

I see a Darkness

Cash I See a Darkness (Paperback)
A review of the graphic novel.
by Rheinhard Kleist
224 pages
Self Made Hero



A spare and elegant interpretation of a story anyone likely to read will likely already be familiar with.

The challenge then, for German cartoonist Rheinhard Kleist, is to take the same material from Johnny Cash's autobiography and every other compendium of tributes and oral tradition that the makers of the film dipped into and justify his own versions existence.

But Kleist has produced something wholly unique and beautiful here. His choice of which parts of an iconography almost gospel to Cash adherants and produced a must have for Cash fans and fans of excellent sequential graphic art.




The format is an assured biographic narrative inter-cut with less successful dramatizations of Cash songs with Johnny in the starring roles. Get it for the southern Gothic aesthetic of the depression era segments and the noir prison bar shadows of the mythic concert at Folsom.

Not the dramatic comic strip interpretation of Ghost riders in the Sky.

The art is the real treat here. An evocative mix of intricately delinated and shadowed close ups and almost expressionistic rendering of the backgrounds along with almost cartoonish sequences that mostly manage not to distract from the rest of the book's look.

It's a fine line, but for the most part Kleist walks that line.






Of course there's also this earlier interpretation from Christian Archie publishers Spire:

'I'm Peter Lorre, bitch."

And you're not.

Ghost of Stephen Foster

The Squirrel Nut Zippers

Supervillain Pickup Line #1

"I bet you don't have an evil bone in your body.
Would you like one?"

Charon

Adapted from the story by Lord Dunsany.

Weekly Comics - August 15

The Walking Dead
Volume 10, What We Become

I collect The Walking Dead in it's trade paperback collections. I balance the painful wait between volumes with getting more story at a time. Volume 10 collects issues 55 to 60 of the savagely brilliant ongoing series that is one of the most bleak but compulsively readable epics in comics.

The premise, for the uninitiated, is that at the end of the zombie movie the story just keeps going. We follow the hunted survivors of the roaming bands of zombies that have over run the Earth. Different hunted groups merge, characters join the group, form relationships, get eaten, new people arrive, but distressingly, less all the time.

People transform. As the book advertises. 'No government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead we are forced to finally start living.' In this volume we learn that can also mean becoming monsters no less terrifying than the hungry dead.

Highest recommendation.



Amazing Spiderman
602

Let's call this the 'Welcome back Mary Jane' cover shall we?

So, a few decades ago in real time, a few years in comics time Peter Parker found out that Mary Jane Watson knew he was Spiderman, had in fact always known since they were both teenagers but had kept that knowledge a secret even from him.

After years of playing the field Peter Parker zeroed in Mary Jane Watson, they were a steady item for a few years and then in a time of event driven comics they got married.

And the writers just couldn't figure out how to do Peter Parker, put upon young everyman if he was married to a super model/actress. They were split up by Mary Jane's move to Hollywood but stayed married. You can't give a heavily licensed trademark comic book character a divorce. Just can't happen.

So after the Marvel Comics Civil War event when Spiderman revealed his identity as Peter Parker to the world and Aunt May got shot by a sniper, the powers that be specifically editor in Chief Joe Quesada, decided that they needed a full continuity reset.

Spiderman couldn't get a divorce, so he sold his marriage to the devil in return for Aunt May's life and the secret of his identity back.

No, really.

After a year away, after everyone on Earth's memory is wiped of the knowledge that he's actually Spiderman Mary Jane returns to establish the current continuity line that almost everything happened the way it originally did except that they didn't get married. They had a longstanding relationship, she seems to still know he's Spiderman, maybe they even lived together, but they didn't get married.

Oh, plus, J. Jonah. Jameson is Mayor of New York and Peter's back to working for him and a creepy serial killer super villain coats Peter's face in plastic and drops him into a pit of acid.

Yes, this review was an excuse to run that cover.


