Wife and I caught Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince today. We’ve both read the books, which makes watching the movie a little less interesting. Still, it was something to to do on a summer afternoon. Our local critic noticed the large teen soap-opera content, as Harry, Ron and Hermione work through youthful entanglements. The rest of the movie is largely given over to providing background, or the search for background. There are not nearly so many action scenes as in the previous movies, though the few they have are pretty high quality. But four or five action scenes in an almost three-hour movie ain’t much. This movie seems to see its role as setting up the audience for the two Deathly Hallows films, and it is a success as far as that goes. As an entertainment, though, it’s kind of weak.

I’ve never been much of a Clive Barker fan, so I never saw “Lord of Illusions” when it came out. It’s been playing on our cable though, so we gave it a try. Despite Leonard Maltin’s half-hearted endorsement (“Intelligent thriller [. . .] better than the usual genre fare, but it’s thinly plotted, and condescends slightly to its audience” it was entertaining enough and I never saw any condescension.

It stars “Quantum Jump”-er and “Star Trek Enterprise” captain Scott Bakula as a out-of-his league gumshoe and a very hot, young Famke Janssen (Jean Grey of “X-Men” ) as the damsel in distress. The plot, which involves cults and real magic, has several Howardian elements, which makes me wonder if Barker is a fan.

At the start, two cultists murder a mystic, and one of them has filed teeth (not that that necessarily owes anything to Howard’s “Shadows in Zamboula” — but the other one is the creepier. This is a prelude to the main plot, which involves the PI being hired to check into whatever problem is haunting an illusionist, who then apparently dies in a stage accident. He has been hired by the sultry wife/widow whom he promptly bangs. What the illusionist feared is a man who has been dead for over a decade –a man who taught him that magic was real. In a very creepy sequence with echoes of Acheron, this dead sorcerer is brought back to life by his faithful cult.

For our P.I. hero, who seems not too far removed from Howard’s River Street, handgun fire is a hearty incantation, but in the end, it is the borrowed power of a formerly subordinate mage (the illusionist, not actually dead after all, but now getting there) who tried and failed to stem the black master’s evil — as in “People of the Black Circle” — that lets our braver and more determined hero throw the sorcerer back down to hell, in a sequence that relies on flashy special effects to the detriment of good storytelling. Still and all, a very interesting film.

“Before Conan, there was Kane, a Puritan swordsman on a restless search for justice.”

That’s the lead-in from Nick Owchar’s, “Man in black: Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane,” published this May 24th in his monthly column for the Los Angeles Times. Owchar, deputy book editor for the LA Times, turns in a quite respectable piece on the Man From Devonshire (and his creator). His column, “The Siren’s Call” (a title I truly dig), was a joy and revelation once I (very recently) discovered it. Dear readers, brethren, kindred and fellow travellers, Ol’ Nick is one of us. Peruse his previous columns (future blog-fodder, for me) and tell me it ain’t so. (Continue reading this post)

I’ll say this: I have never liked Jerry Lewis movies. With back-handed apologies to the French, I have never found it appropriate to laugh at some poor shmuck who is indequate, inept, and pitiful, and knows it. (Of course, if he imagines himself brilliant and capable, like Inspector Closeau, then it’s funny.)

Kröd Mändoon is rather like one of those Jerry Lewis characters, it seems. So to me the very premises puts me off. Sean Maguire’s (Meet the Spartans) earnest, pleading hero is the sword and sorcery Charlie Brown, always having the football pulled away. I never thought he was a funny character either. Most of the poor reception Krod got from Howard fans seems to be because of the poor taste, the pure offensiveness of some of its humor. “Truly awful” was one succint response. And a lot of it is truly offensive. But I can accept offensive humor in such shows as Reno 911! and the long-running South Park, because these shows are funny. Unfortunately, for the most part, Krod is simply not funny.

You have Krod in a relationship with a woman whose sexual appetites he cannot begin to fill. That is funny how? You have this shaman who cannot cast spells, and a pig-man who cannot shoot straight — well, OK, that last might be a little funny. You have the flaming gay hispanic – please, if you can’t do it as well as Hank Azaria’s Agador/Spartacus in “The Birdcage“, why bother?

