No Reservations

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Having watched, and liked, Oddity some months ago, I was glad when a friend told me that Caveat was by the same writer/director, Damian McCarthy.  I don’t always pay close attention to director’s names unless I’m writing a book where that’s relevant.  I should pay more attention, since Caveat was also quite good.  And I found it on a streaming service for the price of watching commercials.  The premise is quite creepy.  Isaac is suffering from amnesia.  His landlord offers him good pay to watch his niece for a week.  She has a mental condition, he says, but she’s harmless.  She lives in a remote house and all he has to do is stay with her.  Distressed to learn that the house is the only one on an island, since he can’t swim, nevertheless he takes the job.  But there is a caveat.  He has to be chained in a harness that limits how far he can go.

Olga, the niece, is catatonic when they arrive.  When she starts walking and speaking she’s armed with a crossbow.  She tells Isaac that he was on the island before and that he locked her father in the basement where he shot himself with the crossbow.  His landlord, her uncle, is the one who sent him to do that.  He has no memory of it.  Isaac and Olga distrust each other, each attempting to get the upper hand.  Supernatural events take place while Isaac struggles to remember.  Isaac escapes the harness and locks Olga into it, but she shoots his leg with the crossbow.  There seems to be some indication that  Olga’s mother—killed by her father and uncle and buried behind a wall in the basement—is the source of the supernatural occurrences.  The landlord comes to the island and Olga shoots him and his dead sister-in-law stalks him in the dark.  Isaac manages to escape.

There is a bit of confusion about parts of the film, but it works as a distinctly unsettling horror story.  The toy bunny that Olga, and then Isaac, uses is very creepy.  Mostly it’s the premise that makes this folk horror scary.  Being left on an island with someone of questionable sanity while chained up in a house is already frightening.  The supernatural elements, which are few and brief, add enough fear to tie all of this together as a good example of Euro-horror that has elements of folk horror to it.  I will be adding Damian McCarthy to my list of horror directors to keep an eye on.

First, Kings

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Recently I sat down to read 1 Kings.  Of course, I used to teach Hebrew Bible so I have more than a passing familiarity with it.  This time, though, I was reading it through the lens of Game of Thrones.  I wonder how much George R. R. Martin drew inspiration from the biblical book.  Indeed, a movie could be made from it—sex, conspiracy, battles, deception, it’s all there.  Perhaps someone should novelize it.  If you read it without knowing that it’s holy writ, you might be surprised to learn that it is.  Of course, having been edited by the Deuteronomists (so it’s supposed), it’s a bit preachy, but the action is pretty much the same.  In fact, Game of Thrones has quite a few biblical tropes in it.  And 1 Kings, if excised from the Bible, with its chapter and verse format, is pretty gripping itself.

Another thing that occurred to me is how little politics has changed over the millennia.  Powerful families want to retain power and privilege.  They aren’t too concerned with religious niceties but they rely on the backing of religious authorities.  (The priesthood and monarchy were always a tag team for keeping power in “the proper place.”)  And a number of the characters are quite colorful, even if you wouldn’t want them in the Oval Office.  Outside that context they can be quite loved, or at least people love to hate them.  Immature boy kings, seductive queens, and armed conflict at the slightest provocation are parts of the story across the ages.  The truth of power in powerful families plays out even in democracies.  Consider father and son presidents from the Adams and Bush families, husband and wife (nearly), in the Clintons, and countless powerful families represented in the senate or in the house.

Politics never change. Image: Saul threatening David, by José Leonardo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed.  Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem).  Alas, poor Uriah.  The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.  People still believe in magic.  Widely so.  This belief drives much of politics in two related nations far apart but bound together by a book.  Reading 1 Kings is a useful spiritual, and practical exercise.  We can learn much about how people behave.  The Good Book isn’t shy about the motivations either.  Sex, power, and fame drove leaders of antiquity even as they continue to do so today.  The Bible tells me so. 

Popping Clowns

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You need a scorecard to keep track of all the killer clowns.  While not the greatest horror movie, Clown in a Cornfield isn’t bad.  As with most of my movie posts, there may be spoilers here.  Before I get into it, I should note that this is a horror comedy, so it doesn’t take itself too seriously.  That’s important to help you get the most out of it.  So, Quinn and her father have moved from Philadelphia to Kettle Springs, Missouri.  Quinn’s mother had died that summer and her father was having trouble coping.  In the new town, however, the adults are generally jerks to the kids, not trusting them.  Even harassing them.  Quinn’s father supposes that she’s acting out when she begins to hang out with a “bad crowd.”  These kids like making prank videos of Frendo the Clown killing people and posting them online.  The problem is, there is really a killer Frendo on the loose.

