Cinema Suicide

30 Dec

The Suicidal Book Club: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Posted by Bryan White | Friday December 30, 2011 | Suicidal Book Club

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Could it be? Do mine eyes deceiveth me? After a few months of sporadic updates are we actually getting two updates in one week?” If that’s not what you’re thinking, you’re probably thinking something along the lines of, “Honestly? Another fucking book report?” Just bear with me. I’ve been busy, for fuck’s sake! The holiday season will take the fight right out of you and what has felt an awful lot like Major Depression or at the very least Seasonal Affective Disorder has pretty much sapped my will to watch horror movies and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot that I’ve really given a shit about lately. Everything I watch has sucked except for the few TV shows that I’ve been keeping up with. Every time I try to write anything, I get a thousand words in and find that I hate every single one of them. Bummer, I know. I’ll cut the shit.

I was once interviewed by a writer from one of the local free papers about horror in literature and comics and the then-sudden resurgence in books and comics about zombies. Because I’m local horror blogger numero uno in New Hampshire, the conversation inevitably drifted toward my favorite horror novels because I’m such a strong local resource in matters such as these. I was confronted with a problem, however. With the exception of my eternal devotion to H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t really read much horror. My bag when it comes to books is science fiction. Truth be told, at the time I didn’t read much at all. When it comes to lit I’m easily distracted and my progress when reading is typically very slow so it’s very easy for me to throw my hands up and shake off the entire notion of reading, leaving me to feel like some kind of moron because I can’t seem to make it through four hundred measly pages. Then one night I find myself in the home office of author Joe Hill (Locke & Key, Horns) and he shows me ‘The Shelf of 10′, an OCD collection the next ten books he’s going to read and the next ten movies he’s going to watch. In order. At first it strikes me as a little weird and then it clears a bit and strikes me as the sort of thing a working author might need since free time is a valuable commodity when you’re as busy as a Bram Stokers award winning author but then it dawns on me. Maybe this is what I need. A little organization coupled with the same force of will it took to quit smoking to pick ten books I want to read in order and then marry myself to that list. I go on and on about it but there’s a thin line between a self-effacing sense of humor and an obnoxious line of self pity. So maybe I don’t need to be so down on my reading habits. I just need a code to follow. I quickly put together a list on Goodreads and got to work. I began with Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, a title that I’ve seen tossed around liberally in the Twitter feeds of Wil Wheaton, Cory Doctorow and Patton Oswalt. With some of my favorite nerd-culture gurus namechecking it, I figured I ought to knuckle down and check it out. I couldn’t have been happier with this decision. Kicking off my own personal Shelf of 10 got me off to a good start and gave me the momentum to roll into another title right away.

Such is the way with a lot of speculative fiction with a sci-fi bent, it’s the future and the future sucks a dick, man. Fuel shortages, staggering unemployment, rising crime and widespread poverty have made America a really terrible place to live. An MMORPG called OASIS was developed several decades back as a competitor to World of Warcraft and then evolved into a deeply immersive front end for the entire internet. So if you’d like to party up and raid a dungeon, you can do that but you can also go to school there and spend your day in a huge library called Wikipedia. The designer of OASIS is James Halliday, an amalgamation of Richard Garriot and Steve Jobs and as our story begins, Halliday has died and released his last will and testament to all users of OASIS promising his entire estate, hundreds of billions of dollars and the entire company behind OASIS to the one person who can find three keys that open three gates in OASIS, each hidden cleverly with a series of clues. Halliday, being devoted to 80′s pop culture, laces his quest with obscure and deeply nerdy references to 80′s music, movies, video games and role playing games. The OASIS community springs into action and for years, Egg Hunters search OASIS for the first key before giving up, leaving behind only the most dedicated of the Gunters. Key among these is Wade Watts, Parzival, a teenager living in the oppressive settings known as the Oklahoma City stacks, literally towering stacks of RVs. Watts devotes his life and every available neuron to memorizing the life and times of James Halliday and every piece of 80′s pop culture, significant or insignificant so that he can escape his dire situation and live a life of luxury. Like everyone, he spends all his time in OASIS and has befriended other Gunters in the quest for Halliday’s keys. After years of no results, Parzival finally makes a crucial connection and makes his way to the first key, tipping off Gunters everywhere and a race begins to find the other keys as Wade and his friends struggle against the Sixers, agents of a tyrannical ISP that wants the OASIS all for themselves, feeling as though Halliday and his company never took full advantage of OASIS’ financial potential.

Ready Player One is making the rounds on blogs and lit review sites everywhere, garnering praise for what is, essentially, VH1′s I Love The 80′s couched in classic cyberpunk conventions. It’s a clever bombardment of pop culture with plenty of explorations of The Net with a heaping dose of ‘jacking in’. Every single page is saturated with nods to old school video gaming, John Hughes movies, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Saturday morning cartoons, etc. I mean this shit is nonstop. From cover to cover, you’ll be overwhelmed with nostalgia and that’s sometimes the problem. Protagonist and his friends, are drawn up to be complete characters with compelling stories of their own taking pace in a dreary, nasty setting that’s as compelling as our main characters and their motivations but all of these positive qualities are constantly contending with Cline’s constantly winking eye and nudging elbows, trying to remind those of us who grew up in that bygone era of how cool things used to be and while I don’t necessarily disagree – being a kid in the 80′s fucking ruled – There’s a lot at play in Ready Player One and it’s constantly being drowned out by lengthy walks down memory lane with regards to the Atari 2600. This quality is not a deal breaker. Hardly, in fact. It’s just a bit tedious and because the book’s main trait becomes its constantly shifting pattern of nostalgia, the second act sags as the tragedy builds among a rising tide of Family Ties and Wargames references. I won’t lie, though, a sprawling homage and an entire gameworld devoted to Rush’s album 2112 brought a huge smile to my face.

