A Mexican comics collective that calls itself Parranda de Moneros has a comic out, “Paranormal Directo“, a collection of six short stories based on the two concepts “paranormal event” and “public transport”. I’m not sure it’s on sale yet, but the cover promises, well, ghosts and ghouls on a Mexico City subway train, and lots and lots of tits. The whole exaggerated female anatomy thing is overdone in comics, and I’d like to see less of it, but then again, Mexican horror comics, from an independent publishing collective, no less? You don’t see that every day.

I’m not sure it’s on sale yet, but I want it, and when I get it, I’m going to review it here.

Mondo Schlocko posts a YouTube clip of a Hijo del Santo cartoon. It’s actually pretty decently animated, and lots of recognizable Mexico City landmarks and stuff. Spanish language dialogue, and looks fairly modern, apparently from Cartoon Network. Go check it out.

The Horror Blog posts a short Bloomberg interview with Roger Corman. I’ve got a lot of respect for the man and his work, and while the whole interview is worth a read, there’s one quote that stands out. The Horror Blog also chose the same quote, and I think it’s worth repeating:

“The strategy was to make the best possible film for the money. I’ve seen so many people slough off low-budget films. You cannot do that. When Jonathan Demme did his first film, which was for us, it was a woman-in-prison picture. He said to me, “I’m going to make the best woman-in-prison picture ever made.” That’s the attitude that you must have.”

And holy shit, is he ever right. And more than that, he’s actually agreeing with me. Ok, that sounded pretentious. When I finally saw Bolas Chinas, the low budget movie I acted in last year, I was disappointed. Not because it was a low-budget movie with largely amateur actors; I already knew that. I was disappointed because the director, who also wrote the script and edited, had not realised the full potential of the thing. The script wasn’t particularly good, and it also wasn’t finished before we started shooting, and the editing was incredibly sloppy and careless.

The problem, again, isn’t the budget. It’s that people don’t care. In this case, lots of people involved were originally making “art film”, and did this project for fun inbetween other, more “serious” project. And it’s fine to make a movie for fun, I guess. But it’s not fine to not care about it. Making a movie is hard work, and lots of it. If the people who are doing it, when they get tired in the middle of the project, as always happens, say “fuck it, it’s just a project for fun, my real, serious art movies are what matters, I’ll just do this as quickly and carelessly as possible”, then what you get is a movie that sucks, instead of a movie that’s at least competent and decent for the resources you had available.

If you’re going to make a movie, make the best movie you can. Maybe even make the best movie of its type ever made, if you can bring yourself to say that (I’m not sure I could). But always do the best you can, give it 100%, because if you don’t, if you stop caring, it’s going to suck, no matter what the budget is. There are lots of big-budget turkeys that are obviously a result of people not caring, not caring because they don’t believe in the project, or they believe it’s going to be a blockbuster no matter what, or for any number of other reasons. And they flop. Low-budget movies where everyone does their best usually come out at least decent, and the people involved often get a chance to make another movie, maybe with a bigger budget.

If you’re going to do something, do it right. If not, just don’t bother, because it’s going to suck. Roger Corman agrees with me.

Bret Easton Ellis writing a horror novel is weird in itself. That it’s at the same time a postmodern rumination on his own life, featuring a first-person narrator with the same name and at least partially the same life as the author makes it stranger, but surprisingly, Lunar Park works quite well, both as postmodern novel and as horror.

The book’s Bret Easton Ellis has enjoyed a career as a celebrated novelist, but has also royally fucked up his life with drugs and meaningless relationships. One such relationship resulted in a child, and years later, he’s married the child’s mother to try to have a more normal life. Since, in the book’s world, the large cities are unlivable due to incessant terrorist attacks, Ellis and his new family relocate to the suburbs of New York City, where he tries to stay off drugs, and to connect with his sullen teenage son and his wife’s younger daughter by another man. Everyone’s on a cocktail of mood-altering drugs, even the six-year-old, and life in the suburbs is not really what Ellis is used to.