The movie seems to enjoy indulging in cliches—the Black kid is the first to get killed, clowns as monsters, and kids at a loss when faced with old-timey devices such as a stick-shift car and a rotary phone.  These do make the film fun to watch.  Anyway, one night at a party the kids discover that there isn’t just one Frendo.  There are many.  And they come out of the cornfield in a horde, killing the teens.  Quinn has to watch her new friends being slaughtered, but two of them, a gay couple, manage to survive.  The final girl here (Quinn) is hardly virginal.  And it turns out that the adults in the town are Frendo.  Their kids are a “bad crop” and they’re only to glad to kill them off and start over again.

Some of the social commentary is quite good, and some of it is aimed at the cultural moment in which we find ourselves.  Our species is strange; the longer we live (ideally) the wiser we become.  Yet, for procreation we depend on the boldness and general lack of knowledge among the young.  It creates an interesting dynamic, and one that is explored in horror in many ways.  Having the young turn on the old has been done, as in Children of the Corn.  Hmm, maybe corn is dangerous?  Clown in a Cornfield turns that around.  Of course, an older generation that wipes out a younger dooms itself to extinction.  And that’s to say nothing of the psychopathic lack of feeling for your own family.  Clown in a Cornfield is a strange movie, but it is pretty well done.  And it adds yet another clown to that long list of those to fear.

Together Again

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Body horror can be gruesome, but also thought-provoking.  Together shares a similar them to The Substance, namely, bodies merging.  They differ in the details, and some spoilers may follow.  Before I get there, however, I’ll say that this is yet another example of horror and religion working, one might say, growing, together.  The basic premise is that a pool of water in the woods, located at the bottom of a cave, causes two people (or animals) who drink it, to physically merge.  Tim is an emotionally immature, and troubled man and Millie, his girlfriend, refuses to give up on him.  They buy a house together outside the city, but their relationship continues to struggle.  Out on a hike, they fall into the cave and drink the water.  Soon Tim, who has refrained from intimacy with Millie for a long time, can’t be away from her.

As the movie unfolds, they try to resolve their differences, but if they try separating, they are physically forced together.  Religion comes into this in that a New Age church, which collapsed into the cave, had formerly accepted this new form of marriage.  Those who have gone through with it experience a level of belonging and intimacy that is otherwise unattainable.  One of Millie’s coworkers was a member of that church and encourages her to go through with the union.  Meanwhile, Tim discovers the horrific fate of those who resist.  Despite all these positive reassurances, the two resist it until Tim tries to stop a deep wound of Millie’s from bleeding.  Stuck together once again, they decide to go through with it.

Interestingly enough, the rationale given for the New Age church in the movie is a story taken from Plato’s Symposium.  People, the claim is made, once had doubled bodies.  When these were forced apart, they thereafter cannot be at peace until they find their other body to merge with.  The fictional church even has a painting representing this.  Anyone who’s been in love knows the feeling.  Together exploits the fear associated with it—the loss of self to become someone new.  Literally.  In that way it can almost be a parable of parenting a child, although one of the couples that merges in the movie is a gay couple.  And he, it can be argued, is the most content person in the film.  Movies like Together and The Substance tend to find praise among the critics because they concern issues of embodiment and what it implies.  That in itself is thought provoking.

Actual Intelligence

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Horror movies love a good sequel.  A self-referential genre, there’s a lot of give and take and reassessing.  I may have waited a little too long to watch M3GAN 2.0, however.  I remembered the premise of M3GAN: an AI robot companion built to keep a young girl company misreads its protocol and ends up killing people.  I’d forgotten the details of how this came about, but as I watched the sequel, it started coming back.  It might’ve been best if I’d rewatched M3GAN first, but weekends are only so long and I’ve got a lot to do.  In any case, it isn’t bad.  This is sci-fi horror, but the future it foresees doesn’t seem very far off now.  So, M3GAN was destroyed at the end of the first movie.  Her maker, Gemma, has become kind of a Neo-Luddite, such as yours truly, and is advocating for control of AI by the government.  This need is underscored when a military application of M3GAN goes rogue and starts killing people.

