The Wolfman

My dad is a big werewolf fan. I wrote a book on werewolves. So the notion of bringing the Wolf Man back to the screen is near and dear to my heart.

This version is actually a new incarnation of the classic Wolf Man movie of 1941 from Universal Studios, which in turn was preceded by Werewolf of London. The new version incorporates elements from both movies. From Werewolf London, we get the origin of the werewolf originating in Tibet, dueling werewolves, and death by gun. From the Wolf Man we get the Talbot family line, the "wolfbane" poem, and the silver wolf-headed walking stick. Perhaps the biggest inspiration is the makeup itself, which eschews the now standard gorilla-werewolf transformation for a form that looks distinctly like the original Wolf Man makeup.

Shakespearian actor and American Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) returns to his family manor after a long separation at the bequest of his dead brother's fiancé Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt). Conliffe is central to the plot; she enamors Lawrence as well as his father, Sir John (Anthony Hopkins), and it is her presence or lack thereof that drives the lycanthropes to murder. As the body count rises, Francis Aberline of Scotland Yard (Hugo Weaving) arrives to solve the mystery. The hunt is on, but who's hunting whom?

Benicio del Toro is undeniably wolfish-looking, but he seems wooden and out of his element compared to Blunt, who uses her big soulful eyes and gothic Victorian attire to good effect. Unfortunately, they lack chemistry. More imposing but erratic is Hopkins, who lends a cold menace to the cast. Weaving doesn't have much to do but glare and shout orders, but then that's what we're accustomed to by now. He does add "horrified stare" to his trademarked expression.

Interspersed throughout the mystery is the family rivalry between sons and father. The best part of the movie takes place in an insane asylum. It provides an ironic take on lycanthropy as a mental disease and contrasts Victorian logic with the lurking world of magic and curses.

The Wolfman stays true to its roots. This is not a remake as much as it is a reimagining, filled with lush backdrops, gloomy settings, ancient moors, and a Tim Burton soundtrack that pays homage to Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. This incarnation is a gothic period piece set in Victorian times

Unfortunately, you get the sense that this new version is very insecure about its choices. The movie isn't particularly scary -- the horror is meant to be from the doomed plight of the protagonist -- but it nevertheless resorts to random shrieks and jump cuts. The Wolfman, while undeniably violent, transforms into an over-the-top death machine capable of tearing off heads and limbs with one swipe of his claws. This isn't just a new version of the Wolf Man, he's the Wolf Man on steroids.

Like Dracula, The Wolfman does not end well for any of its characters. As a gothic romance the best we can hope for is a resolution, not a happy ending. And that's exactly how it should be. The Wolfman respectfully carries a legacy of violent beasts on its hirsute shoulders, but mainstream audiences will probably hate it.

Jennifer's Body

You might think, judging from the commercials, that Jennifer's Body is about some high school queen bee that uses her unholy popularity to cut a bloody swath through cliques and clichés of all types. Alternately, you might think it's basically soft-core porn featuring Megan Fox. None of these marketing approaches served Jennifer's Body well. Please note: this review contains spoilers!

Diablo Cody, who earned a reputation for smart dialogue from Juno, isn't interested in writing a horror flick. She wants to delve into the issues of friendship and sexual maturity, as viewed through the lens of demonic possession.

Right, about that. In a fashion similar to Ginger Snaps (which combined lycanthropy with puberty), Jennifer (Megan Fox) is now the sexiest girl in high school. Her best friend, helpfully identified as "Needy" (Amanda Seyfried), has nothing in common with her. In a twist on the old trope, it's Needy who has the boyfriend (Chip, played by Johnny Simmons).

The two end up at a dive bar for an emo band, Low Shoulder. Low Shoulder is actually a band of amateur cultists who believe, on the strength of Jennifer's transparent lie, that the hot chick oozing sexuality is in fact a virgin. This leads to a hilarious misunderstanding with hell, in which Jennifer is sacrificed only to return from the dead as a succubus.

Jennifer's Body waffles between horror tropes of stupidity – the band believing Jennifer's lie; Jennifer's ability to get away with murder; victims doing really dumb things – and mood-killing reality checks. The murders are drawn out over time, such that the high school deals with them in a realistic way reminiscent of other real-life high school tragedies. Midnight vigils are held, jocks cry, and camera crews roll tape.

Although Jennifer's Body is supposed to be about its namesake, we get precious little insight into Jennifer's thoughts. The film is actually about Needy, who is a typical "Final Girl" of horror movies. Like the legions of Final Girls that have gone before her, Needy is psychically connected to Jennifer in a way that's never explained. This movie is much more about Needy, her boyfriend, her "nerdy" persona that's never convincingly portrayed, and her awkward relationship with Jennifer. Jennifer's Body tries hard to imply there's some chemistry between the two of them, but it just doesn't click. Jennifer comes off as uniformly one-dimensional and Needy as a disconnected cipher.

The pacing in this film is incredibly jarring; at various points, Jennifer just jumps out the window and exits a scene. The movie starts to feel more like a series of vignettes than an actual plot. Cody uses the Lovecraftian technique of "I was there!" that is no longer in favor because it saps a film's momentum.

The ending, such as it is, is something of a foregone conclusion – we know that Needy is committed to an insane asylum because as narrator she tells us in the beginning of the film. But don't worry, Jennifer's condition is some kind of super-virus (you can "get succubus" on you, apparently), which destroys any pathos around Jennifer's transformation and turns our Final Girl into a superhero who can fly. That's right, fly.

Still, Jennifer's Body isn't terrible. Slickly produced, with competent special effects, the movie tries hard to be both sexy and cool. All the navel gazing around why it "failed" is unwarranted; Jennifer's Body made back twice what it cost to produce. It's just that Jennifer's Body, despite using lots of "hip" dialogue, wants you to like it so much that it throws everything at you: a contrived horror plot, prolonged seduction scenes, a lesbian kiss, and a superhero revenge sequence. In the era of the Internet, that's not enough to make a great horror film anymore. It could just have been easily called Needy's Movie.

Waxwork II: Lost in Time

Quick, what movie features a murderous disembodied hand, zombies, buckets of blood, possession, projectile organs, time travel, and Bruce Campbell getting tortured? No, not Evil Dead II…Waxwork II: Lost in Time!

Picking up immediately where the first Waxwork left off, Mark Loftmore (still Zach Galligan) and Sarah Brightman (replaced by the considerably hotter Monika Schnarre) attempt to return to their normal lives. Sarah creeps back to her abusive stepfather's home where he berates her for ruining her dress. After she goes to bed, the zombie hand (also from the first film) murders the abusive stepfather because…let's face it, he had it coming.

In the typical Waxwork aside into "that makes perfect sense" territory, Sarah is blamed for her stepfather's murder, claims about murderous zombie hands not withstanding. She will likely be condemned to death unless she can prove her innocence. And that's where any semblance of realism ends, because Sarah and Mark concoct a scheme to find ANOTHER zombie hand by traveling backwards in time through a magic mirror. Because of course, that's where zombie hands hang out, right?

Waxwork II is of course not about time travel at all. It's about whatever the director (Anthony Hickox) feels like parodying, beginning with Frankenstein, alternating between Alien and The Haunting, and then throwing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Godzilla, Jack the Ripper, Nosferatu, and Dawn of the Dead for good measure. And oh yes, a long fantasy sequence that has nothing to do with anything.

Waxwork II establishes a couple of things: They are NOT time traveling, but more dimension traveling, or perhaps film hopping. Mark and Sarah have stumbled into the world of Cartagra, "God's video game," as Sir Wilfred explains – in the form of a crow (it's complicated). Cartagra is a universe where good and evil duke it out for supremacy, apparently in the form of movie plots. Mark and Sarah are now Time Warriors, inhabiting the protagonist roles of each movie and ensuring the good guys win. Or something like that.

It is also a different form of dimension hopping than the pocket dimensions seen in the first movie. When Mark, facing down Igor the hunchback, attempts to disbelieve, he gets socked in the face for his trouble.

It's clear that Hickox a real fondness for all things Evil Dead and for swashbuckling romance. He has his cake and eats it too here (like he did in the first film) by including a long fantasy sequence involving what must be the first sword fight across movie genres. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

FRANKENSTEIN: Mark manifests as the butler, while Sarah is Frankenstein's wife. They are caught in the moment when villagers are about to set the place on fire. It takes awhile for Sarah to remember her true nature, during which time Mark battles it out with Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Monster, Igor, and angry villagers. Using a weird compass he found amongst his uncle's belongings, Mark can usually find the exit out of each movie by running in that direction, regardless of all apparent obstacles. Once he figures this out, Mark and Sarah are split up as they escape…

THE HAUNTING: Filmed in black and white, it's clear Hickox is a fan of The Haunting. And so is Marina Sirtis, collecting a paycheck. But the biggest winner here is Bruce Campbell in a hilarious series of slapstick. This is the funniest part of the movie. It's also the most overt homage to Evil Dead.

ALIEN: Sarah has taken on the role of Ripley. She faces down a giant Alien-rip-off – literally, the Aliens look terrible, with huge, lumbering heads. The Facehugger-equivalents are much more disturbing, with tentacles probing orifices. This scene drags on far too long, seeking to emulate the terrible silences and long pauses in Alien. Fortunately, Mark shows up and ends the madness just in time.

