Saturday, December 30, 2006

Dead and Breakfast

Dead and Breakfast is a horror comedy in the vein of the Evil Dead series, Feast, Night of the Creeps, Shaun of the Dead, and Slither. I had pretty low expectations going in, but I was pleasantly surprised with how good and silly it was.

Dead and Breakfast has a bunch of college kids in a Winnebago traveling through Texas on their way to a wedding. They stop overnight in Lovelock, TX and end up in David Carradine’s bed & breakfast. He of course oozes Kung-Fu greatness just by standing there being the proprietor in his few scenes. Unfortunately, it’s also the night something escapes and causes the entire town to turn into zombies, and even David Carradine, Kung Fu master, can't save the day.

What did I really like about this movie? Throughout the opening credits and interspersed in the film are comic panels that help move the story along. I really liked the style used in the panels; it added an element of style to the film. I don’t expect a zombie comedy to have too much of a plot or character development to be funny. Dead & Breakfast has the required fake blood spurts; in fact the chainsaw scene is just priceless. You don’t really care about any of the characters. They are nowhere near as developed as they were in Shaun of the Dead, but this being a straight to video flick, I didn’t really expect them to be terribly developed. Everyone did okay with what they were given, but no one was particularly stand out either. I do like Gina Phillips though; I have ever since seeing her in Jeepers Creepers. The conversation between the sheriff and the doctor about the cow chip competition is quotation-worthy.

What was mediocre? The story has a Chorus in the form of a country band, much like Something About Mary. It’s funny, but it can pull you out of the story too. Their lyrics are just silly. Portia d Rossi’s character was unnecessary, and there wasn’t a whole lot of chemistry between any of the actors.

I’d say if you are looking for a zombie comedy and you have already seen Shaun of the Dead, you should rent Dead & Breakfast. It’s straight-to-video, but the gore and acting is better than you might expect. It’s no Shaun, but no much is.

Rating: 3 Purrs

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Sherlock Holmes Movie Double Feature

I love mysteries, and Sherlock Holmes is of course, one of my favorites. I stumbled across the following two movies due to NetFlix recommendations. They were both worthwhile for any Arthur Conan Doyle fan to see.

Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle (also known as Murder Rooms) tells the story of how Arthur Conan Doyle created the character of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was in medical school when women were first being admitted. Amongst the hubbub of the young men protesting this intrusion, Doyle meets his mentor, Dr. Bell (Ian Richardson), an unusual teacher who believes in new methods of detection and treating illness. His newfangled ways work to his advantage, in that he moonlights as a consultant to the police and test out his theories. The police aren’t very sure in his methods, of course, but he eventually proves himself to his doubtful student, and that’s all that really matters. Soon, the two are drawn into the cases of a few murdered women, and the woman Doyle has fallen for, who is a medical student along side him, is being threatened. Dr. Bell and his student rush to solve the mystery and save the girl. In doing so, Doyle finds the influence he needs to create the indomitable character of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking

Rupert Everett plays Sherlock Holmes and Ian Hart plays Dr. Watson in this Holmes tale. Here, Holmes is lured out of semi-retirement by Dr. Watson. Young debutantes are being stalked and killed by a serial killer, and Holmes is on the case to stop the madness. Introduced is Dr. Watson’s fiancĂ©e, Mrs. Vandeleur, who is a psychologist in her own right, and points Holmes into the general direction in which he must go to solve the crimes. Rachael Hurd Wood (Wendy from Peter Pan) has a small part as one of the debutantes.

The acting in both movies was well done. Ian Richardson was wonderful as Dr. Bell. He felt like an aged Sherlock Holmes. Dolly Wells was excellent as Elspeth Scott, the girl who captures Doyle’s affections. She is smart, pretty, and very serious. Rupert Everett was a wonderful Sherlock Holmes. Jeremy Brett is probably my favorite Holmes rep in the actors list of those who have played the great detective, but Rupert Everett was good at making the role his own. Everyone’s favorite demon from Hex, Michael Fassbender, had a small part and was appropriately attractive and creepy all in the same moment.

Overall, I thought both movies were worthwhile if you like the great detective. If I had to rate one over the other, I’d go with Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle first. It felt like a better production and had a more interesting plot.

Rating: 4 Purrs

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Hard Candy

What a movie. Finally, I find a horror thriller that my husband will watch with me. He was intrigued by the concept of Hard Candy, and by the end, both of us were curled up on the couch cringing.

Hard Candy is all about Hayley. She’s met a man in a chat room and they decide to meet for coffee. At first, you cringe because you know something’s not right. You think to yourself, “Girl, what are you doing? Can’t you tell the man’s a little freaky?” It doesn’t take you very long to realize that things aren’t all what they seem. Soon, Hayley is back at Jeff’s house and things start to play a little differently that what Jeff expected.

