My old film lecturer TOM CRAIG is making/has made a horror film! He and his crew need a little bit more money to properly finish the process, so if you can help, that would be AWESOME. A lot of my university lecturers weren't very good, to be frank, but Tom was engaging and knowledgeable so I'm chuffed to see he's making something worthwhile. Also, he gave me decent marks for my final year dissertation 'Zombies Ate My Thesis: Zombies as Social Commentary and Metaphor' and said my writing was "good enough for Empire" so that gives him a special place in my heart haha Below is a trailer for the film in question, ARGON GREEN. It does look good, very atmospheric. Thanks to my chum Jim Moore (who also attended the same uni) for letting me know about this. You can find out about his films HERE.
Funding for ARGON GREEN is being handled via INDIEGOGO, a crowd-source funding platform something I was only made aware of recently thanks to a writer called David R. Roberts, who's putting together a play in London called THE SHADOW FORMULA. Here's a trailer for THAT:
To pledge some support for THE SHADOW FORMULA (or just for more info) go HERE.
To pledge some support for ARGON GREEN (or just for more info) go HERE. (At the time of writing this has slightly less time left to acquire additional funds).
To find out more about Indiegogo, go HERE. For info on Kickstarter go HERE.
You'd better believe it! I've finally got myself a proper website. THIS SENTENCE IS HAUNTED is it, and as well as having all the guff on my stories/published work, it has a ton of music on, some short films, a little bit of art, and...A TERRIFYING COMPETITION SPONSORED BY CTHULHU'S FACE. Find the hidden page, win a book!
So that's exciting. Yes, it is. I've also been interviewed by G. R. YEATES, about my story in PHOBOPHOBIA and my writing in general. Go HERE to witness some Grade A self-aggrandising and a Timmy Mallet joke. You will also get to see my SUAVE FACE.
And finally...I've been filling my ears with this a lot lately:
SHUT UP! I'll tell you why. I hate that it's the sort of film that needs to be seen, but the reasons why it should be seen can't be talked about because that would utterly spoil it. Before I go on, I'd like to point you in the direction of Alex Kane's review/opinion of it, because I think it acts as a nice counterpoint to what I'm about to say.
Say what you will about the film, this is a brilliant poster. OR IS IT?
Here's what I can tell you: a bunch of "college kids" go to the titular cabin. When one of them recites a passage from a creepy diary, things go south pretty darn quick. Honestly, after (inadvertently) catching the trailer, I thought I'd figured it all out...but I hadn't! Let me be frank: [The] Cabin in the Woods isn't the most amazing film in the world, and I don't think it 'rewrites the script' of horror films to quite the extent that some people say, but it is bloody good fun, and does some truly unexpected things...but that's more to how utterly fkkking mental those things are than anything. And that's as much as I'm going to "divulge". So there.
CABIN does toy with convention, though anyone familiar with the work of film-makers Josh Whedon and Drew Goddard will spot repeated/common themes and ideas used here which dilutes the impact a bit. The very start of the film introduces us to the 'world' this film inhabits, as well as giving the horror world one of the best credit sequences I've ever seen - I'm referring to when the actual title pops up. It scared the shit out of me haha
I'd like to make an aside on 'hype' - I touched on this in a previous post about the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remake, in that it's sometimes best to leave a considerable amount of time between a film's release and when you see it, to create a 'buffer' between expectation and enjoyment. I watched CABIN with a group of friends last Sunday, and that undoubtedly adds to the enjoyment factor of a film, but I honestly think the only thing that might 'spoil' the impact of CABIN is if it really does create a genre/sub-genre/movement of 'nuts to this!' films, which I do doubt (considering how often budgets stymie the creative process/how studio meddling 'tones down' ideas, and all the rest of it). I think it'll have the same impact in two years as if you saw it right now. It would be nice if it proves me wrong, but we'll see.
Bill Moseley has an awesome cameo as a hook-handed killer. OR DOES HE?
Alex makes note of the comedy aspect outweighing the horror, which I am inclined to agree with. At one point near the beginning, I found the characters almost unbearably interchangeable and unrealistic - they're ALL swapping witty banter and uttering snappy one liners, and it felt terribly forced. Thankfully, as the film progresses, their roles become more refined/defined - I am aware this may have been the point, but I still don't think starting a film with unlikeable characters is a smart move.
