Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002), by H.G. Lewis

While Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat was Herschell Gordon Lewis' third-to-last film, it is nonetheless a fitting finale to his career. I wish I had been the age I am now in 2002 so I could properly bask in the hype that surely arose when a sequel to Blood Feast was announced, and yet I think it's just as fun to look at this movie fourteen years later. How long-ago and embarrassing the early 2000s seem. Yes, they're largely embarrassing because that was when I was a kid, but a lot of people say that the 20th Century had a particular hold on trash that our present time has yet to duplicate. If you cruise the "21st Century" tag here on the A-List, you'll find movies that range from Noah to Five Across the Eyes. We've managed to do strange just fine--just not nearly as frequently, it seems.

But what about the mega-terror of the embarrassment that is the self-aware super-late sequel? There's nothing but cringing in movies like Hobgoblins 2--if the first movie was bad, in ways that both killed it (as in Hobgoblins) or let it thrive (such as Blood Feast), self-awareness is never, ever, ever, ever the answer. Shitty self-awareness is why people hate postmodernism. And yet, it's an inevitable product of postmodernism itself--we really are moving into so-called "transmodernism" as postmodernism itself becomes a joke. We are reacting to and building upon an art movement that has become popular. As you might expect by the fact that I'm even talking about postmodernism or transmodernism in the first place, I enjoy good postmodern works. And going into this movie, I tried to put faith in Lewis as an intelligent and ambitious but occasionally clumsy and wrong-headed director--someone who would make good use of the lateness of his sequel. I like to think that my faith was well-placed.

After an extremely bizarre Beast of Yucca Flats-style opening, involving two roadkill-eating hillbillies murdering each other for no discernible reason, we cut to a young man moving into his new catering shop. He is Fuad Ramses III, grandson of the killer from the first Blood Feast. He seems to be an ordinary fellow at first, even if he's warned by the local police detective that the locals probably won't trust him for what his grandfather did--inside the very halls of Fuad's new digs, even! However, Fuad III discovers his predecessor's old statue to Ishtar, though it clearly isn't the same spraypainted mall mannequin from the first movie. The statue seems to possess him, and he begins to transform into a copy of his grandfather, adopting his speech patterns and tendency to arrange "Egyptian feasts." This seems to be an act of fate, as an injury incurred by one of his victims gives him Fuad I's Torgo-esque limp! From there history repeats itself, as Fuad tracks down the guests of the wedding party he is to cater to, removing their body parts and turning them into food as a sacrifice to his goddess. That's it, really, until it reaches a relatively straightforward--albeit pretty hilarious--climax.

Blood Feast 2 has the primary fault of being overly repetitive. Like A Taste of Blood, BF2AUCE is a long film and not merely by H.G.'s standards. Most of this time is spent with builds up to and executions of either gory murder sequences (often featuring by-now familiar Goofy H.G. Lewis Songs) or scenes of women acting dumb and taking their clothes off. Fine. Blood Feast had that too, albeit to a more minimized extent--Blood Feast 2 has more nudity and is generally gorier. And certainly anyone who is a diehard Blood Feast fan is going to want to see more of the same. It's played with creatively at points. Lewis lampshades his own hammy dialogue, and has managed to get enough of the main cast to replicate the strange combination of wooden clunkiness and community-theatre scenery-chewing that his original cast insisted on, in a way that is clearly tongue-in-cheek. (It was probably tongue-in-cheek back then, too.) And yet self-awareness is not always salvation. Blood Feast was barely over an hour. To essentially do what that first film did for an extra hundred minutes stretches my ability to use pastiche as a defense...which I should say is saying something. Yet, it is good to see the master behind the wheel here--for indeed, there were Blood Feast knockoffs here and there, which generally lacked Lewis' panache (Bloodsucking Pharaohs from Pittsburgh, anybody?). Lewis does a good job of preserving the spirit he had in '63, though he does so perhaps a bit too strictly. (Weirdly, the best metaphor I came up with while watching it was that it was like a porn. Everything was meant to set up the actors to Go At It, whether that was stripping or killing, in the place of fucking. I've heard of that sort of accusation being leveled at gore films before, that they structurally resemble sexual material and that that adds to their supposed depravity. I don't really think I'm in a position to judge one way or the other, but after seeing many gore films in my life, including a depressing number of [bad] torture porn films, none struck me so much as being like porn than Blood Feast 2.)

All U Can Eat is much more directly a comedy than Blood Feast, which made me dread watching it a little bit. As a rule, I hate, hate, hate horror comedies, and I was worried that Lewis was going to go all Poultrygeist on me. I like to think that the good stuff in this movie makes up for the bad. This movie is pretty sexist--I expected it. "Women are dumb and bitchy but they look good nekkid and scream well" is the general maxim here, and it is usually played for laughs or general sleaze-rooted humor. Plus, it gets old fast when we keep seeing that Detectives Myers and Loomis (HAW HAW HAW GEDIT) are, respectively, prone to vomiting around corpses and being obsessed with food. Because Loomis is FAT, and fat people are simply OBSESSED with food. As the Traflamadorians say, so it goes. I enjoy these movies, love them even, and will return to them repeatedly, and yet I hate the idea that I'm supposed to turn off my brain while watching them when it comes to sexism and stupid jokes. There is no happy medium for me, and this is why nobody watches horror comedies with me. That having been said, I will still laugh at offensive jokes. John Waters has a cameo in this movie, and it's great. Maybe it's just that I love seeing John Waters in things, especially when his character is just Waters-as-himself in costume. I also laughed when Fuad started arguing about Detective Myers' use of the phrase "turn up missing"--after all, someone can't "turn up" if they're missing, right? It is, as one should expect from a 21st Century horror comedy, far from perfect. And there's that paradox again. You really can't expect something even close to perfect, can you...?

So it goes, so it goes. I really, really liked this movie, even if I won't judge anyone who cuts out twenty minutes or so from their personal viewing. I'm glad I'm not disappointed. 2016 wasn't a great year, let's just say. I don't know what comes up after here. I'm glad, however, that H.G. Lewis was a man who existed. He and others like him deserve to be remembered, because even if their movies were trash, they're another way out of the horrors of our horrible world. And they remind us it's not horrible at all. We have...entertainment. We have people striving to make people laugh or scream or just be happy, and we have the times when those people marvelously succeed. I hope I've joined Mr. Lewis and others in helping to keep your spirits up a little. Because in all likelihood, you deserve it.

We'll see you in 2017! Thank you so much, all of you, for stopping by. None of this would be possible without you. You are the true A-Listers. Or just generally awesome. Have a happy New Year. OR ELSE.

A Taste of Blood (1967), by H.G. Lewis

There's a curse that happens often to creators. The things we make that we love the most are often viewed by others as our worst crap; and the stuff we churn out just to pay the bills is usually seen as our classics. Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes, but he covered the rent--meanwhile, M. Night Shyamalan seems to consistently believe he's onto something big with each new project and yet everyone harkens for the days of The Sixth Sense. That brings us to this entry in our H.G. Lewis retrospective: the one he hoped everyone would remember for. Herschell Gordon adamantly believed that A Taste of Blood was his magnum opus, which is why the thing runs for nigh-on two hours. I suppose I'd be cheating with that curse if I applied a more critical lens than usual to this film, but if a movie is proclaimed to be one's personal best, and if it's going to make me sit still for 120 fucking minutes, I'm going to study the holy hell out its every bad inch. Of course, when that movie is ostensibly an adaptation of Dracula, I have to go full Academe™, 'cause Dracula, after all, is "High Art!" Even if it is honestly remembered more because of its adaptations, rather than literary merit--one need look no further than The Lair of the White Worm, with its twisted syphilitic misogyny, to see the prose failings of Bram Stoker, brimming with hate for the same wife who would viciously defend his copyrights after his death, nearly resulting in the complete destruction of all prints of Nosferatu. But I digress. We're here to talk about H.G., and study him in what he viewed as his greatest triumph. Does A Taste of Blood stand up? Well...we'll just have to see!

John Stone is a wealthy businessman with a devil-may-care attitude towards his wife Helene and his business partner/flirt-buddy Hester. He receives a large package from London, and it is the first large package that John has probably received because he is a sexist pig, even by H.G. Lewis standards. "Maybe my friends in London sent me Anne Boleyn's chopping block!" he jokes. His wife replies, "I hope her head isn't still attached." He shoots back: "If it is, at least she'll have learned to keep her mouth shut!" HAW HAW HAW. Of course, he's hardly the biggest idiot in the early parts of the movie, as both Hester and the deliveryman don't seem to notice that the mysterious box is smeared with blood. John, Helene, and Hester learn that the box contains brandy from John's ancestor "Baron Khron," with a deed to the Khron family estate in London, and instructions to drink a toast to the Baron. When John does so he slowly becomes a different person: literally. It turns out that Baron Khron's wicked brandy is transforming John into the reincarnation of Count Dracula. He becomes distant and cold to his wife, and moves to England to begin killing descendants of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Quincey Morris, and Lord Godalming, the members of the group that struck down Dracula in the 1890s. Of course, when Helene's friend Hank gets involved, he finds a Dr. Howard Helsing at his side. Will they be able to stop the vampiric Stone? Or will Helene be his next (neck's) victim?