Fighting fire with fire, Gemma decides she needs to bring M3GAN back to stop AMELIA.  After the usual chaos and action, it seems that AMELIA is going to merge with the motherboard of the first AI system built, which is now super-smart, and will then wipe out the human race.  M3GAN, however, has “learned” empathy and is able to stop AMELIA by sacrificing herself.  The film doesn’t have a clear message, although overall it seems to advocate caution regarding artificial intelligence.  On that I agree.  (Of course, we’ll need to get some kind of actual intelligence in the White House before we can consider any of this.)  This does seem less horror and more action than the original, but it goes quickly and is fairly fun to watch.

A few months before seeing this, I’d watched Companion, another AI cautionary horror movie.  A few months before that, Ex Machina.  Companion was a bit better, I think, but the original M3GAN was out of the gate first.  Ex Machina, however, was even a decade earlier.  The films are very different.  Companion is about a sex-bot and M3GAN concerns a, well, companion for a lonely young orphan.  Ex Machina is about an AI woman developed just because she can be.  She, however, can’t be controlled either.  All three films represent the zeitgeist of an underlying, lurking fear that we are really going the wrong direction with all the tech we’ve created.  All feature female robots, and none of them end well for humankind.  At least if the implications are followed through.  It might not be a bad idea to pay attention to the human creative side when thinking about Actual Intelligence.

Summers and Hauntings

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I’ve written before about that odd Ken Russell movie Gothic, one of my “old movies.” In case you missed it, the film is a fictional retelling of the gathering of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, John William Polidori, and Claire Claremont in the summer of 1816.  They read ghost stories to pass the time and decided to try writing them.  Two famous stories came of it: Frankenstein and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” a story that would go on to influence the genre.  I hadn’t realized, being generally the one invited to someone else’s choice of film, that two years following Gothic a movie called Haunted Summer was released.  Directed by Ivan Passer, it is a slow-paced romance that tells about the same meeting.  It’s somewhat more believable than Russell’s movie, but it has some oddities.  Perhaps the most telling is that it doesn’t mention the famous “contest” at all.

No doubt, one of the most compelling aspects of that summer meeting was the fact that a nineteen-year old Mary Godwin would go on to write one of the most influential fictional books of all time.  The influence of Frankenstein is visible in most unexpected places.  Internet personalities create “Franken” products by mixing together discrete products.  (For example, “Frankensoap” is when you cut up and blend different soaps.  You’ll actually find Frankensoaps in our bathrooms at the moment since that’s the way I handle soap scraps.  Soap never seems to go fully away before it becomes unusable.)  Frankenstein influenced everything from feminists to science fiction.  Not to mention horror.  Haunted Summer, however, although it has Polidori as a character, doesn’t mention his story at all.  It really focuses on the sexual tension between Byron and Mary Godwin.

Our imagination of that meeting of two famous writers and one soon-to-become famous one, often doesn’t make room for the fact that Shelley and Godwin were actually traveling with their infant son William—not shown in the movie.  (Mary had delivered a premature daughter the year before, who didn’t survive.)  I suppose putting a baby in the mix might, in Puritan America, dampen the romance implied in Haunted Summer.  Both that movie and Gothic make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare.”  And although Haunted Summer isn’t a horror movie there are a few moments of fairly high tension—one when Godwin has her dream of the creature approaching her bed at Villa Diodati.  The story, however, had already been told by Ken Russell’s movie and Haunted Summer failed to make much of an impact.  That isn’t, however, quite the end of the story.

Not Conan

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What are Weapons without a Barbarian?  I learned about the latter movie after reading about the former.  After watching Weapons I knew I had to see Barbarian.  It is outlandish but decidedly scary.  I haven’t been that tense during a movie for some time.  Nor have I watched one where there were so many moments when the average person in real life would’ve just left before things got so bad.  There may be some spoiler-level information here, but I won’t give away the ending.  Tess is booked into an AirBNB in Detroit, but arrives to find another renter already checked in.  It’s a rainy night and there’s a convention in town so all the hotels are booked.  Tess decides she can trust Keith and stay the night.  They end up getting along very well, and she’s planning on staying the next night as well, even with the double-booked situation.  Then Tess discovers a disturbing room in the basement.

