Scotland, PA

“We're not bad people, Mac... just underachievers who have to make up for lost time.”

I heard about this movie a long time ago and it had been sitting in my NetFlix queue for a long time. I thought oooh, a MacBeth movie. Sounds interesting. And it was.
This retelling of MacBeth takes place in 1970’s Scotland, Pennsylvania, hence the name Scotland, PA. Joe McBeth and his wife Pat work in the local fast food joint. Pat’s convinced that Joe should be running the shop rather than bowing and scraping to the owner Duncan. She's sure that she could be doing a much better job of running the place. The oh so simple plan turns out to be a disaster, as you might expect from a Shakespearean tragedy. Things look bright for awhile, but you know how it goes – no water, no perfumes of Arabia can wash those hands clean, and boy do they know it.
The cast in this movie was amazing – James LeGros, Maura Tierney, Christopher Walken, and Amy Smart.  All sorts of indy verterans were in this one. The atmosphere was great and the 1970’s fast food resturant location was inspired. I mean, it it also a bit campy, but I think that was the point. I love Shakespeare, so I’m fine with extremely accurate, line by line interpretations, but this whole retelling has the comedy and tragedy all at the same time. I wouldn't consider it to be Oscar winning or anything like that, but it was a great rental. I’m ashamed that it sat so far down in my queue for so long.

Rating: 4 Purrs for campy, bell-bottomed French fried fun with tragedy and Christopher Walken to boot.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

I picked up Sharp Objects because it sounded dark and spooky and a murder mystery to boot. It delivered on all of those counts, and then some. I tore through this book in just a few hours; I just couldn’t put it down.

In Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn tells the story of Camille Preaker, a Chicago journalist called back to her hometown to write a story about a murdered young girl.  Camille’s trip back to her hometown of Wind Gap, MO isn’t all wine and roses, in fact, her troubled childhood was enough to drive her to self-mutilate, carving words into her skin. Her highly dysfunctional family plays a key part of this novel, and to describe them in too much detail would take away a great deal of discovery. Camille’s mother is devoted to her youngest daughter, trapping the girl in a forever childhood. The father is barely there, bowing to the mother in all things. Camille isn’t so sure the police will solve the case; they think it’s a transient. Camille thinks it’s someone local. Who has killed to girls, and why? Will Camille find the truth?

Gillian Flynn does a great job building the suspense and slowly revealing the truth behind the mystery. The end is a double-whammy; you think you have it all figured out and then it’s something else, and then wham! It’s great and suitably disturbing all in one.  

This book was so much more than I expected. I thought I would find a decent mystery with a “cutter gimmick.”  Instead, I found a finely crafted mystery thriller way above the normal paperback thriller you take to the beach.

Rating: 5 Purrs for the creepiest mother since Joan Crawford

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

I just love Half-Price Books and their 20% off sale.

• The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
  
• Brimstone (Pendergast, Book 5) by Douglas Preston
  
• Dance of Death by Douglas Preston
  
• Dark Angels: A Novel by Karleen Koen
  
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan
  
• Diamonds Are Forever, You Only Live Twice, Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Other Stories by Charles Dickens
  
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  
• Still Life with Crows (Pendergast, Book 4) by Douglas Preston
  
• A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York by Timothy J. Gilfoyle
  
• Collected Poems 1947-1997 by Allen Ginsberg
  

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

Here's a list of my latest trade additions from my favorite comic shop, Titan Comics. 

• Serenity: Those Left Behind by Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews, Will Conrad
• The Death of Superman
• We 3 by Grant Morrison
• Pablo's Inferno: An innocent child's descent into the Underworld and Beyond by Rhode Montijo
  

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

I've been quite the comic book geek lately. Here are some of my newest acquisitions:

• Zebediah the Hillbilly Zombie - Redneck Bites the Dust by Scott Mills
• Lost Boys: Reign of Frogs Vol 1
• Doctor Who Classics
• Doctor Who
• Locke & Key by Joe Hill
• Serenity: Better Days
• The Dark Tower series
• Helen Killer Vol 1
• House of Mystery Vol 1
• Buffy Season 8
• I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space
• Buckaroo Banzai: Return of the Screw

Final Girl Film Club: The Devil's Daughter

You know, I went into The Devil's Daughter not expecting much. You know, 1970's TV Movie about devil worship and all that. Surely it won't be much of anything. Color me embarrassed - it was actually pretty good. It's on par with a long Night Gallery or Twilight Zone episode (love those), and about half-way through, I said to myself, man this seems really familiar. I've actually seen it before, some time or another, probably when I was home sick from school and needed something to watch on TV.

