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.

Monday Night Roundup #13

I've been busy at Apocalypse Later since my last Monday Night Roundup. I caught up with a couple of submissions, for a start.

One is a feature, Death in the Desert (2015), which stars Michael Madsen and the city of Las Vegas in a story based on the real murder of casino heir, Theodore ‘Ted’ Binion. It's a very different approach to a familiar story.

The other is a short, the latest from the Fatal Pictures combination of writer/director Richard Powell, producer Zach Green and star Robert Nolan. I loved Worm and Familiar and was delighted to find an Apocalypse Later quote about the latter on the Kickstarter page for this one. It's Heir (2015), 'a touching story of a father and son' which description has multiple meanings. Yes, this is a really creepy short, aided by the addition of Bill Oberst Jr in sparkling form.

I celebrated a couple of birthdays: Charlotte Rampling's 70th with a review of Nagisa Oshima's thought provoking surrealist feature, Max Mon Amour (1986), and James Spader's 56th with a look back at his last pre-fame film, the interesting thriller about twins, serial killing and an homage to Jack the Ripper, Jack's Back (1988).

I reviewed a couple of short educational films for my Weird Wednesdays project: the American bicycle safety film with monkeys, One Got Fat (1962), which my better half saw in class in first or second grade, and a chilling British take on why not to play on railway lines, The Finishing Line (1977), which was commissioned by British Transport Films and then withdrawn from circulation due to the ensuing controversy.

And I started a new project, in which I remember important people to the world of film on what would have been (or, in two instances, what hopefully will be) their one hundredth birthdays by reviewing one of their most interesting films. The first entry for this project is for the underrated Japanese director, Masaki Kobayashi. I picked a dark drama, The Inheritance (1962).

Here are brief reviews of some other features I watched this last week that won't end up reviewed on that site any time soon:

Cooties (2015)

Director: Jonathan Miliott & Cary Murnion
Stars: Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Jack McBrayer, Leigh Whannell, Nasim Pedrad, Ian Brennan and Jorge Garcia

Fifteen minutes into Valentine’s Day and I gave my better half cooties. Well, Cooties. It’s a 2014 comedy horror movie starring Elijah Wood from the Lord of the Rings movies. He looks younger here, even though it’s thirteen years since he first put on those hairy feet for Peter Jackson.

He’s Clint Hadson, a wannabe author who’s writing a horror novel about a possessed boat and a teacher about to substitute for Mrs Kenner at the school he used to attend as a kid: Fort Chicken Elementary, home of the Fighting Roosters. The town is well named, because it’s about to get subjected to a zombie-like outbreak caused by contaminated chicken. The film’s disgusting opening sequence starts off with a Happy Poultry Farms worker wringing the neck of a chicken and progresses all the way through the pink slime manufacturing process to a Fort Chicken Elementary schoolgirl biting into the chicken tender that it became.

That’s pretty much it for the sweep of the story, this hardly being a deep exploration of anything, but it introduces a fair set of characters for us to laugh at or with. Only Hadson and Lucy McCormick, a girl he went to school with and now works as the fourth grade teacher, are remotely normal, though neither really stays there for the whole film either. Well, the obnoxious kids are normal but not in the way we want. Cooper Roth does an amazing job, for instance, as a pissant little kid called Patriot, given to the world by God on 9/11 so he can grow up to be a marine and go kill all those towelheads. No, this isn’t remotely politically correct, thank goodness.

The crossing guard is a druggie who spends most of the film in his van. He’s as high as a kite because he eats all his mushrooms when the 5-O show up in response to the zombie outbreak. ‘Are you on shrooms too?’ he asks the giraffe in the passenger seat. The vice principal is a happy go lucky sort who has bouncy balls for chairs in his office. Or is that the principal’s office, given that he’s only temporarily in charge? We really don’t care. This isn’t about a school, not really. The reason teachers will like this film is because they can live vicariously through the staff bashing in the heads of their annoying students with fire extinguishers and dodgeball equipment. This is wish fulfilment fantasy relief for hassled teachers worldwide.

One staff member has a rape alarm and just loves to tell people why she wears it. She’s a religious freak who hates the state of Illinois because it won’t let her teach creationism or carry a gun in class. There’s Wade, the huge PE teacher who can’t land a single basket in the playground and manages to miss most of the initial massacre because he’s distracted. And there’s Doug, who gets most of the best lines of the film. He’s reading a book called How to Have a Normal Conversation when we first meet him, which is much needed. He’s the staff’s nominal scientist because he had a six inch iron spike lodged in his brain when he was a kid, so he naturally got to know all about that stuff.

Doug is played by Leigh Whannell, in a rather different role to the one we know him best as: the other guy in Saw, which franchise he created. Given that we have notable names like Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson and Alison Pill, it’s somewhat odd to find myself focusing on an actor better known as a producer. Then again, Vice-Principal Simms is played by Ian Brennan, the creator of Glee, so maybe it’s a trend. Whannell shows a great sense of comedic timing as Doug, throwing out lines like, ‘Now I’m going to extract the brain’ or ‘I always wanted to have sex with a prostitute who was non-white’ at exactly the right moments. I’ve seen a lot of people who enjoyed Rainn Wilson as Wade, but he mostly left me dry. This movie is all about Doug for me.

The biggest problem the film has is that it forgets what it wants to be. It builds slowly with a focus on character development, as if it’s a drama, but with a neat touch of comedy. The humour grows quickly until we can’t fail to realise that this is very much a comedy first, a drama second and a horror flick a distant third. The first act is engaging, the second act is hilarious and the third act is... well, the third act is mostly just there.

All the invention of the early scenes fades away to become samy samy blah. The character development is either thrown away entirely or leaps forward as if we slept through half an hour and woke up to find out how things had changed. The kids, who are frankly awesome for at least half the film, start to make less and less sense. If this chicken virus destroys their brains, then how come they keep doing smarter things than the teachers they have under siege? The only good thing in the last third of the film is the ramping up of gratuitous violence and, as much fun as that is, it really can’t save the movie.

I applaud the film for being willing to tell such a controversial story in comedic form, casting a bunch of kids who know exactly how to be creepy little bastards and spinning a tale of horror violence out of the juvenile idea of cooties. At one point, a little girl who’s avoided the chicken plague, gives Hadson an imaginary cootie shot and it’s a surprisingly touching moment in a film mostly devoid of them. Oh, and I applaud the idea that the token black kid is the only one to survive. No spoiler there either. You aren’t going to watch this for a story anyway. You’re going to watch it because a bunch of kooky teachers get to bludgeon a bunch of kids to death in increasingly outrageous fashion and we get to laugh while they do it. On that front, it works like a dream. On any other front, it’ll impress and then disappoint, so don’t get too invested.

Action Jackson (1988)

Director: Craig R Baxley
Stars: Carl Weathers, Craig T Nelson, Vanity, Sharon Stone, Thomas F Wilson, Bill Duke, Robert Davi, Jack Thibeau, Roger Aaron Brown and Stan Foster

I can’t say that I’m a particular fan of Denise Matthews, the artist formerly known as Vanity, but given that 2016 in film is currently being defined by obituaries more than releases, I felt I should take the opportunity of her untimely death today to review the movie for which she was nominated for a Razzie as Worst Actress. It turns out to sum up her career rather well.

