Friday Links: Bad Apples, Baked Apples, and The Duke of Burgundy

Last week's Friday Links had to be canceled due to multiple family engagements, so I'm making up for it with an extra special Friday Links, just for you.  Yes, you.  Let's get after it:

• It's been all Bad Apples all the time this week at Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "So it’s my turn to confess. I have had this on my Kindle since it was released last year and have never gotten around to reading it. I am slapping the back of my hand as I type. Know how difficult that is?"  Read on to find out!
• Continuing our apples theme, Ghost Hunting Theories showed us some very neat things to do with everyone's favorite fall fruit.
• The Horror!? delved into early 80's nostalgia by discussing the slasher film My Bloody Valentine: "George Mihalka’s Canadian slasher is one of the handful of entries in the sub-genre I truly love, so it’s no surprise finally getting around to watching the uncut version of the film doesn’t change much about my opinion."
• Sean Eaton analyzed Edmond Hamilton's The Earth-Brain at his always readable, always trenchant R'lyeh Tribune: "In The Earth-Brain, adventurer Clark Landon has become a human epicenter for unusual earthquakes and seismic activity wherever he travels in the world.  He avoids the interiors of tall buildings and keeps far away from mountains to avoid avalanches.  Cities in Newfoundland, Norway, Russia, Egypt, Italy and other places are ruined as he travels through them, and thousands die amidst the rubble.  He is wracked by guilt and terror—cursed for an act of sacrilege committed a couple of years before."
  
• At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, Alex Davis tackled the horrific film Aftermath: "The visuals leave little to the imagination, but one thing that is effective in the first half of the movie – and even more so in the second – is the use of sound. The music in the film is used very sparingly, so what we mostly have is a funereal silence (not a word of dialogue spoken by any of the characters) punctuated by the crunching of bone, the squelching removal of organs and the insidious sound of saws and knives cutting through flesh."
• The Ringmaster's Realm reviewed Wyrmwood - Road of the Dead: "Recently, I have been staying far away from the zombie genre, as many of the films that have been coming out lately seem tired and played out. Fortunately, I am glad that I picked this one, because it took an interesting route outside of the box and created something rather original." (Interested readers can check out my review of Wyrmwood here.)
• At Zombos' Closet of Horror, Zombos presented the Jungle Woman pressbook, which demands your attention.  Note the name of the actress playing the titular character.
• The bizarre movie The Duke of Burgundy was an interesting topic of discussion at The House of Self-Indulgence: "I liked how the relationship in this film was two women, as opposed to a man and a woman. What I mean is, I'm glad it wasn't a man dominating a woman; I can't stand maledom. And while it's true, I do prefer femdom. The relationship depicted in this film can't really be classified as "femdom," as it doesn't properly identify who the dominate party is, and both parties are women."
• Here, I talked about a very good bad guy and described that careful face people sometimes put on.

Illustration by Earl Geier for Call of Cthulhu's Blood Brothers 2 supplement.

Friday Links: Carcosa, Donnie Darko, and The Time of the Hawklords

As the weekend hurtles toward us, let's take a long look back on the days that led up to it:

• John Kenneth Muir tackled Donnie Darko in a must-read piece: "In seeing his world end, however, Donnie experiences an epiphany.  He comes to finally recognize that 'destruction is a form of creation,' to quote the film.  His ending -- his death -- creates a new beginning for his family, his girlfriend, and the whole of the human race.  He laughs madly immediately preceding his death, because only at the end does he recognize God’s plan for him."
• Sean Eaton took us on a brief, disturbing trip to Carcosa in his invaluable, incredible R'lyeh Tribune: "Interestingly, The King in Yellow is not a history book or a procedural manual like its brothers on the shelf.  It is a dramatic work, a play. Its creator Robert W. Chambers beguiles his readers with snatches of dialogue and song, but never provides enough of the material to cause insanity or suicide in the reader—only curiosity.  His marvelous fictional work of the same name, published in 1895, is a collection of stories linked thematically around the effects of reading The King in Yellow."
  
• The pressbook for Nightmare was one of the many interesting things to come out of Zombos' Closet.
• Nev Murray reviewed Caroline Mitchell's Don't Turn Around at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "The addition of the paranormal element is a fantastic twist that keeps you glued to the story because you never really know what’s going to happen next. Jennifer doesn’t so why should you? You know the way you can guess things when the main character is still in the dark and you might scream at them to see what you see? Not with this baby you won’t. I knew who the ultimate villain in the story was from very early on. No I didn’t. I thought I did then when it became clear it wasn’t them, I finally had it sussed."  (No word on whether Der Kommissar's in town or not.)
• The Time of the Hawklords was a featured dish at Breakfast in the Ruins: "Given that Michael Moorcock knocked about with Hawkwind quite a bit on the Ladbroke Grove freak-scene of the early ‘70s (contributing spoken word recitations and slightly more nebulous ‘concepts’ to their ‘Space Ritual’ and ‘Warrior At The Edge of Time’ albums, amongst other things), it must have seemed splendidly inevitable that the prolific scribe should choose to immortalise his rock n’ roll mates in fiction at some point. However, the co-billing here of Michael Butterworth (a latter-day New Worlds contributor who went on to co-found the controversial Manchester imprint Savoy Books), together with the book’s absence from most Moorcock bibliographies, tells a slightly different story."
• At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Alex Davis watched Guinea Pig: The Devil's Experiment so you don't have to: "It was particularly made infamous when, in 1991, the second movie in the series, Flower of Flesh and Blood, was investigated by the FBI as potentially being a genuine snuff film. The sixth film in the series, Devil Woman Doctor, was also found in the collection of serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, which only added to the movies' dark reputation."
• Here, I reviewed the zombie apocalypse film Wyrmwood and pointed you to a trio of brand-new reviews of The Blessed Man and the Witch.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan, taken from Call of Cthulhu's Masks of Nyarlathotep supplement.

Two Minute Movie Review: Wyrmwood

How many more zombie apocalypse movies do we need?

At least one more.  Wyrmwood is it.

Spoilers abound. Read at your own peril.

It's fun, it's loud, it's gory, it's funny, it's violent.  The budget might be low, but you wouldn't know it to watch the film.  The cast does a great job with what they've been given, and even the more mediocre performances were leavened by great lines.

The movie is not without its flaws, but they're easily overlooked.  A big example is the roving experiment truck: if the zombie apocalypse just occurred, how did they get up and running so quickly?

Brooke was a frightening character from beginning to end: physically strong, mentally tough, clever.  The filmmakers were smart, however, by not making her a woman who acts like a man to survive.

Barry did fine; if you're looking for a lot of character depth in a zombie apocalypse film, you're likely going to be disappointed.  Still, he pulled off his role without flaw.

As is usually the case in films like this, the best, most interesting characters never survive; it's how we are made to feel bad about their exit from the film.  Benny was a worthy comedic character, though his delivery at times seemed a little flat.  Frank elicited pathos just before his end, which worked.

The two most interesting concepts: zombies as petrol and Brooke's ability to control zombies, were weird but somehow fit, probably because it's Australia and we automatically assume that an Aussie film is going to have its own brand of strangeness.

Compare this movie to The Walking Dead, with its endless, heavy, humorless drumbeat of loss and despair and interpersonal conflict.  I'd rather watch a zombie apocalypse show like Wyrmwood that doesn't take itself quite as seriously and includes some fantastical elements.

Four out of five stars.

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.