It starts getting strange and horrible, in a fashion very typical of Ellis, when things from his past seem to invade his present. Someone keeps showing up driving a car identical to that of his late father, the paint of his house, which is new and has never been painted another color, peels off to reveal the color of his father’s house, and so on. Add to this a classic demonic children’s toy, a serial killer reenacting murders from “American Psycho“, and boys his son’s age disappearing randomly from the neighbourhood, and some sort of vague form stalking the forest behind his house, and you have a very personal and postmodern horror novel. Essentially, Ellis is haunted by his past and the relationship with his father, but along the way, the book echoes both Stephen King and John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.

The ending is typical Ellis too, where things sort of resolve, but not in any neat and tidy way, and many parts of the story are left open to interpretation. I’m a longtime fan of Ellis, and this book is up there with his best, especially if you’re a horror fan too.

I just saw Guillermo del Toro’s latest, El Laberinto del Fauno (aka. Pan’s Labyrinth), and I’m pretty impressed. This is one of the best original works of speculative fiction in film in recent years, I think. Like most of del Toro’s movies, it teeters on the edge of being amazingly good, but then fails because of some hard to believe plot twist or dialogue. Guillermo del Toro is obviously an idea guy, and he has great ideas (all of his movies have the kind of stories that probably look amazing as treatments), but he’s not a great screenwriter. Still, this is probably his best movie to date, even better than Hellboy, which in itself was quite good.

This isn’t that easily identifiable as either horror or fantasy, but it has aspects of both, set against the in itself quite horrible reality of early Fascist Spain. A young girl, Ofelia, travels with her pregnant mother to rural northern Spain to meet her mother’s new husband, an army captain whose two principal interests are brutally defeating the remaining leftist guerrillas hiding in the mountains, and the impending birth of his son by Ofelia’s mother. He’s not particularly interested in Ofelia or her mother, which leaves Ofelia to wander about and soon find an ancient labyrinth whose central chamber is occupied by the titular faun, who tells her she might just be the lost princess of an underground kingdom.

That fantasy story, however, mostly takes the back seat to the fight between the captain and the guerrillas, punctuated by a couple of sequences of extremely brutal violence that made me flinch. The first one is very unexpected, and reminded me perhaps most of the murder in the first sequence in Irréversible, not at all as long-lasting, but much more jarring because of the surprise onset. During the movie, the captain is painted as so much of an asshole (but quite a believable one) that when he finally gets his dues, you wish he could suffer more.

In the meantime, Ofelia has to pass three tests given to her by the faun, to prove that’s she’s really the lost princess. In the first, she must confront a giant toad living under a dead tree, a challenge that, apart from the visceral special effects, is quite in keeping with the fairy-tale roots of the movie. The second, however, is when things veer deeply into horror territory. Simply drawing a doorway on her bedroom wall with a piece of chalk, Ofelia enters the gallery of The Pale Man, a monstrous humanoid thing with no eyes in its head, but with apparently removable eyes in the palms of its hands. The creepy alien weirdness of it reminds me of Lovecraft, which is obviously a general inspiration for del Toro (see Hellboy, and also del Toro is apparently doing an adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness). Now that I think about it, there’s also a visual parallel with Y’golonac, an extended Lovecraft mythos monster with mouths, not eyes, in the palms of its hands.

Sadly, it’s in this very creepy scene that the movie also offers its biggest letdown in terms of character motivation. Despite having been warned explicitly and urgently by the faun not to partake of the Pale Man’s buffet of delicious food (he sits motionless at the head of a large table filled to the brim with it), and despite the faeries who guide her trying to stop her, Ofelia decides to stop at the table and taste a couple of grapes. This piece of plain, unadulterated, and unmotivated idiocy wakes the Pale Man, from whom Ofelia barely escapes, and also causes the faun to declare her unable to pass the tests. It’s a plot contrivance to be able to wake the Pale Man, but it could easily have been handled in a myriad other ways that would not have caused the audience to view the main character as either terminally stupid or suffering from acute short-term memory loss.