She first appears on a club stage singing a suggestive song in a suggestive outfit, appropriate because she found fame leading Prince’s girl group, Vanity 6, in hits like Nasty Girl. The number in the band’s name represents the collective number of breasts belonging to the trio and we get to see Vanity’s two relatively soon into her role here. She turns out to be both the mistress of the villain of the piece and a drug addict, shooting up what is presumably heroin. In real life, she became addicted to crack cocaine and overdosed in 1994, nearly dying of complete renal failure. Given three days to live, she was visited by Jesus who told her that he’d let her live if she gave up the persona of Vanity. She did so and survived, turning to the Lord in the process: getting clean, cutting all ties to show business and devoting her life to evangelism. That’s here too, as her character rescues Action Jackson at one point by pretending he’s an evangelist and we get a hilarious scene with Carl Weathers as a pretend preacher man.

Unfortunately she’s clearly not the best of the two up and coming female stars who were willing to get topless for the camera. The other one was Sharon Stone, still seeking stardom at this point, her eighties career going through the usual cycle of extra work (Stardust Memories), a horror movie (Deadly Blessing), wannabe blockbusters (King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel), embarrassing aims for fame (Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol) and action (Cold Steel, Above the Law and this film). How did I not know about Beyond the Stars, though? I should find that one. Total Recall was still two years away and Basic Instinct four, so she’s still at the point where she had to do a shower scene even though she was clearly better than that. She even gets a second topless scene as a corpse and, no, that doesn’t spoil much because she’s surprisingly underused and hardly in the film.

I wanted to mention the ladies first, as inconsequential as they are here, because it’s really a man’s film, a testosterone fuelled eighties action flick with all the component parts we might expect, so we can safely now forget about those ladies.

Of course, there are overblown action scenes and the film naturally opens with one. To the strains of the music of cliché, a man is taken down hard by what looks like the nearest heavy metal band to answer a casting call (one of these hitmen turns out to be the lead singer of Giuffria). Two swing in through the windows while the other two use the door, but they all pose while they blow their target through the gap the glass left to fall many storeys to his flaming death.
There’s also embarrassing music. Beyond Vanity’s songs, which are entirely capable but cheesy eighties R&B, the score is by both Herbie Hancock and Michael Kamen, who between them defined film music in that decade, and there are featured songs by Sister Sledge and the Pointer Sisters. I’m proud to say that by 1988 I was stagediving to Napalm Death so managed to avoid this stuff for the most part.

Perhaps the most successful aspect is the film’s sense of humour. I loved the first calm scene, for example. A young black hood called Albert Smith attempts to steal the purse of a huge black woman, played by a big stuntman in drag for no apparent reason, in the streets of Detroit. The lady doesn’t even let go of the bag and promptly beats him with it until the cops who are driving right next to him when it happens save him and take him downtown. They’re a refreshingly well adjusted multi-cultural pair, who scare the crap out of the kid by telling him stories about a bogeyman cop called Action Jackson, whom young Albert naturally runs into while trying to run out of the precinct, spilling coffee all over his desk. One line from Jackson and he faints. A few scenes later, a mere look through a set of offices is enough to make him faint again. And he shows up later in the film too. I loved this humour, something that modern takes on eighties action cinema, like The Expendables films, only mostly got right.

And of course there’s Carl Weathers. In fact, given that this film sprang out of an idea he had for a new blaxploitation movie while making Predator a year earlier, it features a bunch of his fellow cast members from that film. There’s police captain Bill Duke and drug dealer Sonny Landham who shows up late for a fight scene. I’m used to the blaxploitation of the seventies and hadn’t realised how many regular faces I would recognise here from a decade later.

The story plays fourth fiddle to the action, the humour and the faces, mostly because it’s a stunningly routine sort of story for this sort of film. Jackson is a dedicated cop but he ran up against a powerful man called Peter Dellaplane when he put his son in jail. Allegations of police brutality, which were probably true (‘You nearly tore that boy’s arm off,’ suggests the captain; ‘He had a spare!’ retorts Jackson) lost the cop his lieutenant’s stripes, his gun permit and his marriage. Now he runs into Dellaplane again, because the captain sends him to the Detroit Business League’s Man of the Year Award ceremony, to see if he can deal with Dellamore winning it. Of course it merely begins a plot in which Jackson discovers that his nemesis, an automobile industry executive, is killing off union bosses and so pursues him.

Carl Weathers is fine as Action Jackson, though he remains a little stonefaced at points, as if afraid to act, surprising given that he does fine throughout most of the film. Some of his best work is in early scenes where he pressures important people, like Dellaplane, while knowing that he can’t resort to the violence for which he’s known. His one liners are great and he gets plenty of them. ‘How do you like your ribs?’ he asks one bad guy as he turns a flamethrower on him. His action is fun, even though he doesn’t get to show off his remarkable physique until almost the end of the picture. One car chase in particular is quintessential eighties action flick fodder: chockablock full of outrageous leaps, crashes, explosions, gunfire, destruction and, of course, cheap plot conveniences. I loved it!

I can’t say I loved the film but it’s certainly a lot more enjoyable than it is good. I’d have happily tuned in for the sequel that never came, even if the Germans did pointlessly release 1990’s unrelated Dangerous Passion as Action Jackson 2. This is routine cheesy action comedy with a predictable plot that couldn’t be mistaken as being from any other decade but the eighties. But hey, that’s Craig T Nelson from Coach as the villain of the piece and he gets Sharon Stone for a wife and Vanity for a mistress. Really, that’s all we need to tune in. Carl Weathers as Jericho ‘Action’ Jackson and the whole modern blaxploitation concept is really just icing on the cake.

RIP Denise Matthews, formerly known as Vanity.

February 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 February's batch are now online. I reviewed between seven and nine books this month, depending on how you count:

A, B, C - Three Short Novels

This is a collection of three early novels by Samuel R Delany, a multi-award winning science fiction author who I've somehow never got round to before.

The Jewels of Aptor was his first novel to see print, written at nineteen and originally published in 1962, though this is the full version, with the fifteen percent cut for space restored.

It's science fantasy, setting up as a fantasy novel, with some characters congregating together in Leptar to end up on a quest together, working for a priestess and former personification of a goddess, to retrieve the jewels of the title from the island of Aptor and her daughter with them. It becomes more science fiction as it goes but remains fantasy throughout. It's interesting but not essential, important mostly as a debut.

The Ballad of Beta-2, however, overjoyed me. I adored this novel, originally published in 1965, and can easily see this becoming a long term favourite. It's the shortest of the three novels in the book, but it resonated with me.

It follows a graduate student in galactic anthropology on an assignment he doesn't want, to provide a historical analysis of the ballad of the title from primary sources, which means he has to visit the Star Folk, who live on generation starships that mostly got where they were going only to find that the rest of humanity jumped ahead when a hyperspace drive was invented. This book looks at how these folk changed during their journey of twelve generations and what they found on the way to change them even more. This may sound dry, but it's utterly engaging and as accessible as a Heinlein juvenile.