Ellen Page plays Hayley with much more depth that I would have expected after seeing her in X-Men 3. She’s creepy, she’s smart, and she’s vulnerable. She’s a chameleon, and just perfect in the part. Patrick Wilson plays Jeff, and he ranges from flirty and creepy, to scared, to terrorized, to angry, to lost, all without ever seeming to slip into “acting.” The movie rests on the shoulders of these two actors (they are the only ones on the screen for 98 % of the movie) and they never let you down. They have excellent chemistry.

To be honest, I knew to make this a horror thriller it would have to deviate from the normal child and pedophile storyline, so the earlier twist wasn’t all that unexpected. It didn’t diminish the movie in the least. In fact, it heightened the whole experience, because you were left wondering when would things flip back? Would they? Who would win?

Hard Candy is one of the best thrillers I have seen in a long time. It’s scary and full on cringe-worthy. It’s just about perfect in its own disturbing way.

Rating: 4 ½ Purrs

Thursday, December 21, 2006

The Return by Bentley Little

Bentley Little is one of those writers I found while browsing at Half-Price Books. One of his short stories, The Washingtonians, has been adapted for the Showtime Masters of Horror series. It’s one I enjoyed quite a bit actually, and because of that, I put him on my regular list for the used bookstore browsing. The first round, The Walking, I didn’t like much, but each book I have read has gotten better. Either that or I have gotten used to the very bizarre machinations of some of his plots.

The Return tells the story of the Mogollon Monster, an ancient Bigfoot type creature that was made up to scare the Boy Scouts camping out in Arizona campgrounds. It is supposed to be just a tall tale, a campfire ghoul, but then an archeological excavation starts digging up unusual Anasazi artifacts. Artifacts like a figurine of a screaming woman, pottery shards that show the houses and people involve din the dig, bones that are unclassifiable and misshapen. Suddenly, Anasazi artifacts start dancing and moving in museums, regular townspeople start returning to the basic instincts of violence and survival at all costs, and a few of the people on the dig start wondering how much truth there is in legend and how in the world you stop a legend turned real.

The Return involves most of the Bentley Little trademarks. It takes place in the Southwest, ancient evils are involved, and the protagonist is a regular guy who stumbles upon the weird goings on. There are sections of extreme gore, and people acting in extremely violent ways. It’s all a little familiar, but different enough that it’s interesting. The plot is creative, the main characters likable, and the mystery intriguing enough to keep you guessing how it will be wrapped up.

I liked The Return. I wouldn’t rank it at the top of Bentley Little’s work, that would be The Collection, The Revelation, or The House, but if you are a horror fan, think of Bentley Little as a Clive Barker lite.

Rating: 3 ½ stars

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

In a Glass Darkly is a collection of short stories introduced by Dr. Hesselious. The fictional doctor is obsessed with the metaphysical, and his case notes bind each of the otherwise unrelated stories together. Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer who was obsessed with the supernatural. He wrote this collection in 1872, and much of the content reflects his studies of death and the unknown after his wife died. Some sort of sadness or conflict in addition to possible supernatural events haunts all the characters in these stories.

In a Glass Darkly includes five stories: Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. Out of all of them, Carmilla was my favorite, but my opinion was probably colored by The Vampire Lovers (the movie version of the novella, and the way I even found Le Fanu). Green Tea is Dr. Hesselius’s story, where he is called in to save a friend who is haunted by a monkey. The Familiar is very similar, except the man is haunted by a past transgression. Mr. Justice Harbottle is the story of a man haunted by the decisions he has made in the courtroom. The Room in the Dragon Volant has a touch of the supernatural, but this man is haunted more by a beautiful woman he has come to love, not a ghost. Now he fears for his beloved’s life and plots to save her from her dangerous husband. Trouble is, he is staying in the room at the Dragon Volant, and every man who has stayed there has disappeared into thin air. Carmilla was a delightful vampire story tinged with lesbian undertones. The young heroine recounts her adventures with Carmilla almost wistfully.

Carmillla is the most complex story in the collection, followed closely by Dragon Volant. There is more content in these stories to flesh out plot and characters. All of the stories, except Carmilla, have two possibilities. They could be supernatural events or they could just be unusual happenings. If you like Victorian ghost stories, or if any sort of lover of vampire lore, you should definitely take some time to read Sheridan Le Fanu. I have one of his other well-known books, Uncle Silas. I look forward to reading it.

Rating: 4 Purrs

Monday, December 18, 2006

The DaVinci Code

I just finished watching Ron Howard’s movie, The DaVinci Code. I have no words to describe my dislike. I’m at a loss; I can’t even write a few paragraphs to describe how awful, unimaginative, uninspired, and unbelievable waste of time this was. There was no chemistry between any of the actors, and you had some serious actors here: Jean Reno, Tom Hanks, Audrey Tatatou, Paul Bettany, Ian McCellan, Alfred Molina. We aren’t talking B-List, but you would think you had the D-List cast with the quality in this movie.