We then learn that Keith, whom we’re all suspecting (Bill Skarsgård has become well known for playing horror villains), isn’t the real threat.  In one of the moments when I would’ve left, she goes to find him after he falls silent in the basement.  She discovers a sub-basement where a strange, inhuman woman dwells.  This woman kills Keith.  Cut to California where AJ, a guy who’s not exactly evil but certainly not good, is being accused of rape and is losing money.  He’s the owner of the AirBNB and he flies to Detroit to get the house ready for selling.  He sees that it’s occupied, but the agency says no one is staying there.  He discovers the secret sub-basement and we learn a sexual predator has for years been abducting women, having children with them, and then having children with their children, thus producing the scary woman.

As I say, outlandish, but the story is quite effectively filmed.  The real monster is not the woman, but modern people such as AJ.  The police refuse to help because they assume everyone in that neighborhood is a crackhead.  The urban blight reminded me very much of It Follows, another horror film set in Detroit.  This is kind of a new form of folk horror where the landscape becomes a monster.  Instead of using traditional folklore, however, films like It Follows and Barbarian suggest that the landscapes we build and then neglect become scenes of supernatural horror.  This is quite effective.  Having grown up in a much smaller town, but one which is equally neglected, this kind of horror really works.  Zach Cregger has become another horror director to keep an eye on.

Logan Again

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A couple of friends, both younger (ahem), liked my recent post on Logan’s Run.  As did someone my post on Goodreads.  I was pleased to see that.  I was alive, but not yet literate, when the book was originally published.  So, predictably, I sat down to watch the movie again.  My wife had to work that weekend and I had last seen it in 2011.  This time, the book fresh in my mind, I was able to notice just how much the movie diverges.  For practical reasons, the movie has people live to 30 instead of 21.  The issue was finding enough young actors (this was the seventies, after all) who could carry off the story.  Michael York was over thirty, but he could pass.  The book is a romp across the country, and it would be unbelievable in the film if Peter Ustinov were able to walk from Washington DC to Los Angeles.  

The movie has Logan dedicated to Jessica, but in the novel they have to grow to love each other.  In the film, Logan is sent on a secret mission to find Sanctuary, which, it turns out, doesn’t exist.  The novel has Ballard (transformed into “the old man” in cinematic form) disguised as Francis, Logan’s fellow Sandman, from pretty much the beginning.  On the screen, Francis remains a dedicated Sandman to the end.  Gone are the zoo animals in Washington, the hovercraft chases, and the little children who save Jessica’s life.  Granted, a lot in the novel would be very difficult to transfer to celluloid, and changes had to be made.  The whole episode of the religion of “Carrousel” isn’t in the book, but was added to give the movie coherence.  I did find it odd that they included the scene with Box, which really doesn’t fit the film.  

In any case, it warms my heart that some of my younger friends have fond memories of this movie.  It’s definitely a period piece.  Fitting for the seventies, there’s kind of an atheistic undertone to it.  Sanctuary only exists in people’s minds.  Nobody is “renewed” (born again).  But not all is doom and gloom.  The old man quotes from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot.  (That fact is the only way that I could get my daughter to watch the film.)  And it does have an optimistic ending.  Logan and Jessica decide they want to stay together—marriage was ancient history in their world.  And the young people, my greatest hope for the future, came to see the old man was fascinating.  Something that gives this particular writer a true sense of hope.

Accidentally Backward

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I watched Regression by accident.  “How is that possible?” you might ask.  Well, I don’t read up about movies before watching them.  These days I try to save money by streaming on services I pay for anyway, such as Amazon Prime.  I had identified The Tractate Middoth as a movie that I could see without knowing anything beyond that it was based on an M. R. James story and that it was only about half an hour long.  I clicked on it.  It struck me as strange that it began with a “based on true events” intertitle, but people will do anything to sell a movie, including saying fiction is fact.  Then I noticed that the production values were pretty substantial.  I began to wonder if there were two movies by that title.   About forty minutes later, I’m needing to take a restroom break and I’m thinking, this movie should be done by now but it feels like we’re in the middle of things.