They Fly at Çiron, which was mostly written in the sixties but didn't see print until 1993, is the work of three decades and feels like it. It's enticing but somehow not quite right yet. It's accompanied by a couple of short stories set in the same world.

It's back to fantasy, with the blissfully peaceful town of the title (they don't understand what weapons even are) attacked by a passing army who conquer because they need to expand. It's a strange tale that follows a number of different characters on a number of different sides, as the experience builds them all in ways they couldn't expect. I liked it but was still thinking about The Ballad of Beta-2 even once it was done.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

A Crucible of Souls

This novel, the first in the Sorcery Ascendant Sequence and Mitchell Hogan's first book, looked like a relentlessly generic fantasy and frankly didn't do much to dissuade me from that thought. It also feels like a five hundred page prologue, as we're set up strongly with Caldan, our lead character, and a host of others in support, as well as the the city of Anasoma and a little of the world it's part of, but the story we're waiting for starts s the book finishes.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed it and devoured its five hundred pages in two sittings. If it's an Emperor with no clothes, he's a thoroughly engaging Emperor, drawn in exquisite detail and generating questions all over the place. This is a world of sorcery but we're not quite sure who the good guys are and what's going to come crashing in from outside the city. It's told in three strands, two of which meet halfway through the book and the third waits until the very end, setting us nicely up for chapter one, I mean book two.

I'm looking forward to finding out some of the answers, because none of them show up in this volume. Maybe the next one will explain to me why I enjoyed this one so much when nothing of grand importance really happens.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Press Start to Play

This is an anthology, edited by Daniel H Wilson and John Joseph Adams, which aims 'to recreate the feel of a video game in prose form.' It's a mixed bag, as anthologies tend to be but it's an interesting one with only a few stories worthy of exclusion. Sadly the first two are among the list of what shouldn't have made it, but persevere and you'll get to some real gems.

Early highlights for me include S R Mastrantone's Desert Walk and Charlie Jane Anders's Rat Catcher's Yellows, which brought my faith in the book back. The former uses videogames not just as a subject but as a way to explore obsession and it gradually slides from the banal to the surreal. It felt very true. The latter looks at games not as entertainment but as therapy and explores a fascinating relationship between two married women, one of whom has been neurologically damaged by the disease of the title and doesn't even recognise her wife. This story goes nowhere I expected and I adored it.

Recurrent themes include blurring the boundaries between games an real life, health and social issues and text adventures, an old genre that I remember well and which perhaps fits in story form better than any other.

The worst thing about anthologies is that they're almost never consistent and this is no exception though it's decent overall. The best thing about them is being able to discover a bunch of great writers that you've never heard of before. To me, that was Mastrantone, Holly Black and Hugh Howey, each of whom I'll be looking into now. I had heard of Anders but hadn't read her, so I'll be rectifying that too.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Three Parts Dead

Having been given the fourth volume in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence to review, I thought I should work my way through the first three, especially as I'd bought them from the author at Phoenix Comicon last year.

I thoroughly enjoyed Three Parts Dead, which is a fantasy novel set in a world where gods are real, but they serve as channels for energy, receiving it through worship and expelling it in a number of physical ways, such as fire which generates the steam that runs the city of Alt Coulumb. When the fire god dies, as gods can be killed, the lawyers are summoned because the work of gods is bound by legal contracts. As those lawyers are also necromancers, they can resurrect if appropriate.

Mixing up fantasy, steampunk and legal action, this is original and fascinating. Gladstone's prose is glorious and far better than it ought to be for a debut novel. His characters are good too and his plotting is tight. It's hard to find anything bad to say about this book and I thoroughly look forward to following up with the second, third and fourth in the series.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Apollo the Brilliant One

A large format graphic novel skimpy on the page count, running under eighty pages, this is a cross between fun adventure and textbook for kids. It's clearly aimed for children in school, right down to the list of questions at the end to spur children to discuss what they've read.

It's the eighth in George O'Connor's Olympians series, each of which focuses on a different Greek God. Some former subjects show up here, such as Hera, Ares and Poseidon, so the books will build on each other, but this is Apollo's story and, to a lesser degree, that of his son, Asklepios.

I enjoyed the approach, which was to split Apollo's story into a set of short vignettes, each introduced by a different muse. It's a fun read too, written and illustrated well, but it's not exactly challenging. Kids ought to enjoy it very much but this isn't where the rest of us should go either for information or adventure. To be fair, we're not the audience, but hey.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

The Land Leviathan

I reviewed Michael Moorcock's 1971 proto-steampunk novel, The Warlord of the Air, in January, and I'm following up this month with its 1974 sequel, The Land Leviathan, which returns Oswald Bastable, time traveller, to a new future, this an earlier one, having him move forward from 1902 to only 1904 but a different one to earlier.

This time out, he finds a world which had become utopian, with the various inventions of Manuel O'Bean, a child genius from Chile. However, the pace of technological change outstripped man's ability to cope with it and a War Between the Nations erupted on a scale more vast even than the ones we know from our own history. Biological weapons scorch the planet and much of the northern hemisphere is reduced to rubble. Into this vacuum moves the Black Attila, Cicero Hood, whose New Ashanti Empire expands across most of Africa, throughout Europe and is set to take North America too.

As before, this is told in the Victorian style, not only with its vintage prose but also its vintage philosophising, which is, of course, most of the point. It's even more thoughtful than the first book, playing with concepts like good and evil, war and peace, justice and injustice and so on. More real people show up, such as Gandhi, who runs the racially integrated Marxist Republic of Bantustan here, formerly known as South Africa.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed The Warlord of the Air.

The Polar Treasure

I've been reviewing a Doc Savage novel every month, working in the order of publication in the pulps rather than the Bantam paperbacks. This is the fourth book, The Polar Treasure, from June 1933, which shows a steady improvement for Lester Dent, writing, as always, as Kenneth Robeson.

It's a lost treasure story, triggered by a blind violinist who was on a liner chased into the Arctic during the Second World War and lost, along with fifty million dollars in diamonds and gold bullion. Unbeknownst to him, the map to the treasure was tattooed on the violinist's back with ink that can only be seen by X-rays. Now the two factions who want it have come to get it and only Doc Savage and his men stand in their way.

This is still relatively predictable, but it's handled well with believable twists and turns, more believable exotic locations and more to do for Doc's men. I enjoyed it as much as I did the previous episode, but it's a better book and it shows how much Dent was progressing with his new series.

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

Monday Night Roundup #12

I've been busy at Apocalypse Later over the last couple of weeks:

I celebrated the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe by reviewing a lesser known adaptation of one of his short stories, Mystery of Marie Roget (1942).

I commemmorated the 130th anniversary of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by reviewing four silent versions of the story, all called Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the 1912 version with James Cruze in both lead roles, the 1913 version with King Baggot, the famous 1920 feature version with John Barrymore establishing himself in no uncertain terms and the shorter 1920 version with Sheldon Lewis.

