From Zombos' Closet

Boris Karloff: The Man Remembered

Horror suggests physical repulsion, disgust, and that seems to me a worthless, pointless reaction for any work of entertainment to aim at; it's so easy it isn't worth doing. An eye, say, plopping all bloody into a glass dish may provoke a gasp of revulsion when it is first seen on the screen, but this is an entirely physical thing, and something one can get used to--no doubt with a certain coarsening of one's responses in the process. The second or third time something like this happens in a film, the surprise and excitement is gone, and then you come back to the old, inevitable question. What is there to support it in the way of plot and characterization, to give it some point other than providing an immediate physical shock? In other words, what is there to appeal to the spectator's imagination? --Boris Karloff interview, The Times.

I met Gordon B. Shriver at the Monster Bash in 2007, and again in 2008. He read from his one-man play on the life of Boris Karloff at Max, the Drunken Severed Head;s annual party for the notables and quotables attending the annual classic horror convention. Max lets me in anyway.

Boris Karloff: The Man Remembered grew out of Shriver's fascination and admiration for the man whom many horror fans hold in high regard. Karloff's tireless and masterful acting brought life not only to the Frankenstein Monster, but to the Mummy and countless other major and minor roles, whether by using his unique mannerisms and posture, or by using his unmistakable voice,  lisping ever so eloquently, immortalized as the narration for 1966's animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Karloff became the personification of embraceable horror for a generation--and beyond, bringing his terror with a twinkling eye into everyone's living room.

While we grew to love him in movies that tickled our fright-bone, much of Karloff's acting also occurred on stage, radio and, in later years, television.Throughout his long career, even when faced with debilitating arthritis and emphysema, he continued to give every assignment his professional all. Shriver's correspondence with many of the people who worked with and knew Karloff provides a view of the man as consummate acting professional, always downplaying his stardom, and tempering his sinister onscreen persona with wit, charm, and an urbane demeanor in real life.

LOTT D Roundtable: What's Wrong With Today's Horror Movies? Part Two

In Part One of What's Wrong With Today's Horror Movies, the League of Tana Tea Drinkers hoisted a few crisp, wet ones while dwelling on the exigencies, intricacies, and commodities of postmodern (as well as classic and neo-classic) horror film fair, and it's looming quietus into something amounting to little more than the taste of grisly pablum. With salty pretzels well in hand, and a cold drink in the other, let us get back to the discussion.

Dinner With Max Jenke wants more on his plate...

This is a topic that lots of fans have an immediate answer to, with plenty of vitriol to share about how horror is a diluted product now - just watered-down thrills made for an undiscriminating audience. Tips for improvement run the whole gamut--horror movies should be R and not PG-13, there should be less of a focus on teenagers, and more original films instead of remakes and sequels.

But horror fans of every generation have typically made it a point to complain that the horror films of the present are inferior to whatever scare fare they grew up on. I imagine that even some ancient moviegoers who were raised in the silent days must have believed that the advent of sound was the death knell of true horror. Because, you know, movies are only scary when you have to imagine what a creaking door sounds like. And once black and white was replaced by color, I bet some fans never recovered from that because everybody knows that horror movies just don’t work as well unless they’re in black and white. The point being that every era has given horror fans something new to gripe about.

LOTT D Roundtable: What's Wrong With Today's Horror Movies?

Are you a horror movie fan? Maybe you prefer a good slasher flick from the 1980s, or perhaps you are more into gore and dream of squirming in your theater seat every Halloween watching the umpteenth version of Saw? Maybe you pine away for the good old days when being scared by Boris, or Bela, or Price was fun, not nauseating. Maybe you are just fed up with it, and dread every new--strike that--every remade horror release from Hollywood? Even if it is not a remake, odds are it will be the same old dreck dressed up with new victims. So what is really wrong with today's horror movies? Have they traded in the carefully crafted hair-raising scares for easy gut-wrenching shocks? Has the Sargasso Sea of inept, Happy Meal-packaged DVD dreck finally sunk the horror craft? Whatever happened to using suggestion and suspense and atmosphere to tell a story anyway?

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers gather at the table for another round while they ponder this curious case of forgotten lore. Have one on us and join the conversation.