After I flushed and clicked back in, the title “Regression” flashed across the top of the screen.  Well, that explained a lot.  I didn’t recall having read any M. R. James stories like what I was seeing.  Clearly my initial click had been off and I’d hit the movie next to, or above or below, the one I wanted to see.  With that level of investment, I figured I might as well watch the rest.  It wasn’t bad but it took me a while to reassess my expectations.  Regression is about how the Satanic ritual abuse scares of the 1990s were fueled by, well, regression therapy.  A girl in Minnesota is identified as having been ritually abused.  Her story convinces police, who use a therapist to do hypno-regression to uncover what “really happened.”  Soon even the cop in charge is seeing Satanists coming after him in his own house.

The movie isn’t great, but it’s not bad either.  It has enough Bible in it to have made the cut for Holy Horror (or Holy Sequel).  And it is religion-based horror.  It wasn’t what I was expecting to see, of course, but that can’t be blamed on the movie.  The Satanic panic was real and unfortunate.  The movie is probably more of a thriller than horror, and yes, I can accept that it was based on real incidents because the panic is well documented.  There is no Devil here.  There are also no Satanists.  The real culprit, the film implies, is the fundamentalist minister who first suspected the abuse.  It is something to think about, but it was no Tractate Middoth.

Talking Tolkien

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I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings back in college.  Although I enjoyed them a great deal, they weren’t enough to swing me into high fantasy.  I do sometimes think I should go back and re-read them, but with so many books on my to read list, it’s a matter of time.  In any case, I’d read that the movie Tolkien was a good example of dark academia, cinema-style, so I finally got around to seeing it.  Although I learned quite a bit about Tolkien’s life from it, as a movie it really never soars.  The academia part is pretty straightforward as King Edward’s School and Oxford University play a large role in Tolkien’s life, and in the movie.  As does World War I, which is where the darkness comes from.  That, and being an orphan.  And also a guardian priest who prevents you from being with the girl you love.  The movie stays with Tolkien until he begins writing The Hobbit.

The difficulty with biopics of writers is that trying to portray where they get their ideas is a fraught business.  Those of us who write fiction know that inspiration comes in many forms, from dreams, to real life events, to the visit of an unusual shop.  Travel, intriguing people, and ideas out of the blue can all trigger a story or novel.  How do you capture inspiration on film?  A love story is, believe it or not, somewhat easier.  The film portrays Tolkien’s early fascination with Edith Bratt, whom he would eventually marry.  One thing that I’ve learned from psychology and those who teach storytelling is that certain narratives more or less play automatically in people’s minds.  Now, this cannot be asserted universally, but if you introduce a young woman and a young man in a story, many people’s minds naturally begin to bring them together romantically.  Showing how a writer goes about their craft is different.

Many biopics of writers are considered examples of dark academia.  Probably one of the reasons is that no lives are lived without loss and trauma.  People handled traumatic events differently.  Many writers use their art as a coping mechanism.  I can’t know, but I suspect that such things often lead people to become writers.  Poe, for example, keenly felt the loss of his mother at a young age, a trauma that would lead to a lifetime of writing.  I hadn’t known, until watching this movie, that Tolkien had become an orphan.  I knew little of his life; I’d read his books, and even walked by his house in Oxford, but this movie did provide a bit of context.  I’m glad, for that reason, to have seen it.

Demon Pop

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To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of KPop Demon Hunters.  The places I look for media advice generally don’t cover such fare.  I’m not into K-pop, Manga, or boy/girl bands.  Most of my media tends a bit towards the weightier side.  Now that I’ve sufficiently justified myself, my wife asked if I’d like to see it, pointing out that there were demons in it.  The concept seemed intriguing; Huntrix, a girl-band K-pop trio, hunt demons while building a protective barrier with their songs.  Then Gwi-Ma, the king of the demons agrees to a plan for a demonic boy band, the Saja Boys, to draw attention away from Huntrix, lessening their power and the protective shield they’ve built.  When demons get through they feast on the souls of humans.  Huntrix is hampered by the fact that Rumi, one of the singers, had a demon for a father and her bandmates, Mira and Zoey, do not know this.  When they find out, internal strife leads them to losing the battle of the bands.  Until they accept Rumi for who she is.

The story is well told, even for those of us who wouldn’t normally willingly listen to K-pop.  I appreciate stories of female empowerment.  And there are, after all, demons.  The concept of demons in eastern Asia is quite different from how they’re conceived in Abrahamic religions.  Gwi-Ma is not “the Devil,” although he shares some of those characteristics in this movie.  The demons are portrayed in monstrous form, and they are very numerous.  Since this is an animated film for audiences that include younger ages, they don’t reach horror-movie levels.  All in all, this wasn’t a bad diversion for an evening’s winding down.  It did make me think about the way demons differ not only across time, but across cultures.

