The Spiraling Worm

Chaosium achieved a real coup for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game (RPG) in a way that Dungeons & Dragons never did: it put RPGs on equal footing with Lovecraftian literature. Because Chaosium publishes fiction and RPG supplements it presents both as legitimate, best evidenced by the Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, which draws on both sources to round out the Mythos.

So it's a bold move when Chaosium publishes a new modern work without the comforting bosom of the surrounding Mythos to prop it up. Even more daring, the Spiraling Worm is a collection of action stories set in the modern day.

Ignore the cover. The picture of Peel, with his oddly stubby arms and stiff posture, isn't particularly compelling.

David Conyers may be best known for his RPG contributions, but he's equally comfortable in the fiction realm. His protagonist of note, Australian Army military intelligence officer Major Harrison Peel, is a no-nonsense action hero waging war against a cosmic threat he barely understands. John Sunseri's character of choice is NSA agent Jack Dixon, who is a bit less stalwart than his Australian colleague. Rounding out the global trio and connecting the stories is MI6 agent James Figgs, who ranges from cold aloofness in Sunseri's stories to borderline psychopath in Conyers'.

The series starts out with Peel and Figgs in Vietnam in Made of Meat, featuring only a hint of the Mythos in the Tcho-Tcho and their worship of Shub-Niggurath. The conclusion is open-ended and unsatisfying.

To What Green Altar is Dixon's introductory tale, a less satisfying but interesting take on Cthugha, the Tunguska Event, and the Vatican. Unfortunately, the Mythos knowledge possessed by the Church doesn't seem to figure in the other stories.

Impossible Object, more a science fiction tale, is awesome. Peel fights a battle of perception in his native Australia, trying to grapple with a device nobody can truly perceive, much less comprehend. The ending is an awesome cliffhanger, leaving you wondering if the entire universe might implode…

Until you read False Containment, so the universe clearly did not end. It unfortunately saps some of the strength of Impossible Object, but False Containment is so strong that it's easy to forgive. Featuring time travel, body horror, and a gibbering monstrosity that cannot be contained by time or space. False Containment is one of the few stories in this collection that isn't afraid to drive home the insane horror of the Mythos.

Resurgence features two shoggoths gone wild, the inevitable conclusion of a monstrosity that eats everything. Resurgence isn't afraid to escalate tensions to an international level, forcing Peel to sacrifice himself to save his beloved continent…

Until, that is, the events in Weapon Grade. Dixon brings Peel into another mission, this one featuring another dimension and more shoggoths. It's interesting but not as powerful as the other short stories – it feels more like an excuse to keep Peel alive (he's cured of his ailment by the end of it) than anything else.

The title work, The Spiraling Worm, is a filthy, disturbing foray into the heart of the Congo jungle. Dixon, Peel, and Figgs are together again, and the circumstances are unsparingly brutal. This is a story that's not for the faint of heart. It features a suitably climactic showdown between helicopter gunships, Nyarlathotep, and an elder artifact. Unfortunately, the bizarre mask and its rotting cult steal the show. The conclusion is actually a beginning, as Dixon and Peel join forces to launch a secret organization dedicated to eradicating the Mythos…

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's been done already: Delta Green, wherein government agents with little infrastructure support wage a secret war against the Mythos. Chaosium has never quite fully embraced the enormously popular modern take on the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, publishing its own brand of "Cthulhu Now" supplements. In fact, some of the stories in Spiraling Worm were originally meant to be part of Delta Green, but presumably they weren't able to get the rights from Pagan Publishing.

It seems as if the authors are intent on building their own, parallel, government-against-the-mythos series by connecting to Tim Curran's Hive. Which isn't a bad thing. But with the resurgence of Delta Green, I wonder if DG fans will be forced to choose.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Quick, what movie features Britain in turmoil, three young children growing up under the tutelage of a sorceress, invocations of ancient demons and wizards, curse spells, and a modern school of magic that's not what it appears to be? Nope, it's not Harry Potter…it's Bedknobs and Broomsticks!

It's the beginning of World War II and Miss Price (Angela Lansbury, looking suitably spinsterish) has been saddled with three British war orphans: Charlie (Ian Weighill), Carrie (Cindy O'Callaghan) and Paul Rawlins (Roy Snart). Although she prefers to keep to herself, Price has no choice but to take them under her wing, at least until a more proper home can be found for them. As it turns out, Miss Price is a witch, a witch who hopes to help the British war effort if only she can master the final level of her training and thereby learn the spell "substitutiary locomotion."

