Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

GODLESS

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godless

GODLESS, a Netflix series, delivers great characters, dialogue, and action in a fantastic Western. Despite a saggy middle, the series starts off great and ends with one hell of a bang.

Frank Griffin (the great Jeff Daniels), leader of a ruthless outlaw gang, searches for Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell), his partner who turned against him. Roy is hiding in La Belle, New Mexico, a town made up almost entirely of women after a mining accident claimed the men.

In classic Western fashion, this is a story of good and evil in the beautiful, harsh, and empty Old West. Griffin is evil, a man of God raised in violence and believing violence is God’s way of teaching us something, and he loves Roy as family, making him a complex villain. Roy is good, an outlaw who turned against the man who raised him from the time he was an orphan looking for a family and finding it in the outlaw gang. They’re kin, and their conflict leads them on an inevitable collision course.

In La Belle, we’re given plenty of other characters and stories we can sink our teeth into. Marshal John Cook (the great Sam Waterston), who is going to get the cavalry to help him hunt down Griffin and his gang. Alice Fletcher and her Paiute son and mother in law, a very self-reliant and independent family who live on a ranch and give Roy Goode shelter. The sheriff (Scott McNairy, a great actor), who harbors a deep despair and is slowly going blind. Whitey, the young and brash deputy who loves the wrong girl. A nearby settlement of Black Civil War veterans (Buffalo soldiers) who just want to be left alone. The mayor, who dresses in men’s clothes and has a relationship with the town’s teacher, a former prostitute. Even the minor characters stand out, from the eccentric German artist to the Quicksilver mining executive to the guy who runs the livery stables.

Only seven episodes, the series introduces these characters and allows them to live and breathe naturally, without anything forced. They’re all likeable, the dialogue is excellent, the pacing good though a big bogged in flashbacks. The show ends with one hell of a bang as everything comes to a head, and the denouement is very satisfying.

This is the kind of TV I love–focus on characters and story, characters we can root for and agonize over if they don’t make it, realistic personal battles for redemption, no heavy-handed moralizing (which I thought we’d get with an Old West town run by women, and a nearby settlement run by Blacks), a terrific villain, defied expectations, and a fantastic climax.

Recommended, and a must if you like Old West stories.

DRAGON TEETH by Michael Crichton

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dragon teethDRAGON TEETH, written by Michael Crichton in 1974, was published after his death May 23, 2017. This light and entertaining novel about the Bone Wars in the Old West flits along and is somewhat forgettable, but it’s an easy read with many entertaining elements.

In DRAGON TEETH, William Johnson, a listless Yale student, decides to join an expedition into the Wild West on a bet. He follows paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh into territory contested between the United States and the Sioux Nation to dig up dinosaur bones, which at the time were amazing the public, shaking up the scientific world already in turmoil from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and challenging firmly held religious views. A lot was happening around this time–the gold rush into the Black Hills, the lawless town of Deadwood, Custer’s Last Stand, Wild Bill Hickock’s murder, Wyatt Earp’s travels. Johnson’s adventures take him out of Marsh’s service and into the camp of the man’s arch rival, Edward Drinker Cope, another paleontologist.

When Johnson gets separated from his expedition, he finds himself stranded in Deadwood with crates of bones, including an extraordinary find. He must protect the bones and somehow get them back East on his own. Johnson takes on the challenge and becomes a man in the process.

As far as a Wild West novel, it’s very light fare, if touching on some interesting American history. DRAGON TEETH is far more engaging in his description of the Bone Wars. The two paleontologists portrayed in the novel were real men who hated each other and dedicated their lives and fortunes to the pursuit of fossils and discrediting and ruining each other, socially and financially ruining themselves in the process. Their competition, which sometimes came to gangs of paleontologists shooting at each other at remote sites, produced a revolution in recovering precious fossils and our understanding of Earth’s history. Before their very eyes, humanity was achieving an understanding we now take for granted, that dinosaurs walked the earth long before modern humans existed.

So I give an “A” to Crichton for teaching me something I didn’t know in a novel that, while not his best work, reads short, fast, and easy. A fantastic beach read. If you’re interested in the Bone Wars, check out some of the sources Crichton points out at the end for further reading. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and Amblin Television are apparently also working on a limited TV series.

WITHOUT A NAME (2016)

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WithoutName

WITHOUT A NAME (2016) is an Irish ecological horror film that both engages and, well, frustrates. Eric is a land surveyor having a mid-life crisis. He accepts an assignment in a remote forest, happy to get away from his wife and son, who clearly resent him. He’s remote and having an affair with a much younger student, who joins him on the trip as his assistant.

