International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival 2016

It's almost time for the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival again. Nowadays this is the genre track of the Phoenix Film Festival and it will run from 7th to 14th April at the Harkins Scottsdale 101 at the very top right corner of Phoenix.

This was my first film festival and it's still my favourite, excluding my own, the Apocalypse Later International Fantastic Film Festival, which I'm kicking off this October. More on that soon! I love this festival so much I wrote a book about it, The International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival: The Transition Years, in which I review every feature and every short that played this festival in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

The schedules are now up, so check out the Phoenix Film Festival schedule grid. If you just want to see what's playing, you can leap stright to the succinct 2016 IHSFFF index that I've built at Apocalypse Later. I maintain indexes for every year that the festival has run (and this is the twelfth) with titles, years, directors and IMDb links. As I watch films, I add ratings. As I review them, I turn the film titles into links to my reviews.

This is a particularly interesting year for me and I'm eager to see how it turns out. This is for a couple of reasons.

One is that, for the first time in many years, there's been a change to the crew who mount the festival each year. Andrea Canales, the Midnite Movie Mamacita, who we first met at this event in 2007 and who has served as Festival Director for many years, has stepped down and Monte Yazzie, formerly the festival manager, has stepped into her shoes. I'm fascinated to see what vision he'll bring to the event.

Another is that 2016 marks the last in a new set of three years, the time period by which this festival has identified itself thus far:

• The 'Early Years' from 2005 to 2007 were wildly inconsistent but very eager, with the festival full of life and happy to try anything new. It didn't really know what it wanted to do at this point but it was having a blast finding out.
• The 'Indie Years' from 2008 to 2010 took the show on the road, playing indie theatres with a very consistent model. It knew what it was at this point and was happy with its vision.
• The 'Transition Years' from 2011 to 2013 saw the festival eaten by its bigger sister, the Phoenix Film Festival, shrinking down to a shadow of its former self but then steadily building back up again.

You can see many differences in this table, which counts the number of features and sets of shorts, how many were in competition and the number of total slots.

		Features			Shorts			Slots
Era	Year	Horror	Sci-Fi	Showcase	Horror	Sci-Fi	Other	Comp	Total
Early	2005 2006 2007	4 4 3	3 3 3	8 6 14	3 3 3	2 3 2	0 0 1	12 13 11	20 19 26
Indie	2008 2009 2010	3 3 3	2 2 2	13 12 12	2 2 2	1 2 2	1 1 0	8 9 9	22 22 21
Transition	2011 2012 2013	3 2 3	1 2 3	5 8 8	1 1 1	2 2 2	0 0 0	7 7 8	12 15 17
?	2014 2015 2016	3 3 4	3 4 3	11 9 9	2 2 2	2 2 2	0 0 0	10 11 11	21 20 20

It's reasonably easy to see the patterns:

• The Early Years show inconsistent numbers, especially with showcase features and the total number of slots for material. They were the strongest era for competition films, both for features and shorts, especially on the horror side.
• The Indie Years ran very consistently, with no numbers different by more than one throughout that era. They were the strongest era for showcase films, with competition film slots moving over to showcase.
• The Transition Years dropped most numbers greatly, though horror features and sci-fi stable but horror shorts down and sci-fi features having to build back up. They were the weakest era for number of slots available, whether in competition or not, but numbers grew year on year.
• The new, as yet unnamed era, saw the stop to that regrowth, stabilising it and keeping each set of numbers relatively consistent. They weren't the strongest or the weakest era for anything except the number of sci-fi features in competition, which reached a new peak.

Incidentally, the 'Other' category that you may be wondering about were sets of local horror short films called Seven Deadly Films (2007) or Deadly Event (2008 and 2009). They're the biggest anomaly to the concept of trilogy years, as they start and a year off.

Another table highlighting the venues is even more obvious:

Era	Year	Location
Early	2005 2006 2007	Harkins Centerpoint and Valley Art Harkins Centerpoint Harkins Centerpoint
Indie	2008 2009 2010	Chandler Cinemas MADCAP Theatres MADCAP Theatres
Transition	2011 2012 2013	Harkins Scottsdale 101 Harkins Scottsdale 101 Harkins Scottsdale 101
?	2014 2015 2016	Harkins Scottsdale 101 Harkins Scottsdale 101 Harkins Scottsdale 101

It's easy to see threes here. Pretty obviously, the first three years were on Mill Ave in Tempe at Harkins venues, the second went on the road to indepedent venues and the third and fourth have been back within Harkins at a consistent location.

Another way to look at the festival is by its count of older films on the schedule and the number of guests who were often there to introduce them.

