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Goth Chick News; The Girl (and the Movie) With All the Gifts

Goth Chick News; The Girl (and the Movie) With All the Gifts

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The Girl With all the Gifts novel-small The Girl With all the Gifts poster-small

Seeing that it now has a sequel, I finally got around to reading M.R. Carey’s first novel, The Girl With All the Gifts (2015).

I’m not sure what I was expecting. As the book has been out for over two years, I don’t think it is giving away too much to tell you the story takes place in a future dystopia, made such by a literal zombie apocalypse. And with all of us having lived through seven years of The Walking Dead, Brad Pitt in World War Z and slightly lighter takes such as Zombieland and Warm Bodies just to name a few, one might conclude that zombies, as a monster fad, might be played out both on screen and in print.

So if I was expecting anything at all, it wasn’t much. In fact, my local bookseller placed it in the YA section which meant I might either love it like A Series of Unfortunate Events or hate it with a burning passion, like Twilight.

Turns out, I definitely didn’t hate it.

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Fantasia 2017, Day 1: The Bizarre Adventure Begins (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable)

Fantasia 2017, Day 1: The Bizarre Adventure Begins (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable)

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Fantasia 2017The body has a memory, memory activated by the time of year and the weather and the repetition of physical activity. Every year now as summer passes its midpoint, walking through Montreal evokes for me a sense of wonder and anticipation: a physical remembrance of the Fantasia International Film Festival. I’ve covered Montreal’s genre film festival for Black Gate the last three years, walking downtown during the days of the festival and then walking back at night marveling at the things I’ve seen. Last Thursday for a fourth year I set out for the Fantasia theatres at Concordia University’s downtown campus; and so here is the first installment of my Fantasia diary for 2017.

As always, I’m looking forward over the coming weeks to things I’ve heard of and things I’ve never heard of. I’m trying to figure out what movies I’ll have to pass on seeing in order to watch other movies scheduled against them, and then what movies I’ll be able to see on a computer monitor in the Fantasia screening room. This year the recipients of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Awards are a little outside my immediate areas of interest — B-movie auteur Larry Cohen, luchador and movie star Mil Máscaras, and Cüneyt Arkin, star of over 300 Turkish films including The Man Who Saved the World (Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, also known as “Turkish Star Wars”). But who knows if I’ll find myself sitting in on a screening of one or more of their varied works?

This year I began my Fantasia experience on the festival’s first night, Thursday July 13, with a viewing of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable. I arrived early, reaching the Hall Theatre at 8:30 PM for a 9:45 screening, and found a line-up of ticketholders already stretching a good 200 feet. The movie’s directed by Takashi Miike, a winner of last year’s Lifetime Achievement Award, with a script by Itaru Era based on the long-running manga by Hirohiko Araki. I happened to watch this showing in the company of the redoubtable Dave Harris of Pieuvre.ca; neither of us had any experience of the manga, but after the movie we were able to speak briefly with some friends of Dave’s who were fans of the comics. “11 out of 10,” said one, while another said that the movie was so faithful it replicated specific panels on the screen. So: if you’re a fan of the source material, you will like this movie. What about those who aren’t?

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Peplum Populist: Short Takes on Three Streaming Titles

Peplum Populist: Short Takes on Three Streaming Titles

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samson-7-miracles-world-US-poster

When I first set out to write articles about Italian peplum (sword-and-sandal) films, my intention was to excavate for worthwhile titles available from the quarry of low-quality streaming options. But my intention started to skid, and now I’m turning into the skid. I’ve already dealt with a quality film you can only get on DVD (Hercules, Samson & Ulysses) and a high-quality streaming film you shouldn’t watch (Colossus of the Stone Age). The more I sort through the archives of sword-and-sandal flicks on Amazon Video, the more limited I find the options for movies in even the most modestly acceptable presentation.

So while I continue to sift through streaming choices and look into DVDs from boutique labels, here are three short takes on films in the Amazon Video library (all free for Prime members) that don’t pass my normal picture quality threshold, but may be interesting to the Black Gate readers who can grit their teeth and struggle through blurred, pan-and-scan transfers.