RANDOM FANTASY SETTING: Hickox may be a fan of horror movies, but what he really wants to do is write a swashbuckling romance. So stuck in the middle of the rest of the horror homage is this sloppy collection of Monty Python jokes, subpar special effects, and confusing elements. The best part is George (Michael Des Barres), a powdered, effeminate dandy who isn't afraid to murder people with a garrote. There are some laugh-out-loud jokes here, but they don't save the piece. Oh and David Carradine (?). There's also the aforementioned appearance of the talking crow, which is in fact Sir Wilfred reincarnated. His appearance presages a huge exposition dump explaining Cartagra. No matter, all is forgiven as Mark engages in a no-holds-barred sword fight with the villain, Scarabis (Alexander Godunoy) across the universe. In no particular order, their cross-dimensional brawl leads them to…

GODZILLA: A giant, poorly made puppet. The most hilarious part being that Mark is badly dubbed in English.

JACK THE RIPPER: Okay, not really a movie per se. Poor Jack gets kicked into…

NOSFERATU: Silent and with intertitles, Hickox nails the entire feel of a silent movie. And we get to see Nosferatu gnash his teeth after The Ripper.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS: Sarah takes a sneak peak at people running from a train. And alien pods.

DAWN OF THE DEAD: 1970s style attire, a funky beat, and a bunch of people bristling with guns shooting at zombies in a mall. It also conveniently provides a disembodied zombie hand, that flimsy "evidence" our heroes were looking for.

The swordfight ends back in Fantasy-land, but only one person can go back through the portal. Mark pushes Sarah through.

Sarah, with evidence of a zombie hand CLEARLY confirming her innocence, receives a note from Mark in the "past", attempting to establish that he was indeed time traveling. Yeah, right.

And the lovers are reunited. Eventually. The End.

Cue a gonzo song about the film, complete with rap lyrics that narrate the entire ridiculous story and 1980s style dancers.

Less horror and more a tribute to films Hickox happens to like, Waxwork II never seems to make up its mind as to what film it wants to be when it grows up. But that's part of its charm.

Waxwork

You might think that a movie titled "Waxwork" is about some guy who kills people and turns them into wax mannequins, like in House of Wax starring Vincent Price. And for the first half of Waxwork, you'd be right.

But Anthony Hickox, who directed Waxwork, wasn't content to just direct a horror movie. He wanted to direct ALL of them. So he dreamed up this idea (he's also the writer) of a waxwork display serves as a gate to a pocket dimension, where unsuspecting visitors are put in the roles of the victims. If the victim dies, their dead bodies become part of the waxwork. Clever, huh?

Of course, this being an 80s movie, Waxwork is stuffed with characters from The Breakfast Club: the slut (China), the virgin (Sarah), the confused protagonist (Mark), miscellaneous female sidekick (Gemma), her "cool" boyfriend (Tony) and the prankster moron (James). They're all there to die of course.

Why? Does anyone really care? Oh all right if you insist…

Mark's grandfather was a benevolent adventurer who, for reasons that make sense only in movie-land, collected trinkets from eighteen of the most evil people who ever lived. Mr. Lincoln (David Warner) has sold his soul to the devil and plans to bring about a zombie apocalypse by feeding victims to the wax effigies of each of the villains. Lincoln kills Mark's grandfather in the first few minutes of the movie, stealing his artifacts and embedding them in his wax effigies. This makes no sense, but Waxwork is unconcerned by your petty notions of plot and narrative. It's only out to show cool monsters killing people.

What we get, then, is a bunch of vignettes where some poor unsuspecting idiot stumbles into a waxwork display and, discombobulated and suddenly in the role of the victim, struggles to survive. Let the Battle Royale begin (this review contains spoilers)!

DING DING!

TONY VS. WEREWOLF: Actually, it's Tony vs. John Rhys-Davies as the werewolf, who must have been hard up for work. No matter, he promptly becomes a werewolf after sending Tony out for firewood. Tony, confused and thinking this is a trick (because that's of course what victims do), plays along until the werewolf bites him. Seconds later HE'S a werewolf and two hunters come in to finish the job. So actually it's TONY VS. OLD GUY WITH SILVER BULLET. Two guesses who wins.

But that was just the warm up act. What we really want to see how China, ahem, handles herself.

CHINA VS. DRACULA: Oh this is going to be good. China is in a gothic-style mansion where Dracula and his host as eating raw meat. What ensues is an oddly slow, creepy dinner scene that features no violence whatsoever. Until China goes to bed, a vampire tries to eat her, and as she flees she stumbles upon her fake fiancée strapped to a table. That's when the fun starts: the vampires have kept him alive while they feast on the bloody remnants of his leg. This leads to China fighting off a whole host of vampires, until she finally meets Big D himself. Does China "can't a girl get laid around here without being burned at the stake" have a chance? That's foreshadowing folks.

The movie then injects an odd dose of reality as Sarah and Mark go to the police to plead their case. Detective Roberts is unimpressed but decides to check it out on his own along with his silent partner (the one in the bad Miami Vice getup). But who cares about him? What we're really here for is…

DETECTIVE ROBERTS VS. THE MUMMY: Roberts, unlike the other idiots, knows how to handle himself. Roberts is thrust into the role of an adventurer along with his helpless female sidekick and a Howard Carter stand in. They open the tomb, only to release a black-ooze drooling mummy, who proceeds to kill fake-Carter and throw everyone else in the sarcophagus. See, even kick-ass cops get killed in Waxwork.

Of course, Sarah and Mark then have to investigate things themselves. Which leads to…

MARK VS. ZOMBIES: Mark ends up in Night of the Living Dead. He escapes by shouting that old D&D maxim, "I disbelieve!" And it actually works. Except for the whole dismembered zombie hand…

ZOMBIE HAND VS. WAXWORK: This zombie hand actually launches its own franchise later. Seriously, this has to be the first case of a zombie hand becoming so pivotal to a plot that it launches a sequel.

SARAH VS. THE MARQUIS DE SADE: Now don't get me wrong, de Sade is pretty villainous but…really? The Marquis de Sade? Fine. Sarah, virginal, sweet Sarah, falls under his hypnotic spell, whereupon R-rated tortures take place, including a prolonged whipping scene with lots of moaning. In fact, this whole scene drags for a while and starts to get a little uncomfortable. Eventually, Mark shows up to rescue her. The Marquis de Sade, who we didn't realize until now is apparently the main villain, promises revenge.

JAMES AND GEMMA VS. PLOT DEVICE: Lincoln needed four victims (poor Roberts doesn't count, I guess), so James and Gemma have gotta go. They take Sarah and Mark's place as corpses in the waxwork displays.

BABY FROM IT'S ALIVE!, AUDREY FROM LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, RANDOM AXE MURDERER…YOU GET THE IDEA VS. EVERYBODY: Mark's wheelchair-bound uncle Sir Wilfred, his butler, and a bunch of guys with pitchforks and guns come in and burn the place down in a grand, awkward melee. Rubber masks are smashed with bats, miscellaneous extras are hurled through the air, and much mayhem is made. In the fracas, de Sade has a sword fight (?) with Mark, who wields his grandfather's magical saber (?!) bestowed upon Mark by his uncle. And then somebody falls into a vat of wax, because this movie is named Waxwork and somebody has to.

The end.

Waxwork was made by a horror buff that loved all these old horror movies but didn't feel like they had enough gore, so he went and filmed his own versions with a bigger special effects budget. By far the best effect is the dimensional transition between the scenes.

Oh sure, the acting is terrible, the jokes aren't all that funny, and the plot makes no sense whatsoever. But you know what? This movie is so fully of cheesiness, special effects, and gore that it rises above it all to turn into some kind of monumental tower of waxy, cheesy awesome.

And for that this movie gets four zombie fingers.

Titus Crow, Volume 2: The Clock of Dreams; Spawn of the Winds

After having slogged through Volume One of the Titus Crow series, complete with lisping dragons, green haired space princesses, and a narrative riddled with ellipses, I steeled myself for Volume Two. With the prototypical pulp hero Titus Crow and his trusty sidekick Henri de Marginy cleaning the clocks (pun intended) of the Cthulhu Cycle Deities (CCD, ugh), there wasn't much left for them to do. But like every good epic series, when the heroes become gods among men in the mortal realm…they leave the mortal realm behind to find adventure.

The Clock of Dreams begins with a rather peculiar scenario: Crow and Tiania have been captured in the Dreamlands. How this happened is hand waved; basically, Crow and Tiana are drugged and enslaved by the Men of Leng. Given that Crow is a cyborg that is highly resistant to damage, it seems unlikely that poisoning him would work…but perhaps that's because this is the Dreamlands and not Earth's reality.

The first half of the novel involves de Marginy's quest to find Crow in the Dreamlands. Once there, Crow takes up the second half as he seeks to rescue Tiania. What's interesting is that Clock of Dreams is one of the first to posit that Cthulhu's dream sendings actually infect the Dreamlands. Here, great nightmarish factories corrupt the land, guarded by three foul guardians: the worm-like Flyer, its tentacle-armed Rider, and a three-legged Runner. Overseeing the entire operation is a deathly titanic Keeper, who in turn servers Nyarlathotep.

