TRICK OR TREAT, SMELL MY FEET, GIVE ME SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT!

It's Halloween! Yippee! Let's start proceedings with a naff metal song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOAl0enE7kI

Now that's out the way, make yourself comfortable whilst I bombard you with film and game recommendations for this most spooky of days. BOMBARD!!!

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1995) is brilliant. WHY? OH GOD WHY? you scream. The premise is ripped right out of the Twilight Zone but filled with enough ideas and style to make it more, oh so much more: Top-selling horror writer Sutter Cane has disappeared. Insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) is called in to find him and make sure it's not all some sort of hoax. Unfortunately for Trent, and the rest of the world, Cane has found a way to alter reality via his writing.

Although Cane's editor and publishing house make a big deal about how he outsells Stephen King (making King the reference point for Cane's brand of literary horror), I think this film is best summed-up by the notion that it's "the best story H.P. Lovecraft never wrote" (as stated by a critic, but I can't remember who). You get people turning into monsters, stories that can send the reader insane, ancient monstrous gods, the strong suggestion that what's unfolding can not be stopped...it's all solid horror gold.

Sam Neill turns in one of the best performances of his career (but to be fair I can't remember the last film I saw him in where I thought he was rubbish) and most of the supporting actors are also decent. Jurgen Prochnow plays Cane with a streak of blasé arrogance, with just a touch of pity for those who can't appreciate how powerful he is. Julie Carmen isn't bad as Linda Styles, Cane's editor, even though there's a section where it's difficult to tell if she's acting weird because she's being affected by Cane, or if she can't actually act in the manner she's supposed to be acting, if that makes any sense. And you've got Charlton Heston as the boss of the publishing house, who doesn't really do much but then he doesn't need to - he's Charlton Heston!

There's so much to love about IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS that I can't even tell you. And almost all the samples used on the Hard Wired album by industrial band FrontLine Assembly came from this film, which is also pretty cool. "Giving me the power to make it all real" indeed!

TRICK R TREAT is a more recent film (in regards to appearing on DVD - it was actually made in 2007) and follows the citizens of a small American town one Halloween night as their individual stories and paths cross: a family man has a killer secret; a reclusive old man meets a relentless trick or treater; a college girl is apprehensive about her 'first time'; some kids play a mean prank and get their just desserts.

Some of the stories are a little obvious, in that you can guess where they're going before they get there, and there's the feeling that a couple of segue scenes are missing, but other than that TRICK R TREAT is a solid and entertaining horror film with a surprisingly stellar cast. And a cute (and deadly?) main character called Sam (the kid on the poster), who pops up in most of the stories, or hovers on the periphery of them. Which leads me nicely onto my next film:

SATAN'S LITTLE HELPER (2004) tells the darkly humorous story of a young lad, Dougie, who unwittingly teams up with a serial killer who's dressed like his favourite videogame character. Well, I say "unwittingly", but when it becomes apparent how sinister 'Satan Man' is, Dougie's own mental stability is called in to question...

SATAN'S LITTLE HELPER is a really fun film, that relies on black comedy more than gore for it's thrills, and is quite a nice change of pace from a lot of other Halloween-themed horror films. There, that was nice and succinct. What's next?

How about some honourable mentions? --> MORTUARY (2005) is a Lovecraft-tinged film set around...well, a mortuary. It's got it all: creepy black mould, zombies (well, near-enough), an ancient monster, excellent set-design and decent lead actors (let's ignore the sleazy laughing man who ruins the film every time he appears on screen. Seriously, Tobe Hooper, what were you thinking letting this guy act like this?!).

MAN-THING (also 2005): I don't care about all the remarks that this is Marvel's "Swamp-Thing rip-off", or that the blurb on the DVD case has bugger-all to do with the film itself, it's still awesome. When a dodgy oil company starts drilling in the 'dark heart' of a swamp, it awakens Man-Thing, a humanoid plant monster with burning red eyes and a habit of killing people by growing trees out of them. I mean literally growing trees out of their bodies. One of the rare examples where the CGI is handled well (particularly in the Man-Thing 'birth' scene).