A Taste of Blood is interesting because while it is a Lewis movie through and through, it is also, in its own way, two films. The way the characters interact, and the many--too many--scenes of characters in rooms talking to each other, which are often used as the only manner of character development, are very much Lewis' work. This includes the sexism, which I'll get to in a moment. These scenes often contain some truly strange dialogue; believable dialogue to be sure, but somewhat off in a way that could have been fixed with some editing. First John is talking to Hester about a trip to Hawaii, where if she drinks too much coconut rum, she'll end up "dancing the Hawaiian war-dance." (Ah, so he's racist, too.) But Hester's response is, "Ah, a man who likes efficient women." Are we supposed to correlate a war-dance with efficiency somehow? Is she being sarcastic about the inverse relationship between efficiency and getting sloshed off your ass? She's one to talk--were it not for off-ass-sloshing, many of her costars wouldn't have their careers!

But once John becomes a vampire, there are some notable departures from the Lewis mold. There is little blood in this movie, much less people getting their tongues ripped out or arms hacked off. There's definitely a Universal vibe here, especially in the interactions between Dr. Helsing and John/Dracula, even if there's still some trademark Lewis silliness as far as choices characters make--and he plays with shadows and muted images in a way that contrasts the Batman '66 approach of the pop-gore Blood Feast. My experience with Lewis' films after this one are that they do not reattempt the Gothic shadow spookiness--the ever-tedious Wizard of Gore, for example, is like Yellow Submarine in my memory. If Lewis doesn't succeed here with atmosphere, it's because he employs it scarcely. While it was admirable for him to try for subtle creeps, Lewis worked best with a cudgel. That's how he made the stuff he did as audacious as it was. Loudness was never a second point on the list for him. And mercifully, the film's divide is never as extreme as it was in Lewis' earlier effort, Monster a-Go Go, which was completed by Bill "The Giant Spider Invasion" Rebane, which never resembles either a Rebane film or a Lewis one.

And yet there are still some interesting thematic tidbits I want to crack open. The movie, as I said, is sexist, but there is an interesting subversion in the fact that it is patrilineage that dooms John to vampirism. John remarks on how his mother was Baron Khron's descendant, and yet she was not the recipient of the brandy, nor was her mother. Hester replies that John is Khron's "only heir," as contrasted from heiress. If John had been Joan, then presumably she would have been spared. (But then, if you think about it, Dracula's awfully exclusionary for not wanting to reincarnate into a woman...) What's more is that John's vampirism makes him abusive to his wife in a particular way: he becomes cold to her. No lusty vampire is he, it seems--the problem with vampirism, Lewis seems to say, is that it creates barriers between the sexes. The love they have for each should save each other, but the evil that has come upon them turns John away from that love. It's telling that Hank and Helene develop feelings for each other, though that may be a small victory for Helene, as Hank has a tendency to be as irksome as John. Nonetheless, masculinity is not wholly the heart of the triumph here. It's the men who are the true monsters of the film.

Speaking of Hank, there is an interesting part where he jokes about how he get during "a full moon." Man, imagine if it turned out that there was a werewolf in this movie, too! Then H.G. might have crossed the threshold from what is ultimately an overlong and over-padded film into an Al Adamson wonderland a la Dracula vs. Frankenstein. I can see that H.G. wanted to aim for the artistic rather than the schlocky this time, but sometimes, if you're really good at knocking haymakers into people's face, you don't end up any good at taekwondo. If you want to see the man's wackiness at work it's still a good watch, but Lewis' true artistic-aesthetic powerhouse was Jimmy, the Boy Wonder. Not only does Lewis voice Baron Khron, doing a reasonable Russian-type accent, but he also plays a character known only as "Limey Sailor." Trust me, I tried to analyze these scenes to figure out why exactly Lewis chose these roles in the movie he considered to be his diamond. But all I could come up with was another question, a parallel: why did Jess Franco play a piano player in all of his movies?

Jimmy, the Boy Wonder (1966), by H.G. Lewis

There are a lot of things that make being a critic worth it, and I have to admit, to be able to force my readers to make the jump from Two Thousands Maniacs! to Jimmy, the Boy Wonder fills my stuttering, emaciated heart with some sort of sick joy. Any H.G. Lewis fan familiar with his filmography will know how weird is to think that the same man who brought us the first explicit tongue-ripping scene in cinematic history also made a goddamn kids movie. What's more, that kids movie is bizarrely imaginative--far from an unsung classic for the genre, but a breakout effort nonetheless. Of course, you already know I have a bias! This movie is weird as fuck, so of course I'm going to praise it!

Jimmy J. is a kid with a grown-up's schedule. His mom wants him to eat breakfast, take a shower, get on the bus, all at the same time! It's enough to make him wish that time would stop, and unfortunately this is a kids movie, so wishes can warp time and space. To be specific: every 1,000 years there is a single moment where the heart of the Great Clock, which rules all of time, is exposed to the sun, and as such, is vulnerable to wishes. Jimmy's words make time stop, as shown in a series of segments where clearly not all the actors got the same cue to "freeze." Fortunately, Aurora, the daughter of an astronomer-wizard, decides to help Jimmy on his quest to undo his wish by restoring the Great Clock. The two are stopped along the way by Mr. Fig, a checkered-jacket, Dan-Dare-eyebrowed motherfucker who wants to stop time permanently, because statistically there would be at least one individual who would want that. Mr. Fig is a legitimately creepy bastard, grabbing Jimmy, shoving his face up near his, and barely disguising the fact that he hates everything good in the cosmos. But Jimmy is no idiot (the whole time-freezing thing wasn't done out of malice or even misunderstanding, just a lack of awareness that it was a possibility) and throughout this entire movie Mr. Fig's plans fall flat one after another.

The quest takes Jimmy and Aurora to Slow-Motion Land, which is a great way to show off the fact that your editor is familiar with film-speed effects that were wowing audiences six decades prior; to the land of the Green Indians, which ends with Aurora pelting people with hard candy; and to a public domain cartoon that was redubbed by Lewis and Friends to fill out another twenty minutes of the movie. Yes, before you ask, there are musical numbers, and frankly, the songs are not horrible--those with bad lyrics are usually sung well, and those that are sung poorly at least have fun words to them. When we aren't breaking into song the soundtrack is pelted with generic cartoon library cues, and an astonishing number of these cues appear in a lot of the exploitation movies that Lewis' contemporaries were working on. It's a kids movie so there's not much more to it than that: singing, random goofy events, moving towards a general quest conclusion. Jimmy and Aurora don't really go through character development, but we at least learn who they are, and as a team, the two actors work well together.

Overall, the acting is pretty solid. When people fail they are catastrophically awful. But for a kids movie, this is acceptable. You get an impression of earnestness throughout the whole thing, a dedication to the director if not the concept, which is prioritized over the sense of a paycheck. In a kids movie, this is everything. While kids movies have always been decadent and money-hungry, it's hard not to want to give up on a world that will turn out commercialized garbage like The Oogieloves. These movies need heart more than they need economic focus--I mean, they're for kids, after all! H.G. Lewis had nothing, and yet he still made something that's better than even a lot of the recent Dreamworks productions.

It's interesting because as it turns out, kids movies really depend on comedy, or at least a sense of fun, even if they should be allowed and encouraged to go into dark places. The general wackiness of the movie gives it a good atmosphere, and guess what, there are actual jokes that sell in this thing! That's something it's got over me, that's for sure. In a last-ditch effort to stop Jimmy, Mr. Fig tries to say he's turned good and wants to offer him food after his long journey: "Hot dogs...peanuts...popcorn...soda... handcuffs...oh, whoops!" Man, that's a joke that was probably way more innocent in '66...

Actually, that same scene offers a little tidbit that my brain wanted to use to transform the whole scope of the film. Mr. Fig barks at Jimmy, after he refuses again and again, "C'mon, kid! It's not an apple, it's a hot dog!" I had already been joking to myself about Mr. Fig being Satan in Jimmy's Christly Temptation, but there is something symbolic about a villain offering his hero food...in a jungle, no less! Of course, Mr. Fig is simply promising bodily nourishment, not knowledge of Good and Evil or the ability to turn stones to bread. But to view Mr. Fig in the Satanic tempter sense, perhaps literally, gives him an added depth, and indeed depth in the first place--he's not human, we know that much, as he fades away all creepy-like just like Charlie Evans from Star Trek when he's beaten. Plus, whoever he is, he's immune to time itself halting in its tracks. There are probably some Lovecraftian tentacles hiding behind that Robbie Rotten-esque face.

There's some other creepy stuff about the movie besides the slimy Fig. How do you account for the weird half-second close-ups of the strange faces the Green Indians keep making? It jars me every time. Oh, the Green Indians are exactly what you think they are, by the way, and they're racist to be sure, but there's something about being gawked at by a white man in greenface dressed as a Native American stereotype that is visceral even outside of racism. Weirder still is the fact that the Green Indians wear purple pants. This was four years after Marvel Comics started publishing the adventures of a certain green-skinned fellow. Coincidence?

