Eye On Movies: "Star Trek Beyond" and "It Follows"

 I hear Idris Elba is in this . . . I'm still looking.

I’ve always been much more Star Trek than Star Wars. Star Trek is tastier to my cerebellum and sense of humor while Star Wars is too gooey and humorless. And whatever missteps taken in the Star Trek cosmos, nothing compares with the static, sludgy awfulness of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

Still I’m not a real fan by any stretch. I have by no means seen every episode and outlay of Star Trek: The Entire Universe and because I’m not a fanboy, I found Star Trek Beyond, the thirteenth feature film in the series, to be a bland experience. It’s typical of today’s genre films—too loud, too hurried, too afraid of losing its young target audience to their smart phones. I hate smart phone usage in theaters as much as anyone but toward the end of Star Trek Beyond, I was wishing I had one.

As you might know—in case you’ve been off camping in the wilderness, as you should be— the latest Star Trek incarnation is a continuation of the prequels to the original series with new young actors impersonating the Beloved Venerable Ones.

The latest episode involves the Enterprise zooming off to a distant nebula on a rescue mission. Unsurprisingly, the mission turns out to be a trap laid by Krall, an embittered monster alien played by Idris Elba, an excellent, compelling performer who is wasted for most the film’s two hours behind a mask. (A lot of this going around: see poor Tom Hardy in the last Batman.)

Trapped on a distant planet, the Enterprise crew must find and fight their way out and that, of course, is what they do, with no real surprises along the way. Even in 3D, the effects weren’t that impressive to me, the colors seeming pallid and milky, like watercolors.

So, for the most part were the performers. Of them, only Zachary Quinto, as Spock, and Karl Urban, as McCoy, capture the flavor of the original actors with their Bud and Lou act. However, the script forces Spock to have an emotional life—a romance with Uhuru— there by destroying the very core of who Spock is! To me that doesn’t count as a genuine surprise so much as a pandering contrivance, behind which may lurk the stealth hand of marketing.

Urban as McCoy deserves a special medal for bravery, since (I’m cruising for a bruising here) he’s taken on a role first played by one of the worst actors in the history of the medium (not only am I mocking fandom, I’m also speaking ill of the dead . . . better close my Twitter account now.)

And Chris Pine, as Captain Kirk, once again proves there’s no replacement for his Shatnerness, Kirk the First. Here, we once again face the limits of feature film reboots of old beloved TV series. Those shows depended enormously on their casts, good and bad actors alike, for their appeal. No matter how you bloat the budget and pack it with special effects, without William Shatner (or Patrick Stewart) in the captain’s chair, Star Trek Beyond remains docked in space.

 

It Follows from 2014, drew my eye because of word that it was comparable to the most artful horror films of the early 2000s (Session 9, The Ring, The Babadook and The Witch make my list). It promised those subtle, unsettling scares, poetic atmospherics and uncanny glimpses of great and sinister forces, instead of the confrontational splatter preferred by many horror fans. Unfortunately, despite its good intentions. It Follows didn’t lead me anywhere much.

The setup is certainly clever. Riffing off of 1980s horror films, story concerns sex gone wrong, as a young girl’s backseat hookup leads to her contracting an STD—Sexually Transmitted Demon, that is—who proceeds to make her life hell. The only way she can rid herself of the thing is by passing it on by getting it on with someone else. Her choice is limited to her close circle of friends. She’s a nice girl and so stranger hookups are, it seems, out of the question.

The demon is effectively handled for the most part—seen at a distance or in shadows, or invisible, it wears many masks. Toward the end, though, inconsistency sets in. Further, despite a couple good boos, its quarry is less than interesting, with one promising sequence is brought to an abrupt end. None of the characters are particularly memorable or sympathetic, despite earnest performances.

It Follows quotes extensively from other films—in addition to other teen horror films, there’s a badly contrived nod to the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur classic Cat People. At this point, it develops a parodic postmodern flavor that further distances the viewer. It Follows is more of a movie about horror movies than an absorbing and disturbing experience.

Thoughts on "A Kind of Anger" by Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler wrote A Kind of Anger in 1964, after the success of his comic Edgar-winning The Light of Day. It’s a more serious novel with a somewhat different character than we’ve seen before from this master spy novelist.

Usually, the Ambler man is an innocent who finds himself tonsil-deep in trouble. In A Kind of Anger, the one in trouble is Piet Maas, a Dutch journalist living in Paris. Like Arthur Abdel Simpson in Light of Day, Piet is anything but an innocent. Unlike Simpson though, he’s not a befuddled pawn, but a disturbed and broken man, recovering from a suicide attempt and nervous breakdown following a wash of business and personal failures.

Piet’s on the outs with just about everybody, working as a stringer for an international weekly magazine called The World Reporter. One night his bosses hand him a story that everyone else has given up on. Some weeks before, a Kurdish-Iraqi official in exile was murdered in the south of France. His murderers got away, as did Lucia, his beautiful mistress, who drove off in the night wearing only a bikini.

The trail has run cold, the police are losing interest—the victim was just a foreigner after all--and most of the Reporter’s reporters have become bored with pursuing this dead-end story. So the publisher and editor hand the story to Piet, ordering him to find the mistress and expecting him to fail so they can fire him.

But Piet turns out to be more resourceful than they expect. He heads to the French Riviera persistently following various leads—among them a sinister British property developer and his glamorous wife—until he tracks down Lucia.