As I discuss in Nightmares with the Bible, the concept of demons evolved over time in the western world.  Not all demons were bad in Greek thought, but monotheism made them evil.  Meanwhile further east in Asia, the concept—which may have developed independently—was more ambivalent.  Many years ago, while visiting my brother-in-law on the west coast, we watched an Anime movie about demons, but I’ve unfortunately forgotten the title.  Since this was about two decades ago, hope of recovering that data is minimal.  Still, I remember being affected by seeing it.  Of course, it wasn’t a musical.  Boy bands and girl bands seem not to have enough world-weariness to sing songs that resonate with me.  I guess I have my own demons with which to struggle.

Finding October

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This post is both about and not about a movie.  On a recent weekend I tried to watch The Houses October Built.  I found it on a free streaming service (with commercials) and settled in.  I’ve been looking for good movies to watch in October for many years, and this one seemed to have promise.  Then a couple of things happened.  But first, the idea: a group of friends want to find the most extreme haunted house attraction in the country.  Fine and good.  Their banter is appropriate, and engaging.  But thing one: the backdrop is again in part of the country where the leaves don’t change dramatically.  Like Halloween, it has the Southern California feel.  Not the truly spooky mid-Atlantic, upper Midwest, or New England autumn.  This is, for me, an integral part of the Halloween, or October experience.  It’s one of the reasons I could never move to the south.

Thing two: as a found footage movie, the camera motion made me physically sick.  Now, I don’t want to give up on “found footage” films.  I really liked The Blair Witch Project.  Perhaps because one of the missing campers was a film student, the camera motion wasn’t extreme.  I do remember newspaper reviews when it came out saying that some people left the theater ill because of it.  Since then, however, found footage has become a standard horror trope.  Some of it is quite good.  The Houses October Built joins VHS Viral, Amish Witches, and even Avatar 3D,  as films I could not finish watching because of too much camera motion.  Other movies have come close.  I’m sure the condition I have has a name.  Since it mostly affects me these days when watching movies, I see no reason to go under the knife to fix it.  But the fact is, the nausea after it sets in lasts for more than a day.  The insidious part is that I notice I’ve entered that realm suddenly, usually because a movie, like The Houses October Built, are engrossing.

If enough people read this blog I’d call this a plea to movie makers—the camera does not have to move constantly to make your film scary.  You are, in fact, limiting your viewership by at least one fan by making it utterly unwatchable.  No movie is worth being physically ill into the next day.  I have a friend whose favorite type of horror movie is found footage.  I often can’t discuss this with him because I’m often afraid to watch them.  And really, does anybody else appreciate that the trees are part of what makes the fall spooky?

Tapped Out

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I grew up with rock-n-roll.  Those born in the previous decade to mine can say the same thing, but collectively we are the earliest now adults who never knew life without it.  Extrapolating from that, the longest surviving early rockers are also aging and many of them are still playing.  In a nutshell this was the inspiration for Spinal Tap II, a mockumentary where Tap is legally obligated to perform one more concert.  The band members have been estranged for years, each having taken up a different career.  As with This Is Spinal Tap, their final concert is being documented by an interested director.  The band tries to negotiate all the changes that have taken place since the eighties which, God help me, were forty years ago.  The premise is both funny and sad.  Tensions still exist between Nigel and David, with Derek being the glue that holds them together.

The movie is entertaining and well done but does lack the energy of the 1984 film.  It made me reflective since the nature of fame is no protection against having to work into old age to survive.  Rock stars, like athletes, tend to peak at a young age.  With the improvements in health care and lifestyle, they can live many years beyond the height of their influence and it’s not unusual, if the money wasn’t managed well, for work to continue.  That fact hangs like a pall over the humor.  I still listen to the bands and performers from my youth who’ve continued to rock into their seventies, or in the case of the movie, Paul McCartney in his eighties, and ponder the passage of time and what it means.  As someone aging myself, I know what it’s like to think like a young person but awake with a body shy on the spryness factor.