As he surveys the forest, it increasingly gets on his nerves. Sometimes, it appears animated and either inviting or malevolent, other times trying to communicate in some way. When his equipment is damaged, he gets angry. This is an uptight guy who hates losing control, making his chemistry with his young student awkward at best (and the viewer wonder what she’s doing with him), and resulting in him wanting to impose order on everything around him. The previous occupant of the cabin where he’s staying left behind a journal titled, KNOWLEDGE OF TREES, documenting philosophical musings and homegrown potions made from plants in the neighborhood. The man apparently went mad and disappeared, a madness that appears to be infecting Eric as well as he grows increasingly frustrated.

In the end, he will have to give up control to impose what he thinks is control–to solve the mystery–but it carries a cost.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of WITHOUT A NAME. The acting is good, the dialogue just right, the core mystery of the forest engaging. I enjoyed the film but found it a bit tedious as I often do art house-type films, and Eric is simply a hard guy to get behind as a likeable protagonist. This is a film that is character driven, though the protagonist is distant from us, and one interpretation is the forest isn’t strange at all, but simply Eric is going insane. I wish had been a bit more plot driven, in that I liked how the director played with the strangeness of the forest (using interesting visual and sound effects) and wished there were more to the exploration of that mystery than what was given. The payoff at the end is fairly straightforward and basic horror, satisfying but nothing extraordinary.

Overall, I give this one a B.

THE INNKEEPERS (2011)

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Innkeepers

Written and directed by Ti West, THE INNKEEPERS (2011) has a lot of charm and some decent tension but is a bit too sleepy for my taste. I’d enjoyed West’s SACRAMENT quite a bit and wanted to try more of his work.

In THE INNKEEPERS, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are working their final days at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, an old hotel that is about to close its doors. Luke is trying to make a buck on a website about the hotel being haunted, enlisting Claire’s aid to help him ghost hunt. Their main objective is capturing evidence of Madeline O’Malley, a bride who hanged herself after being jilted at the altar and whose body, according to legend, was buried in the basement by the hotel owners. During the long weekend, the hotel is mostly deserted, giving Claire ample opportunity to stir up the ghosts and potentially get herself into something she can’t handle.

As I said, it’s a charming film. Claire and Luke are likeable characters, and plenty of screen time is given to them bantering and going through their routines until they bump into the haunting. These little bumps escalate over the course of the film, but they’re very slow in coming and not very scary (relying on jump scares to make the point), and the core mystery of what happened to O’Malley is never really explained.

Overall, I liked it but didn’t love it. West managed to do a lot with very little with this film. The hotel was creepy, the characters were likeable, and I was interested in what happened to them, but in my view the film is a bit too slow and doesn’t deliver quite enough of a satisfying punch at the end.

THE INSTITUTE (2017)

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The Institute

Co-directed by and starring James Franco, THE INSTITUTE (2017) takes an intriguing premise and some great elements and waters them down until they’re pretty much drowned.

In Baltimore in 1893, Isabel Porter (Allie Gallerani, who does a lot with what she’s given), an upper-class woman suffering bouts of melancholy after her parents die, commits herself to the Rosewood Institute, run by the brilliant Dr. Cairn (Franco, who shines in the role). She is hoping to take a break from the pressures of high society and just be herself for a while. Dr. Cairn challenges her to go further, much further, in liberating herself and coming into possession of her own will. She agrees, leading to brainwashing for a far more nefarious purpose involving a secret society.

Cool set up for a horror thriller, right? Titillating stuff with lots of promise, but the heavy-handed direction, convoluted script, over-reliance on tired tropes, and overall silliness keep it from going anywhere. I have to give this one a C-.

LITTLE BIG MAN by Thomas Berger

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little big man by thomas bergerI grew up watching LITTLE BIG MAN starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, which I’d enjoyed several times, and finally got a chance later in life to read the even better novel by Thomas Berger. Berger is a great novelist; another one of his books got made into the movie NEIGHBORS starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.

The novel is similar to George MacDonald Fraser’s terrific Flashman series. Both present picaresque tales, picqaresque meaning fiction that presents the adventures of a roguish hero, usually told in first person and combining realism with comedy and satire. While Fraser turned popular conceptions about popular Victorian figures on their head for comedic effect, Berger does same for the American West, relying on overlooked historical documents such as diaries, memoirs, and letters as research for his account.

The novel presents the reminisces of Jack Crabb, a 121-year-old man who’d come out West with his family as a boy, been raised by the Cheyenne after losing his father, and then finds his way around the Old West crossing paths with many well-known historic figures, such as Bill Hickock and George Armstrong Custer. Through twists of fate, he often finds himself crossing over between the native and White worlds, though never finding a home in either one. As with the Flashman series, non-Whites are talked about as they were during the times depicted, which may offend some, though Berger’s Jack Crabb is an equal-opportunity cynic about people and cultures, being on the outside of both worlds.

Berger’s story is well told, irreverent, and hugely entertaining. I loved it and recently ordered NEIGHBORS to give a try as well.