That's enough films for now. How about video games? You crazy kids like to play your video games, don't you? Of course you do, it's all kids do nowadays. That, or go to a park and get drunk on cheap cider.

RED DEAD REDEMPTION: UNDEAD NIGHTMARE - just in time for Halloween, it's a sexy zombie add-on for the rootin- tootin' RDR! Saddle up on your undead steed and find out why the Wild West is being overrun with flesh-eating ghouls and partially-rotted animals (not to mention various mythical beasts). The zombies can only be killed by a headshot, which is easy enough when there are only one or two after you, but once they start to swarm...I don't mind telling you that, as with any decent zombie film, that's when things get pretty hairy. Luckily they can't climb ladders so get to a high spot and shoot their bastard heads off. Do it!

DEAD RISING 2 - I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about this incredible zombie game in one gloriously ridiculous sentence: Motocross celebrity Chuck Greene needs to uncover the reason for a zombie outbreak in the Vegas-like Fortune City (and find anti-zombie drugs for his infected daughter), and he can do this whilst wearing a dress and bunny slippers and headbutting zombies to death with a lego head topped by a lawnmower blade.

LIMBO - for a more sedate change of pace, but in a manner that's no less horrific, you could do worse than give this side-scrolling puzzler a go. You're an unnamed boy, wandering a mist-shrouded, monochrome world, looking for his sister. The game looks beautiful, and the sound design (almost no music, practically all ambient fx) is top-notch.

I've yet to complete it, but so far I've wandered through a creepy forest, an industrial zone and a desolate town, all of which merge seamlessly into one another, and all of which contain new ways in which you can die. And you will die - a LOT. There are hazards and enemies just waiting to impale, eviscerate, decapitate or drown you. Plus, some of the deaths can be caused in a brilliantly sadistic manner, in that the thing that crushes you is supposed to be the thing that helps you continue on...if only you'd stepped to the left a little quicker...But every time you restart a short distance away, so that you can learn from your mistake and carry on.

But, is this possible because you're playing a videogame, or because the world the boy is in allows him to suffer violent death over and over again? Exactly where is he? Early on, you'll encounter other people, and there's a disturbing suggestion they're also children...but these are followed by worms that stick to your head and force you to walk like a zombie in one direction, and giant spiders that stalk and creep towards you at a deceptively fast pace. None of the puzzles are mind-bending, but they will tax your noodle a bit. Interestingly, quite a few can be 'solved' via physical manipulation, eg running from one side of a beam to another so that it rocks high enough for you to jump off and onto another beam.

I get the distinct feeling that I'm not going to like it when I reach the end and find out where the boy is, but this is precisely why I want to get to the end. Is this how the game really tortures the player? I think so.

Phew! What a massive post! I think I'll go downstairs and see if my housemate wants a hand getting things ready for tonight. Happy Halloween, scumbags!

DEAD! ON! EARTH!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled internet browsing to inform you that aliens have appeared and unleashed the zombie apocalypse upon the earth.

So goes the general outline for a new graphic novel called DEAD ON EARTH: BEGINNINGS (available for your Kindle HERE). It takes the form of diary/journal entries of various characters as they describe the events leading up to and during the aforementioned alien/zombie powwow. It also features an introduction by none other than JONATHAN MABERRY!!!! C'mon, you know who is. His books are in WHSMITH!!!!!!

I, unfortunately, had to drop out of the project because I couldn't give it the time and attention it deserved, but Clarke (the chap behind it) has been very cool about it all and a thoroughly professional chap. My character is/was Jake Lynch, a preacher from the UK who was travelling across the States. Hopefully, I will get the chance to finish his particular story at some point because I had a chunk of it mapped out, and it was pretty sinister (you get a glimpse of what he's capable of within his first few entries)...

Clarke's also set up a DOE store, which you can check out HERE (and stuff featuring Jake Lynch is on it HERE). If you need something to read on one of your fancy ebook whatsits, and you like zombies, comics, multi-strand narratives and apocalyptic fiction, you can't go far wrong with DEAD ON EARTH. No. No, you can't. Get it already!