Mildly negative criticism aside, though, Ready Player One is hard to put down once you get started. Few books have ever driven me as hard as this one and the fact that it’s so deftly written and swiftly plotted makes it easy to hurtle to the finish line, all the while dreading the inevitable conclusion. Cline’s characterization of the extremely resourceful and quick witted Wade Watts left me wanting to live in his collapsing world forever in spite of its fatal flaws. As long as it was possible to log in to a game where I could have a physical fight with Godzilla and pilot the Milennium Falcon around as my personal mode of transportation, that is. Books don’t often make my heart race in anticipation nor do they often make me laugh out loud. The only other book to hold such titles is Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

Look, it’s a few days after Christmas and I’m sure you’re sitting there with at least one gift card to a major book retailer or there’s a local indie shop in your neighborhood that could use your cash. Why don’t you grace them with your patronage and ask the person at the counter for a copy of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. The nostalgia net is cast so incredibly wide that no nerd fetish escapes its gravity and if you’re reading this – and my analytics are correct – you’re probably just the right age for this book to properly tweak your 80′s nostalgia gland. It’s fast, it’s furious and it’s a lot of fun. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Take my fucking word for it.

28 Dec

The Suicidal Book Club: The Hammer Vault by Marcus Hearn

Posted by Bryan White | Wednesday December 28, 2011 | Suicidal Book Club

So did you guys get anything crappy for Christmas? Come on. We’re all friends here. You can tell me and I promise I won’t tell your mom because if you did, I know exactly what you can exchange that shit for. You’re going to want to ditch whatever you don’t want in order to get your hands on a copy of Titan Books’ latest Hammer Films-related release, The Hammer Vault by Marcus Hearn. I try not to heap praise on products here as it sounds really fishy when I do. When anyone does, really. I’m so cynical and take so much pleasure in pointing out flaws that when I can’t help myself but gush about something, people start to suspect that I’ve been bought off. Not so, I assure you. It’s just that when something tickles my fancy, I mean really gets down to the erogenous zones and stimulates me without the distractions of qualities that I can be negatively critical of, I don’t quite know what to do with myself and begin with the awkward fondling of its finer qualities.

Titan Books is probably the outlet for all your Hammer needs and they’ve kicked out a series of books on the topic that have proven to be nothing less than authoritative. About this time last year, I put their title, The Art of Hammer to the test; a book collecting twenty years of movie posters and not much else and in spite of its minimalist approach to Hammer data, it was still the sort of thing that Hammer fans were going to want kicking around. The Hammer Vault takes that premise and kicks it up a notch. Though, I sense that this line of fan service has just about been mined of all its value with this release, The Hammer Vault is still an excellent coffee table book that delivers insight and entertainment.

The Hammer Vault is a presentation of noteworthy Hammer releases, beginning with The Quatermass Experiment, and the marketing materials that were used to sell theaters on bookings and tickets at the box office. In many cases you see the original marketing brochures, posters used in pre-sales, original script pages, promotional photography and cadids, etc. Like previous Hammer books from Titan, this thing is exhaustive! Titan’s resident Hammer author, Marcus Hearn leaves no stone unturned and those of you horror fans out there with a yen for British vampires and the stately gentlemen who hunt them, you’ll appreciate the staggering depths that Hearn goes to to report on the history of one of the United Kingdom’s most important film institutions. Where The Hammer Vault takes a detour from The Art Of Hammer, which I keep comparing to it to for some reason, is that Hearn this time actually delivers some anecdote and written word to give these press materials some context and it’s all quite interesting. For instance, going back to Quatermass, I’d always wondered why they cast a bullish American in the role of a character who was clearly intended to be a British dude. Brian Donlevy always struck me as particularly wooden and as it would happen, Quatermass series creator, Nigel Kneale, felt the same way. See? Learning is fun! Thanks, Titan Books!

This being a product based on a particularly specific niche, it should come as no surprise that its potential audience is a little on the narrow side. If you’re as excited about this book as I am, it means that you’re in the club and Hammer horror is your bag, if not you’re probably not even reading this and chucking down the coin required for just such a hardcover treasure isn’t really in your future. I’m hoping, though, that Titan Books isn’t on your radar and that as a fan of Hammer Films, I’m shedding some light on a vast archive of nerd culture data that’ll get your heart racing. The Hammer Vault is, in fact, all that and a bowl of grits and pretty much another feather in Titan Books’ cap. This company is unstoppable, I tell you! I look forward to another Hammer item in 2012.

22 Nov

100% culinarily accurate! The Turbaconepicentipede: Full Sequence! Happy Thanksgiving, motherfCAWers!

Posted by Bryan White | Tuesday November 22, 2011 | News

I keep hearing that Youtube is some kind of full-on replacement for TV, what with all these channels providing web series after web series. Some of these shows are produced on a peanuts and some have actual production value like something you might see on, you know, actual television but they all have one thing in common that I can’t get over: I usually don’t get it.

It’s times like these when I really feel the generation gap. It’s not like I’m really all that old but I watch some of these clips of the top Youtubers with their Vans slip-ons, wind-swept scene hair, making goofs on Metroid and Super Mario Brothers steeped in dubstep remixes of the Legend of Zelda theme song and it all just goes right over my head. I tell you, it makes me feel old. So f*CAW* those guys. All of them.

Except for Epic Meal Time.

I could watch and have watched Epic Meal Time for marathon stretches. Those Quebecois motherf*CAW*ers are funny, once again supporting my Greater Theory of Canadian Comedy. If you’ve never seen them, it breaks down like this: Big mouthed Harley is the ring-leader of a bunch of maniacs who create ridiculous meals that generally consist of massive amounts of fast food, junk food and *CAW*loads of bacon. They have a theme: Make a meat car, make a giant s’more, make a giant protein bar and they handily get to work. At the bottom of the screen they usually count the calories and fat, which number in the thousands of grams, or kilograms, if you will (and I think you will). In the end, Harley’s hatchetman, a surly personal trainer known only as Muscles Glasses, messily chows down on whatever they’ve made. Between the conception of the meal and completion, they drink a sh*CAW*load of Jack Daniels. The latest installment of Epic Meal Time goofs on The Human Centipede in a most horrific way, therefore qualifying it for greater syndication on Cinema Suicide. I present to you: 800,000 calories of Thanksgiving horror. Sixty turkeys containing ducks, chicken, cornish game hens, quail, stuffing, covered in bacon and sewn inside ten whole roasted pigs, sewn together anus to mouth. If Epic Meal Time wasn’t already a celebration of excess, this episode features cameos from other Youtube stars, Smosh, that chick from My Drunk Kitchen, Jimmy Wong, etc. They also seize the moment to promote crass commercialism in the name of Epic Meal Time bacon products, which includes bacon-flavored lube. You know? For fuckin’.

