Mummy Issues, Part I

Mummy Issues, Part I

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The Mummy Resurrected (Halcyon International Pictures, 2014)

Starting a new 20-film watch-a-thon project. All previously unseen, all free to watch. The twist for this one is that I typed the word ‘mummy’ into Tubi’s search engine, and just chose the first 20 films that showed up. I already know this is going to be terrible, and I’m really interested to see if any of the films I’m going to watch will score higher than 3 out of 5 stars. Here goes…

The Mummy Resurrected (2014) – Tubi

Straight out of the gate comes this steaming pile from Halcyon International Pictures, a production company in the same vein as The Asylum, UnCork’d, or Wild Eye. HIP had a go at ‘reinventing’ a bunch of classic horror stories, and for this one they claim it is based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, a tenuous claim at best.

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Tor Double #20: Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacekeeper and L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If

Tor Double #20: Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacekeeper and L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If

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Cover for The Pugnacious Peacekeeper and The Wheels of If by Joe Burleson

While the eighteenth volume of the series included C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season and Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country, which takes place at the same time, this volume includes a story and an actual sequel. It also includes the first original story in the series (Silverberg’s story appeared in IASFM nearly a year before appearing in this story). From a production point of view, this is also the first volume that does not have an embossed cover.

The Wheels of If was originally published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction in October, 1940. The story is an alternate history tale that follows Allister Park. Park is a prosecutor in a world which seems to be our own. His current goal is to successfully prosecute the Antonini gang. He sees the successful prosecution as a stepping stone to being nominated for the position of District Attorney for the County of New York. However, when he awoke on Monday, April 11, it was clear that something was different. Park suddenly had a moustache and the New York in which he found himself was not the New York in which he was familiar.

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Goth Chick News: “The Season” Approaches and Midnight Syndicate is Celebrating

Goth Chick News: “The Season” Approaches and Midnight Syndicate is Celebrating

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The summer sun may still be baking us alive, but the haunt world clearly didn’t get the memo, because my inbox just lit up with juicy updates from none other than Edward Douglas of Midnight Syndicate. If you’ve ever wandered through a haunted attraction worth its cobwebs or spent any amount of time here at GCN, then you’ve heard of their work. Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka have been crafting the gothic, orchestral soundtracks of our nightmares for nearly three decades, and this month, they’re unveiling something truly historic.

For the very first time in their career, Midnight Syndicate has composed a “custom score for a haunted attraction,” and not just any attraction. They’re the sonic architects behind Universal Horror Unleashed, Universal’s first permanent horror experience, which opened earlier this month in Las Vegas at AREA15.

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Manly Wade Wellman, Part II: Hok the Mighty

Manly Wade Wellman, Part II: Hok the Mighty

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Planet Stories #30: Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty, by
Manly Wade Wellman (Paizo Publishing, March 2011). Cover by Kieran Yanner

Wellman created his character Hok the Mighty in 1939 and wrote several follow up stories with the character. In 2011, Planet Stories released a “complete” Hok the Mighty collection called Battle in the Dawn, with a cover by Kieran Yanner. The character as Yanner imagined it is shown here and makes me think of Brak the Barbarian.

Despite that image, the stories are not sword & sorcery but what I call “Caveman” fiction. Hok is a Cro-Magnon, an early Homo sapiens. He is wandering north in search of new hunting grounds and comes into contact with the Neanderthals (beast-men) living there. The result is a war between true humans and the sub humans, and Hok leads the way.

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K-Pop Demon Hunters: A Lesson

K-Pop Demon Hunters: A Lesson

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Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

If you haven’t heard of Netflix’ surprise movie sensation, I almost envy you. This movie is everywhere. It’s a phenomenal hit; becoming Netflix’ second-most viewed movie and has its songs everywhere on the Billboard top 10. The song Golden has hit the charts at number 1 in many places. It even, this weekend just passed, did something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It enjoyed a theatrical release just over two months from its initial release on the aforementioned streaming platform. I learnt about it too late to acquire tickets, and I’m quite sad about it.

I watched it. I loved it. I have already reviewed it, so you won’t be getting a rehashing of a review from me here. Instead, I want to talk about what K-Pop Demon Hunters says about original content, audiences, and how wrong some decision makers are about both.

There may be some spoilers. There definitely is at least one piping hot take. Let’s go.

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What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2025

What I’ve Been Listening To: August, 2025

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What I’ve Been Listening To is back for another installment. Audiobooks are omnipresent in my life now. Work, home, car, walking, bedtime: I’m constantly listening to them. Often something I’ve listened to before, which lets my mind half-focus to no ill effect. But I’m still listening.

Some recent plays – all Audible, as I need to get Hoopla set up on my ‘new’ used phone. I have listened to five different Bruce Campbell projects recently, so that’s probably another post.

