Tag Archive for 'ultraviolence'

Book Review: Way of the Barefoot Zombie by Jasper Bark

Way of the Barefoot Zombie by Jasper BarkAh, zombies. How far are we all from being zombies, anyway? I often find myself wondering that very thing when I get a vapid hankering for some meat, or when I find myself mindlessly consuming something. Sometimes I feel dull and listless, or as if someone could hack one of my arms off with an axe and I would just lurch around the room, spraying gore, and wonder what was for lunch. Yes, I am far too familiar with these kinds of feelings. These zombie feelings. They’re all around us. You know: everything in its own season and all that?

So let’s talk. You all know that I’m a monster and that being a monster, I’m like a monster expert? Well, the secret that nobody wants you to know is that while there IS a tooth fairy, there are no lurching, flesh-eating, brains-craving zombies. And no there is no debate in the monster world over whether or not fast-moving zombies are more scary than the slow type. Real zombies are poor horrible victims of Voodoo priests who were driven mad by being buried alive with huge spiders, like the poor guy in Serpent and the Rainbow. This book kind of walks a line between the two.

Enter Way of the Barefoot Zombie by Jaspar Bark. The book bills itself as a satire about capitalism, the rich and powerful, paperback gurus, and zombies. The villain of the novel, Doc Papa, hosts a billionaires club where evil capitalists learn to discard their souls and act like zombies. Our heroes infiltrate this seminar with the goal of freeing the zombies.

I’ve got get one thing off my chest right now. Being someone who has read enough about the history of Haiti to know about Francois Duvalier, I was unable to read a book with a character named Doc Papa without being pissed at the author. Like this bold choice of character names, Barefoot Zombie is naive and heavy-handed. It’s also all over the map. All in one book we have: the pain of growing distant from a parent, rampant consumerism symbolized, a perverted self-help seminar for rich capitalists, the senseless and cruel murdering of environmental activists, poorly aimed teenage angst, anger at step parents, an unfortunate character with Asperger’s, good and evil portrayed as lovers, evil capitalists tearing the aforementioned activists apart with their bare hands, a psychologically-neatly-stitched up necrophiliac (he kissed his mother on the lips, at her WAKE), a guilt-wracked Voodoo priestess, some Voodoo lore, and of course, zombies of the brain-eating kind.

(Wow – how’s that for a movie subtitle? “He kissed his mother on the lips – at her WAKE!” I like it.)

What was I saying? Oh yes. I think the book needed some focus. Barefoot Zombie lurches in the direction of being a slasher novel, then veers off into teenage angst, then over to political relevance, and back to gore island, but ends up being a coming-of-age story. I was able to make peace with the book when I turned off my brain and enjoyed it as trashy zombie fiction. This book is trashy zombie fiction. If you’re looking to read a piece of trashy zombie fiction with a lot of exposed brains and intestines and people getting their eyeballs popped out, you can’t go too far off the mark with Way of the Barefoot Zombie.

Yes one thing that Barefoot Zombie definitely succeeds at is over-the-top gore. The body count is high, and we have a real contender for the “worst possible way to die” of the year. Thus we’ve bumped up the Creepy Factor.

Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 3 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 2 out of 5

Final result: Trashy zombie fiction from a publisher who appears to be serious about finding new authors and publishing outrageous horror fiction. While it is a very imaginative book, I was left wanting more focus. Recommended for die-hard fans of Zombies and Voodoo who are looking for a trashy read with plenty of gore.

Way of the Barefoot Zombie by Jasper Bark – Abaddon Books – 2009
Way of the Barefoot Zombie on Amazon
Everything Zombie on Amazon

Many thanks to Abaddon Books for sending me this book to review. (See my disclosure policy.) Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. Hopefully next time I review a nice juicy horror novel with loads of Weird Erotic Tension. I’m working on it! See you next time!