During October they actually did a Cthulhu-themed meal and presented it at a Deadmau5 show. This would have qualified for Cinema Suicide syndication as well, except that they really didn’t eat much of it. It involved octopus tentacles and sh*CAW* and most of it went unconsumed, instead using the opportunity to promote Deadmau5, who I think is worthless.

18 Nov

Halo-8′s Matt Pizzolo organizing Occupy Comics to benefit Occupy Wall Street!

Posted by Bryan White | Friday November 18, 2011 | News

This is the internet and I realize that a lot of you out there are going to feel compelled to add your voice to the ongoing discussion about Occupy Wall Street in my comments section. Internet comments are like retard magnets and quite a few of my articles seem to draw the absolute dregs of internet commentary. I’m talking worse than Youtube comments. So I’m just going to put this on front street and you can absorb it or let it wash over you. I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK OF OCCUPY WALL STREET. Personally, I am a huge supporter of the entire Occupy movement. I do not see it as a vague and muddled message. Growing movements don’t come together around vague and muddled messages. If you fail to see what’s going on around you and you can’t understand what’s happening on the streets down there in New York and Oakland and DC and everywhere else that protesters are sitting in, being abused by the cops, then that is your problem.

If you happen to be a sensible American who has had it with policy being influenced by huge corporations and banks, or if it bothers you that the very people who ruined our economy so spectacularly have been given tax money paid by you and I so that they can keep their banks alive and still post record profits you’re going to want to have a look at this. There are people on the ground in the Occupied cities who endure regular police brutality and the general change of the seasons just to make sure that nobody goes home until this shit is resolved and they need help in a logistical sense to make sure that no one starves or freezes to death. Plenty of people in a position to front some cash and deliver the goods are doing what they can and among the latest to join the fray is Matt Pizzolo of Halo-8 Entertainment.

Pizzolo explains that since the face of the resistance, the Guy Fawkes mask (actually a symbol Anonymous has been using for quite some time), came from comics, immortalized in Alan Moore’s absolutely sweeping comic book saga of rebellion, V For Vendetta, then the story of Occupy Wall Street ought to be told in similar format. To this end, he has pulled together a stable of artists who will tell that story through various artistic expressions in a series of comics called Occupy Comics. With people on board such as: Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead), Joseph Michael Linsner (Dawn), Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night), Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan), Douglas Rushkoff (one of my favorite media-theorists) and Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls, aka Neil Gaiman’s wife) not to mention many, MANY more. This is a really gigantic project and these are just the names on the list that jumped out to me.

This isn’t just a cash grab by Halo-8, though. That would be incredibly sleazy not to mention wholly uncharacteristic of Pizzolo’s organization. There are obviously costs associated with the production of a comic. The contributors are pros and need to be compensated. There are filmmakers documenting the comic’s production, servers to host the digital copies of the comics, an eventual hardback compilation of all the work. These people need to be paid. Ultimately, according to the Occupy Comics website, these people will turn around and donate all of the money they received to the Occupy movement to buy shit like food, clothing, heaters and other essential survival equipment but for right now, they have to collect a little bit of cash. In the end, their donation becomes tax-deductible, so you can see the incentive. Pizzolo guarantees that it’ll be a transparent process. Occupy Comics is a strictly not-for-profit venture. According to Pizzolo:

I’m hyper aware of the need to keep things transparent,”said Pizzolo. “Halo-8 is only lending support because it can, but ideally third-party accounts will send all revenue directly to the fund–and I’d love for an indie publisher to step in. I don’t want this getting muddy and the more checks & balances the better. The idea is to keep hard costs as low as physically possible and all other revenue goes directly to the protesters.

Occupy Wall Street has been an inspiring movement. I’ve been a jaded and cynical asshole for the last 12 years. This country didn’t so much as lift a finger when the Bush Whitehouse all but mailed us each a baggy of Karl Rove’s feces to show its utter contempt for us. I was convinced that we would continue to allow all of these assholes to just do what they wanted. Who would have the balls to hit the street and start pushing back if they hadn’t by now but Occupy Wall Street has given me a tremendous amount of hope. It turned out that there was a tipping a point after all. Two months on, hundreds arrested, some severely injured by our very own police, worsening weather conditions, endless media criticism, pre-dawn evictions from the encampments; The Occupy movement has adequately demonstrated that it isn’t going anywhere. It reorganizes and changes to suit the times. We are presently looking at the most significant political movement of our lives and at this point it’s either join the protest or get the fuck out of the way.

I am the 99%.

Get more information at the following resources:

11 Nov

When genres collide: Heavy Metal meets Science Fiction!

Posted by Bryan White | Friday November 11, 2011 | Horror Rock

Heavy metal music is fairly predictable stuff in terms of subject matter. The pairing of metal and horror is a no-brainer and has pretty much been in the mix since the dawn of the genre. The very name of the founding heavy metal band, Earth, was eventually changed to Black Sabbath when bass player, Geezer Butler, observed lines of people queuing up to see Mario Bava’s horror film of the same name. Death Metal made it even easier with its obsession with the fragility of the human body. What is surprisingly not so common is a heavy metal connection to science fiction. It’s out there, though. There’s an apparent crossover between horror and science fiction so naturally there is the same crossover between heavy metal and sci-fi. Like my lists of Songs About Vampires, Heavy Metal-themed horror movies and the Sci-fi, horror and fantasy connection to Progressive Rock, here’s a new list of science fiction-themed heavy metal.

