Author Archives: Chris

Fairest Vol. 3: The Return of the Maharaja

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I don’t even know the last time I read a Fables-adjacent book, nor what it was[1]. And I’m not even sure how many books are left. I think not many? I should probably zerg rush the ending, but that would make it still months away. Just not years.

In any event, this book was way way off in the periphery of the series. The land of Indus (think The Jungle Book) is no longer threatened by that one woodcutter’s evil empire, since it doesn’t really exist anymore. But all the villages and palaces and suchlike have been basically emptied of able-bodied men who went off to lose the war, leaving only the elderly, the infirm, the very young, the harems[2], and of course the [other] women.

Which brings us to the main character, Nalayani, protector of her village from roving packs of dhole, which are wolf-adjacent animals from the Indian subcontinent. (I had heard of them before, but not with any commonality.) Anyway, she must now quest to the new maharaja I mentioned to ask for help with the problem, only to find herself embroiled in a civil war and with a pretty unlikely ally, at least if you remember previous events in the series, which I must admit I did not very well.

I have no idea if I should know who Nalayani is as a fabled character? I definitely do not, which did not negatively impact my enjoyment of the story, and anyway there were other characters I did recognize. If the series wasn’t nearly over, I’d think big things were afoot in the main sequence as a result of this one. As it is… maybe this was a happy ending?

[1] I mean, now that I’ve searched it and linked it, I maybe know. But I did not before.
[2] If you happen to live in the maharaja’s palace, at least, and this I suppose explains the presence of the new maharaja, Shah Ah Ming.

Eyes of Laura Mars

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Another podcast movie, this time with a scare that is not really technology, but a style that is most definitely New York City. Eyes of Laura Mars is not a giallo. For one thing, it is zero percent Italian. But it’s not not a giallo either, if you take my drift. There is definitely shared and/or stolen DNA.

Laura Mars[1] is a fashion photographer who has entered her “coffee table book of staged murder photos” artistic phase, but since it’s 1978 that’s not entirely a thing yet, and therefore she is drumming up a lot of controversy around how she’s causing people to be desensitized to violence, and okay, sure, there really is nothing new under the sun is there?

Anyhow, the twist is that she suddenly starts observing the murders of people who are professionally close to her, through the eyes of the murderer. Soon the cops are involved, albeit more because of the murders than because of her weird psychic connection to the killer. And before you know it there are more dead half-naked models (among other victims) than you can shake an icepick at. Is the killer her loser ex-husband? Her creepy limo driver? Her gay but the movie never openly admits it agent?

Actually, that was the weirdest thing about the flick. Because as soon as you know Brad Dourif is in the movie, you also know he’s the killer. To be clear, this is not a spoiler, I’m not saying if he actually is or not. I’m just saying that, as a savvy viewer of horror films over the past five decades, there’s no question in your mind about whether he’s the killer, which makes for a very strange viewing experience of what is nominally meant to be a mystery in which nearly any of the still living characters should be a suspect.

Am I making sense here? I’m pretty sure I’m making sense.

In conclusion: it’s not bad! It’s definitely not good, it is I daresay pretty damned silly. But it’s not bad. Well, except for one piece of unnecessary prejudice that would be a pretty big spoiler to reveal, but alas for the way certain mental health issues are treated as low hanging fruit. And, oh, one other thing: this was written by John Carpenter, which is notable in that I’ve never seen him write for a different director or probably a different composer than himself before. Weird.

[1] To the best of my knowledge, not Veronica’s mother

Hereditary

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Because I have not been hiding under a rock, I’ve known about Hereditary since 2018, maybe 2017. But it always seemed a little bit too much, so I held off, and held off, and kept holding off, and finally it took on a life of its own I guess? But, because I sort of have been hiding under a rock, I also managed to avoid virtually all information about the movie, and thus came into it essentially unspoiled, excepting only genre, really.

I would recommend this, as a great deal of the fun was in trying to unravel just what precisely was going on, with really only the title as a potential clue. On the downside, this means I kind of shouldn’t say much. So, the first thing that happens is grandma dies. Then we learn about the difficult dynamics in the family surrounding grandma. Then, one of the more shocking and disturbing <spoilers> I personally have ever seen occurs. Then, shit gets weird.

In addition to being compelling from beginning to end, I need to give a shout out to the sound design people, who did a masterful job. Also, the special effects surrounding zooming in on a miniature and it seamlessly becoming a real life room? Top notch. And, okay, going to put the spoiler behind a cut, because I really need to talk about this and, after all, most people in the world have seen it by now.

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Blind Fury

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As I probably mentioned the last time I read one of these, I bought a bunch of really cheap books, including really cheap series of books, on my Kindle over the past year and change. A fact about books that come in 6 to 8 volumes for $2-3 is that they’re likely, especially in the apocalyptic fiction subgenre, to be the kind of propulsive book that expects and nearly demands that you read the whole thing in about seventeen minutes without pausing for breath.