To castigate this show as sophomoric is to degrade sophomores everwhere. Still, there are a few bright spots. India de Beaufort is one steaming hottie, especially when stripped down to chainmail bra and the hottest of hot pants, as in episode four. And then there’s the villians.

British improv comedian Matt Lucas as Dungalor is a hoot. While he rates Dungalor as somewhere between Pol Pot and Blofeld on a scale of villianny, I see him as Baron Harkonnen on drugs. Alex MacQueen, playing his henchman Barnabas as a refugee from the staff of Slithering, is a perfect foil. When they are onscreen, the show is funny. They even succeed in making the plague funny.

I really wanted to like this show. I thought a sword and sorcery farce was something with potential. But aside from the villians, there’s really nothing much here to enjoy.

It’s called The Hunt for Gollum, and there’s some trailers up for it right now at their website. The entire forty-minute film is set to debut on May 3.

This is the kind of thing I’m intrigued by on many levels, as a guy who has often harbored dreams of doing something similar. Think about it: they used a couple of HD prosumer video cameras in the $3000-$5000 range, some extra equipment to achieve a cinematic look (SGPro depth of field adapter, SteadiCams, computer color correction and visual effects), and a lot of donated acting, prop, and makeup help. Putting aside for a moment my loathing of the Lord of the Rings films and watching the trailer, it seems they did a good job of pressing up against true feature quality, with the usual exceptions common to fan films: somewhat subpar acting, like kids playing dress-up, along with poor choices of lenses and angles in the action scenes (too many wide lenses and not enough telephoto, odd bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, and camera skews with no motivation or coherence) which seem to give away that it was shot on a video camera. But the long shots and general quality of the images are quite stunning, the British locations magnificent, and even the Orcs seem to mirror those in the Hollywood version, at least in the little clips I saw of them in the trailers.

The main thing I am always struck by when seeing these sorts of films (there are a lot of good Star Wars ones out there, too), is that people would spend so much time and effort aping a copyrighted world, when with a few small adjustments and a good script they could make a similarly inspired and magnificent film based in a world of their own making, which would allow them to make money off of their effort, use it as a demo reel to get a job making a more expensive feature set in the same fictional universe, or any number of other options. But I suppose that a lot of people helped solely because it wasn’t just any fantasy story but one that aped Jackson’s LotR vision. I personally can’t stand that vision — that grey and drab world of misty forests peopled by unshowered Rangers and hippie elves accompanied by a soundtrack of ghostly Enya-esque wails. I think it’s beyond silly for the orchestra to boom and the camera to swoop around every time there’s a nice view or a mountain. But these guys have clearly made a great effort, achieving enough to prove yet again that independent films of this nature can and will become as cool as Hollywood fare someday soon. Amazing new cameras and computers are coming down the pike, stuff that is going to make a good homemade video every bit as stunning as most Hollywood films, even effects-laden ones. When that happens, I wonder how many Howard stories are going to get filmed? That little Solomon Kane one that made the rounds a few years back might only be the humble beginning of a big low-budget push to get Howard’s work on screen.

Those of us who remember the agonizing wait between new issues of the Watchmen limited series have at last endured through an even more momentous wait – the famed graphic novel has finally been released as a movie. Of course, many elements of the story had to be trimmed or chopped, but as a Cliff Notes version, it’s a very faithful adaptation, for the most part. Like the makers of the so-called Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though they are doing great right up to the end, they feel they have to have at least one really significant change. Don’t ask me why.

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I’m a little surprised that last year’s big-budget Sword & Sorcery epic hasn’t seen any commentary in the Howardian blogosphere, at least not in the forums I visit. Sure, Uwe Boll’s videogame spin-off In the Name of the King was a massive flop, returning around 5% of its $60 million budget on its not-even-in-the-top-ten opening weekend, apparently failing to even draw the game’s fans. (It’s world wide gross is still only $12.5 million or so.) And it undoubtedly deserved to be a flop, being a derivative, muddled and terribly cast example of how not to make a fantasy film — still, it has its moments. Like The Sword and the Sorceror, a sentimental favorite of some older Howard fans, it lends itself naturally to MST3K-style mockery. The director even picked up a Razzie for his efforts, though the film itself lost out to The Love Guru as worst picture. So why even watch this film? Well. . ..