The Green Indians of course represent the main fault in the film, the main thing that's aged poorly. I feel like it's doubly offensive for a kids movie to be racist, because racist media, of course, makes people feel excluded and encourages that exclusion; to exclude kids, and encourage kids of differing races to reduce their peers to stereotypes, is particularly foul. They're not around for long, though, and the good nonsense comes back again.

H.G. Lewis was a filmmaker who cared when he could, which was often, and had luck where he lacked talent. Jimmy, the Boy Wonder is an artifact of what happens when underground or outsider artists aim for something a bit more socially acceptable. As long as they don't compromise their personality, there's bound to be a spark of something in it. And I don't think Lewis could compromise his personality if he tried.

Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), by H.G. Lewis

We lost Herschell Gordon Lewis earlier this year, and in the wake of Bookvember and Spookyween I promised a look back at four films made by the Godfather of Gore. In 1963, Lewis' Blood Feast cracked open a new sort of filmmaking--gore-trash was born, and things would never be the same. Blood Feast was only the beginning, and it served as the opening part of what would become Lewis' "Blood Trilogy," consisting of Blood Feast, Two Thousands Maniacs!, and 1965's Color Me Blood Red and it's that second film we'll be looking at today. (We probably won't be looking at Color Me Blood Red because I think Lewis lost some steam on that one.) And before we start, I want to clarify something: when I started planning this month, realizing that Two Thousand Maniacs was a given (as it is on my A-List), I wasn't anticipating a Trump victory. In the wake of this election, a movie about a town full of right-wing Southerners trapping and killing Northerners to avenge the Confederate loss of the Civil War will be...interesting, to say the least. So break out yer finest moonshine, and pluck a song on the banjo. We're goin' down under the Mason-Dixon line.

We open with a song sung by none other than Lewis itself, recounting the defeat of the major Confederate generals during the Civil War, done in the style of a stereotypical "hick" ballad--like many things in Lewis' horror movies this is played for laughs. As this song plays we see a group of yokels move signs and tree branches to divert a pair of cars into the town of Pleasant Valley. The entire town comes out to greet these Northerners, proclaiming that they are holding their centennial celebration and they've been looking for outsiders to make into their guests of honor. Despite the oddness of such a proposal--and despite the fact that they've been invited to stay two whole days--the travelers agree to such "Southern hospitality." Almost immediately the audience is shown that there is something sinister about this town, aside from the fact that it is literally plastered with Confederate flags. And the characters only notice this when it is far too late: for the name of the game here, essentially, fucked up carnival games, like a "horse race" that turns out to be drawing-and-quartering, or going down a hill in a barrel...lined with nails! That's to say nothing of the "emergency surgery" they get ready for a woman who "accidentally" loses her thumb...or the cannibalism. Yes, this is all to make up for an incident a hundred years ago where the Union Army decided not only to butcher the Confederate forces they were facing, but the inhabitants of Pleasant Valley as well. Of course, there is a twist ending which reveals that these new folk in Pleasant Valley may not quite be the original victims' descendants.

Two Thousand Maniacs! is a movie that thrives on being high concept. A town of vengeful Southerners kill Northerners in wacky and gruesome ways, behind the guise of Southern kindness. That is your one-sentence premise; nuance is not what Lewis aims for, and I think that shows in that I can't tell you the name of a single character from this movie (though the movie certainly establishes its characters, even in a thin way--there are familiar faces). But what makes high concept, single-sentence stories interesting to talk about is that we get to fill in the nuance ourselves, in contrast to the didactic style of the complicated, experimental works which I will equally defend. Like I said, a movie like this is gonna say some weird things in the wake of a Trump victory. So let's get into my reaction.

When I first saw Two Thousand Maniacs, I found it as amusing and wonderful as the other Lewis movies I saw. I will not hide from the fact that now, today (I write this back on November 10th), Two Thousand Maniacs is actually pretty chilling if you are a minority concerned about the future, as I am. Never mind the fact that my new copy of the movie doesn't have the psychedelic Technicolor of the first print I saw, which highlighted that the blood was the too-bright red paint that Lewis employed to save money. Never mind the lack of realism concerning the violence, or how the characters handle it. What has happened in America in 2016 is a result of a lack of understanding of the dynamics of power and privilege, and that lack of understanding was carried by rural, non-college whites. For better or worse, the murderous Confederates in this film are part of the liberal narrative of who we should be afraid of, and even if I recognize that neither the liberal or conservative ways of things are absolutely correct, it's scary, having grown up with the liberal side of things, to be faced with the prospect of bands of regression-worshiping idiots (for remember, stupid people are scary 'cause they're immune to logic) who use their majority to torture and murder people. Of course, I'm of the mind that it's more complicated than both Lewis and the modern media let on: the people who support Trump, along with the people who supported the Confederacy, were victimized by Republicans (or Democrats, in the 1860s) who wanted to make them into their pawns, and shaped the media and education systems to this end. The xenophobia and intolerance shared by both Trump supporters and the slave-owning South are inherently unnatural, and culture can be changed to help people understand the intersectional function of power in our society--but I majorly digress. I am viscerally scared of the events of Two Thousand Maniacs if I understand that things are more complicated than my feelings let on.

Moving away from my own feelings, we have the movie itself. There's an interesting distinction I noticed. While 1964 was definitely in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, being fifty years closer to the Civil War has made a lot of difference. Even a lot of whites these days get on edge in the presence of the Stars and Bars, and yet the protagonists of Maniacs never seem to worry about being Yankees in a town that has spent millions of dollars on flag orders. Again, they are white--think of how different the movie would be if there was a single person of color in the cast--but we so readily assign that flag status as a symbol of hate today.

And that leads me to my next point: even beyond that detail, the protagonists are pretty naive. While I get that people might be more generally trusting, even outside the flag issue, in 1964, it takes a little bit of stupidity for someone to choose to derail their trip for two days to participate in a small town festival. The male lead of the story is even supposed to be headed for a teachers' conference, and his car has already broken at this point--only through hitchhiking with the female lead did he make it this far. And it's interesting to focus in on the fact that Lewis chose his male lead to be a teacher, of all things. He's played by the same guy who played the manly police detective in Blood Feast, so maybe his masculine charms are supposed to represent a self-assurance that things will turn out okay, but it's hard to write off the fact that the movie ends with our teacher friend telling the female lead that the best thing to do about discovering this patch of murderous, past-obsessed hatred...is to forget about it. What's that? The white middle-class educator wants to ignore a crime committed by his fellow whites? One which, because this is the Confederate South we're talking about here, is inevitably and irrevocably tied up in racism? Shocking.

I don't know if this style of filmmaking is what's needed for what's ahead in politics--and yes, that's a serious question I asked myself. I say that because I helped publish a book called The Fires of '16: Reign of Emperor Tromble. It was published before the election, and it's one of those things where it takes an offensive group and wallows in their awfulness, out of anger, out of a complete inability to digest their worldview. I'm sure it was written with good intentions, but wallowing is stagnation. It doesn't help anyone, because it doesn't move forward. Two Thousand Maniacs wasn't intended at all, probably, to be a progressive film in any way, but I'll interpret it with that lens, because even if the Godfather were still alive today, I will claim Death of the Author. (And I celebrate it for his intended goal for it, a gory, silly horror movie.) Were it not for the fact that it implicitly calls out its Northern characters alongside its reactionary ones, Two Thousands Maniacs would be simply a slate for the anger its creator had over the crimes of the South, both in the past and the present, representing only how disgusting and low humanity can sink. (And the ending very directly says that this way of life is literally dead.) By adding in a degree of care to his plotting, Lewis has asked us to look at the bigger picture, and to understand where us "do-gooders" fall into the scheme of things when it comes to violence and hatred.

Book Club of Desolation #12: The Pepsi-Cola Addict (1982), by June Gibbons

My process for this site is pretty simple. I look for movies or books I think I might like, and if I like them enough, or find them notable enough, I review them. To my knowledge, that's just the general critical process for a site like this. A natural aspect of this process is the Holy Grail Development Event. When you know what you like, you know what you'll probably love. There's always just one more thing out there, one more score, that will bring you critical artistic bliss. The perfect movie. The perfect book. And it's a tricky thing, the Holy Grail Development Event, which, in all honesty, could probably stand with a better name. The Internet is a thing now. Unless it's like The Weird Ones or something and every print was destroyed in a huge fire, or it's some penny dreadful published back in the Victorian period, you can find basically anything if you're willing to dig deep, risk viruses, and take a blow to your wallet.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict is basically the reason why I ended up doing the Book Club of Desolation. Yes, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was the first hint I had that these books existed. Yes, Harry Stephen Keeler showed me I'd have enough material for it. But when I began my research I knew that this was what I would build to. And now that I've gotten it done less than a year...what do I do for an encore? Well, something that makes me feel less guilty. This is one of those books where a lot of the meat of it is in the story behind it, so without further ado...