In The Devil's Daughter, Diane Shaw returns home for her mother's funeral. She's never really known her mother, and at the gravesite, enter Shelley Winters. (Has she ever not been large and scary? Even in the Poseidon Adventure she was scary and she was supposed to be a nice character...) Lilith is a friend of dear old mom, and why don't you dear sweet girl come home and stay with me while you find a job and get settled? Of course, a nefarious plot must be afoot, and really, it's not too hard to figure out early on, but getting there is half the fun in this movie. 

Shelley Winters is more than enough of a reason to watch this movie - she's camp personified. She's like that crazy old lady that bakes you cookies all of the time that you just can't get rid of, and the cookies are missing the sugar but you don't have the heart to say anything. Her two neighbor friends are unsettling, like two overgrown idiot twins, even down to the same outfits. But the kicker comes at the end, in true, ta-da, movie of the week style. Again, it's not a shocker if you have seen any horror movies at all, but it's well done and like I said before. It's  just like ending up a Night Gallery episode, and my TIVO really knows just how much I love that show. 

Rating: 5 Purrs, cause you gotta love a movie that features an over-the-top painting of Satan that every character just pretends is perfectly natural for 3/4 of the movie, and of course, the mad, smiling face of Shelley Winters there at the end - now that's creepy

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

Here are a few of the latest books I've added to my library:

• Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
• The Dead Travel Fast by Eric Nuzum
• Ghost by Alan Lightman
• Eat This, Not That by David Zinczenko

We've been slowly accumulating the Mystery Science Theater DVDs as well. Man, you gotta love those guys.

Sydney White

I rented Sydney White because I think Amanda Bynes is just adorable. What a Girl Wants was a  cute little movie and I liked She's the Man. Amanda Bynes makes the movies - she's cute, funny, not afraid to dress like a boy or fall down - very Lucille Ball. Sydney White was a disappointment, especially after seeing She's the Man, which was really very goofy and funny. 

Sydney White is a retelling of Snow White, with Amanda Bynes starting her first year of college and finding herself facing the "evil witch" aka head of the big time sorority and crushing on the handsome prince aka the fraternity boy next door. Sydney ends up at The Vortex becoming the "Snow White" and taking care of the resident outcasts (the seven dorks), and of course ends up making changes all over campus, true fairy tale style.

It's a cute idea, it just falls flat. I'm not sure if it's the directing, the script, the fact that Bynes seems almost manic in her humor, or that she seems a little too fake-baked to be appealing. I don't know, I just know that I was disappointed. (One thing that didn't disappoint me was the scene where Sydney is shaving her legs at the sink and one of her friendly dorks walks in. It's a shot of her oh-so-very long legs and wow. She's got legs and she knows how to use them. (Have I mentioned before that I am very much a leg person?) It feels slightly wrong to have that kind of reaction to someone 13 years or so my junior. It makes me feel like a dirty old lady, but seriously, she's become kind of a hottie. But I digress...)

Sydney White - it's not quite a fairy tale but you can't have everything I guess. 

Rating: 3 1/2 Purrs - it would be more if the movie had seemed less forced and contrived. I can accept rom-coms to be that way but this seemed stilted rather than fantasy.

The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

I first picked up a Preston and Child book because I really liked the movie Relic and I was curious about the source material. The book was substantially more robust, as you would expect, and different enough that the story was surprising. The Cabinet of Curiosities is the third story by Preston & Child to feature the mysterious Agent Pendergast and have a ton of interesting historical info on museums, natural history, and New York history.