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Here at TC Central a schism wider than the Hyrkanian steppes has long separated me from site-founder Leo Grin and Silver-Key–wielder Brian Murphy. Is John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian Li’ Abner versus the Moonies, as Karl Edward Wagner discerned so many years ago, or the most stirring sword-and-sorcery epic ever filmed? Well now [redacted], who posts as “Taranaich” at the Conan.com REH Forum, has graciously given us permission to run El Ingenioso Bàrbaro Rey Konahn de Simaria, an attempt at reconciling the Howard and Milius Conans that far surpasses the L. Sprague and Catherine Crook de Camp CtB novelization. Mr. [redacted] is clearly the greatest Scotsman since Sean Connery, and Gordon Brown should knight him forthwith:

The film starts in the northern mountains of Brythunia. There, a tiny backwards village lies, far away from the rest of the world. The Simarians are a comfy folk living on the northern border, originally founded by a small community of luddites shunning the civilized wonders of Brythunia for a more “honest” rural life. Using distorted and piecemeal information gathered from drunk adventurers and senile folklorists, they model themselves after the Cimmerians, though their society leaves a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy. They worship Krumm, a mashup of Cimmerian and Nordic mythology whitewashed into a benevolent deity to suit their drippy ideals. Not actually knowing how to make proper swords, they use simple casting techniques to create attractive but impractical replicas: since they rarely meet other people, they never actually test their weapons in combat. This is the tribe of Konahn. Young Konahn has a happy childhood with his nice dad and hot mother, with no bandits or dangerous beasts to contend with, and no feudal lords to oppress them.

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Part One: Hypersensitive, Not Hyperborean

Part Two: Cry ‘Havoc!’ and Let Slip the Hounds of Tindalos

In certain surroundings our entire being is made of eyes, every atom dilates to witness the haunting of the universe.

Thomas Ligotti, “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”

A good critical overview or survey is courteously coercive in that we feel obligated to impose some sort of order and consistency on our own opinions. Having spent the better part of two weeks thinking about S. T. Joshi’s The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos — better because the alternative was redrafting various cover letters yet again to try and suppress their ghostly, single-song soundtrack of “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” — I’d like to follow up Part One, which mostly engaged with Joshi’s comments on Robert E. Howard’s Mythos work, and Part Two, a wide-ranging look at Rise and Fall‘s treatment of “everyone else,” with subjective and selective suggestions about Mythos-mining. Those who can, do, and those who can’t blog; I’m about as qualified to offer such suggestions as were the walking loyalty oaths and newly-hatched ideologues who found themselves brattily supervising entire Iraqi ministries or provinces during the heady summer of 2003. But if nothing else, this Part Three has been a pretext for some enjoyable re-reading and re-watching.

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“He was always a devil,” snarled old Job. “[. . .] The black dog! The fiend from Purgatory’s pits!”
“Well, we’ll soon see if he’s safe in his tomb,” said Conrad. “Ready, O’Donnell?”
“Ready,” I answered, strapping on my holstered .45. Conrad laughed.
“Can’t forget your Texas raising, can you?” He bantered. “Think you might be called on to shoot a ghost?”
“Well, you can’t tell,” I answered. “I don’t like to go out at night without it.”
“Guns are useless against a vampire,” said Job, fidgeting. . .
— Robert E. Howard, The Dwellers Under the Tombs

Not if you’ve got the right load, apparently. In the long-running CW series Supernatural, brothers Dean and Sam Winchester — I’m sure the name intentionally invokes both the gun-maker and the nation’s most famous haunted mansion — are quick to pull out their street-sweeper shotguns and blast away at all kinds of things ghostly and inhuman, usually with a load of rock salt. This is a play on the old idea of salt as a purifying substance, an idea common to pagan and older Roman Catholic rituals, but adds highly to the dramatic action quotient of the show. In other scenes, the brothers use salt to form a protective barrier that evil spirits cannot cross. This actually has precedent as supernatural lore, which is not always the case in this show. Later on, another famous gun-maker, Samuel Colt, becomes the source of two important plotlines, one involving a special gun that will kill vampires — and anything else.