Overall, this is book is an improvement over the first volume, if only because there's more for Titus to do. Unlike the previous books, it's told in the present tense, which lends much urgency to the narrative. There's plenty of combat, skullduggery, and a hilarious moment where the only way de Marginy can return to the Dreamlands is to get roaring drunk. With guest appearances by Randolph Carter and King Kuranes, flying airships, and shields that shoot laser beams, this is pulp Cthulhu at its wackiest. But it's juicy and satisfying, especially when Nyarlathotep shows up at the end to put our heroes in their place.

Spawn of the Winds, on the other hand, is a different breed of pulp. Crow and de Marginy are nowhere to be found in this book; its inclusion is primarily because of Ithaqua, who is assigned a peculiar set of personality traits here. Ithaqua, you see, lusts after human women (as all pulp villains inevitably do) because he seeks to spawn terrible progeny who will walk among the winds with him. The winds, as defined by Lumley, are the spaces between worlds, and occasionally Ithaqua kidnaps people and carries them across dimensions to the world of Borea.

Borea is a wind-swept frozen world filled with every snow land cliché imaginable: Vikings, Eskimos, white wolves, polar bears, ski-boats, and lots and lots of snow. I kept waiting for Santa Claus to show up. Ithaqua's penchant for turning people into wendigos is turned on its ear here – instead, Ithaqua alters the physiology of those whom he traps on Borea so that they are immune to the cold.

The protagonist is an American named Hank Silberhutte, a member of the Wilmarth Foundation out to avenge his cousin, whom he believes was killed by Ithaqua. Silberhutte is a Texan, which of course means he can punch anybody's lights out who dares mess with him. He is also a powerful psychic, capable of linking with Juanita Alvarez, a telepathic receiver and our narrator, across the gulfs of space.

Tagging along is Silberhutte's companions, Paul White (an oracle known as "hunchman"), Dick Selway, Jimmy Franklin, and Silberhutte's hot little sister Tracy. A fateful encounter with Ithaqua ends with Selway dead and the others changed. Only Tracy, holding onto her star stones, remains unaffected.

Awakening on Borea, a brutal war of attrition ensues between worshippers of the Wind Walker who want nothing more than to sacrifice Tracy to Ithaqua (she's a "damned good-looking girl" says Silberhutte). Leading the opposition is Armandra, Woman of the Winds and daughter of Ithaqua. She's basically Storm with wind powers. She flies about the wastes, her flame-red hair whipping behind her, with skin as pale as snow and eyes as stormy as a winter…you get the idea.

Silberhutte falls madly in love with her, both physically and psychically, and their escalating relationship only complicates the war between the two factions. If Armandra dares intervene directly with her wind powers, Ithaqua joins the fray as well. And yet Armandra refuses to let any harm come to Silberhutte, who also wants to join the fight as the macho leader of his Eskimo warriors. It's all very primal.

Unlike the other books in the Crow series, this is a lusty, gun-toting, fist-swinging, princess rescuing, rip-roaring yarn that chews up scenery like a bad actor in a Shakespearean play. It doesn't always make sense, but it's a heck of a lot of fun to read.

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.

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.

Titus Crow, Volume 1: The Burrowers Beneath; The Transition of Titus Crow

Titus Crow's adventures are a lot like the role-playing game exploits of player characters: they start out believable enough, but as the power creep and leveling sets in, the character's achievements and enemies seem to grow exponentially.

There are a few things that modern Cthulhu fans should be wary of when reading Lumley's foray into the Cthulhu Mythos. According to Lumley:

* Mythos beings can be repelled quite handily with "star stones." These are made with tiny chips of the original soap stone elder signs. That's right, they're mass-produced "extract of Elder Sign." And they work against shoggoths.

* The Tikkoun Elixir is actually holy water, which also works against the Mythos.

* There is a globe-spanning organization of psychics known as the Wilmarth Foundation. This Foundation has men in every level of government and business, and marshals their resources in times of great need, like when battling the Mythos. They also keep the Mythos hidden to prevent worldwide panic.

All of this is told to the reader after the fact in The Burrowers Beneath. In the tradition of Lovecraft, the stories are all from journals and letters of those who were there, shifting from character to character to build a story around giant psychic killer worms known as Chthonians. Mind you, they're just minions of the larger Cthulhu Cycle Deities (who are, irritatingly, referred to as the CCD).

Lumley seems intent on explaining everything in Lovecraft's fiction and providing a logical framework behind it all. This is great for a role-playing game but makes for boring reading. But when Lumley writes an action scene, such as when DeMarginy (the Watson to Crow's Holmes) is attacked directly by a Chthonian, it's absorbing. Unfortunately, there's so little action that the rest of the tale becomes a dry retelling, sometimes bordering on parody.

Did you know that there are dinosaurs swimming in Loch Ness? Lumley drops that and other nuggets matter-of-factly throughout the narrative – and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than to perhaps explain that the Wilmarth Foundation, with its uber-psychics, knows everything there is to know about the world.

By the time we get to the second part of the book, The Transition of Titus Crow, Lumley just gives up. Crow experiences every pulp trope, from the love of a green-haired "girl-goddess" to riding a lisping dragon, to replacing his shattered body with cybernetics manufactured by robots, to time traveling in an extradimensional clock. Crow, it turns out, is both the descendant of the Elder Gods and a cyborg. It's like a Rifts game in prose.

But the most unforgivable of all is that Transition is told in fragments. A terrible attack on the Wilmarth Foundation means its records have been lost, so we are left with a story that has been pieced together. Where the pieces are missing, Lumley uses ellipses. A lot. Reading the book becomes painful… whenever Lumley doesn’t feel like filling in the blanks…he uses ellipses…until you get just fragments like…ENERGY RAY…INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVEL…OH MY GOD MY EYES ARE BLEEDING…

There's a particular standout scene where Crow, confused and lost in a prehistoric era, engages in a battle of survival with a pterosaur and a giant crab. It's good stuff, but doesn't make up for the sheer insanity of what can only be described as lazy writing. We get it: the fragments of what happened to Crow are hard to piece together. But since this is, ya know, a WORK OF FICTION, it would be nice if the narrator made a token effort to craft a full story for the reader rather than transcribe the bits and pieces literally. And for that only Lumley can be held accountable.

In terms of characterization, Crow is a bit of a cipher. De Marigny has most of the personality, and even he tends to bluster through the book with very British exclamations of surprise and horror. The characters are rarely in actual danger and their stiff upper lip attitude becomes so overbearing that they begin to feel invincible even in the face of the mind-blasting insanity that is the *cough* CCD.

Worth reading to provide a foundation for Titus Crow and as a template for a role-playing game universe where the player characters actually have a chance against a Lovecraftian menace. If you can stick with it, the next book in the series gets much better.

Unholy Dimensions

There's no flowery introduction by anyone to Unholy Dimensions explaining what a major contributing force Jeffrey Thomas is to the Cthulhu Mythos. It just starts immediately with a short story set in Punktown, a seething planet of decay and corruption in a sci-fi universe where there are holograms, ray guns, and aliens. This review contains spoilers!

Thomas' science fiction tales are not his strongest. My reaction to this sudden and jarring juxtaposition in THE BONES OF THE OLD ONES wasn't favorable. It features Hound of Tindalos, a private eye who dabbles in sorcery, a creepy kid, and Yog-Sothoth. Although Thomas deftly handled the tension between the protagonist and his former friend, I wasn't impressed with the setting because I hadn't yet bought into the idea of sci-fi Cthulhu. By the second story, with the same protagonist in the same universe, I was hooked. John Bell, a Mythos hunter archetype that would make any Delta Green gamer proud, takes on a weird conglomerate being led by Nyarlathotep in THE AVATARS OF THE OLD ONES. This story is told from the view of a third party and love interest, H'anna, which helps preserve the sense of horror when a conglomerate of deformed Mythos minions are activated. THE YOUNG OF THE OLD ONES is the last of the Punktown trilogy in this volume. It features an Elder Thing and Horrors from Beyond. It is also something of a tragic love story, a theme that will continue throughout Thomas' work.

Thomas returns to the science fiction genre with THE SERVITORS, a star-crossed tale of two beings who really, really hate their bosses. When they finally meet, it turns out their worlds are far more different than either might have dreamed. THE HOUSE ON THE PLAIN reads like the trailer to a science fiction horror movie…because the perfectly preserved house is on an otherwise barren and inhospitable planet.

I'm not a fan of Thomas' poetry. THE ICE SHIP, ASCENDING TO HELL, and YOO HOO, CTHULHU are clever enough but relatively uninspired.

