Captain Clegg, or, Night Creatures (1962)

This is a strange film to talk about, if only because it's a Hammer film that only pretends to be a horror film. The US title of Night Creatures , the presence of Peter Cushing and the opening scenes suggests another Hammer period horror piece.  But it seems like an attempt for Hammer to move beyond the horror genre, an attempt that had little success...

We start off in 1776 on Captain Clegg's ship, where his bosun is reading off the punishment of a crewmember (Milton Reid) who apparently raped Captain Clegg's wife, for which crime the man will have his ears sliced off, his tongue cut out and marooned with no food or water on a deserted island. Did I mention we only saw the Captain from behind and in shadow?

Almost immediately we jump to 1792, to the Romney Marshes, where an old geezer (Sydney Bromley) has made the mistake of taking a late night walk. Unfortunately, a bunch of ghostly, skeletal horseman (watched over by a scarecrow with human eyes!) have also decided to go out tonight and frighten the man to death.

The next day, Captain Collier (Patrick Allen) and about a dozen British sailors show up in Romney Marshes to investigate a smuggling ring. They've timed their visit so that the villagers are in church and won't have time to hide their smuggled French alcohol. However, the normally verbose Reverend Dr. Blyss (Peter Cushing) decides to cut his sermon short and gives a signal to certain churchgoers to leave early. It looks like Captain Collier might be up against more than the normal crude smuggling operation. On the other hand, Captain Collier brought along a certain tongueless, ear-less gent with a good memory of old comrade.

As you can imagine from that description above, Captain Clegg is more of a crime thriller with horror touches. If I had to be that annoying high concept movie pitch guy, I'd suggest The Untouchables meets Tombs of the Blind Dead. The story is very loosely based on Dr. Syn by Russell Thorndike, which was also the basis for the 1937 film Dr. Syn and the 1962 Disney tv special (!) The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. The character is also referenced in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels.

I can easily see why Hammer would make this film. It looks like horror, but allows them to move into less heavily exploited territory and explore beyond the normal horror pantheon.

And the movie is quite fun. Cushing does a good job of jumping between the poses of the goodhearted Reverend Blyss and the colder, more pragmatic Captain Clegg, without making it easy for the viewer to decide which one is the "true" man. Allen is also fascinating as an iron-willed naval officer who can be as vicious, if not more so, than his quarry. Oliver Reed shows up as the male ingenue and manages to find a little depth to an under-written character.  The "marsh ghost" costumes are creepy and effective while remaining credible as homemade outfits.

On the other hand, Clegg doesn't really come together. The cat-and-mouse game between Allen and Cushing is well done, but too much of the movie is about the sailors and smugglers sneaking around rural England.  It's pretty easy to guess at Cushing's former identity early on, so there is no mystery. And while Oliver Reed does a good job with what he has, he barely registers as a character for the first half of the film and he doesn't get to do that much afterwards. And the "ghosts" only show up twice for a few minutes each time.

I wouldn't be surprised if horror fans left disappointed and no one else showed up. When Hammer films are discussed in books or websites, Clegg gets left out (even when someone will go so far as to cover Dracula AD 1972!). If anything, it seems like the story would do better now that Pirates of the Carribean has opened the door for pirate/thriller hybrids, although the supernatural elements would need to be seriously ramped up.

Thematically, the movie keeps raising ideas like the way the government regulation is more likely to hurt common people than help or the games people play with identity or the secrets hidden beneath the surface of idyllic rural life and then casting them away to focus on an uninteresting mystery.  I certainly didn't expect a fifteen minute speech on Milton Friedman or John Keegan, but there were certainly relationships and plot points which would have delved deeper and that got rushed through or ignored.

Jesus was no zombie, God was no necromancer

Okay, I have no idea if anyone finds my MBotF liveblogging interesting, but this post is just using that as a starting point. So bear with me and I'll be in broader territory soon enough...

Right now in Toll the Hounds, there is a lot of to do over a newly created God called the Redeemer. A few books back, a human soldier basically took all the sins of one of the undead demihuman races upon himself, died in the process and was reborn as a good.

However, since this is a fantasy novel, filled with cruel, distant, vengeful, whimsical or semi-retired gods, some of the characters are wondering what sort of god takes all his followers' burdens upon himself without demanding anything of them.

This is a weird development, since the universe these characters exist in is unrelentingly pagan in outlook. A few people get a pleasant afterlife, but a lot of them (including some of our heroes) end up as ghosts, or chained to an endless rolling wagon pulled by the souls of the dead or utterly annihilated from existence (even in a metaphysical sense). Just like the tragedy of King Lear is worsened by the fact that, in pagan England, Lear and Cordelia won't even face a better fate in the afterlife, so much of the death and destruction in the Malazan Book of the Fallen becomes more powerful. 