I also remembered Dan Haggerty by covering the two films he selected from his career for me to review for my Make It a Double project back in late 2014: Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013), a classic tall tale reinvented as a slasher movie, and The Capture of Grizzly Adams (1982), the TV movie that wrapped up his run as his most famous character after a 1974 feature and a 1978 TV show.

Here are brief reviews of some other features I watched this last week that won't end up reviewed on that site any time soon:

Crime Spree (2003)

Director: Brad Mirman
Stars: Harvey Keitel, Gerard Depardieu, Johnny Hallyday, Renaud, Said Taghmaoui, Stephane Freiss, Albert Dray, Shawn Lawrence, Joanne Kelly, Richard Bohringer and Abe Vigoda

January 2016 has been a really tough month for film fans, with the loss of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Angus Scrimm, Dan Haggerty and now Abe Vigoda, who at 94 has finally left us after decades of false news reports. He died on the 26th in his sleep.

I never saw him in his most famous role, as Det Sgt Phil Fish on the sitcom Barney Miller and its spinoff show, Fish, but I’ve seen him in films as varied as The Godfather, Cannonball Run II and Joe vs the Volcano. To remember him here at Apocalypse Later Now!, I pulled out a picture that I hadn’t seen but which looked like a whole bundle of fun, riffing comedically on his many serious gangster roles. It’s Crime Spree, a Canadian/British co-production from 2003 which pits a number of French legends against American gangsters. It turned out to be a really good choice, because I laughed aloud for a majority of the first half and some of the second.

The picture begins in French, with Gérard Depardieu and a couple of cronies trying to steal a painting from an art gallery in Paris. They fail because they’re utterly inept. While they did buy a flashlight, they neglected to buy batteries, so they use a cigarette lighter to help them see. Once they’ve cut out the painting from its frame on the wall, one crook gets burned by the lighter, which he throws across the room, setting the curtains on fire. He uses the rolled up painting to put out the flames. It’s ruined, of course.

Now, at this point we might expect a Pink Panther sort of story, but that’s not where we’re going. In fact, the boss’s henchman highlights that well by mixing up the Pink Panther with the Black Panthers. That’s not where we’re going either, but America is. The boss wants them to go to Chicago to steal jewellery from the bedroom safe in an empty house. Even these morons can’t get that wrong, but just in case, he sends his right hand man and they add a professional assassin and someone who used to live there and owes them money.

The team ends up as six people. Depardieu is Daniel Foray and his two partners in crime, Julien Labesse and Raymond Gayet, are played by Stéphane Freiss and Albert Dray. I didn’t recognise either, but both looked familiar and they make a great trio with their better known leader. The two professionals arrive in the legendary forms of two of France’s biggest rock stars: Johnny Hallyday, as Marcel Burot, and Renaud, as the killer, known only as Zéro. The final man is Sami Zerhouni, a young Algerian portrayed by Saïd Taghmaoui, who was César nominated for his role in La Haine and is now starring in a host of Hollywood films as varied as GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Conan the Barbarian and American Hustle. His arrival in this film is when the dialogue mostly switches from French to English.

While these half dozen French hoods are not equally inept, they’re all hilarious and the comedy in this script was priceless. I don’t recall the last time I laughed this much out loud at a movie. It works this well partly because of the situation comedy conjured up by writer Brad Mirman, who also directed, but also because of the supremely serious way in which all of them, but especially Hallyday and Renaud, do everything. I enjoyed the odd culture shock scenes, like when they go to a café and attempt to smoke and order wine (‘What kind of country is this?’ asks Zéro), but it’s the utterly serious way that they do utterly ludicrous things that works best. And, while we could have done with a lot more background on each of these characters to bring them to more effective life, how they conduct themselves is enough to make us laugh as they dig themselves into progressively deeper holes.

How deep a hole, I hear you ask. Well, over in Chicago is a mob guy called Frankie Zammeti. He’s tough enough that he has his men break his own brother Vinnie’s arm because he can’t pay back the $20,000 he lent him. Later, he has them send him flowers and a get well card, but he sticks to principle. Frankie is a big deal and he’s played by Harvey Keitel, who can play mouthy gangsters in his sleep. So when these French hoods show up at the address they’re given, find that it isn’t as empty as they were led to believe and tie up the occupant and break into his safe, it won’t be too surprising to discover that that’s Frankie Zammeti in his underwear that they’ve duct taped. Uhoh!

Anyone who laughed aloud at the idea of inept French crooks robbing Chicago gangster Harvey Keitel by mistake will absolutely adore the first half of this film and they may well stay with it as it starts to get a little more serious. The laughs never go away but they die down somewhat as we realise that nothing is as simple as it seems. Of course, nobody could be this unlucky; this botched robbery was a set up. But who’s setting up who? We have a large and capable cast who all have their part to play in this story that reminds of the work of Guy Ritchie, in its levels of complexity and number of characters, but doesn’t aim for the same sort of style. Let’s just say that these French fish out of water are soon on the run from the FBI, the Chicago mob, a local Latino gang (after they steal their getaway car while they’re busy robbing a convenience store) and the Chicago police department.

The cast are excellent. The French criminals aren’t given the background they deserve but the actors do their jobs and some get a good opportunity to grow throughout the film. Their boss, Laurent Bastaldi, is well cast too: the highly experienced Richard Bohringer does exactly what he needs to. This could have played out as an entirely French film without any of the additional complexity and it would still be great fun. However, we have a whole American side to the story too.

Keitel is exactly as you expect but thrown into surreal situations that impress; there’s a shootout in a bar that ends in a fantastic way, for instance. At least he got an establishing scene with his brother. He’s a major player but he’s not the boss; that role goes to Abe Vigoda as Angelo Giancarlo. He has a lot of fun here too and watching Keitel and Vigoda reprise what they do best while the script conjures up laughs around them is an absolute blast. This applies to their men too. One of the funniest sections is when the tied up and duct taped Zammeti rings Joey Two Tons with his nose and the latter thinks it’s a dirty phone call. The Frenchmen’s contact in Chicago is Sophie Nichols, in the form of Joanne Kelly, six years before she’d become Myka Bering on Warehouse 13. I love that show but I liked her better here, where she isn’t as stuck up. Shawn Lawrence also gets plenty to do as FBI Agent Pogue and he keeps evolving with the film too.

The story is massively complicated but it’s easy to keep up with what’s going on because it’s episodic; each reveal serves to explain one plot device and then set up the next one. There are some interesting shots: one uses split screen in an odd way with different pauses per section to highlight who’s talking in a conversation, while another has Hallyday and his men shoot their way through a series of rooms to get out of a hotel trap, all shot from above. I loved the pregnant pause in between records on the jukebox in the bar shootout scene too but that’s less original.

The downside is surely in the odd consistency of the film. It starts out as a comedy but ends as a drama; while the entire film is both, the laugh factor decreases consistently throughout the film and the serious side grows just as consistently. This makes us wonder if the hilarity of the first half was part of the actual plot rather than the film and, if we start to believe that, the occasional humour in the second half feels a lot more out of place. It also means that the first half is much faster paced than the second; we spend half a film building up complexity then the other half tying up all the many loose ends.