I also completely agree with Alex's point that what we don't see is scarier than what we do. I love a lot of older fiction by writers such as Algernon Blackwood et al and that way of thinking has been a gold standard for horror writers for years. However, I am also a huge fan of in-your-face monster stories/nature-runs-amok/giant creatures, so I'm equally happy to watch some terrible creature go nuts in full view. If the point of a film/story is one thing, but it does the other, I'm disappointed, but I don't think CABIN is one of these. It's cheeky in its intent at points, but I was never convinced it'd be one more than the other. That's not to say it is either of these things. Or maybe it is.
Following on from this, and massaging my own ego (sort of) - I recently discovered a review for an anthology I'm in, that mentions my story as being "bad", not because it's badly written or anything like that, but because it's "TOO fantastic". The reviewer had previously expressed a clear delight in an earlier story of mine (for 'freaking her out'), which made me consider the themes and comparisons. Both involve the destruction of a small town, though one is done via undead insects, and the other a hellish carnival. I actually thought the carnival story is the most realistic/most obviously grounded in reality, yet that's the one she disliked.
I think this (and things mentioned in Alex's post) shows that different people have different perceptions of reality. That could be the start to a particularly deep and philosophical debate, but let's leave that sort of thing for people with an entire alphabet after their name. CABIN asks questions of reality, which is perhaps the aspect I enjoyed the most about it. It's clearly not set in ours, but then, maybe it is. I suppose it depends on how 'fantastic' you're willing to let things get. Go see CABIN and decide for yourself.
The best scene was the one in which Screamin' Meemie appears. OR WAS IT?
As a separate bit to this post, I'm working on my own website - a proper one, with a real domain name and everything. It'll be unveiled next weekend! Whilst working on it, I was listening to lastfm, and discovered that Justin Broadrick, from Godflesh, has a new project on the go called Pale Sketcher. I really like it! Here's an awesome track off his current ep:
You can also download this as an mp3 from HERE, which happens to be the home of one of my favourite bands, Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities. If you like African hi-life guitars, nightmare jazz and baroque Americana, check them out too!
Stop whatever you're doing and read this! The latest book I'm in is now available, and I'm especially excited because, at long last, I have been able to cause the literary destruction of Scunthorpe. WHHHHAAAAT?! Here's a taste:
The road tore itself free from the earth with a terrible rending of stone and metal. Pipes burst and gushed water and gas into the air as the tarmac peeled away in one huge strip. All the houses on either side shook and rumbled into new positions, closer to each other but still in neat rows. A monstrous bellow filled the world, and Dave saw how the Earth had become the bottom of a mouth; the homes teeth and the road a tongue.
Now THAT'S what I call a cover!
24 different authors, 24 different time zones, 24 different apocalypses! HOWZAT?! I'm sharing page space with:
Suzanne
Robb
Aaron
J. French
George
Wilhite
Craig
Saunders
John
McCuaig
David
Dunwoody
Sean
M. Thompson
Gregory
L. Norris
Rebecca
Snow
Dave
Jeffrey
Patrick
D`Orazio
Emma
Ennis
Adrian
Chamberlin
Henry
Snider
Stephen
A. North
D.A.Chaney
Micheal
S. Gardner
Patrick
Shand
Hollie
Snider
William
Todd Rose
Brooke
and Scott Fabian
R.B.
Payne
Darren
Gallagher
The book has a foreword by Joe McKinney and a bunch of wonderful endorsements. By who? you may well wonder. Buy the book to find out! WHERE?! Calm down. You can get it from HERE.
And the soundtrack to my apocalypse is provided by.....
Believe it or not, naming this blog 'they call me potato' has an actual bearing on me personally, and isn't called that just so I can use that ace 'I am POTATO' picture my friend Colin gave me. But that's another story. I'm going to rename this blog so it's a bit more relevant to what I do/mainly use it for. That's right, chump - writting! I mean, writing!
From next week it'll be thissentenceishaunted.blogspot.com / thissentenceishaunted.blogspot.co.uk MAKE A NOTE!
I thought about starting a new blog with that name, but I don't want to lose all the stats related to this one - it's nice to see how many people have viewed this since I started it, and keep checking it out [11346 views since I started it!] - thank you, whoever you are! You're making my ego feel ten storeys high. I might only have 23 'followers' over there --> but the amount of people who have a nosey [515 views last month!] tells me that someone's actually interested in what I'm doing/saying, or are at least stockpiling ammo for their own anti-potato blog. You can never be too sure when the internet's involved.