Thomas enjoys dabbling in the relationships between his characters, building on romantic tension to further accentuate the horror. I MARRIED A SHOGGOTH is both the most disturbing of the lovelorn tales, despite the clever name. Thomas plays on the Lovecraft-style of the narrator narrating something he obviously survived. Here, he sets out to show that there are some fates worse than death. It's a parable about getting exactly what you want, even when what you want involves turning a Shoggoth into your own personal plaything. In SERVILE Thomas deftly interweaves romantic tension in a love triangle that features the Dreamlands and a Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua. You'll never look at a pair of dentures the same way again. THROUGH OBSCURE GLASS is another love story about a man tasked with guarding against a Dreamlands' intrusion by Gugs and the woman who loves him. CELLS is another sad love story between a mad scientist and his wife as they desperately try to cheat death through misbegotten science. In LOST SOUL, Thomas shows that there are worse things than a Mythos sorcerer as he explores an obsessive, incestuous love triangle. The ickiest story of the bunch. The collection ends with another love story, THE CELLAR GOD, combining Tcho-Tchos with Moonbeasts in a tragic tale of secret romance. THE FOURTH UTTERANCE is perhaps the best story of the lot. It features an exchange between a lonely woman, a sorcerer who summoned something terrible, and the answering machine between them. The Mythos is only hinted at, but that makes the story all the more disturbing.

In THE DOOM IN THE ROOM, Thomas parodies Lovecraft's writing style by filling the three pages with flower text and a narrator who madly types the story even while a Mythos beast advances on him. He must type very, very fast… Lovecraft is parodied again in the super short WRITING ON THE WALL, a cartoon-like representation of the typical Lovecraft explorer deciphering his own doom.

RED GLASS establishes another theme: that when you look into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back. Narrating in first person, the protagonist is drawn to a house full of mental illness and secret portal behind its peeling walls. Thomas is also an expert at prolonged suffering. BOOKWORM is a short tale but the ending sticks with you as we glimpse the last desperate moments of a too-curious thief succumbing to the Mythos. THE BOARDED WINDOW builds slowly, exploring parallel dimensions and how each side views the other as strange and horrible. THE FACE OF BAPHOMET provides an alternative twist to the Templars, Baphomet, and Shub-Niggurath. The initiation ritual and main character would complement the Templars as described in Unseen Masters nicely. WHAT WASHES ASHORE follows a conflicted female protagonist who is fond of seashells, a hobby that will ultimately consume her in the outskirts of a forgotten town.

Thomas enjoys spotlighting the war against the Mythos, including the terrible cost it exacts on the mortals who dare fight back. OUT OF THE BELLY OF SHEOL is told like a biblical tale, featuring a prophet, the insides of Cthulhu, and a war between the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones. CONGLOMERATE, told from the perspective of a security guard working at Monumental Life Insurance Corporation, features Nyarlathotep in one of his many guises as the CEO of a massive, sinister corporate entity. Good stuff for Keepers looking to expand Stephen Alzis' holdings. Two sorcerers and brothers of Cthugha and Cthulhu go to war in CORPSE CANDLES, baffling the police. Building on the war between Mythos and Man, THE THIRD EYE is a sad little tale of a broken detective, his frightened son, and the burden of occult knowledge of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. PAZUZU'S CHILDREN takes place during the first Iraq War. It ends with a fitting Twilight Zone-esque scream.

There are a few layout problems. Pages 193 and 248 feature just a few words and a whole lot of blank space. The artwork is blurry, abstract, and not particularly scary, serving only to interrupt the story. Thomas' text is evocative enough without these distractions.

But overall Unholy Dimensions demonstrates Jeffrey Thomas' amazing talent to tell an approachable Mythos tale that is both entertaining and creepy. A must read for Delta Green and Cthulhutech gamers.

Last Rites of the Black Guard

Last Rites of the Black Guard is a d20 Modern ghost-hunting adventure, produced by 12 to Midnight, for low-level characters. It includes suggestions for adjusting to higher-level campaigns, a bookmarked PDF, and a printer-friendly version. The scenario also features rules from the OGL Horror ritual system. The 12 to Midnight website also offers free downloads of cool extras such as audio recordings of ghosts, pre-filled initiative cards, and more. Please note: this review contains spoilers!

If you’re familiar with the Karotechia in Delta Green, you know that it is led by a triumvirate of Nazis on their last legs: the ancient Olaf Bitterich, the artificially sustained Gunter Frank, and the immortal Reinhard Galt. Advancing the Delta Green timeline thus causes a bit of a problem, because Bitterich should be dead of old age. The solution: Last Rites of the Black Guard (LRBG).

In LRBG, the investigators visit Rosetta, Texas, home of a dirty little secret: it was once home to a Nazi, Franz Heimglimmer. Though Heimglimmer is dead, his legacy lives on in his secret acolytes, who are both trying to rob him of his power and keep him from returning to life. The investigators start out visiting the home of Lisa Gray and her two children, Marissa (7) and Matthew (6). Marissa is in contact with the spirit of Aimee Resnick, a little girl who was murdered at the hands of Heimglimmer. Matthew is protected by the spirit of a Rabbi, but that doesn’t stop glowing atmospheric balls of energy and poltergeists from terrorizing their home.

LRBG has difficulty structuring the plot such that the events flow from one to another. In my experience, players crave clear paths – it helps move the game along, gives them hints to their next clue, and ensures that the game master is appropriately prepared. Because LRBC is largely freeform, it's possible for players to skip whole swaths of the game…like skipping the haunted house to visit Heimglimmer’s home.

The free downloads are awesome, including audio clips of the various spirits speaking and photos of each of the main characters. These really add to the horror, which is why it’s all the more important that don't skip it by going to visit Heimglimmer’s home immediately.

LRBG assumes the characters will conduct a séance, which isn’t necessarily something every group will try. Instead, I had our resident psychic character possessed by Aimee’s spirit and let him role-play out the answers with the other characters. Only after enough clues were gathered about what happened to the spirits did I reveal that there was once a Nazi living next door.

LRBG then moves to the second part of the scenario, which is essentially a death trap. There’s reference to a gold tooth that’s part of the next installment in the series (as far as I know, there’s never been a sequel). Then the investigators find a secret door down into the basement…or they would, if it were on the map. There appears to be only one set of maps, labeled as handouts which are presumably for both the players and game master. This means that secret doors aren’t labeled on the map, and one of those secret doors is critical to finding the finale. The map of the Gray house, conversely, has several rooms labeled “Jeana” – we figured out that this was supposed to be Lisa and the name must have been changed.

Once the investigators find their way down to the secret door, it locks behind them and they are engaged in a fight for their lives with a Risen of Osiris, an undead monster. Since I adopted this monster to a Delta Green setting, I changed it to a Screaming Crawler. The effect is the same: the investigators have to slog it out in a toe-to-toe fight. My players were unhappy about this, expecting to uncover some plot-device to destroy it. The monster has no other purpose than as a guardian, which surprised my players, who expected it to be the Nazi himself (more about him later).

Once the investigators defeat the monster, two undercover cultists arrive to finish the job. When one of the cultists dies, the spirit of Heimglimmer appears (he’s also responsible for locking the characters into the chamber) and absorbs his soul. The other cultist flees, screaming “you’ve doomed us all!” I wasn’t content to just let the scenario end like that, so I had the police, already spooked from the swirling spirit activity around Heimglimmer’s home, fire on whomever ran out the front door waving a pistol.

It turns out that the characters’ actions have led to the resurrection of Heimglimmer and we get to see his return in a cut scene. In other words, the investigators have managed to unearth a great evil. This didn’t make my players happy, who felt like they were being manipulated all along.

It bears mentioning that one of the Nazi cultists has a Jewish-sounding name. For a scenario that spends a significant amount of space dedicated to respecting the Holocaust legacy, it seems peculiar that it would casually cast a Jewish person as a Neo-Nazi without explanation.

Overall, my players really enjoyed the first part of the scenario but were frustrated by the second half. The lack of an overall story arc may irk some game masters, who are left with a newly revived Nazi cultist without a plan as to how to proceed. For Delta Green keepers, however, it’s the perfect way to put Dr. Bitterich back in action. I recommend The Painting by Modern Misfits as a follow-up.
For more info: To see a demo of Last Rites of the Black Guard, visit the 12 to Midnight web site.

Fall of Cthulhu Vol. 3: The Gray Man

The Grey Man is the third volume in the epic story arc that is Boom Studios' Fall of Cthulhu comic series. I discovered Fall of Cthulhu when I was just launching my Delta Green campaign and was hungry for any fiction dealing with the Cthulhu mythos in a modern context. Fall of Cthulhu is all that and more.

The Gray Man continues the story of the odd knife that caused so much havoc in the earlier parts of the series. Our new protagonist is Raymond Dirk, Arkham's sheriff, who is accustomed to strange goings-on. His life is radically changed once he crosses paths with a Brazilian thief named Luci Jenifer Inacio Das Neves (Lucifer for short). A student of Professor Walter McKinley, Lucifer returns to Arkham only to discover he committed suicide.

McKinley had Lucifer steal a cursed knife from an antique collector in Fortaleza in an attempt to keep it away from Cthulhu cultists. It turns out the knife belonged to a very special person: The Gray Man, patron saint of sacrifice. Lucifer and The Gray Man are in a race to get to the knife first.

Dirk is a likable lead character, a man who keeps his cool no matter how strange things get. Lucifer, on the other hand, looms larger than life: she is a master thief and adept sorcerer, capable of concealing herself from the Gray Man and entering the Dreamlands at will.