What I’d like to do is watch the film again now that I know where it goes, because I want to see if it’s just as funny with that foreknowledge or even funnier because I’m not trying to figure out where it’s going. I especially wonder about that second half, when the French hoods we know little about become the folk we’re totally rooting for. Early on, we don’t have much connection. ‘Why do you work with these morons?’ Bohringer asks Depardieu. ‘These morons are my friends,’ he replies and that’s about all we have then. Later on, we care because we’ve got to know them better. These morons become our friends too and so does the film.

Sure, it’s an odd picture in many ways. The pace isn’t remotely consistent. It’s an English language film with a lot of subtitled French dialogue. It changes from being a serious comedy to being a funny drama. The ensemble cast meas that some characters don’t get the opportunities they should and we deserve more background for many. But I like laughing out loud and this film got more of that from me than any I can remember in quite a while. I’ll definitely be showing it to other people for that reason alone.

Now, we’re almost into February. Hopefully Death can calm his scythe down a little and leave us some of our legends for a little bit longer.

RIP, Mr Vigoda.

The Revenant (2015)

Director: Alejandro G Iñárritu
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck, Duane Howard and Arthur Redcloud

It takes a director of the calibre of Alejandro González Iñárritu, the writer/director of Amores Perros, Babel and Birdman to create something as empty as this and make it rivetting, absorbing and emotional. The Revenant runs over two and a half hours, unfolds in a snowy wilderness shot in natural light and features very little dialogue, most of it from Tom Hardy, who mumbles his way through the film. We’re not even told where or when we are, though the future Dakotas in 1823, as Wikipedia tells us, is completely believable. We’re left to figure out quite a lot, though the story itself is a simple (but never easy) tale of revenge.

What we don’t get in story or dialogue, we get in cinematography, as a group of trappers, led by Captain Andrew Henry, try to escape an Indian attack with whatever they can take with them. This is the most gorgeous picture I’ve seen in a long while, courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki, who won the last two Oscars awarded in this category, for Gravity and Birdman, and could easily make it three in a row with The Revenant, his eighth nomination. Nobody’s ever done that before and it would take something very special to beat him.

His camera roams, floats and turns but rarely cuts. Stephen Mirrione does a solid job as the film’s editor but he makes less cuts than I can remember seeing in a feature. There’s a shot where the camera follows the trappers onto a boat to leave, under fire from the tribe attacking them, then works back around to see the shore, now very differently populated. We’ve changed focus a few times and perspective a few more, with intricate choreography to make it all viable, but it’s all done in one single, utterly amazing shot. And this isn’t the only one. It’s one in a bundle of a dozen early on. It wouldn’t surprise me if my jaw wasn’t hanging open at this point. These early scenes are what cinema is for.

The trappers leave their haul in the safest location they can think of, so they can escape but return at a future point in time and hopefully recover it. We follow them for a while, but then the scene that will go down in cinematic legend comes along and things change completely. Hugh Glass, the party’s guide, is attacked by a grizzly bear who is protecting her cubs. This is an utterly brutal scene, once again shot in a single take, and it’s not an easy one to watch. The bear is CGI but Leonardo DiCaprio, who throws himself into this role like you wouldn’t believe, could have fought a real bear and it wouldn’t have been any more realistic.

Glass manages to kill the grizzly but is horribly mauled in the process and close to death. Realising that they can’t carry him back over the mountains to their home base at Fort Kiowa, Capt Henry promises a bonus to any volunteers who will stay with Glass until he dies and then give him a proper burial, before following the main party. And here’s where things really get interesting.

One of those volunteers is John Fitzgerald, who’s the Donald Trump of the party, in the sense that he says what everyone else is thinking but also goes much further to boot. Having previously survived a scalping attack which left the skin on his head disfigured, he’s already biased against Glass, who has a halfbreed Pawnee son called Hawk. He’s also selfish and unscrupulous enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead, so he takes the $100 bonus to stay with Glass and promptly tries to murder him, using witchfinder logic: blink if you want me to do it. When the dying man’s son interrupts him, he kills him in front of Glass’s eyes, an especially tough moment for a man of action who’s utterly unable to move. Then, with Indians closing in, Fitzgerald drags Glass into a makeshift grave and leaves him for dead.

However, with Glass too tough to die and now burning for revenge, the main thrust of the film begins: the march of the many, followed by the two, followed by the one, followed by a Native American tribe looking for the chief’s daughter, Powaqa, who has been stolen by trappers.

What Hugh Glass endures in this story would be hard to put into words yet retain the impact and I don’t want to spoil the film anyway. What Leonardo DiCaprio endures in this film as he plays Glass is just as mind-boggling. He’s said that ‘I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do.’ As with Iñárritu and Lubezki, it’s hard to imagine DiCaprio not picking up the Best Actor Oscar for this performance, especially as Academy Awards are often awarded politically and he’s been overlooked enough already, with five nominations for his acting but no wins so far. And, of course, he’s already won the Golden Globe for this role. What’s most amazing is that he hardly speaks, initially because he knows that silence is the best policy in hostile company and then because his dire condition prevents the very possibility.

As Fitzgerald, Tom Hardy is almost as good but in completely different ways. He actually reminds of Jesse Ventura here: the hunch, the headgear and the attitude. He gets most of the dialogue in the film, and I’d love to find out the percentage, but he’s rarely clear. I was annoyed initially as I missed lines, but then I realised that this approach fits the character well. Fitzgerald is a lazy soul who doesn’t care if anyone can understand him or not and we all get the point, even if we don’t hear the words.

These two would dominate the film, if not for Lubezki. Even with what he shows us early on, there were points where Iñárritu’s script calls for something else nigh on impossible to deliver and Lubezki promptly delivers. The entire film was shot on location, in harsh terrain, under snow and storm and cold. The lighting is almost never overt, the majority of the film lit naturally with campfires or odd glimpses of sunlight from over the horizon or through the trees. Light is a precious resource in this film for us, as it would have been for these trappers in real life. While we see characters up close often enough, there are many shots that are very long and wide to emphasize how small man really is in these surroundings. The trappers struggle against the land even more than they do the pursuing Indians, who are dangerous enough on their own.

There are others in support of DiCaprio and Hardy and they’re strong too, if with much less opportunity. Domnhall Gleeson, enjoying an insanely good year, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ex Machina and Brooklyn also to his credit in 2015, plays Capt Henry, a principled man who merely isn’t the outdoorsman that Glass and Fitzgerald are. Will Poulter is Jim Bridger, a young and idealistic trapper who volunteers to stay with Glass for nothing, only to fall foul of circumstance and Fitzgerald’s scheming. Both are solid but eventually become props for the two leads to use.