SO HALLOWEEN'S COMING UP

What, you didn't know? Where have you been, under a rock or something?

I'm going to celebrate this most prestigious of occasions by extolling the virtues of (ie gushing about) some of my favourite horror films, starting with In The Mouth of Madness. Later. Right now, I need to finish making THE PUMPKIN OF UNSPEAKABLE HORROR - if anyone's bored on Saturday, take a drive to Scunthorpe, to 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, where you'll get to see my pumpkin and a bunch of other ones. Yeah you will. It'll be worth it, too!

I might also vomit forth praise for some horror-related things, like computer games and books, but only if I can be bothered. What? This is my blog. If I can't be arsed, I can't be arsed. Suck it up and carry on, soldier!

SEXY DEATH

The building was old, narrow, tall. Maybe four floors, but the gap between them wasn't consistent so it was difficult to tell. A narrow pathway ran down the side of the building, with overgrown trees and bushes on the left of it. The building only had windows looking out over the pathway, and not all of them had glass in. Every level was one long narrow room, filled with miscellaneous junk and dust. Bare floorboards. Bare walls.

A small, old doll lay just inside the entrance, covered in a dry brown, brittle-looking growth, like dead sponge. Although I'm sure it was dead I didn't want to touch it, because I strongly suspected it might turn out to be a dormant fungus. There was someone else in the building with me; a woman, I think. A friend whose name I'd forgot. The second/middle floor had an old tv and Megadrive games system in it. We fought over the controls.

I couldn't access the top floor from inside, so I clambered up the side of the building. Most of the top windows were filled with birds, sleeping in nests. They were all regimented and ordered, something that shouldn't have been possible naturally, which asked two questions. The first: if it was natural, what did this say about the intelligence of the birds responsible? Secondly: who would come to an otherwise abandoned building purely to neatly organise bird nests, on a floor you couldn't reach from inside the building?

Most of the birds appeared to be pigeons. I looked in one uncovered nest to see a batch of eggs. One had turned black. In a nearby nest a pigeon woke up and stared at me. It had a black-feathered face. The other birds looked like they might be blackbirds, though they were all asleep - unless they didn't have heads at all. Their feathers shone with the sort of rainbow that plays across the surface of oil.

Something else about the house - it made want to tear the woman apart and make love to the remains.

The most surprising thing is, I wasn't even dreaming.

THE EXPLOITS OF MY EXCITING MEETING WITH WRITER MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH IN A MOST UNEXPECTED MANNER THAT WAS UNEXPECTED!

So there I was shopping for books in a large bookstore, for it was my day off and I decided that I wanted to visit somewhere that sold books and a large bookstore seemed like a sensible place to go. I was busy perusing the horror fiction section (which was sandwiched between the erotic and vampire sections in a manner I found both obscene and thrilling) when I accidentally bumped into a well-dressed chap beside me.

"Oh, pardon me!" I said. "Sorry!"

"That's quite all right," the man said, stooping to pick up the book he had formerly held in his hand but had recently dropped to the floor from his hand, when I accidentally bumped into him whilst perusing the adjacent books. I immediately recognised him as being Michael Marshall Smith, author of such notable cross-genre books as Only Forward and Spares. I recognised him because he'd dropped one of these books, I forget which one, and it had fallen open on his mugshot.

"You're Michael Marshall Smith!" I exclaimed, in the hope that I had just cured some form of amnesia he may or may not have been suffering from. "I find your work to be imaginative and excellent, but not necessarily in that order. It's a real pleasure to meet you. But I have to ask: Why are you buying your own book?"

As he shook my hand he narrowed his handsome eyes and said, "I'm trying to convince this bookstore I'm more popular than that woman who writes the Twilight books. Maybe then they'll put in an 'alternate reality/sci-fi/fantasy/pulp/humour' section."

"One can only I hope, " said, nodding sagely.

"Wait a minute, " he said then. "You look awfully familiar. Are you Wayne Goodchild, otherwise known as Reverend Austin?"