MIDDLEBRIDGE MYSTERIES

I wrote about Mistletoe Murders, which is an Audible original series. It’s like a Hallmark mystery movie. Emily Lane runs a Christmas-themed store, but she has a secret past. Of course, there’s a local cop boyfriend, with a daughter named Violet.

I like the series, and they turned it into a Hallmark TV series as well, though I’ve not seen that yet. It uses different actors, which I’m not too enthused about.

Well, Violet was trying to get into college at the end of season three, and she did. So, Anna Cathcart is back and starring in Violet’s freshman year in criminal justice studies. Her professor is played by Eric McCormack (Will and Grace). I was a big fan of his show Perception and he’s good as a supporting character here.

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George Barr’s Christmas Card Fantasies

George Barr’s Christmas Card Fantasies

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Some of the art included in Joy To The World: The Fantasy Christmas Card Art of George Barr, from American Fantasy Press

This is the complete Introduction to Joy To The World: The Fantasy Christmas Card Art of George Barr, a new volume of previously uncollected Barr artwork. Join the Kickstarter here.

Several years ago, my wife Deb and I took a cross-country drive to the West Coast (or at least as cross-country as you can get by starting in the Chicago suburbs). While in Oregon, we stopped by to visit some friends of ours, Dick and Bette Wald. At that point, Dick had been a prominent collector, as well as a dealer, of science fiction and fantasy books and original art for decades. Among the many artists we discussed with Dick and Bette was one that was a favorite of all of ours, George Barr.

Several Barr originals hung on their walls and I saw there for the first time many of the works that are reproduced in this book. By the mid-1970’s, Dick had been a fan of George’s art for many years, going back to George’s work on various fanzines in the early 1960’s.

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Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Part III

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Part III

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Rise of the Machine Girls (New Select K.K., November 22, 2019)

Rise of the Machine Girls (2019) – Tubi

Arriving eleven years after Noboru Iguchi’s Machine Girl, this film is directed by Yûki Kobayashi in the frenetic style of a live-action manga — all high energy, insane reaction shots, and over-the-top violence.

In a dystopian town, a desperate population is forced to survive by selling their body parts and organs to the ruthless Dharmas, the crime family that controls the area. In the midst of this misery is a small cabaret show that features a pair of girls, Ami and Yoshi, who put on displays of combat for their adoring customers, when they would rather just be ‘idols,’ doing cute dances and making cute sounds. Yoshi has already lost an arm, and she sets out to get revenge on the Dharma family for something or other. She is captured and tortured, and it is down to Ami and a helpful assassin to save her.

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Tor Double #19: Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha

Tor Double #19: Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha

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Cover for Ill Met in Lankhmar by Sam Rakeland
Cover for The Fair at Emain Macha by Mel Grant

This volume of the Tor Double series offers something it hasn’t offered before.  Although several of the novellas previously published in the series have played with the tropes of fantasy novels, such as Jack Vance’s The Last Castle or Joanna Russ’s Souls, all of the stories published to this point have been science fiction. With Volume 19, the series offers two novellas which are unabashedly fantasy, Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha. Not only are both fantasy stories, but both of them are parts of series exploring the characters who feature in them.

Fritz Leiber introduced the world to Lankhmar and his characters of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in August of 1939 in the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which appeared in Unknown. By 1969, he had published an additional eighteen stories about the adventurers, including one story which told of the Grey Mouser’s life before he met Fafhrd.

Ill Met in Lankhmar was originally published in F&SF  in April, 1970. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Ill Met in Lankhmar is the second of four Leiber stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. A prequel to all of the previously published Lankhmar stories with the exception of “The Unholy Grail,” this novella tells how his two characters meet for the first time. …

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Goth Chick News: Reporters at Large Head to the Fan Expo ‘25 – Special Correspondent Nick S and Photog at Large Kat

Goth Chick News: Reporters at Large Head to the Fan Expo ‘25 – Special Correspondent Nick S and Photog at Large Kat

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Chevy Chase and Brendan Fraser at Fan Expo Chicago

Unfortunately, real life sometimes gets in the way of our “fun” jobs. Last weekend, Black Gate Photog Chris Z and I were forced to miss out on what was likely the biggest pop culture event in Chicago.

As you may remember, for decades, the Chicago Comic Con was the Midwest’s scrappy answer to San Diego, with folding tables covered in long boxes, artists sketching for a few bucks, and maybe a handful of cult TV guests tucked away in the corner. Things began to shift in the 1990s when Wizard Entertainment bought the show and rebranded it as Wizard World Chicago, pumping up the spectacle with celebrity signings, mainstream movie tie-ins, and that strange mix of pop-culture carnival and dealer’s room we all know today.

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