Seventeen year old Forrest Goodluck is quiet, moody and resonant as Hawk’s, Glass’s son, but he’s overwhelmed by the leads and doesn’t have the presence of the older Native Americans with screen time. Arthur Redcloud impresses as Hikuc, a philosophical Pawnee who Glass stumbles upon on the trail and who assists him in a number of ways. Duane Howard is a major presence in the film as Elk Dog, the chief of the Arikara, searching for his daughter. He gets few lines but clearly doesn’t need them, as his powerful final scene underlines. Melaw Nakehk’o is effective as Powaqa too. It’s great to see a Native American cast playing Native American characters.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this film is that it’s a true story, or at least close to one. Some of these characters didn’t exist or had other names and some of the situations are conjured up for the film (or taken from the novel it was based on), but Hugh Glass was a real man and he was really mauled by a bear and left for dead by his comrades, only to survive alone in hostile country and struggle 200 miles back to Fort Kiowa even with a broken leg, exposed ribs and festering wounds. In real life, he set his own leg and used maggots on his wounds to avoid gangrene. Friendly Native Americans sewed a bear hide onto the skin of his back to cover his wounds. So, while Iñárritu and novelist Michael Punke gave him a little too much credit at points, there are others where they don’t give him enough.

There have been other film versions of this story. Richard Harris played Zachary Bass in 1971’s Man in the Wilderness and Dewitt Lee played Sam Glass in the 1975 western, Apache Blood. I’m interested in seeing both, especially the former, but surely neither will hold a candle to this one. The Revenant was nominated for twelve Oscars. In less than a month, we’ll find out how many it wins.

Monday Night Roundup #11

I ended up getting different writing done over the last week, but did post a Weird Wednesdays review over at Apocalypse Later. It's the fascinating, genre-spanning Japanese pinku movie The Groper Train: Search for the Black Pearl (1984). I also built an index for all my Weird Wednesdays reviews.

Here are brief reviews of some other features I watched this last week that won't end up reviewed on that site any time soon:

Chappie

Director: Neill Blomkamp
Stars: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Chappie, from District 9 director, Neill Blomkamp, but it certainly wasn’t what I got out of it. It’s an enticing mixture of the classic and the modern, playing with a variety of time-honoured science fiction concepts but thrown into a heady contemporary setting in a near future Johannesburg.

Early scenes can’t fail to conjure up memories of RoboCop, with crime running wild in South Africa and a weapons corporation, Tetravaal, selling armed robots to the police force to deal with it. They even have a couple of very different designs, the human-sized Scouts and the bulky and horribly beweaponed Moose, which raise obvious comparisons to RoboCop and the ED-209. The only differences are minor: there’s no human being inside the scout suit and instead of the beast being pitched first and failing, so prompting the more realistic alternative, here the realistic alternative goes first. With the scouts doing great work, taking down thirty large scale crime rings in a year, the cops don’t want the clear overkill of the Moose.

Fortunately, this quickly grows beyond RoboCop and I had a blast with the first half of Chappie.

I liked the realism at Tetravaal, which is a far cry from the yuppies and fat cats of RoboCop’s OCP. Deon Wilson, lead developer of the Scout program, and Vincent Moore, who has the same role for the Moose program, sit in standard cubes in the same aisle of an office. They run Linux with a spot on screensaver and software that doesn’t look like it escaped from the Enterprise. Scouts are modular, so if one part is damaged, they can simply replace it and sent the scout back out to work.

I liked the realism in the streets. When the cops arrive to take down heavily armed crooks, the scouts go in first, guns blazing, and the human cops follow, using them as shields. People get hurt. So do scouts, with 0022, who has already been repaired once in this film, getting hit by a rocket and thrown through a wall. It isn’t repairable, with its battery fused to the chassis, so it’s written off as scrap with a believable reject sticker.

I liked the realism in Deon Wilson, who lives his work. After leaving his robotics job at the office, he gets home to be greeted by a few home robotics projects in a down to earth version of J F Sebastian in Blade Runner, then gets to work on his pet project of a conscious artificial intelligence. When he nails it, after 945 days, he blisters in to talk it up to his boss, who rejects it out of hand. Why would a publicly traded weapons manufacturer go for an AI that can judge art, write poetry and enjoy music?

And, while it’s an odd form of realism, I adored the choice of bad guys. Instead of cookie cutter villains, we’re given Ninja and Yo-Landi from the zef group, Die Antwoord. I’m not a fan, but I have a great deal of respect for their integrity and they bring something utterly unique to this film. I’ve never seen a bad guy with a yellow machine gun before, or a pink punching bag for that matter. Odd hair. Weird tattoos. Pastel colours. Why the heck not? It’s better than the usual criminal mastermind with a suave British accent. The third in their gang, Amerika, is a little more traditional, but that works to ground the other two.

Where the story takes us isn’t too surprising. Deon salvages 0022 from the reject pile to take home and upload his new AI into. After Yo-Landi figures that the guy who created the scouts must have some sort of remote control to switch them off, she and Ninja kidnap him and end up with 0022 for good measure. So Deon gets his shot but under the scrutiny of criminals rather than his company, as he can’t call the cops about them stealing what he stole to begin with.

And here’s where the old school concepts start to rear their heads. 0022 wakes up, but as a child. He’s a baby who learns quickly but still needs to be trained. I loved how Deon is totally in the zone as he gives his creation a rubber chicken and he’s not happy when Yo-Landi names it Chappie. By the way, Sharlto Copley is superb as Chappie the sentient police robot, even if he didn’t provide its movements through motion capture, making him a very believable child. He doesn’t just channel kids, he channels childlike adults such as Raymond Babbitt from Rain Man and he steals the show without ever appearing on screen.

So we have the whole robot coming alive concept. Chappie is written wonderfully, grabbing little bits of information and connecting the dots between them as best he can. He makes leaps that make sense to him but may well be completely wrong.

We have the moral angle, with Chappie’s promise to Deon that he won’t commit any crimes working as a simplistic version of Asimov’s laws of robotics. However, as a child, Chappie is easy to deceive, so we’re given scenes of Chappie stealing cars because he thinks he’s merely returning them to daddy. He won’t take part in the heist that will save them, because that’s a crime, but when it’s all explained to him in a different way, he gladly helps out. It’s not merely abuse on the part of this gang of crooks, it’s abuse that the victim doesn’t even know is happening.

We have the question of how to define consciousness. ‘That’s it!’ Chappie says at one point, looking at a digital copy of his neural map, ‘That’s me!’ And after the definition of consciousness, there’s the definition of death. ‘Just a temporary body, mummy. I’ll make you a new one,’ is a glorious line that resonates through its childlike innocence.
In between consciousness and death is the will to live. Chappie’s battery being fused to his chassis is a built-in death sentence; he has five days before it’ll run dry and it apparently can’t be replaced. So this creation learns about birth one day and has to deal with death only four days later. That’s a tough life and it raises a number of other concerns like self worth, sacrifice and moral prioritisation.

All these are explored pretty well, though the technological side does take a lot of shortcuts. This is the near future. I can buy the concept of uploading an entire mind into a machine but I can’t buy that it can be dumped onto a single thumbdrive or transferred in ten seconds. Clearly, serious breakthroughs were made in storage and networking technologies, but they didn’t trickle down to anything else except this. Nah, don’t buy it.