Era	Year	Older Films	Guests
Early	2005 2006 2007	2 1 5	3 4 4
Indie	2008 2009 2010	6 5 3	2 3 2
Transition	2011 2012 2013	0 1 1	1 1 1
?	2014 2015 2016	1 0 0	1 0 0

Again, it's pretty easy to delineate here but there's some background to note too:

• The Early Years saw the most guests but the number of older films varied. Some presented other material, others simply came to be inducted in the IHSFFF Hall of Fame.
• The Indie Years saw the number of guests drop but still remain high, while the older films thrived. This was in part due to tie-ins to local repertory cinema efforts.
• The Transition Years dropped all these numbers to token values. Both Heather Langenkamp and Michael Biehn presented new material.
• The new, as yet unnamed era, dropped both ideas entirely, with Dee Wallace-Stone's presentation of Cujo the only number for either.

So what will the years of 2014 to 2016 be remembered as? Well, that's still up in the air but I'm eager to find out.

I think they may be the Reevaluation Years, in which the festival did well and justified its bulking back up from the low year of 2011, but struggled to really affirm itself as its own entity, partly for inherent reasons due to its being rolled into the Phoenix Film Festival but also partly from the standpoint of vision.

Losing its status as a separate event meant that patrons couldn't buy an IHSFFF ticket any more, just a Phoenix Film Festival one, and dedicated VIP passes vanished too (a VIP pass to IHSFFF used to cost $100, while the equivalent PFF pass, which admittedly covers a longer period of time, costs two to three times that). Dedicated program books stopped and the only merchandise that remained available year on year are T-shirts.

But while I can easily see the vision for the Early, Indie and Transition years, I can't for the new era yet, beyond a shift in policy from having a guest to draw customers and introduce a classic film to entirely focusing on new material.

Perhaps after watching everything screening this year, something will come to mind to replace the Reevaluation Years. Perhaps, only after the fifth set of three years will the differences really become obvious.

See you there!

March Reviews at the Nameless Zine

I write book reviews for The Nameless Zine, an online zine run by the Western Science Fiction Association (WesternSFA), a non-profit fandom group based here in Arizona.

As the Nameless Zine follows a graphical indexing system, I also maintain my own text index of what I've written at my own website. You can find it here at the Reviews at the Nameless Zine page.

Reviews at the Nameless Zine post monthly on the 15th of each month and March's batch are now online. I reviewed seven books this month:

Delilah Dirk and the King's Shilling

This is a magnificent graphic novel from First Second that continues a series by Tony Cliff that was begun in Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, a book that was nominated for Eisner, Shuster and Harvey Awards. Book two works well even if you haven't read the prior volume; I haven't, but I certainly will.

We're in the early 19th century with an Englishwoman traipsing around the continent in voluminous dresses but somehow coming across as a sort of Indiana Jones type anyway. The plot is not particularly deep but it's thoroughly enjoyable and the style reminds of Hergé's Adventures of Tintin. The lines are simple but effective, most of the book beginning as pencil art that's enhanced digitally.

If the story isn't deep, at least the characters have substance and we're all going to cheer for our heroine and her long-suffering companion, the Turkish Lieutenant of the first book, Erdemoglu Selim. Neither play to convention and I'm looking forward to seeing them grow as this series expands.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

The Mall of Cthulhu

I had a lot of fun with this book by Seamus Cooper, even if the story is thoroughly predictable and the characters hardly deep. The leads, Laura the FBI rookie and Ted the latte maker, are more like sets of neuroses riffed on throughout, and the villains of the piece could be replaced by cardboard cutouts for all the depth they're given. Laura is Clarice Starling lite and Ted is a human version of Odie from the Garfield cartoons.

We're in a world where bad things exist, but most people don't know about them, just those like Laura and Ted who happened to encounter a vampire sorority in college. So when they stumble onto a set of cultists all set on recovering a copy of the inevitable Necronomicon from under H P Lovecraft's house in Providence to call the elder gods forth from non-Euclidean dimensions, it's up to Laura and Ted to do something about it.

What works most is the humour, which is utterly irreverent and, on occasion, blasphemous, if you're fans of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos (and if you aren't, this would be a strange way for you to learn about it). More serious die hards are going to get a little upset here and the rest of us really need to buy into the humour to dig the rest.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Two Serpents Rise

I'm working through Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence and this is the second in the series, following Three Parts Dead. It's not a sequel to that book, as almost nothing continues on from it, but it's set in the same world. Instead of a legal thriller set in Alt Coulumb, Gladstone gives us a thriller set in Dresediel Lex, a foreboding city infused with Aztec mythology.

Well, I can't say mythology when the gods are real. The King in Red defeated those which lorded it over Dresediel Lex in the God Wars and has moved the old ways, right down to human sacrifice, outside the law. We follow Caleb Altemoc, a risk assessor who works for Red King Incorporated, as he investigates sabotage of the city's water supply.

If that sounds boring, let me emphasise that it isn't. He's also the son of Temoc Altemoc, the former high priest who used to run the city and still floats around perpetrating terrorist acts. He claims not to have anything to do with these new ones, but he does complicate matters. So does Mal, a cliff runner, who seems not to be involved but to be everywhere that things happen.