In The Cabinet of Curiosities, construction workers at a new building site uncover a ghastly collection of bodies, all mutilated in the same fashion. Enter Agent Pendergast, the tall, pale agent involved with the earlier Relic and Reliquary novels who seems to be extra rich, full of endless facts, and borderline sexy (maybe that’s just me). Pendergast investigates with the help of Nora Kelly, an archeologist at the New York Museum of Natural History, much to the chagrin of her bosses and the building’s developer, who has the mayor pretty much in his pocket. Things heat up when the city is plagued by new killings that mimic the bodies found at the construction site, and Kelly’s boyfriend, William Smithback Jr., Times reporter, starts throwing out clues in the press. Is the serial killer just mimicking the19th century scientist who was looking for the secret to immortality or is the killer that same scientist become immortal.

I really liked the story here.  Why I like most about Preston’s & Child’s books (at least those that I have read) is the crazy amount of detail that is included about whatever the main storyline is – Relic and the whole DNA sequencing bit, this one with urban archeology.  The incredible detail about the museum and the mechanics of how it works is so interesting to my Art History, museum studies brain. Plus, I find the tall, pale, spooky Pendergast sexy in a weird sort of way. It’s probably the oversized brain he seems to have and his interest in the weird and spooky cases. It’s probably a hold over from my Spooky Mulder crush days. (Okay, so I still have a Spooky Mulder crush. I’ll admit it.) The story seems long at points but the tightly woven climax is page-turning.

What I didn’t like – Nora Kelly actually falling for the slime bag Smithback. I didn’t find much of value in his character but hey, maybe it’s my Pendergast crush talking.

Overall, if you like Michael Crichton books and his ability to turn future science into interesting stories, but like a little horror/sci-fi thrown in, you might check these guys out.

Rating: 4 Purrs, and not just because of Agent Pendergast

Death Sentence

"You go near my family, and I will cut out your goddamn guts like I did your fucking friend. Do you hear me?”

I was really surprised at how much I liked this movie. I had pretty low expectations going in – it’s a revenge flick so I didn’t expect much depth or much besides some gore and some angry scowls.  You know, some Charles Bronson blowing some guys away and maybe some Chuck Norris action here and there.  I was really surprised at how unexpected things were in this movie.

In Death Sentence, Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) is a family man. Everything seems swell. He’s got a great wife, two great sons, a high paying job and a beautiful house. There’s some tension underneath the surface there though,…and after Nick Hume brush with the dark side of the city, all the underlying ugly comes out.  Nick and his star hockey player son are driving home after the game and have to stop for gas in a not so great part of town. You know, THAT part of town. The one that always shows up in these movies, the dark and not so safe looking one that you of course have to stop at because your car just happens to be out of gas right at that moment. Well, the bad guys come and kill the all-star favorite son, and when Nick hears that even though he can identify one of the doers, the guy won’t do much time.  Nick wants revenge, so a hunting he will go. The problem is, the gang doesn’t just sit back and take it, and that’s really when all hell breaks loose and things veer from what I think is the standard formula.

What did I like most about Death Sentence? Well, it was raw.  Nick Hume isn’t one of those Commando types that underneath his clean-cut exterior lies a ninja or a Army Ranger. No. Nick Hume is a normal family man. He may want revenge and he goes after it full force but he's not too slick about it.  His revenge is half dumb luck as it is  skill, in fact more dumb luck than anything.  The acting was spot on, with maybe the bad guys being a bit over the top, but that’s pretty normal. John Goodman's character was so evil – but went a long way to almost make you sympathetic towards the gang guy and his cohorts. There’s always a bigger fish in the pond.

I can’t really think of anything I disliked about Death Sentence. I was way better than I expected. It felt pretty tightly edited. Backstory was concise. The story was compelling and there was plenty of action and rough stuff.  I’m not sure I’ll buy this one cause I’m kind of  sad about the whole thing but I wish I had seen it in the theater. It would have been worth the full-on evening ticket price.

Rating: 4 ½ Purrs for a near perfect revenge flick that doesn’t make you feel dirty like  some of those more grindhouse flicks can. I did think of something a little off – that guy's aim was pretty darn good for someone who had never shot a gun before. But hey – it’s Hollywood. Everyone hits targets right on in Hollywood.

