Film Review—Crimson Peak by Guillermo del Toro

Edith Cushing believes in ghosts. Her belief was made certain after her mother visited her after she passed, giving her the warning to “beware of Crimson Peak”. Years later, she has completed the manuscript to her first novel, a ghost story, seeing herself as something of a Mary Shelley, although a potential publisher would prefer works of a more romantic sort. Edith’s father, a successful industrialist, is visited by English baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe, who is visiting America with his sister Lucille, looking for investment in a device that will effectively mine the blood red clay upon which their ancestral home, Allerdale Hall, sits. Not taken with the prototype or the air of privilege that surrounds Sharpe, Cushing refuses to invest. However, Edith is slowly becoming enchanted by the baronet, and soon finds herself his bride and accompanying him to live in Allerdale Hall, which in the winter is known as Crimson Peak, were dark secrets are discovered and threaten the new bride.

The story is less a frightening tale than a homage to several horror traditions. It makes direct references to the likes of Mary Shelley and Arthur Conan Doyle, an author as adept at creating tales of suspense as he is at inventing a super sleuth.  But its strongest link is with the Gothic fiction tradition, particularly Edgar Allan Poe. Contrasting the decaying, inescapable past that is England with the hope for promise that is American, as well as featuring an old, ancestral house made up of as much history and sorrow as it is mortar and succumbing to the weight of its trouble (ala “The Fall of the House of Usher”), the film is clearly enamoured with this rich trove of literature, and knows how to use its tropes. But director Guillermo del Toro takes yet another horror tradition, from the very medium of Crimson Peak itself. With its rich colour palette (especially blood reds, emerald greens, and deep blues), as well as the dense melancholic haze of its atmosphere, and its melodramatic tone, it is as much a tribute to the 1950s and 1960s film adaptations of Poe’s work, as well as the Hammer Horror films. Yes, this does mean much of the film is overwrought, and the links with the aforementioned film traditions may possess some creaks of campiness, but it nonetheless delivers a rich, mesmerising development of those traditions.

While its frights may lack the chills one may expect, Crimson Peak’s rich tone, striking visuals, and astute use of its varied influences will leave many very pleased with its macabre tale.
Andreas

Film Review—Martyrs by Pascal Laugier

A young girl, Lucie Jurin, is found wondering around an abandoned industrial estate. Her body shows signs of malnutrition and physical abuse and police discover that she has been held captive and ritually abused, but her captors and their motives are never discerned. Lucie spends the next 15 years trying to adjust to the outside world and to make sense of her ordeal while being haunted by a ghoulish creature. She eventually tracts down those who held her captive and exacts her revenge, much to the shock of Anna Assaoui, her one friend who has been trying to help her. Anna tries to cover up Lucie's actions, but in the process discovers more about Lucie's captors and the horror that will soon be unleashed upon her.

The film is certainly brutal, and its ending, with its ambiguous nihilism, does not ease its impact, and for many this will immediately remove it from their viewing list. But the violence is not from some voyeuristic viciousness. It forms the heart of the narrative, where pain provides an avenue to something less profane and approaching the sacred, yet having an unbearable cost on the victim and those sanctioning the torture. What allows the film to achieve this is what is surprising of a film this brutal: its restraint. This is especially in the last act. Where cheaper films would see it as an opportunity to unleash a litany of sadistic rites of ever escalating severity, Martyrs establishes a routine of beatings and deprivations. It is testament to the much neglected role of repetition in art, seeing the violence become an ordeal and not a spectacle, to which the audience is forced to bear uncomfortable witness and share in the guilt of the tormentors.

Uncompromising yet executed with admirable restraint, Martyrs is not an indulgence in violence but a meditation on its consequences, both for the victims and the audience.
Andreas

Film Review - World War Z By Director Marc Forster

World War Z stars Brad Pitt. This movie is a non-stop action, horror. UN employee Gerry Lane travels the world for answers to stop the zombie pandemic which is dominating governments and conquering armies all over the world.