Horrors Not Dead opines today's horror movies are not yesterday's horror movies...

The problem with today's horror movies is they are not yesterday’s horror movies. I mean this not in a caliber comparison, rather strictly in temporal proximity. I think neither the horror community nor the fan community at large has had enough time to digest the current crop of horror output. I feel only time will separate the wheat from the chaff, that the current generation of horror acolytes have forgotten their now cherished classics were often not only ill received upon first introduction, but down right dismissed. The saying goes Time Heals All Wounds. I think as far as horror is concerned, time shows which wounds never heal.

Not nearly enough time has passed for this conversation to properly take place. Not nearly enough middle schoolers have snuck into current R rated films, had parents let them run wild in the sacred horror isles of a Video store (rare oasis they be), or had older siblings pass them an illicit DVD of a film so reprehensible it shall surely burn itself upon their psyche for years to come.

Times have changed. The arena has changed and, frankly, I think the old guard hasn’t. For the purpose of full disclosure, let me state the following: I am fairly confident that I am the youngest of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers. Barely weeks into my 23rd year on this blue ball, I have grown up with a different set of films than the other LOTTD’ers. I wasn’t weaned on the likes of black and white, of De Palma and Wes Craven, of Grindhouse or Italian shockers. I cut my teeth on Predator 2, on Alien 3. On Tremors and Army of Darkness, Lord of Illusions and Scream. I grew up thinking Slashers were a punchline to be laughed at. I caught the tail end of the golden age (as far as I am now concerned) and was none the baby faced wiser.

Did it change my appreciation of horror? You bet. Do I love The Thing as much as the next nut? You bet. Point is, I was rewinding VHS tapes of I Know What You Did Last Summer long before I had any idea who in the hell John Carpenter was. By the previous generation’s standards, today’s horror sucks. Hell, by my standards today’s horror sucks. However, let us not forget that a slumber party somewhere is full of bodies quivering with anticipation at the prospect of watching Hostel. Maybe they snuck the DVD out of their older brother’s collection; maybe their parents could care less what the kids add to the Netflix queue. Maybe they strolled into Best Buy and bought the flick without incidence. Whatever the circumstances, I assure you that a new generation of horror fans are cowering in fear watching the likes of Hostel.

And I hate Hostel. I think it is a terrible film, a boil upon our smooth operating genre. This love fest is coming from someone whose site’s title, Horrors Not Dead, is a direct reference to Hostel purveyor Eli Roth’s thoughts on the Cabin Fever DVD commentary. But just because I think the thing is a dreadful exercise in shock with no awe, an affliction spreading through the new harvest of horror films, that does not unsoil the pants of an adolescent batch of horror fans in the making. They eat it up and I respect that. I was first in line to see Jennifer Love Hewitt’s cleavage bounce around in a low cut top like some kind of rain dance to stave off a hook wielding fisherman. I had poor taste once, too. So did you.

However, aside from the current cohort of horror fans loving the films we versed in the genre lambaste, I still stake the problem with today’s horror is that it is not yesterday’s horror. The space-time continuum does not yield for us. Horror films are being produced and released at an unprecedented pace. Even the most dedicated of fans, new or old, can’t keep up with the niche throughput. Factor in the excision of latitudinal and longitudinal borders thanks to the Internet, cheap international shipping rates and region free DVD players, and, well, few can see everything.

The problem with today is its inability to simultaneously be yesterday. No one has discovered the real gems yet, the wounding 24 frames per second unhealed by time. Nothing is canonical, because nothing can be canonical in an industry of perpetual discovery. No one has time to pull back, take a breather and acknowledge just why the Spanish hit [REC] is a viral piece of cinema because they are too busy watching the trailer for the American remake re-titled Quarantine or reading about the proposed sequel. That isn’t a snide swipe at the current state of the industry, which anachronistically remakes and repackages before release even takes place. That is just the state of the game.