The Chronicles of Wormwood The Last Battle
Preview
Garth Ennis and Oscar Jimenez

Like the novel Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Wormwood is a play on The Omen, the story of a sympathetic Antichrist. Instead of a likable 12 year old boy, Wormwood is a mostly likable grown up TV executive. He has a perverse intelligent rabbit, a forgiving girlfriend and he likes to hang out at the bar with his brain damaged buddy Jesus Christ.

In the first volume Wormwood's girlfriend dumps him after finding out about his steamy afternoons of anal sex with Joan of Arc. She's taken him back now, but he's still keeping the whole Antichrist thing a secret. Volume 2, The Last Enemy was really only memorabe for the line "Suck my cockectomy spawn of the Dark One!"

Now after defeating both his father Satan and God in Volume One to get them to leave humanity alone, somebody even worse has taken over Hell. This is just a brief preview of the coming miniseries Volume 3, The Last Battle, with an affordable $1.99 price tag.

It's a sacrilicious treat!



Dominic Fortune #1 of 4
Howard Chaykin and Edgar Delgado

Chaykin resurrects his 30's era pulp adventurer created in the 70's. He was originally published by Atlas Comics and called the Scorpion and then in Marvel magazines and comics as Dominic Fortune. It was always a stylish and sexy book. Now, in the new miniseries for Marvel Max, Marvel's explicit content line there are a lot more naked people and blowjobs.

A cross between Indiana Jones and Alexander Portnoy, as the story begins Dominic Fortune is demonstrating what an amoral swashbuckling mercenary he is by selling his fighter pilot skills back and forth to both sides of the just ended war between Bolivia and Paraguay, (which would make this June of 1935.) and falling from the sky into a naked starlet's swimming pool.

The war over he drifts to Hollywood and a job babysitting a trio of drunken actors. A racist conspiracy and some rather brutal whore shooting hint at the larger story.

It's got my attention and I'll be coming back for issue #2.

Raw Hide

Dead Kennedys
(All Midget cast)

What's in a name?

So a rapper named 'C-Murder' was just convicted of murder.

This suggests you should never leave books of matches around Steve Arson, and whatever you do, never go out for dinner with Johnny McDaterape.

Weekly Comics - August 8

The Saga of Solomon Kane Dark Horse
Dark Horse

Collecting classic stories from Marvel magazines like Savage Sword of Conan and Kull (Even Tomb of Dracula as the two characters meet in these pages.) with script adaptations by Roy Thomas among others and featuring art from such 70's superstars as Bernie Wrightson, Neal Adams Howard Chaykin and even some early Mike Zeck.

Solomon Kane was one of the many pulp creations of Robert A. Howard that were stacked in comic and magazine form under bongs and Black Sabbath albums in bedrooms all over the world. The Dour puritan with the flashing blade and a fierce hatred of evil never became as popular or well known as Conan or even Red Sonja, but he had a long career of backup feature status. Dark Horse has added him to their Robert A. Howard publishing line and this release is a nice affordable collection in the popular black and white 'phone book' format. Over 400 pages of content for under $20.

Justice League Cry For Justice #2
DC

Popular writer James Robinson returns to comics after a long hiatus and is joined by the beautiful painted art of Mauro Cascioli. Classic characters Green Lantern, Green Arrow and The Atom are joined by Super Girl, the new Captain Marvel and minor oddities Congo Bill and the 70's Starman in a story about the heroes deciding to become proactive and start actively hunting super villains. So far its all buildup, albeit with Robinson's sophisticated dialogue and Cascioli's expressive art.

The best scene in this issue is Green Arrow twitting Green Lantern about what a man-whore he is, most of this issue is conversations on rooftops or in warehouses.

Worth picking up but you may want to wait for the inevitable trade or hardcover collection.







The Hangman #1
DC
DC Comics takes another stab at reinventing the Archie Comics Red Circle heroes. Last time it was the Impact Line in the early 90's. Respectable but not spectacular and ultimately short lived. This time they've given the characters to Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Stracynski and he's begun the process of incorporating them into the main DC continuity. There will be one-shots for the major Red Circle titles The Shield, The Inferno and The Web (But not The Fly this time unfortunately.) as Stracynski does much the same for the Archie golden age characters as he did with Timely's lesser know Golden age characters in his Marvel miniseries The Twelve.