Anthrax
I Am The Law
from Among The Living

Thrash metal, the mutant offspring of heavy metal and hardcore punk was the chocolate to science fiction’s peanut butter. Most thrash in the 80′s that wasn’t heavily concerned with social and political issues of the Reagan 80′s had a weird fixation on post apocalypse settings, nuclear war, genetic mutations and man vs. machine conflicts. Just about every one of them had a song with heavy sci-fi tones. Anthrax, the flagship band of the East Coast thrash culture, nailed it down on what is probably the finest of their Joey Belladonna-era albums, Among The Living. Among The Living has all the social commentary you could want but in the middle of it all is a pummeling mainstay of their live sets, I Am The Law, a song about the iconic British comic character from 2000 AD, Judge Dredd.

Dredd takes place in a future United States rendered almost uninhabitable following a devastating nuclear war that confines humanity’s survivors to domed megalopolises that are riddled with crime. To combat the crime, the government institutes The Judges, roving officers of the law who exact justice on the spot. They’re cops but they’re also judge, jury and executioners. It’s a cool comic. Unsurprisingly, the band’s main lyricist, Scott Ian, is a pretty big fan of science fiction and comic books, in general (former Anthrax guitarist, Dan Spitz, was also known at this time to play a Jackson King V decorated with Ninja Turtles). The track doesn’t so much tell a story as it is a sort of overview of Judge Dredd, speaking of Megacity 1, isocubes, The Burning Earth and so on. In the lead up to the chorus the band shouts a gang vocal, “DROKK IT!!!”

Queensryche
NM 156
from The Warning

I always felt kind of bad for Queensryche. I’m sure they feel differently, but it always seemed to me that they got the shaft and never received the respect they actually deserved. As metal was reaching critical mass at the end of the 80′s, they released their magnum opus, Operation: Mindcrime, an album that sounds as good today as it did in 1988 but somehow got mixed up with all those hair bands that were ruling the charts at the time. They were most certainly not a hair band in spite of a bit of posing, hair spray and leather fringe. As a matter of fact, they shared far more in common with bands from The New Wave of British Heavy Metal and their lyrics were often seriously cerebral. Then they hit huge with their slow jam Silent Lucidity and just kept on trucking, leaving their way out lyrics mostly in the past.

The first Queensryche LP, The Warning, was mostly unremarkable with the exception of a couple of standout tracks. The most notable among them was NM 156, a mysterious title about computer supremacy in the future. Mankind is ruthlessly kept in check by a dictatorial computer with a boner for cold logical data. Man versus machine was a common theme in metal’s explorations of science fiction. It’s easy and it preys and on the same sort of paranoia that fires off the same neurons that are stimulated during particularly horrifying death metal lyrics. Queensryche were way ahead of the curve, though. NM 156 reads like a blend of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (which was published a year after this album was recorded and Harlan Ellison’s nasty post-nuke novela, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Queensryche was progressive before anyone had even thought of the concept of progressive metal.

Hypocrisy
Dead Sky Dawning
from The Arrival

American death metal seemed to spring to life in Florida, of all places. Bands like Death, Deicide and Morbid Angel all came out of Florida and before the style had spread to the rest of the country, never mind the rest of the world, it was undergoing all manner of experimentation down in America’s wang (aka The Sunshine State). Plenty of bands in Europe were leaning in that direction but it wasn’t until Hypocrisy’s Peter Tagtgren picked up stakes from Florida and moved back to Sweden that the Swedish metal sound, one of the most popular variations on death metal in the world, began to take form. Hypocrisy was like most death metal bands with the usual gory lyrics but what was surprising about their rise was the more than occasional song featuring lyrics of a paranormal nature. Specifically, lyrics having to do with harrowing visitations and abductions by aliens. It almost became the Hypocrisy calling card. This weirdo twist on death metal passed into the metal consciousness without so much as a second thought as other death metal bands embraced the idea. Plenty of bands were writing songs about unstoppable serial killers and zombie hordes eating people, but a corner of the death metal community celebrated tracks both brutal and melodic about an apocalypse at the hands of flying saucer men. Nobody did it better than Hypocrisy, though, and Dead Sky Dawning, an actual return to themes of alien visitations after a hiatus from this theme, tells the story of mankind’s total demise at the hands of an enemy in the sky. It’s a ballsy track.

Municipal Waste
Unleash The Bastards
from Hazardous Mutation

At some point in the early 90′s, thrash metal fell out of vogue as death and black metal dictated the future of metal’s extremes but in the last ten years or so, thrash has surfed a wave of nostalgia back into fashion and leading the way are thrash metal party masters, Municipal Waste. If they weren’t so fucking good at what they do, they’d seem like a novelty throwback that’s good for one album before breaking up.

Metal has a tendency to take itself seriously to a fatal degree. It’s not easy to sing a song like SATAN SPAWN!!!! THE CACODEMON!!! and be taken seriously but jokers like Glenn Benton are burning inverted crosses into their god damn foreheads, for crying out loud! In Norway a bunch of these guys committed serial arson and killed a couple of people. It’s nice to find a band like Municipal Waste who realize exactly how silly it all is and prefer to write songs about The Toxic Avenger. Not this song, though. Unleash The Bastards, in true thrash form, is another song about man against machine. This one is about killer robots. At some point, the people in control of, well, everyone, build a race of machines to keep those below them on the social food chain in line but the robots turn on their masters and kill them.

Gama Bomb
OCP
from Citizen Brain

After this I promise I’ll leave thrash alone. I’m sure you get the picture. These goofy guys in the sleeveless denim and the upturned baseball caps fucking love horror and sci-fi movies. It’s a staple of the scene. Most of these guys come from a similar background as me and I’m sure that’s why more than any kind of metal in the 80′s when I was a little metalhead, thrash had the most appeal. It was fucking loud, it was fucking fast, it served up a bleak social message and they constantly namedropped horror movies that I spent hours past midnight watching from age 12 on. Nobody in the current wave of thrash owns this vibe more than Northern Ireland’s Gama Bomb. With songs like Lunch Hall Food Brawl and Horny For Blood, it’s hard to top Municipal Waste in terms of foolishness but Gama Bomb succeeds and exceeds with flying colors. They get the thrash sound right but lyrically they’re in the ballpark with shit like New Eliminators of Atlantis BC, Apocalypse 1997 and In The Court of General Zod. No track qualifies for this list more than OCP, though. For obvious reasons. It takes a ballsy disregard for giving a fuck to write a song about Robocop and arrange it so the lyrics are all taken from the movie.