This unfortunately does not interact well with me using them as a “well, you only have your phone with you, this is your safety net” book and taking a good eight months to read one of them. What’s worse is, they’re really all just one long book, and the division markers are pretty arbitrary. Cliffhanger, maybe, but there’s no apparent thematic or character arc rationale for the splits between books. Of course, if I’d waited to read the whole thing before writing a review, that probably would have been a worse choice? Hard to know.

Anyway, Blind Fury starts out with the world (or at least Denmark’s slice of it) not quite collapsed and depopulated, but certainly on its way. The main tensions of the story are a) keeping the pregnant lady alive, while b) pushing the immune characters closer together so they can band up to [insert future plot here] but also c) dodging the shadowy and probably evil government agents who want to dissect them to save the world. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also a Renfield[1] who is either in contact with the precipitating force that put the crack in the sky that turns people into blind rage zombies, or is schizophrenic, or most likely both.

Yay, apocalypse!

[1] You know, the crazy dude who serves the bad guy(s)

Dust

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I have officially finished a series of books! That doesn’t happen much, mainly because of how I don’t read enough, but for other reasons too. In any case, noteworthy!

This time, it was the third book of the Silo series, Dust. And, you know what? It is definitely a conclusion to a story, with satisfying logical, logistical, and even emotional beats. But… it was also kind of overstuffed. I’m going to use an example from the story that is pretty much a spoiler, but if I disguise it by not naming any names or concrete details, I think it should mostly fly.

So, a bunch of people are escaping doom, like let’s say 1% of the people in the doomed location escape to somewhere else. Due to happenstance, some of them are religious nuts. So the first thing the religious nuts do is go all Handmaid’s Tale and forcibly select women for the men to marry (also forcibly), even women who qualify as underage, or wildly underage. And then someone shows up with a shotgun to resolve the situation. And it’s pretty realistic, both the horrific human behavior of people unhampered by rules and the part where those same people can be easily cowed under the correct circumstances. So it’s not that I disputed the realism of the vignette. But I dispute the utility of throwing in that kind of complication so late into a series that is about to end, and I paradoxically also dispute making it so easy to resolve, if you were going to monkeywrench it into the story like that in the first place.

This did not ruin the book for me, but… it kind of felt like someone trying to write their way out of a corner and stalling for time, and then not having an editor to correctly excise those bits once the corner had been escaped. But that’s the important part. The corner was escaped, and the story ended on a satisfying note, with a clear indication that there’s a lot more story left, even if it will never be (and should never be) written. Is this how all stories should end? Nah, lots of times “and they lived happily ever after” or “and he surveyed the lands he had destroyed with no small satisfaction” is the way to go. But I like stories that can pull off the “lived in, living world that you can imagine what’s next however you like” endings quite a lot.

Nochnoy Dozor

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This week’s podcast movie was a) vampires and b) a bitchin’ soundtrack. I think I will agree that Night Watch hits both of these marks, even if the soundtrack isn’t quite what I expected it to be. The movie is based on a series of six books, which I almost want to read. The premise is that there’s been a precarious balance between the forces of good and evil, portrayed as the Night Watch (the good guys who guard against evil) and the Day Watch (bad guys who guard against good). Because maintaining the balance is important, since all out war was going to just destroy everything, as per the prologue to the movie.

So now everyone who isn’t human and eventually discovers this about themselves gets to choose if they will join light or darkness, and the movie is about one such dude, who got caught up in the Night Watch during a sting operation when he hired a witch to make his wife stop cheating on him; he was the bait for the bad guy witch, you see. And now he’s trying to save a kid from a vampire but also save the world from ending because it turns out there’s a prophecy about a cursed virgin, and… you know what, I could go on for another two paragraphs and never once have to make a lick of sense. The point is, it’s a dark fantasy movie in an extremely Russian way, and I think most of what I liked about it is that it’s something that would never have been made in America.

It’s not that it’s exactly good, and me saying it that way should not be construed as it being exactly bad either. But it’s 100% Grade A different, and in these fallen days, that’s not nothing, you know?

The Karate Kid (2010)

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What happened was, I sat down to watch Child’s Play 2. This is because except for the first one and maybe Bride of Chucky[1], I never saw any of the movies in that series, and it seemed like it was time to give it a go. But then, when I pulled up my search bar to find what service it’s showing on, I saw an old search that had revealed a new Karate Kid movie set after Cobra Kai.

Is that compelling? Okay, maybe not, even though I truly loved Cobra Kai. BUT, my son also just started a karate class, because of how he needs something that will calm him and center him and give him a modicum of discipline, and martial arts sounds like the right thing for that. And so this new Karate Kid movie also somehow pulls in Jackie Chan from The Karate Kid remake, and I never saw that one, except now I have I suppose.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

So anyway, this is a straight remake of the 1984 original, with different characters and setting, but somehow the precise same story beats. A 12 year old black kid and his mom move from Detroit to China, where he has no friends and where being friendly with a girl gets him beat up by some kids who know kung fu. (To be fair, he probably egged it on with some poorly thought out posturing.) He does something dumb to get petty revenge after they continue picking on him, and right when they are about to truly beat him up, the handyman at his apartment jumps in and wins a six on one fight without throwing a single punch.

