From Zombos' Closet

Book Review: Nocturnal by Scott Sigler

Zombos Says: Very Good

Bryan Clauser and Pookie Chang, two San Franciso Homicide Detectives, step into it badly when a department conspiracy turns into a monstrous nigthmare for them and the rest of the city. The monstrous part comes from a cult of monsters. A big cult of them, living underground and coming out only at night. Their prey is the homeless, the vagrants, and the unnoticed. Keeping them at bay is the Saviour, an arrow-shooting, cloaked avenger with unusual abilities and weapons. When Bryan and Pookie muck up the Saviour's aim with their good intentions, the monsters, who have been around for a century or so and just itching to hunt freely and without fear, quickly grab the opportunity in this escalating horror thriller by Scott Sigler. Combining police procedural with mind-numbing genetics  gyrations to make it all plausible between the covers, Nocturnal's 500 plus pages accelerate faster and faster until the blow-out payoff grudge match.

Along the way there's character growth, some stunting, and enough lively banter between Bryan and Pookie to define their natures so much you care what happens to them. Pookie dreams of bringing his cop opus, Blue Balls, to television; Bryan can't quite get his hands around the concept, or his ex-girlfriend Robin, either, as she suddenly finds herself running the City Morgue and soon involved in a knee-deep police coverup. Pookie is overweight and wears suits a size too small. He also drives like he owns the road. Bryan's the one with the deadly aim, cool exterior, and odd history that churns up disquieting things from a dark sediment he'd rather have left alone.

If you've read Clive Barker's Cabal or saw that novel's movie version, Nightbreed, you will have a slight familiarity with Sigler's bizarre creatures. If you've seen Slither, there's one particularly unpleasant scene early in that movie you will vividly recall when you read about Mother and how she gives birth to all those nasty monstrosities with cute names. The monsters' underground home reminded me of the Goonies (ancient ships figure in both), but I'll leave it up to you to see if it does the same. 

I bounced between very good and excellent rating this novel; I felt a few less pages here and there would have moved the action faster for me, especially in Book 2: Monsters, the part of the story where everything starts going to hell more quickly than in Book 1: People. And that's only because I kept fighting the urge to skip past paragraphs as I became increasingly ansy to find out what would happen next. 

The writing style is more movie-ish than literary--cheeky dip dialog, straightforward, visually concise action descriptions, and people with just enough needs, foibles, and dirty nails to make them interesting in a nutshell--so the pages turn quickly as plotlines converge. Sigler's habit of sizing chapters to measure the pace even more may leave you as breathless as Bryan and Pookie when push comes to shove.

One important note for zombie and romantic blood-sucker aficionados: although these monsters enjoy chewing on humans, there are no zombies among them. Or romantic vampires. The only things Nocturnal's monsters love to do is hunt and kill.

Strangely enough, Bryan enjoys those activities, too.

A courtesy copy of Nocturnal was provided for this review.

Around the World Under the Sea (1966) Movie Herald

What caught my eye here is the illustration and the clever use of the tagline. I also like David McCallum and Lloyd Bridges. Keenan Wynn's kind of fun to watch, too. And how can you pass up Marshall Thompson (It! The Terror from Beyond Space)?

I briefly met David McCallum in the 1980s, when I was shlubbing the shelves at B. Dalton's Software Etc. store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. He was close to my height (okay, yes, short!), so we could see eye to eye. I liked that. I forget what computer program he was looking for, though. 

Movie Review: Chernobyl Diaries (2012) Short a Few Entries

Zombos Says: Good

The cleverest moments in Chernobyl Diaries come early: scenes of young American tourists enjoying the sites of London, France, and eventually Russia as seen through the digital camera recording them. But director Bradley Parker and scripter Oren Peli are just teasing us. This isn't, thankfully, a through-the-lens or found footage movie, although more professionally handled handheld cameras do follow the six Americans as they head to Prypiat, the ghost city near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Their tour guide is Uri, a beefy entrepenuer with special forces training,  offering "extreme" tours through the abandoned, desolate buildings and less radioactive areas of ground. The cleverness stops somewhere between their boarding of Uri's rundown van and a little after its breakdown as night approaches, leaving them stranded in Prypiat. 