The Executioner Always Chops Twice: Ghastly Blunders on the Scaffold by Geoffrey Abbott

I picked this book up from my paperback book club and I think this might be the very first time I was disappointed. The Executioner Always Chops Twice seemed like it might be a quirky list of mishaps and goofs, but instead it was a pretty dry collection of whoopsies and gore.

Geoffrey Abbott knows his stuff  - he is a former Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London. The problem is he reports in such a way that it becomes almost tedious to finish them all. There’s a ton of stories in here (I think 80 to 90, somewhere in there), some illustrations to help with the imagination, and plenty of gore to aid in the nastiness. Not only are there amusing last words and whoops I missed your necks accidents, there are pretty detailed accounts of how executions are performed.  I think the real problem wasn’t a lack of interesting stories or last words, I think it’s that after 50 or so, it just gets to be a challenge to get through them all.

On an interesting side note, I had an up close look at a botched hanging last month when we stayed the night in a historic, haunted hotel in Clayton, New Mexico. The Eklund has photos of the whoopsie hanging of Black Jack Ketchum – you can see him caught, noose around his neck, on the platform, and beheaded because the noose was tied in one of the ways Mr. Abbott describes. It was a bit gruesome to see photos, but hey, I had to look.

I don’t know that I would recommend The Executioner Always Chops Twice to anyone looking for a laugh, but it can be darkly comedic for a while. It’s just that after about 30 examples, you get immune and it gets a bit depressing and then a bit boring.

Rating: 3 Purrs for lots of historical and background information but some hisses for needing some comic relief – off with its head with a flamingo croquet mallet

Aswang

Oh NetFlix, how you have betrayed me.  I took your recommendation. I trusted you. You said, Aswang, it was a big old too-do at Sundance some years back.  It caused a panic at the midnight showing. It's scary. Fie! Fie I say! I think maybe the panic it caused was people trying to leave because it was so damn boring.

In Aswang, Katrina is young, unmarried, and pregnant. She strikes a deal that looks pretty good on the surface – Peter Null is a rich man, and to keep his money he needs an heir. Problem is, his wife can’t have children. Solution- he hires Katrina to pretend she is his wife. Katrina’s problem is this – why is the family so damn creepy? Why is the housemaid giving her hard cider and getting her drunk? What about the weird dreams and the weird dried up baby cocoons in the trees surrounding the house?

What I could have liked about this movie was the idea behind it all. Aswang, Filipino vampires, would be scary, but not in this movie. Instead they creep around and have weird, phallic sucker tongues that get squished in windows. I mean, soul-sucking vampires that like to eat children. That’s scary. The problem is, none of it ends up being scary. The story is thin. The atmosphere is practically nil. The big twist, or the one thing I saw as possibly a twist was obvious from the beginning.  The acting is poor at best and laughable most of the time. 

I hate to be so negative about a horror movie. I mean, I LIKE bad horror movies. Usually there is something I can find that makes me laugh or spooks me or has some camp value that I'll remember fondly. But this, well, this one was bad with no camp value. Bad with no Manos, Hands of Fate value.  Bad and the cardinal sin of all movies - just plain boring.

Rating: 1 Hiss for nothing. I mean, I can’t think of anything here.

 

Capote in Kansas by Ande Parks, Chris Samnee

I picked up Capote in Kansas at APE (Alternative Press Expo) in San Francisco last year, mostly because I judged a book by its cover and because I really enjoyed In Cold Blood. I thought it was an extremely well written and engrossing true crime story. Plus, who doesn’t like that crazy Truman Capote? I was really pleased with what I ended up with.

Ande Parks infuses a lot of truth in his fictionalized tale, Capote in Kansas. Here he tells the story of how Truman Capote came to write In Cold Blood, the struggles he had fitting in with the local folks in Kansas, the emotional struggle he had trying to get a grasp on the tale, and how writing that book changed him. It’s a high-level view of course, but hey, it IS a graphic novel. I mean, I don’t expect a whole ton of depth here. There is even the ghost of Nancy Cutter, who helps Capote get that sense of humanity to infuse into his story and shows him the heart, so to speak.