The Moose is an interesting creation. It might look like ED-209 but there’s no brain inside; it’s controlled by a human being via neural transmission, making it like an insanely flexible drone. There are plenty of issues to explore there but they’re rejected in favour of turning Hugh Jackman into a cheap villain set up by an obvious line to do ridiculous things. He clearly enjoyed it and used a few opportunities to his best advantage, but he’s a waste of a character introduced only because of cheap writing.

Similarly Sigourney Weaver is wasted as an inconsequential CEO who gets a few strong scenes early on but soon fades into nothingness. What’s worse, the company she runs does the same thing: it walks the walk in the opening scenes but soon becomes a mess of plotholes masquerading as security holes.

Fortunately Dev Patel is given a better role, playing Deon Wilson as a sort of benign Victor Frankenstein. Chappie calls him Maker but connects to him through the emotions of a very dangerous child. Sadly, it’s not the role it could have been. Then again, with so many concepts in play, some had to be prioritised and this was clearly one that wasn’t. He’s mostly a foil for Ninja because, while Deon wants him to paint, Ninja wants him to walk cool and shoot guns like a gangsta.

I adored Neill Blomkamp’s debut feature, District 9, and clearly should revisit it again. I haven’t seen his second, Elysium, which I should check out soon. This one is a great film for a while, a good film in many respects but ultimately a disappointment because it doesn’t have the courage to finish what it started.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Director: J J Abrams
Stars: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew and Max von Sydow

Note: This is a spoiler-free review of The Force Awakens for those who haven't seen it. For those who have, who still believe it's a good movie and who want to try to put their case, I wrote a spoiler-filled version for my Star Wars I-VII Runthrough earlier in the month.

Oh dear, oh dear. The Force Awakens, which is the seventh feature film in the regular Star Wars series, even if it doesn’t include an episode number in its title, is a stunningly safe retread of the entire original trilogy, a complete mess of a story that actually gets worse the more we think about it and, in many ways, a worse film than The Phantom Menace. And, now that I’ve upset everyone who saw it six times and adored it more every time, please calm down and let me explain.

My theory is that J J Abrams was a Star Wars fanboy who adored the original trilogy and went to see the prequels with the sure knowledge that they were going to be the best thing in the history of ever. As we know, they weren’t, though recently watching all seven films in order in seven days suggests that they’re not as bad as we remember. However, when he was given the task of making a new first entry in an official Star Wars trilogy, he knew that he couldn’t make the mistakes that George Lucas made so emphatically with The Phantom Menace, and so proceeded to make the safest film he could to make the fans happy.

And they were. While people went back to see The Phantom Menace again and again because they were unable to accept how awful it was, they went back to see The Force Awakens again and again because it felt like a Star Wars movie and that felt good, dammit! Abrams certainly got the feel right.

Thirty years after Return of the Jedi, the Empire has fallen and been replaced by the First Order, just as the Rebel Alliance is now the Resistance. The same fight is on that we’re used to seeing, merely with different names. Things are a little shakier, a little darker, a little grittier. But there’s Max von Sydow, a very cool new droid called BB-8, a brutal massacre in the Lidice style led by a snappier Darth Vader by the name of Kylo Ren and some intriguing scenes with a stormtrooper catchily named FN-2187.

And then there’s the planet of Jakoo. It's a desert planet littered with Imperial wreckage: downed AT-ATs, downed TIE fighters, even a downed Star Destroyer. A whole community of scavengers has grown up to loot this equipment for parts to trade for food. I adored the scale, which is beautifully shot, as much as the detail. I adored the dirt and the open spaces and the fact that broken things fell out of the sky, all anathema to George Lucas. It’s quintessential Star Wars but all shot in a way we’ve never seen before that pulls at the heartstrings and makes us want to cheer J J Abrams for finally doing it right.

The downside creeps in with the progression of the story, because it feels rather familiar. Von Sydow is here because he has documents stolen from the enemy. He gives them to a member of the Resistance who, under fire from the First Order and their dark helmeted commander, secretes them into a droid and lets it loose on a desert planet to seek help. Yes, this is A New Hope all over again, but it doesn’t stop there. Without trying to throw out spoilers, it proceeds through The Empire Strikes Back and ends up in Return of the Jedi territory with the Resistance aiming to destroy the shield generator to Starkiller Base, which is a gigantic superweapon the size of a planet.

And so those millions of us who grew up on the original trilogy start to wonder if they actually wrote a new script or just changed a bunch of names in the old ones. We already know that the First Order is the new Empire and the Resistance is the new Rebel Alliance. Well Jakoo is the new Tatooine. Kylo Ren is the new Darth Vader and Supreme Leader Snoke the new Emperor. Poe Dameron is a male Princess Leia and BB-8 is a round R2-D2. Starkiller Base is the new Death Star, just even bigger and even more dangerous. Rey, the movie’s lead, is a female Luke Skywalker, even if she isn’t let in on much of why during the film and has to figure a lot of it out for herself. FN-2187, soon renamed Finn, could even be a new Han Solo until the real one shows up.

Which he does. And it feels awesome. This is what Abrams does in The Force Awakens. He feeds us a lot of recycled material, but watered down to make less sense. But he does it with cinematic style that awes us. And then he throws another bone to the fans to make us happy. A bunch of favourite characters are brought back and every one of them is re-introduced in an entrance that combines emotion and style. The Millennium Falcon gets the first cheer, rescued from a junkyard and immediately put through its paces. Then it’s Han and Chewie, who have been working as smugglers again because it’s what they know best. Then it’s Leia, now serving as the leader of the Resistance. Then it’s a chipper C-3PO and a drained R2-D2. Eventually, it’s Luke, who’s the MacGuffin of the piece rather than a player in it. I adored every entrance and wanted to cheer at the screen.

And then I thought about what I was watching. Nothing here makes sense. In the original trilogy, those stolen documents were the plans to the Death Star, an unprecedented superweapon. Here, they’re the map to Luke Skywalker. Now, who the heck makes a treasure map to a person? Who can move around whenever he wants. Who would give it to the bad guys? And break it into two parts? Why would anyone even care, given that the majority of the universe apparently believe that the Jedi order and even the Force are mythical stories. This is all clearly ridiculous. Why are the Resistance fighting the First Order, given that the Republic is apparently back in play? Who are the Resistance if they’re not the Republic? What’s going on in this universe? Did we blink and miss a movie? Is this Episode VII or Episode VIII?

A little less ridiculous is the story of Rey, which is completely unexplained and left for the next movie to cover. She’s an orphan, having been dumped on Jakoo as a child, where she’s grown up to be a talented scavenger. As things happening around her start to drag her in, she turns out to be something more. A Jakoo scavenger wouldn’t be able to fly like that, for a start, and a Jakoo scavenger wouldn’t have a wild connection to certain things that I won’t spoil. She’s clearly someone important but we aren’t let in on that secret yet.

Fortunately, Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, is a revelation. Her character may be nothing but a new Luke or Anakin, but she nails her role absolutely and dominates the film. She’s better than Mark Hamill and much better than Hayden Christensen. In fact she’s the best actor in the entire franchise who isn’t an old white man. I’ll be seeking out her previous work because she’s definitely going to be a huge star.