Gama Bomb also wrote a song about ninjas. Bitches leave.

Voivod
Tribal Convictions
from Dimension Hatross

Voivod are fucking genius, y’all. They began as your average thrash band from Quebec but with each LP they evolved into the most forward thinking metal band of their age. Voivod seemed to hit their peak with their album Nothingface but the release before it, Dimension Hatross is my personal favorite. Beginning with an album called Killing Technology, Voivod took to crafting concept albums featuring their ongoing character, The Voivod. On Dimension Hatross, Voivod has created a pocket universe with an atom smasher and uses it to move himself to this place to find a planet populated by warring factions representing ideologies of total, unrestrained freedom and complete dictatorial control. They all happen to be fairly primitive, though, and regard Voivod as a sort of god. They struggle against one another until the universe proves to be unstable and tears itself apart just after Voivod manages to escape.

Dimension Hatross is an intense, extremely experimental album. It toys with the model for what a heavy metal album can be. Compared to its contemporaries, it’s a fairly controlled and restrained experiment in metal. It has as much in common with Metallica as it does Pink Floyd. The lyrics are, at times, impenetrable and the structure of the music embraces weird tunings, keys and time signatures. It’s not as out there, musically, as Meshuggah but without Voivod there probably wouldn’t be a Meshuggah.

Megadeth
Hangar 18
from Rust In Peace

Rust In Peace was the album when it all seemed to come together for Megadeth. Dave Mustaine is an exceptionally skilled guitarist but the first three Megadeth albums, as good as they are, are mostly unfocused affairs and have not aged well. With Rust In Peace, the lineup was magic and everyone was moving in the same direction. Megadeth no longer felt like Mustaine’s personal vendetta against James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. It was a huge step toward maturity and some of the tracks reflected the band’s interest in science fiction and comic books. Also on this album is the album opener, Holy Wars… The Punishment Due, which concerns both the religious fighting in Northern Ireland and Marvel Comics’ The Punisher. Hangar 18, however, is all about the United States government’s alleged containment facility at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the contents therein. Namely, the recovered alien craft that crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

20 years on and this song still sounds fresh. This is not easy for a metal band to do. Particularly if your name is Megadeth. The first three albums sound like 80′s metal albums and, admittedly, much of Rust In Peace sounds like the time that it was produced in but this is such a blazing track with a number of killer solos and a great rhythm section. The lyrics concern a guided tour of the secret government facility that is Hangar 18. The person taking the tour clearly knows too much and that’s never a good thing.

Iron Maiden
The Final Frontier
from The Final Frontier

Man, you’d think Maiden would provide a menu of sci-fi metal tracks to choose from. I mean, they’ve made a career as metal gods out of highly imaginative fantasy themes for their entire catalog but I had a bitch of a time nailing one down that I wanted to talk about. Turns out, apart from To Tame A Land from their album, Piece of Mind, there’s just nothing else to talk about that’s science fiction and that song kind of sucks. Let me stop you before you go any further, though. Caught Somewhere In Time isn’t actually about time travel. Sorry, bro.

No, it took Maiden this long to crank out a track that had something to do with sci-fi. At the time of this writing, the latest album is The Final Frontier. Once Bruce Dickinson was back in the band after a few years away, learning to pilot commercial aircraft, learning to fight with swords and kicking out a series of pretty decent solo albums, I gave the band an unfair shake, insisting that the reunited Iron Maiden wasn’t the band that they used to be and that without any kind of progress on their part, they now sounded like the bands that they influenced but that’s not fair at all because for all that lack of progress that I give Maiden a hard time about, I love AC/DC for the same reasons. No. The new Maiden albums are all pretty good. As for the song, it’s barely sci-fi material, actually. The song concerns the final thoughts of an astronaut whose craft has drifted off course and is woefully out of reach of any kind of help. He’ll drift through space until he finally dies and as he does this, he reflects on his life, his only regret being that he can’t tell his family that he loves them one more time. Poignant, but did this heartfelt and probably very genuine sentiment need to be framed in such a strange setting?

Nocturnus
Arctic Crypt
from Thresholds

Death metal isn’t the kind of place you’re going to commonly find sci-fi inspired soundscapes and lyrics. It’s just not the right setting. The entire notion of death metal is a celebration of horror. It’s an often over the top circus of gore and vomit. Black metal and power metal got all the trappings of fantasy and thrash pretty much cornered the market on sci-fi as I’ve proven. Hypocrisy bucked those trends but even before they were getting carried away with songs about alien invasions wiping humanity out of the universe there was Nocturnus. Nocturnus managed to combine the horror of death metal with their own interests in the paranormal. When they weren’t writing songs about ancient aliens, they were writing songs about vengeful pyschics and poltergeists. If it sounds silly, it is.

Death metal gets a bad rap from people who don’t know any better. Often dismissed as unsophisticated crap, the truth about death metal is so much more than your average music listener thinks. Nocturnus, one of the more obscure Florida death bands had two absolutely brilliant guitarists capable of technically complex and seriously amazing playing. They also had a keyboardist, which was something that stayed out of extreme metal until black metal bands in Norway started using them to add texture to an otherwise frozen expression of metal. Arctic Crypt concerns the discovery of an ancient alien craft hidden in polar glaciers for ages until an earthquake breaks it open. The people who discover it open it and wind up unleashing the being inside which wreaks havoc on the Earth. I mean, yes. This is some sci-fi shit, but it wouldn’t be death metal if the song didn’t describe at least some kind of act of genocide. Right?

