Voices
Dec. 6th, 2009
10:35 am - Deadline (2009)
Screenwriter Alice (Brittany Murphy) has lived through some hard times with her ex-boyfriend Dan. During the course of their relationship Dan developed a very unhealthy amount of jealousy and finally tried to drown Alice in the bathtub, killing their unborn child in the process. She survived, but has had a major breakdown, and doesn't remember anymore what exactly happened between her and Dan, only how hard it hit her.
Now, after some time (and presumably a lot of therapy), Alice has decided it's time for her to start working again. Her new girlfriend Rebecca (Tammy Blanchard) doesn't seem all that convinced, though. Be that as it may, Alice is positive that spending a writing week alone in a Victorian mansion somewhere in the boons is just what she needs to find back to her old self again.
Once she arrives at the mansion, it doesn't even take a whole evening until the first strange things begin to happen. It is your typical ghostly stuff - strange voices, wet footsteps, a mysteriously self-filling bathtub, the shadowy figure of a woman, the works.
While she is freaking out more and more, Alice distracts herself with some camcorder tapes the ghosts have lead her to find. On them, she witnesses the deterioration of the marriage of Lucy (Thora Birch) and David (Marc Blucas) Woods. At first, the relationship seems healthy enough, but David's love passes the point of obsession and dangerous jealousy. That, just as it was in Alice's case, a baby is on the way only seems to make the problem worse.
Alice identifies herself more and more with Lucy, until she has trouble telling reality and dream apart, quickly reaching a point of crisis.
Sean McConville's Deadline is a very traditional ghost story, perhaps trying a little too hard to be also an artsy drama. You could argue that the film's ending betrays the ghost story for pure melodrama, although I think it keeps everything admirably open, never exactly defining how much of what we have seen has happened in Alice's head and how much outside of it.
McConville's directorial style is slow, moody and a little conservative. There are no flashcuts, no whooshing noises and no shaky cam to be found anywhere (even the home videos are shown as conventional film scenes), and it is the right way to direct for the story the film is telling. There's the characters and a little plot, and McConville is intelligent enough to not get between the audience and those.
Deadline concentrates much more on Alice's mental state as mirrored in Lucy (or is it the other way round?) than on being all that scary, so people only looking for scares in their horror will probably be quite disappointed by it. Instead of trying to frighten its audience, the film uses its ghosts as amplifiers of Alice's mental state, which doesn't mean that there are no disconcerting scenes to be found at all. The second half of the film has some moments that make good use of the psychological horrors of the tale to unsettle the viewer.
I was pleasantly surprised by the actors. I don't necessarily expect great work from Brittany Murphy, but her performance as the brittle woman getting more and more disturbed is really quite good. Not as surprising, but equally convincing is Thora Birch; even Marc Blucas' typically flat affect fits nicely into his role here.
For some, Deadline will probably be boring - there's no action to speak of, the spooking is very conservative and the film is interested in character and not much else. I for my part think that this is a good direction for a ghost story to go in. There should be space enough for something a little old-fashioned among the gore and the spring-loaded cats that seem to be making up much of the horror genre today.
07:14 pm - mirrors and paintings in horror literature
Mirrors or paintings as reflections or doubles of the soul are a fairly obvious idea in horror. The Picture of Dorian Gray is the obvious example, and Poe used it as well. Angela Carter wrote a very clever story called Reflections.
Do you have any favourite exampes of original or striking uses of this idea in horror literature?
05:58 am
[001 -081] A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master 
( running from this nightmare, i turn around but there's no one there )
03:12 pm - Star of the Week - Marian Marsh
Our featured star this week is Marian Marsh. She was briefly a major star in the pre-code era, but her fairly short career was more or less over by the end of the 30s.
What do you think were her most memorable movie performances? What were her greatest strengths (or greatest weaknesses) as an actress?
Marian Marsh in Svengali (1931)
10:48 am - A Peculiar Narrative [115 icons]
Icons inspired by illustrations warning of the dangers of electrocution -- horror (and humor) among the mundane…or whatever you may conjure. Mild nsfw warning: violent themes against men, women, children, and animals + a bit of corse language.
‽ credit: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
theidolhands
‽ comments appreciated
‽ no hotlinking
‽ icons aren't bases
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Why, I'm shocked!!
10:25 am - "THE MALTESE FALCON" (1931) Photo Gallery
"THE MALTESE FALCON" (1931) Photo Gallery
Here is a GALLERY featuring photos from the 1931 adaptation of "THE MALTESE FALCON". Directed by Roy Del Ruth, the movie starred Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels.