You may have heard the story of June and Jennifer Gibbons. Known as the "Silent Twins," the pair refused to talk to anyone but each other, and people who listened in on them heard them speak a language of their own creation. They were hugely dedicated to each other and, in essence, had a death pact of some variety. The twins were separated and placed in a mental health facility after they went on a crime spree which included committing arson. Eventually they determined that of them must "sacrifice" themselves in order to "be free," and in 1993 Jennifer died of unclear complications possibly related to other health problems brought on by her antipsychotics. Afterwards, June became much more expressive, and has gone on to live an apparently average life.

Before their crime spree, however, the girls wanted to be writers. Jennifer produced The Pugilist, Discomania, and The Taxi-Driver's Son, along with a play and some short stories, while June wrote The Pepsi-Cola Addict. Their work appears to have been published by New Horizons, a vanity print-on-demand press in their native Wales. Only Pepsi-Cola Addict is known to survive--because they were print-on-demand titles the amount of extant copies would be based on the number of copies that sold. Consequently, if Jennifer's books never sold, or only sold a copy or two, they may be gone for good. But Pepsi-Cola Addict exists, floating around as a bootleg. And sure enough, my copy is a bootleg, because I don't have access to the British Library (for geographical reasons exclusively, of course). I can say that it is one of the most incredible books I've ever read, and the fact that it has an astonishing story of authorship makes it all the better. That's saying nothing of the age of the writer. Pepsi-Cola Addict is a rush of pornographic comic book action, featuring some truly odd plot decisions pulled off with a remarkable skill. It is a true lost gem.

Preston Wildey King is a young teenager in love. However, he is also an addict. Preston loves Peggy and yet cannot quit his fixation with Pepsi cola. He steals it and steals to buy more, and often fantasizes about drinking huge quantities of the stuff. At times, he channels both Burroughs and Cleland as his Pepsi addiction resembles that of heroin, while also taking on sexual dimensions. Preston is also joined in his ennui by his friend Ryan. His best friend. His...best...friend. Ryan wants to rob a store but he also wants to bang Preston. This is not a hinted thing--there is oral sex in this book, and it is not of the hetero variety. There is a long and detailed series of events, all extremely delirious and laden with snappy Bogartesque dialogue. (Casablanca is maybe just a little influence here?) The inevitable happens. Preston bangs his lusty 30-something teacher. Then, he goes to jail as the robbery catches up with him. And we sink into nihilism, as a handful of pills washed down with Pepsi carries sweet Preston from this world.

I've glazed over a lot but that's because, like Don't Go in the Woods, the book's sheer oddity is hard to summarize. Every sentence is crafted with an odd precision, stumbling over amateurish metaphors while also evoking actual drama and pathos for our characters. The weird magical awkwardness of early teenagerhood, better in memory than in real life, comes back to you while reading, even if you didn't run into quite as crazy of shit when you were fourteen. Think the experimental passages of "Adams Farr" combined with a hatred for living a la Nathan Schiff. And while there are some stumblings, Gibbons keeps things moving, and shows that she has a remarkable intelligence alongside being well-read. It supports the notion that there is a connection between intelligence and mental illness, and that this is literature (convincing literature) about mental illness adds a certain layer to it all.

Of course, that sounds exploitative, but I prefer to look at the Gibbonses from the perspective of a fellow mentally ill person. I wish to celebrate their work as triumph with or over their illness as well; it's an expression of what mental illness does to a person. It's pretty clear that it affected Pepsi-Cola Addict and we can't get away from that. As a person with anxiety and depression (with some stuff probably stretching deeper than that), I am fascinated by what other mentally ill people produce. Even something like this, which many would decry as wallowing trash, is part of our voice. It shouldn't be ignored.

Plus, it's an important artifact of writing from a teenage author. My criticisms of "Canon" from my Don't Go in the Woods review apply here--literature written by youth always needs a closer eye, so that more of them may be considered classics. The work that young people do astounds me, much in the same way (though not the exact same way) that first-time work by very old people does. I hope I'll get to do Old People Goofing Off sometime soon as well. (This isn't really "Goofing Off," of course. But it's Kids Doing Great Things and that's what counts.)

I do hope there is a new edition of Pepsi-Cola put out at some point, and I hope Jennifer's works are rediscovered as well. Of course, I won't accept anything that doesn't benefit June Gibbons, or whomever or whatever she wants the new editions to benefit. But this should not be a book condemned to bootlegs, bless those bootlegs all the same. If you can find this, read it. I have built hype and yet I have faith the book can own up to it. It must be read to be believed. Track it down.

Thank you for stopping by for Bookvember! We'll see you again soon in the Book Club of Desolation...for now, get ready for December, when we'll take a look back on some moments from the life of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Book Club of Desolation #11: The Ferocious Fern and Other Stories (1943), by C.B. Pulman

One of the most indispensable sources of knowledge I've found in my quest to fill out the meetings of the Book Club of Desolation has been Chris Mikul's Biblio Curiosa, a zine dedicated to exposing the weird writings and weird lives of some of the forgotten writers of this world. I encourage you to look into it when you have a chance, if you're interested in seeing a good hard look at some unjustly--and sometimes justly--forgotten regions of literature. Through Biblio Curiosa I came across Clement Barker Pulman's The Ferocious Fern, a book apparently composed of plant-themed stories. I had no idea what to suspect when I found a copy, and suffice it to say that it delighted me. The Ferocious Fern is a lost minor classic, deserving a wider distribution than it ultimately obtained...I don't know if I can do the book justice in this review alone. In celebration of Bookvember I've decided to fill in the otherwise scanty information on this book for an Internet audience--I hope to be informative more than anything else!

Some brief notes before I talk about the individual stories, one at a time. The book does have something of a plant theme to it. Many of the stories have references to nature and natural themes, which ties in with its status as a regional work. I'm told the label of "regional literature" is kind of considered to be literary poison, and indeed, the thick Britishness that Pulman employs, along with the tedium he sometimes invokes in his lengthy description of rural English life, can be a bit of a deterrent. But Pulman's charm is intoxicating and you recognize quickly that he is a writer very much in charge of what he's writing. The regional/rural quality of his stories suggests a peace that he craves, in refuge from some of the horrors this world presents. To some degree, the book has some indescribable qualities, so perhaps it's best that I simply disclose my notes about the stories.

The titular story, "The Ferocious Fern," is an interesting choice for opening the collection. For readers unfamiliar with Pulman--i.e. everyone--it's a fantasy story, and as we'll learn, Pulman is good at genre fiction when he chooses to do it, and it's a shame that the rest of the stories in the collection aren't like this one. But it's also probably a bit of a good thing, since I found "Fern" to also be charmingly awkward from a writing perspective. My first thought was that Pulman was someone who read often but wrote rarely, probably a botanist or gardener. Later stories shot up that opinion because he really does show that he's someone who refined his craft, but "Fern" is a little clunky here and there. Plus, it doesn't have an entirely original premise: an unseemly fern turns out to be sentient and evil (or at least misguided), and kills a man. (Don't be mad that I spoil the ending, as Pulman himself does it on the inner flap and back of the book.) However, Pulman manages to have an interesting theme, one of conflict between magic and science. Two vague explanations are given for the fern's behavior, one being that chlorophyll and blood are not dissimilar (therefore allowing for predatory plants just as there are predatory animals), the other being that the plant figures into a 17th Century prophecy involving the Eve of St. John. The scene where the mysterious backwoods landlady talks about the prophecy explanation is effectively chilling, because Pulman suggests a secret, creepy world that exists far beyond the secure bubbles of our precious cities. It's very much like the quiet-but-real magic of The Witches' Mountain. I loved it.

"Murgatroyd has his Dinner" lacks horror or fantasy elements, but carries on the plant theme, and is one of his feel-good pieces to boot. Murgatroyd gets the wrong dish served to him at a restaurant, with unexpected results. Like many stories in the collection, it's more a scene or vignette than anything else, and thus really needs to be experienced for itself.

"The Speck" is a return to horror, albeit without paranormal elements. A man trapped on an island begins to hallucinate that the specks on his furniture are moving around. It was this story that made me realize why I was so quick to label Pulman as amateurish when I started the book: this is the sort of horror story I wrote when I was ten. When I first decided to be a writer, I was obsessed with deriving terror from subtle emotions. Being probably more bored than anything else, I had this habit of observing my emotions and my reactions to quiet observations, like looking at patterns in furniture. My conception of horror at the time was something "loud," or at least obviously horrific. The stories I could come up with for the patterns of my furniture and how I felt about them was sort of an untapped market, I felt. I think a lot of that must have been the fact that I was reading a lot of British literature at the time, which is usually "quieter" than what we see in America. To see that emotional obsessiveness put on paper by another writer was pretty awesome.

"Nothing Much in the Post" is another psychological horror story, of another kind. What the story ends up coming down to is what is surely a firsthand account of the London Blitz. The descriptions of bombs dropping puts this story among some of the best war literature I've ever read, period, and if for nothing but the account of the Blitz contained in this story, this book should be remembered. This is also a platform for Pulman to examine some of his views on class. Most of the time it seems like he's one of the good guys--the poor are sympathized with more than the rich, usually.