Blue Oyster Cult
Godzilla
from Spectres

Blue Oyster Cult were no strangers to the horrifying and the weird. While they’re a far cry from the hard rock and metal bands that came in their wake, they were among the first bands out there to point to genre media like comic books, horror movies and science fiction TV shows and base songs on these things. It just so happens that a certain song and an accompanying sketch from SNL made sure that everybody remembered them for Don’t Fear The Reaper. Then again, didn’t producer, Bruce Dickinson (played by Chrisopher Walken) tell them? More cowbell would ensure the song’s immortality! Truth is, Don’t Fear The Reaper was produced by Sandy Pearlman. It’s also a killer track.

Don’t Fear The Reaper dominates classic rock radio playlists for obvious reasons but from the same album is the hit song, Godzilla. I’ll give you three guesses what it’s about.

So there you have it. Ten unlikely tracks about science fiction themes from the world of heavy metal. If you want to check them out all in one place, plus a few more tracks that I didn’t mention here from the likes of Fear Factory, Deep Purple, Evile and In Flames, check out the 8tracks mix I put together for your listening pleasure.

7 Nov

Rescue the fading Style Wars outtakes footage!

Posted by Bryan White | Monday November 7, 2011 | News

I watch a lot of documentaries and I listen to a lot of hip hop. The New York style of the early 80′s and the wave of electro-funk that emerged in that time in that place are my particular cup of tea. It probably explains why I have such a soft spot for breaksploitation flicks like Beat Street and Breakin’ (even though that takes place in LA). Combine that love with my nerdy hipster tilt toward documentary and it should come as no surprise that my favorite doc of all time is Style Wars. Have you ever seen Style Wars? If not, I’m going to have to suggest you drop everything right now and dig up a copy. It shouldn’t be too hard to find. It was released in a sweet 2-disc package a couple of years ago and to my knowledge, it’s not out of print. It is, quite frankly, amazing.

Style Wars is a time capsule of New York City in the early 1980′s that captures street culture as we know it today in its infancy. It’s mostly about the artists and writers who pioneered the art of train graffiti. It gets up close and personal with the artists and you see them at work. It also spotlights the dance crews of the time as well as the musicians producing the hip hop and electro and shows their interconnectedness, exploring why it was such a vital movement and meant so much to the kids on the street at the time. It’s real. It’s raw. Art is this is abstract concept that so many people perceive as this high-culture thing that happens in posh galleries and art schools around the country but Style Wars shows that the truth is the exact opposite of this. The art in Style Wars is freely available during any ride around the city on a train. It comes from your average teenager. It’s confrontational and expresses very real sentiments as well as being something that’s very nice to look at. It’s the voice of the street.

When it was produced in 1981, the filmmakers shot 30 hours of footage that wound up getting cut down to 69 minutes for broadcast and while this is a white-hot 69 minutes of a now mythical age of New York City, the hours of unseen footage (some of it available as outtakes on the DVD) is just as fascinating. The film’s producer, Henry Chalfant wants to make this footage available in a supplemental DVD release but to do this he’s going to have to rescue that footage. With digital film technology, this is going to be possible but at a hefty price tag of $28,000! Naturally, he’s turned to the internet. Using the killer Kickstarter platform, Chalfant is appealing to the masses out there for help in making this project happen. Like all other Kickstarters, you get something when you chip in, so pop over to the Kickstarter page, see the footage, see the promo clip and throw Henry a few bucks, will ya? They need to raise $28,000 in 30 days and as of this writing, they have $4,000 wit 28 days to go. We can make this happen! The film is amazing and the entire story of Style Wars is dying to be told!

Donate to the Style Wars outtakes project now!

Need convincing? You can watch the doc here, courtesy of Pitchfork Media

7 Nov

The Innkeepers trailer: Looking good y’all!

Posted by Bryan White | | News

I really didn’t care for House of the Devil. I know. I can sense each of you clutching your pearls in horror. That flick was the darling of many a horror blogger in the run up to its general release when those of us not lucky enough to catch it early at a film fest and bask in the warm glow of hype finally got a chance to see what everyone was talking about. It just didn’t move me. Personally, I thought it wasted all of its potential on keeping its time in a bottle quality consistent as if we were really watching a movie made in the early 80′s. I understand that that’s what a lot of people liked best about it but I’ve seen enough of those movies that try to capture a particularly nostalgic character of our dear beloved horror genre. Ti West proved himself a capable filmmaker with House of the Devil but left me wondering if he could tell a quality story. With The Innkeepers, I’m hoping that he rights the ship and leaves me cold sweats.

This trailer seems to have all the right moves. Haunted house flicks seem to me to be the hardest sort of horror movie to do right because you have to take a measured approach to your filmmaking craft. Major Hollywood productions chasing ghostly spooks and creeps fare seem to botch the process every time, convinced that what we as a horror movie audience want to see is elaborate and grotesque monster make up. To a huge studio sinking millions of dollars into production and marketing, it doesn’t seem to make sense that phantom sounds and unexplained phenomena is enough to move ticket buyers in the general direction of the box office but when you’re working independently and budget appropriations for future projects don’t hinge on a strong opening weekend, you have a certain freedom to let your imagination run wild and make the kind of picture that you want. My personal favorite haunted house movie is Michael Winner’s ‘The Sentinel’, a seriously spooky flick from the man who brought you ‘Death Wish’. It’s a total fluke and it seems like West and I share a particular fondness for that one seeing as how West’s latest feature seems to capture The Sentinel’s vibe without pointing directly at it and namechecking it. Sure, you have some shock shots of gruesome ghosts but it seems to also let your imagination run wild with some spooky ammo courtesy of the power of suggestion and a quality audio track. Check it below and let me know what you think. I had a feeling we were seeing a new film talent rise out of Ti West but House of the Devil wasn’t it. I suspect that The Innkeepers may be the movie that makes him a household name.