Given this real and eerie environment, suspense builds for us while concerns mount for Uri and the six adventurers. Their this-is-cool mood, filled with playful banter and a few false-start scares that leave them acting giddy, filled with the sense of doing something special and naughty--like American youth traveling abroad, in horror movies anyway,  are supposed to act--changes to recriminations, fears, and blame-gaming. The change is on a dime, so it surprises me; where do all these pent-up feelings come from?  Not from the script: it doesn't pinch harder than necessary to line up the usual suspects for this phase of the movie, shifting everyone into last-one-standing mode. 

Uri pulls a handy gun from the glove compartment as stray sounds and vicious, starving, dogs frazzle nerves. I would have put my money on Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) to bring this story up a few notches. He looks tough, acts tough, and is built like a brick wall. Perhaps it was too much to expect that the story would break out of the mold for parts unknown, but Uri, the biggest and baddest of the group is still written out early, leaving six bickering, frightened, American numbnuts to go find him or, at least, his gun while they figure out what to do next. 

It's the figuring part that wears this movie like yesterday's fashion (which admittedly, for the majority of the horror movie industry,  is worn everyday);   shaky-blur "found footage" of an attack on the van; darkened interiors punctuated by flashlights to disorient us and tease at possible terrors lurking outside the light; phantom assailants we never see clearly, and a lot of screaming, shouting, and running away from them, leading deeper into ever tighter passageways, a maze of claustrophic, bunker-like rooms, and the Chernobyl Power Plant, still hot with radiactivity. If you've ever screamed through a haunt attraction with your friends (or a bunch of strangers), the overall effect is similar to watching Chris (Jesse McCartney), Michael (Nathan Phillips), Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), Zoe (Ingrid Berdol), Amanda (Devin Kelley), and Natalie (Olivia Dudley) be terrorized, although more usually happens in the haunt attraction.

Chernobyl Diaries is well acted, atmospheric, loaded with promise, but leaves a bland taste. Some people will find some scares (or recognize them from the trailer), but seasoned horror fans will find a well-worn roadmap to boredom with too few interesting stops along the way.  

Double Bill Pressbook: Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory and Corridors of Blood (Part 2)

See Part 1

Here are the press luncheon invitation, action accessories, catchlines, and more promotional gimmickry for this very appetizing double bill pressbook. And to think, today we only have the Internet to do all this. Bummer. And remember, There's gold in them thar Chills!

Double Bill Pressbook: Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory and Corridors of Blood

This pressbook is in my top ten favorites. Black and white, 12 inch x 17 inch format, perfect tagline, werewolf-making kit theater giveaway, suitably atmospheric press luncheon, and excellent publicity articles--what more of Nervo-Rama can you ask for? (Click to enlarge pages. And don't try this on your mobile phone: these are BIG pages.)

Dracula Game By Waddingtons

I found this Waddingtons' Dracula Game on eBay some years ago. I was mesmerized by the box illustration; a little Spanish influence, don't you think? The colorful game pieces are also neato, especially the green vampire bat mask.

LOTT-D Joins the Avengers

Move over Thor and Captain America, members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, those super bloggers of horror (and superhero movies!), want a seat at the table. 

From Midnight With Love takes on the mission..."Now that I have seen it, it is certain in my mind that Joss Whedon is the true hero of The Avengers.  His script, which is filled to the brim with scenes that are honestly hilarious, is also incredibly faithful to the heroes as they've appeared in the comics and films that led to this point."

Gospel of the Living Dead preaches a new gospel..."Really, to call it a great comic book movie is shortchanging it. The Punisher (2004) is a great comic book movie - over the top, two-dimensional, cartoonish violence, with dialogue that consists of grunts and wisecracks. The Avengers is a great action flick, generally. This is much more of a "Team of Bad-Asses Who Don't Get Along with One Another" film and should be compared to those (and compared quite favorably, allowing for tights and people who fly and what-not)."  

TheoFantastique invites Jess Peacock from The Crawlspace to wax on the popularity of The Avengers..."Whedon knows who the Avengers are, what they have been, and where they need to go. As such, he avoids the mistake of reinterpreting the mega-team through a postmodern, nihilistic lens, a trap too often ensnaring other contemporary superhero projects. (I’m looking at you,Man of Steel.) Neither does Whedon devolve into camp (*cough* Green Lantern). Rather, he allows the characters to play in a world and respond to a threat that Marvel has brilliantly pieced together since the release of Iron Man in 2008."

