From Zombos Closet

JM Cozzoli

A horror and movie fan with a blog. Scary.

Graphic Book Review:
Helheim Vol. 1: The Witch War

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Helheim-graphicZombos Says: Fair to Good

The draugr of Norse mythology takes center stage here with a nod to the Golem's protector modus operandi and Frankenstein's Monster's patchwork quilting of stitched body parts. Only here, Cullen Bunn and Joelle Jones's draugr is a giant pawn caught between two warring witches and their demon-play to best each other.

No reason is given as to why Bera, the beautiful witch, and Groa, the ugly hag of a witch (note how ugly witches always have names that imply ugliness, too), are feuding and decimating the countryside in the process. From the level of despair and desolation shown it's been going on for a long while.

The story places us in the middle of the conflict at the start, with a hunting party being hunted as they quickly return to their village with the wildmen in pursuit. An opening salvo of bloodshed and hacked limbs within their village gates reveals the ferocity and supernatural nature of their adversaries. When the handsome, brawny, Rikard is killed, Bera reveals her true talent by bringing him back to life. Larger and smellier than before and able to swing a mean axe, Rikard is now a hulking dead creature under her control. She sends him after Groa and her demon minions.

A puzzling question arises early on: why does each witch have a village of her own to fight for her, especially after all the constant turmoil and lack of food this incessant animosity is causing? Either Bunn is riffing off the historically important village idiot role (and one still prevalent today in politics, by the way) by twisting it around to one of a village witch role (which would be closest to the village savant role I'd surmise), or perhaps he's presuming we won't notice. Or maybe he's cleverly turned this whole village idiot role into a plural endeavor, implying that each villager is stupid enough to stick around, waiting to get killed in the crossfire, rendering an idiot village in effect?

Other plot-convenient assumptions let him jump through the issues of this collected series without applying effort toward providing explanation or illustration: for instance, Rikard has amassed an army of men, a hundred or so, to fight along with him by issue four, but in issue three he's alone, needs the help of a little girl to stitch his head back into one piece, and he still smells badly. How he amasses an army of men to follow him is anyone's guess, but he instantly has one by issue four.

Helheim: The Witch War has a Van Helsing vibe to it. If you just accept it and don't ask questions, or don't bother to think too deeply as to whys and wherefores, it's an entertaining horror story that makes less sense than it ought to, but still provides some good scenes and moments. But if you're pigheaded and need more flesh to the motivation-backbone of your storytelling, just remember the good thing is this is only volume one. Assume that volume two will flesh it all out better and you'll be fine.

If you can wait for volume two, that is.

Graphic Book Review: Half Past Danger

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Zombos Says: Good

Once again, the Nazis are up to no good in Half Past Danger. This time around they’ve got dinosaurs and a deadly secret, with Stephen Mooney and a very good period-toned coloration from Jordie Bellair tying it all together into a neat package wrapped around with colorful main players.

There’s a Samurai-wielding Japanese Naval Landing Forces ex-soldier; a super GI soldier–but he doesn’t carry around a shield; an Irish soldier who carries around a bottle or two that’s either half-empty or half-full at any given moment; a femme fatale with long black hair and a fetish for long black jumpsuits who carries the mission’s intrigue; and the German Officer they’re up against, who carries the usual supercilious attitude and Aryan-inspired confidence of cool determination we’ve come to expect from our movie and comic book German Officer nemeses.

Much grease gun and fiery mayhem explodes across this collected six issues’ worth of vibrant, retro-storied pages, which hints a little The Lost World: Jurassic Park, a little multi-chaptered Republic Serial, and with Bellair’s appropriate earth tones, military tones, Nazi tones, submarine interior tones, and jungle campfire at night tones, smoothing Mooney’s heavy lines (that are too heavy at times, obliterating facial nuances), it all moves breezily and 1943’s-ish through hold-on-to-your-ass military exploits, haul-your-ass dinosaur-stomped jungles, torpedo shooting submarines, dastardly deeds, and well-timed revelations. Mooney draws and quarters his story evenly across six issues with minimal loss of melodramatic pacing while maintaining his characters’ dynamics (sure, they may all be stereotypes, but they’re still well-executed stereotypes), making his story an entertaining read from start to finish within each issue.

And watching people get eaten by dinosaurs, especially nasty Nazi people, is always a pleasure for horror fans to see, of course. And watching samurai swords slice through impossible things, with maybe a neck or two in the way, is fun to see, too.

Book Review: Snowblind by Christopher Golden

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Snowblind-goldenZombos Says: Good

The bedroom scene around page fifty jolts a chill, more so than the blizzard raging beyond the smashed window, even if those whispering voices and cold, malevolent, faces riding the storm's wintry gusts of air and frost keep getting closer. Lesser chills follow this scene, taking place in the novel's twelve-years-earlier prelude, but Christopher Golden invests brooding eldritch evil across two blizzards to effectively wallop us and the townspeople of Coventry, Massachusetts, with a vengeance. Especially when those people include not only the ones who survived the first storm, but the ones who didn't and are now returning when another approaches. Just ahead of those evil others.