Next is "The Sound of a Voice," a story where unfortunately Pulman loses a bit of his pace. It is a ghost story with some of the leftover regional creepiness of "Ferocious Fern," but it is also overwhelmed with a sort of Dickensian sentimentality that I feel has aged poorly. There are a lot of descriptions of men's choirs choosing the songs they want to sing, and they are all supposed to be old favorites to the reader, and yet modern readers are unlikely to recognize or know the words to most of them.

"The Maid Goes Out" is another story about classism, though it is more optimistic than "Nothing Much in the Post." One of those ones that you have to read to experience. Brace yourself for some cheese--but otherwise know that this is a good one.

"Audience for an Exile" is another feel-good piece, albeit a somewhat complicated one. The exile of the title is an Eastern European refugee named Vestrovic, who is a wizened master piano player. One of the locals of the English village he lives in asks him to play a piece that no one else in the village can--playing the piece causes Vestrovic to walk back through his life, including to visions of a concentration camp. I assume that Pulman was aware of the Holocaust and this is a reference to it. The finale has an air of victory to it, but it's a fascinating avenue to travel down. I want to reread this to make sure I get everything out of it.

"The Road" is less optimistic and less interesting. In essence, an old roadman is called to plow a mountainous road so a doctor can reach a sick man in time. As the roadman plows his path through the mountain, he reflects on how hard his life has been. I may have missed something, but I find that unlikely: this one is as tedious as plowing a mountain, which may have been Pulman's intention--but it doesn't make the story very good.

Regrettably, "Tale of an Idiot" is another one that doesn't hold up well to time, and it suffers from perspective issues. It centers around Daft Davie, a mentally handicapped man who ends up helping to save a burnt town due to apparently being able to talk to water and use divining rods to dig wells. The story's theme, in essence, is "mentally handicapped people are useful too!" but repeatedly referring to a disabled person as "daft," "mad," "crazy," "stupid," or "an idiot" will probably bring about some cringing. As I said, the perspective jumps around too much as well, making it difficult to make sense of the events. And the usual vagueness as far as the supernatural events is a weakness rather than a strength in this case: I was left wondering if Davie did have some sort of superhuman ability, but not in the way that I felt that Pulman knew the answer. The story felt hollow or unfinished.

Thankfully, we're on solid ground from here on out. "The Great Quiet" is the story of Hamlin, a tortured poet whose desire to work in silence leads him to the realization that the mortal realm will never be quiet enough for him. It has a first person narrator, which is a nice departure from the norm, and through this narrator we have some interesting subtexts here. The narrator is ostensibly Hamlin's butler in his spooky old house on the hill, but there is something beyond just a desire to serve in him. I seriously read the narrator and Hamlin as lovers, and I have a bias, being queer myself, but there's something about how the narrator reacts to being shoved out of Hamlin's life by his obsession that screams "jilted." And there's a mutual connection between them that's not entirely a boss-employee sort of thing. And no, the narrator is not Hamlin's maid, because Hamlin has a maid whose femininity is always put in a different context from that of Hamlin and the narrator.

"The Apple Thief" is essentially a thriller, and it is a good one. Fate has constantly forced two men, Cawthron and Hemingway, to fight each other, ever since Cawthron stole an apple from Hemingway years ago. Hemingway is now the dictator of a small island called Tierra, while Cawthron has decided to pose as a socialist rabble-rouser to incite a rebellion and get Hemingway killed. I will not say anything further because this story is excellent and really shouldn't be ruined. Again, it is a testament to the fact that, at least for me, Pulman was better at genre fiction than he was at his literary vignettes, if anything because I feel like his conflict is better presented and more interesting when he tries something like a fantasy story or a thriller. But that's just me.

"Faltering Furrow" is another regional vignette but has more depth than some of the others we've seen so far. A farmer strives hard to cut straight furrows on his father's farmland so that he can prove to his father that he's worthy of inheriting the property. The twist to this one is almost cruel, and that's why it warrants attention.

"Wind Struck" ends up slipping a little again, because not only is it a love triangle story but it is a love triangle story that uses weather metaphors. It really doesn't help that the female love interest that the triangle sides fight over is presented in a flat, sexist fashion. Fortunately, the prose is some of the best that the book has, so it's worth checking out for that.

"The Square Watch" may well be the best in the collection, if anything because it shows how much imagination Pulman possessed. He was a good recorder of a life that probably doesn't exist anymore, save for in Britain's deepest depths, and "Ferocious Fern" showed that he could conjure up fantasy worlds, but this one takes the cake. As the title suggests, it may be a time-travel story. At its very least, it's a philosophical, pseudo-scientific reflection on the nature of time, written in a compelling and fascinating way. Professor Oughtershaw seeks the last of a set of thirteen Roman coins, because they may be the key to solving his model of time--and the personal stakes he has in it.

And finally, we have "Love and Mr. Portway." Dull, depressed Mr. Portway encounters his double, the robust, trophy-wife-marrying Mr. Forthergill, and relates to him the story of the only real excitement he's had in his life: an encounter with a beautiful young woman in the woods during a rainstorm. The twist at first is a comedic one, before a second twist unleashes the most hilariously depressing final sentence I've seen in a book in a looong time. It is a great way to end the collection and it's a great story in general.

I hope that provides some insight into a book that I hope reaches a wider audience. In fact--hm. I'll stay quiet for now.

If you have the chance to find this book, give it a shot. It's a tough thing to love, as you may have seen, but it doesn't disappoint.

Now, as you may expect, I've saved the best for last with Bookvember...the very best. The Ferocious Fern is a holy grail of sorts, but there's magic in our futures. Till next time...

---

Image Source: Kearn's Rare Books

Book Club of Desolation #10: Operation H.A.T.E. (2012), by Richard Franklin

Well, this ought to be easy. I get to talk about Doctor Who again.

Welcome back to the Book Club of Desolation, as we continue to celebrate BOOKVEMBER! This week's book is Operation H.A.T.E., by actor Richard Franklin. Franklin famously played Captain Mike Yates of UNIT during the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee)'s era of Doctor Who in the 1970s, and Operation H.A.T.E. is essentially "official" Mike Yates fanfiction. I put quotes around "official" because, like a lot of the productions put together by BBV, the creators of Cyberon, Operation H.A.T.E. does not operate with an official BBC license (or licence, I suppose I should say). The book began life in 2002 as an audio book put out by BBV as one of their more controversial releases, as written and narrated by Franklin. The original story, called The Killing Stone, seemingly has almost no differences from Operation H.A.T.E. aside from a stronger emphasis on the Doctor Who elements. While BBV had acquired the licenses to aliens like the Krynoids and Sontarans, and characters like Liz Shaw and the Rani, they got in trouble for The Killing Stone as there was no way the BBC would have given BBV the licenses for the Doctor and the Master even if they'd asked. When Richard Franklin chose to release the text of the novel, he of course had to change the names to avoid copyright issues.

So that's the backstory. Did I mention this review is gonna be a lot of dry trivia? I do love a good dry trivia session but I realize it's not great reading. I do have some complicated feelings about this book and so I'll try to focus on those rather than simply annotating Doctor Who continuity references.

With the flimsy excuse that I am not the first person on the Internet to do, I am going to have spoilers in my synopsis. There will be helpful [brackets] along the way to explain the codes Franklin uses. Our protagonist is Captain Martin Bigglesworth [Mike Yates], and he has been discharged in the wake of his betrayal of the Special Terrestrial Operations Project Intelligence Taskforce, or STOPIT [UNIT]. He has retreated from public life to find himself as a person [as Yates did in Planet of the Spiders], and we learn that his betrayal involved helping an ecoterrorist plot [just like in Invasion of the Dinosaurs]. He reminisces about his STOPIT family, including an exiled two-hearted Guardian of Time named Professor Cosmos, or The Brain [The Doctor]; gruff STOPIT alien-buster General Hycock-Bottomley, aka "The Bum" [Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart/The Brig]; thick but charming WO Bloggs/"Smudge" [Sgt. Benton]; and The Brain's traveling companions, Joley "Dizzy" Darling [Jo Grant] and Mary-Ann "Sniffles" Peabody [Sarah Jane Smith]. Captain M, as Martin is sometimes called--making him one letter away from being the Game Master--is encouraged to take a long stay in Morocco. Along the way the text sees fit to give us many details about Richard FranklImean Captain M's life, including his hunting achievements, acting achievements, and knowledge of British geography.

While in Morocco, Martin has various adventures but eventually comes across a sinister snake charmer. The charmer reminds him of STOPIT's old enemy, another renegade Time Guardian whom STOPIT dubbed Moriarty [The Master], due to his role as the evil counterpart to The Brain's Holmes. As it happens, the snake charmer is Moriarty, and he has a non-lethal cobra spit in Martin's eye. When he awakes doctors inform him he has a gallstone. The gallstone, when extracted, resembles the amphora-shaped jug that Moriarty kept his cobras in. Upon returning from space, The Brain discovers that this gallstone is actually the Amphora Calculosa, a component which will enhance Moriarty's signature death-by-shrinking weapon, the Matter Mangler Gun, or MMG [The Master's TCE]. In a confrontation at a department store (far from the worst of the book's questionable choices), Martin outwits Moriarty and risks death to stop him. The Bum reveals that STOPIT was testing Martin's cool as an independent agent since they were interested in taking him back into the fold, with a promotion, to boot.