Later on, the movie improves again, and the end is heart-wrenching and appropriately fairy-tale style tragic, although the “was she imagining it all, or was it real” touches of the ending, despite seeming to finally come down on the side of her experiences being real, weaken things a bit, and if one were to come to the conclusion that it was all fantasy, the moral would be that childhood fantasy is a dangerous thing which leads children to putting themselves and others in mortal peril for no good reason. I don’t think that’s the moral del Toro wants to promote, and that’s without even getting into the theme of someone being a lost princess whose very soul has qualities that makes her fit to rule, in a movie that’s otherwise doing a fine job of being anti-fascist.

But, quibbles aside, this is a very good movie in many ways. It’s a shame that del Toro, a Mexican, seems to be unable to make his movies in Mexico (only his first, Cronos, that of the interesting idea but fatally flawed and clichéd execution, was made in Mexico, subsequent ones have been made in Spain or the US), but even though his production is uneven, he always seems to dedicate himself 100% to the story of his movies, with little concern for anything else. That’s got to be worth something, and he seems to be getting better all the time.

Wonderfully cheesy Mexican movie channel De Pelicula is running a Halloween horror movie marathon. All Mexican horror movies, all the time, this whole weekend. It’s not as bad as you think… it’s much, much worse.

I just watched Vacaciones de terror, a movie considered something of a classic by people I know (who never call it just by the name, but always say “Las vacaciones de terror, con Pedrito Fernández“). It’s directed by René Cardona III, grandson of legendary Cuban-born Mexploitation director René Cardona, who directed almost 150 movies, including several Santo movies, the Luchadora movies, and La horripilante bestia humana (aka. Night of the Bloody Apes), as well as acting in El Barón del Terror (aka. The Brainiac), amongst others. René Cardona Jr., father of the director of today’s movie, worked on more straight up trash cinema, including the entire series of La risa en vacaciones, one of the most successful lowbrow comedy series in the history of Mexican cinema. So René Cardona III is the last in a long line of schlockmeisters, as well as having some sort of family obligation to deal with vacations in his movies.

The story of the movie is fairly straightforward. A family gets a cheap fixer-upper summer house in the Mexican countryside, but all is not what it seems, as the youngest daughter finds a diabolical doll who takes control of her and supernaturally attempts to kill the rest of the family. The doll accomplishes this mostly by moving its eyes, which is always accompanied by a “scary” synth chord, and mostly makes furniture topple over slowly, or in some cases, cutlery fly about. The aunt falls mysteriously ill and has to go to the hospital, accompanied by the uncle, leaving the now demon-possessed kids in the hands of their niece and her eighties-haired boyfriend. The boyfriend has come upon the one thing that can stop the diabolical doll, namely a shiny medallion. Being Mexican, he’s done the obvious with the medallion: Hanging it from the rear view mirror of his crappy truck. This turns out to be fortuitous, since the doll remote controls his truck and tries to kill him with it, but the medallion stops it (after he stupidly tries to outrun the truck for a while). He then gets back into the truck and drives it through the wall of the house, which does no good at all, since he’s soon impaled by several pieces of levitating cutlery, and then sucked into a smoking mirror (well, he’s pressed against the mirror for a while, then disappears).

The girlfriend hangs around for a while screaming, the uncle tries to return from the hospital, but has diabolical car trouble, and then the idiot girlfriend remembers that the boyfriend said something about the medallion being their only hope, so she gets it and presses it against the doll, then throws the whole thing in the fireplace. This makes the house catch fire, and then explode several times, while everyone barely escapes alive. The final scene shows the house for sale, now in its original dilapidated but not burned down and blown up condition, and the diabolical doll reveals itself to another little girl.