Although critics mostly liked Spinal Tap II it did poorly at the box office.  I suspect many people my age feel this dilemma keenly.  Those of us who are seniors sometimes aren’t willing to let go and let others eclipse us.  We see this in the world of politics all the time.  Capitalism sets us up so that generally those who are old control the resources, and, rewarding greed, this system doesn’t encourage letting go.  Power, I imagine, creates quite a rush.  Being on stage with thousands of people adoring you must be something almost impossible to let go.  I also listen to some younger artists.  Rock is uniquely fitting for the young.  To me it seems that all is right as long as the music continues and inspired people, often young, continue to make it.

On the Run

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I come down on the side of book.  Usually.  In the book or movie first debate.  I have to confess, however, that I learned about Logan’s Run because of the movie.  It was quite impressionable on a teenage me, thinking that in such a world I’d have less than ten years left.  I bought the movie tie-in book and read it.  It was very different from the film.  I only remembered one scene from the book and so, nostalgia smothering me, I had to read it again.  The book was actually published in 1967, when I was quite young.  The movie came out in 1976, as did the tie-in novel.  The story has been replicated since then but the basic idea is that in the future overpopulation leads to the radical decision that everyone dies after turning twenty-one.  This is a world of the young.  Politics are handled by computer, and Sandmen, like Logan, hunt down and kill runners—those who try to escape their mandatory death.

There are a number of things to say about this.  One is that the two authors, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, had distinguished writing credits.  Another is that this is good sixties sci-fi, but belles lettres less so.  I still enjoyed reading it again.  It had been literally fifty years.  When this was written a population of six billion was considered unsustainable.  We’re now at over eight billion and it does seem as if we’ve tipped some kind of balance.  Another thing that stood out, one of the dangers of future-projecting sci-fi, is that newspapers are still a thing in the future.  They’re hardly a thing now.  They do make predictions for 2000, so maybe they should’ve pushed things out a bit further before committing.

In real life, the “developed” world actually has a problem of too many of us seniors and falling birth rates.  Nobody to take care of us when we no longer can.  This seems to be true in the United States, Japan, and China, at least.  Hopefully we won’t go to Logan’s solution.  So, as the book title suggests, Logan decides to run.  There’s a fair bit of religion in here.  He runs to find Sanctuary but, until very close to the end, intends to kill Ballard, the guy who helps runners escape.  There’s lots of adventure, several changing scenes, and a fair bit of testosterone.  Still, the story isn’t a bad one.  It’s old enough (ironically) to be a classic.  And yes, it’s still in print.  Part of my childhood has been restored.

Oh Deere

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Strange Harvest seems to have impressed a number of viewers, but for someone attuned to religion and horror it rang false.  The Lovecraftian elements appear with the idea of a serial killer who’s the devotee of an unfamiliar god.  The story is presented as a documentary, interviewing the detectives who resolved the case, intercut with crime scene footage—often quite graphic and gory—and trying to get to the bottom of this case.  So a guy named Leslie Sykes has been killing people in San Bernardino county since 1995.  He took a hiatus in his killing spree to go to Jerusalem, after seeing something in a cave while out hiking and experiencing a religious mania.  From Jerusalem he goes to Damascus and then into Europe, learning about religions, apparently, before stealing a grimoire from a bookshop in Germany.  He’s pretty clearly trying to raise an unorthodox deity, but the police don’t connect the dots.

After his years’ long absence, he starts killing again in order to have his last sacrifice ready when a rare triangular alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible with the naked eye.  He is stopped from his final murder attempt by the police, but witness cameras captured some strange cosmic event starting to unfold as the final victim is about to be immolated.  I’m not a fan of this kind of movie but what really made it seem less authentic was the stitched together nature of this religion.  It is never spelled out, it is true, but what is shown does not seem to add up to any coherent system.  The movie does an effective job of creating a scary sociopathic killer, but it implies that the religion responsible is real.  A religion of one, however, isn’t really a religion at all.

Again, critics seem to have liked this but I found the actions of the police inscrutable and the grotesque methods of torture and execution unequal to the task of suggesting how these might be connected into even a psychotic religious outlook.  The only thing that seems to connect them is an occult symbol left behind at the crime scenes.  The letters from the killer to the police are read only in part, and that by some kind of synth voice that’s probably meant to make them sound sinister.  This kind of horror can work, but in general, creating new religions is not as easy as it looks.  Lovecraftian isn’t a bad choice, but drawing the threads a little more closely together could’ve helped a lot.