Friday Links: Wherewolves, Vermiphobia, and the Hollow Earth

While you thank your deity of choice that Friday has arrived, do click on the following links to catch up on what's gone on in the world of the bizarre and horrific:

• Joel Harley reviewed Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead at The Horror Review Hole: "There's few make genre movies quite as interesting as those of the Aussies. Their weird filmmaking prowess is such that there's a whole documentary dedicated to the exploits of Ozploitation (the itself-rather-fantastic Not Quite Hollywood). The Aussies have been relatively quiet in recent years, but they're back on the map with the critically and fanboy acclaimed zombie effort Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead."
• At the insightful, invaluable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton squirmed into vermiphobia: "There is a tendency in horror fiction to depict the simpler, less evolved creature as more reptilian in form, giving it eyes and teeth for example, which it does not possess in nature.  Doing this reduces the ‘otherness’ of the worm and makes it more recognizable as a predator."  It's a great piece, full of information.
• John Kenneth Muir analyzed The Road through the eyes of a parent: "Instead, The Road very explicitly -- and very emotionally -- concerns the bonds of family, and in particular the relationship between a loving father (Viggo Mortenson) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as the duo attempts to navigate a planetary graveyard; one populated by hungry vultures, in the form of scavenging human cannibals. The boy's mother (Charlize Theron) has taken her own life rather than exist in such a world, and in his quiet moments, the boy fantasizes about joining her. The child doesn't really understand death, and wonders, when his father dies, if he will see him again; or if he can take him with him."
• Nev Murray reviewed Wherewolves at, where else, his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "The book starts at 100mph. The first ten percent is a fast flowing chase with two people fighting for their lives to get away from an unseen evil, hell bent on ripping them to pieces. The next seventy percent is spent going through the lives of the school kids and getting them ready for the trip. It’s not until eighty percent through the story that it takes off again and leaves you pretty breathless with a rip roaring race to the finish."  Whither the wherewolves, indeed.
• Crimson Quill reviewed the golden oldie I Spit on Your Grave at Rivers of Grue: "Originally titled Day of The Woman, Zarchi’s film sparked an outcry upon its release and ended up branded as immoral, repugnant, and many other expletives all of which suggested that it was exploitative trash of the algae division. With a moniker such as I Spit on Your Grave it was asking for trouble and, even now, there is a stigma attached to this film which prevents many from giving it the time of day, although Steven R. Monroe’s remake helped to fill in the blanks for modern audiences and performed well enough to bankroll a sequel."
• Kit Power kicked off Ginger Nuts of Horror's essay series The Path to the Scarlet Gospels with an analysis of Clive Barker's The Last Illusion: "The opening is instructive in this regard, seeding very early the concept of the real magician hiding in plain view – performing acts of spectacular magic on stage, so that people know there must be a trick to it. That’s a neat concept in its own right, but in the context of the story as a whole, it's downright audacious – like the magician, Barker himself is giving you most of the information up front, trusting that you'll assume along with the fictional audience of the show that it's an illusion, misdirection – when actually, the whole story is right there in the intro. It's stunningly assured stuff."
• At Ghost Hunting Theories, we learned about Olaf Jansen's Hollow Earth voyage: "Olaf Jansen was a Norwegian who gave an account of his voyage to this Hollow Earth. Hollow Earth is a long-held theory by some that there is a whole world within our world. This hearty Norwegian in the 1800s had a father and uncle who encouraged him into ship owning and eventually he was able to sell the business, move to the Midwest of American in 1901, he moved on to Los Angeles. He spent the rest of his life drawing maps of new lands they found."

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's The Great Old Ones supplement.