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CRASH DIVE #4: CONTACT! Now Available

June 20, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

The fourth episode in the highly acclaimed CRASH DIVE series is now available for pre-order for Amazon Kindle!

Still reeling from the hellish battle in the Japan Sea, Lt. Commander Charlie Harrison returns from Prospective Commanding Officer School to find the Sandtiger languishing in repair while her crew idles. He expects to take command, but the post is given to Captain Howard Saunders.

Sandtiger’s orders: Take a team of elite commandos to the island of Saipan to destroy a major coastal gun before 70,000 Marines land on its beaches. Once Saipan is taken, American bombers will be able to reach Tokyo. For the Japanese Empire, this triggers kantai kessen—the final decisive naval battle.

When disaster strikes, Charlie must save his submarine and salvage the mission, battling his erratic commander while fighting the enemy. Along the way, he learns sacrifice and the true cost of war.

Official release date is July 28, 2017.

Note all previous CRASH DIVE episodes are now available in Kindle eBook, trade paperback and audiobook. CONTACT! will be available in paperback by the end of August. The fifth episode, HARA-KIRI, will be out by the end of 2017.

Thanks for reading!

Click here to pre-order CONTACT! for the Amazon Kindle.

REBIRTH (2016)

June 5, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In REBIRTH (2016), Kyle (Fran Kranz) lives a life of routine as a white-collar suburban husband and father holding down a meaningless bank job. When he’s visited by his freewheeling college pal Zack (Adam Goldberg), he is invited to let loose for a weekend at REBIRTH, a self-discovery weekend.

Kyle is immediately singled out as not belonging. When he tries to leave, every door he opens leads to new rooms involving seduction, violence and/or being singled out. By the end, Kyle realizes Rebirth does want him to fit in. In fact, it wants to own his life.

This movie has some good execution, excellent acting, terrific premise and plenty of promise. There’s an interesting message here that we’re all yearning for something to help us become free, but even if we find that something, it winds up controlling us. Despite its promise, however, REBIRTH fell flat for me. In some ways, it feels like a bad remake of THE GAME (starring Michael Douglas), while the Rebirthers are presented as part free-spirited anarchists straight from FIGHT CLUB (with Zack playing Tyler Durden), and part ominous cult.

I could have loved this movie if the experiences Kyle had in the Rebirth rooms were in fact cathartic and meaningful, were in fact a rebirth of sorts. That he learned something about himself and became willing to change, perhaps thinking it was for the better but actually for the worse. In fact, that could have been an amazing movie. Instead, it’s just one poorly staged ritual of humiliation or attempted seduction, pointless in the end.

In the end, the film raises interesting questions and could have been truly mind bending, the way it’s being described in some reviews, but for me widely missed its potential.

THE ELVIS ROOM by Stephen Graham Jones

June 2, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

I recently read MONGRELS by Stephen Graham Jones, who in this Bram Stoker-nominated novel offered up a fresh take on werewolves. Buzzing from the encounter, I picked up another work by Jones, a novella titled THE ELVIS ROOM, a novella dealing with themes of the paranormal and scientific obsession. The premise grabbed me immediately.

In THE ELVIS ROOM, a scientist accidentally discovers evidence of ghosts while trying to disprove them. He goes public with his findings, which earns him ridicule. An outcast in the scientific community relegated to speaking at conferences specializing in the paranormal, he stubbornly searches for the truth. At the center of his thesis is exploring Elvis Rooms–rooms set aside as permanently empty at hotels in case a VIP shows up and needs a room. He finds that when all the rooms are occupied including the Elvis Room, somebody dies in the hotel.

Testing this hypothesis produces morbid results, and leads him deeper into the secret life of the dead.

The scientist is an anti-hero, somebody we root for while kind of hoping he gets his comeuppance for disturbing dead things and using the living as guinea pigs. He’s kind of like a Herbert West in his pursuit of proving the dead walk among us; his sociopathic obsession makes him strangely likeable, particularly since what he’s trying to prove is a groundbreaking discovery that would change the world. The novella’s horror element is similarly strong. The ghosts are chilling–not terrifying but creepy enough to provide an adversary that once cornered, has a big bite.

The result is a ghost story that is anything but your average fare. Titillating in its directions, intriguing in its scientific viewpoint, morbid in its aims, and chilling in its conclusion.

RAW (2017)

June 1, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

RAW (2017) is a French film about a young woman’s awakening that happens to include a genetic desire for human flesh. A strait-laced and innocent vegetarian, Justine is attending her first week of veterinary school, following in the footsteps of her parents and more experienced sister Alexa. The week includes heavy hazing, drinking, partying and sex, students trying to fit in within a brutal academic and social environment. In one humiliating ritual, the freshmen are splattered with animal blood and required to eat a sliver of raw meat, in Justine’s case a kidney.

This taste of meat awakens her desire, a deep and all-consuming hunger for human flesh. She tries to satiate it with alcohol and sex, but it’s a losing battle. Her older sister Alexa wants to guide her through it, but Alexa’s domineering nature and Justine’s resistance combine to set their sibling rivalry ablaze.