Published on September 6, 2009 in Book Reviews. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Monster Alphabet: M is for Mermaid 2

Mermaid Chalk Drawing

As you can see from this found chalk drawing, mermaids are deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Some might say that mermaids are merely the mythologized representation of an attractive young lady who ensnares the adventurous young man with her charms but then turns out to be a monster (or worse) and “devours” him. Or something. But we know better!

Here she is seen wearing opera gloves and making shadow hand puppets. I’m shocked to find this in a child’s drawing because shadow puppetry is one of the favorite pastimes of mermaids and humans are unaware of it. Mostly because mermaids tend to be fatal to them.

Contrary to much popular thought on the matter, there are no mermen.

Being a monster, I am immune to the siren song of the mermaid. To those of us unaffected by its magic, mermaid singing sounds like a school bus full of children being fed through a giant wood chipper: All rending steel and blaring, off-pitched nonsense vocalizing as if from a hundred mouths. Look back at the picture and imagine that.

This is M is for Mermaid number 2. Click here for M is for Mermaid number 1. More Monster Alphabet.

Published on August 11, 2009 in Monster Alphabet. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Horror Book Review: The New Weird Anthology

The New Weird edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer Although I love collections of short stories by a single author, anthologies always seem to disappoint me somehow. The good stories are too short and the bad ones are too long. The last anthology I really enjoyed was the Granta anthology on the Fall of Saigon. I just looked that book up and it was published in 1985. I remember picking it up in the Aardvark bookstore in San Francisco so the earliest I could have read it was 1991. Something like eighteen years later and I am still savoring the memory of reading it. That was a good read. That’s the magical thing about reading, isn’t it?

That and the little book pixies. They’re magical too. I’m not really into the book pixies, though. With their dust, and their little footprints. They put on a good show, and drive a librarian over the edge here and there, but to a monster they’re just more competition. Maybe someday they’ll surprise me.

I guess that I had high hopes for this anthology. I like my weird weird, and I like my dark dark, and my dark weird, and my weird dark, too. It’s like two great flavors that go great together. The book is split up into four parts. The first is a bunch of selections of early practitioners of new weird fiction. The second is new weird fiction from a younger crowd. The third is a long thread from an internet message board. And the fourth is a multi-author round-robin story that was commissioned for this book.

On the plus side anthologies tend to offer enough variety that there’s something for everyone, and there were some stories in this book that I found entertaining.

The Luck in the Head – M. John Harrison – Almost a cute nonsense story, except for the death, murder, and decay. As I read this I pictured it illustrated in an ’80s Heavy Metal Magazine. I liked it.

In the Cities the Hills – Clive Barker – A fine selection from his Books of Blood, but I have this feeling like it’s also his most reprinted selection.

Crossing into Cambodia – Michael Moorcock – Is it Isaac Babel who wrote a story where the only sane person in a band of troops was the person who should normally be the most evil, the intelligence officer? I know I’ve read something like that.

The Braining of Mother Lamprey – Simon D. Ings – Just plain weird. I actually wished this one was longer. The ending seemed much too abrupt.

The Neglected Garden – Kathe Koja – There must be better ways to exact revenge on a man.

A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing – Thomas Ligotti – I really liked this one. A man holds winter in his soul and assigns meaning to the ramblings of a doctor. I wish it had been further developed.

Jack – China Miéville – The are better ways to exact revenge on a man it seems.

Immolation – Jeffrey Thomas – Saw that one coming a mile away.

The Lizard of Ooze – Jay Lake – Would have made a good comic book. Not so hot as a short story.

Watson’s Boy – Brian Evenson – Annoying.

The Art of Dying – K. J. Bishop – Like some awful romance novel daydream but with death.

At Reparata – Jeffrey Ford – Entertaining satiric farce. Stupid in a good way and weird.

Letters from Tainaron – Leena Krohn – Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities but the perfect length and about insect-like aliens. Awesome. Nice stomach-turning ending that you can’t think about too much.