Delighted, I couldn't help but beam like a hyperactive lighthouse, or a happy child full of radioactive fuel. "Yes, that's me all right!"

Once again shaking my hand he said, "I've heard you're a pretty funny guy."

"No," I said, "I'm not."

He went home disappointed.

THE END.

HOW FAR CAN TOO FAR GO?

Submissions are now open for THROUGH THE WORMHOLE: BILL AND WAYNE'S FAR OUT SPACE TALES, to be published by the Library of Science Fiction...

Editors : Myself & Bill Tucker

We want your most gnarly, whacked-out and downright mondo science fiction stories. We want you to really cut loose and give us scenarios we've never seen before.

We don't want to see any obvious staples like 'people answer a distress call to find a spaceship drifting empty through space...or is it?!' or 'a new friendly alien race turn out to be evil' or anything like that. Be fresh, be creative, be utterly mental.

We're also not after bizarro - but you are encouraged to take your story as far as it can go before it actually becomes that genre (i.e. surreal, but still grounded in reality).

Other than that, the usual genres are welcome, and stories can be set anywhere or anywhen, provided it's fundamentally science fiction.

Word limit: a very firm 4K - 7K words

Payment: 1 cent p/word + 1 contributor copy

NO reprints
NO multiple submissions

Simultaneous submissions are okay, but please do us the courtesy of letting us know if your story gets accepted elsewhere.

Format:

Put name/by-line, approx word count, postal address and email address at the top of the first page.

NO headers on any other pages, please.

Indent by 1 press of the TAB key to start a new paragraph.

NO fancy formatting. Sometimes people have their writing software set up so it adds extra space between lines and/or paragraphs. Please remove anything like this, as it's really annoying. Thank you!

Other than this, usual Shunn manuscript rules apply.

Send submissions to wormholeantho[at]gmail[dot]com

Deadline is March 1st 2011 so plenty of time to work on something!

Further details and discussion can be found on the Library forum! http://libraryofthelivingdead.lefora.com/2010/10/20/through-the-worm-hole-submissions-open

THE TIME HAS COME TO...GALVANISE!

NEWSFLASH! Richard Kelly's third directorial feature THE BOX wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. Initial signs weren't good, though: for one thing, putting James Marsden in your film's always going to be a bit of a gamble. He's the sort of charisma black hole that makes his appearance as Cyclops in the X-Men films feel like stunt-casting, and if you put him in a room with Hayden Christensen they'd cancel each other out.

In THE BOX, he plays Arthur Lewis, a Nasa...somethingorother. Engineer, I think. He helped develop an optic lense for a space camera, or something. But really, all he seems to do is make prosthetic feet for his wife, Norma (Cameron Diaz) - in a needlessly convoluted bout of exposition, Arthur explains that Norma has a deformed foot, not for a simple reason like birth defect or burn wound, but because she dropped a dumbbell on it, and then when she was getting x-rayed in the hospital, the doctor left the machine on and irradiated her toes so they had to be amputated. The actual point of all this nonsense is to reveal that all she got in the way of compensation was $10, 000. WHAT AN INJUSTICE!

We're supposed to care about Arthur and Norma, and feel sorry for their money troubles and hard-done-by life, so that we're more willing to accept the incredibly simple premise of the actual film: Here's a box with a button on it. Press the button and you'll get $1million...and someone you don't know will die.

I try to avoid spoilers but I'm going to have to mention the 80's Twilight Zone episode, and the original story this film mutated from so be warned. In the TZ show, the family aren't exactly well-to-do, so we believe they're willing to risk killing a stranger to get their hands on some dough. In the original story, the husband gets pushed in front of a train, and the insurance money is the amount the wife's been promised. The caveat is "How well do any of us really know someone?"

Not so in THE BOX. Arthur works for NASA for crying out loud. How are we supposed to believe he's not getting a nice amount of money, especially if he helped build a bloody space camera. And then there's Norma, who's a teacher, and she's losing her 'teacher discount' (I have no idea what this actually pertains to). Fair enough, she makes the comment that they're living 'pay cheque to pay cheque', as so many people tend to do, but any and all sympathy you might have for this couple goes right out the window when she comments that the £1million would really let them have the life they want. Not a better quality of life, but the life they want.