However, someone somewhere does need to pull back, needs to attempt to separate themselves from time and space, factor in all the variables and see what sinks and what rises. If that is my burden to bear as a modern horror blogger, so be it. No regrets on this end. I get to tell someone that Teeth is the millennium’s most unappreciated creature feature. That Altered is a thoroughly enjoyable twist on the alien abduction niche undeserving of its relegation to Straight-to-DVD obscurity. That I may just be one of the few people blown away by The Last Horror Movie. ThatBlack Water struck an indelible fear of crocodiles in me. That Storm Warning is a welcome relief in the overwrought Hillbillys-Rape-Locals brand of horror. That some studios still take risks on superficially silly material like killer plants and turn out horrifying product like 2008’s best horror film thus far, The Ruins. Or that [REC] will make grown men shit their pants.

I, not a film critic, just a film enthusiast, get to discover and share all those films with readers around the world. Every couple weeks I round up my own little big-screen-in-the-basement bound festival of titles chosen from blog of mouth. My friends, who couldn’t tell David Cronenberg from David Caruso, are routinely blown away by the new batch of horror out there. And when they aren’t, well, I just pop in The Thing and let ‘em discover how glorious old school horror is. Let’s not forget just how many horror films are released each and every month. I personally don’t see how anyone can cover them all with a blanket statement declaring, “The problem with today’s horror is…”

The only problem I find is there isn’t enough time in the day to discover what I’m missing out on.

Slasher Speak wonders where all the innocents has gone...

Modern horror movies have lost their innocence. Sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true. Gone are the days of wide-eyed awe at creatures that defied explanation and dazzled with their improbability, monsters that sprung forth from our internalized fears onto the screen. The modern horror film is less thematic and more about…well, everyday horror.

Trouble is that genre films today are more focused on the depiction of horror where horror films past concentrated on the personification of horror. Horror once spoke subtly, using allegory and metaphor and symbolism to convey the horror at its core. Horror spoke to you through the back door; it whispered in your ear. Headlines of the day were cloaked in comforting doses of filmmakers’ imagination - monsters and make-believe terrors. You escaped with horror to indirectly deal with broader societal issues that terrified or confused you – communism, war, racism, sexual liberation.

With its propensity for horror that’s ripped from the headlines, the genre now clobbers viewers over the head with the same reality they’re trying to escape. Home invasions, torture abroad, organ harvesters. There's little symbolism, little metaphor, little allegory. It’s all on full, graphic display, and there is no escape. Horror films today force us to confront visceral depictions of the stories we hear on the evening news. Our reality is met with reality masquerading as escapism on the screen. As a result, the horror movie experience is less cathartic, less therapeutic. It reinforces instead of relieves our fears. It's less roller coaster, more carousel.

Perhaps we’ve become too sophisticated for the simple cinematic metaphor, too jaded to buy into the personification of evil, too numb to bloodshed and violence. We know what evil is – we’re inundated with its images and affects 24/7 on streaming newscasts. There seems to be so little that shocks us that the boundaries in modern horror cinema have been stretched to their outer limits. And now that the concept of community is a fading aspect of our culture, there are few collective fears. Tapping into individual fears is a taller order for filmmakers, so they opt for depiction over personification. Moviemakers cop out and recycle ideas instead of creating the next creature from a black lagoon or the next thing from another world. Studios opt for remakes that spit in the eyes of the source material and reimaginings that have less to do with actual imagination and more to do with wringing as many dollars from old ideas with as little effort or artistry as possible. The fun has been zapped from modern horror movies, and we’re often left to suffer through joyless celluloid creations that lack passion for the horror at their core – slick eye candy possessing all the substance of a vacuous blond sipping cosmos at a bar. There are exceptions, of course, but those are few and far between the dreck.

Even the horror movie experience itself has changed drastically. With the fading of community, the collective viewing experience of Saturday afternoon matinées is on the decline. People opt for the comfort and sanctuary of their own home theaters and the resulting experience is heavily dulled down. No longer is there that marvelous shared fear, tension, and anxiety of a hundred people all simultaneously tensing and cowering and jumping and screaming in a crowded movie theater. The enchantment of greasy popcorn and musty theater seats is quickly approaching antiquation as studios contemplate ways to make quicker, bigger bucks by releasing films simultaneously to multiplexes and home viewing markets. We’re developing cultural immunity to our once beloved horror movie experience.