I would recommend watching, oh I don’t know, National Treasure, for more chemistry and excitement than The DaVinci Code, or, you could just watch the Indiana Jones movies if you want to watch a treasure hunt movie. It’s a much better choice for your time.

Rating: 1 Hiss

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis is one of those writers you either love or hate. (I happen to like him.) He writes about people you can’t really like, and many times his plots are convoluted or just vapid, mirroring his characters. Ellis wrote Less Than Zero while his was still in college, and that alone is enough to make you give this book a look. He peel back any attempt at making the world of this book pretty like you would like Los Angeles, the place of dreams to be. It’s an empty, ugly world, with empty, pretty people.

In 1980’s L.A., Clay is home from New Hampshire for Christmas. His ex-girlfriend Blair is still attracted to him, but that doesn’t keep either of them faithful. His friend Julian has become heavily addicted to heroin and is now selling himself for drugs. Clay hardly knows his family and has no clue about who he is. He does drugs and drinks constantly and spends his days and nights partying with people he doesn’t even know.

The end of the book comes, and you are left just as confused as Clay. All of the characters run together. They are all blond and tan, they all have too much money and too much free time. Towards the end, you hope that Clay has reached a point where he wants more from life, especially after seeing Julian reach rock bottom, but you have no guarantee. You hope the phrase that opens the book, “people are afraid to merge,” resonates with him at the end. You hope Clay, having been removed, returned, and leaving again, realizes he can be of some substance. You hope he has redeemed himself, but deep down, you know he hasn’t. Being a Bret Easton Ellis character, you know not to hope for any real change, and that’s the real point of the book. These children are lost souls with no way out and no real will to leave. No one can help them, because they care little about helping themselves.

Rating: 4 Purrs

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman writes beautiful prose, and she writes a lot of it. The trouble is, sometimes that means books tend to feel like repeats of each other. I feel that The Ice Queen is somewhere in the middle. It’s similar to others she has written, but it doesn’t feel like a complete copy.

The Ice Queen tells the story of a solitary librarian who is obsessed with death. When she was eight years old, when it was night and ice was on the ground, she wished her mother dead. Her mother never comes home. She from then on she separated herself from everyone and everything, making up her life story into a fairy tale with a girl whose heart is frozen into a ball of ice. Later on, she loses her grandmother and ends up in Florida with her brother Ned. There she wishes to be struck by lightening, and her wish again comes true. From there she becomes obsessed with a man named Lazarus who was also struck by lightening. He is fire, constantly burning from within, while she is solid ice, constantly frozen. Their affair makes her life interesting for a while, and helps thaw her inner frozen heart. Later, circumstances help her wake up to life and turn her back on death.

The main character is never named, and it is appropriate. She is not a character you really have any sympathy for. The real characters that grab you only really show up at the end. Ned and his wife are those characters, and you only really see into their lives when the main character finally melts enough to see outside of her own self. If that is what Alice Hoffman wanted, then she was effective with her character development. Otherwise, she fails in developing any real characters you care about.

What really grabbed me in this book was a scene towards the end. The scene in California made me cry, and I am not completely sure it was just her writing, or if it was a little too close to home with events in my life lately. I could see the beauty of the scene, and it still makes my heart clench. I’d wade through all of those ice-cold pages to read that scene with fresh eyes again.

Overall, if you are a fan of her work, I’d recommend reading The Ice Queen. Otherwise, I’d point you to some of her better work, like The Probable Future, The River King, or Practical Magic.

Rating: 3 Purrs

Monday, December 11, 2006

Recent Aquisitions to the Library

  • The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
  • The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
  • Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
  • Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
  • A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Thunderstruck by Neil Larson
  • The Monsters by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
  • Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz
  • The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
  • The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

The Crow: Wicked Prayer

I’m a sucker for Edward Furlong. I remember the boy from Terminator 2 fondly, so of course I had to rent the fourth installment of The Crow series. I took a real chance, because the third installment, The Crow: Salvation was downright awful, despite Kirsten Dunst. (Yes, you read that right. Talk about contractual obligation.) This installment was definitely direct-to-video worthy, but it was not nearly as bad as the third.

Jimmy Cuervo (Furlong) is an ex-con who loves Lilly (Emmanuelle Chiquri), an Indian shaman who is leading her people to shut down the toxic mine in their community and open a casino. Luc Crash (David Boreanz) is the bad guy, the leader of the local satanic cult, whose followers are called Famine, Pestilence, and War. His girl is an ex-hooker called Lola Byrne (Tara Reid) who wants to be more than just white trash. Luc wants to become the Anti-Christ, and of course to do this, Lilly and Jimmy have to die. This of course leads Jimmy to come back as The Crow, to set the wrong things right, etc., etc.