This is also a strange step because when I think of sword and sorcery or epic fantasy, there is either no religion or a bunch of pagan religions that might superficially resemble modern day faiths (but only superficially).

I wonder how much of this is down to the influence of Tolkien. After all, despite his deeply held faith, he refused to inject Christianity into Lord of the Rings (or at least overtly). Contrast this to C.S. Lewis, his contemporary and sometimes friend, who has Santa Claus show up in Narnia to accompany Thundercats Jesus. [I'm sorry, I think Lewis is a enjoyable writer and I have fond memories of the Narnia Chronicles, but only a child would find Aslan a subtle stand-in for Jesus].

I'm also sure that some of this is fallout from the 80s, when anything that smacked of darkness and magic (heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons) was accused of satanism. I doubt that it was only religious parents that felt this way (even some agnostic or mildly religious families probably thought Ozzy Osbourne and Gary Gygax were encouraging suicide or the occult) but you merely have to surf the RPG blogosphere for five minutes to hear stories about church ladies taking Keep on the Shadowfell away from high schoolers. And as for metal (or punk or anything that wasn't "She Loves You") ...just watch a couple Behind the Music segments on Ozzy or Judas Priest, or listen to Jello Biafra's monologues on the PMRC.

I think it's pretty apparent that people suffered scorn from other sources than adults (parents, church leaders, teachers) for their hobbies, but bullies or girlfriends or peers can't actively keep you from playing a game/reading/listening to music. I also think that this is why so many people involved in speculative fiction or RPGs or alternative/metal/punk are dismissive of religion in general. Their development as adults and fights for independence are tied up in what they see as a struggle against religion. There's nothing like over-bearing, un-Christianlike Christians for creating overbearing, contemptous atheists/agnostics (and vice versa, I'm sure). 

And frankly, I think it has hurt both sides, poisoning discussion, turning bright and creative people against their faiths, and depriving lonely and misunderstood people of a place that is supposed to be a shelter for the lonely and misunderstood. 

I know I didn't feel the sting of this so much, personally. I didn't get into RPGs until college and my parents were fine with me checking out whatever books I wanted from the adult section at the age of 10 (including Stranger in a Strange Land). I have had conversations about the music I listen to and (weirdly enough) the Simpsons, but they've usually worked out well. *

It probably also helped that I was Catholic and our church (i.e. St. Francis of Assisi in NC) was not obsessed with the Bible as a literal Word of God.  I get the impression that all the Evangelical churches that obsess about the Earth being created in six days forget the fact that the Bible is full of metaphors, allegories and parables. 

More later, probably...

*I still remember getting Nas' Hip Hop is Dead and Sweeney Todd: The Original Cast Recording when I was home for Christmas a year ago. I was listening to Nas in my old bedrom when my mother came in to ask me something. She immediately said something along the lines of, "I can't believe you like that". I put in Sweeney Todd and she was fine with that.  Once again, Nas album about rap moving beyond drugs, violence and acquisitiveness = no. Musical about cannibalism, murder, and rape that suggests the world as a charnel house untouched by God = yes. The medium is the message, I guess.

Annihilate this week...of comics

Urgh... such a disappointing week of comics. A lot of stories where everyone is going through the motions and not really delivering. Warning: snark might follow. You have been warned.

War Heroes #2: As much as I enjoy Tony Harris as an artist and even though I can enjoy Mark Millar, this whole issue felt like it was hitting required beats without really making an impact. Even the cliffhanger, which should have shocked me, made no impact. I don't really care anything for the characters, so I'm not hurt by their betrayal. No one's actions have actually had consequences yet (the few possible places where the exercise of powers could have gone too far, they were treated comically). And I haven't even seen enough of this future America to decide whether or not this threat would be good or bad. This isn't like any number of dystopias, where the awfulness of the nation is established as permeating everything, nor does it feel close enough to our world to feel much at this America's fall. Please, Millar, stop being so "badass" and start actually feeling things, okay?

Solomon Kane #1: I might as well admit I bought it for the Joe Kubert cover. I did hope that I'd get something as good as Conan the Cimmerian, which is not deep but which is well told. But the story is too decompressed (the cliffhanger is Solomon Kane praying!), the storytelling is poor (tell me what went on in the opening action sequence without charts and graphs, please) and very little is done with the concept.  Let me put it this way: Solomon Kane, the Puritan punisher, stays in a castle built on a ruined abbey, that is ruled by a possibly evil Catholic Baron and his Muslim wife. And the only tension I brought to this situation was created by my own knowledge of history and religion instead of anything in the actually comic. Next issue, Solomon Kane naps and reads the Gideon Bible in his room!