Like zombies, a blizzard can make you feel trapped, keep you isolated, and leave you praying for quieter times (or at least a good pudding or cup of hot cocoa). So there's an inherent uneasiness, discomfort, and concern that Golden easily taps into, to start with, by adding his snowy horror. His icy bogeymen are mysterious, deadly, and elicit welcome shudders, riding the currents of the first blizzard as Officer Keenan struggles to save a life, Doug and Allie suffer guilt and loss, and TJ and Ella spark a future they will find difficult to hold on to. The first blizzard leaves a lot of people dead, missing, or left coping with their memories of that night and their lost loved ones. 

Golden directs our eyes and feelings through those people who survive and through the ones who didn't. He reveals what's become of them, including the Great Recession's effect on their lives. Intertwining these revelations with the frosty bogeymen hunting in the snow drifts and the wintry night air make us fear for  everyone's safety, especially when locked doors and shuttered windows do not keep the monsters out. This simple but classic form of monstrous presence, of ancient evil beings that are seemingly unstoppable, can be found in many novels (especially in recent ones), but combining this presence with the impending whiteout conditions and relentless cold raises the suspense level significantly. Golden diminishes his overall reach for scares by failing to sustain the supernatural mystery he builds up so well in his first fifty pages by offering an explanation for the bogeymen through dialog spoken by a wraith to characters desparate for explanations. In horror, no explanations are needed; just the inexhaustible terrors of the unknown when it bears down on you with deadly intent. 

In twelve years' time, Officer Keenan becomes Detective Keenan, and Doug sinks into criminality. Other lives also change, for better or worse, and Golden's narrative relies on these changes to propel the middle of his story, leading up to the showdown that will either heal open wounds or open more of them. At the beginning and toward the end, he provides more action than an icy snowball fight on slippery ground, by moonlight, with mittens on. His handling of everyone's motivations is the strongest part of his narrative, holding our interest, ultimately creating disappointment when his denouement is not formulated with as much dexterity or pacing. 

But you will imagine how bitter cold and isolating it must feel as the threatened brace themselves against the storm's frigid blasts and the monsters riding them; you will fear the evil things hiding in the snow and wonder how these people will ever survive as you turn the pages to find out; and you will indeed hope they make this into a movie, but not one directed by Rob Zombie, Uwe Boll, or Stephen King.  

Profile of a Killer (2012)

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Profile of a killer

Zombos Says: Good

Profile of a Killer (2012) is a movie that, ultimately, fails to explain why characters behave the way they do, but director and writer Caspian Tredwell-Owen manages to keep us asking anyway.

He focuses on three people: David (Joey Pollari), the teenage killer; Saul (Gabriele Angieri), the almost-retired FBI Profiler who David wants very much to meet; and Rachel (Emily Fradenburgh), the special agent who reluctantly works with Saul until David kidnaps him. Then she works hard at finding Saul and David as more victims, old and new, come to the surface. Or she works as hard, at least, as Fradenburgh can project her acting acumen up to.

Of the three, Rachel is the weakest participant when she needs to be the driving force for all the actions taking place to find killer and profiler. Fradenburgh has one facial expression, one mood, and one modus operandi. Her backstory is the least fulfilling, the least explained, which seriously releases the steam built up from those moments when we are listening in on Saul and David’s tete-a-tetes: David desparately needs Saul to profile him, an active killer, and Saul wants to understand David’s motives to stop him; but both of them are asking the same question: why am I/why are you killing? The simplicity of this question propels Profile of a Killer along, and can either generate much turmoil for both men, or it can overwhelm the storyline with expedient banalaties cobbled together from the numerous movies about killers that have come at us in all shapes and sizes and levels of sanity and gruesomeness.

Is David like the killer Bobby Thompson in Targets? Or is David a stone cold killer like Anton in No Country for Old Men? We see David’s not hungry for his victims’ livers (not yet, anyway), but he kills randomly (or so it seems) , forcing Saul to put up or shut up and watch helplessly. What little we learn about David gives no justification for his actions. The Wall of Success his mom’s pinned up for him embarrasses him, so we know he’s not a Norman Bates with a mother complex. He’s not even a thrill killer like Mickey in Natural Born Killers. He alternates between regretting what he does and needing to do it.

Oddly, Tredwell-Owen’s camera maintains a steady eye as David flips through slideshow presentations of his intended victims, which is an anachronism given David’s laptop nearby with the pictures he’s painstakingly turning into slides for the projector. And how does he manage to make those slides within the confines of the abandoned dairy farmhouse? But anachronistic stylistic conventions aside, watch the camera as it fixes on Saul and David,  steadily framing them , and slowly, very slowly, moving toward them as they challenge each other with questions and become agitated with the lack of answers.

Contrast this with how the camera handles Rachel’s scenes. Perhaps Treadwell-Owen realizes Fradenburgh dissipates any tension in those frames her character appears in, so he shakes the handheld camera, slightly, to energize the frame? Or maybe he’s playing on our expectations of who is actually in control, or not in control, of the situation? An unsteady camera usually implies disorientation, unease, or something not quite right. But the unsteadiness and unease is Rachel’s, not David’s.

Treadwell-Owen, like Rachel, can’t seem to alter his tone or mood beyond morose, keeping Profile of a Killer weighted down in moments when it should spring forward, and there are times when his camera moves more than the depth of his characters. But unlike the anemic vampire academies and tireless retreads of worn movie plots, Profile of a Killer aims its premise between sensationalism and drama with a rare spin on the serial killer genre that emphasizes the relationship (which seems like that of a father and son) between the older profiler and the younger killer more than a cat and mouse game of wits. Here, they share the same goal: both want answers and to live.