50 Pages a Night – Vol. 3 (Postmortem readings)

Without one word of a joke, I purchased Patrick Billing's TOR horror paperback “The Quiet” in 1994 – to finally read it twenty-three years later. This novel survived 10 moves, one of the cross-country and one of them completely off of the continent. It not onlhy survived, but remained in very good condition, as would most of the paperbacks in my collection, nearly fifty percent of them sitting in the same scenario “The Quiet” had been in – loved yet unread for years. Some, like “The Quiet”, for decades.

Patrick Billings' horror novel is a whip-snap tale set in the wilds of Yosemite National Park and concerns a park ranger protagonist who tries to figure out why the park's bears are suddenly killing the tourists. And brutally killing, at that – it seems that the bears are almost acting like serial killers. And this is where the story goes into the bizarre, because it looks like there is in fact a serial killer at work here. This novel was such the page-burner that I was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea of consuming all things in the nature-horror sub-genre, and so I immediately called one of the last video stores in Vancouver – Videomatica – and requested that they order a very rare blu-ray edition of William Girdler's cult film Grizzly for me, which I had thoroughly enjoyed when I was in my early twenties.

In the meantime, since 1994, Patrick Billings had passed away. Billings being the author's pseudonym, it was hard for me to track down information about him right away, but eventually I discovered that his real name was Earl Patrick Murray, a prolific crime and western novelist who had also written three horror books, “The Quiet” seemingly the only one under the Billings pen name. Earl Patrick Murray died “suddenly”, according to online obits, in 2003 at the age of 52.

Prior to relieving “The Quiet” from its dust-gathering spot on the bookshelf, I had also freed the late Robert “Psycho” Bloch's 1989 novel “Lori” (purchased by me in 1992 from the discount bin in a U.S. bookstore). Robert Bloch passed away two years after I first purchased his paperback, and again this book moved around with me, unread, for decades. When I finally did crack open this outrageous supernatural mystery-thriller, I became hooked on Bloch and immediately found myself in a used bookstore with a handful of his old TOR paperbacks (some of which I'll talk about in later blog posts on the subject). “Lori”, though, is one of his best, I think, at almost a breakneck pace Bloch takes us through his dark world where doppelgangers, murders, deceit, and nightmare misconceptions abound.

Most recently, I came across a novel titled “The Devouring” in a second-hand bookstore. Again the force of a horror novel consumed my imagination and I proceeded to zealously research the author F.W. Armstrong – only to find out the “The Devouring” was actually the middle book in a short horror series, and that Armstrong was actually a pseudonym for author T.M. Wright, whose cult novel “Strange Seed” is perhaps his best known work. I was a little saddened to see that T.M. Wright had passed away in 2015.

Horror and surreal crime author Tom Piccirlli, who had published several mind-bending experimental horror novels with Leisure Horror, had also passed away from a brutal battle with cancer in 2015 (he was 50). I'd been a big fan of Piccirilli's, having read a lot of his earlier works and horror shorts; and he'd also been the screenwriter, very early in his career, of the underground-independent direct-to-VHS vampire film Addicted to Murder. However, the short novel that had been released four years before his death, “Every Shallow Cut”, was one of his best and most memorable works; the still-experimental narrative now more defined and refined as Piccirlli takes us through an emotionally wrought journey via an emotionally wrought protagonist; almost as if Bukouski had inadvertently wandered into Piccirilli's world of nightmarish noir. “Every Shallow Cut” was the last book I'd read of Piccirilli's, although there is still one more of his on my bookshelf, purchased roughly ten years ago. Maybe I should go and check the dust level on it. 

--V.

 

Their Later Films Vol. 3 – Wes Craven.

The late horror-meister Wes Craven's 2010 horror-thriller My Soul to Take gets a bad rap. I remember reading a fan's tweet to Wes Craven, after its initial release, saying “It's okay, Wes, we still love you”. Clearly this film failed to strike a chord with horror audiences and with Craven's die-hard fans alike – originally titled 25/8, the film then sat on the shelf for over a year and a half after its completion, only to then be renamed, and then to be post-converted into 3D, which was all the rage in 2010, even though the film had not been shot with that in mind. Already the studio was worried about its reception and preemptively created the 3D theatrical release hoping to lure in the teenage audiences. Oh, yes, and his film was cut, too – some of the bloody horror toned down to get it from an “R” rating to a “PG-13” for its theatrical release. Really, from any aspect, it looks like Craven's film had gone through hell and back, and it did not come out unscathed, not it the least.