So anyway. I'm going to mess about with the layout for a bit, so if you pop by here and it looks funky (the bad kind) you know why. I'd also like to 'step up my game' with regards general writing pimpage by actively promoting other writers. Everyone I've met since I've started taking writing seriously has been either very nice or supportive, sometimes both. I've hit some speed bumps along the way, such as getting ripped off by a publisher by paying for books that never arrived, and 'losing' several anthologies I'd compiled/edited due to differences (not personal ones) with regards to how small presses/indie publishers work. That's all rubbish, and in truth knocked me back a bit, but it's all stuff I can learn from. I'd also like to thank many of the writers I've worked with on the cancelled anthologies for being super supportive and understanding even while they were going tits up. The anthologies, not the writers. [I'm also aware the future of yet another antho has taken a turn for the worse, but I'm going to try and get this sorted as soon as I can].
What was I saying? Oh yes. I recently did a 'blog invasion' with Robert Harkess which was really good fun. I'd quite like to do more things like this with other writers - something different from the standard Q & A every other bugger does. Or at least a monthly interview-type thing. Consider this an open invitation to take part! You can pimp anything, not just your latest book!
I'll continue to do all the other guff I normally do, like talk about music and movies (my other two loves) but see if I can maintain some form of order between posts. Unless people like chaos, in which case I won't change a damn thing. About the only thing that'll hold up all these grand schemes is the work I do as part of an art collective - we (that is, my friend and I) are currently project managing a two day arts festival, so that has already, and will, taken up a lot of time. Take up a lot of time. Will take up. See my good is English? LOLOLOLZ!!!1111one one
I think that's HOW for NOW. I'm about to write my answers for an interview that'll appear on G. R. Yeates' blog at the start of next month, which is exciting. I like gobbing off about shit. More people should ask me things. GO ON THEN.
Recently watched three films; one was a remake, one could have been, and one should be [remade]. The films in question were: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, DRIVE, SUCKER PUNCH. All different genres, but with a common thread, which is 'originality' (bear with me).
I really, really wanna make you zig-a-zig aahhhhh!
SUCKER PUNCH is the only one that, technically, scores highest if we were to judge them on the standard definition of what 'original' means, given that there aren't many films being made today that recklessly lob a load of genres together in quite the way this film does. Steampunk zombies, giant samurais with chainguns, mech suits...it's just a shame the story is incoherent in its purpose, rather than layout.
Ostensibly, it's RETURN TO OZ turned into a 'girl power' parable. 'Babydoll' accidentally kills her younger sister, whilst trying to defend her from their cruel stepfather. He sticks her in a mental asylum, where she lives and works and suffers for five days, before being lobotomised (OR IS SHE?). The majority of this stuff is brought to us via the magic of montage, which works surprisingly well. It sets the style and tone of the piece from the off; SUCKER PUNCH is a 90 minute music video more than anything else.
However, just as Babydoll is due to get her brains scrambled by Don Draper from Mad Men, she finds herself in an alternate version of the asylum - now it's a bordello, with her and her female inmates playing the parts of dancers and srtippers. For some reason, whenever Babydoll dances, she enters another fantasy, in which her and her feisty girl chums go on madcap adventures to recover certain items that'll help them escape the bordello/asylum. All the items refer to signs and items she noticed when she first entered the asylum, and all the main villains she encounters are based on/played by people who work in the asylum. Throughout each 'quest', the girls pull a Charlie's Angels and receive sagely advice from a crinkly mentor, including the quite nice saying that acts as this post's title. The rest of the stuff he spouts, though, is a bit naff.
There are a million essays on how awful/offensive the film is if taken seriously as being about female empowerment, so I won't go there. I'm a bloke, so obviously I'm going to appreciate a film filled with fit lasses kicking the crap out of people whilst dressed in kinky costumes. Score one for misogyny! But the fact is, director Zack Synder tried something different. Never mind the message of 'you have all the weapons you need, now fight' - this means nothing when we can't understand why we should care about the characters. Babydoll has a tragic backstory, but what's to say the other girls she meets aren't actually mental? The only insight we get into them as characters is in Fantasy Land, so we can't be expected to believe they're all really sane and ultimately harmless, can we?