Worse, we’ve created a generation numb to horror films. Their reactions alone – laughter, mockery, derision – bespeak the failure of the modern genre film. Imagination in our young has been replaced by the instantly gratifying images of interactive video games and other high-tech fare that spell it all out on high-definition monitors. There are no spooky walks through the woods, no backyard sleep-outs, no summer camp rites of passage to tantalize and tickle those dark spots in our subconscious. Folklore that once fueled imagination is on the decline, with yarns about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and the Bermuda Triangle reduced to tabloid fodder and ridicule from even the youngest of minds. Campfire tales and urban legends have been replaced by sensationalized newscasts. In our scientific world, everything has a rational explanation and there’s little room left for the possibility of things unknown to us. We’re arrogant in our knowledge as a society, and the simplicity of horror cinema has suffered. Sometimes ignorance is bliss – at least when it comes to our horror movies.

Theofantastique ponders on our current social and cultural context of postmodernity and the influence of commodification...oh my.

The problem with today’s horror movies is our current social and cultural context of postmodernity and the influence of commodification. No doubt, at this point, readers are scratching their heads and saying, “What?” Allow me to explain.

Horror is a complex genre involving multiple layers of interpretation, and as Stephen King has noted it “is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful.” One of the ways in which horror demonstrates its adaptability is that it provides a means of not only entertainment, but also an expression and means grappling with some of our greatest fears as individuals and cultures. It should come as no surprise then that as individuals and cultures change so do their fears, and these changes result in differing cinematic expressions of horror. Earlier in the modern period horror helped express fears of the Other in its various manifestations that were symbolized in the monster. But with late modernity or postmodernity, a post-1960s phenomenon which is often tied cinematically to films like Psycho (1960), The Night of the Living Dead(1968), or The Exorcist (1973), there has been a shift from the monster as Other to an internalization process whereby the monster is us. The shift from the externalized monster as the locus of horror to an internalized terror is the result of social forces and perceptions that in turn colored interpretation of the self. Lianne McLarty discusses this in her chapter “‘Beyond the Veil of the Flesh’: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror” as part of The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press, 1996):

This ‘delegitimization’ of social institutions and the ‘instability’ of subjectivity finds expression in the ways in which these films depict both the monstrous threat and its consequences for protagonists. In contemporary (postmodern) horror, the threat is ‘not simply among us, but rather part of us, caused by us.’ Institutions (like the church and the military) that were once successful in containing the monster and restoring order are at best innefectual (there is often a lack of closure) and at worst responsible for the monstrous. Contemporary horror also tends to collapse the categories of normal and monstrous bodies; it is said to dispense with the binary opposition of us and them, and to resist the portrayal of the monster as a completely alien Other, characteristics of such 1950s films as The Thing (from Another World) (1951), Them! (1954), and The Blob (1958). This tendency to give the monster a familiar face (the monster is not simply among us, but possibly is us) is tied, in postmodern horror, to the focus on the body as site of the monstrous.

This shift from modern horror with the monster as external Other to the internal us with a related emphasis on the body has resulted in the continued tendency toward the production of slasher films beginning in the 1970s and gaining steam in the 1980s and beyond. A further development of this may be found in more recent films where the monster is not the lone psychological deviant such as Michael Myers of Halloween, but a group dynamic (in terms of the perpetrators) of psychological deviance as in Saw (if not in the original at least in the sequels), and Hostel, where the body most strongly becomes the site of the monstrous through graphic depictions of torture and mutilation.