With a few lapses, I tried to keep that synopsis as objective as possible. By itself, Operation H.A.T.E. doesn't sound too bad. In fact, it sounds like a fun, if average, Classic Who serial. To be honest, my original interest in the story was piqued by several fan-nonsense things present in the uncensored Killing Stone version. For one thing, I'm a big fan of the Master. This story opens partway through Planet of the Spiders and ends after that serial has concluded, when the Third Doctor has returned from space. Given that that trip to space was what killed him and caused him to regenerate, the original story starts in the hands of the Third Doctor and ends with the Tom Baker incarnation. The Master, meanwhile, is portrayed as the bearded incarnation of the Third Doctor's era, played by Roger Delgado. Because Delgado tragically died in a car crash before the end of Three's era, the only versions of the Master that Baker's Doctor fought were the disfigured version played by Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers, and the again-bearded incarnation played by Anthony Ainley. I love every incarnation of the Master, but to see Delgado's take go up against the Fourth Doctor is a fantasy I share with a lot of Whovians. More relevantly to the book, however: I am also a fan of Mike Yates. While I love all of the UNIT family companions, Yates presented a lot of depth to the UNIT era, clearly having a vivid life outside of work, uncommonly for early Who, having a set character arc. I don't know if Mike would be in my Top Ten or even Top Fifteen list for favorite companions, but he was a nice character to see.

And this brings me to a pressing issue I have with Operation H.A.T.E.: there is a reason why, typically, actors do not write their own scripts. While certainly there are many actors who write and direct with as much skill as they show in acting, this is usually because their acting training has informed them that there are limits you have to impose on yourself when it comes to writing the characters whom you portray. Before I go further, I just want to say: Richard, I love your work. I am gladdened by the fact that you still love the character of Captain Yates, and you are an awesome actor--at some point I plan on buying the audio stories you with Tom Baker and AudioGo because they sound excellent. This is not an attack on you, and I will never oppose anyone publishing any book they want. If it's true that everyone has a story, by all means, tell it.

However, I can't read about the adventures of "Captain M" without the names Mary Sue and Miles Gloriosus coming to mind. Operation H.A.T.E. not only endows Yates/Bigglesworth with superhuman skills, cunning, wisdom, and handsomeness, but it does so while also shoving down the rest of the cast...and while continuously reminding us of just how amazing he is, and how stupid everyone else is. Now, I absolutely believe that this was done with the best intentions in mind, even though the ad blurbs for the book, and endless passages about Mike's backstory that suddenly become much more detailed than anything else, really do show us that Captain M is supposed to be Franklin with Yates' career (which complicates things when you wonder if some of the book's more damning offenses are meant to be products of Yates' perspective rather than Franklin's writing, and that the book's faults are done on purpose). I do have to wonder if any of Franklin's fellow Who actors have read his interpretations of their characters next to the Mighty Yates. To put it bluntly, everyone but Yates is an imbecile, reduced to their very base traits. Some characters end up getting fairer treatment than others, with there being at least one scene that only just exaggerates the spittle between the Brig and the Doctor, and where Benton gets one of those moments where he's genuinely clever, in his own way. Jo and Sarah Jane don't get that; Jo is a ditz in the show, but here it's basically her only trait. Sarah Jane cries, yes, but here...it's basically her only trait. Women are generally described only by their prettiness, and I think there are other female characters beside the pre-established ones ported over from Who, but they don't last, instead being present largely for Yates to ogle at.

As with himself and Yates, Franklin binds attributes of actors to their characters. It is briefly mentioned that Jo is "blind as a bat," and apparently Katy Manning, who played Jo, did require a lot of help on the set as a result of poor eyesight. Fair enough. But then we see that the last UNIT has heard of the Master was that he died in an accident with his traveling machine, in Turkey...the same fate as Roger Delgado. To throw the real-life death of an actor whom one co-starred with into such a farcical story alongside something like an inside-joke regarding an actress' bad eyes is more than a little tasteless. Unfortunately, the presence of the Master also exposes the story's issues with race. Franklin is someone who is probably not fond of "political correctness" but there does seem to be some implicit belief that the reader thinks Arabs are evil, or at the very least, weird and mysterious. The Master is disguised as an Arab when he poses as the snake charmer, but even afterwards there are references to the darkness of his skin, at one point even making the point of contrasting Mike's whiteness to him as a symbol of good versus evil. True, Roger Delgado was usually typecast as an evil person of color (usually Hispanic or Arabic), so presumably this is another inside-joke gone wrong, but there is a taste of imperialism here.

I won't comment on the quality of the prose itself, simply because writing is not Franklin's chief profession. Though he makes some shoutouts to Sherlock Holmes and the Bigglesworth books (as well as implying that Mike got a PPK from Q Branch), Franklin commits something I've seen in other inexperienced writers: the sentence structure, and word choice, to an extent, resemble something you'd see in a kid's book. It is passable, and I've been mean enough.

You'll note that I've been referring to the characters generally by their Doctor Who names; unfortunately I don't believe that this one really works as an original novel. It seems to have been intended to simply be a Who novel under code. I won't condemn that--I have some complicated views on fanfiction and copyright, which is another story for another day. But even if you can follow the background elements, referencing what are ultimately Doctor Who episodes, you're left with a book that exists in a world uncannily similar to Doctor Who, with characters resembling ones from Doctor Who, by an author who had a regular role in Doctor Who. And that's going to mean a certain degree of continuity lockout for the average reader, but let's be fair here. I don't know if I would've found this if I was not a fan of the show, and I think that's typical. This is a book for the most intense of Captain Yates fans.

Operation H.A.T.E. will never be one of the worst books I've read, but I can't say I was expecting the faults the book ultimately contained. It's a piece of Doctor Who obscura resurrected ten years after it's creation, for all the good and ill that that implies. There's certainly a fair share of fun moments...again, I won't pass up the fanwank fun of a Fourth Doctor/Delgado!Master meetup. But in the end, it is rather like your grandpa (a good and solid grandpa, not one who gets you Plug and Plays when you ask for XBox games) writing a sci-fi story for the very first time--clumsy and occasionally embarrassing.

---

Image Source: Timelash.com

DON'T GIVE UP

Hey guys.

Man, talk about that America! And I thought the movies I watched were crazy! Heh, heh...okay, joking aside. I'm here to tell you that we are going to be okay. It will not be easy...but it will be okay.

I'm writing this largely because of how I've spent the last couple days. Cold. Tense. Nauseous. Panicked. And it only got worse when the night ended two days ago. But now, I've passed through it, and I want to try to light up the world. Because I think in some ways, we can take help and safety and security for granted. We don't like to face up to the fact that our way of life is not fixed in time, and it can be taken away before we even know it. Unfortunately, that is life: nothing stays the same. All we can hope for is that our lives and the lives of our loved ones are long and happy. And I want you to have that. I want it if you are my friend; I want it if you are my enemy, or if we are just passing acquaintances, or if we've never met. If you are a human being, you deserve your life, and you deserve to be happy.

In a sense, that's why I do this. I started Adam Mudman's A-List because I loved these movies and books so much that I couldn't keep it to myself anymore. Even if no one cared about them--and I'm learning now that people do care--I had to try to share that love, just that maybe even one person would watch Winterbeast or read The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, and be changed by it in the way I was changed. Because it's fun to find new things!! And that's why the forces we face are wrong. It's good to embrace the weird, the different, the new and unprecedented. Throwing people out of here, or stopping them from coming in, or making it so they want to leave is just taken what is a lovely bush of flowers and cutting it down to only one color...with a chainsaw. And I want more than anything to emphasize the "fun" part of it, because I've seen how my peers and heroes in these sorts of reviews have reacted, and I'm with them: I will always be here to make you laugh and smile, and to lead you to things that will elicit more of the same. Movies and books like these, that are politically "useless," are still important, because even though we need to fight and engage with the real world, we will still need a place to go. We will still need imaginations, escape hatches, unrealistic divergences.

Of course, I'll be doing political stuff, too. I feel I have to. Yeah, some of the reviews will have politicized analysis. But keep your eyes peeled for news on some of my other literary projects, which will be dedicated towards mobilizing artists into speaking their mind and standing up for social justice. Art and entertainment, along with donations, protests, and volunteering, are how our side fights back.

Don't be afraid. I may be white, and relatively abled, and financially stable, but I'm a queer woman. I won't run from that; anyone who tries to stop me, I will just walk through and over. I can't understand every fight, but I can sympathize because I have my own experiences. I don't know everyone's pain, but the pain in any form is bad enough. As a queer woman, I'm not scared. Being scared is what they want, and letting that fear run your life will give them power to do more (as hard as that is to think about, I realize). Just remember that if you were sweating all the way through the election, the worst has happened. For many of you this may be your absolute worst fear. But the thing about running into your fears is that you face them; you accept them. You know that Doom is here, but the Doom of Real Life is way, way smaller than the Doom of What Could Be. It's like in movies: suspense is scarier than the reveal. So now that worst fear is confirmed, and this man is our President, but as long as we fight and work together, we have nothing to fear.