It's a shame, because the 'bordello' part of the film is really interesting, with some suitably nasty bits and great characters. There are also some nice touches in the asylum sections, but the fact is, in an effort to be something 'cool' and 'original', SUCKERPUNCH gets mixed up and doesn't spend the requisite amount of time focusing on its central message or ideas. If it could be reworked, they'd likely be a strong, decent and genuinely interesting film here, but as it stands it can only really be taken as an exercise of style over substance. But as a serious parable, it sucks balls. Fnar fnar!
"So how's this..."
Next is DRIVE. Honestly, like a friend of mine recently said, the film almost denies analysis. It's the sort of story we've seen done a million times before: a nameless loner gets caught up in gang business whilst trying to help a woman and her child. That's it in a nutshell, but there are of course different aspects to the story that make it more interesting than that simple sentence suggests. Like, the protagonist's penchant for extreme violence, and his skewered moral code. He is, at his core, a perfect example of the sort of 'hero' Raymond Chandler once talked about. What makes DRIVE stand out from the millions of other like-minded films is, above all, it's execution. It's clearly set in modern times, but the music, visuals, and clothes make it feel like the 1980s never stopped. It is also the first film I've seen in ages that is, simply put, a joy to watch. Just stick it on and let yourself get absorbed in it.
Now with added 'camp hand'.
And finally...A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The 'new' one. Again, there are million rants and diatribes online about the pointlessness of remakes, the ire of fanboys when cult films get a repaint, etc etc etc. I'm not going there, not really.I think it's best to watch remakes when they're suitably removed from the hype, and subsequent backlash. Get some perspective. Don't watch the original a bit before the new one to 'remind' yourself of it. Try to let the remake stand on its own two feet. If it then falls over because someone tied its shoelaces together, then so be it. I managed to give THE RING, DAWN OF THE DEAD, DARK WATER, FRIDAY THE 13TH and MY BLOODY VALENTINE a wide berth when they (re)appeared on the scene, and did the same with NIGHTMARE.
The biggest fault with remakes is when they don't bring anything new, or substantially new, to the table. It must be a tough juggling act, keeping the core concepts from the original, but putting a fresh spin on them. By and large, I enjoyed all these remakes, but the only one I could enjoy as a 'separate' film was DAWN OF THE DEAD. It took the settings and ideas from the original and did something interesting with them. But anyway. The latest FRIDAY fails because it feels like the latest entry, rather than a new beginning. VALENTINE does something a bit different to the original (even if the twist can be seen from space) and ultimately succeeds by virtue of being a more polished, well-acted version than its predecessors (okay, I might have a man-crush on Jensen Ackles). NIGHTMARE falls somewhere between FRIDAY and VALENTINE.
The core story is the same. Freddy Krueger is killed by vengeful parents, then comes back as a dream demon to off their kids. The set design is excellent, owing more to Silent Hill than the 'fake but cool' dream sets of the original(s). The characters are okay, but largely cannon fodder. Jackie Earle Haley's Krueger is all right, but feels a bit 'paint by numbers villain'. There is a nice suggestion that he may have been wrongly murdered, but this is offset by gaps in logic you can drive a bus through. "We didn't know what we were saying!" declares one character, at the news that he and his friends claimed Krueger had molested them in their youth. "You could have killed an innocent man!" he says to his dad. His dad could come back with "An innocent man wouldn't make a knife-glove" which would shut his kid up, but he says nothing. "We wanted you to forget!" says another character's mum. So why keep evidence of the past in the form of photos? "I'm fuelled by your memories!" Krueger tells Nancy (also the heroine in the original films). So how can she hope to destroy him if she keeps remembering him? (An idea nicely addressed in FREDDY VS JASON, I might add).
It's a pity this version didn't go balls-out with the idea of dream logic. Whether that's down to the script, or the studio, who knows. There are flashes of 'dreams within dreams' and of Krueger altering surroundings to hinder his victims, but it doesn't provide any real intellectual meat to chew on. "That's not the point!" you declare. "I know!" I shout back. "But it would be nice if someone somewhere realised their films would have more of an impact if they remembered to put brains in their creation!"