"Ah!" you say, possibly clicking your fingers in realisation. "They're spoilt brats! I have no sympathy for these people!"

Norma's parents are clearly well-off, so that's undoubtedly supposed to explain her desire for 'nice things'. But there's no suggestion they wouldn't help her out, financially, so why is there any real need for her to worry about money? And Arthur drives a ridiculously flash car. Sell it, mate. There's this thing called 'downsizing'.

And who dies as a result of Norma pressing the button? I'm not entirely sure. This is where it starts to get confusing. A lot of people have been, and are being, offered The Box and the money, so a lot of people are dying all over the place as a result of other people pressing buttons. Possibly. There's no real indication who Norma and Arthur 'killed', except at the end when...well, I won't spoil the actual ending for you.

If I remember correctly, in the original story, and I think the TZ episode, we either don't get to find out who's behind The Box, or it's possibly the government. In THE BOX, it's aliens. There, I've said it. Aliens. They're testing the human race to see if they should expppzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

HUH? WHAT?! Oh sorry, I kinda zoned-out there for a while. Something about watery gateways, and the afterlife, and...something. Or something.

To it's credit, THE BOX turns into a mutant conspiracy thriller (that is, it's a weird version of a conspiracy thriller, not a conspiracy thriller about mutants, which might actually be quite good) but the downside to this is that it adds a whole load of superfluous guff to proceedings. There is absolutely no need for the alien angle at all, as it doesn't add anything to the film except a sense of confusion. Something about the Mars Project, and lightning putting a man in contact with aliens, and...you get the idea. Well, no you won't, but you can at least marvel at the disgusting wallpaper in Arthur and Norma's house.

THE BOX is a prime example of the source material not warranting a full-length movie. And instead of crafting a lean paranoid thriller with supernatural undertones, Richard Kelly vomits his science fiction obsessions over the script (which he wrote) and tries to be interesting, but comes across as desperate. Aliens! You can't trust anybody! They're going to kill everyone! No, wait, they're going to take everyone to a better place! Hang on, they're malevolent! No, benevolent! Look at me! Look at what I'm doing! I can be good again; I promise Donnie Darko wasn't a fluke! Just keep giving me money and continue to not let anyone else read my scripts!

Oh Richard, you're not a terrible filmmaker, not at all. You have a fine imagination, but it lacks focus. THE BOX isn't a terrible film, it's just not very good. And I'm not angry with you - I'm disappointed.

OPOPANAX AND BLEEDING FOOTSIES

I found Stephen King's Dark Tower saga so enjoyable I didn't want it to end. So I stopped reading it. I put the seventh (and supposedly final) book down when I was only half-way through it, and have never picked it up again. One of the things that so gripped and fascinated me about the Dark Tower story is that it is absolutely huge, and quite mind-boggling in its intricacies. With it, King had woven threads between and through pretty much every single thing he'd ever written, tying apparently unrelated threads together to form the world's biggest and craziest jumper.

BLACK HOUSE links directly into the Dark Tower saga, but not until quite a way into the hefty 600+ pages. To start with it feels like a mystery/thriller, before mutating into a sort of horrific fantasy, which took me by surprise let me tell you.

A serial killer dubbed 'The Fisherman' is targeting the children in and around the Wisconsin town of French Landing. But he doesn't just kill them - he eats parts of their bodies, in an echo of notorious murderer Albert Fish's M.O.

A few years before The Fisherman appeared, former homicide detective Jack "Hollywood" Sawyer retired to French Landing after helping the chief of police, Dale Gilberston, apprehend another killer who lived in the town. As a favour to his old friend, and his best friend Henry (Dale's blind uncle), Jack agrees to help the FLPD hunt for The Fisherman.

But what caused Jack to retire at the ridiculously early age of 31? And what is it about his past that links him to The Fisherman?