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The Man of Legends by Kenneth Johnson: Q&A with the Author, Part 2

The Man of Legends by Kenneth Johnson: Q&A with the Author, Part 2

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Incredible-Hulk-Jacket-Kenneth-Johnson-Q-and-AKenneth Johnson’s new book, The Man of Legends is now available at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

Last week I posted the first part of my interview with Kenneth Johnson, author of the recently released novel The Man of Legends, focusing on the new book and its inspirations. But Kenneth Johnson’s long career as a writer, producer, and director of television and movies deserves its own section. Shows like The Incredible Hulk, Alien Nation, The Bionic Woman, and V: The Original Series are gems among 1970s and ‘80s science-fiction television and continue to have an enormous influence today. I expected to hear some interesting stories about making those programs when I interviewed him, especially considering how timely some of them continue to be (seriously, go give V: The Original Miniseries as look again and you’ll be stunned at how much its themes stand out), but I didn’t expect to hear a story about Richard Nixon as well!

Q&A with Kenneth Johnson, Part 2

You mentioned you were one of the youngest producers on the lot when you were working at Universal. You were in your early thirties when you produced The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, and The Incredible Hulk.

Yeah, and I had had half a career before that. I came out of the Drama Department at what is now Carnegie Mellon University, then Carnegie Tech, which had a sort of renowned Department of Drama. I was a graduate in directing; there was no film or TV or anything like that. It was strictly “theater!” you know. Everybody there, except me, sort of looked down on TV and film. Everybody except me and a couple other guys: Jamie Cromwell, a wonderful and well-known actor out here who played the farmer in Babe and so many other things since then; and my dear friend Steven Bochco, who was a classmate and came to California a little bit ahead of me and helped me get my foot in the door at Universal.

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Goth Chick News: Stranger Toys for Cool Kids

Goth Chick News: Stranger Toys for Cool Kids

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Stranger Things Funco toys-small

Netflix’s Stranger Things is one long nostalgia trip for kids from the ’80s, so it only makes sense that at some point, homage would be paid to the most prominent of 80’s attributes aside from should pads – rampant consumerism.

Funko, the company best known for their Pop! Vinyl toy line agrees. It’s preparing Stranger Things action figures that are bound to rekindle memories of playing with GI Joe or Masters of the Universe toys as a kid and cause collectors who love the show to be willing to traverse the Upside Down to get their hands on them.

The news comes directly from Funko’s website, where they explain that they’re selling two separate three-packs of 3 3/4 tall action figures. One pack contains figures based on the characters of the group’s de facto leader Mike Wheeler (played by the awesomely-named Finn Wolfhard), the logic-driven Lucas Sinclair (played by Caleb McLaughlin), and the mysterious Eleven (played by Millie Bobby Brown). The other pack includes figures based on the unfortunate Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), the loyal Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), and the evil Demogorgon.

The figures are all fully articulated, and most come with some sort of prop that reflects the character: Eleven has her Eggo waffles (obviously), Mike has a walkie-talkie, and Lucas gets two – a slingshot and a pair of binoculars. The second pack is far more sparse; it looks like the only prop that comes with that is a package of chocolate pudding, which I’m guessing isn’t intended for the Demogorgon.

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When Fantasy and Theology Collide: Some Thoughts on Satan

When Fantasy and Theology Collide: Some Thoughts on Satan

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Lord_of_DarknessI recently met a woman whose father-in-law had been a federal prison guard at a medical prison that held the “Blind Sheikh” back around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel-Rahman) was an associate of Osama bin Laden and the planner behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — one of the early “masterminds” of Al Qaeda. In other words, a real life counterpart to the nastiest, most nefarious villains in our fictional thriller novels and cinema fare.

She told me that her dad-in-law spoke to the Sheikh a couple times, as could be expected: casual banter will occasionally happen between guards and the imprisoned criminals they are guarding. She said the Sheikh seemed friendly enough to her father-in-law, but she added, “The Sheikh told him that we worship three gods. That was a big issue he had with us, that we worship three gods. So much of it was cultural misunderstanding.”