I leave you with the words of Blind Guardian. Yeah, we're Doomed, but it's happened before, and we'll find a way out.

We will remember!

Skies may fade and stars may wane; 

we won't forget.

And your light shines bright, yes,

so much brighter--

shine on!

 We will remember,

until the skies fall in we won't forget.

We will remember;

we all shall follow Doom.

Book Club of Desolation #9: Weasels Ripped My Flesh! (2012), by Robert Deis et al.

Even if I was a man, I wouldn't get men. I didn't get men when I did feel like I was a man. That's why I turned out not to be one.

I don't claim to get women, either. I don't claim to get humans. That's why I'm a shitty writer. Well, ordinarily, I would say that. Apparently, there's not great necessity to understand human function to be a good writer. I mean, the business is chiefly based around lying, and I like to think that I'm decent at lying when I do have to say I know people. And that lying, I think, empowers me. And I like the fact that writing gives me infinite power. It gives me the chance to use my imagination and it's meant that exact thing to billions of humans throughout history.

It means that writing has a lot of variety to it. I respect that variety, deeply, and I've tried to read everything. I like a lot of "good" books, and also, as you know, a lot of weird shit. I recently discovered I like some Westerns. I had a chance to read this thing called Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires, which appears to be a political brochure talking about anxiety in Argentina in the '70s which turns into Fantomas fanfiction. The Book Club of Desolation has brought me to a lot of these books, and I started to plan out this month's event, to follow up on the conclusion of Spookyween. I propose thus to the reader a BOOKVEMBER, where the Book Club of Desolation will meet weekly for a month to discuss this great variety in literature. We need to get to something that I never would have checked out before now, because I have mixed feelings about it, even after reading a full volume of it. Get your deodorant ready, bros, because we're diving into the Armpit Slicks--Men's Adventure magazines.

Don't get me wrong, the Men's Adventure genre had pulled at me for sometime, because to be frank, I find that shit hilarious. I've had regrets about passing up 100 Mack Bolans for a dollar at a garage sale. Lord knows that would be a fun piece for this site. And I'll probably end up checking out that Donald Westlake pseudo-James Bond novel at some point. But I will say this, and this is the only time I say it: the lure here is purely an ironic one, or, in more/less pretentious terms, an anthropological one. Most of the content on this site that I appreciate I enjoy unironically. If I'm going to be reading Men's Adventure, though, it has to be because I want to poke fun. For some time, I've known about the original "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" story, which I learned about through the film of the same name. It was convenient of Robert Deis, Josh Alan Friedman, and Wyatt Doyle to entitle this book after that famous story, so that people like me could strike the motherlode with a good intro primer for the Men's Adventure genre. And despite what I may end up saying about this book, I owe all of those fine gentlemen much, because stories like these are valuable and worth preserving. The variety of literature and art is worth preserving if framed in the right context. And yet, also, hanging it out in the air to dry, as it is, for everyone to form their own interpretations--that's important to me too. I guess I should just present this book rather than pass judgment on it--though, incidentally, I will also pass judgment on it.

Usually when I do a short story collection I want to examine each story on its own to the best of my ability. However, there are a lot of stories in this book, and so in general I'll be talking about the book as a whole. There are some common threads between the stories, and the book in turn presents more than just the stories, so it in turn has to be looked at in layers. We'll start with the stories.

I was able to pin down about four basic categories for the stories contained in this book: Killer Creatures, Sociological Studies, Adventure, and Woman-Haters. All of these overlap and interact in some ways, so they're not hard definitions. Killer Creature stories are the namesake of the book and this one has some good ones. It's satisfying to read the original "Weasels" story (which would inspire Zappa who would inspire Schiff), and it's also nice to know that I live in the same universe as a formally published story called "Monkey Madness." These stories probably inspired the wave of animals-gone-berserk movies in the '70s and '80s, like (just off the top of my head) Frogs, Dogs, Strays, Slugs, Grizzly, and Squirm--to say nothing of Jaws. This was seen by some as an opportunity to resurrect the good ol' giant monster flick, leading to movies like Island Claws and Food of the Gods. I'll probably delve into those soon enough with a collection of cryptozoology-themed Men's Adventures put out by the same team. The Killer Creatures are a blast, and it's a good idea to open with one. It drew me even if later elements shoved me back out. Plus, the editors included a master list of all of the animals that have been featured in this kind of story: it included the obvious ones like ants, lions, crocodiles, tigers, sharks...but also anteaters, lemmings, newts, badgers, and iguanas. Excellent.

The Sociological Studies are what they sound like--reports or inside stories about scandalous topics. They vary in quality and, as you may expect have not aged well. Stories about the horrors of Beat culture will be amusing--racism-laden tales bashing Calypso music won't be. I can't properly gauge the lesbian expose stories, of which there are several. These are the literary equivalents of Mondo movies. They are tedious, offensive, and have aged badly, albeit not as badly as some of the other pieces. Have I mentioned this book doesn't support modern values yet...?

The Adventure stories I found to be somewhat boring, though there was a story that was done pretty professionally by Harlan Ellison, shriveled prick through he was. I should say here that if you can imagine the narration from a Something Weird B&W release, you can imagine the prose style of most of the stories in this book. Hardboiled into oblivion. Throw in war stories played straight and you've got me snoozing, and throw in racism and you've got me mad. I don't know what else to say about these ones.

And then we come at last to the Woman Haters. Man, these were a hard sit, but in the trainwreck sort of way. I really had difficulty putting these down even though they were some of the most monstrous stories of the collection--I blame my immunization to such things on having watched so many exploitation movies. Some of these really do give you insight into the sick fucks who were behind a lot of this. I got excited for "Grisly Rites of Hitler's Flesh Stripper" only to be disappointed (when I shouldn't have been) that it was merely an excuse for a nameless, faceless sexy lady to be repeatedly raped and mutilated by a Nazi for x number of pages. While these stories are offensive to basically everyone, sexism is their most prominent issue. And yet there's always something that's compelled me to look into the sick side of our culture, and I know it's not a unique trait. In this case, I don't think I have an explanation for it. I am probably a bad person in my own right.

But, to defend myself somewhat, I do want to step away from the layer of the stories and instead look at the book itself. The editors feature introductions to many of the stories, along with several introductions to the book as a whole--this is also seeded with interviews from some of the guys responsible for the big content of this market, including Mario Puzo. All of this is loaded with a rich history of the genre, showing how fast-moving of a market it was. It's easy for a modern reader to view this material as the Kindle porn market or clickbait "news" sites of the time. And like any sort of "bottom barrel" market, it's an important part of history, because people aren't reading "art," they're reading this stuff. Of course, that won't stop us from writing "art," as well as also writing "this stuff" to pay the bills. Such is the life. Take Mario Puzo for instance: he wrote trash, and yet an adaptation of one of his novels is considered by some to be the best film ever. I'll always walk on the artsy idealistic side of things, but man, do those cynical, realist, "economist-type" writers get the big breaks...

So naturally, the editorial stuff is going to be great for history lovers. The third layer, then, is the art: the team has lovingly reproduced hundreds of vintage covers, pages, and ads from several decades' worth of magazines. This is pure eye candy for fans of the hilarious. Thrill to the things that made your grandparents and great-grandparents hot on the forehead! It's nearly impossible to believe that these images were once printed and sold, and yet more importantly it makes one wonder what will be considered trash-treasure in the future, which we take for granted today?

This is a book where the actual content would fall apart without context. The book itself is so well put together that it's worth getting for the notes and images. It creates a historicity for a genre that we can't take straight anymore--even if the values live on (we need look no further than to our modern politics for that). Deis, Friedman, and Doyle deserve recognition for their work, and to top it all off, Mr. Deis himself signed my copy. If you can survive the horrors of Wanton Witch, you can make it with this one. Try it out if it's your speed. All I can say for now is that I'm hyped for this cryptozoology book.

Bookvember continues next time with a look at English sci-fi...of a very particular brand.

---

Image Source: New Texture

Don't Go in the Woods (1982), by James Bryan

You know, this movie brings SpOoKyWeEn to such a perfect close that I had better hope I have something this good for next year. Good thing I do! Don't Go in the Woods was, for a number of years, the closest thing I had to a favorite movie of all time. Not just my favorite horror movie...my favorite movie. Ev-er. Now, comments like that are decently common on the A-List. It is, after all, my List of A-class trash movies--the reason why I had to do things like a Godzilla Retrospective is that no one wants to hear about how I love every single movie I review. But it's movies like Don't Go in the Woods that caused me to start keeping an A-List to begin with. I have seen this movie more times than I can count. And so I think I'm going to have to close out Spookyween's look back at four decades of horror with a review that's a bit more frank and stream-of-consciousness than normal.