We recently picked up the DVDs for Season One and Season Two, and watched them over the space of two weekends and a few rare Tennessee snow days. It probably worked out to a malevolent spirit being dissolved by shotgun blasts every 16-18 hours or so — never got tired of the effect, though. Sometimes, the beings they face don’t care for the touch of iron, so they use iron loads as well. Another effect used very commonly in the show is for the ghosts to move in jerky stop-motion cuts, an effect used in quite a few horror movies these days — I believe it started with Japanese movies like Ringu and The Grudge. I think the reason this effect is unsettling is that our primate ancestors, being hunters and often hunted, had to devote a lot of the brain to instantaneous vector analysis — the same skills we use nowadays to catch a football or safely navigate a left turn. It is against the norm that we are hard-wired to expect for something to move from one point to another without crossing the space between — it freaks our vector-based defenses. Against such an enemy — one moving through HPL’s oft-invoked “non-Euclidean geometry” — “no can defense,” like the nonpareil crane kick from The Karate Kid.

Like The X-Files and The Night Stalker before it, the show has a smorgasbord of monsters, demons, ghoulies and ghastlies to entertain. The brothers are on the road constantly, covering uncanny USA coast to coast. Due to the age of Dean’s traveling cassette collection, the show has an 80’s soundtrack ranging from punk to pre-Silver-Bullet-Band Bob Seger to Southern mullet rock, with the latter predominating.

I’m surprised Steve Tompkin’s feet weren’t burning with eagerness — a little Blackwoods humor there — to tell you about the Supernatural episode “Wendigo” when he mentioned the show in his post about the Fear Itself episode “Skin and Bones,” which I’ve been hoping to catch ever since. Other good stand-alone episodes include “Scarecrow”, about a fertility god who requires annual sacrifices, “The Benders,” about the family of cannibal hillbillies, and “Something Wicked” which features an Eastern European witch called a “shtriga” — a word strikingly similar to “Stregoi-“, the first part of Howard’s Stregoicavar, the “Witch-town” of “The Black Stone.” The writers on this show are obvious fan-boys and girls, judging from all the movie paradigms they pilfer, from haunted asylums to invisible hook-handed killers, to creepy little girls to killer clowns, just to name a few.

But while all the episodes were good, what I enjoyed best were those which dealt with the overlying story arc that ran through both seasons, finally culminating in a two-part finale. It’s a very dark theme of long-sought vengeance against the demon that killed the mother when the younger brother, Sam, was still an infant — a quest that has consumed their father and made him a night-stalking “hunter” who insists on them following in his footsteps.

Since they seem to be making it up as they go along, sometimes the supernatural “lore” is shaky. When asked about the significance of the number 40 in “Phantom Traveller,” Dean replies curtly, “Biblical numerology. It means death.” Um, not exactly. The reason 40, as in “40 days and 40 nights”, appears so frequently in the Bible is that it is a Hebrew idiom, best translated as “an indeterminate, but pretty long time.” I think it really means something like “I counted all my fingers and toes, and you counted all your fingers and toes, and then we gave up counting.”

Sometimes, it’s almost brilliant, though, as in “What Is, and What Should Never Be.” Here the writers reconcile the Western idea of a genie as a powerful being that can grant any wish with the Near Eastern idea of a djinn as a deadly evil spirit. They do this by having the djinn induce a fantasy in its victim that makes him believe his wishes have come true, while it feeds on his life-force ultimately causing his demise. I’d be more impressed if I didn’t suspect the idea was taken from Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything” in which Superman is stuck in a fantasy based on his heart’s desire by a sorcerous parasitic plant called the Black Mercy. In Superman’s case, he is normal and living on a Krypton which never exploded — in Dean’s case, he is normal and living in a world where his mother never died, and he never became a ghostbuster. At any rate, it’s a very poignant episode and shows the tensions within the characters very well.

Like Josh Whedon’s Angel and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the show deftly flits between humor, horror, action and angst, and it’s well worth the time spent. Since Robert E. Howard’s ghostbuster stories get about as much respect as O’Donnell’s decision to bring along his .45 — which does turn out to be a lifesaver when the “dwellers” emerge — it’s good to see stories in a similar vein making good on the small screen.