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You Deserve a Great Mummy, So Here’s My Favorite: The Mummy ‘59

You Deserve a Great Mummy, So Here’s My Favorite: The Mummy ‘59

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Mummy-1959-US-posterMy short take on The Mummy unleashed to theaters last week as the start of Universal’s “Dark Universe” franchise gamble: It’s an embarrassment for everyone involved. Except maybe Sophia Boutella as Princess Ahmanet. She deserves a real mummy film, not a schlock Tom Cruise action picture only interested in selling later movies. The Mummy ‘17 is ugly, confused, stupid, and boring. North American moviegoers decided to watch Wonder Woman again rather than see Universal trash its own legacy: The Mummy opened to a glum $32 million domestically, putting it almost $25 million behind Wonder Woman’s second weekend. However, The Mummy is targeting international revenue (one of the reasons Universal allowed the criminally miscast Tom Cruise into the room), and so far it’s grossed $141 million in foreign markets. The “Dark Universe” will proceed, but under a bleak curse.

Okay, I’m finished with that movie. Healing time. I shall now read from the Scroll of Life, brew tana leaves, and bring back the sleeping Gods of Egypt with what I consider the high point of eighty-five years of movies about the undead of the Nile River Valley: 1959’s The Mummy from Hammer Films Productions.

The Alchemical Feat of The Mummy ‘59

“The Mummy made by Hammer Films is, in my opinion, one of the best films of its kind that British cinema has made.” — Christopher Lee

Because it stands in the shadow of Hammer’s first two Gothic hits, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula/Horror of Dracula (1958), it’s easy to gloss over The Mummy as merely a good Hammer horror film rather than one of the greats. But since it debuted on Blu-ray in the U.S., I’ve come to the realization I prefer The Mummy ‘59 to the famous 1932 Boris Karloff-Karl Freund film. I didn’t believe this was possible: The Mummy ‘32 is on my shortlist of Universal’s best classic monster movies. But watching the Hammer version in a pristine Hi-Def restoration, the vibrancy of its colors and designs rescued from dull DVD transfers, I had to face my emotions honestly and embrace it as My Favorite Mummy.

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Don’t Mess With the Amazons: The Wonder Woman Movie

Don’t Mess With the Amazons: The Wonder Woman Movie

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Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman

A lot has been said about Patty Jenkins’ movie Wonder Woman, pretty much all of it by people smarter and more qualified than I.

But given that I do a lot of comic books musing for Black Gate, and that I also reviewed Rogue One and Dr. Strange, I wanted to give Wonder Woman the attention it deserves.

Superhero movies are what they are.

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The Massachusetts Mummy: Universal’s Kharis Mummy Movies

The Massachusetts Mummy: Universal’s Kharis Mummy Movies

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tom-tyler-kharis-mummys-hand

A new Mummy is in theaters this weekend from Universal. How is it? I’m not sure, since as of this writing I haven’t watched it yet, although I’ll attend a screening on the morning this posts. But one of my favorite movie critics, David Ehrlich, said of it: “It’s an irredeemable disaster from start to finish, an adventure that entertains only via glimpses of the adventure it should have been.” You know you’ve got problems when people start talking of their fond memories of the Brendan Fraser Mummy from the Summer of ‘99. (I have a genuine affection for that silly movie. The Jerry Goldsmith score is killer.)

If you want to know more about why plenty of folks who love the classic Universal Monsters are a bit, well, concerned about this new Tom Cruise-starring Mummy and the studio’s plans for an entire “Dark Universe” franchise, our own Sue Granquist has you covered. As for me, I have no plans to write a post about Nu-Mummy. Instead, I’m going to hang out here in the 1940s, maybe work on my victory garden, listen to some 78s of Artie Shaw and the Gramercy Five, purchase War Bonds, and watch a couple of mummy flicks.

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Goth Chick News: “Show Me the Mummy!” or Universal Studios Eats Its Young…

Goth Chick News: “Show Me the Mummy!” or Universal Studios Eats Its Young…

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The Mummy 2017-small

Back in October I reported on the travesty that Universal Studios was perpetuating on its own iconic catalog of classic movie monster films. Though I was sincerely hoping the early rumors were not true, it has recently been confirmed that Universal is indeed committing this violent crime which they are entitling their “Dark Universe,” the umbrella under which it is planning at least five films including The Invisible Man (with Johnny Depp), Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe), Frankenstein’s Monster (Javier Bardem) and Bride of Frankenstein (not yet cast but Angelina Jolie is rumored).

So what’s the problem you ask?

These films have already been remade multiple times, you say.

True enough.

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