Speaking of the Dreamlands, The Harlot is back in this series. Although her dialogue is wry as always, the Dreamlands artwork is not up to the same creepy standards of Andrew Ritchie, who oozes weirdness with every frame he draws.

Throughout the storyline, a little girl in a yellow dress makes random appearances. Her origins are somewhat explained in the final volume of Fall of Cthulhu, but the nature of separate installments means that readers new to the series will invariably be confused. My guess is she's an incarnation of Hastur (and his avatar, the King in Yellow).

Gnruk also makes an appearance, but he is not nearly as horribly realized as his debut earlier in the series. A conflict between The Gray Man and Gnruk looks a bit like the two are waltzing together.

At the conclusion, Mickey Rennier, a Cthulhu cultist with a green Mohawk, provides a bit of a deus ex machine to wrap it all up. Rennier feels oddly out of place in a comic that seems so grounded; punk villains went out of style in the eighties.

Lucifer is clearly a favorite character; her abilities as a thief aren't really demonstrated in this comic – her claim to fame is basically grabbing a knife and jumping out a window while failing to avoid The Gray Man AND Gnruk – but it's clear she's being set up for greater things, specifically the comic series Hexed.

The conclusion has a great twist and ends on a surprisingly poignant and bittersweet note. Unlike some of the other volumes in the Fall of Cthulhu, this story largely stands on its own. Overall, this is an excellent entry in the Lovecraft tradition that manages to bring the horror of the Mythos down to a personal level.

Dark Wisdom

I was chiefly interested in Gary Myers' collection of Lovecraftian-inspired short stories because they all take place in a modern setting. I'm always looking for ideas for my Delta Green campaign and was curious to see how other authors updated the Cthulhu Mythos.

There are two ways an author can modernize Lovecraftian horror. He can borrow elements from Lovecraft and incorporate them into his own work, thereby changing the setting but not the theme. Alternately, he can maintain the narrative style of Lovecraft and apply it to a modern tale. Most authors choose the first option, because it's easier; Lovecraft's archaic voice is difficult to emulate and even more difficult for modern readers to absorb. His protagonists narrate the horror tale after the fact, diminishing any sense of urgency. And the final twist is always blasted with great fanfare; italics, exclamation points, and all.

Myers vacillates between these two options with varying degrees of success. Unlike Lovecraft, he is fond of ending the tale at the moment the protagonist is about to discover his fate. He does mimic Lovecraft's narrative style in "The Nest," wherein a police officer shares in the first person his encounter with a ghoul. It's actually one of the best of the lot, and shows a glimmer of potential that isn't always recognized in the other stories.

In some cases, Myers is just content to create an eerie sense of weirdness. "The Web," in which two boys mess with a Necronomicon web site, plays out more like a bad eighties horror movie.

"Slugs," in which a thief finds a statue of Cthulhu in a sewer, begins what is something of a problem in Cthulhu-mythos authors: massive information downloads. Look, we're all fans of Lovecraft. But it is not necessary to mention every Mythos deity, explain who Cthulhu is, and otherwise lay out the plot like a Saturday morning cartoon. Part of Lovecraft's genius was being perfectly comfortable not explaining anything, and in these very short stories there's not a lot of room for exposition. A thief who just happens to run into a sewer and just happens to find a Cthulhu statue and just happens to be on the run from the police and just happens to know an antiques fence…the whole thing begins to sound like a Tales from the Darkside episode.

"Mother of Serpents" is an oddity as the tone is completely different from the rest of the stories. It's written in the stilted language of an older, more formal time. The ending isn't particularly scary and entirely predictable.

It's not until we get to "Fast Food" that Myers really knocks it out of the park. An office worker is sickened by the food at Belial's (yes, it's called Belial's, complete with a pitchfork logo on a matchbook), a burger joint. Customers obsess over the burgers, become grotesquely fat from gorging on them, and are then led herd-like into the restaurant at night. Despite the cheesy name of the restaurant, this is a clever take on an old mythos beast…and no, it's not tcho-tchos. The imagery at the end stuck with me long afterwards.

Connecting Deep Ones to the Creature of the Black Lagoon is the plot of the "Understudy," a mediocre entry. "The Big Picture" is much more Lovecraftian, about a man obsessed with stereograms (remember when those were popular?). This is a modern twist on a popular Lovecraftian notion of perception beyond space and time, but it's pretty standard fare. Similarly, "Omega" is more like a Lovecraftian tale, with a narrator who provides the big twist at the end. This is another massive Cthulhu Mythos dump that saps the story of its momentum.

"The Mask" is another great entry, expanding on the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign and the Mi-Go war. That's followed by "What Rough Beast," a hitchhiker tale that is both heartbreaking and terrifying.

"From Inner Egypt," like "Omega," provides too much detail and not enough freaky weirdness. Likewise, "Horror Show" ends without any real denouement.

For reasons known only to the publisher, someone allowed Myers to produce black-and-white artwork for this book. This was a mistake. The cover is perfectly evocative, but the interior art is a lesson in bad Photoshop. Two cloned pictures of a pixilated butcher standing in a hallway, meant to represent two cultists at Belial's, nearly ruins the story. As does the full-page picture on page 97 of…boxes. A story about Yig has a picture of a snake; a story about Tsathoggua has a picture of a toad. This book would have been better off without the art.

For modern Cthulhu fans, Myers has some entries worth reading. But the uneven nature of the tales and the terrible art detract from what could otherwise be a solid collection.

Splinter

Splinter is an indie horror movie inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II. Like any good horror film, Splinter achieves the right balance to terrify its protagonists: 1) psychological tension between the characters, 2) isolation, and 3) a creature. This review contains minor splinters—I mean spoilers.

On the surface, our happy couple and soon-to-be-victims Seth Belzer (Paulo Costanzo, last seen on the failed Friends spin-off Joey) and Polly Watt (Jill Wagner, who took Jessica Biel's place in the Blade television series) plan to camp out in the woods for a romantic evening. The in-joke is that they are the reverse of a typical horror couple: Seth is a wussy botany student and Polly is a rugged outdoorswoman. Unfortunately, this difference is a little too extreme – Polly seems too sexy for a guy like Seth.

Another couple is thrown into the mix, and this is where the parallels between Evil Dead and Splinter begin. Dennis Farrell (Shea Wigham) is a convict on the run with his junkie girlfriend Lacey Belisle (Rachel Kerbs). They hijack Seth and Polly's car, ratcheting up the tension. We're never quite sure how trigger-happy Dennis is or how crazy Lacey will get in need of her fix.

The quartet runs over an oddly infected raccoon, which blows a tire. Seth pricks his finger on a strange splinter while changing it out and Lacey goes nuts when the dead raccoon she confuses with her long lost cat begins to move. The car repaired, they tear off, only to have the vehicle overheat. Polly stops at the nearest gas station, which just happens to contain an infected gas station attendant. We now have our isolated location.

All that's missing is our monster, a plant-thing that co-opts its host's body. The monster has a very specific biology that's integral to the plot; it's up to the survivors to figure out how the creature works. Which is why, when you're being attacked by a plant monster, it's good to have a botanist on your side.

Splinter never moves beyond the gas station and doesn't need to. The characters make dumb decisions, but they do so for good reasons – the convict and his junkie girlfriend are unstable enough to begin with. There are plenty of other parallels to Evil dead, which similarly confined the action to a handful of characters in an isolated location with killer plants (among other horrors), but that's a good thing.

There are some weeds in the plot. It takes awhile before the action really gets started as Splinter struggles mightily to convince us that Polly and Seth are a real couple. Wigham mumbles all of his lines, making some of his delivery impossible to understand. And the ending, while satisfying, is a bit off in its timing.

Still, Splinter shouldn't be missed by monster horror aficionados. It has all the ingredients of a great horror film – and a great salad.

Drag Me to Hell

After being disturbed by Evil Dead and delighted Evil Dead II, I decided to host a showing of the two movies to share the madness with my friends. We then all went to the opening of Army of Darkness. We were confused (the three films vary widely in tone) but ultimately loved them all, adopting the Raimi clan and The Man, Bruce Campbell, as one of our own in geekdom.

Ever since then, Raimi's fans have been waiting for him to return to his horror roots. Oh, we've gotten hints that he hasn't forgotten us through the years. We caught the Evil Dead II homage in the chainsaw sequence from Spider-Man. Campbell is in just about every movie Raimi produces. And the Oldsmobile Delta 88 makes an appearance in Drag Me to Hell – a big appearance, actually – as it has in every Raimi movie since Evil Dead. The Oldsmobile's arrival signals that Drag Me to Hell is a quintessential Raimi horror film.

Drag Me to Hell harkens back to the golden age of 80s horror, an era Raimi helped spawn, when humor and horror were inextricably mixed thanks to Freddy Krueger's perpetual joke-machine. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a cute blonde loan officer in five-inch heels working at a bank – any social commentary is surely accidental (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) – and when she turns down an old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver), things go horribly and hilariously wrong.