The Ride of the Gabbleratchet – Steph Swainston – Another winner. A tour of improbable landscapes made to escape a monster that does not exactly exist.

The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines – Alistair Rennie – Very much a video game format story. Street fight. Street fight. Big Boss. A little humor. Another stomach-turning ending.

As mentioned above, the book ends in a round-robin story, Festival Lives, that I thought was extremely entertaining. It follows the adventures of a terrorist, a detective, and a factory worker caught in the machinations of two rival holy men in a weird other (maybe future) version of India. The different parts of the story are as follows:
Death in a Dirty Dhoti – Paul Di Filippo
Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered – Cat Rambo
All God’s Chillun Got Wings – Sarah Monette
Locust-Mind – Daniel Abraham
Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes – Felix Gilman
Golden Lads All Must… – Hal Duncan
Forfend the Heavens’ Rending – Conrad Williams
Tangled in the Nets of the Gods – Paul Di Filippo

The round robin is finished online in a PDF that is available on Tachyon’s website.

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 3 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 1 out of 5

Final result: Like any anthology, The New Weird has its ups and downs. There’s enough here that I would recommend it to fans of dark fantasy and dark science fiction, especially if you like anthologies. Have you read this book? How did you like it? Do you enjoy anthologies in general? Let us know in the comments!

The New Weird – Ann & Jeff Vandermeer – Tachyon – 2008

View this book on Amazon

Published on February 18, 2009 in Book Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Pyramid Head Paper Model

I think sometimes when you’re a person who is as menacing as I am, people have a lot of preconceived notions. Like for instance, they might think I like to limp around with a hump on my back and that maybe a terrible accident has made my hands into horrible claws. Or maybe they think that years of crawling around in tunnels deep under the earth has blunted my senses. Well I’m here to dispel some of these stereotypes about things that bump around in the dark. We don’t just BUMP around in the dark all the time. We can be deep and sensitive and creative in the dark as well. This week I’m excited to share a paper model I made of Pyramid Head from Silent Hill. The original design is by Chamoo232 who has a lot of cool paper models on her site.

Pyramid Head from Silent Hill

I don’t know about you but it seems like pyramid head is a pretty insane character. I mean, for one thing, that knife is pretty huge. So a person ends up thinking the whole pyramid head things is Freudian. Pyramid head seems to be very popular. He appears in some of the Silent Hill games, but I guess mostly in Silent Hill 2. In the movie he shows up once dragging a body around, and then later, pyramid head pulls the skin clean off one of the characters, which is pretty brutal. I don’t know about you, but if I was walking down the street and saw pyramid head walking towards me, I might cross the street.

In Silent Hill 2, pyramid head seems to do quite a few awful things. For one, he seems to kill a few people, including Maria. He is also seen doing something kind of sexual looking but maybe not sexual in a kitchen with two Mannequin creatures. There are a lot of YouTube clips of that. For that matter, there are quite a few YouTube clips of various scenes with Pyramid Head. At one point there are two pyramid heads and they eventually impale their own heads on their own spears, killing themselves. Yes it is a wild and wooly world in Silent Hill.

I really like making paper models. I think I’ve talked about it before. When you’re making a paper model, you do a lot of cutting of the paper. And then also you glue the model together. Then you have a finished paper model. I have a bunch of papercrafts, from mummies to monsters. It’s very satisfying to make paper models, and besides the paper and the ink that you have to buy, it’s pretty cheap to make them too. I love making paper models!

Thanks for tuning in. This has been about the Pyramid Head Paper Model.

Published on January 29, 2009 in Papercraft. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Movie Review: Grindhouse

This isn’t a book or music review, but I’m bending the Dark charter a bit today because I’m a member of Final Girl’s Film Club and this is my entry for this month’s Film Club choice, Grindhouse (2007.) Many of you probably already know that it’s a double-feature of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.