I never did see My Soul to Take in its theatrical 3D, PG-13 incarnation; instead I found a used (uncut and non-3D) blu-ray for three dollars at a store that was closing down. To be honest, I would have grabbed it if it was thirteen dollars; I was also a die-hard Wes Craven fan and I'd actually been looking forward to his film for a while, though at that time I was intentionally avoiding all things 3D at the movie theatres. After giving Craven's film a spin, I was immediately left wondering what the hell all of the negative feedback had been about. Okay, before I get too far ahead of myself, let's go back to the storyline for a quick moment here –

My Soul to Take concerns a group of high school kids (like Scream) who have been selected to die at the hands of a supernatural serial killer – or maybe not, maybe this killer is just out for vengeance, in a plot that vaguely echoes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven then throws more secondary horror themes into the mix, including the spirit of the killer who is able to body-jump from person to person (as in Craven's film Shocker), and the film's story starts to go down a not-entirely-necessary, yet weirdly exciting labyrinth of horror sub-plots and backstory; and Craven is impressively able to handle off this within his story without it fleeing into convoluted territory. The thing is, this is one of the trademarks of Craven's horror style, right out of his earlier films that had become part of his cult-hit cannon. So, why, then, I wondered, did My Soul to Take not hit it with his intended audience? Was Craven's signature style of storytelling no longer relevant? I find that even seven years later, I can't figure that one out. My only though on this is that perhaps, with time gone by, it might be time for fans to revisit My Soul to Take along side of his classics Shocker, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and his epitomic mind-bending meta-horror A New Nightmare (or, “Wes Craven's A New Nightmare”).

That being said, Wes Craven, ever the horror meister, was able to rebound with a vengeance (well, overseas, anyway) merely a year after-the-fact when his cinematic swan sang, Scream 4, was released into cinemas. A commercial hit overseas, and a moderate hit in North America, Scream 4, which this time concerned a grown-up Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and newcomer Emma Roberts (Scream Queens), was able to overcome the bad publicity and criticisms of My Soul to Take as well as the previous and dreadful Scream 3 (which had featured the ill-advised cameos of Jay and Silent Bob). Not quite as good as the first and hugely original (for its time) Scream, this fourth entry – fifteen years after-the-fact – was still just as good as Scream 2, despite the awkwardness from the internal jokes which couldn't make out if Scream 4 was supposed to be an actual sequel or a Hollywood reboot, and despite the trendy but unfortunate miscasting of Alison Brie and Marley Shelton. Still, Hayden Panettiere and Emma Roberts were a blast to watch, and Craven's last high school slasher film prevailed and subsequently spawned a new television series based on his work.

I still feel now, in the wake of his sad passing near the end of the first season of the Scream television series, that Wes Craven had another horror film in him. This could certainly be chalked up to wishful thinking on my part, but judging from the creativeness of My Soul to Take and Scream 4, there might've been something else that went untapped.

RIP, Wes Craven, 1939-2015.

--V. 

 

RIP, Jack Ketchum

I was surprised and saddened to hear about horror author Jack Ketchum's passing last week (he died from cancer, he was 71). Although he first published his controversial cannibal-horror novel “Off Season” in 1980, over the past decade Jack Ketchum (which is actually a pseudonym, his real name was Dallas Mayr, the name usually found on the copyright notice inside the front pages of his paperbacks) was coming more into the spotlight due to the recent “extreme” horror film adaptations of his works, which at times were met with almost as much controversy as their literary origins. DVD distributor Anchor Bay became involved with the film versions of The Girl Next Door and The Lost, and later Ketchum would team up with young filmmaker Lucky McKee to co-write the wildly controversial horror movie The Woman.

Usually I'm very good at remembering where I'd first heard about any author, band, or film director that I'm regularly into (or whose work I become obsessed with), but with Jack Ketchum, the events that lead up to me seeking out, finding, and purchasing his first novel “Off Season” have, over time, slipped my mind. I want to tell you that I read about Ketchum's “Off Season” from Stephen King – but upon checking back through King's horror-reference book Dance Macabre, I was unable to verify that notion. But however I'd heard about Ketchum's cannibal book, it was pre-internet, sometime in the early nineties, and I managed to find an original first-printing paperback for dirt cheap – but again, I can't remember from which used bookstore. I could take an educated guess, but it would still be a guess. What I do remember was my actual first reading of “Off Season”, and how it grabbed me immediately, and I swallowed the entire thing in one sitting. I was blown away, and “Off Season” became one of my top-five books of all time for nearly two decades. I do remember trying to find more Jack Ketchum books throughout the nineties, and finding two (then-new) Jove paperbacks at a Coles bookstore (when those existed) – “Joyride” and “Stranglehold”. I would tell anyone within earshot how awesome Jack Ketchum was and how “Off Season rocks.” (I remember actually saying that to a stranger in a used bookstore one time). I remember vividly the day I read “Stranglehold”, I was reading this book in the wait-times between a marathon of films during a day at the Vancouver International Film Festival; I'd taken that day off of work just to see a half dozen films – and I still remember Ketchum's novel most of all from that day. “Stranglehold” was the most brutal, gut-wrenching, emotionally-wringing and terrifyingly real novel I have ever read to date. Which is why, after experiencing similar reactions to the film version of The Girl Next Door, it took me a little time to build up the courage to crack open that book. Leaving viewers inside the cinema emotionally and psychologically wracked, a friend and I agreed that there would be no need to revisit that film – and to this day, I haven't; and there has been no need to, the horrifying thwart of the perception of Americana through a Norman Rockwell lens and its twist into the utter horrors of jealousy, manipulation, under-education, narcissism, and torture is still lingering in my mind over a decade later.

Around this same time period, 2007 and earlier, the Dorchester publishing company was releasing several of Jack Ketchum's titles (old and new) through their Leisure Horror paperbacks line, which was actually an amazing horror line. Not all of the freshly-printed Ketchum novels were of the raw and emotional brutality-type that “Stranglehold”, “The Girl Next Door”, and “Red” were, some were just teeth-grittingly violent horror-thrillers, like “Offspring” (the sequel to “Off Season”) and one of my favourites, “She Wakes”. Leisure Horror also published an anthology book titled “Triage”, featuring three stories from the late great Richard Laymon, Edward Lee, and Jack Ketchum, whose novella "Sheep Meadow Story” is not only the best story in “Triage”, it is one of the true highlights in his creative career.

Now, sadly, Jack Ketchum, one of my favourite authors for the past 33 years, has joined some of the horror greats who have recently shoved off this mortal coil, leaving us with an astounding legacy of their genre work – and for Jack Ketchum in particular, it's a legacy of work that remains locked (and sometimes tortured) in readers' minds and emotions long, long after the last page of the novel has been turned, and the last frame of the film has flickered out. Dallas William “Jack Ketchum” Mayr was a true American original. Plus, he had the coolest-looking author's profile pic ever. RIP.

RIP, Umberto Lenzi.

Holy Christ, this has been a sad year for genre cinema fans, as another quiet icon of genre cinema passed away earlier this week. Italian director Uumberto Lenzi may not have been a household name, but many fans knew the name of this hugely prolific commercial Italian genre director – more specifically, Umberto Lenzi actually specialized and made his entire career out of Italian sub-genres, from Poliziotteschi the Italian cannibal “gut-munchers”, the latter with which Lenzi has actually been credited with inventing upon the release of his cannibal classic Man from Deep River. Indeed, he explored this sub-genre further with his equally important Eaten Alive (my personal favorite of his cannibal films), and his most popular, Cannibal Ferox.

In 2002, several years before the advent of the smart phone and any traffic law preventing the use of cell phones while driving, my friend Josh (now from GBW Podcast) and I got into an argument while driving down a freeway as to whether or not Umberto Lenzi had directed the zombie-virus movie Nightmare City. I insisted that he had, Josh maintained an argument to the contrary. Neither of us letting go of our arguments, he finally phone one of those friends who knows everything about everything to do with genre cinema, one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding his flip-phone up to his ear. “Yo, who directed Nightmare City...? No... No...! No!!” he exclaimed before slapping the phone shut. “What?” I asked. “You were right,” he said. “That's why you're pissed off?” I asked him. “No, I'm mad because Lenzi's so much better than that!”