Gerry has to work fast to stop the down fall of humanity in its entirety, its a heavy weight to have on one persons shoulders. Filled with non stop-action and horror, it will keep you on the edge of your seat at times. Anne

Film Review—The Babadook by Jennifer Kent

Amelia (Essie Davis), a widow, tries to live with her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) who has behavioural issues. Hyperactive, he fears monsters, a fear that has real world effects on both mother and son. One night she lets him choose his bedtime story and he selects Mister Babadook. In the pages is a terrifying bogeyman, who warns “the more you deny/ the stronger I get”. Having to deal with the lurking grief of her husband’s death as well as Samuel’s increasingly severe behaviour, Amelia becomes more disturbed by her son’s focus on The Babadook and the real threat it begins to pose.

The film is disconcerting throughout, presenting a world that resembles ours but with the strange proportions of a Grimm’s fairy-tale. This is heightened by the fairy-tale like Mister Babadook, reminiscent of old children’s tales like the Great, Long, Red-legged Scissor Man, that both fascinate and frighten children and adults. The colour palate of the film is true to its story, where we get hints of emotion that slowly build, rather than raucous shifts in mood, or the overused and ineffective quite-quiet-LOUD copout that passes for ‘technique’ in so many horror films. The spectre of the Babadook and Amelia’s grief are fantastically twined within the cold and claustrophobic tinge that stains every shot and conjures the evocative interplay of light and shadow. The result is a subtle story where even the happy ending is marred.

Understated and unsettling, The Babadook is not just horror cinema at its finest, but a strangely beautiful look at grief.
Andreas

Film Review—Evil Dead 2

Sam Raimi’s second horror classic. Ash and Linda go for a romantic vacation to a secluded cabin. There they discover a book bound in human skin and find the recorded notes of the archaeologist who discovered the terrifying tome known as the Necronomicon Ex Mortis. The recording recites incantations that release evil spirits that possess both the living and recently deceased. Linda falls prey to these spirits, and Ash is left to try and vanquish the evil.

It may sound like a tasteless cliché, and worse, the sequel of a tasteless cliché. But it was with the first Evil Dead that the “cabin in the woods” horror film had its genesis, and the true genius of Evil Dead 2 is that it is not a simple continuation of events of the previous film. It is an extension of the first film while at the same time being a parody of it and other horror films. It teeters the fine line between horror and comedy, scaring you immediately after you finished a hysterical cackle.

Few films can boast the distinction of being both a masterpiece of the genre and at the same time a loving satire of it, but Evil Dead 2 can proudly hold its severed head high in that camp.
Andreas

Want to watch Evil Dead 2 right now? You can with IndieFlix on the Library Website. IndieFlix provides award winning independent films, cult favourites and out right classics that can all be watched wherever and whenever you want. To start enjoying these movies all you need to do is go to the Camden Library IndieFlix page, create your RBdigital account, and release your inner movie lover.

Book Review—Breakfast with the Borgias by DBC Pierre

A novella from Hammer Horror (yes, the British film company that brought you those wonderful 60s and 70s horror films) and written by DBC Pierre. Ariel Panek is a mathematician on route to an A.I. conference in Amsterdam when his plane is landed due to dense fog. His accommodation is a rundown guesthouse on the Essex coast. Modern comforts like wifi and phone reception are not present, and as company Ariel has the guesthouse proprietors and a family that would make the Manson family look functional.

The tale adopts many clichés of the horror genre with wonderful enthusiasm. The foggy, decaying setting, the ghoulish proprietors, the creaky, empty hallways, the bizarre and evermore disquieting family. These characteristics are used lovingly and with brilliant humour. Pierre off sets these tropes with highly detailed tech speak and convincingly woven particulars of A.I. theoretics. Like Ariel, you are regularly reminded that it is the modern world while at the same time being isolated from it.

Both reminiscent and fresh, Breakfast with the Borgias will have your spine tingling while you are grinning from ear to ear.
Andreas

Speculative Fiction....more than the undead.