BLACK HOUSE is a sequel to King and Straub's first collaboration THE TALISMAN, but I haven't read that and I don't think it's necessary too either, as BLACK HOUSE is largely self-contained, and the references to the previous book are explained well enough so you're not sat scratching your head.

In that book, Jack Sawyer was a young boy who was involved in a quest to help his dying mother. His journey took him to the Territories, a sort-of alternate/parallel reality that's a bit like a fantastical Wild West. BLACK HOUSE sees him journeying there again, in a bid to help protect the Dark Tower itself.

BLACK HOUSE is a frustrating book. The characters are all excellent, with the main trio of Dale, Jack and Henry being the stand-outs (as you'd expect). King and Straub pepper the story with an insane amount of other characters, some of whom appear briefly, but almost all play an important part in the grand scheme of things. There's also some decidedly affecting emotional tugs along the way, particularly once Jack and his friends start to close in on The Fisherman.

What is less excellent is the overall style of the book. King/Straub choose to use a third-person omniscient narrative form that allows us, the reader, to see and experience things the characters themselves aren't aware of. On the one hand, it helps to build tension and suspense as we're told of someone stalking another person, for instance, but on the flipside it ruins the fictive dream the moment the narrator (which is actually the joint voice of both authors) makes a point of following someone else, and thereby reminding you you're reading a book.

Thankfully, it doesn't ruin the overall experience - generally speaking, the story and execution is top-notch - but it does serve to keep breaking the flow and pulling you out of the action...sometimes literally. However, I will mention the cheeky author intrusion at the end of the book that invites you to stop reading, unless you want to see what the last few pages have in store. I did think that was actually pretty cool.

It's also difficult to tell quite how much of this story is down to Straub. The Dark Tower, and it's related environs, is a resolutely King-created proposition. I've only read one collection of Straub's stories, and remember they were generally quite strange, so maybe he created the book's monstrous villain Mr Munshun? Or suggested The Fisherman's M.O.? Admittedly, the point of a collaboration is that it's, well, a collaboration, so it shouldn't sound too much like one author over another, and trying to separate the voices and ideas is a fairless pointless endeavour. But it's difficult not to wonder...

BLACK HOUSE has well-developed characters, and even shines the spotlight on ones you wouldn't normally pay much attention to. It's core story is sinister and gruesome, and its plot is interesting and involving. It weaves literary references through it smartly and smoothly, and adds another exciting dimension to King's Dark Tower saga. Is it a fine example of the talents of Peter Straub? It's difficult to tell, but it certainly lacks a lot of the needless description that occasionally plagues King's work. The best of both worlds? That would have to be up to you to decide, dear reader.

NO, I REGRET NOTHING

The time has come to bid a fond farewell to some very dear friends of mine. They've filled my life with joy and pride (well, one of them has) and many, many fruitless hours of waiting for them to actually DO something. I hoped they'd have children and grow old together, or indulge in a three-way and make some sort of mutant mega-baby, but this never happened. Maybe I cut one of them off in his prime, so the blame lies squarely on my shoulders. The others...never really did anything in the first place so I can't be blamed for their lack of enthusiasm.

So please, join me in bidding farewell to three of the worst pets I ever had, as I set them free in the backyard to get eaten by birds or perhaps ants. Sayonara, LEGS MCKINLEY (Impossibly Fast Snail), PAJAMAS BANDICOOT (Relatively Attractive Snail) and TINY TIM (Very Very Small Snail). We'll always have Acapulco *sniff*

Legs McKinley, pissing all over the competition at the Indoor Snail Racing Championships, 16th July 2010.

UP, UP, AND ACROSS!

It's nice to have my computer back, because now I can crack on with writing again (having not done any in about two weeks). Now, if only I could decide which story to focus on and finish, I might be on to something...

Recently watched EAGLE VS SHARK, a New Zealand film starring Jermaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords (who're brilliant). He plays Jarred, a full-on computer shop geek with bad hair who's the inexplicable source of infatuation for the main character, Lilly. Jarred is the sort of dweeb who's mercifully unaware of how naff he is, which is funny for us as an audience to watch, but makes him come across as a pitiful try-hard. However, this is all offset by a form of self-confidence that borders on arrogance, which turns him into a more fleshed-out individual and (whisper it) an interesting one. Why is he this way? The answer is both surprising and strangely poignant.