I am not a prude when it comes to violence in film, but I do have my preferences in expressions of horror, no doubt due to the influences of my social environment as I was growing up. I first encountered horror in the late 1960s and early 1970s through horror’s twins in science fiction and fantasy films that depicted the monsterous Other as alien invader, the result of science gone awry, or prehistoric beast meets modern society. Later I encountered the classic Universal and Hammer horror films which again depicted the monster externally, and it was only in my later teens that I engaged postmodern horror with its emphasis on psychological deviance, the internalization of horror, and bodily mutilation as the primary expression of the horrific. In essence I suppose I was inculturated in a particular expression of horror, the early modern expression with the externalized monster, and as a result I have always found this expression of horror more frightening, indeed, more appealing. I think I might also find the complete internalization of horror within myself extremely distasteful. I recognize that human beings are indeed a curious mix of greatness and tragedy, but for me, postmodern horror’s revelry in human evil and bodily mutilation presents an overly dark and nihilistic expression of human nature and horror that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Related to these social and cultural considerations that result in a struggling horror market is its connection to commodification. Horror films are commodities designed to provide the highest return on investment possible, at least in those films produced by Hollywood and mainstream studios, and the emphasis on horror as commodity often leaves creativity and good storytelling by the wayside. In my view, some of the best contemporary horror comes from independent filmmakers and from the international market, with directors from Asia and Mexico, not the United States. In regards to independent filmmakers, the priority is given to good stories and frights, and while international horror is just as connected to commodification as the American horror market, somehow they have manged to provide a fresh infusion of creativity and conceptualization into the American horror market.

I recognize that my preferences for horror cause me to lean largely toward the Gothic, although my preferences for an early modern form of horror certainly go beyond this specific expression of horror. I am not alone in such preferences, and in sharing the reasons why these are indeed horror preferences, as evidenced by others such as Bruce Lanier Wright in his book Nightwalkers: Gothic Horror Movies (Taylor Publishing Company, 1995), have expressed similar preferences in contrast with contemporary postmodern horror:

..I believe that ideas have consequences, and I do worry about the idea embodied both in gore-porn and a good many modern ‘horror’ films. The underlying theme of Grand Guignol entertainment can be stated quite simply: You and I are pieces of meat, and all our interactions - anything we do to or for one another - are merely the random collisions of pieces of meat, without meaning or significance. This is a legitimate artistic position, and one developed with some brilliance by George Romero and others. It’s also a tremendously popular idea in mass media. The handful of individuals how decide what appears on television and in our theaters, not being particularly altruistic by nature, must believe it’s what you want to see.

The Gothic position, by contrast, is that good and evil do exist, and that men’s actions carry a moral weight; that our choices count. And if our actions have some sort of importance, maybe we do, too. Maybe we’re more than just the some of our desires and hatreds.

This post will likely be a little more “heady” than many of my fellow LOTT D unity post bloggers, but I think there’s something worth thinking about here. If horror is indeed an adaptable and useful genre we might be thinking about not only why it entertains, but also why it changes in its expression, and what the internalized “monsterous us” of contemporary, postmodern, nihilistic horror says about us as individuals and as a culture.

Intermission time! "Let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby, to get ourselves a snack!"

Read Part Two

Interview: Leslie S. Klinger

In regard to the curious incident of  Leslie S. Klinger's extensive background in annotating fictional works of great significance, which begin with a certain detective--

Mr. Klinger's work is an update and expansion of William S. Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a monumental feat of scholarship, published in 1967. It was Mr. Baring-Gould's edition, which Mr. Klinger received as a gift from his first wife in 1968, that initially sent him sliding down the rabbit hole of Sherlockiana. --New York Times, 12-30-04

--And culminate with his elucidation of one singular individual, of dubious notoriety, and ungodly nighttime habits--

In his first work since his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger returns with this spectacular, lavishly illustrated homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula. With a daring conceit, Klinger accepts Stoker's contention that the Dracula tale is based on historical fact...employing the superb literary detective skills for which he has become famous, Klinger mines this 1897 classic for nuggets that will surprise even the most die-hard Dracula fans and introduce the vampire-prince to a new generation of readers.

--This much can be said: bring it on. And he did.

Movie Review: Mirrors (2008)

Zombos Says: Good

In a vivid red and brightly gruesome death scene, a woman's mirror reflection pulls it's mouth apart while leering at her lying in the bathtub; very, very far apart. As the reflection's mouth starts ripping into dripping, stringy tissue, so does the real one, sending a shower of blood in every direction. I blinked for a second, wondering whether this was really happening to her or just an illusion, like Ben Carson's (Kiefer Sutherland) incendiary mirror reflection encounter earlier in the film, which left him unnerved but not scorched. Whatever the smudgy black cloud in the mirror is, it can either make you imagine what it shows you is real, or make its diabolical reflections really happen. This time, her mouth stayed open; wide, wide open.