Don't Go in the Woods, at least for the first big chunk of it, is maybe best described as an anthology of vignettes. Essentially, a bunch of (mostly) nameless people Do Go in the Woods and are butchered by a large unwashed lunatic who carries a spear, wears rosaries on his head, and lives in a convincingly disgusting shack full of trophies/junk stolen from his victims. Along the way we follow a group of campers named Joanie, Peter, Ingrid, and Craig as they slowly begin to understand--too late--that there is someone out there hunting them. That's about as High Concept at it gets. And that's where director James Bryan succeeds. With a relatively (and deliberately) simple premise, he left himself room to fill in all the little nooks and crannies with pure oddity. Remarkably, both these oddities and the main plot (following the four young campers) are extremely satisfying. The movie succeeds in its event-content, and as I'll get into later, you'd better believe that this isn't the only type of content it does well.

I can't bring up the strangeness of this movie without describing it, and yet it permeates the movie so profusely that I can only scratch the surface--which is good, because then, as is my constant goal, you will be forced to watch the movie yourself.† When you take into account the reports that Bryan did make every ounce of weirdness on purpose, you recognize that this movie has a level of genius to it. Now, while I just said I want you to watch the movie, there is some stuff I have to spoil, so if you want the full experience, which I will absolutely recommend over my writing about it, Don't Finish This Paragraph. There are three scenes in particular that I refer to. The first is the one involving Dale and his...wife? Mother? Sister? In any case, Dale and his companion are two gaudily-dressed dweebs who stand out in a movie largely populated by gaudily-dressed dweebs. And if you've ever met me and my fashion sense in real life, you know what it means for me to describe someone or something as "gaudy." Dale just wants to take a photo of "the train" pulling in (there's no way a track runs through a forest this thick); she is more intent on annoying the fuck out of the audience in the most amusing way possible with her constant, contrast whining of "Daaale! Daaale! Wait for me, Dale!" Next, there are Cherry and Dick. They are a newlywed couple consummating their marriage. And their names are Cherry. And. Dick. May they and their mobile home RIP in Peace. And finally, there is the odd, odd sequence with Wheelchair Guy. I will say no more, even with a previous spoiler tag in place, but let me just say this: I don't think people in wheelchairs usually try to climb mountains unsupervised. Always, always, does this sequence get to me...

Can you start to see what I mean? I hope you can. I like to think this is a movie that can sell itself even in vagueness (even if I pump my admittedly-flawed bombast into things as usual), and I hope that becomes more apparent as I write on. In regards to that bombast, I really should be more quiet about this movie. It deserves a better analysis--not to say that any of the other movies I've reviewed didn't deserve me shrieking hysterically about them. I am sort of moving towards a thesis here--that's been planned--so I think trying to actually get academic might help in the long run...

With that being said: this movie is actually pretty scary. All the movies I've done for Spookyween are, in their own way, and that's why I picked them. Weasels Rip My Flesh has a hopeless grunginess to it; I Eat Your Skin has an atmospheric soundtrack and some eerie shots; and Daughter of Horror terrifies me from beginning to end. Don't Go in the Woods keeps its voice way, way down on its creeps, and encourages repeat viewings. For example, when we meet the four campers, they talk about rabies and what to do if you see an animal that could be rabid. Craig warns the group that it's not normal for forest animals to eagerly approach humans: "No animal in its right mind would dare bother us," he says. The scene cuts on that sentence, meaning we're supposed to pay attention to it. That leaves us with the impression that it's meant as foreshadowing: there is an "animal" who's gonna "bother" them, and no, he's not in his right mind. And in the scene where poor Dale the photographer is killed, his body is thrown down onto some rocks...next to a lake the four campers are playing in. At once, Hitchcockian suspense kicks in: we the audience know that there's a slaughtered corpse right next to our heroes, but they don't. Add this onto the fact that Bryan clearly knows how to use and place a camera. Murders are bookended with wide shots of the woods, which gives us a sense that nature is almost apathetic to what's happening here. And it shows how fucked the killer's victims truly are: when the cops finally get involved, they say that they've found around fifty bodies. The killer has been doing this for years, if not decades, and no one ever knew. Brrrr.

Of course, the movie is also laden with some more overt horror--yep, this is a Video Nasty, a member of that league of honored greats banned or sliced to ribbons in the UK by censors. And that means that the deaths are pretty gory. We never see any organs or entrails a la Lucio Fulci, but cinematography and blood packs come together in a way that makes it nicely visceral. Plus, it helps that there's usually something to make us care about the people being diced...

I do have to talk about the characters before I go into my conclusion. This movie manages to establish better characters in five minutes than five hours of DC movies did--and I know that's a cheap joke, but I mean to say more that there was a great script on this one, much more than "cheap" stereotypically allows. (Back to that in a second.) Peter is whiny, but ultimately courageous; Ingrid is snarky, but more reserved and chill than Joanie; Joanie is okay with smashing her friends' hands with rocks for fun (in a lovable way); and Craig is a nerd, obsessed with his own apparent knowledge of the woods but still being pretty dumb and useless. We also meet a Sheriff who is still somehow not the most corpulent police officer I've ever met, his pinball-playing deputy, and an attractive, compassionate nurse. Though none of them really get to say much, we get a feel for who they are, and they seem like real people. Maybe it's because their acting/dubbing is notably awkward. But it's well-acted awkward, a "we-knew-what-we-were-doing" awkward. I absolutely love it when movies do that, because somehow, in an age where "nerd movies" dominate the box office, we still can't fucking put nerds or awkward people in movies and have it be more sophisticated than goddamn Big Bang Theory. This movie--in its acting, direction, scripting, and editing--is a triumph for nerds. But cool nerds. Because James Bryan is one of the Cool Guys, or at least he can sell himself to me as such.

So I said earlier that I was building towards a thesis with this, and that's true. When I was preparing my review for this movie, I remembered something one of my professors told me in regards to the idea of a literary canon. She reminded us that a "classic" book has really never meant much more than the phrase we use almost as an idiom, "It's a classic!" It really does just mean a book that a large group of people happened to like very, very much, and begin to obsess over. We take the idea of "canon" in both literature and film pretty seriously, and I think most people take for granted the idea that something stereotypically great like Citizen Kane is going to be a good watch, and, perhaps consequently, that that which is unlike Citizen Kane is an inferior grade of film. And mainstream critical views have generally lauded praise on movies that, like Citizen Kane, have good budgets††--to the point, in fact, where I do think some receptions have colored their views based on how much the movie cost. And I say "receptions" here rather than opinions; I'm not going to be a dick and claim the right to critique what individual people think and say about movies I like or don't like. Opinions in crowds, however, form receptions, and we've seen that receptions can be engineered. The Golden Raspberries, for example, have the tendency to preemptively or flippantly pick movies to nominate for their Worst Movie categories, based on the fact that the members don't have to see the movies to nominate them. And while, yeah, the Razzies are basically just for fun and whatnot, and they clearly pick movies based on infamy, they are still well-known enough to leave a social impact, and critics have changed their minds in modern times about many of the movies that the Razzies helped condemn, like Heaven's Gate, Mommie Dearest, and hell, even Howard the Duck and Star Trek V. Of course, there's no objective way to determine if anyone was "wrong" or not--and the Razzies at least make sure to go after movies that actually made it to wide release, so there's there not an issue of budget here, but you'll see that critical culture has difficulty getting away from judging movies based on expense. Note that so many of them frequently call Ed Wood--mediocre at worst, next to some of the shit that's been made--the worst director ever because he and his movies were cheap. And so Don't Go in the Woods left me one general statement, which I want to apply both to the obscure "trash" I review here, as well as a lot of experimental or unusual "bad" movies of better budgetary standing, like At Long Last Love: we should be fairer to movies.

I condemn bashing movies that one hasn't seen, but more relevant to Don't Go in the Woods: I condemn bashing movies that had little money behind them, by that factor and by what ramifications it had on the film. By that, I guess I mean I want mainstream critical examination of movies that, by our current capitalist standards, fail. I want people to learn to appreciate the unique qualities of amateur acting, directing, scripting, and what those qualities mean--I want them to tease out detail and substance from things that we've already decided have none. And in doing so, I like to think that we'll learn something. I can't say I know what, but I'm starting to see inklings. And even if the best we can conjure for these movies is ironic, humorous appreciation...I'm sure we can glean something from that. I'm of the opinion that everything goes down forever, and there is nothing that is meaningless. We humans, I think, get a little snobby when it comes to deciding what things have what importance, and I know that's because we are short for this world. We only have so much time spent awake before we die. But let's be idealistic. Let's look into the past, review all the forgotten films that have come before, that no one watched or liked, and see what we can find.

Because while you watch this movie, I want you to remember that the classics we take for granted are just the ice above the water--the real heft is in the dark depths.

So that's Spookyween! Thanks for stopping by--grab some candy corn on the way out. It's the best I can offer as apology for the Sin of Didacticism, plus, I lied about there being a cash prize for the Costume Party. Next up will be a quartet of meetings for the Book Club of Desolation, because it's finally ~*~*BOOKVEMBER~*~*. So hang on tight, 'cuz y'ain't seen nuthin' yet!

---

† Do not watch the bootlegs on YouTube. Those are, as far as I know, derived from the Video Nasty cuts, and most of the gore is removed, along with the soundtrack, for fuck knows what reason. I'm going to assume that that means music is too controversial for the average British censor.

†† Citizen Kane cost ~$840,000 in 1941, which is equivalent to roughly $14 million as of 2016. I do not consider this a small budget.