Samnee’s bleak, angled black & white drawings do a nice job showcasing the town, the time period, the emotional struggle of Capote, even the confusion and despair in the atmosphere of the town.  It does get a bit difficult to keep track of who is who though.

I would never say Capote in Kansas would be a replacement for reading In Cold Blood, or even a deeper look into Capote and the desires that drove him to write his masterpiece, but if Capote or the Clutter family murders interest you, you’d probably find this graphic novel of interest.

Rating: 3 ½ Purrs for a nicely meshed piece of art and story that is able to include a “ghost girl” without seeming trite

30 Days of Night: the movie and the comic

“Welcome to Barrow. Top of the world.”

It took me a movie to get me to finally pick up the graphic novel 30 Days of Night. I would flip through the book in Titan, and I just couldn’t bring myself to pay 20 bucks for something that looked like so little story. But, lucky me, because the movie was released, they released a cheaper version of the book, so I went ahead and succumbed to the call of the bloody vampire graphic novel. After all, I couldn’t see the movie without reading the source first. 

The plot’s pretty much the same in both the graphic novel and the movie. In the small, secluded town of Barrow, Alaska, the residents are battening down the hatches for winter. Many of the residents have moved out to their winter homes out in warmer parts, but the few that remain are in for and even bleaker winter than they expected. There are some unexpected guests coming into town, and they want more than just a room at the bed & breakfast. These guys have big, pointy teeth and are out for a vampiric vacation in the town where for 30 days it’s nighttime, all the time. Will the police chief and his wife be able to save the people and town they love? Will they be able to save themselves? 

The art in the graphic novel was bleak and bloody, like what you would expect from a horror comic. It’s all in shades of gray, black, red, and white, scraggly lines and splashes of color. It’s all desperate and full of teeth. The movie’s art direction follows closely to these images, with the computer editing stripping the little color there is in the clothing and atmosphere. It’s a decent replica of the graphic novel – not nearly as close as say, Sin City or 300, but not much is.

The movie deviates a bit from the comic in that it removes a few baddies and adds a few residents for you to care about, bit other than that, it’s pretty close. Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are good as the bickering sheriff and his estranged wife. Josh Hartnett’s earnestness plays well, but I would have expected an older actor to play the role. Danny Huston is pretty creepy as the head vampire. This movie relies on a bunch of creepy, toothy atmosphere form his character and it does a pretty good job of it.  How cool that Amber Sainsbury showed up – she’s from Hex (a BBC show, think British Buffy) and it’s nice to see her in another role.

Overall, I’d recommend the graphic novel over the movie just because it was a bit more effective. That could also be because I read the comic first and so knew most of the scares and twists in the movie. Either way, both are a good 90 minutes for a horror buff. 

Rating: 4 Purrs for both, with plenty of blood for everybody’s thrills and chills

28 Days Later: The Aftermath

I am a huge fan of 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. If you have read any of this blog, you will know that I adore zombies. (Okay, I know some think the fast bloody fellas aren’t real zombies, but fie on you I say – Fie! I consider them zombies of a sort, so there. They may not be brain-dead reanimated kind, but there are single minded as such. Anyway…) I picked this graphic novel up at my favorite local comic shop, Titan Comics, and wasn’t disappointed. My matching zombie socks weren’t knocked off but it was a decent “interim” story to the two movies.

The idea behind 28 Days Later: The Aftermath was to tell the story of what happens between the two movies.  On that level, I don’t think it really meets that goal.  Most of the stories take place in the same time period of the first film or shortly thereafter. The last story kind of gives you an idea of where the sequel film will be, but honestly, I think the stories here add little to the 28 Days narrative. In one story, we see the researchers who developed the virus and more depth on how it was released. In the second story, we see a family on a picnic the day after the accidental release of the Rage virus. A chimpanzee attacks the young son and the family must flee to survive. In the third story, we see Hugh, a lone survivor in London tracking and killing the zombie hordes. As he engineers the death of another survivor by zombie attack, he sees American fighter jets zooming overhead. In the fourth story, the characters from the previous three stories meet in the refugee camp set up by the Americans. The survivors find out the truth from each other, with dire consequences.