It turns out Lucia fled the murder scene clutching some very important documents wanted by two very important and dangerous groups in both Iraq and Kurdistan. Piet immediately see there’s gold in them there papers, so he and Lucia join forces to whip up a scheme to sell them to both parties and make out like bandits.

Aside from Ambler’s interesting take on Iraqi-Kurdish politics of the mid-1960s (it seems all so far away compared to now), this is, unfortunately, a dull bit of intrigue from the master. The core of the conflict takes place in the Mideast, but setting the action entirely at a remove in the south of France keeps the stakes from ever amounting to much. The plotting is sometimes clever, but beyond that there doesn’t seem to be much at stake in this minor effort by a major writer.

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield’s latest novel, Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up will appear later this year. His screenplay, Now Speaks the Devil has just appeared as an e-book. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all four are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, and you can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Thoughts on "Interior Darkness" by Peter Straub

For many readers, Peter Straub is to horror fiction what John le Carré is to spy fiction: the genre’s greatest, most ambitious, writer, one who deepens and enriches an often-disdained literature with talent, skill and daring vision. Straub takes the horror genre’s old tropes and enlivens them, turns them inside out and upside down without ever demeaning them. He not only makes them seem new, he makes them new. Peter Straub’s eighteen novels may vary, inevitably, in their success, but his energy, intelligence, and ambition are always on display.

When I finished reading his classic Ghost Story in 1980, I knew I’d actually read a good book--enormously entertaining but written in a high literary style, its roots deep in American and world literature. It worked on multiple levels, as college professors like to say. At the time, I firmly believed in that ten-foot high, three-foot thick wall between art and entertainment, between literature and genre fiction. Ghost Story cracked that wall, made it crumble. I was driven to press it into the hands of everyone I knew, especially sniffy reactionary skeptics: “Oh, that stuff? That’s junk!”

But they were wrong then. And they’re wrong now.

There is one area, however, where I dissent from Straub’s other admirers. It’s commonly said among horror fans that the best stuff is found in short fiction. I believe that can be said of Straub’s work: Most of his best work is in his novellas and stories.

To demonstrate my thesis, I happily point you to his latest collection, Interior Darkness: Selected Stories.

Interior Darkness is a gift, a sampler not only for Straub’s longtime admirers, but also for readers who may be new to—or still suspicious of—the horror genre.

Interior Darkness draws from all of Straub’s collections over the years, starting with Houses Without Doors (1991) and ending with The Juniper Tree and Other Stories (2010).

I read most of the stories when they first appeared. The second and third time through brought more rewards, delight streaming after delight. Though I knew them, many felt new to me, bursting and bristling with surprises I’d missed the first time through.

Interior Darkness opens with the classic “Blue Rose,” a hidden room in the Straub literary universe that began with his award-winning suspense novel Koko. It’s a harrowing tale of sibling cruelty that is both wrenching and beautiful as Straub leads us through the surreal hallways of family abuse, all the way up to a very grim attic.

Also exceptional is “The Juniper Tree,” about a young boy in the 1950s who encounters evil in the local movie house while trying escape a miserable home life, a kind of No Exit scenario.

“The Buffalo Hunter” (probably my favorite) is a rich compelling portrait of a lonely man’s mind crumbling away as the border between the pulp novels he reads and the dreary world he lives in starts melting away, causing him to sink into decadent infantilism, involving, among many strange things, baby bottles.

“A Short Guide to the City” another longtime favorite, remains one of the most formally daring stories I’ve ever read as Straub refashions a typical Chamber of Commerce tour guide, turning it from boosterism into a brooding atmospheric portrait a Midwestern city sinking into decline as it suffers under the terror of a serial killer.

Too much is going on in Interior Darkness to capture it all in this pixillated transitory space. Straub writes in a strong high literary style, rich with metaphors, allusions and elaborate, often mystifying, scenarios. The tendency toward sentimentality I find in some of his novels is happily, to me at least, missing here.

Among the strangest tales is “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a very black comedy about a double team of professional hit men whose ambitions extend beyond doing their job and collecting their fee. As one of their clients discovers to his ruin, there really is no getting away with murder. It’s the funniest story in the collection.

Straub draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including Henry James (for whom he’s had a lifelong passion.) “Ashputtle” seems inspired, in part, by Charlotte Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Music is also a major fount of inspiration, especially blues and jazz, captured in such excellent tales as “Pork Pie Hat” and “Little Red’s Tango,” both dealing with lost young men seeking to plumb the mysteries of creative passion, both their own and that of the mysterious musicians they love.

Straub’s portrayal of the spirit world—the place we glimpse only through the cracks—is more allusive and indirect than most other horror writers. The Beyond rarely shows its scorched face, but peers from under the thin ice upon which we all skate. Sometimes it eats its characters from within, enveloping them in smoldering decadence and bitter isolation. (Bunting, the protagonist in “The Buffalo Hunter” seems especially gripped by these forces.)

Of course, not all the stories succeed. “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” a Lovecraftian tale set on in the Amazon Basin remains static and unsatisfying despite its humid jungle atmosphere, and several “bridge” tales seem to have little effect.

But these small matters fail to dent the overall power of this collection. This is a worthy monument to Peter Straub’s work. It is so far and by far, the best new book I’ve read this year.

Thomas Burchfield’s latest novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up, due later this year. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and the upcoming Dracula: A Tale of Power. (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work online at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.