Her co-star is Finn, the one original idea in the movie as a stormtrooper who can’t be part of the opening massacre and tries to get as far away from the First Order as he possibly can. He’s a great character as he’s a blank canvas for morality to paint on. He’s not the bad guy they want him to be but that doesn’t mean he’s the good guy he could be. He spends the film trying to run away only to find that he might be more than he ever thought possible. John Boyega, who was so great in Attack the Block, is just as great here too.

Sadly, the other major character for the trilogy looks like being Kylo Ren, who’s supposed to be the new Darth Vader but comes across more like the new Jar Jar Binks and that’s not good. I don’t think it’s really Adam Driver’s fault as the actor stuck in the Vader Halloween suit, but he’s acutely embarrassing and often laughable. It’s like Darth Vader, the personification of evil for an entire generation, was revealed to be nothing but a spotty little oik. Kylo Ren is Alan Partridge playing Severus Snape with a vague Tom Hardy as Bane voice, less effective than Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet. My better half burst into giggles every time he took off his helmet because she expected him to introduce himself as Vinnie Barbarino.

Kylo Ren excepted, I understand why Abrams did what he did here. He made something that pleased the fans and got them on board for the Disney trilogy. All the old guard got another moment in the spotlight, Harrison Ford in particular being better than ever as Han, and BB-8 is going to make toy companies rich. But this is a glorious facade that hides an astounding lack of substance. It’s like a gigantic chocolate egg of goodness that looks amazing but only shows us that it’s hollow after we take a yummy bite.

Surely the next film, Episode VIII, will be more substantial and it’ll get the crowds that Attack of the Clones missed out on, having to follow The Phantom Menace. I want to know what Finn gets up to. I want to know who Rey is. I want to see Kylo Ren’s arm cut off, though I’d prefer that it be his head that meets a lightsaber. But I also want it to not suck. So I’m going to go with my fingers crossed.

Ex Machina

Director: Alex Garland
Stars: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia VIkander, Sonoya Mizuno and Oscar Isaac

This was clearly the best of the three science fiction films I’m reviewing tonight and the one which most deserves to be called science fiction instead of sci-fi. It’s sad to see a frequent description of the film as ‘smart science fiction’ as that infers that the genre nowadays fails to be smart by definition instead of by frequency.

It’s a neat intellectual puzzle, written by Alex Garland, the writer of 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd, who also debuted as a director here. It revolves around the Turing test, which can be considered passed only if an artificial intelligence can convince an observer through conversation that it’s human.

The setup is that a billionaire CEO runs a competition within his company, apparently for an employee to spend a week with him on his massive estate. The company is Blue Book, which has multiple meanings but to most people will translate to something similar to and as successful as Google and Facebook put together. The CEO is Nathan Bateman, who exudes the confidence of a young genius who’s already conquered the world. The winner is Caleb Smith, a talented young computer programmer, who promptly has to sign a non-disclosure agreement because there’s something else going on here.

Once done, Bateman tells Smith that he’s here to be the human component in a Turing test, tasked with judging whether Ava, an AI he’s created, could pass that test. A number of flags immediately arise, the most obvious of which is raised by Caleb himself, namely that Ava is obviously a humanoid robot, given that her arms, legs and torso are transparent and show her inner cabling. If he knows that she’s artificial, how can he conduct a fair Turing test?

So, of course, we start asking questions in our heads. The obvious setup is that Ava isn’t the real focus of the test, which is surely Kyoko, the Japanese housemaid who speaks no English. However, that’s a little too obvious and she doesn’t actually speak at all, so we dig deeper and become rather engaged in this intellectual puzzle. Given that Caleb isn’t stupid, he realises this too, especially given that this wonder of a research facility is apparently subject to convenient power cuts. So Caleb asks these questions as we ask these questions. My better half and I came up with a few theories, which to my mind hold water. The good news is that the one that Garland pursues wasn’t any of them but it still makes complete sense. To my mind, that’s the best sort of puzzle, one whose solution isn’t obvious but is clear and concise once revealed.

Garland is clearly the star of the show, having both written the script and directed the film. There’s a lot of clever detail here, so read the Wikipedia page and the IMDb trivia. I caught a few of these little details, like the riffing on the alien tones in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a number of references to the man becomes god motif highlighted by Robert Oppenheimer when he built the atomic bomb. However, I missed other references and was blind to quite a lot of it, making this a learning experience as well as an enjoyable viewing.

However, Garland isn’t the only star of the show. The technical aspects are consistently strong, though I didn’t feel like I was watching a Stanley Kubrick film as I get the impression I was occasionally supposed to. More obviously, there are four actors with prominent parts who all prove very capable indeed.

Domhnall Gleeson from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows gets a lot more opportunity here as a bright and awestruck young programmer than he did as General Hux, the commander of Starkiller Base, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, though I’m sure he made a lot more money from the latter. He had a wonderful 2015, also starring in Brooklyn and co-starring in The Revenant, meaning that he made four pictures with multiple Oscar nominations. He’s a precocious young man here, uncomfortable for much of his time in a rich man’s house but willing to continue with the experiment he’s tasked to perform. The way he moves in and out of control is fascinating.

Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davies is arguably even better here. He was also in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, playing ace pilot Poe Dameron, but I didn’t even recognise him here. He’s very believable as a child prodigy and a rich man, mildly eccentric and socially awkward but very direct. He’s often a little the worse for drink and often inappropriate but he’s always in charge. He has the beard and glasses of a nerd but the muscles of a jock and he capably walks the line between the two, making him at once predator and prey.

Alicia Vikander from The Man from UNCLE plays the robotic young lady at the heart of their interaction. She’s calm and composed, but obviously thoughtful and with a clear agenda of her own. She’s also both prey and predator, stuck behind glass in an experiment she doesn’t like but notably able to turn Caleb’s questions around on him.

Backing them up in a much smaller role is Sonoya Mizuno, a ballerina and model who debuted on film as Kyoko. She does a good job too; she merely had much less to do.

The heart of the film revolves around artificial intelligence and the Turing test. The questions asked are good ones, examining what consciousness means in a very different way to Chappie. This is old school science fiction, often reminiscent of Frankenstein, but with some modern twists to keep things up to date for the 21st century, such as how things go when an AI turns the Turing test round on a human being. There are also side issues raised that are well worth debate, like the idea of using search data from a large enough search engine as a map of how people think or whether there can be consciousness without a sexual component. I’m sure both of those ideas will be used more and more over the next few decades.

I definitely plan to revisit this movie in a year or so to see how it stands up now that I know what happens. I’m acutely aware that there’s a meta level here with Alex Garland using me as the human component in an imaginative Turing test by tasking me with figuring out which and how many of his four characters are really human and which are artificial. If I’m rating this film highly today on the basis that he successfully manipulated me, then I’m likely to lower that rating on a second viewing. If I’m rating it highly because I appreciate how he played with these ideas, then I’m likely to keep it high, unless flaws become obvious with a second look. I’m eager to see which it’ll be.