Scared Silly reminds us of the comic book fun... "Last but not least, this weekend sees the release of the live-action Avengers movie, based on the popular Marvel Comics super-team of heroes...Since we’re all about “the classics” here, I’ll leave you with a clever “pre-make” that has been making the rounds – a “trailer” for an “Avengers” film if it had been made in 1952! You’ll spot some footage from vintage serials, sci-fi flicks, TV shows and more in this fun-filled lark."

Book Review: Zombie Island A Shakespeare Undead Novel

The play's the thing, and in Lori Handeland's Zombie Island: A Shakespeare Undead Novel, that play would be The Tempest, wherein Prospero's  temperate isle becomes the fertile ground for raising zombies, or tibonage as they are known by necro-vampire William Shakespeare and his fair chasseur (zombie hunter) amour, Kate. This is the second book in Handeland's adventures of the vampiric Bard and his beloved Dark Lady of the sonnets, but stands alone well enough to keep you happily marooned, along with them, for its 250 and some odd pages.

The zombies are as balmy as the island's weather, so this is not a tome for hardcore gore fans. With the undead's constant "Brrr!" murmurings, they're the all- the-brains-you-can-eat phenotype of walking dead risen up from the shipwrecked and doomed crews Ariel's tempestuous storms swell onto the shore.

Ariel, the magical spirit Prospero freed from a tree, is bound to his bidding, although she hates killing so many innocent people for Prospero's mad dream of retaking his lost throne. Ariel's feminine gender here--in Shakespeare's play Ariel is a man--plays an important part: she's blue, fetchingly flies around naked, although invisibly, gives off impressive sparks when angry, and yearns for an emotion she doesn't understand. Calaban helps her with that, but he's all paws and razor claws which presents some tactile issues to surmount.

Emotional and tactile interlocutions abound as much as the zombies, providing the true bite and sustenance on Zombie Island. This is a love story: Prospero loves to have more zombies; the zombies love to have more brains (to eat); Shakespeare loves to hold Kate within his arms; and Kate loves for Shakespeare to hold her in his arms.

She also loves to kill zombies, and that's why she finds herself, at Ariel's scheming, on the island. Ariel creates the zombies, she wants Kate to kill the zombies. All works as well as could be given the circular reasoning of one magical sprite desperate to stifle Prospero's plans, but Shakespeare's unexpected arrival on the island, while at first beneficial, becomes problematic. Being a necro-vampire, he can easily raise the dead into zombies at the full moon. If Prospero finds this out it could thwart Ariel's plan.

Handeland intertwines Shakespeare's familiar words with his vampire counterpart's visions, emotions, and speech into breezy reading through the chapters. All players are directed with their needs, tempers, spleen, and desires foremost, and with romance while zombies go about their business. There is no strutting to fret about here; only a simple and enjoyable tale of love and zombies' labors gained and lost. Just add a banana daquiri or coqui, sip it while stretching idly on a tropical beach as you pause between Zombie Island's chapters, and read on. 

A courtesy copy was received for this review.

Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012) No Dark, No Shadows

Zombos Says: Fair

Listen to Movie Review

Up until that big letter "M" appears on screen (trust me, you can't miss it), Tim Burton and Seth Grahame-Smith's incarnation of Dark Shadows broods deeply in its Gothic sensibility of ill-considered trysting and vengeful witchcraft. Then it falls apart, leaving Johnny Depp's Barnabus Collins a floundering vampire fish out of suitable waters. With strikingly lifeless humor ("gonzo comedy" Burton? Really?), no serious bedevilment to beguile us, no involving supernatural romance to entrance us, and no fully realized characters to relate to, this amalgam of familial oddities and cobbled scenes such as Barnabus carrying an umbrella and wearing dark sunglasses in the sunlight, Barnabus calling Alice Cooper the ugliest woman he's ever seen, Barnabus showing much more energy for revitalizing his family's fishery business instead of wooing the reincarnation of his lost love, Josette DuPres, for whom he had jumped off a cliff to kill himself after she plunged first, and Barnabus mesmerized by a lava lamp filled with bobbing red wax, well, it all amounts to a perfect example of what "stupid creative license" is all about.