I think the filmmakers set out with several common goals. There may be more, but the ones I caught were:

  • Use a lot of the same actors in both movies.
  • Have both films reference each other in clever ways.
  • Express nostalgia for watching old films in theaters.
  • As part of the nostalgia use effects to imitate what a film used to look like after it had been shown a lot. So both films use things like scratches, sloppy retitles, and spliced-out parts to look old.

There’s something about sexual politics and emasculation going on in both these movies too, but I decided not to cover that.

Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror

Wow I loved this movie. There are several sub-plots to it but the basic gist is this: A military biological weapons project goes wildly awry and a town in Texas is over-run by zombies who are hungry for brains. The result is suspense, gore, violence, crazy stop-motion effects, and hilarity. Choice moments include:

Horrible Infections Catalogued

Horrible Infections Catalogued

…and…

All that pole dancing finally paid off!

All that pole dancing finally paid off!

I had to edit my list of favorite moments down quite a bit so as not to bore you with screenshots. The moment I keep coming back to in this movie is the part where Dakota, the maybe-lesbian anesthesiologist who is trying to escape her psychopath doctor husband, shares a funny and tender moment with her son, and tells him to be careful with the gun she just gave him (with instructions to shoot his father if he shows up.) She says. “Be careful where you point that thing. You’ll blow your own face off.” Then she gets out of the car and hasn’t made it ten feet before you see a flash from the car and hear the gun go off. I haven’t figured out how, exactly, this scene encapsulates the whole movie, but for me it does. Probably because it takes a horror standard (the wise boy and his panicked, caring mother) and turns it on its ear.

Be careful with that.

Be careful with that.

I also have to say that I loved how Rodriguez used the “old film” effects in a purposeful manner. There are several choice scenes where the film jitters, develops streaks, warps out of shape, or gets “jammed” and burns through in ways that add depth to the movie. Also, the ending credits are simply beautiful.

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 5 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof

I have to say up front that besides the inevitable Pulp Fiction, I am not a fan of Quentin Tarantino, so for this film I decided to set my baggage aside and give it as fresh a viewing as I could. I had my work cut out for me, it appears, especially because Netflix said I was going to hate it.

Uh Oh. 2.5 stars?

Uh Oh. 2.5 stars?

Netflix turned out to be right, but not for the reason I expected. Death Proof is agonizingly long, boring, and stupid. By stupid, I mean that all the dialogue is stupid and everything everyone does is stupid and boring. Tarantino knows how to make an interesting movie with sly dialogue so this turn of events makes me think he set out to make a dull, stupid movie on purpose.

XXXX lap dance = *YAWN*

XXXX lap dance = *YAWN*

The dialogue is about who is and isn’t sleeping with who, who is in this month’s fashion magazine, who isn’t drinking and who is (and how much.) The lap dance is boring. Even the final chase scene is rendered impotent by someone yelling the already-tired-in-2007 phrase “tap that ass!” over and over and over and over.

Om Nom Nom Nom

Om Nom Nom Nom

For me the most disturbing part of this movie was watching Stuntman Mike (played by Kurt Russell) eat nachos. Another thing I liked about this film was the Technicolor-like opening credits. Oh – and for some reason I was fascinated when Stuntman Mike put eye drops in his eyes, and then also where he stopped to sneeze but then didn’t. (This may sound like I’m joking but I assure you I’m serious.) See? I found three nice things to say.

Besides the coloring, Tarantino decides to use his “old film” effects almost randomly, and they end up mostly pulling the viewer out of the scene to remind them that they are watching a film, not a movie. Perhaps most annoying to me is that Tarantino decides to pull a Tarkovsky and insert a seemingly arbitrary black and white scene into a color movie. The black and white scene chronicles another several dull minutes at a convenience store.

Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5

Grindhouse – Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez – Dimension Films – 2007

View Planet Terror at Amazon
View Death Proof at Amazon

Published on January 11, 2009 in Movie Review. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .