Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

THE VOID (2016)

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the void

I finally broke down and paid the $8 to watch THE VOID (2016), a Canadian Lovecraftian horror film shot on a very small budget. I found it crazy fun, definitely reminiscent of 80s horror films (it made me think of what John Carpenter and Clive Barker would make if they did a weekend of drugs together) with its old school over-the-top gore, though a bit convoluted and resting on somewhat weak characters.

The film centers on Carter, a police officer, who finds a bloody man on a remote road and brings him to a hospital that is being shut down due to an old fire. Only a skeleton crew is running the place, which includes a doctor and two nurses, one of them Carter’s ex-wife. What Carter soon realizes is an enormous evil resides in the hospital, one breaking in from another dimension, and warping reality, infecting people, and calling its followers (homicidal white-robed cultists) in this dimension. As the cultists lay siege to the hospital, the evil within begins to infect the people inside, leading Carter on a journey to confront it.

It’s the kind of movie where people die like flies, the horror elements are kitchen-sinked, and the gore is over the top. If the filmmakers had managed to invest a little more in making us care about the characters and streamlining the structure a bit, THE VOID could have been great. As it is, it’s good, and if you don’t take it very seriously, it’s a fun watch. Just bloody weird mayhem.

HIGH-RISE (2015)

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HIGH-RISE (2015) is a British social-surrealist dystopian film based on the cult novel of the same name by JG Ballard. Fragmented and lurching to a diffused finish, nonetheless I found it utterly compelling and engaging. While I would have liked more clarity, particularly in the ending (where a Margaret Thatcher quote comes out of nowhere and doesn’t really apply), the movie’s solid performances, direction, and pure craziness got in my pores and stuck with me long after I finished it.

In HIGH-RISE, Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston, nailing it) moves into a giant high-rise apartment building built by Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons). Set in 1970s Britain, the building was conceived on a utopian concept that the building should provide everything its residents need, including a supermarket, school, gym, and pool. The upper classes live on the top floors, middle-class people like Laing and single mom Charlotte (Sienna Miller) live in the middle floors, and lower-class people like Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) and his wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss) live at the bottom.

The building warps perception. Everybody living in the tower becomes so immersed in it they forget the outside world and see no reason to ever leave. The tower becomes their world. When the building starts failing due to excess demands on it and faulty design, resulting electricity shortages put pressure on the fragile social order by introducing scarcity. The rich believe they have an inherent right to all of the building’s services, while the lower classes, who pay the same service charges, believe they have an equal right to them.

The first power cut results in impromptu parties that unleash primitive impulses. The classes begin fighting between floors and act out against the building itself. Royal, the architect and owner, looks on it all as a grand social experiment, excited about humanity entering a new phase. Wilder, a brutish firebrand, sees the insanity inherent in the building and wants revolution. The rest of the residents normalize the degradation, acting in accordance with the conventions of their designated class even as everything falls apart.

As this is based on a JG Ballard story, Laing, our protagonist, is a passive observer in all this, rebelling against and aiding events in equal turn. He gets a taste of power telling a colleague who slighted him that he might have a brain tumor. He’s told by an admiring woman that he’s one of the building’s best amenities. Over time, he becomes at one with the building and its apocalyptic vision. The movie’s main concern isn’t a typical narrative but more its themes of utopia versus humanity, scarcity and class war, and the insanity inherent in a system that promises everything but puts classes at odds with each other over finite resources. As such, it functions as a nearly perfect allegory for Western societies.

Overall, again, it’s a somewhat diffused story without a particularly strong protagonist, but it’s a compelling, even fascinating, watch.

BOYS IN THE TREES (2016)

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BOYS IN THE TREES (2016) is an Australian film about growing up and letting go of the past in order to accept change. There’s a supernatural element that I believe is supposed to be surprising but is strongly signaled early on. I found it a really mixed bag. The set up is terrific, and then it becomes increasingly stilted and heavy until the end. Overall, the film could have easily lost 20-30 minutes. I liked it (particularly the first half) but didn’t love it (mostly due to the second half).

Corey is a senior in high school during the 90s, and graduation is right around the corner (school is ending around Halloween, but it’s Australia). He’s a skater kid, secure in his social standing with the other alpha boys led by Jango. He’s interested in photography and hopes to leave town for the wider world, which Jango finds threatening. Jango comes across as deeply insecure, monitoring his tribe and keeping them in line. He’s threatened by Corey liking a girl named Romany. He’s particularly cruel to Jonah, a loner boy whom everybody dislikes.

Corey and Jonah were best friends in their youth, but something happened, and they grew apart. Corey feels guilty about one of Jango’s pranks and, sick of the usual crap, goes off on his own. He bumps into Jonah and they agree to walk home together, reliving their childhood and dreams along the way. This is a strength of the movie, its exploration of how kids start out together in innocence but are forced apart as puberty creates a new social hierarchy.

The movie starts off great with plenty of 90s nostalgia, excellent music sequences, and interesting characters backed by decent acting. When Corey and Jonah agree to walk together, things started to go downhill for me. There’s on-the-nose symbolism (Corey is told he must “run with the wolves or get eaten like a lamb,” his Halloween costume is a wolf mask, and he drops and leaves it when he decides to change). Jango comes across as obsessed with Corey and his allegiance. Corey stops being, well, cool. And Jonah speaks in sophisticated monologues that leave no doubt why he was antagonized in high school. While the revelation of why they stopped being friends so long ago was powerful, the ending could have been far more powerful if it hadn’t been so strongly signaled earlier in the film, and if the dialogue weren’t so stilted.

So overall, I found BOYS IN THE TREES to be pretty uneven. I liked it, especially the first half, and might have loved it if the script had stuck to the relationships in the gang and not between Corey and Jonah, who never comes across as very likeable.

THE THING ITSELF by Adam Roberts

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the thing itselfIn Adam Roberts’ THE THING ITSELF, two scientists working and living at a remote Antarctic research station grate on each other’s nerves until one night, one of them acts on dangerous thoughts and the other is exposed to a horrifying vision. Years later, Charles still hasn’t recovered, getting by his minimum wage job using alcohol, and Roy, now considered dangerously insane, is still in jail.

It all started with a strange theory Roy had, which has now caught the interest of a mysterious organization that wants to exploit it using artificial intelligence, as well as the government. This theory, a scientific application of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, gives unimaginable power to whoever can wield it.

Adam Roberts is one of the most imaginative and fascinating speculative fiction writers around. His books rarely get me in the gut but always hook my brain and reel me in. THE THING ITSELF starts off as really promising science fiction but kind of loses itself. The main narrative is broken up by stories about various people in history having encounters with the “thing itself”–the universe as it really is without human perception shaping it, one of Kant’s central tenets–which are interesting but only loosely tie to the plot, and for me broke up the flow. The Kant philosophy is extremely intriguing, and a strong case can be made he was onto a major truth way ahead of his time, but there’s so much of it even I, who loves philosophy in speculative fiction, found myself skimming. There are so many long philosophical conversations at one point Roberts makes one chapter a series of dialogues written as a play.

So in the end, as much as I love Roberts, I have to say THE THING ITSELF is a brilliant book that should have been much tighter and shorter. Recommended if you miss Philip K. Dick and are looking for some big intriguing ideas, but let the buyer beware.

The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-19

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In 1918-19, the Spanish Flu burned its way through the world’s population of two billion in less than two years, killing more people than died in combat among the 19 nations involved in five years of fighting during World War I.

As World War I was ending, an even bigger threat loomed—the Spanish Flu, which followed in the wake of mass troop movements during the war, and ravaged the armies on both sides of the trenches. In fact, the Spanish Flu may have played a decisive role in ending the conflict; it is believed that the flu dramatically weakened the German Army and caused its last great western offensive to fail in 1918, bringing the war to a close.

In the spring of 1918, Spain, a neutral power, did not have wartime censorship and so was the first to report the epidemic that subsequently became known as the Spanish Flu, the Indian Flu, the Naples Soldier and other names around the world. The flu, however, was thought to originate in Canton, China, although the first recorded cases occurred at a U.S. Army base in Kansas. At first, the flu seemed mild, although millions caught it, eight million in Spain alone, including King Alphonso XIII.

As summer turned to fall, it turned deadly. The flu burned its way through every continent except Antarctica. Doctors were helpless against the scourge. Public authorities shut down public places such as churches and theaters. Some even passed laws against sneezing in public. People wore gauze masks in public. Wherever the flu struck, people displayed the best and worst of human nature—courage, charity, fear and prejudice.

In October, the epidemic peaked in the U.S. and Canada. Thousands were dying every day. Then the number of cases declined until the Spanish Flu disappeared the following July.

Some 22 million Americans got sick and more than 675,000 died out of a population of 103.2 million. As a result of the Spanish Flu, the average life expectancy of Americans dropped by 10-13 years. Globally, the Spanish Flu killed 40 to 100 million people, or up to five percent of the world’s population of two billion. About one billion caught it. Based on today’s population, this is the equivalent of more than three billion people catching it and 130 to 320 million people dying.

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Americans Fight on Russian Soil in 1918-19

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Let me tell you about the time the U.S. Army fought the Red Army on two fronts on Russian soil. That’s right, from September 1918 to July 1919, nearly 13,000 American troops fought in Russia as part of an international invention in the Russian Civil War that had started immediately following the 1917 revolution.

The Russian Civil War had two major contestants, the Red Army (Bolshevik socialists) and the White Army (monarchists, capitalists, alternative socialists, democratic and undemocratic). Additionally, the Green armies (rival socialists and non-ideological) fought both the Reds and the Whites.

Fearing Bolshevik socialism, eight countries intervened to prevent the Reds from consolidating power. The British and French had three objectives. First, prevent the capture of Allied war materiel in Arkhangelsk. Second, help the Czech Legion stranded on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Third, get Russia back in the war and reopen the Eastern Front. They asked the Americans for help, and President Woodrow Wilson agreed, overriding objections from his War Department.

The U.S. sent 5,000 troops to Arkhangelsk (in North Russia) and nearly 8,000 to Vladivostok (in East Russia). In Arkhangelsk, the Americans arrived to find the war materiel had already been captured by the Reds and moved. Under British command, they went on the offensive to help the Czech Legion and pushed the Reds back for six weeks, though they failed to link up with the Czech Legion. The front became too large to sustain, and American forces went on the defensive. During the following winter, the Reds went on the offensive and pushed them back, inflicting many casualties. Conditions were miserable. Morale plummeted, and unrest began to spread in the ranks.

In Vladivostok, U.S. forces stayed under American command, with General Graves seeing his mission as limited to protecting Allied war materiel and refusing to take part in offensive operations.

Early in 1919, mutinies in the Allied armies were spreading. President Wilson ordered the withdrawal of American forces from Russia.

The Red Army went on to defeat the White Army by 1920, though it took until 1934 to completely crush all resistance and gain control over the entire country. An estimated 7 to 12 million Russians, mostly civilians, died during the war from the fighting and various hardships, including the Spanish Flu. Relations between the Soviet Union and the Allies started on very cold terms as a result of Allied intervention and countries like the U.S. refusing to formally recognize the USSR. President Warren G. Harding called American intervention a mistake and blamed the Wilson administration.

In 1930, the last American dead from the North Russia campaign buried in Russia were returned and re-buried at the “Polar Bear” Monument in Troy, Michigan. The last surviving veteran of that expedition passed away in 2003.