So then Mr. Han agrees to teach young Dre kung fu[2] so he can enter a tournament and fight against the kids who are being trained at a “No Mercy” dojo(?) during said tournament instead of out in the streets, and that should settle everything. And then there are some montages, some 12 year old flirting, and a kung fu tournament, which was probably but not definitely bigger than All-Valley.

Yep. That’s the Karate Kid alright.

Now I can watch the new movie, in which Mr. Han and Daniel Larusso join forces for some reason to teach a new kid something. Possibly about karate.

[1] Huh. According to here, I’ve seen Seed of Chucky. Boy do I have no memory of that. Best part: still no idea whether I saw Bride.
[2] That’s the biggest problem with the fact of the remake. At no point is anyone a karate kid.

Weapons (2025)

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The guy who made Barbarian[1] just made another movie. In Weapons, a whole classroom of kids just up and run away from home, on the same night, at the same time. As you can imagine, everyone in town finds this event to have been very wtf. If you are anything like them, you are wondering: how did this happen? Why did this happen? If you are anything like humans in general, you are also wondering: who can we blame?

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the movie. If you want to know what happens next, or if you liked Barbarian, then you definitely want to watch this movie. Barbarian is a better horror movie, but Weapons is I think closer to mystery than pure horror in the first place, which makes a difference in comparing them. Either way, they are structured similarly, and I like to think they are set in the same universe of Zach Cregger’s mind, a universe in which I’m excited to see what comes next.

[1] I just saw that again, earlier in the weekend. Man, it is an all time baller.

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie

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It’s been weeks. I don’t even a little bit remember what the podcast random dice were. Probably one of them was anthology, maybe? Regardless, the movie they watched four years ago and therefore I am watching today is the movie version of Tales from the Darkside, a show I never really watched back in the day. I hope it was better than this movie was, though? Someone called it (the movie I mean) a secret version of Creepshow 3, which never got made for whatever reason, but wow are the Creepshows better.

So, there are four stories. In the first one, a kid gets kidnapped by a witch and has to Scheherazade his way out of getting cooked for a dinner party, but for some reason using the witch’s own book of scary stories, all of which she should have read before? Did not make a lick of sense. This story, via the book, provides the frame for the other three.

Then in the second one, Christian Slater and Steve Buscemi have a Re-Animator relationship sort of, only it’s a mummy and a sister thing instead of dead bodies and a girlfriend thing. It was fine as far as it went, but the twist at the end did not make the slightest bit of sense to me.

In the third, someone adapted a Stephen King story about a hitman assassinating a cat, which truly did have a Creepshow vibe, but without the comic book stills and the crypt keeper, it felt cheesy instead of delightfully over the top. Which is too bad, as it might otherwise have been the best of the bunch.

Finally, in the actual best of the bunch, James Remar plays a starving artist with a dark secret who unexpectedly finds love and success, except for, you know, “dark secret”. The sad thing was when the witch from the connective story even knew it was the best story they told the whole time. Like, you should not admit which child is your favorite, yo. It’s not kosher!

I’m not mad I saw the movie, exactly, but I’m mad it took me this long to see it, as by rights I should have moved on to better stuff long since.

Halloween Ends

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I saw Halloween Kills four years ago, and when the final entry in the trilogy[1] had not yet been released. It was released the next year, and yet here I am four years later and only finally watching it. Kids, I think, is the only answer worth mentioning.

Unlike Halloween Kills, I am disappointed to report, the next movie is not a direct continuation of its predecessor. Instead, three or four years have passed. Also unlike its predecessors, Halloween Ends is not a Halloween movie. Set in the Halloween universe, I think? But at least two thirds a different kind of movie entirely. I think I liked it for what it was, but it took a while to adjust away my expectations from what it was not.

What it is: a new character that we’ve never seen before experiences an intensely personal accidental tragedy, and then a few years later becomes entangled with Laurie Strode via her granddaughter Allyson. Also, Michael Myers is still unaccounted for, which has short and long term consequences to the plot’s development. And, look, I’m being too coy to call this an actual review, but at the same time, if you can stomach the idea of a movie that is mostly “in the Halloween universe” instead of an actual third movie in a trilogy[1], I’d hate to spoil it for you. Especially when it is a very spoilable movie.

Two things of note though: there’s a Darcy the Mail Girl cameo, and also the series ends on an emotionally satisfying note. By which I mean, it’s up to you how happy or unhappy you are with the ending, but you cannot say they did not provide an ending.

[1] sort of a trilogy