The art in this graphic novel was good, with the starkness of Piccadilly Circus beautifully done in Chapter Three. It’s nothing terribly groundbreaking though, I think the style of 30 Days of Night would be even better. Overall, I was expecting more from this, but then I have high expectations for the 28 Days franchise. I wanted more to do with the time in between 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later.

Rating: 3 ½ for a decent bridge between two of my favorite zombie films

Cloverfield

 “What is that?”

“It’s a terrible thing.”

“Oh my god what is what?”

“I don’t know! Something else! Also terrible.”

Cloverfield’s viral marketing campaign pretty much passed right by me so I think I saw the movie with a set of completely untarnished set of eyes. I also saw it way back in the theater, in what, January, and am just now getting around to posting this. (Call me lazy. It's okay. I know.) I avoided as much about the movie as I could so I could see it with no real expectations other than the completely random images in the trailer. I think that’s what made the movie so enjoyable for me.

 Cloverfield tells the story a small group of New Yorkers who, while having a going away party for a friend, are thrust into a life-or-death situation. Something is attacking the city and no one knows what it is.  These friends are thrust into trying to survive, get out of the city, and save the life of the love interest. All of this told through recovered videotape, and thus is told with a fair amount of shaky camera scenery.

I adored Cloverfield. It was a movie that even my husband (who hates monster movies, horror movies, pretty much anything I lap up with a spoon like it's carrot cake soup) loved.  I loved that it was a monster movie, and a terribly scary one at that, but I loved that it had even more going for it.  I loved the weird, gigantic monster out of nowhere. I love that no one knows what is going on. I love that no one explains and no one is safe. I loved the unknown, the terror, the real scary-ass, holy shit, what just happened situations.  I loved the commentary on contemporary history, the post-911 world New Yorkers and the rest of us. I loved the use of the camera as character and narrator.  The actors were relatively unknown, which made it much easier to see the characters as involved in the story rather than as “Mel Gibson” or “Tom Cruise.”

The only thing I didn’t care for was the vertigo. Other than that, I loved this movie.  Loved.  Loved it like take her home to your momma and say you are going to marry her loved it. In fact, we might be sending out invitations any time now. (Next Tuesday when the DVD comes out I am sure.) But I have heard, the best way to see it is without a whole lot of expectations or guesses about the story. Just go in for a good, scary monster movie.

Rating: 5 Stars for a near perfect film going experience. I loved this movie, but from what I have heard, it’s either a love it or hate it type of thing.

 

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

I waited anxiously for World War Z to be released in paperback for ages (I rarely buy hardback books, just too heavy to carry around with me), and when it finally was released I snatched it up so fast I might have knocked over some nuns on my way to the counter. After reading it, I would have bought it in hardback it was so good.

In World War Z, Max Brooks creates much more than just a zombie story. He takes that step that most zombie films have tried to do since Night of the Living Dead. He uses zombies to address the real possibilities of a global epidemic and how the world might be after the war is finished and peace is reached. It’s amazing. Brooks tells the story of the Zombie War, a true World War that affects every corner of the earth, from small province to large city using a series of first-person accounts and interviews. It creates such a feeling of history and truth that it’s almost spine chilling. The story covers tales from military folks, smugglers, doctors, teenagers and children, political officials, and regular Joes, all who in their own way dealt with the 200 million plus zombie horde. The ones that stick out to me, even now after weeks of reading it, are the stories from the young woman whose family fled to Canada to ride out the zombie horde, the military team with the trained dogs, and the military personnel who recount the stories of PTSD and the Battle of Yonkers.

I’m definitely going to pick up Max Brooks’ other book, The Zombie Survival Guide, just to see if it is just as good. I really can’t recommend this book enough. It’s scary as a horror novel, but it’s even scarier as a contemporary history or story of one of our possible futures. It feels impossibly real but never loses its entertainment value.

Rating: 5 Purrs for zombies with a purpose. Buy this now.

DOA: Dead or Alive

“You can have him. But what about the other 300?”

