Del Toro: Lovecraft Yes, Godzilla No

In an article on HitFix, Guillermo del Toro squashes rumors that he will be involved in the upcoming re-launch of Godzilla. That might be bad news for the fans of the giant Japanese monster, but good news for those of us who have wanted the Hellboy director to tackle his dream project for years.
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Animals

You may recall my assertion there aren’t that many great werewolf movies. Today we have another contender, the 2008 film Animals. Will it crack my all-time list?

Jarrett (Marc Blucas, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is a former football star who had his dreams crushed by a knee injury, forcing him to return to his hometown, Clayton Valley. There he works in construction for an overbearing boss and forgets his troubles each night at his friend’s bar. Vic (Naveen Andrews) and Nora (Nicki Aycox) are two transients, moving around the country by car. Nora wants to escape from Vic, but he always tracks her down.

As you can probably guess, Vic is a werewolf, and Nora is infected as well. She manages to elude him and ends up in dear old Clayton Valley, where she sees Jarrett as a possible protector. She seduces him, and passes the infection along in hopes he will be able to stand up to Vic. Doing so will bring tragedy to Jarrett’s little town, but Nora isn’t exactly your hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold type.

There’s not a lot to be said about the story, as it is pretty straightforward. Nora Infects Jarrett, Jarrett fights Vic and loses, Jarrett fights Vic again. You know have a couple outline of the plot.

The acting is decent, with the main cast plus Eva Amurri as Jarrett’s waitress friend who pines for him doing the best they can with the material. The direction is somewhat competent, although the director (or editor) uses jump cuts at odd and meaningless times, as well as peculiar slow motion, and the movie looks as if the entire thing was shot with inadequate lighting, though not as dark as some of the disasters I’ve seen. There is a great emphasis on sex, and some of the scenes seem to be going for a Cinemax-type appeal. If these were the only flaws, the movie might be a decent way to pass an evening if expectations were low.

However, the movie contains maybe the worst CGI I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched a lot of SyFy channel movies. The werewolves look more horse-like than wolf-like, glow, and are cartoonish. If you are old enough to remember games on the Atari 2600, you’ve seen much better animation there. Also, except for color variations, all the werewolves are identical after the change, so when they fight, you don’t know who is biting who.

Perhaps the final word on the film is the director Douglas Aarniokoski didn’t want his name on the film. He used the alias Arnold Cassius instead.
Animals is based on the final book written by the legendary splatterpunk writing team of John Skipp and Craig Spector, and adapted for the screen by Spector. Skipp and Spector produced some really good books, but, in my opinion, there was a decline in quality toward the end, and Animals was not one of their better ones.

You should see this if you have an overwhelming desire to see Nicki Aycox naked. Otherwise, spare yourself the lame CGI and give it a miss. I don’t think it’s worth it. Also, be forewarned: other than the names of the cast, the DVD cover has nothing to do with the movie inside.
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Wag the Fox on Charles Beaumont

Friend and fellow blogger Rabid Fox, whose blog you should read regularly anyway, just did a nice piece called "My Five: Favorite Twilight Zone Episodes by Charles Beaumont". This is worth a look, because Beaumont, who wrote a number of classic short stories and 22 episodes for Twilight Zone, is one of the great more-or-less forgotten authors. Beaumont contracted what seemed to be early-onset Alzheimer's in his early thirties, and was dead at 37. There are a lot of great stories that didn't get written because of this. Read his collection The Howling Man, if you get a chance.
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Dark House

In time for Halloween, a group of new horror DVD releases have hit the stores under the banner of Fangoria Frightfest. They are all inexpensively priced, and somewhat indistinguishable outwardly in quality. I settled on Dark House as my first test subject, primarily because its cast included Jeffrey Combs (Reanimator) a genre veteran who is under-valued as an actor. I figured he’d be entertaining, at least.

Fourteen years earlier, a little girl accepts a dare from her friends to enter a spooky house where a crazy woman cares for foster children. Inside she finds a house filled with freshly murdered children, and the proprietor standing at the kitchen sink, grinding her hands away in the garbage disposal. The little girl, by the way, takes this all in rather calmly. I start getting nervous by the third butchered body I find, and I can’t stand to see someone mutilate themselves with a garbage disposal, but she takes it like a champ.

Flash forward to the movie’s present, and a now-adult girl is going to acting classes and seeing a shrink to deal with the memory of those events. The psychiatrist must have studied under Doctor Mengele, because he urges her to return to the scene of the murders to confront her fears. Oh, yeah, that’s great advice. Her opportunity to do so comes one day in acting class when Walston (Combs) shows up to hire the fledgling thespians. He makes a living off building spooky attractions, and his next project is to turn the Darrode House, where the killings occurred into Dark House (hence the title) into the greatest of his attractions. Given the lure of money, the students accept.