Lilly, on the other hand, is the very epitome of a Plain Jane. Dowdy clothes, dowdy hair, dowdy voice; walked all over by her employer and fellow employees, the only thing that appears to sustain her is an infallible sense of optimism. And the daydream that she and Jarred (who regularly visits the fast food restaurant she works in) will one day become a couple.

When she in effect crashes his birthday party wearing a shark costume (theme: dress as your favourite animal) and then promptly wows him with her prowess at a computer game, they end up bumping boots in one of cinema's least erotic trysts. Finally a couple, their relationship moves along at a wonky pace, exuding about as much romance as one of the Pope's farts, yet it still works. Just as we're wondering quite what else the film has in store for us, Jarred announces he's going home to beat up a former bully, so the action (such as it is) moves to Wellington, and the focus shifts slightly to encompass Jarred's dysfunctional family.

I was concerned that EAGLE VS SHARK would be a twee-fest, and at times it veers dangerously close to twee territory: Lilly's workplace, a cinema with a dinosaur head entrance, the contrived awkwardness of several scenes...but what saves it from actually being twee is, for the most part, the unaffected performances of many of the characters.

Jemaine plays Jarred with a remarkable lack of self-awareness...or so it appears. Loren Horsley plays Lilly pitch-perfect, which makes how later events conspire to crush her spirit all the more effective. There's even a stop-motion sub-plot/juxtaposition featuring apples that was unexpectedly sweet.

And that's what EAGLE VS SHARK is: sweet. And cute. And a romantic comedy! Oh no! Not quite the laugh riot the DVD blurbs would have you believe, it's still an amusing and interesting spin on the 'misfits fall in love' sub-genre. In truth, there are quite a few aspects that make this film worth watching (most of which are definitely worth discussing but constitute as spoilers, so I'm keeping schtum), from the unexpected sight gags (keep an eye out for a petrol pump) and Lilly's brilliant brother Damon (who can't do impressions to save his life, but no one acts like he's rubbish, making it funnier). And the score, by the Phoenix Foundation, is very very good indeed.

Would you look at that: I'm giving a romantic comedy a favourable review. Wonders never cease.

BACK ONCE AGAIN WITH THE RENEGADE MASTER

Here I am! Back in Internet Land again and with more good news: the next JONNY CAVE adventure is now ONLINE! For the uninitiated, he's a jazz musician turned preacher who, along with his sidekick/best friend Laura 'Lolly' Paris, deals with weird situations in the fictional town of New Bedlam. This time: a theatre troupe arrive, bringing mystery and madness with them! Have a gander HERE.

More exciting updates soon. Until then, stay fresh, peeps! VVVRRROOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM

SSSCCCRREEECHHH! Here's some more news: Kindertrauma's posted another of my traumafessions! See what gives me the willies HERE. I've also been playing Dead Rising 2, so I'll review that soon. So far, my main opinion is that it is remarkably similar in almost every way to the original game, but slightly more polished. Plus, no other game lets you wear children's clothes and headbutt zombies to death with a weapon made from combining a cheerful lego-robot head and a lawnmower. No sir!

+=

wow that's a bloody big thumbs up!

GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS/BIZARRO AM NUMBER ONE

My computer died a couple of Thursdays ago, taking various files and the internet along with it, so I haven't had a chance to look at my emails and so forth until today, and what did I find? Well apart from slightly annoyed emails from quite a few people, I found news that my bizarro story HALF PRICE MEDS is now live on SNM, so go read it, you mooks! The editor had some very nice things to say about it, namely:

Wonderful!!! Now this is bizarro at it's finest! Fun, fun, fun, great writing, wonderful descriptions, great characters, highly entertaining and fast paced.

Think he's a liar? Judge for yourself: Small town, orgy, moving fence, apocalypse. GO! http://www.snmhorrormag.com/snmoctoberissue1.htm