02:29 am - Here’s Looking at You, Boy
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )
Dec. 5th, 2009
04:34 am - The Shub-Niggurath Solstice Sacrifice is back!
On the solstice, December 21, 2009, we will sacrifice a goat to Shub-Niggurath and beg Her to spread Her hideous madness across the globe.
Read more at: goatsacrifice.livejournal.com
Contributors of all kinds (literary, artistic, financial) are being sought.
This holiday season, do something meaningful - help us summon Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of a Thousand Young, so that She can smite and devour every living thing on earth.
09:03 am - The Stranger And The Gunfighter (1974)
The thief and expert safe-cracker Dakota (Lee Van Cleef) is trying to steal the fabled riches of the Chinese-immigrant businessman Wang. To his disappointment, Wang's safe only contains four pictures of the backs of Wang's four mistresses. Worse still, the pictures' owner stumbles onto the burglary and falls down dead (I suspect four mistresses weren't such a good idea for a man of his age). Poor, semi-innocent Dakota ends up sentenced to death for murder.
A little later somewhere in China, a warlord presses Wang's nephew, the martial arts expert Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh), into his service to travel to America and get him his uncle's money. The fabled riches weren't actually Wang's own, but belonged to the warlord who used Wang as intermediate to invest money in the US. Now, the rather rude man has gotten impatient and gives Ho Chiang exactly one year to return with his money, or the fighters' father and sister will die.
Once arrived in America, Ho Chiang soon realizes that Dakota didn't steal his uncle's money. It also becomes clear that uncle Wang was quite the fetishist and had the whereabouts of his treasures tattooed onto his mistresses backsides.
Since Ho is a nice guy and thinks himself in need of a traveling companion who knows the lay of the land, he frees Dakota from the gallows and offers him a little money for his help. Dakota agrees to the proposal, very un-Spaghetti-like without showing any sign of ulterior motives.
Together, the two men travel the land to stare at female asses everywhere. It's just too bad that they aren't all that good at secrecy, so they soon have to compete against an insane preacher only known as The Deacon (driving a mean mobile church) to get at the behinds.
As the film's fascination with female backsides (not that it is actually showing any of them) should demonstrate, The Stranger And The Gunfighter is not to be taken seriously. It's a film built - in the glorious Italian tradition - to cash in on the short popularity of Lo Lieh in American grindhouses as a martial arts hero (which of course blissfully ignored the fact that he more often than not played the bad guy in his Hong Kong films) and the absolute willingness Lee Van Cleef's to do any damn thing for a movie (see also Captain Apache), and it succeeds admirably as a silly piece of fluff.
Many among the surprising number of Spaghetti Western/martial arts crossover films aren't too entertaining to watch, but most of these films weren't directed by house favorite Antonio Margheriti, who always had a sure hand when it came to directing silly adventure movies. And at heart, The Stranger And The Gunfighter is a deeply silly adventure movie outfitted with the trappings of a Spaghetti Western and a little Kung Fu more than it belongs to those other two genres.
Watching the film, I found it hard to shake the feeling that everyone involved had a hell of a time - Van Cleef shooting, singing (alas) and drinking and Lo Lieh staring at female bottoms with scientific earnestness and a looking glass and kicking male asses when necessary. I imagine Margheriti giggling with glee behind his camera, as I often do when watching the man's films.
All this is obviously far from that mysterious thing experts call "good taste", but I stopped caring about that a long time ago when I decided that I'm not that bourgeois. While the bottom business and the not completely enlightened interpretation of Chinese culture which isn't as bad as in other films I've seen, mind you) might offend some people, that will mostly be a problem for those looking to be offended.
For my tastes, the film is much too good-natured and light to deserve anything but laughter, and much too fast-paced and silly not to be entertaining.
05:27 am - Allyson Bird
After hearing the buzz surrounding the novice British horror author Allyson Bird, I recently ordered a copy of her collection Bull Running For Girls. This book won the British Fantasy Society's award for Best Collection this year, fending off some stiff competition from established authors writing at the peak of their powers. So, does Bull Running... live up to the hype?