The group of acting students is one of the weaker parts of the movie, since they pretty much fit the stereotypes. There’s The Jock, The Slut, The Goth Chick, etc. despite the stereotypes, only a couple are annoying, so you don’t fall into the usual mode of rooting for everyone to die. They agree to play roles in the haunted house, not knowing one of their group has a history with it. Let me tell you, when the main actress is playing an actress who is supposed to be acting, you can tell she has the wrong major.

Dark House does look like the greatest haunted house ever. There are lifelike holograms that chase you down the hallways, elaborate sets, and anything else you could want in an attraction. I certainly wanted to buy a ticket. Of course, on the trial run-through, with a couple of reporters present (one from a fictional version of Fangoria, for those of you who like your stories meta), everything goes wrong. The holograms come to life, the fake traps turn deadly, and the group is diminished as they try to find a way to escape.

It doesn’t sound that great, does it? But surprisingly, I was pretty pleased with it. Combs is a delight as always, but the main thing is the makers of the movie didn’t take it overly seriously. There is a fair amount of humor, each of the characters have something to do other than die, and there are a number of in-joke references to other films (sample lines include “Be afraid. Very afraid.” and “Come with me if you want to live.”) I thought the frequent intercuts to warnings on the screens of the computers that controlled the house (FILE CORRUPTED, VIRUS ATTACK, etc.) to be useless and annoying since we know it is a supernatural threat, but nothing’s perfect.

If Dark House is a good representation of the series, I’m eager to see the others. If you’re looking for something new this Halloween, you could do worse than this one. It doesn’t set the world on fire, but it will give you an evening’s entertainment.

Art For Halloween

Sometimes you gotta go high class. Today, here's a link for you to Chicago Now's Halloween Art Monsters, featuring classical paintings with morbid or horrific scenes, such as the one to the right (It is Edvard Munch's The Vampire). I don't remember any of them from Famous Monsters of Filmland.
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Halloween Cartoon # 3

The Dead Path

The most over-used cover blurb in horror fiction is some version of “The next Stephen King!” There’s good reason for this, as King is the all-time horror sales reader, and is still hitting the best-seller lists 35 years after his debut, but the only Stephen King is still the original. Horror readers have learned to wince and ignore the hyperbole, which has to have been used with half the published horror writers over the years, and it has become pretty much of a joke, and most reviewers who want to be taken seriously have learned to avoid the comparison. I bring this up because I’m about to do it myself, as far as I can remember for the first time, with the debut novel of Australian author Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path.

Nicholas Close is an Australian expatriate living a good life in London. He’s got a good job, buying antiques to use in design for restaurants, and is in love with his wife, Cate. A tragic combination of accidents ends his dream, as Cate is killed, and he is left with an unwanted ability: to see the dead. His is not a hip, useful ability to converse with the spirits of the dead and gone, but a debilitating one. If he is where a death has occurred, he sees the person’s demise, repeated over and over again, including that of his wife. This destroys whatever chance he had of living a decent life in London (in such an old city, there probably aren’t too many locations where someone didn’t die at one time or another) and send him back to Australia, to his home town of Tallong and his distant mother.

Tallong presents more problems to Nicholas, as there is a patch of sinister woods near his old house mostly shunned by locals. When Nicholas was a boy, he and his best friend were chased through those woods by a killer. Nicholas escaped; his friend was found days later with his throat cut. This event is brought to the forefront of his mind upon his return when he learns another boy has died in similar fashion in the same woods. Haunted and with time on his hands, Nicholas learns children have been killed in a similar fashion for over a hundred years. Something ancient and evil lurks in those dark woods, and it has long had plans for him. He learns his past is more intertwined with those dark experiences than he could have imagined, and he may very well be the only one who can stop them.

I was riveted by this novel. It is the best horror novel I have read this year, and time will tell how high it ranks with me overall. Irwin has a smooth assured style, very much so for a first time novelist, and the book has a narrative flow that has become somewhat rare these days. I hate to make the comparison, but The Dead Path reminds me of nothing so much as early-to-mid period Stephen King, and in all the right ways. Transplant the location from Australia to King’s Maine, and it would fit in well with the better part of his body of work. If you like Stephen King, and if you read horror you probably do, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t like The Dead Path. I loved it, and I will be eager to see what Mr. Irwin writes next. A hat tip to my friend Matt Staggs for this one.

A lot has been made in recent months about the future of horror being found in the small press, but I have to say that most of the enjoyable new horror novels I’ve read in the past few months have come from mainstream publishers, with The Passage and The Fall joining The Dead Path on my tentative best of 2010 list.

If you live in the UK, The Dead Path was published there last year under the Bentley Little-ish title The Darkening. Normally, I think U.S. titles are somewhat dumbed down, but I think here The Dead Path is a superior title.

{Addition} As The Doctor points out in the comments, The Dead Path was the original title in Australia, it was changed to the more generic one in the UK. For no good reason, I think.
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