Okay, so that was the second thing I'd disagreed with during that drive. Incidentally, we were coming back from a DVD warehouse where we'd loaded up on genre DVDs, as was our passion. But Nightmare City was an Italian genre movie I was actually extremely fond of. Despite Umberto Lenzi's hugely significant contributions to the Poliziotteschi and cannibal-horror sub-genres of Italian cinema, my favourite films of Leni's career actually fell within the giallo and the popular 80s zombie genres. Along with the exciting and original Nightmare City, I was also a huge fan of his brilliant gialli Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Spasmo, and the revenge-giallo/thriller Hitcher in the Dark (which was actually an American production starring a pre-Melrose Place Josie Bissett). Lenzi's importance as a groundbreaking genre filmmaker did not stop with merely having invented an entirely new horror sub-genre for Italian cinema, his work had also been copied by his more famous colleagues (Brian DePalma and David Fincher using key sequences from Seven Blood-Stained Orchids), and in the 70s his movies had even been re-worked by American filmmakers for the North American releases (it has been rumored and at one point confirmed by Lenzi himself, although he truly hadn't wanted to believe it, that George Romero had shot added footage for Lanzi's Spasmo for the American theatrical/drive-in releases).

Finally, though, as contemporary maverick filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez sought to create new works based on or influenced by pioneers of popular Italian genre cinema, Umberto Lenzi got some mainstream North American recognition via Robert Rodriguez' Nightmare City-inspired segment for the pair's genre throwback film Grindhouse. Rodriguez and Tarantino both celebrated Lenzi's film as the key idea behind Planet Terror. Since then (2007), a portion of Lenzi's insanely massive genre output had been restored and re-released in the Blu-ray catalogues of British distribution companies Arrow and Shameless and the Italian/American distributor Raro, following in the DVD footsteps of the old Anchor Bay and Shriek Show releases of the early '00s.

Lenzi was one of the quieter, and most under-appreciated talents of genre cinema; but quiet or not, he was no less a giant in the arena of genre cinema, and the body of work he has left behind will no doubt be appreciated for years to come. RIP, Umberto Lenzi. 

~V.

 

RIP American Character Icon Harry Dean Stanton.

Last month we lost another cinematic icon when character actor Harry Dean Stanton passed away at the age of 91. Of course Stanton was one of America's greatest character actors, but to a genre film fan like myself, he was also a key figure in the genre-film world, appearing in the films of Alex Cox and Ridley Scott, while also maintaining brief collaborations with John Carpenter and David Lynch, who put Stanton's talents to amazing use in memorable and near-iconic roles of starkly satirized Americans. Often, Stanton could bring any given film epic waves of emotion and intelligence by his subtle and equally expressive manner from underneath an all-American baseball cap. Wim Wenders exemplified Stanton's talents in his film Paris, Texas, which incidentally had been written by L.M. Kit Carson, who had also scripted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 for Tobe Hooper and which starred another Vietnam-era American acting icon, Dennis Hopper. Hopper and Stanton were somewhat cut from the same American, (or Americana) cloth, with the likes of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and Warren Oates, the last of which Stanton had appeared alongside in Monte Hellman's Cockfighter. Like Hellman's own films, Harry Dean Stanton was as American as the Road Movie itself, born of and bred by American cinema. Stanton himself could effortlessly inject a deeper Americana into any of the genre films he played in, often simply just by showing up. And often this imbued culture of Stanton's Americana came from a comfortably paradoxical angle; such as the baseball-hat wearing spaceship mechanic in Ridley Scott's Alien, a film that itself was conversely on the fringe of the science fiction genre back in the late seventies as it was on the fringe of American culture itself. The charm of Scott's vision of Alien that has never been (and could never be) replicated is the down-home American feel of the working-class characters aboard the ship, characters that are clearly a product of the ideals of the working-class US citizens of the seventies, farm enough removed from the Vietnam War to achieve a little skeptical hope, and not yet embroiled in the Regan administration of the eighties. Much of this working-class idealism is what Harry Dean Stanton seemed to embody in his work as an actor, and as America progressed towards narcissism, riches, and fame-mongering, so Harry Dean Stanton began to appear, through his characters, as slightly more sardonic, a little more weary, a little more cautious about his previously-embodied Americana. Strangely, these characteristics culminated very well for Stanton in his cameo for Korean director Kim Jee-woon in his first American film, the Schwarzenegger-comeback action-comedy The Last Stand, where Stanton plays a farmer taking his last stand against an evil Peter Stormare who wants to bulldoze his land in order to facilitate a ridiculously over-the-top (yet hugely entertaining) jailbreak for his billionaire boss. Of course, Stanton has portrayed this typified character elsewhere in more critically-celebrated films, like his last movie Lucky (released to film festivals just this year), but being a genre fan, movies like those of Kim Jee-wong, John Carpenter, Alex Cox, and David Lynch is where my cinematic compass happens to be magnetically attracted. My own memories of Stanton's performances are encapsulated in John Carpenter's Escape from New York and Christine, David Lynch's Wild at Heart, Ridley Scott's Alien, Alex Cox's Repo Man, Wayne Wang's Slamdance, and, perhaps a little oddly, John Binder's 1985 American sci-fi comedy UFOria, which I saw on Superchannel that year as a 10-year-old-kid, and from one of Stanton's lines “Well, everybody's gotta believe in something... And right now, I believe I'll have another beer,” was honestly the first time I'd ever heard that joke and I practically busted a gut when I heard that.