( A Bird in the Hand, haw haw )
Of course, her publisher, Screaming Dreams, is a small business, and Bird is a fledgling writer (as Gary McMahon acknowledges in the Introduction), and there are definitely signs of great potential here. And it's hardly fair to give Bird a hard time for winning that award - it wasn't her decision, after all. I do however think that Bull Running For Girls would've been more of a contender for some kind of 'new writers' award (if the British Fantasy Society have one!) She would certainly deserve that hands-down. But Would I recommend buying this book? Well, priced at around £10, with decent typography and jacket art and plenty of material, it's a (relatively) cheap and cheerful affair, which I think would be a fitting addition to the bookshelves of any serious fan of modern horror fiction. In any case, it's always good to support budding talent, and Bird is definitely a refreshing new presence in a genre where world-weary, cynical, male-oriented "voices" abound. I might well buy her second collection, if she writes one, as she's definitely one to watch!
01:03 am - "ДЕНЬ СУРКА". Стебаются же чуваки!
Офигенная породия на "День Сурка".
За такой стеб и проголосовать не жалко.
Dec. 4th, 2009
12:57 pm - That wishlist meme thingamabob
Step One:
• Make a post (public, friendslocked, filtered... whatever you're comfortable with) to your journal. The post should contain your list of 10 unlimited holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything at all, from simple and fandom-related ("I'd love a Snape/Hermione icon that's just for me") to medium ("I wish for _____ on DVD") to really big ("All I want for Christmas is a new car/computer/house/TV.") The important thing is to make sure these wishes are things you really, truly want.
• If you wish for real life things (not fics or icons), make sure you include some sort of contact info in your post, whether it's your address or just your email address where Santa (or one of his elves) could get in touch with you.
• Also, make sure you post some version of these guidelines in your journal, so that the holiday joy will spread.
Step Two:
• Surf around your friendslist (or friendsfriends, or just random journals) to see who has posted their list. And now here's the important part:
• If you see a wish you can grant, and it's in your heart to do so, make someone's wish come true. Sometimes someone's trash is another's treasure, and if you have a leather jacket you don't want or a gift certificate you won't use--or even know where you could get someone's dream purebred Basset Hound for free--do it.
• You needn't spend money on these wishes unless you want to. The point isn't to put people out; it's to provide everyone a chance to be someone else's holiday elf--to spread the joy. Gifts can be made anonymously or not--it's your call.
* There are no rules with this project, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just... wish, and it might come true. Give and you might receive. And you'll have the joy of knowing you made someone's holiday special.
( my wishlist )
02:57 am - ISSUE #10-THE HORROR DRUNX Online Magazine-DEC 2009 IS HERE!
THE HORROR DRUNX
DECEMBER 2009 ONLINE MAGAZINE
IS HERE!
Just CLICK the cover below to read it!
THE PRISONER - The 1967 TV Legend and its 2009 remake!
"V" The Alien Invasion TV Series
SAW: THE VIDEO GAME! (review)
THE BOX (review)
EVILUTION (film / dvd review)
BASEMENT JACK (film / dvd review)
Voting is closed...
04:29 pm - Blog links for scribewraith
I suddenly realise, looking at this list, why I have no free time any more.
( blogs wot I like )
04:44 am - "The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters
Has anyone else noticed the increasing incidence of mainstream, 'literary' novels with supernatural content in the nation's bookshops? I failed to find a single decent book to buy in Sheffield Waterstone's Horror section the other week, but to my surprise a grumpy shuffle through the much larger Literature section turned up an embarrassment of ghostly or occult novels! As I didn't have an unlimited budget I decided to plump for The Little Stranger, the weighty new novel by Sarah Waters. I thought some of her earlier novels were quite good (especially Affinity) and I was attracted by the slightly silly jacket art, which is done to look like a battered old book of urbane, thrilling ghost stories from the 50s or 60s (something by A M Burrage or Wakefield perhaps).
As it turned out, the book and the cover are two very different things. ( Love is a Stranger... )
Oh well. Maybe in a few years' time, if respected authors keep plugging away at it, the ghost story will finally begin to be treated with the respect it deserves. In the meantime, if you like a doorstop novel and don't mind Waters' forsaking the whole prancing lesbian bit in favour of some more subtle human interaction, then you should probably pick up a copy of this. Possibly second-hand though, as I'm not sure it was worth the £12 I paid (and that was with £4 off!)
08:39 pm - "KELLY'S HEROES" (1970) Review
"KELLY'S HEROES" (1970) Review
I wrote this REVIEW of the 1970 World War II comedy called "KELLY'S HEROES". Directed by Brian G. Hutton, the movie starred Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland.
02:00 pm - Not Quite Hollywood (2008)
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )
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