My only criticism is as with other movies, much of the narrative tension relies on people not asking basic questions and communicating. “Oh, I’m a cannibal, I’ll just roll with it,” is not something we’d expect someone to think. I’m good with misunderstandings propelling conflict, but in this case there’s an utter failure to communicate, resulting in over the top drama. I was also oversold on the film being disturbing and erotic. It is, but not that much for viewers familiar with the genre.

Still, RAW has real strength, visually compelling, constantly intriguing and occasionally gross. It’s a coming of age story about a girl discovering herself, exploring her desires and asserting herself in the world–with cannibalism functioning both as metaphor and a very real thing. It’s also a film about love–the sisters’ rivalry appears to stem from both Justine asserting herself and the sisters loving each other so much it compels them to provoke excuses to bite. About loving so much you want to eat, about loving so much you’re willing to be eaten.

Overall, RAW is a visually arresting and titillating film combining cannibalism with sibling rivalry and erotic overtones, not your usual fare, and for me that made it a fun movie to watch.

GET OUT (2017)

May 31, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

The directorial debut of Jordan Peele of Key and Peele fame, GET OUT (2017) is an okay horror movie but its concepts are intriguing.

Chris, a Black photographer, travels with his White girlfriend Rose Armitage to visit her parents at their rural estate. Chris is struck by how White the community is, a situation that is made even more uncomfortable by the people he meets making racial comments and asking racial questions. The only Black people he meets are the help, and their strange Stepford quality puts him on edge. When he meets another Black man acting strangely and whom Chris thinks he knows, things start to unravel for him and he learns the truth. He is there for a very specific reason.

As a horror movie, the film is okay. I found the pacing clunky and a bit slow, the horror elements fairly standard for the fare. The film’s racial subject matter, however, makes it feel bold and fresh. While horror movies have long tackled uncomfortable political and social topics, in my view this is the first that takes on race in such a provocative way.

Peele made the film during the “post-racial” Obama years, when White American society congratulated itself on conquering overt racism. What Chris encounters is a different kind of racism, a kinder form of it often ascribed to liberals but could actually be ascribed to White people generally. He is asked questions like whether he regards Black as being an advantage or disadvantage, and admired as a Black man for having natural stereotyped perceived advantages such as athletic ability, sexual process and natural cool. Living in their ivory community, the Whites in the movie actually envy Chris for being Black, showing ignorance of what being Black in America really entails despite the cultural whitewashing.

The result is B for storytelling, A for ideas. The vehicle felt pretty standard to me, but the ideas it conveys make the film feel bold and fresh.

LOGAN (2017)

May 26, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Wow. LOGAN is a great superhero movie, a great movie period. It’s the year 2029, and the X-Men are all gone except for Charles Xavier (their founder and mentor), Caliban and Logan (Wolverine). They live off the grid in a remote site on the Mexican border, saving their money for a final escape from the civilized world. No new mutants have been born in 25 years. A woman finds them who claims her daughter Laura is a mutant who needs their protection. A road trip ensues in which Logan must get the girl to a safe haven before the violent authorities who created her catch them.

This dark film breaks so many conventions I can’t believe anybody had the stones to actually make it. It elevates the superhero genre into something that far transcends its roots, something approaching literature, and in my view is one of the best superhero films of all time, if not the best.

LOGAN is R-rated, bloody violent and filled with cursing. The action scenes are amazing. Wolverine is finally unleashed to use his claws with gory abandon. No costumed figures throwing CGI effects at each other while exchanging witty quips. No character deaths that evoke yawns. LOGAN delivers great action but has a leisurely pace and focuses on character, making me care when somebody tries to win, when somebody gets hurt, when somebody dies. It’s a movie about people with superheroes, not the other way around, and that makes it a film you can invest in. There are numerous instances where something realistic or surprising happens, keeping you engaged.

LOGAN is not a happy movie, it’s filled with pathos. The X-Men reference a glorious past that is now gone, with the survivors suffering in old age. Charles Xavier has Alzheimers, which causes him to periodically lose control of his powerful psionic abilities. Logan’s metallic skeleton is slowly killing him, degrading his self-healing abilities and making him age. He drinks to self-medicate against the pain and also the memories of his troubled past. They’re still alive, but they’re hardly living, broken down and weary. They reference their past, but these are powerful moments, never cutesy or winking at the viewer. (The viewer can enjoy the film while having only a basic knowledge of the X-Men franchise.) When they are given the task of saving Laura, they get to experience life to the fullest again and once again use their abilities to achieve a higher purpose.

Speaking of cutesy, the film also includes kids, normally a no-go for me. I have kids, I love kids, but they often ruin adult movies–Terminator 2, Aliens, Indiana Jones 2. Not in LOGAN. Laura is a fantastic character, a mini Wolverine, moody and savage. The actress who plays Laura, Dafne Keen, is amazing. She and the rest of the excellent cast led by Hugh Jackman, the terrific script, the gritty realism, the exciting action, all combine to create a movie that made me care and wowed me.

Highly recommended.