This movie was incredibly horrible, like some sort of retarded, slow-moving version of The Evil Dead, without anyone being raped by trees. Lucky for me, there’s a sequel, which I might get to see some time, called Vacaciones de terror 2: Noche de brujas, and as a bonus, that one features children’s artist Tatiana. I can’t wait.

Over at ADDTF, Sean Collins has found a Bollywood ripoff of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Words cannot describe it.

Back to the horror stuff with a quick review of this Japanese horror movie that’s been remade in the US. The remake, Pulse looks really bad, and has gotten horrible reviews, but people keep telling me the original is quite good.

Kairo isn’t really much of a horror movie, though. It tries to be a philosophical look at loneliness and alienation in modern Tokyo, with computers and the internet as an important ingredient. And then there are ghosts, and a zombie-type apocalypse. The mood and tone it tries to strike is of one of fevered nightmare, unease and decay.

And yeah, it’s dream-like, but it’s one of those annoying, slow-moving, frustrating and repetitive dreams where you get nowhere and can’t get anything done. The pace is excruciating, and when it finally does move, it makes little to no sense. Like many J-horror movies, concepts are demonstrated and insights revealed through endless expository dialogue. What insights there are feel trite and banal, like pretentious student film by students oblivious to their own limitations, and the script makes little sense, don’t come together, flows badly or not at all, and the setups and payoffs are so trivially obvious and by the book that they had me rolling my eyes and scoffing.

It’s not all bad, though. Some of the actual horror sequences (of which there are few) are creepy, but not hard to watch scary and tense like some other, more successful Japanese horror movies. Visually, it’s nice, although the “we don’t have a big budget, let’s just break out 3D Studio and After Effects” look of all the special effects gets annoying after a while.

All in all, this might be worth watching for mood. It might be better on opiates, I don’t know, and I’m not going to be bothered to watch it again to find out.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind is promoted as a sort of literary thriller, along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose, and people also seem to compare it with Borges a lot. Those comparisons aren’t exactly wrong, but I think they sort of miss the point.

More than anything else, The Shadow of the Wind is about synchronicity. The young protagonist, Daniel Sempere, goes to the “Cemetary of Forgotten Books”, is entrusted with a novel by mysterious author Julián Carax, and soon, events in his own life start to echo those of the Carax’ life. The novel in the novel is also titled “The Shadow of the Wind“, which should give you some idea of the direction in which this is headed. A mysterious man has been burning all copies of Carax’ novels, and is after the one Daniel has, which might be the last. The mysterious man uses the name Laín Coubert, which is the name of the devil in one of Carax’ novels, and so on and so forth. There’s also a large helping of references to 18th century gothic horror, romance, and adventure novels, especially later in the book, which of course are exactly the genres Carax wrote in.

The large story arc is interesting enough, and it’s skillfully executed, although some of the “mysteries” are not too hard to figure out, and the main mysteries to be revealed are more the details of how things happened, instead of the larger revelations it seems Ruiz Zafón wants the reader to experience. In the end, however, this doesn’t matter too much, since a lot of the joy in the book is in the details, especially, perhaps, in the humorous ancillary characters, such as Fermín, the ex-revolutionary turned homeless drifter under the Franco regime who Daniel and his father take in and give a job in their bookstore. I found myself looking forward to any sequence where he would play a prominent role, since his hilarious anecdotes and outrageously brazen solutions to problems are the book’s high points.

The ending is not entirely unexpected, and perhaps a bit pat, but by then, you’ve been so thoroughly charmed by the characters (not to mention Barcelona, which is as much a character in the book as anyone else) that you don’t care too much. Highly recommended, especially if you don’t take it too seriously. It’s not as intellectual as Eco or Borges, but it’s at least as enjoyable, especially if you love books.

I’m on The Horror Blog‘s Horror Roundtable again this week, where the question is about one’s favourite cinematic animal attack. Go check it out.