I rented DOA: Dead or Alive because I can’t help but love Jamie Pressley. I’ve followed her career every since that god-awful and yet somehow impossible to turn off Poison Ivy sequel. She’s gorgeous, funny, and sexy-as-hell. What’s not to like? So when I saw that she, along with some other nice-to-look-at ladies were teaming up in a martial arts film that looks like a ladies Mortal Kombat, I snatched this puppy up in my NetFlix queue and put it right up there at the top.

 In the opening montage of DOA, a group of the best women fighters are challenged and invited to the ultimate martial arts contest – DOA.  These amazing ladies each have a specialized skill, including Christie Allen, a jewel thief who really wants what is in the island’s safe, Tina Armstrong (woot Jamie!), a pro-wrestler who wants to prove she isn’t a fake, Helena Douglas, the daughter of the creator of DOA who wants to honor her father’s memory, and Kasumi, a Ninja princess who has been exiled from her clan so that she might find what happened to her brother, who left the year before to fight in DOA. Off these ladies go to the private island where the tournament takes place. After being told to jump out of the place and make their way to the main fighting location and actually enter the tournament. All of the fighters are put into a pool and pitted against each other where they must knock out their opponents or be sent home. As the usual story goes these ladies fight each other but soon learn to depend on each other when an even greater evil is unearthed. The tournament’s master Donovan is up to something, and the only way good can win is if these ladies can start to work together instead of fight each other.

This movie is fun. Period. The story is silly, of course, but the scenery is nice. The martial arts are fun while not nearly as “true” as a Jackie Chan or Stephen Chow movie. There is this one scene in the film that is hilarious – two of the ladies end up sharing a room together later in the film and one of the girl’s Dad walks in (they are scheduled to fight). The exchange there is priceless. So funny.

I’ve never played the video game DOA was based on, so I have no idea how good of a “video game” movie it is, but as a fun Mortal Kombat flick it rates highly in my book. It’s funny, it has some nice fight scenes, and it’s nice a short. It never takes itself seriously. I’m seriously considering picking it up at the used DVD store just so I can watch it again for a laugh or two. 

Rating: 4 Purrs for the ladies. That fight scene in the rain was very nice.

 

The Terror by Dan Simmons

I read several of The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons starting way back in high school. He is still one of the few sci-fi writers I can truly enjoy, so when I saw he wrote a horror novel I was really surprised. In fact, I went back and made sure it was the same Dan Simmons. I was even more surprised to see it on several top 10 lists, including Stephen King’s list in Entertainment Weekly. I had let this book sit on my bookshelf for a while, intimidated by its size and subject matter. I am very glad I finally picked it up and listened to the folks who thought so highly of it.

In The Terror, Dan Simmons creates a fictionalized story of the doomed Franklin Expedition. In 1845, two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, left England on a quest to find the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. They never returned. Rescue missions were sent, and few answers or traces were ever found. Dan Simmons takes what history knows and builds a deeply engrossing adventure, horror, and fantasy novel. In Dan Simmons version, the men of the Erebus and the Terror are frozen in the Arctic for the third (or second, I can’t remember to be honest) winter. Franklin is dead, and the two ships are dealing with not just frozen temperatures, rancid food, low rations of rum, and the general crew issues that come up in those kind of conditions, but also a weird tongue-less Eskimo woman and a strange beast that may be a polar bear or it may be something else. The “thing on the ice” is stalking the crew, and for the longest time I didn’t know if it was a polar bear, a figment of their imagination, or something like my old friend The Shrike from the Hyperion novels. It’s a definite pull into the narrative – is it real or is it symbolic for the evil within? (well, yes, but it’s also a rip-tastic slashie beastie.)

What stands out most to me about this book was the attention to detail. After reading it, I went to Wikipedia to find out more about the Franklin Expedition and I was surprised at how much truth there was in this fiction. Franklin of The Terror and Franklin of the real world were the epitome of that “British spirit of exploration,” a man who brings along fine china to the Arctic and yet refuses to adopt native customs that might help his crew live.