In director Alexandre Aja's version of Kim Sung-Ho's Into the Mirror,  the mystery in Mirrors surrounds the bizarre actions of two former security guards making the rounds of a burned-out department store, in New York City (though primarily filmed in Romania), awaiting renovation. Carson is a suspended NYPD detective involved in an accidental shooting, now battling his retreat into a liquor bottle. He takes up the nightly routine to pay the bills, walking through the department store's charred hallways past the many scorched mannequins and large mirrors reflecting the destruction all around him, with his flashlight barely illuminating the darkness. A palm print on the surface of one squeaky clean mirror peeks his curiosity, and soon a dark force begins to exert its will on him through the glass, showing people in flames and sending him to the flooded basement where  the answer to the mystery lies.

Movie Review: The X-Files I Want to Believe (2008)

Zombos Says: Very Good

Mulder:
Scully? Why would he say that? "Don't give up." Why would he say such a thing to you?

Scully:
I think that was clearly meant for you, Mulder.

Mulder:
He didn't say it to me. He said it to you. If Father Joe were the devil, why would he say the opposite of what the devil might say? Maybe that's the answer, the larger answer. Don't give up.

Can a summer movie containing no car chases, no explosions, no larger than life monsters still succeed? Yes, according to director Chris Carter and writer Frank Spotnitz, if the movie is The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Replacing the special effects-driven drumbeat of the summer blockbuster with the drama of people wanting to believe in something greater than themselves, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are brought together again to find the truth behind strange disappearances in snowbound, rural, West Virginia (though actually filmed in Canada). Along the way, they must come to a greater understanding of their own truths: the ones that drive both of them to never give up.

For Mulder, the truth is out there, waiting to be revealed if you keep searching for it. For Scully, the truth is deep inside, waiting for you to see it, even when those around you refuse to believe in its possibilities. For Father Joe, the truth is already known: he loathes it and desperately hopes for a greater one to take its place. For Janke and Franz, they want to believe in something the two of them can share, even if it is freaky enough to open an x-file-styled investigation; for them, the end justifies the means, and those means are gruesome. Who will be saved, damned, or remain indifferent? This is the essential quandary that every x-file poses for us as well as Mulder and Scully.

LOTT D Roundtable: The Allure of Evil

Why are we attracted to and mesmerized by evil people in horror cinema and novels? Gloomy Sunday's Gothic-romantic, Absinthe, kicks off this round of commentary from the League of Tana Tea Drinkers to explore this question. From Bela Lugosi to Freddy Kruger, the league pokes and prods as only it can do, to unearth the answers, the assumptions, and the contradictions. 

Gloomy Sunday explores the bad boys of screen and novel...

Why are we attracted to villains? Why are we drawn towards characters we really should hate? Why do we sometimes find sex appeal in characters who are hideous or deformed? Is it we can relate better to people who have flaws, people who are more realistically human with their dark sides instead of the cookie cutter heroes and heroines we usually see in movies?  Or does it go deeper, to an instinctual level, left over from a more primitive time, when only the strong thrived and reproduced, drawing us to the powerfully wicked onscreen?

Pinhead from Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart and the later Hellraiser movies--although I only speak for the first two because after that they suck--is one of my favorite villains and one I think has strong sexual appeal despite his skin being the color of a dead fish, with nails protruding from his head, and a strange, but kinky, sadomasochistic leather outfit hinting at damnation. If you wanted to, you could compare the premise Hellraiser is based on to a metaphor for sexual freedom by looking at the puzzle box, which involves a quest for something much desired, yet secret, dark, and forbidden to have. If Pinhead quickly came into scene and dispatched his victims, we would not be so drawn to him. Instead, he shows human characteristics we can relate to. In Hellbound, Hellraiser II he does not kill Tiffany when she opens the box because he knows that "hands did not call us, desire did." He seems fair even though he is a killer, and he continually lets Kirsty slip through the damning cracks by allowing deals and bargains. Is it his power we are drawn to, the relief provided by his human flaws that we can relate to, or the subtext of sublime sexual naughtiness he is the front man for?