24 Oct

Based On A True Story: The Black Dahlia

Posted by Bryan White | Monday October 24, 2011 | Based On A True Story

The Black Dahlia isn’t really a horror movie at all. If anything, the movie is an example of neo-noir. Based on James Elroy’s novelization of the murder and the investigation surrounding it, the novel and the movie become a weird sort of fusion of fiction and history. Unsurprisingly, this sort of thing is called Historical Fiction and Elroy specializes in it. He has a series of novels which take place in the world that we live in, involving people you’ve heard of, often portraying these people in a seriously unflattering light because that’s what this guy does best. In American Tabloid, Jimmy Hoffa is portrayed as a murderous psychopath and numerous real-life gangsters are outed as gay (and also murderous). The Kennedy brothers are depicted as ruthless in their crusade against organized crime (which was probably true) and Jack Kennedy’s reputation as a pussy hound is exaggerated for dramatic effect. Elroy paints a picture of Americana that is almost unbearably sleazy, where every man hates women, everybody at the top of the financial food chain is a hopeless drug addict, the cops are all corrupt and incompetent and the denizens of the organized crime underworld could give the world’s most brutal serial killers a run for their money. Calling James Elroy pessimistic is a grotesque understatement. His novel about the Black Dahlia Murder is no different. It exists in this world and plays by those rules.

What makes this movie qualify for the Based On A True Story series, apart from its basis in fact is that the original story of the murder of Elizabeth Short lives in a creepy namespace. The movie may be an example of seedy crime noir but the actual story and the ensuing investigation of the murder have turned over the rock that the dark side of Hollywood lives under. The case remains unsolved and will likely never be cleared. On top of that, the case, though never conclusively linked to any other murders, had all the markings of a single murder in a series, aka serial murder. If ever there was a cautionary tale about moving to Hollywood with stars in your eyes, this is it.

Elizabeth Short, by all accounts was a good girl in spite of a difficult life. Born on the East Coast, she was born and lived most of her short life in Medford, Massachusetts. She moved out west to visit an old boyfriend that she had met while living in Florida. While there, she was determined to make it in the movies. While in California during the days leading up to her murder, Short had made a reputation for herself as a bit loose. She partied constantly, worked little and seemed to be with a different guy every night. Her preference was for service men but the last man to see her alive was Robert Manley, a married salesman who was most likely trying to get her into bed. Tossed out of her last place of resident, the home of a sympathetic family whose hospitality Elizabeth took advantage of, Manley picked her up and dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel. Following this, Elizabeth Short was never seen alive again. She disappeared on January 9th, 1947. It is believed that she was murdered on July 15th. Her whereabouts during that time are still unknown. Naturally, Manley was a suspect in the murder but he was cleared after a couple of life detector tests and an alibi that checked out. But the murder…

The body of Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot. Her body was left nude and she had been bisected at the waist and drained of blood. Her face had been slashed from ear to ear and her body cleaned and posed deliberately. The cause of death was blood loss. She was most likely alive when her face was slashed but may have been knocked unconscious by blunt force trauma to the head. Immediately, smelling blood, the LA press leaped into action, painting the story up in lurid colors and giving her the inexplicable nickname, The Black Dahlia. This high profile murder brought the lunatics out of the woodwork, too, giving the police tremendous amounts of bogus information and some actual leads that led the investigation in many directions. The most interesting yet least likely is my favorite: The investigation of George Hodel. LAPD homicide detective, Steve Hodel, framed up a theory that his father, a wealthy physician, had killed Elizabeth Short and that the murder may have been a part of decadent Hollywood Babylon style sex and drug orgies held by the sadistic senior Hodel. George Hodel, accused of molesting his daughter by his daughter was cleared of any charges and Steve Hodel’s book, The Black Dahlia Avenger, seems to be nothing more than a smear campaign against a father that he harbors a tremendous amount of resentment towards. In spite of this suspicious motivation, Steve Hodel’s case against his father is compelling and also links him to the Cleveland Lipstick Murders in a way that is hard to dismiss. It also implicates artist and photographer, Man Ray, in the murder, claiming that some of his provocative and disturbing photos of women was evidence of a sexual and sadistic mean streak and that Ray and Hodel were close friends. This has yet to be proven.

What’s more, in the wake of the murder, as the headlines began to cool and the press began to look for something new and seedy to fixate on, Elizabeth’s killer, identifying themselves as The Black Dahlia Avenger, began to contact the press, taunting them and the police and offering up evidence that would prove that they killed her as long as she stayed in the papers.

In total over two dozen suspects have been offered up to the police and the cops were unable to build a case against any of them. The murder of Elizabeth Short was clearly a ritualized act and suggests that she was not the first. The care taken in the presentation of the body and the skills necessary to cut her body in half as it had been would have required some serious skills with a knife, these qualities of the case suggest a killer with a specific set of skills and tools. The details of this case, the victim, the suspects, the cops, the press, the setting, it all sets people’s imaginations on fire. The case will likely never be solved but it won’t be leaving the public consciousness any time soon.

22 Oct

Based On A True Story: Primeval

Posted by Bryan White | Saturday October 22, 2011 | Based On A True Story

The inspiration for this entire series came from a massive marketing push a few years ago where every horror movie released was ‘based on a true story’ in whatever capacity that meant. Sometimes the movies were fairly accurate portrayals of some horrific moment in history, but the reality of the situation was that most of the movies released at this time were remakes of movies from the 70′s and 80′s that were loosely based on a true story. So you do the math. The most evil of the bunch, the most misleading in it marketing was easily this one: Primeval. The original ads were so completely full of shit that it makes me wonder why they even made the movie in the first place.

Primeval billed itself as based on the true story of the most prolific serial killer in the world. A killer that had killed as many as 300 people in Africa. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How did this one get by me? If there was a murderer out there who had that many confirmed kills, even if the body count was some kind of overblown figure, surely I would have known about it. A cursory examination of the Wikipedia article about Primeval confirmed my worst suspicions.