Raimi has always been a master of scaring you with things you can't see. He knows how to use sound to freak out the audience, employing the same shrieks and creaks he used in Evil Dead II to represent something from another dimension crossing into our world. Raimi also knows when to use silence as a tool, which just ratchets up the tension – this is the first film where I could hear the movie projector clicking away in the background. He manipulates billowing curtains and floating handkerchiefs with the methodical calculation of a Universal horror theme park, shrieking "BOO!" when the tension is at its height.

Raimi expertly manipulates the audience's affection for Christine. On the surface she's an adorable girl from the country just trying to be accepted by her big city boyfriend's parents. But as we get to know her, Christine comes off as a mewling brat more concerned about her appearance while poor people like Mrs. Ganush are being thrown out on the street. There's a turning point mid-way through the film where Christine crosses the line from being merely pathetic to reprehensible, and from there on out cat-lovers may well begin cheering her demise (I know I was!).

The similarities between Drag Me to Hell and Evil Dead II are striking (SPOILER ALERT!): an unwitting protagonist is cursed; an evil hag attacks; his friends become demonically possessed, flying around the room cackling and dancing like marionettes; the evil "gets inside him" causing him to vomit a huge amount of nasty stuff; there's a fight in a tool shed; eyes show up in weird places; eyeballs fly into somebody's mouth; even the twist ending is similar.

I didn't love this film, though I desperately wanted to. It's probably because I'm not the target audience – Drag Me to Hell is a PG-13 film and although its scares are suitably disgusting, they aren't nearly as gory as other horror movies. In other words, it's perfect for teenagers out on a date. For jaded horror fans like myself, we've seen it all before. The only thing missing is The Man himself.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Seeing current movies these days is a challenge with a very active toddler. When Valentine's Day came around, we dropped our son off with my parents and I let my wife pick the movie. She of course picked the "vampire movie." Which is why I love my wife.

As a big fan of Kate Beckinsale and the World of Darkness role-playing game, the Underworld series quickly became a favorite. It featured big budget special effects, lots of PVC and leather, and plenty of pouty vampires. It also featured a battle between vampires and werewolves, a concept that was so prominent in White Wolf's World of Darkness series that it sparked a lawsuit.

Despite the lawsuit, Underworld continues to forge its own path, such that it now has prequels. You know your movie franchise has made it when executives are willing to pay to produce what is essentially a history book. Fortunately, this bit of history is actually worth watching.

Werewolves and vampires have always been a bit of a mixed bag in Hollywood. The fact that Dracula could turn into a wolf seems to be one of the less plausible aspects of vampirism that were dropped in favor of the Ricean pouty goth. Thus the ability to transform into a wolf is exclusively the domain of the werewolf. But it wasn't always this way.

The vrykolakas, draws its name from "vryk," meaning "wolf" and lakas, meaning "fur" in modern Slavic languages clearly meant "werewolf." Vrykolakas in other countries, however, is used to describe vampires. This is because of the aforementioned ability of a vampire to turn into a wolf, which can be strictly interpreted as meaning that all vampires are actually werewolves.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans turns this confusion into a plot. In short, vampires and werewolves are descended from the same bloodline, but the vampires have risen to the role of aristocrat while werewolves are little more than beasts. Or at least, that's what the vampires believe. To that end, Viktor (Bill Nighy) the vampire lord treats domesticated werewolf Lucian (Michael Sheen) as his foster son, giving him blacksmith duties that ensure werewolves don't transform with inward-pointing spiked collars. But Viktor's benevolence has limits, and when he discovers that Lucian is having a dalliance with his daughter Sonja (the delectable Rhona Mitra, who still isn't quite Beckinsale but comes pretty darn close), he teaches Lucian a terrible lesson. What Viktor underestimates is the kinship that Lucian has with his wilder brethren, a kinship that will spark class warfare.

Rise of the Lycans is basically what you get when you give a serious goth injection to the elves from Lord of the Rings, rehash the plot from Romeo and Juliet, and steal the feudal arrangement of vampires and their human "cattle" from the World of Darkness series. Nobody speaks in contractions. Everything is viewed through a dark blue lens. And lots of limbs get hacked off.

The real story here is the werewolves. It's their class struggle, after all, and the movie never shies away from the dire consequences of the characters' actions. There is a high enough body count on both sides to make Shakespeare proud.

Vampires. Werewolves. Vampires and werewolves killing each other. Two star-crossed lovers bound by their family allegiances and the curse of their blood. What more could you ask for in a Valentine's Day date movie?

Cloverfield

Like so many other monster fans, I was taken in by all the hype around Cloverfield. I incorrectly predicted the monster's appearance based on a sketch, I correctly predicted that the movie wasn't about Cthulhu or Voltron, and then my son was born and I forgot about movies for a year.

I finally saw it. And man is it good.

But you see, I'm a monster movie fan. Cloverfield's marketing was intentionally minimalist, relying on viral marketing instead. One of the dangers of viral marketing is that it's viral, and thus doesn't necessarily distinguish by target market. Indeed, the whole point of viral marketing is to get the word out to as many people as possible. And many of those people aren't monster movie fans.

Look. This is a monster movie. If you don't like the fact that attractive people run around screaming, maybe you shouldn't watch a movie about a giant monster. If you don't like the shaky cam effect, maybe the preview gave a hint that the movie wasn't for you. And if you don't like the unrealistic nature of characters running in high heels, people surviving horrible wounds, and the insane bravery/stupidity of the protagonist, perhaps you shouldn't see a movie about a giant monster that comes out of nowhere and rips the head off the Statue of Liberty.

The joke's on us: Cloverfield is a love story cloaked in a monster movie. It's about the lengths our hero is willing to go to save his true love, a girl he's only just recently met. In times of stress, our tenuous attachment to loved ones becomes all the more precious--if you lived in New York City during the 9/11 attacks, you knew that already.

Stripping away the complaints about the genre, as a monster movie Cloverfield knocks it out of the park. To Abrams' credit, it's just as scary as we feared. Only now we have real reason to fear the impact of a colossal assault on our city. The movie is filmed the way we experienced 9/11, and the floating papers and dust from the collapse of a building are a sign that we know exactly what a monstrous attack looks like.

When 9/11 happened, I walked home from work. I watched a cop stick his head out the driver's side window, so terrified of another attack from above that he was nearly drove off the road. Cloverfield invokes those fears: of confusion, of anarchy, of wanting to run but not knowing what's a safe place to run to anymore. It is a monster movie made when the charm of monster movies can no longer be appreciated by the audience - we now know that if a giant monster attacked New York, evacuations would clog the streets, people would be poisoned by the debris, stock markets would crash, and worse. It's not just about being afraid the monster will eat you.

Cloverfield has its giant monster and lets it eat too: it's an immediate physical threat and a mysterious menace, far more frightening than anything the Godzilla remake could muster. In the same way Godzilla evoked fears of the atom bomb, Cloverfield is 9/11 reimagined as a hideous, unexplained thing from beyond. The film is also fearless in facing the monster (literally) and reinforcing the helplessness we all felt in the face of such a huge disaster. Forget the boogeyman under your bed: it's hundreds of feet tall and smashing its way down your street.

For monster movie fans, it doesn't get any better than this.

Last Rites: Four Present-Day Adventures for Call of Cthulhu

Last Rites is actually four separate scenarios for the Call Of Cthulhu RPG, set in the modern day. This review contains spoilers, so if you plan to play in these scenarios you should read no further lest the blasphemous truths contained herein rend your feeble mind to tatters!

Last Rites is also the name of the first scenario. Henry Ennis was never a good father or husband, resulting in his wife Nicole's suicide. This left Lucinda, his eldest daughter, bitter and angry towards her father. Her sister, Sophia, disappeared years ago, a mystery that was unsolved until recently. Lucinda met a mysterious fellow named Jason, who opened her mind by sharing a book titled Flagitious Fragments.

Flagitious Fragments unlocks psychic talents in the reader, a rather campaign-altering event given that an investigator reading the book has a chance of acquiring psychic powers equal to his POW rolled against D100. These psychic powers include telepathy, mind control, and the ability to send nightmares to a target. All these powers are rather unbalancing in the hands of an investigator trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. It almost seems as if this scenario was written to introduce psychic powers to investigators, but it does so in the most boring fashion possible - I'd much rather have a PC receive his psychic powers through a traumatic event, a brush with the Mythos, or Mi-Go surgery. Not because he happened to read a book and then "meditate and perform mental tests to learn if he or she is a suitable candidate." Flagitious Fragments makes acquiring psychic powers sound like passing your driver's test.

After offing her father (we never find out how), Lucinda plans revenge on those who killed her sister. You see, there are no less than four cultists lurking in the town of Runville. Runville is an extremely small town nestled on the edge of a cliff and numbers "perhaps a hundred souls." Nobody said they were smart cultists.

Lucinda's convoluted plan involves animating her father's corpse as her instrument of revenge, which basically turns him into a zombie slasher. Controlled by Lucinda, Henry then offs the cultists one by one. It's up to the investigators to stop him.

There are so many disparate elements here that it's easy to lose the thread of the plot. Who are the cultists that killed Sophie? Who is the shambling corpse killing them? Who is controlling the corpse? Where did Lucinda get her psychic powers from? Who is this Jason fellow, anyway?

