"Accomplishments"
At home: I could never really get a handle on Killing Mary Sue's humor, and I don't think IT could, either. The premise behind this black comedy is that a senator's trashy stepdaughter is both named Mary Sue and is, in plotting terms, A Mary Sue - a young woman who can do anything the script requires. Okay, fine, and if they'd gone the whole hog and made this some kind of meta-textual exercise where the Writer is in some way invoked, it might have worked. As is, everyone is surprised at her ability to fend off assassins (including herself) AND they throw in a mundane explanation at the end that fails to land. And yet, also include an outrageous gag at the end that's unearned given those revelations. But largely, if it doesn't work, it's that Mary Sue is incredibly unlikable, a kind of sociopathic, unbreakable junky hero who only wants love from her stepfather and seems completely oblivious to what's happening in the world. Dermot Mulroney as the evil senator is going way over the top like he's in a Jerry Lewis movie. The political satire is surface-level. And ultimately, it just tries too hard to be irreverent, and simply comes off as tedious.
A total classic from 1980, Little Darlings swam so Superbad could walk and Booksmart could run. Teenage Tatum O'Neil and Kristy McNichol are goaded into competing for who loses their virginity first at summer camp, and it's played more for truth and drama than later, more comedic examples. The cliché is that teenage boys are horndogs, but if you've had any frank conversations about this with women, you'll realize they're the same. But these girls (watch for a tiny Cynthia Nixon in the cast) are mostly in a hurry to grow up, and often play-act their interest in sex. There are telling moments in between the talk of getting condoms and "womanhood" where they share a childish laugh over a food fight, for example. They may be hormonally teetering, but are they ready? I love the twinned climaxes (so to speak), replete with ironies, and the sentimental button, too. McNichol has already won some Emmies for Family, but this has to be some of her finest work.
The "horror" in And God Said to Cain is largely background radiation - unless you're one of the baddies that Klaus Kinski's gunslinger is hunting down, more or less where slasher flicks meet revenge pictures, then yeah, maybe it's a monster movie. Kinski's intensity serves this spaghetti western well. A presidential pardon frees him from a chain gang and sets him on a course to kill the man who framed him. In the way, perhaps, is the bad guy's innocent son, who will have to make a difficult choice. Director Antonio Margheriti - better known for horror flicks with lurid names like Castle of Blood, Cannibal Apocalypse and Naked You Die - gives the hero's extended siege on the villains a Gothic atmosphere, with organ music, church bells ringing, and a tornado storm that acts, in tandem with Kinski, as the Wrath of God. Various religious allusions also push us in that direction, to the point where I fully expected some supernatural reveal at some point. There isn't, but you could decide for yourself that there is some kind of Old Testament divine presence at play.
Cemetery Man (AKA DellaMorte DellAmore)... What a bizarre experience. If Rupert Everett hadn't been in it, I'd have pegged it for a 1970s (or even 60s) Italian horror flick. It has that look, the iffy dubs, and even the poster looks like a throwback. It takes place today (the 90s), but it has a Gothic atmosphere, with its story about a cemetery caretaker employed to kill the dead as they invariably rise from this particular graveyard and falls for various women all played by Anna Falchi. But it's also existential theater of the absurd, and ends on a Beckettian note. So I certainly appreciate it without ever getting a good handle on it. What might have made a quirky novel is, as a film, an odd patchwork of styles and ideas, remorselessly episodic in that is largely eschews plot by tying off story elements and moving on. It surprises, but it can also disappoint, the way a dream might feel real, then evaporate. And Everett's Dellamorte's dreams feel more real than his reality.
Based a true story - which is why it takes place in France, despite all Italian appearances - Killer Nun avoids feeling like a biopic by focusing on the mystery (in fact, I forgot about it until the final cards reminded me of it). Sure, there are only two real suspects - an older nun who runs a hospital ward, has just had a brain tumor removed, and is struggling with dark thoughts and impulses... and the younger nun who loves her enough to cover for her, perhaps even enough to kill? - but the clever editing confuses things enough for the movie to slip into giallo. Certainly, some of the violence fits that genre, and the sex and nudity is on the exploitative side and don't entirely pay off (are these all ready part of the "true crime"?!). Man, nuns or not, this place is a pit of sin! Cool soundtrack, too, using sounds to create the descent into madness. Still, I wanted more from Killer Nun, which I feel was held back by the facts of its case, especially in its slow start and abrupt ending.
It doesn't take long for Lucio Fulci's The Beyond to get real goopy (not to be confused with the equally goopy From Beyond), oof! For fans of clever gore effects, this is sure to be a classic. Cartriona MacColl just inherited a bed and breakfast sitting on a Hellmouth in Louisiana, and if there's one thing you don't do when your building is on a Hellmouth, it's commit brutal, sadistic violence on the premises. Well, how was Catriona to know? At its strongest, The Beyond destroys very human-like dummies with ghoulish abandon and spins an intriguing mystery of escaped souls and people blinded by horrors only Lovecraft could imaging. It unfortunately doesn't spend all its time in that space, and the tedious climax is essentially just David Warbeck shooting slow-moving zombies over and over. Nice ending, however. Fulci is one of the most sadistic horror directors of his generation and this, I think, transcends the essential ick he usually delivers.