Primeval tells the story of Gustave, the marketing’s serial killer with a body count of 300 kills. What it failed to mention is that Gustave isn’t a serial killer. He’s not even a person. Gustave is a giant crocodile that makes its home on the banks of the Ruzizi river in Burundi. Yeah. Crocodile. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

What makes Gustave special enough to have a horror movie made about him with a criminally misleading marketing campaign is that he’s the largest of his kind. Unusually so, as a matter ofact. Gustave is 20 feet long and weighs a ton. He’s also 60 years old. Usually crocodiles hunt smaller species of animals that wander too close to their habitat like fish and antelope. Typically, humans aren’t on the menu. We’re just not in the crocodile food chain. Gustave, however, is far too big to be effective against smaller, faster prey. In order to survive, he has to shift up his habits. Larger species that fall into his jaws tend to be hippopotamus and wildebeest. Also people. 300, allegedly.

There’s really no way to accurately track how many people have been attacked and eaten by Gustave but over the years, herpetologists and the people of Burundi, who are positively petrified of this crocodile, have tracked as many as 300. Attempts to capture or kill Gustave have been launched by hunters over the years but every attempt is thwarted or it turns out that the hunters can’t even find a 20 foot long, one ton croc out in wild.

The hunt began by official counts in 1998. Gustave is still loose in Burundi.

21 Oct

Based On A True Story: Rope

Posted by Bryan White | Friday October 21, 2011 | Based On A True Story

Never let it be said that I don’t have class up the ass. I write about low-brow bullshit and trash like it’s something to be savored. Like you have to check the legs, bouquet and let it breathe before taking in a movie like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-rama. I pride myself on my low class sensibilities when it comes to movies but I like to class things up every now and then and pretend that I’m all intellectual and shit. This series has been pretty morbid from the beginning and this doesn’t mean that it’s about to get any lighter because Rope is based on some seriously dark shit that actually happened but in the context of Alfred Hitchcock, it doesn’t seem as nasty as, say, Andrei Chikatilo.

Hitchcock had a seriously dark side evident in everything he did. He pioneered in commodities like dread when he hit with Rebecca and then wrote the blue print for slashers with Psycho, which was also based on a true story. As a matter of fact, I already touched on it early on in the Based On A True Story series. I did Ed Gein when I talked about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On top of being a completely twisted British guy, Hitchcock also had some seriously wild ideas about how to make a movie. Before Rope was a film, it was a play in three acts where the action was continuous from scene to scene. Hitchcock aimed to replicate this quality in his adaptation but there’s a problem when you shoot on 35mm film. A single magazine of film takes nine minutes of footage so every nine minutes you have to switch out mags. Ultimately, through clever manipulation of scenery, Hitch was able to dupe audiences into thinking that he had filmed a feature-length movie in a single continuous take. It’s cool. You can tell where the cuts are, but the effort was novel. No one had done it before. These days, setting up a single take shot or a single-take feature like La Casa Muda is a challenge but the advantage of video is that you can shoot and shoot and shoot until you run out of disk space. Rope is a gem in this respect. It’s also based on a seriously fucking tragic crime, so fall in. You’re about to get schooled.

The Leopold and Loeb murder was committed in 1924 yet was so baffling in its motive that it continues to find its way into the popular consciousness even today. Mad Men will drop a passing reference to it and most of its audience is left scratching its head but those of us who have tasked ourselves personally with cataloging the world history of murder know. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, a pair of teenage Nietzche fans considered themselves walking examples of Nietzche’s superman archetype. Too badass for everyone else, perfect in every way. Though this sounds like a typical teenage line of bullshit, the pair were, in fact, brilliant minds. We’re talking gifted at birth with superior intellect. Bored with everything, the pair began planning and executing petty crimes until it occurred to them that they were probably capable of committing the perfect crime, a murder that no one would ever be able to figure out.

The pair plotted to kidnap Bobby Franks, son of a Chicago millionaire, murder him, dispose of the body and collect the ransom money without being caught and on May 21, 1924, they put their plan into motion by luring Franks, a neighbor of Loeb’s into their rented car. Once in the car, Franks was murdered with a chisel. They then stripped the body and dumped the clothes by the roadside. To make identification of the body difficult, the poured hydrochloric acid on it and dumped the body in a culvert. After dinner, they called Franks’ mother to tell her that he had been kidnapped and then mailed a ransom note. Then things began to go wrong.

The body was discovered sooner than they thought it would be and Loeb had lost his glasses near the dump site. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing were it not for the fact that his glasses were extremely unique to the tune of there only being three pairs of them in existence and record of Loeb owning them were on file. This led investigator’s straight to him and even though Leopold and Loeb had been careful to destroy all evidence that could link them to the murder, their alibi began to fray. Inconsistencies in their stories broke, immediately, and it wasn’t long before they had both confessed to the killing but turned on each other as to who actually killed the boy. It’s likely that Leopold, who was witnessed in the back of the car with Bobby Franks was the killer while Loeb was the wheel man.

Psychological analysis at the trial of Leopold and Loeb classified them in an unusual class of murderers. Though clearly a pair of sociopaths, neither was motivated by sexual urges as serial killers tend to be and even though ransom was on the menu, both came from affluent backgrounds with no need for money. The pair were thrill killers, a class of murderer typified by younger perps who simply kill at random for the sheer exhilaration of the act. Murder for petty reasons like jealousy and money is shitty enough as it is and the horror of serial murder is a potent blend but thrill killers are particularly tragic in that there is no motive for the waste of life apart from the fleeting rush of adrenaline they get from the act. Pathetic.

At the time of the trial, Leopold and Loeb because of their age and their wealthy backgrounds put them in the media spotlight and the case became the 20′s equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial. It was a massive media circus that lit up every paper in the United States like a lurid tabloid. Unlike O.J., though the Leopold and Loeb trial was scarcely longer than 12 hours as their defense convinced them to turn in a guilty plea. The prosecution had a case against them that could have put them in the electric chair. Their pleas saved their lives and they wound up sent to Joliet for life for murder one plus 99 years for the kidnapping. While in prison in 1936, Richard Loeb was attacked by an inmate wielding a razor and died from his wounds. After 33 years in prison, in 1958, Nathan Leopold would be paroled from prison.

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