When I ran this scenario, I stole liberally from Friday the 13th, Part VII - The New Blood, which also involves a psychic girl, her dead father, and a reanimated killer. I changed the first cultist, Dr. Alan Ettringer, to a psychiatrist from Arkham trying to push Lucinda's psychic powers to their limits. I also made it a point of having the investigators discover Sophie's body in another town, so it's a bit more plausible that the cultists relocated to Runville. I made it clear that Ettringer knew this too, and brought Lucy to the town to provoke her and thereby reveal her psychic talents. The rest of the scenario turned into a supervillain battle, with Lucinda using telekinesis (a power not granted by the book) to try to stop her father. Ultimately, father and daughter both sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.

As scenarios go, this one gets a two out of five. Not particularly inventive, a boring town, and the cultists aren't even Mythos cultists.

The second scenario, Lethal Legacy, is much more interesting. A cultist named Douglas Drebber decides to summon a dimensional shambler to off his ex-wife who has since married Randy Kalms, a tough Vietnam vet turned author. But after he summons the shambler, Drebber changes his mind, only to die in his haste to undo the damage. Now it's up to the investigators to get to the Kalms before the shambler does.

This is a great race against time. Drebber's tale of domestic violence tinged with the Cthulhu Mythos really makes the character come alive (even after he's dead). The Kalms family is suitably hilarious and dangerous. Convincing a gun-toting family that something is about to kill them is like Aliens meets Home Alone.

This was one of the first scenarios I game mastered for my players and they loved it. I played Randy as a Jack Nicholson type. And of course, the shambler went after the Kalms' youngest child. It was a bloody fight to the finish.

This scenario gets five out of five stars. I didn't have to change much to make it exciting and the players loved it.

The House on McKinley Boulevard is a haunted house story that involves gremlin-like homunculi. Cedric Hedge, a disciple of Tsathoggua, sacrificed regularly to his dark god until he finally escalated to killing children. This resulted in the creation of an animated idol in Tsathoggua's likeness, but something went wrong: Hedge lost control of it and, in his attempts to stop it, smashed it to pieces before expiring himself. Thus little mini-Tsaothoggaus have been waiting for an eternity to be freed.

The Victorian-style mansion that was once Hedge's grand home is now a modern hovel. Squatters and drug addicts reside there. At the start of the scenario, one of the squatters has already killed himself. It's up to the investigators to get to the bottom of the mystery.

I ripped off the plot from movies again: The Gate. This kept the tension going, gave me ample opportunities to introduce the creepy little monsters, and provided an outline for what victims to go after and when. I used the rule from the Gate that the little monsters have to sacrifice two people to bring their dark lord back to his former glory. The subsequent battle with the swarming homunculi was great, and the spell to deactivate the animated statue of Tsathoggua was suitably climactic. This differed significantly from the original scenario, which sets up the drug addict (the obvious "bad guy") as a killer possessed by the homunculi.

The House on McKinley Boulevard gets four out of five stars. The ideas are great but the characters aren't really structured to provide narrative tension other than the crazy drug-addict guy, and there are far too many of those in horror scenarios.

The last scenario is one I haven't played yet but plan to. It's a little far out there, as it involves time travel, a high priestess of Pazzuzu, and a magic mace. It reminds me a bit of the plot from House (the movie, not the television show). Could be a lot of fun.

There's not a lot of structure to this scenario either, but the time travel and battle against the priestess -- who has a suitably climactic "monster form" -- could be interesting. I give it four out of five stars.

That puts Last Rites at four stars overall. Despite the first clunker of a scenario, the other scenarios are all suitably interesting and different enough to make for a memorable, quick game that will keep modern day investigators on their toes.

Swan Song

I read McCammon's "The Wolf's Hour" when I was a teenager and was amazed by the author's daring: who would have thought to combine werewolves with the spy genre? In the intervening years I forgot the name of the book as well as the author. When I finally remembered the author's name and discovered McCammon wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, I just had to pick it up.

I was not prepared for Swan Song. This review contains spoilers, so if you want to be as unprepared I was read no further.

Steeped in 1980s Cold War paranoia, Swan Song is an end-of-the-world parable about good and evil. There are multiple protagonists, including Sister the formerly crazy homeless woman, Swan the girl who can make plants grow, Josh the giant black wrestler, and a whole pile of supporting characters that are too numerous to list here. On the bad guy side we have Colonel Macklin, a former military officer holed up in a mountain fortress, Roland Croninger, a psychotic gamer and Friend, who might just be the Devil incarnate. There are occasional nods to mysticism, including a glass ring/crown, a magic mirror, a dowsing stick named Crybaby, and a bit of fortunetelling. Indeed, much of the book's plot involves tarot mysticism, a point I gradually lost track of throughout the book's nearly thousand pages.

It's a tribute to McCammon's writing that World War III is every bit as horrible as we fear. The sight of a bus hurled high into the air, flaming bodies falling out of it like burnt embers, stuck with me long after I finished the book. And the fear and hope of the survivors holed up in the mountain fortress as they watch the missiles pass overhead is palpable. His text often verges on the poetic, and McCammon's is careful to realistically portray the effects of radiation and conflict: shock, blisters, and bruises are a common occurrence. I never realized how rarely you hear about shock in fiction until I read Swan Song.

On the other hand, McCammon occasionally veers off into crazy mutant-land with two headed mountain lions, another doomsday device, and another mountain fortress. And that's where Swan Song breaks down a bit. Midway through the book, the plot advances by seven years. The purpose of the time shift seems primarily to move Swan's age forward so she can have a romantic interest, but it's a bit much to swallow--McCammon works so hard to make the world feel real, and then doesn't do enough to make it feel aged by seven years. Relationships seem frozen in time and characters rarely reference the intervening years.

Swan Song is also relentlessly grim: sodomy, rape, infanticide, patricide, matricide, disease, torture, suicide, drug use...it's all on ugly display here. After awhile, it gets so bad it's difficult to stick with the book. When McCammon skips forward in time, I had difficulty believing the characters survived in such a depressing land. But it does get better, eventually, and that's where the biggest problem lies...

There's no real climax between good and evil. The crown/ring of jewels that Sister spends her whole life protecting is hinted at being even more powerful in Swan's hands. And that's it. Friend, the shapeshifting demonic presence, is clearly constrained by limits of the flesh...until it's inconvenient to the plot.

After a thousand pages, you better believe I expect the book to culminate in a holy war. I'm glad McCammon finally gives his poor characters a break (the few he leaves alive, that is), but I'm less pleased by the failure to really settle things once and for all. It's like reading only the first two books of Lord of the Rings. I wanted closure, dammit!

Still, Swan Song is a triumph of writing and definitely worth reading. McCammon provides a tantalizing glimpse of a world that we all secretly know and fear. And he writes with the deft vision of a movie director, creating moments (a race to the death in a mall filled with psychopaths, a showdown with hungry wolves, the aforementioned nuclear war) that haunt your dreams long after you've finished Swan Song.

The Darkness

I've never read The Darkness comic. I couldn't get past the fact that the character looks like a bad Spawn rip-off and the quote from Brunching Shuttlecocks about the truth behind Dungeons & Dragons: "I attack the darkness!"

The Darkness is essentially every Mafia movie cliché mixed with the brooding atmosphere of The Crow. In fact, the protagonist, Jackie Estacado (Kirk Acevedo), looks and sounds at lot like Michael Wincott, who played Top Dollar in that film. If you've seen The Crow, you know that Wincott's got a very distinctive appearance, with his long black hair, leather overcoat, and hawkish features. In The Darkness, Jackie is affectionately nicknamed Ratface by his girlfriend Jenny Romano (Lauren Ambrose). As you can imagine, having personal connections in a dark game like this is inevitably a liability, but I digress.

The Darkness owes a lot to films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, with random narrative from our hero, outrageous characters, and an uneven mix of action and drama. The first cut scene (created with all in-game graphics) gives a perfect sense of what's to come: lots of cursing, lots of gore, absolutely no respect for authority, and plenty of violence, all taking place in New York. It's the New York of the seventies, when crime and graffiti were rampant and sane people didn't wander out alone by themselves. And you're one of the reasons.

The Darkness is a two-headed demonic symbiont that lives within Jackie and, we discover later, the entire Estacado bloodline. In that respect the game is a lot like Spawn or Venom; the Darkness is a personality as much as it is a thing that augments Jackie's considerable gun-fu skills with the ability to create black holes that suck everything into them, whiplash barbed tentacles, magical guns, and snake-like mouths. In the dark, Jackie can summon other demons to do his bidding, which range from kamikaze critters loaded with explosives to gatling-gun wielding warriors.

Jackie's opponents have no such superpowers, and it's a credit to the game's creators that any supernatural monsters you encounter all fit the plot. There's no inevitable escalation of the villain gaining superpowers to do battle; indeed, the villain behind most of Jackie's woes, Uncle Paulie Franchetti (Dwight Schultz) is as much a moral foil as he is an arch-foe. Killing him isn't the point.