With At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, actor-director José Mojica Marins originates his character of "Coffin Joe" who would appear in seven more films between 1967 and 2008(!), initially a gleefully irreligious undertaker with a cruel violent streak and a bent for sexual predation who soon gives in to his murderous impulses. It's an interesting idea: A character whose lack of belief in the supernatural, up to including God, fears no retribution for his evil acts - the atheist as seen by Christian fundamentalists - and ironically, though he worships life above all else, he only means his own life and what depravity this lack of divine accountability allows him to take part in. Ridiculous anywhere but in a horror film. And he's wrong. The spirits of the dead do come for him. Or are they just manifestations of a guilty conscience? I think THAT's even less credible than ghosts and witches. Some fierce kills and tense, triggering moments put Brazilian horror on the map.
Jean Rollin is best known for arty vampire films, but despite having vampires at one point, Lost in New York is not about vampires. Rather, this weird TV project pays tribute to his cinematic influences (perhaps most noticeably represented by Eyes Without a Face) by sending two little girls into a dreamy (filmic?) version of New York, where they are adults searching for one another, play-acting as characters from books and films. Using a strange idol, they may have unlocked dangerous powers, those of their own imaginations, and gotten lost in them. As one might in a good book or a powerful film, is what I think he's getting at. But once lost, could one find their way back to childhood again? Definitely the kind of film that seems to have been "found in editing" and all the running around might feel tedious to some (especially the naked goddess stuff). Ultimately, while there's existential dread - a kind of artistic horror - it's a fantasy, and one that, as cinephiles and bibliophiles - you know who you are! yes, you! - we have to admit we're tapped into, on some level.
Manuela Velasco has a very nice presence in [REC], a well-considered found footage film whose conceit is that we're looking at the raw footage from a docu-series camera following Barcelona firemen on a doomed call. It had such a fun, sprightly beginning, I was initially disappointed that the horror turn didn't seem (at the risk of being compared to Blair Witch) particularly mysterious - just another take on the zombie outbreak tropes. But the long choreographed single takes and earned jump scares won me over, and the mystery of just what was happening was well constructed. It's most intriguing elements come a little late, and this subgenre comes with a couple of built-in minuses, namely motion sickness (not so much at home) and what feels like the foregone conclusion that the leads aren't going to make it out or else we wouldn't have to "find the footage". But not gonna lie, I was a little stoked to discover there are sequels... that has got to count for something.
[Guam] Guam's Board of Education beat Moana to the punch a year early with Maisa: The Chamoru Girl Who Saves Guåhan, an island legend told through animation about equal to one of those Doctor Who lost episode Flash animations, with wooden, but not dislikable live action bookends. It's an interesting tale of the island being threatened by a giant fish, and the power of women of their society. There's a certain amateurishness in the editing, voice acting and character designs, and the CG elements are obtrusive, but the environments are beautiful, and the story compellingly mythic.
[Wallis and Futuna] Seleone is the eponymous "character" (interviewee, but this is at least semi-scripted) in what amounts to a finger-wagging PSA about using local foods and medicines on the French-held islands of Wallis and Fortuna in the Pacific (the short intro plays like an education video, but we never return to the narrator). I appreciate the potshot at colonialism, but this is hardly cinema.
Books: Artist Lucas Varela's debut graphic novel (debut? is that right?), The Longest Day of the Future, looks, on the surface, like a science-fiction utopia in the mold of the Jetsons or Futurama, but the more he scratches at the surface, the more dystopian ugliness is revealed. This is really a world of duelling corporations and deep repression. The twin hearts of the story are a wage slave who buys the wrong coffee and is sent on a mission to infiltrate the other side as punishment, and a sweet servitor robot who likewise lands itself in a similar, but reversed, position. And these flies in the proverbial ointment might topple the whole world down. And though I used the verb "scratched", above, there's nothing scratchy about Varela's work. Rather, it's geometrically and graphically precise, the closest comparison I might make perhaps being Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library. Though the book was first published in French, it hardly matters since it's all told without dialog, and the detailed art is more than up to the challenge.
RPGs: We had to finish one act this week in Torg Eternity, and start another (one I was very keen to get into). In the former, the PCs had to finish their fight with a clear-domed super-intelligent ape, escape the horde of monkeys that wanted revenge, find the tomb that contained the artifact they were looking to gift the Amazons in the next act, and, as a side-goal, survive the experience. But there was a Nightmare Tree on top of the tomb and the heroes decided they need to destroy it, too. BUT the Demon Slayer's rival Killingsworth showed his true colors as one of the Grim Cobra's team mates and started shooting them in the back. BUTTTTT they had drawn a curse card earlier on that meant trespassing in the tomb would cause problems. This was perhaps the closest we got to characters dying - they were pretty banged up by the time they found themselves fighting a super-archer mummy queen in a water-filled vault - not to say a total party kill. While the Realm Runner doesn't like calling Reality Storms because it cuts other PCs off from the action, in this case, I truly believe it saved their lives (though not before the Demon Slayer was taken down and had to pull an Injury card), even if the Runner did discover that big bosses sometimes have 5 Possibilities to drain rather than the normal 3. But they did make it out and I sped them to Act 2. (Now, imagine if they hadn't killed the tree in time for the climax - that Orrorsh tinge interferes with wound-soaking.)