I adored Dresediel Lex, which is painted in what William Gibson used to call 'a sort of elegaic sorrow'. It's not a happy place and there's a real weight to what we read. There's age here, untold centuries of history mentioned in periphery but infusing the very fabric of the city. I can't wait to read the third book in the series and see how different it is again.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed Three Parts Dead.

Reviva Las Vegas!

Author Sean Hoade is a glorious character and he wrote another one into this novel: Chris Newman, who used to compete in the World Series of Poker but now, after the zombocalypse, ekes out a living as an itinerant gambler wandering the west and plying his reputation in games played for food, clothes or other necessities.

And then he's summoned to Las Vegas, perhaps the last city still free of the zombie menace. Nickels Freeman, who used to run a cheap casino downtown, saved the place by surrounding it with a twenty foot wall created out of crushed cars and now lords it over his domain from his personal mansion, the Bellagio. And he likes the great poker players to come to town and play for the most serious stakes of all.

This initially feels like a fun but throwaway novel, but it gets more involved as it runs on and ends up springing a number of very cool twists on us. I've read a lot less substantial work by New York Times bestsellers, even if they don't have as many typos. Hoade lives in Vegas and he transforms it magnificently here into something very different... or is it just a metaphor?

I ate this book up, pun well and truly intended, and it makes me want to read the rest of Hoade's output.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Blood of Innocents

I reviewed the first book in Mitchell Hogan's Sorcery Ascendant Sequence last month, A Crucible of Souls, and thoroughly dug it even though it felt like a five hundred page prologue rather than an actual novel. This first follow up definitely starts to tell us a story, but in a vaguely similar way to the first, just revealing more secrets and ramping up the levels of magnitude.

The city of Anasoma has fallen to the Indryallan army and Caldan, our chief focus, is perhaps the only sorcerer to escape and he's just an apprentice. He, with a small band of characters from the first book, travels to the nearby city of Riversedge to inform the authorities there and to deliver a sword. The story begins long before we get to Riversedge and only escalates once we're there.

As before, we have a diverse set of characters crafted with due care and attention. Every one of the people we follow, and there are three sets of them, has their own history and motivations and we could tell the story from each and every one of their perspectives. He isn't afraid to kill them off either, however well we've got to know them.

This answers a lot of the questions raised in the first book, but not all and it adds new questions to the mix. I'm eager to read more, though I'm guessing I'll have to wait because Hogan surely isn't churning out five hundred pages a month!

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed A Crucible of Souls.

Vendetta

This is the second book in the urban fantasy series that Gail Z Martin began with Deadly Curiosities. It revolves around Trifles and Folly, an antiques store in Charleston, SC, that's run by people who do more than buy your grandma's jewellery. It's been around for three and a half centuries, locating supernatural artifacts and either neutralising them or secreting them away from the public to keep everyone safe.

The first book established their raison d'être and told the first story in a series. If that read like the pilot to a TV show, this reads like the second, more experimental, episode to see what the creators could get away with. It drops the point of what Cassidy Kincaide and her silent partner, the centuries old vampire, Sorren, do to focus on the vendetta of the title.

Someone has it in for Sorren and they're quite willing to cause massive collateral damage in their attacks on him. Our intrepid heroes have to figure out the why to get to the who and, in doing so, help keep Charleston safe, given that whoever's coming for Sorren is stirring up the ghosts and making people vanish into thin air as they walk down stairs.

I didn't like the sweep here, because the vendetta takes over and everything becomes supernatural fight scenes. What I liked was the detail, because Martin gives us great characters and great locations and expands this fictional world successfully. I'm especially keen on reading more about the Briggs Society, but there are a host of people and places I want to learn more about. Hopefully book three will be more focused, but I'll be back to find out.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed Deadly Curiosities.

Pirate of the Pacific

I've been reviewing a Doc Savage adventure each month and I'm up to the fifth, which follows on immediately from the fourth, The Polar Treasure, is even more of a bundle of fun and introduces, for the first time, a real opponent for Doc in the Mongol pirate, Tom Too.

The obvious catch is that it's a product of its time, notably racist in a number of ways that nobody cared about in 1933. It's an entry into the Yellow Peril genre, which is fine, but it has a ridiculous habit of overusing pidgin English. No Japanese is ever going to say words like 'halm', 'fol', 'short' or 'pelhaps' and, if you can't figure them out, just change the L's to R's. Renny even gets into blackface here.

Outside of that, Lester Dent got most things right. He segues well from one adventure to the next. He stays grounded with an exotic but believable location. He introduces the details of the Doc Savage universe for new readers without boring the regulars. He ties into contemporary history with the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. And he sets up an intricate web around the villain of the piece which proves massively difficult for Doc and his men to unravel.

This is by far my favourite of the first five Doc Savage novels and I'm eager to launch into the sixth.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed The Man of Bronze, The Land of Terror, Quest of the Spider and The Polar Treasure.