Movie Review: The Dark Knight (2008)

Zombos Says: Excellent

Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair. --the Joker in The Dark Knight.

 

Moral darkness permeates Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. The Joker, Batman's antithesis, returns to his unsavory blend of homicidal insanity and nihilistic artistry, first seen in the 1940 Batman comic book, but softened in his subsequent appearances. Gone is the whimsically murderous trickster of precise origin, the clown prince of crime as portrayed in movies, the Batman television series, and many of the DC comic books. Replaced by Heath Ledger's chillingly amoral, incomprehensibly insane and powerfully corrupting scion of the Devil, no one, including us, is left laughing now.

Throughout The Dark Knight, one question propels the story with its increasing urgency for an answer: how can Batman and Gotham city combat the irreconcilable evil embodied by the Joker without resorting to evil themselves? Batman, Lt. Gordon, and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), must answer it in their own way as the Joker forces them into an ever narrower space for dealing with his escalating chaos and body count. With his smeared makeup, stringy hair, cruelly scarred mouth--and ever-changing story as to how he received his permanent smile--Ledger's Joker is so evil, so anarchic, and so corrupting in his influence, there is no middle ground for goodness and morality to easily stand on. A human Thanatos unfettered by guilt, he makes Hannibal Lecter and the Jigsaw Killer look like Abbott and Costello. The only way to stop him is to murder him; at least, that's what he really wants. But will Batman put aside his moral code to do it? More importantly, do we want him to?

Remote Control Zombie of Your Very Own!

It's here, it's here! Run for your lives and grab one!

Now, if they'd only come in life-size...

From Archie McPhee:

THE REMOTE CONTROL MOANING, WALKING ZOMBIES!

That's right, you can finally control your own undead minion using a brain-shaped remote that toggles it on and off. No more breaking into graveyards and casting voodoo spells, technology will do it all for you! One push of a button sends your own personal zombie shuffling and moaning in whatever direction you point him! Use this remote control zombie to scare your office mates and torment your pets.

 

Graphic Book Review: Zombie World Winter's Dregs

Zombos Says: Very Good

Summertime fun getting you down? Can't wait for the colder days, darker days, more depressing sunless days? Want to bury all sand-loving, beach-going, family members and significant others up to their necks close to the water's edge at low tide? Fret no more. Don't get mad, suicidal, or homicidal; instead, pick up Zombie World: Winter's Dregs and Other Stories from Dark Horse, and bring back your sanity with its two-hundred and forty pages packed with apocalyptic carnage.

These four stories, originally appearing in the Zombie World comic book series, bring us closer to those undead we all crave. Think surviving the glump at the gasoline pump is hard, try dealing with ravenous hordes of commuters who want to fill up on you. With writers and artists like Bob Fingerman, Kelley Jones, Tommy Lee Edwards, Pat Mills, J. Deadstock (how apropos), Gordon Rennie and Gary Erskine, you can feel secure in knowing that your hard-earned greenbacks are being well spent.

The title story, Winter's Dregs, kicks off the mayhem in a fast-paced panel by panel exchange between central characters caught up in their daily lives--and deaths. In a city overrun by rats, when people dying in reverse shakes up the routine run to Starbucks, cry havoc and let loose the zombies. Each page is drawn in a heavy, EC horror comics, over-inked style, bleeding black into the surroundings, the characters, and the action. The murky colors create a sense of constant dread which lets up only after you reach the last panel. The story takes time to set up its characters first, then introduces zombies in a subway smackdown after the mayor orders a full-scale assault on brazen rats vexing his administration. Involved dialog and social interactions sustain the buildup to zero hour, fleshing out the people whose mundane paths intertwine with the staggering undead in this day in the life--and death--of a city.

Movie Review: Diary of the Dead (2007) Another Day Unlike Any Other

Zombos Says: Very Good

It was a gloomy scene both inside and out. Gloomy inside because outside it was sunny-bright and barbecue-hot, and "perfect beach weather" as the saying goes, making it all the more depressing for those of us who cherish the cooler Autumn months.