Anyway. Watching all these films made me wonder if there will ever be such a thing as an 'original' film anymore. Or, are we now in such a creative vacuum that we're destined to remake things out of existence? I think there are supposed to be only seven possible stories, and that everything is some permutation of these. Fair enough. But it's possible for something to become more than the sum of its parts. A lot of bands (eg Radiohead) can do this. Video games (like the new puzzler FEZ) can do this. Books are perhaps the "easiest" medium in which something new can be made (but this deserves its own essay). Out of the above films, DRIVE maybe does this. To end, here's the "formula for the perfect film" that was mentioned on TV yyyeeaaaarrrss ago. I made a note of it, in the chance I'd actually be able to make some use of it at some point:
"Sue Clayton, a lecturer for the British Film Council and the University of London, studied loads of hit films to work out exactly what makes them so popular.
She
found that the best ones had a certain mix of action, romance and
special effects.
She
worked out that the perfect film must have:
30%
action
17%
comedy
13%
good v evil
12%
love/romance
10%
special effects
10%
plot
8%
music
Toy
Story 2 is close to being the perfect film, according to Sue."
And finally...I don't like Bjork's voice, but her music's good. This is used is SUCKER PUNCH:
Uh oh, normal post headline alert! Double uh oh - boring/depressing intro! Triple uh oh - good stuff at the end!
I don't really feel like I've had any time off in the last few weeks, and it's caught up with me a bit - currently off work with what feels like an invisible lump in my throat, and a head that feels submerged. The good news is, the things that have kept me busy are/were fun and not horrible, and as such have swerved my 'dark' mood of the last post back to what I normally feel like, which is resolutely chipper.
My band, Handsome Bastards, have been making the most of our drummer's return from uni, and we wrote and recorded a brand new song. The idea was to do a 'calling card', that incorporates all the stuff we usually do, but in one 'pop' song (ie it's only three and a half minutes long). We're probably going to call it 'Chuck Berry's New Sound', as it features lyrics and samples taken from the Back to the Future films (the title references a phone call made when Marty's playing guitar at the prom). It also features gang vocals, stoner riffs, pop punk 'wooah ooohs', industrial beats and grindingly heavy beatdowns. OH GOD SHIT YES! I'll post a link once it's mixed and online.
I managed to find the time to rework an old story, and post it in my usual crit group - it's been fun getting back into the editing frame of mind, and taking on board really useful constructive criticism. I'm also working on a pulp story that mixes noir with superheroics, but filtered through vigilante sci-fi. I just made that term up. I've also also started rewriting one of the stories that was on my melted memory stick, and so far I think I'm hitting all the beats, and it's not as tortuous as I thought it might be. It helps that I'm working on it whilst listening to 'Blue Bob' by David Lynch and John Neff. It's midnight lounge (I think I've just made that term up, too) mixed with industrialised blues, but not really heavy, just moody and atmospheric. In truth, it's not the most amazing album ever, but it is very cool and has plenty of wonky slide guitar solos and warped grizzly vocals which always get a thumbs up from me. Here're a couple of youtube vids - Mountains Falling is also available on the Mullholland Drive soundtrack, and I Cannot Do That is an example of the machine-blues sound that occasionally rears his ugly head throughout the album.
Ever since reading The Crow, and finding out James O'Barr liked to write with music on, I thought 'I don't know why I don't give that a go', so I used to spend my Sundays (this is when I was at school, so mid-90s) listening to the radio whilst hammering away at my Brother word processor (before that, I had an actual typewriter. I can't, for the life of me, remember what make it was, but it was grey and beautiful, and a birthday present off my parents, but I traded it in for the Brother (which belonged to my dad's boss), because that had a tiny two-line screen, and built in memory so I could save my stories as I worked on them). If it wasn't the radio, it was usually some metal band, or the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, or occasionally, Joy Division.
As I got older, and my music taste mutated and developed (I'm not so fussed about metal any more) I started listening to stuff that had more of a mood akin to the type of story I was writing, and midnight lounge music is perfect for this. I can often write with no music on, but generally I do like to have something going on in the background. It sends my housemate bananas some times, but that's because she has appalling taste in music. Haha!
I wanted to start linking to songs at the end of blog posts, like this chap does, but I don't have the means to do that, so maybe I'll just start linking to the youtube, because that's easy. So here's a couple of songs I really like, by bands I like to write to. Not in a pen-pal way.