Ambush Bug Year None #3: I really enjoyed the first issue of this series. I loved the way it took the misogyny and gratuitous adult-ness of Identity Crisis and ran it into the ground. And then, it contrasted it with the absurdity and stupidity of 60s DC. But with 2, it started getting unfocused. It was back to making fun of the continuity cast-offs and broad parodies of Countdown to Infinite Crisis (and the tie-ins). Fleming and co. were pushing too much into one issue with few returns.

And now we hit #3, which is partially about Infinite Crisis but not only tries to fit in too much, but is more miss than hit. Ambush Bug has always been about non sequiturs and "inside baseball" jokes, but they came so fast and furious that there wasn't enough time for the fizzles to drag it down. On top of this, there was usually some sort of straight man to work off or vice versa. This issue is like a burnt-out comedian making cliched jokes and lazy impressions. The few sequences that made me grin were those that positioned AB as the straight man (the buddy-buddy Darkseid and the multi-cultural OMACs, for example). I think I might have to find a new superhero parody.

Godland #25: Not much to say and a comic from last week at that, but this is the one comic which got more than an "eh" out of me. The origin of the Earth as a giant cosmic battle with time travel as an integral part of it! I can already see three exclamation points coming after every line of dialogue.  This is the kind of insanity that superhero comics should be full of.  And that is all that needs to be said about this comic.

"Love has no honour": Liveblogging Toll the Hounds

Toll the Hounds by Steven Erikson, pages 46-317

Expect a post on religion in high fantasy and sword and sorcery in another couple of days. The past couple hundred pages have given a lot of interesting materials for those speculations. Perhaps also another post on the point in the venn diagram of literature where epic intersects with purpled prose and why that might be necessary.

However, for the moment, I do want to make a point about Erikson's push and pull (stealing his own terminology for fate) of characterization.  Towards the end of this chunk of TtH is a scene where Lady Challice Vidikas sits down to dinner with two of her husband's political allies, knowing that her husband expects her to carry on an affair with one of them.  Even worse, he sees this as merely one more political marker he can call in later. Most of Challice's thoughts prior to this have been of the coldness of her marriage and her very life. From her point of view, everyone in her circle seems contemptible. Previous books and other scenes in this one has reinforced this impression of the trio of young turks made up of her husband Gorlas Vidikas, Hanut Orr and Shardan Lim. Or rather, the reader sees the first two as dishonorable and manipulative and assumes Shardan is of a piece with them.

He still might be, in fact. But following Hanut Orr's exit in high dudgeon, Shardan Lim becomes disarmingly honest and romantic.  And every time Lady Challice confronts him on a contradiction in what he says, he admits the contradiction, leading to this post's title quote. He even offers to walk out and duel Hanut Orr for offending her, though he admits it will do nothing for her reputation.

In a book where most characters lie to either help themselves or protect those around them, such a moment of honesty wins over not only Challice but this reader. This ability to both see his own foolishness as he is swept away by it... suddenly this novel's Lepidus is suffused with tragedy and reluctantly I hope for his escape from the doom that is sure to come whether their plot succeeds or fails. Well played, Mr. Erikson. Well played.

All Toll the Hounds, all the time: Liveblogging MBotF

A few pages after I left off is a great example of Erikson's humor. Darujhistan's greatest alchemist reads a couple pages of an ancient mythological text, then complains to his companion, who served the text's subject, that this story is ridiculous and inconsistent.

"So what? Show me a written history that makes sense, and I will show you true fiction." (45).

What makes it even funnier is that the text he reads is in the style of a faux-classical epic.

"Surrender to the years of struggle that was life's own chorus": Live-blogging Toll the Hounds

Toll the Hounds by Steven Erikson, pages 1 to 35

So I think it's pretty obvious that I'm not going to get through the entire Malazan Book of the Fallen before Toll the Hounds comes out and I lack the restraint to hold off on TtH until I'm done with the seven previous books (at least two of which are not even here in Chicago with me). However, once I'm done with TtH, I probably will go back and reread again. 

Partly that's because Erikson is trying to wrap up the series (I think there might only be one more book after this), so this book echoes the first book in eerie ways. In general, Erikson has always been wicked (in a good way) about leaving characters alone. One book will see a set of characters off into the sunset with a happy ending...only to run into them out of the blue two books later falling to pieces. 

