Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

TERRIFIED (2018)

by Leave a Comment

TERRIFIED (2019) is an Agentinian horror film about a haunting growing across three homes in a suburban neighborhood. The characterization isn’t very deep, characters often make really bad decisions even when they know better, and the subtitle translation is frequently awkward, but on the other hand, it all comes together and it’s a hell of a lot of scary fun. I caught it on Shudder.

The film reveals the bizarre goings-on at the homes, which range from creepy noises to bringing back the dead to horrific murder. Stymied by these events, a cop brings in three paranormal experts to stay in the homes and investigate the phenomenon. They make remarkable discoveries, but these creatures do not wish to be studied. They want to destroy.

The real star of the movie is some seriously creepy set pieces, including a crazy sequence involving a resurrected boy. Some great scares are offered, but they’re done through powerful reveals rather than cheap jump scares. I love the trope of scientists investigating the paranormal, though their dialogue comes across as weird, which might be due to the translation from Spanish.

Overall, TERRIFIED is a lot of fun, I give it a very strong B+.

THE CURED (2017)

by Leave a Comment

THE CURED (2017) is a zombie movie that examines what happens to the infected after they’re cured. The society that cured them doesn’t really want them, while the cured themselves remember every horrific act they did while they were rabid and murderous. It stands alongside other stories like IN THE FLESH, which examine the zombie apocalypse from a fresh angle and therefore try to bring a bit more heart and brains to the genre.

The story begins with Senan and Connor, ready to be released from a quarantine center in Ireland. The outbreak is over, though Ireland has been devastated. Around 75% of the infected were cured, while the remaining 25% are resistant to the vaccine and locked up in government facilities. During the outbreak, Senan and Connor hunted as part of the same pack, giving them a familial bond. Released into the general public, they face government control and rampant fear and prejudice among the uninfected survivors. Senan tries to reestablish an older familiar bond with Abbie, his brother’s wife (played by the wonderful Ellen Paige), and child, though he ends up entangled in Connor’s spreading terrorist organization fighting for cured rights.

This is a movie that’s more thoughtful and ambitious than your typical zombie tale, hitting themes of how far a society will go out of fear, and how far victims of prejudice will go before they start fighting back. I liked but didn’t love it. It hits all the right notes emotionally, and there’s even a little zombie action, though it’s all a bit dour and sluggish. I think what was missing for me was protagonist character agency–Senan doesn’t really do anything, things happen to him, Connor appears to have way too much agency as a villain, and Abbie, who could have been the face of prejudice against the cured, is one of the good guys from the start. The result is a story focused on plot and ideas, albeit interesting, rather than character, which would have gotten me to invest in the story more. It also might have been more powerful if it was a little less neat and had focused on how the cured dealt with the memories of their horrific acts, offering us more flashbacks to the chaos.

Overall, THE CURED is a good movie, ambitious and thoughtful for a zombie film, and offering something different in a crowded genre, though I felt like it could have offered more.

NORTHGARD

by Leave a Comment

One of my favorite forms of procrastination is to lose myself in a good civilization-building strategy game, and Northgard is currently my top pick to turn off my brain for an hour or two. In this game, you control a clan of Vikings that is settling on a new continent and competing with other clans doing the same. While winning the game is satisfying, simply surviving this brutal game is its own form of victory.

You start out with a few settlers foraging for food. Build a scout camp, and you can assign a worker to reveal more map tiles. Build a wood camp to get wood, or your people will freeze. Build farms, fishing huts, and hunting camps, or they’ll starve. Build mines, so you can improve all your buildings. Build markets and trading posts, so you can sustain your buildings and buy things. Build mender’s huts, so you can heal your wounded and stave off plague. Build towers and train different types of warriors, or wolves, draugr (Norse zombies), and other players will mercilessly tear you to shreds. Stock up on everything because winter is coming, maybe even a blizzard, which will rapidly deplete your supplies. Did I mention everything in this game is trying to kill you? This new continent is wonderful, but it really doesn’t want you there.

The game is easy to learn and play but difficult to get good at, as you have to precisely manage your resources, from manpower to basic necessities to land. Each land tile on the map holds only so many buildings you need to build to grow and survive, so your clan is under constant pressure to expand. Plus you’ll keep finding map tiles you really want, which offer fertile land or iron or stone or easy ability to defend. This pressure to grab land puts you into natural conflict with the other players, who will be raiding you anyway but are now fighting with you over important resources they need. It’s a brilliant part of the game. Speaking of wars, the other players will all have a specialized skill their clan possesses, such as the Raven clan, which hires mercenaries to attack your coastal provinces and plunder them, or Wolf, which earns happiness for having a big army and gold for every one of your warriors they kill.

