Friday Links: Super Metroid, Dust of the Dead, and Automata

It's May Day!  It also happens to be Friday.  What happened in horror this week?

• At This Is Horror, Jason Hicks reviewed the movie Automata: "It seems that as time goes on it is becoming increasingly rare to come across a science fiction film that is fresh and filled with new ideas. For every film that is inventive in vision and storytelling, such as 2009’s District 9, there seems to be a thousand more that hold little substance and appear happy to rehash visual and story ideas that have already been explored to much better effect. Unfortunately, Automata from director Gabe Ibáñez is one of the later."
• Nev Murray reviewed Dust of the Dead at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "A zombie apocalypse tale with a difference. That’s how I, and many others see this book. Not your normal run of the mill “zombies running around eating everything in their path” type book. Refreshing. Opportunities to make this an epic, new zombie genre possibly? It has all the ingredients for it. Sadly for me it just doesn’t deliver."
• Too Much Horror Fiction brought us the 1987 horror novel Spectre by Stephen Laws: "Not quite a coming-of-age story, Spectre introduces the reader to a group of inseparable friends from Byker, a blue-collar town in Newcastle in the northeast of England. Although they grew up together, and dubbed themselves the Byker Chapter, Laws doesn’t spend too much time detailing their childhoods like, say, Stephen King; he flashbacks mainly on their university years a decade ago. It’s the present, as they enter their 30s, that Laws is concerned with. The horrific death of one of the Chapter opens the novel, as Phil Stuart languishes drunkenly in his flat, TV and radio blaring to vanquish the fear and depression that has plagued him for weeks."
• Nekrogoblikon's album Heavy Meta got a positive review at Terrorphoria: "You've no doubt already been swept up in the hysteria of goblin metal that was unleashed back in 2006. Classic records like Goblin Island and Stench, along with the Power EP captured the hearts and minds and guts of the public. To be a fan of Nekrogoblikon is to acknowledge your love of quality art."
• George Lea at Ginger Nuts of Horror reached into the Wayback Machine to bring us an updated review of the video game Super Metroid: "Go back and play it again. Look at it through adult eyes. The title screen alone borrows from a number of fairly evident sources (not least of which is Ridley Scott's Alien, which originally inspired the Metroid series) all of which are iconic of horror cinema. The camera panning over a darkened space, bodies littering the floor, the music chiming rhythmically, almost emulating a heartbeat, the chirruping of something unseen, something alien...panning out, revealing the creature at the heart of the carnage, as iconic in video gaming as the “xenomorph” of the Alien franchise is to cinema: The Metroid."
• At Ghost Hunting Theories, we learned about a (purported) UFO crash in 1897: "Most people have heard about the Roswell supposed alien UFO crash of 1947, and the majority would say that was the first crash. Not so. There was a reported crash, a few years before the Wright Brothers even started the first flight. The 1897 alien crash defies what we thought we knew about man's flight-oriented way of seeing alien visitation. These folks were not used to anyone ever being up in the air except the occasional dirigible in big cities for special occasions. And, what the citizens reported was very vivid an a bit chilling when compared with Roswell."
• Sean Eaton celebrated his two year blogiversary at his must-be-named-but-must-not-be-missed R'lyeh Tribune: "The R’lyeh Tribune will continue to explore the work of Lovecraft and his colleagues, and the importance of their contribution to the field of weird fiction.  As long as Kaleidoscope Books in Ann Arbor continues to operate, and the health and vigor of its proprietor is sustained—God bless and keep him!—I will have access to a deep vein of pulp horror, science fiction and fantasy."
• Here, I pointed you to two reviews I wrote for Ginger Nuts of Horror: AnotherDimension Magazine Issue #0 and Neon Phantoms.  I also wrote a review of the movie The Babadook.

Illustration by Lynell L. McAdams, taken from Call of Cthulhu's Cthulhu Now supplement.