The three orphans eventually stumble upon her secret. In an unlikely series of deals and skullduggery, Price bargains with the orphans to keep her secret in exchange for some magic, a bed knob that transforms any bed into a dimension-traveling device. Soon after, Price discovers that her tutoring via post from the mysterious Professor Emelius Browne (David Tomlinson), headmaster of the College of Witchcraft, has come to an abrupt end. Using the bed knob, Price and the three children track down Browne, who is in fact a con man that doesn't know much about magic at all.

Thus begins a quest to find the elusive substitutiary spell, first via double-dealings with a bookseller who has the other half of a mysterious spellbook, and then to an animated world of talking animals in pursuit of an amulet with the magic words inscribed upon it. Along the way, the motley band will face down the King of the Beasts, a razor-wielding thug, and of machinegun-toting Nazis.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks shows its age, both in its narrative speed and its approach to mature themes. The musical numbers often meander, with the characters speaking their lines and dance routines that are far too aggressive for the two older protagonists. There are a few misogynistic references (met with a frown by Miss Price) and…well, it's all very British, as it should be. The movie also isn't afraid to threaten the children with real harm, be it from a charging lion or a Nazi wielding a machinegun. Bad people in this movie are really bad, and there's a refreshing honesty about the whole thing.

By the time film gets around to its climax, young children will likely be bored. But what a glorious climax it is, complete with unrealistically numerous legions of animated suits of armor arrayed against the Nazis, who are there to "teach Britain a lesson." Although at times jingoistic, Bedknobs aims high and rarely sugarcoats the harsh realities of war.

This is as much a war film as it is a flight of fantasy, and in that regard Bedknobs and Broomsticks has some important lessons to teach young children. And in that regard, Miss Price and friends could teach Harry Potter a thing or two.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

When I discovered a movie was being made about The Men Who Stare at Goats I was excited, until I realized it was a comedic work of fiction. Thing is, The Men Who Stare at Goats isn't funny.

Oh, it's darkly humorous as the author, Jon Ronson, attempts to get to the truth while keeping a straight face. But it's not funny, and the conclusion Ronson reaches by the end of the book, after tracking the noble origins of a twisted, sadistic form of psychological warfare, is a punch in the face. So why was it made into a comedy?

Fortunately, comedy is too broad a stroke for the movie. It's actually a gonzo buddy journalism movie, where the actors play everything utterly straight. The humor is in what isn't said.

For example: When Ewan McGregor's journalist character Bob Wilton, he of Obi-Wan fame, asks "What's a Jedi?" nobody so much as snickers. Unfortunately the audience didn't seem to get it either: only my wife and I were laughing.

Wilton is on a mission to prove to his wife that he's more of a man than the one-armed editor who steals her from him. See? One armed men are funny!

Partnering with Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a Special Forces psi-ops soldier, the two travel around Iraq on a mysterious mission. Just about every eccentric Ronson encountered in his book is collapsed into two characters in the film, Cassady and Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), Cassady's mentor.

And that's pretty much where The Men Who Stares at Goats loses its way…literally, as the two characters repeatedly get lost in the desert. Eventually, they end up at a secret base where more than just goat staring takes place.

The film is faithful to its source in surprising ways, from the Today show broadcast of Barney music used in torturing prisoners to a picture-for-picture reproduction of the First Earth Battalion manual (here titled the New Earth Army). The problem is that following Ronson/Wilton's journey to its logical conclusion should end with court marshals, public outrage, and an official inquiry. The strength and weakness of The Men Who Stare at Goats is that it unflinchingly deals with this problem…it's just that the solution is patently ridiculous. The film drives right off the cliff into a wish fulfillment fantasy that saps the strength of the rest of the movie.

The film ends with a sucker punch (SPOILER). Wilton publishes the truth, and instead of outrage, the world just laughs. The moral is that mass media turned the awful true story into a comedy…just like a comedic buddy movie did to a certain book you might have read.

Too bleak to be funny, too lighthearted to be serious, The Men Who Stares at Goats ends up as a hot mess of hippy idealism smashed together with modern conspiracy. It should have been a documentary.

The Happening

There's a lot wrong with The Happening.

At base, The Happening is a nightmarish parable about our crowded society in modern times. We threaten the world, director M. Night Shyamalan seems to say, with our sheer numbers. On the other hand, being completely isolated isn't the solution either, creating a suspicious, isolationist attitude that leads to a self-destructive spiral.

But The Happening is mostly about watching people commit suicide in terrible ways. This ranges from terrible echoes of 9/11, when workmen jump from a building to their death, to the cartoonishly absurd, when a zookeeper taunts a lion and it tears his arm off. Anyone who watches the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet knows that big cats go for the neck first.