It can be easy to dismiss speculative fiction as purely asteroids and "zombie lit" and while there is an element of that (and that is OK and very enjoyable!), there is oh so much more.

Speculative fiction encompasses not just the bio-engineering fuelled post apocalyptic nightmare that is found in Justin Cronin's The Passage but also the laugh out laugh universe of Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Asimov's robot riddled futures.

As a genre it is one I have returned to many times. In early high school while other young teenage girls were enjoying the Sweet Valley High Series (Bubblegum pulp) I was enamoured with Kelleher's Taronga, a post apocalyptic adventure set in Sydney's Zoo where the main character can communicate telepathically (thankyou to my high school English teacher for that one).

Later high school, saw my introduction to The Handmaids Tale, Atwoods exploration of female subjagation at the hands of a theocracy. Not only did it set of the biggest exam hissyfit in my academic life (I walked out as I hadn't prepared properly and didn't understand the question), it asked a 16 year old to examine doctorine, equal rights and the wisdom of using butter as moisturiser.


Over the ensuing decades (of which there have been a couple), I have enjoyed so many different sc-fi, paranormal, alternate history (some of the many genre's that seem to fit within this one) that it hard not to list them all. Sara Douglass and her twists on Greek mythology and time travel (The Troy Game) kept me thrilled right to the last page. Suzanne Collins Hunger Games made me cry (and quite possibly neglect my children "Shhhh, mummy's reading") and the Time Traveller's Wife was simply one of the best pieces of writing I have come across (just don't get me started on the movie).

Too many people presume that these books aren't literary, or are just for children. Other's think they should "grown up and read a proper book". I support wide reading.  I support reading outside your comfort zone. i also support reading whatever you like, and with so many different themes in speculative fiction, there is alot to like.

So give me vampires, zombies, robots and cyborgs, take me to worlds where war never happens or is never ending and let me indulge in my fantasies of what the world would be like if time travel was possible.
And don't ever tell me (or your kids, spouse or next door neighbour) , that what I read isn't educational, interesting or literary.

(Oh, and if you do enjoy "zombie lit" check out our blog supporting the Narella Zombie Apocalypse.! )

Narellan Zombie Apocalypse  - April 13 2013

Stacey

Oh the horror! A booklist

Nestled in our sci-fi and fantasy reads are tales to dread and terrify. Easily located by the horror sticker (it literally says horror, you won't miss it), these reads cover the horros classics, modern supernatural and pyschological fiction and all sorts of spine-tingling dreadfulness. Why not try these out for size?

Aliens by Jim Pipe

A book of horrors by Stephen King

The Dark Destroyer by John Glasby

Ghost Moon by Heather Graham

The Mall by S.L. Grey

Demon from the Dark by Kresley Cole

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Of love and evil: the song of the seraphim by Anne Rice

The Haunting of James Hastings by Christopher Ransom

Audition by Ryu Murakami

This is proclaimed to be the novel behind the "acclaimed cult movie'' which I haven't seen. A Japanese documentary maker, Aoyama, hasn't dated since his wife died seven years before and he is urged by his son and friend to seek a new wife. He advertises for actresses for a film he doesn't intend to make so he can look over many women with the characteristics he seeks. When Yamasaki Asami enters the room, "Aoyama had a very distinct sensation that something extraordinary was happening all around him. It was like being the millionth visitor to an amusement park, suddenly bathed in spotlights and a rain of balloons and surrounded with microphones and flashing cameras." When she spoke "it was a voice that poured into your ears and oozed down the nerves to the nape of your neck - neither high-pitched nor deep nor dusky, but round and smooth and crystalline". Beguiled by her beauty and intrigued by her troubled past, he ignores the warning signs and rushes headlong into a steamy relationship. Aoyama is a decent man getting though life the best he can but Asami-san is playing by different rules and she wants to be the only person in his life.
This novel is beautifully translated from Japanese by Ralph McCarthy. It is a short novel, lyrically descriptive, explicitly sexual and shockingly violent. It is truly said that you should be careful what you wish for!
Wendy