The costumes are pretty, the Collinwood Mansion divine--it has more substance than anyone living in it--and Depp's performance is perfectly primed for chilling connivance, but none of these are knitted into a continuous thread: there is no clever campy humor, no attunement to 1970s grooviness, and no seriously despairing cursed vampire to propel the story's purpose. Burton shows us everything but Grahame-Smith tells us nothing. Whatever Gothic horror romance the original television series had in its rich storylines, none of it shows up here. If you're a fan of the original series, you probably won't like this lackluster interpretation; if you're new to Dark Shadows you won't find enough to understand why the original was so important to horror fans and the genre.  Simply put, nothing is added, but much is taken away. 

And then there's the werewolf.

It pops in at the end with a quick explanation, just to spice up the showdown between Barnabus and Angelique (Eva Green). She's the saucy witch who cursed him back in the 1700s because he refused to love her. She's still around, running the Angel Bay Fishery that put the Collins's out of business. Their battle, the movie's ending, is as well envisioned as the movie's beginning, before that big "M" I mentioned before appears, to lead us into the interminable middle portion of churning indecisiveness, wasting the talents of Jackie Earle Haley as Willie Loomis and Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters. 

The story has Barnabus accidentally dug up and freed from his iron coffin where Angelique entombed him. He makes his way back to Collinwood Manor, after putting the bite on a vanload of hippies, and finds his former home is now rundown and its inhabitants in the same condition. There's matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) who keeps her knitting in a secret room; Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), who, although she was hired to treat young David Collins' (Gulliver McGrath) delusion of seeing the ghost of his mother, three years later she's a failure and seems to do nothing but drink a lot and sponge off the Collins clan (so I wonder why she's still at Collinwood); Roger Collins (Jonny Lee Miller), is the ne'er-do-well of the family; and tuned-out, groovin' to the music, is Carolyn Stoddard (Chloe Grave Moretz) who hates her family and wants to move to New York just to spite Elizabeth.

Carolyn's the one Barnabus turns to for advice on how to woo Victoria in such modern times (1972). A centuries old vampire seeking advice from an ill-behaved and spoiled girl isn't very funny. She also gives advice on who Barnabus should have for entertainment at his Grand Ball, the event he wants to throw to flaunt the rebirth of Collinwood to the townspeople of Collinsport. She recommends Alice Cooper. Sure, why not? When you've got nothing in the script that works, Alice Cooper's a sure bet to pad some minutes around. 

The money to refurbish Collinwood to its former glory is revealed by Barnabus the night he returns: stairs underneath the fireplace lead through a mirrored passageway to a treasure room. As Barnabus leads the way carrying a lantern, Elizabeth sees the lantern reflected in the mirrors, but not Barnabus. (A similar scene can be found in Mario Bava's Black Sunday.) Realizing Barnabus is actually who he says he is, Elizabeth keeps his secret. The banter he has with the Collins clan when he shows up at breakfast for the first time is as colorless as his pasty face. Dr. Hoffman sobers up enough to become suspicious and hypnotizes Barnabus to learn the truth. Of course, with Barnabus dressed and looking like Nosferatu, it's not a stretch for them or us.

Ghosts do roam the halls of Collinwood Manor.  If only the spirits of Gothic mystery and romance roamed there as well. But there's no ghost of a chance for that in this movie.

Professor Kinema Takes a Trip to LA

On a recent trip to California, Professor Kinema was kind enough to pick up a fitting souvenir for me. I'm wearing it in the photo, standing in front of--what else?--a closet. Every now and then I like to let my lucha libre out.

The professor also paid a visit to the mecca of forgotten movie videos, Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee in North Hollywood. Here are his pics to familiarize yourself with this important bastion of VHS treasures (and trash, too!).

Movie Pressbook: The Dead Are Alive (1972)

I always wanted a mustache like Alex  Cord. Now I just wish I had his hair. I miss the 1970s.

Movie Herald: The Dead Are Alive

Here's 1972's The Dead are Alive herald theater giveaway to promote the movie; one sheet folded to create four pages. The Italian movie title is L'etrusco uccide ancora.