Call it the "nothing ever ends" philosophy of literature. Whereas other series seem to jump the shark when they bring back fan favorite characters that disappeared years ago, it usually happens because they're trotted out to face the exact same threat as before or a less impressive one.

To Erikson's credit, that's not an issue because of the variety of nested threats this series is filled with. Characters might fulfill their ultimate goal, but the world is still going to intrude in interesting way.  The new threats might be even worse because they threaten the equilibrium the character had established. Erikson doesn't do this to just drag characters down into the muck, the outcomes usually end up more complicated than that.

And of all the happy endings to come back and disrupt, Darujhistan has to be the ultimate one. For the last few books, we've seen a few glimpses of Krul's Bar and the Deadhouse as a refuge from the chaos elsewhere. I had a tendency to think of Darujhistan as safe from the problems sweeping the world of MBotF. However, just because they've solved problems in their neck of the woods doesn't mean new ones won't come up (how like real life!).

So after a thematically linked prologue that deals with dogs, especially the Hounds of Shadow, we're back in Darujhistan. And pretty quickly we see *SPOILER* a new assassination plot on the city's inhabitants (as in the early Darujhistan sequences in GotM!), a new cult that has sprung up around the "dead" Rallick Nom (who we know from GotM isn't dead at all), and the murder of a very jaded Murillo (one of the Daru heroes of GotM).

Probably the last is the most shocking since Murillo was one of the good guys and one of the winners in Gardens of the Moon. Now he's seducing alcoholic rich widows and realizing how purposeless his life is. And as this realization starts to register in his mind (as per the post title's quote), he gets killed immediately post-coitus by an over-zealous and clumsily drunk romantic rival.

The effectiveness of this sequence is helped by the way it contrasts with scenes of old, retired Malazan soldiers getting the drop on fresh, young professional assassins (cue PJ O'Rourke quote re: old age and guile versus youth and a bad haircut). It also helps that, in literature, we are trained to expect an epiphany to bring with it salvation and protection from the world's forces. The sufferer of the epiphany might suffer some more, but that new perspective allows them to survive whatever they face and maybe even rise above it.

Unfortunately, in MBotF and in the real world, those epiphanies frequently come too late, on the very edge of death. I'll leave it to someone else to append the moral to this.

If it ain't baroque, don't fix it...

Topless Robot (that's the name of the site, really) posted a list of reasons why the G.I. Joe comic was better than the cartoon and Sean T. Collins disagrees, feeling that Cobra Commander was cooler as a mutant from the Ice Age than a pissed-off used car salesman. 

And while I'd normally agree that trying to make a cartoon series based on a toy line "serious" is going to destroy whatever charm said toy line said, I think that Sean might feel differently if he'd read the comics.

Now I'm not going to pretend that the G.I. Joe comic books have held up well or that Larry Hama, the man who wrote most of the series, doesn't sometimes betray his embarrassment at the source material. But G.I. Joe wasn't Watchmen by any means or even trying to be.  G.I. Joe was a paranoid, Peter Pinguid-style military fantasy tied to a fear of '80's conformity (and I mean that as a compliment).  Hama eschewed the ridiculous sci-fi trappings of the toys in favor of the ridiculous tropes of the spy thriller.  Cobra was actually paramilitary cult based on an Amway-esque pyramid scheme.  They made their top echelon, the Crimson Guard, get plastic surgery so that they all looked alike, then named them all Fred! This wasn't realism by any stretch of the imagination, even to an 8 year old

G.I. Joe was a great comic book to read, especially as a kid, because it located a towering battle between good and evil under the cover of suburbia.  A deadly pursuit for a Typhoid Mary footsoldier on Coney Island! A pitched gun battle in an anonymous small town called Springfield (eat your heart out, the Simpsons) populated totally with Cobra cover agents! A covert ops unit hidden under the Chaplain's rectory at a minor military storage depot! This was genius to a child to whom Metropolis and Manhattan were equally fantastic and fictional. I didn't recognize that the Kingpin was based out of the Flatiron building, but my family drove by a dozen towns like Springfield every time we went on a road trip.

Once again, this wasn't Winesburg, Ohio, but it put an amazing adventure around every corner in places just like my medium-sized Southern city, a city that rarely showed up in movies, TV shows or comic books (and only then as some podunk place that only the people in the Andy Griffith Show would find exciting). That's why I prefer pissed-off used car salesman Cobra Commander to the Himlayan mutant Cobra Commander. And it had everything to do with the fantastic.