I really don’t know what compelled me more, the true story of the Franklin Expedition or the story that Dan Simmons tells and the idea that some of it might be true. The “thing on the ice” became secondary to me when faced with the bare facts of a crew of men faces the odds this crew faced: starvation, freezing temperatures, cannibalism, murder, psychosis, scurvy, the list goes on. Wow. This is one of those rare books that is more than just a horror story. Strip out the gore & beastie and you still have a novel fraught with horror .  Don’t let the thickness of the book scare you away. It’s an excellent read, just make sure you are ready to stomach some big icky areas.

Rating: 5 Purrs for a book well-worth the time and effort it took to read it. I love to find a book that scared me, disturbed me, and taught me something all in one story.

 

Scarecrows

“They only want a brain – yours.”

This is my first foray into the Final Girl Film Club, although I have seen several of the films she has selected. I finally remembered to rent the film on time, remembered to watch it in advance, and actually took notes while watching the movie. I prepared for this thing. I studied.

Ah Scarecrows, how I wanted to love you and hold you close and possibly marry you. I had high hopes. After all, the plot sounded right up my alley. A group of thieves steal the Camp Pendleton payroll and kidnap a pilot and his daughter to get away. On the way to Mexico, the always-popular destination for thieves on the run, one of the thieves double-crosses the crew, dumps the loot out of the plane, and parachutes into a graveyard surrounded by creepy looking scarecrows. The chase begins. Will the group survive the night? Why are there scarecrows surrounding a graveyard? Will the girl and her father get away? Will greed ruin the close-knit team of thieves? Only time will tell.

Scarecrows had its good times and bad times for me. I went into it thinking this plot is so silly it’s got to be so-bad-its-good. Right from the start, I thought - Exorcist opening credits steal, that’s okay. Oh and look – a very cute dog. Don’t hurt the dog. But then, well, I got bored. Scarecrows are undoubtedly creepy. It’s a horror film staple – no one likes those scary guardians of the harvest. Wizard of Oz is maybe the only example of a nice scarecrow I can think of, and he didn’t have a brain so he’s pretty much a zombie scarecrow. Jeepers Creepers 2, Children of the Corn, etc. used the idea, plus I am sure there were a Supernatural episode and at least one X-Files episode in there too. But there was so little action in the first part of the movie I had a hard time paying attention. I don’t expect a lot of character development in a film like this but some tension would be nice. And what was with the voice-overs? Everyone was talking in voice-over like the sound guy wasn’t in residence that day. I began to think that the entire movie would be the group of thieves taunting Bert over their headsets. “You’re crow shit.” Awesome. I wanted Henry Rollins to come in a save the day like he does in Wrong Turn 2. My questions morphed from does the team survive to does Bert ever actually talk out loud? Holy shit that scarecrow just knifed Bert! Something finally happened! Ah – scarecrow surprise in the night vision scope!

(I do have to admit, it made perfect sense to me for the lady thief to check out her hair and makeup in her Clinique blush compact in the middle of the film and then let the kidnapped chica check hers out too. After all, how can you successfully navigate murderous scarecrows if your hair is out of place?)

Then finally the movie gets interesting. The girls had to prepare first, then it really kicks off. Our traitor friend Bert shows up all zombified and the gang rips into him, literally. I’m not sure what I expected there but it wasn’t what you see. Wow. That was the second best part of the movie. Especially when the guys think he’s eaten all of that, and then one of them says, “We’ll have to refrigerate this, it stinks.” Ha! Then rusty saws, limb removal, pitchforks, and scythes all come out to play and the thieves are picked off one by one. I’ve always though a pitchfork was a terribly dangerous tool – how do farmers keep from maiming themselves? Of course, somewhere along the say the kidnapped girl actually starts caring for the folks that kidnapped her and left her an orphan and they all “have to work together to get out of here” and away from the murderous scarecrows. It was sudden, but expected.

But Scarecrows saves my favorite part until the end. Scarecrow-Zombie-dog. Freakin’ awesome. Why did they leave that to the end?

I think, all in all I am pretty neutral on Scarecrows. It had good parts, but the slow start up really did me in. Zombie-dog saved it, and some of the creepy farmhouse and scarecrow atmosphere worked, but the acting and casting was atrocious.

Rating: 3 1/2 Purrs for a film that had potential but didn’t live up to my expectations. Zombie-dog should have gotten more screen time.