Anyway, The Happening's premise is spooky: what if something in the wind made people commit suicide in the most immediate and awful way possible? Where would you go? What would you do?

Night has all the elements of a good horror story: the aforementioned disaster, the strained relationship between Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his distant wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and even an innocent little girl (Ashlyn Sanchez) thrown in for good measure.

The Happening should be a great horror film. It's spooky. The premise that a gust of wind could bring about a fatal, nightmarish end lends an ominous shadow to the events. We can expect plenty of drama, morally ambiguous choices, and desperate survival tactics as our protagonists flee for their lives from an alien foe.

Actually, I was just describing Spielberg's War of the Worlds, which took the same premise and made a creepy, nuanced film about parents, children, and the distance between them. The two films have a lot in common: the insidious enemy that pops up out of nowhere, the little girl in distress, the long journey against all odds to a haven that might already have been destroyed.

The Happening follows the same script but fails miserably on almost all counts. Oh, Night's got the scary part down. But what carries a film like this is the emotional heft of characters brought to the brink. Wahlberg does a workman-like job of trying to be clever and sarcastic, but the script forces him to spew mouthfuls of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook at a rapid fire pace that he can't keep up. Deschanel, never a strong actress to begin with, is comedically awful. There isn't the slightest romantic tension between her and Wahlberg. And the little girl? She barely says a word.

The list of what's wrong goes on and on: citizens leave New York in an orderly fashion without snarling any mass transit; victims go to inordinate and improbable lengths to kill themselves; a father abandons his only child in a vain quest to find his wife; nobody seems to think traveling with a gas mask might be a good idea except two old ladies sitting at home.

They're the smart ones.

EXPO - Magic of the White City

Like so many other viewers, I came round to viewing EXPO – The Magic of the White City ("EXPO") because I read The Devil in the White City (The White City) first. Sort of. Actually, my wife read The White City years after I did and, her curiosity piqued, rented the DVD.

EXPO is about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, an exposition of such majesty, scope, corruption, and expense that it is a feat unparalleled in America today. The closest we have to the Fair is Disney World, a lineage most explicitly drawn in The White City; Walt Disney's father, Elias, was a construction worker on some of the buildings at the fair.

EXPO is narrated by Gene Wilder. I'm admit to a bias – I'm a big fan of Young Frankenstein and he's the only "celebrity sighting" I've ever encountered in real life. Wilder's getting on in age (the DVD was produced in 2005), so there's now a bit of a whistle to his speech. Still, his lilting voice has enough emotion and wry humor to make his narration enjoyable. And there is a lot of narration.

We tend to think of previous American centuries as quaintly backward, where such modern notions as political correctness and global unity didn't exist. And while EXPO is careful to point out that American culture still had its own foibles and intolerance endemic to the time, the World's Fair put all those to shame. It was a global unification of wealth, prosperity, and cultural exchange in a way that's inconceivable in today's contentious world. We can learn a lot from the Chicago World's Fair.

EXPO uses old maps and photographs to detail events at the fair whenever possible, with few computer graphics or animation. There are occasional shots of live actors, none whom particularly add anything of value to the narrative. In fact, it's clear that the producers felt that the medium was a little dry, because there are copious live action shots of a belly dancer interspersed with discussion of the Midway.

Minor quibbles aside, EXPO works overtime to try to encompass the grandeur of such a huge undertaking without losing sight of the details. As a result, it necessarily glosses over some pieces (rampant corruption, the aforementioned Devil himself who is the subject of The White City book) and emphasizes others (global diversity, architecture, and the first appearances of American staples). That's okay though; EXPO is a huge undertaking with such a sweepingly broad subject that it's better served as a companion piece to a book. Like The Devil in the White City.

What's of interest to gamers is the White City itself. It brought together vastly different groups from around the world, including popular entertainers, royalty, and indigenous peoples. Role-playing games set in this era are often constrained by political norms, but the 1893 World's Fair is an exception to the rule. Just about anyone from anywhere could be justified as being in Chicago during the Fair's existence.

If this seems like the perfect setting for a mystery adventure, Peter Nepstad agrees. He produced the text-based interactive fiction 1893: A World's Fair Mystery. Featuring over 30 hours of gameplay and employing over 500 archival photographs, Nepstad's exhaustive research brings to life dozens of interactive characters. Nepstad's game provides plenty of material for Game Masters who want to use the Fair as a setting for their own campaigns. It's the closest thing to being there.