The game revolves around the issue of Jackie's soul. Mob life is a violent one, and The Darkness contrasts the mythical honor of the "old ways" with the mad-dog frenzy of Franchetti. When Franchetti starts blowing up orphanages, the older mobsters use Jackie as their form of vengeance.

The Darkness uses the New York subway system as its primary means of shuttling Jackie from place to place. This makes a lot of sense and provides a sense of realism to an otherwise route form of travel that bedevils so many first-person shooters. The streets are filled with entertaining characters who all have missions of their own to complete. Two of the most memorable characters include Butcher Joyce (Mike Starr) and Aunt Sarah (Norma Michaels), but there are many more and the voice actors are all superb. Between screens, and there are a lot of load screens, Jackie narrates his life and death to Jenny, which provides a humorous series of quotable anecdotes. These are the first load screens that actually distracted me from the load time.

Despite the age-old Mafia tropes, The Darkness takes the themes explored in The Crow and Spawn and amps them up to eleven, without ever losing focus on sacrifice, violence, and even love. I wasn't entirely convinced that saving Jackie's soul was feasible (I earned the anti-hero rating from the game), but the very notion of redemption being possible is a breath of fresh air to the first-person shooter genre.

The Gate

When I was looking for some inspiration for a plot involving little monsters attacking people, I had several movies to choose from. The "little monsters attack" horror/comedy genre was a fad that started with Gremlins and continued on through Critters, Ghoulies, and Troll in the eighties, among others. I was looking for more horror, less comedy. You need look no further than The Gate.

The Gate's concept is straightforward horror: kids alone (Stephen Dorf as preteen Glen and Christa Denton as his big sister Al) at home inadvertently open a literal pit to the netherworld and all hell breaks loose. But that's oversimplifying the movie, because there's so much more here.

Despite its PG-13 rating, The Gate is rather disturbing. Two of the kids are kidnapped by demons, a dead dog is involved, and a parent's head explodes. At one point Al grabs her father's gun and fires it (!) at one of the monsters. Glen's friend Terry (Louis Tripp) comes back as a demon to bite our protagonist, who proceeds to poke out his eye with a Barbie doll's leg. There's no way this movie would get a PG-13 rating today!

Then there are the little demons themselves, who seem like every kid's nightmare. The director knew how to use "bigatures" to his advantage (a technique perfected in Lord of the Rings), giving the demons a disturbingly lifelike appearance since they're actually actors in suits on a larger backdrop. There are other great FX too, not the least of which is a zombie exploding into a swarm of little demons. And to the movie's credit, artwork seen early in the movie depicts the demon lord accurately - the stop-motion demon that shows up at the end is every bit as horrifying.

Although this is a kid's movie, The Gate pushes all the buttons kids are afraid of. The demons prevent the kids from calling their parents (shouting, "YOU'VE BEEN BAAAD!"). The dead dog shows up in the most frightening places. And long, clawed arms snake out underneath beds to grab at the unsuspecting. If this movie doesn't give kids nightmares, nothing will.

The movie is hopelessly mired in the eighties. The teens dressed with ridiculous big hairstyles. The next door neighbor Terry (Louis Tripp) learns how to repel the demons by playing his death metal record backwards. And the dialogue is hopeless: "Suck my nose until my head caves in," is Glen's taunt to one of Al's annoying friends.

But that's beside the point. This is a movie about a kid's love for his big sister and rockets, both of which help him overcome the forces of evil. With special effects ahead of its time, demons that are anything but cute, and a climax that is both terrifying and inspirational, The Gate is an entertaining piece of eighties horror history. After the hell poor Glen goes through, he deserves the sappy happy ending.

Cube 2 - Hypercube

Cube 2: Hypercube is actually a sequel to the highly successful if little known sci-fi exercise in hopeless existentialism, Cube. The premise is that a bunch of complete strangers wake up in a series of interconnected cubes. There are ladders and doors in all six panels of the room. Traps await the unwary, but the real danger is, as Sartre famously quoted in No Exit, "other people."

What made Cube more than two hours of torture was the mathematical puzzle that powered the environment. Because the cube was a three-dimensional environment, it came with certain rules that could be puzzled out. Hypercube adds a fourth dimension, time, and that changes the rules significantly.

The poor saps stuck in the cube this go round include: Rebecca Young (Greer Kent) who went missing into the Cube, Simon Grady (Geraint Wyn Davies) the private investigator hired to find her, Sasha the blind girl with a mysterious past (Grace Lynn Kung), Max Reisler (Matthew Ferguson) the gaming geek, Jerry Whitehall (Neil Crone) the architectural designer, Juila Sewell (Lindsey Connell) the hot attorney, the irritating Alzheimer's afflicted Mrs. Paley (Barbara Gordon), and finally Kate Filmore (Kari Matchett) a psychologist with a dark past and our protagonist.

Like the first movie, Hypercube dumps our mysterious characters right into the grand guignol. Unlike Cube, Hypercube explains how they got there. All of the characters have a past to an organization known as Izon. This nefarious organization doesn't take kindly to failure, and all our characters are flawed in some way. Without hope, our characters revert to their basest natures. For Max and Julia, it's lust. For Simon, it's violence. For Sasha and Kate, it's deception.

Unfortunately, there are long stretches of talking wherein Jerry explains how hypercubes (also known as a tesseract) work. Because it exists in more than three dimensions, just about anything is possible, including parallel realities. Which means there's no reasonable chance for our protagonists to escape, except for the distinct possibility that in another reality, they already DID escape. Once the parallel world concept is introduced, Hypercube really comes into its own. Remember, there's no food in the cube...

The special effects are minimal and the traps are less inventive than the first. Hypercube is more concerned about the possibilities of alternate dimensions than it is about killing people off, relying instead on the inevitable backstabbing. Although there is a tantalizing series of clues as to the true nature of the hypercube, it's a bit of a feint - figuring it out doesn't help the characters escape or give them much of an advantage. This is a refreshing twist for jaded moviegoers and a depressing downer for those who are looking for a satisfying conclusion.

To the director's credit, Hypercube is relentless in its cynicism. If Cube was existentialist, its sequel is nihilistic.

Day Watch

A few things you need to know about Daywatch: it's a dark urban fantasy made by Russians, a sort of World of Darkness (if you're familiar with White Wolf's eponymous game line) or, if you prefer, Underworld. In this version of urban fantasy, which now seems to be its very own genre, every Halloween-type critter coexists: ghosts, vampires, werewolves all live in unhappy harmony just outside human perception.

There are two factions at work: the Daywatch, the dark-type bad guys who lurk in the night, and the Nightwatch, the beings of light who watch over the evil that supernatural monsters do. The two sides have made a truce of sorts to keep the other in balance and avoid all-out war. Each side has its own Chosen One, and if these two Chosen Ones happen to fight, it will be the end of the world. Our hero, Anton Gorodetsk (Konstantin Khabensky) just happens to be the connection between the two: his girlfriend and partner, Svetlana, in the Nightwatch team and his son, Yegor, who is corrupted by the Daywatch gang led by Zevulon. The two forces threaten to tear Anton apart. Literally - at one point, Yegor and Svetlana pull on Anton's arms as the building splits apart beneath him.

The first mistake I made was assuming that I could watch Daywatch without watching Nightwatch. I didn't read the book. I have no idea if Nightwatch established more information about the characters, but I hope so, because I was very confused by the end of the film.

The second mistake I made was my assumption that Russians always sitting around in grubby apartments drinking Vodka is a stereotype. Either the director (Zuberbuehler) was intentionally pandering to the stereotype or that's how it really is there. Whatever the case: there's a lot of smoking, a lot of drinking, and a lot of partying in Daywatch.

What's so refreshing about Daywatch is the complete disregard for American film tropes. It reminded me a lot of Brotherhood of the Wolf, wherein a director takes his vision and sculpts it without kowtowing to the "way movies are supposed to be." Special effects are used on things no American director would even bother with: there's a thrilling scene where a car drives up a building that seemingly exists for the sole purpose of showing off how cool the driver is. At various times Daywatch is beautiful and grotesque, frenetic and achingly slow, overdramatic and subtle. The film starts, stops, and starts again with little regard to whether or not the viewer can keep up.

The subtitles deserve their own mention: this is the first film I've ever seen that animated the subtitles themselves, so that they do neat things to emphasize what's happening on screen: fading away, appearing in front of and behind objects, appearing in a particular order, and turning from red to white and back again.

Nothing's what you'd expect in Daywatch. For all the shapeshifters and vampires, there's just one shape shifting parrot (?!) and no neck biting at all. Baba Yaga is accompanied by a coterie of dolls mounted on spider bodies. There's some business with magic chalk. There's time travel. There's a whole sequence involving body- and gender-swapping. And the world nearly ends through the use of a really deadly yo-yo. No, really.

It's difficult to discern what the rules are that governs the supposed catastrophic war. Perhaps in the same way Godzilla embodied fears about the atom bomb, Daywatch seems to be more concerned about the apocalyptic event when the two Chosen Ones meet than the war that ensues anyway - Daywatch and Nightwatch regularly clash, mobilize troops, and destroy large chunks of real estate. For two groups supposedly trying to avoid a war, they sure don't act like it. Maybe that's a statement on the Cold War itself.