The Hangman is a well written tale of supernatural revenge, even though it does follow a rather well worn path most recently trod by DCs updated revival of western vigilante El Diablo. We've seen this all before, but its an entertaining story nonetheless.







Also out his week: North 40 #2, Wednesday Comics #5, Warlord #5 and Astro City the Dark Age Book 3 #4.

There's Horror...

..and then there's self-indulgent, hateful murder porn.

Rampage is a new film from Uwe Boll. Yeah, that name alone is the hallmark and warning of utter crap. The fair warning that you are considering viewing the product of a sub-literate crap-meister who owes his entire career to a German tax law that seems to have been based on the plot of The Producers. Literally a legal way to make investors money on utter failure both artistic and at the box office.

Rampage is Boll's latest masterpiece. Artistically and morally it is clearly nothing more than repugnant murder porn. Don't believe me? Check out the trailer. Fair warning, you will need a shower afterward.

See? Uwe Boll is about to become the go to film maker to all the dismal little losers who've convinced themselves it's everybody else's fault that they are worthless little turds who can't achieve anything with their lives and all women are evil because every one they meet can smell the crazy loser stink off them from a mile away.

This movie seems designed to create copycat acts of violence. I hope Uwe Boll gets sued to death by the families of every victim of every crazed loser with a gun and a grudge who comes along and has this piece of shit in his DVD collection next to all his tentacle anime and drool covered holocaust documentaries.

Re: Your Brains

Jonathan Coulton

Master of Horror: Vincent Price

Hi, I'm the Dweller and I'm addicted to Vincent Price movies.

Okay, so it isn't crack. I'm not sucking dick to afford my habit.

Among other reasons, Vincent Price DVDs are remarkably cheap. Both in price and quality for the most part unfortunately, but there are some bright spots among the dollar store public domain cheapo releases of The Last Man on Earth and The House on Haunted Hill - two great flicks ill served by the back alley DVD burner and color photocopier versions churned out with depressing regularity. The original Night of the Living Dead has been tarted up and turned out in much the same way.

But the MGM Midnight Movies imprint has a big catalog of Vincent Price's output from the 60's and 70's. They're bare bones releases but better than decent transfers. Stand outs include all the Corman films loosely adapting the stories of Edgar Allen Poe - usually keeping little more than the title, but frequently outrageously stylish gems. They range from the endearingly silly The Raven to the grimly sadistic Witchfinder General - originally titled 'The Conqueror Worm' after the poem to continue the Poe theme but of a very different school of film-making from the light weight drive in fare of most of Corman's output. Gems of the batch include the first film of the series The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Tomb of Ligiea.

Also great are the elaborate revenge fantasies the two Doctor Phibes movies and Theater of Blood. Every elaborate, gory 'murder inventions' and 'one by one revenge' movie including Se7en and the increasingly witless and dreary Saw series has these three Vincent Price films in their lineage.

My absolute favorite from the Price Canon is the ultimate peak of the Corman Poe years The Masque of the Red Death. This was Corman's most ambitious film, with a brooding sinister script by Charles Beaumont and others that grafted the Poe stories Hop Toad and The Masque of the Red Death onto a story that recalls Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. Price is at the peak of his powers as the devilishly charming Satanist Prince Prospero lording over a castle full of slavish degenerate nobles as the Red Death ravages the countryside. His dialogue is witty and bubbling with sinister mirth as he conducts an elaborate seduction of his prisoner the beautiful and virtuous Francesca. His evil is all the more terrifying for the occasional flashes of the possibility of redemption he lets slip out from under his mask of cruelty and sadism. While the decadence and scheming goes on in the castle, Death in the form a soft voiced but utterly implacable hooded figure awaits outside for his hour to toll. Beautifully filmed, this lush exercise in elegant surrealism is one I can and do watch again and again.