As a actor, Harry Dean Stanton, without exception, brought a greater depth in general to the films and stories that surrounded him (or his characters), even if he (or his characters) were not the exact center of those stories. He could always fit into any film he was hired to contribute to with stunning ease; his presence would undoubtedly make a viewer think “of course Harry Dean Stanton was PERFECT for that role!” – but that in itself was all Harry Dean Stanton; that was the true embodiment of his talents, it was his talent to be able to embody any part of any type of story, and to seat himself into his roles perfectly, so that ultimately all of his roles were the perfect roles for him. In the end, Harry Dean Stanton was the last of the truly genuine performers.

-V.

RIP, Tobe Hooper!

So, this is actually a reprint of the celebratory and somewhat angry rant upon the death of one of my personal all-time favourite horror film director, Tobe Hooper. As first published on Facebook last night (uncensored, warts and all...)

#RIPTobeHooper, the second of the horror film giants to have passed this summer and the third over the past two years... To me, his work was so underrated (post-1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre), from his satirical Chainsaw sequel to his Lovecraftian Invaders From Mars to his batshit-crazy vampire sci-fi epic Lifeforce. Someone once asked if you were to create a "Mount Rushmore" of horror directors, who would you pick? Tobe Hooper, for me, would have definitely been in there, sharing space with George Romero and Wes Craven. To me, Tobe Hooper always had a discernible cinematic style, a style that was just as in evidence in Poltergeist as Spielberg's second-unit work was, and I thought it was pretty shitty that some old Hollywood crew members were "coming forward" to purportedly declare that Hooper had not directed his film at all, which I choose to call bullshit on, and not just because there's a face-ripping scene mid film. Hooper's style and mis-en-scene are evident even in the family banter scenes and neighbourhood squabbles. The opening

to Hooper's Eaten Alive inspired one of the most memorable lines in Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1, and his Texas Chainsaw themes became go-to horror movie tropes for the next three decades. Hooper's horror cinema influence has been as widespread as it has been quiet over the past four decades, at times lost in his lesser films, while at other times these seemingly "lesser" films, like Night Terrors and the Toolbox Murders remake, were actually quite a bit better than some fans and critics would have us believe. Hooper's films always slanted towards the unusual, weird, and often the daring, and at times they were downright freaky; and if anyone thinks he lost his touch after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre then I would point them towards Poltergeist, Body Bags, That Damned Thing, Eaten Alive, and Salem's 'Lot.


Writer's Note: I would also like to mention Tobe Hooper's excellent 80s-90s made-for-cable-television films, I'm Dangerous Tonight and the incredible The Apartment Complex.