Inside the library, not even the sombre and ominous strains of Midnight Syndicate's The Rage soundtrack could assuage Zombos' contortions across the various furnishings at regular intervals. For Autumn people like us, summer is that seasonal aberration, a temperate nuisance we must endure before the joys of the grayer October Country days take precedence.

The Fantasy Clock on the mantelpiece stuttered the slow passing of time. I put down the book I was reading, 41 Stories by O. Henry, to see if I could charge Zombos with enough energy to get him out of his summer doldrums. His latest contortion had him slumped across the emerald-green velvet upholstered Sleepy Hollow chair.

"How about watching Edges of Darkness in the cinematorium?" I asked. "It's got vampires fretting over their human food supply when zombies invade their home turf?"

Zombos moaned.

"Then how about we go to Adventure Land and we ride the Haunted House again and again?" I asked.

Zombos moaned louder.

I tossed over the scintillating premiere issue of Scarlet: The Film Magazine to him: no galvanic response. Van Helsing's Journal of World Fantastica produced no spark, either. Damn, this was more serious than I thought.

In the hallway, Zimba and Zombos Jr's going-to-Jones-Beach clamour chided us, by intention, as they rushed past the library door. Zombos Jr. made a point of banging his sand toys loudly, and Zimba clip-clopped more heavily in her flip-flops. A whiff of suntan lotion floated into the library causing Zombos' pearly-white skin to sneeze through his nose in allergic terror at the thought of hot sunlight roasting it in cocoa butter.

Chef Machiavelli, another beach-lover, happily joined them in their sandy debauchery. He stuck his head into the room as he hurried off. "Severese," he said with a wink, pointing in the direction of the kitchen.

Zombos sprung to action. The magic bullet had hit its target dead center. For an aging dilettante of horror movies, he sure could throttle into high gear when Brooklyn Italian Ices were in licking distance. His favorite is Jelly Ring, by the way, and mine is Pistachio. We raided the walk-in freezer and devoured large quantities of deliciously flavored ice like zombies chewing on a cornered victim.

"Speaking of zombies," I began to say, verbalizing my thought.

"What's that?" asked Zombos, going for thirds.

"Why don't we watch Romero's Diary of the Dead. Zombies and Italian Ices go together well, you know.

He looked at me for a second; I was not sure if out of perplexity or sudden brain freeze. "Capital idea!" he said. We loaded up with a generous round of Italian Ice flavors before heading to the cinematorium.

Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk (2008) It's Smashing Time!

Zombos Says: Very Good

By the time the Incredible Hulk bellows his signature "Hulk Smash!" in-your-face taunt to the Abomination, he's already done quite a bit of it in director Louis Leterrier's successful return to the comic book and television roots that made the rampaging, green (with purple pants), behemoth a colorfully melodramatic composition of frenzied destruction and pathos--a superhero more a reluctant monster doing good by accident rather than a skillful, caped-crusader fighting evil by design.

Writers Zak Penn and Edward Harrison (actor Edward Norton's pseudonym), reboot the Hulk's origin, distancing it from Ang Lee's failed attempt at the franchise in 2003. In the succinct opening credits montage, which uses the same gamma ray infusion device first seen in the 1970's television series, The Incredible Hulk, flashbacks show the disastrous results of the failed experiment leaving Dr. Banner (Edward Norton) prone to hissy fits on a giant scale. Lou Ferrigno, television's Hulk, puts in a cameo appearance, reinforcing the thematic connection to that series. There is also a nod to Bill Bixby, who starred as Dr. Banner, through a snippet of his The Courtship of Eddie's Father, playing on a television set.

In this second, more energetic, attempt to launch the movie franchise, Banner is on the run in Brazil, laying low from the U.S. military while searching for a cure to the raging spirit within him. This transition from Ang Lee's more introspective approach lessens the relationship-heavy storyline and heaps on the throw a tantrum, whoop-ass Hulk transformations. With smashing moments strung end to end, briefly bridged with poignant ones showing how unfortunate his condition can be--he cannot make love because too much excitement would you-know-what--this movie is less character-complex and talkative than Ang's, opening the landscape wide for plowing with carnage aplenty; exactly what the perfect, breezy summertime movie is all about: simplicity, much action, and pour on the butter.