If the first Crow was a kung fu Goth action movie, the second was a Goth music video, and the third was just plain painful, the fourth is a western. I saw potential in it, but the actors were either poor or left with very little to do. The dialog was laughable. The action is negligible and where it was present, the wires and slow motion were obvious attempts at masking the fact that none of the actors could really do any of the fight scenes. Even the costumes were Hot Topic bought, and if you are any little bit of a smidgeon of Indian, you won’t like the shaman’s outfits. She looks good in them, no doubt, but they are shamefully not even close to authentic.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this unless you like the actors or just feel like you need to see The Crow series to completion. Otherwise, just pass it on by. If you watch it, you will just wish for what it could have been.

Rating: 2 ½ Purrs

Thursday, December 07, 2006

The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill by David M. Buss

David M. Buss's goal in The Murder Next Door is to explain why normal, next-door neighbor type people murder. He has a plausible theory that normal people kill because we evolved that way. He is an evolutionary psychologist, and he outlines his theory in detail. It's too bad the theory seems stretched thin over repetitions of the same type of examples.

Buss concentrates on the next door kind of murder, and leaves out murders caused by deep rooted psychological issues, serial killers, war, mass murders and the like. According to Buss, it all boils down to survival. Humans evolved to find murder to be a viable solution to certain evolutionary issues. Bottom line, women kill to protect their children, themselves from dangerous mates and outsiders, and their viable genetic contributors (their mates) from poachers. Men kill to protect their genetic contributors (their mates, or in the case of stalkers, their perceived or previous mates), cut off others' genetic lines (i.e., stepchildren), and ensure their place in the wealth and status of the community.

Buss cites much of his own research, where he interviewed a large group of people about situations where they felt they would murder or where they would be murdered, in addition to many other sources cited in the back of the book. The interviews are interesting, and they indeed support his theory. However, I can't believe that his reasons are the be all and end all theory of why normal people kill. Pigeonholing people into strict evolutionary theories just seems too pat to me. Maybe I feel like we have evolved beyond such primitive urges, but then again, I turn on the news and sometimes it makes me doubt it.

I would recommend this book if you are interested in reading a theory about why someone like your next-door neighbor might murder you because you leered at his wife, or if you are interested in the psychology of murder. However, I would also take it with a grain of salt. It's not nearly as extensive as I was hoping, as I was looking to read more than one theory repeated with other examples. Overall, it left me hanging and frustrated, wanting more of a reason behind murder than just the protection of my mate and the insurance of good genetic continuation.

Ratings: 3 Purrs

Recent Aquisitions to the Library

I just received from Amazon (woot for GC for filling out work surveys!):

  • The Hero & The Crown by Robin McKinley (My all-time favorite book, ever. Yes, I know that it is a book for young adults.)
  • The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
  • The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins

Monday, December 04, 2006

Rest Stop

Rest Stop is a straight to video horror flick I got from NetFlix. It looked like it would be a gritty, icky type film like The Hills Have Eyes, Saw, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It wasn’t quite up to par with those, which I didn’t really expect it to be, but still I was disappointed with the story overall.

Nicole sneaks away from home with her boyfriend to drive out to California. After some afternoon delight out in the woods, they stop at a rest stop out in the middle of the woods. Unfortunately for them, this is not a good place to stop and use the bathroom. Weird things start to happen, with first off, her boyfriend disappearing. Then some creepy guy in a truck keeps stalking her. A girl appears and then disappears, lots of blood oozes over the floors, and weird notes are written on the walls. She seeks refuge with a family in a Winnebago who ends up being even weirder than the guy in the truck. She just can’t seem to escape the rest stop and the guy in the truck, no matter what choose your own adventure path she takes.

Jaimie Alexander, the girl who plays Nicole, is an okay actress. She’s somewhat resourceful in her part, and she’s girl-next-door pretty enough to play a horror movie heroine. Everyone else is negligible, except the family in the Winnebago. They are People Under The Stairs creepy. If they were more of the movie, it would have been leaps and bounds better.

There is very little gore involved, and you really do keep wondering why in the world the dumb girl keeps coming back to the same rest stop, when she could just walk away? The plot just meanders about and doesn’t really conclude in any way. It’s like someone cut out everything that might have connected events together and just left the bloody parts. In fact, I had to hit the extras and read the boards at IMDB to just figure out what the heck went on and what was up with the rest stop and the guy in the truck. If, maybe, the director and writer had left a bit more explanation in I might have liked it a bit more, but with the cuts made to the film it’s impossible to follow.

Rating: 2 ½ Purrs