If you’re into gaming and enjoy strategic civ-building games, check it out. I highly recommend it as a really fun and challenging game in the tradition of games like Rise of Nations.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

by Leave a Comment

Inspired by the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel, Netflix’s 10-episode miniseries THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE tells the story of a family struggling to survive a haunted house, both while they lived there in the past and in their separate lives in the present. It’s top-notch horror and the best ghost story I’ve seen on screen in years.

The first few episodes show us the lives of the Crain family, each story focused on one of five children who lived in Hill House and flashing between past and present. As children, they suffered bizarre experiences in the house until a horrifying night in which they were forced to flee their home. As adults, they are all connected but isolated, haunted in a different way now, by their memories, and by the need to protect themselves from the memory and lasting effects of what they’d experienced.

It’s a popular watch on Netflix, and I have to admit going into it I wasn’t sure what the fuss was about. I enjoyed what I was seeing, but I thought the show relied too heavily on jump scares that at times felt cheap. Then it all started to come together, most powerfully starting with episode 6, one of the tensest hours I’ve seen on television and where Timothy Hutton, playing present-day dad, really shined. From then on out, for me, it went from an enjoyable show to something completely riveting. It all builds to a very strong finale.

The series is only roughly based on the Shirley Jackson novel but pays homage to it in a very distinctive way–an emphasis on psychological horror. The house is insane, and its weapon is to drive its occupants insane as well until they die and stay forever.

As adults, the Crain kids are all pretty messed up by their childhood, with addiction, denial, controlling behavior, and self-isolation being rife among them. The house is calling to them, but we’re rarely sure if what the character is seeing is an actual apparition or the manifestation of a damaged psyche. Normally, I don’t go for that sort of thing in TV as the technique is often misused and cheapened, but it really works here. Similarly, the characters sometimes share what they see with each other but usually don’t, because what’s the point? It can’t be real, so nobody will acknowledge it as such.

In the end, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is a very strong horror story about a haunting and being haunted, perfectly blending a ghost story with psychological horror the way the novel did.

HOLD THE DARK (2018)

by Leave a Comment

With its unsettling aesthetic and larger-than-life characters living at the fringe of civilization, HOLD THE DARK (2018) is superb Arctic noir, even if it ends on a very murky note.

Retired wolf expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) travels to a village in northern Alaska at the request of Medora Slone (Riley Keough), a young woman whose son was taken by wolves. Core sets out to track the wolves who did it, only to make a startling discovery. Meanwhile, Medora’s husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) returns from the Iraq War filled with rage over the death of his son and hell-bent on revenge. As local cop Donald Marium (James Badge Dale, who was great in THE PACIFIC) tries to stop Vernon, Core is drawn into a “heart of darkness” trek.

With the moody, brooding Alaskan wilderness aesthetic, the strange and insular people who populate it, and the decisive violence that follows a natural rather than man-made law, HOLD THE DARK is pretty powerful stuff. Core is forced to gaze into the heart of darkness in order to return to civilization and embrace life, while Medora and Vernon fully embrace the darkness and become as wolves themselves. The end is conclusive in regards to character but not really plot, which may leave some viewers puzzled. Despite its murky ending, the strong characters and story punctuated by very real and electrifying violence are engaging, resulting in a thumbs up from this viewer.

CHANNEL ZERO

by Leave a Comment

Created by Nick Antosca, Syfy’s CHANNEL ZERO is a horror anthology series comprised of self-contained six-episode seasons, with the story line for each season based on popular CreepyPastas. I caught the first two seasons on Shudder and had fun with it. I found it somewhat consume-and-forget TV, but it goes down easy, and it’s pretty well done.

In the first season, “Candle Cove,” a man returns to his hometown to confront his childhood, during which a series of children were murdered and his twin brother went missing. Upon his return, children start disappearing again, with several turning murderous under the spell of a mysterious and wonderfully creepy TV show Candle Cove, which had also aired during the first round of murders.

In the second season, “No-End House,” two young women get mysterious messages inviting them to the No-End House, a traveling attraction that is the stuff of urban legend. There’s far more to it, however. The house is alive, and it wants to feed.

These are competent TV shows though even at six episodes, for me, the first two seasons felt like they were two episodes too long. High marks for genuinely creepy elements, some decent pacing and good acting, and overall interesting stories. Weaker moments involved characters repeatedly making really, really bad decisions.

The third season is out but not on Shudder yet, where I’ve been catching it. The fourth season airs starting October 26, 2018.

Check it out if you’re looking for some fun, light horror packaged in an interesting story.