I decided late in the game (based on a player comment) that the city of the Amazons, Themysc--I mean, Olympos, should be a softpoint that still supported the Laws and Axioms of a dead world described in the old Infiniverse newsletter from back in the day. So it's Nile Empire, but since this Amazon Island is supposed to be kind of mysterious in the game books, I made at least their city a mixed zone that supports both realities. AND has its own set of Cosm cards, largely based on Greek tragedy/epic poetry concepts. Will publish in due course. We only had time to meet the Amazons and their queen, with which the heroes must negotiate an alliance to help the war effort, and left things on a cliffhanger as they find they're not the only guests at the banquet that night - there's a Nile Empire delegation, too! Here's the Cosm tent for Olympos. the Laws are pretty thin, but I think that's fine for a dead world which only exists as a mixed zone anyway. The Law of Providence on there refers to the Gods taking an interest in humanity, a flavor that shows up in the Cosm deck.
Best bits: Killingsworth would have been a big problem, but a card made him leave with a parting shot. Only to return another day, kids, watch your backs. I made the Nightmare Tree play with their minds to balance the non-stop action with character moments - the Super-Wrestler started feeling the stitches he used to have when transformed into a Frankenstein's Monster. The Demon Slayer was offered his old Slayer's gun back, but the players universally rejected my proposed house rule that one's legendary perk would be restored/sustained after transformation (I was bummed, but it seems a moral victory for them), and the Deadlands Preacher was invited inside the tree's root system by the ghost of a woman he accidentally killed where he was almost eaten by a giant snake. Unable to get to the plane stuck inside the tree midway, a card was played to get a clue as to how to defeat the tree and its guardian, which made the plane topple down, a dead body fly out of it, and their notebook with such clues drop at a character's feet. A Setback during the final battle made the tomb start to crumble and the heroes would be buried alive (if not dead from being hit with debris) within 5 rounds - they barely managed it, carrying the Demon Slayer out, who would have been dead if not for his Were-Bat curse which includes a healing factor. Still, he talked about being concussed, and that's coincidentally the Injury he pulled (bit of a Mind-drain, but I consider it a temporary injury, he might be relieved to read here). As for Amazon island, I commend the Slayer and Wrestler for using their skills and imitative to modify Amazon dresses into male-wearable tunics for themselves. Showing respect to the culture is a good way to curry favor with Queen Aegea. We'll see how well they do in terms of table manners next time.
Improv: The second date on the "Lucid Dreaming" tour was Atholville (really serving the Campbellton-Dalhousie region (to GoogleMaps, everyone!), in the north of the province), where the public was given a choice of three genres for us to craft a fully-improvised play around - paranormal thriller, hunting story, and science-fiction. It's hunting season and it's big enough of that area that our local celebrity was leaving FOR her hunting lodge after the show (no shade on hunters, but I find the whole thing icky, personally), so the hunting story was the odds-on favorite. Except, the hunters must've been in the woods, and our audience went for that ol' October feel with the spooky story. Jonathan "Bob" Savoie, also a local boy, was drawn to sit in the "chair" and have his memories and psyche probed. The audience decided we should try to solve his character's phobias. Well, fair enough. And he had many - clowns, spiders, mortality, and sleeping lest he dream about those things - but before leaving the house, I had picked up an old tiki idol (tourist tat my mom had brought back from Jamaica when I was a kid) as a possible "occult" or "cursed" object, should the vote go that way. In the virtual reality, it became the vessel in which Bob's grandmother was held and from which she haunted him. Strange lore about her training to be a clown, having died when he was a child, and so on, but we somehow wrapped it all up in the third act when we unearthed a memory of visiting his dying grandmother (Mathieu Lewis) in the hospital. Everything we set up "clicked"... her pale visage, her bloodshot lips, her swollen feet, and the parents (myself and Guyane Pelletier) were desperate to not scare the child by yucking it up, "grandma is just JOKING!"... It basically associated her with clowns, leading to a life of deep anxiety. It sounds heavy, but we have to understand that the preceding 75 minutes had been quite comedic. I joke that I'm just the button pusher at these things, in this case creating frights with screaming banshee noises, etc. from my computer (thank you role-playing game audio clips!), but I was in the groove with this one, with perhaps my funniest performance in years. Guyane and I were VERY sitcom parents and I loved every minute of it - we've always had good chemistry - but really everyone did well, both in jokes and atmosphere, and it took a lot of active listening and team work to suddenly twist the knife in the audience and make them care for the emotional resolution. We still gave them a Twilight Zone twist at the end of the "simulation", and then ONE LAST SCARE(TM) in the so-called real world when the tiki idol showed up as more than a figment of Bob's imagination. Great reaction from our fairly intimate audience (the non-hunters), and I'm very happy with the results.
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