"Before The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, there was The Case Against Satan." This is from the blurb on the back of Penguin's 2015 edition of Russell's first novel. It is, for once, an excellent selling point. It's about a Catholic priest, newly assigned to a small-town parish, who discovers that the teenage daughter of a widower may be possessed -- by Satan himself. The evidence for possession is compelling, yet Gregory is a modern priest with contemporary ideas on psychiatry, so for him the case against is equally persuasive. At first. Other than its leap directly to Lucifer, the book has little in common with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby; on the other hand, if one didn't know better (and, frankly, one doesn't), one would be tempted to say that William Peter Blatty was quite familiar with this book when he wrote his own story of possession, The Exorcist. The parallels are extensive and fascinating, including the scenes of the exorcism itself. That said, while the two books have much in common, they are very different works. To be clear, this is no Exorcist, but horror fans of the latter should be delighted by this earlier book on the same theme, which is just as serious if not as deep and really almost as explicit -- Russell doesn't pull his punches.
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"Before The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, there was The Case Against Satan." This is from the blurb on the back of Penguin's 2015 edition of Russell's first novel. It is, for once, an excellent selling point. It's about a Catholic priest, newly assigned to a small-town parish, who discovers that the teenage daughter of a widower may be possessed -- by Satan himself. The evidence for possession is compelling, yet Gregory is a modern priest with contemporary ideas on psychiatry, so for him the case against is equally persuasive. At first. Other than its leap directly to Lucifer, the book has little in common with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby; on the other hand, if one didn't know better (and, frankly, one doesn't), one would be tempted to say that William Peter Blatty was quite familiar with this book when he wrote his own story of possession, The Exorcist. The parallels are extensive and fascinating, including the scenes of the exorcism itself. That said, while the two books have much in common, they are very different works. To be clear, this is no Exorcist, but horror fans of the latter should be delighted by this earlier book on the same theme, which is just as serious if not as deep and really almost as explicit -- Russell doesn't pull his punches.
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++1/2 You know that the Bond movies are all about the Bond movies when they start building stories around actors playing secondary characters. This one is a send off for Judi Dench, who took over the role of M with Goldeneye. M, of course, is James Bond's boss. M is the person who sends Bond off on all his adventures. M is not 007. Yet here she is, the target of her own government (who think maybe she's too antiquated for her job) and a maniac with a personal grudge. Add to that a plot that sees Bond (Daniel Craig) returning to his family home (a dark topic he refuses to discuss) and the (re)discovery of Q and Miss Moneypenny, and what you get is not so much a Bond movie as a Bond family soap opera. Javier Bardem plays the madman, Silva, and his performance is creepy enough, but the character's a chump. Director Mendes is convinced he is one of the great Bond villains. A great Bond villain, however, doesn't whine about doing his job or others doing theirs, and he sure as hell isn't consumed by mommy issues. Silva is supposed to be a cyberterrorist, but we must take that on faith. All we know for sure is that he's a spoiled brat who got his butt spanked long ago and isn't ever going to forget it. Some villain. The movie is best, by far, in its first half, when Bond, shot and presumed dead during the opening, later learns that MI6 has been destroyed and battles back into shape to take on the psycho responsible for that. One fight scene is imaginatively shot in a high rise office building in Shanghai against the backdrop of one of those giant Asian electronic advertising screens. Bond's big break comes when he speaks to Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe), the maniac's mistress. It may be the best scene in the film: dark, quiet, and humming with tension. But the second half is a drag, one that plays up the film's confusion over point of view. Is the story about Bond, M, or Silva? You get to take your pick. Which isn't the way a "Bond movie" should work. + Remake of Meir Zarchi's brainless ode to torture is slicker and in some ways sicker than the original. The basic story remains the same: young woman (Sarah Butler) goes to backwoods house to write a book and is set upon by a group of violent opportunistic rapists who live to regret their unsociable behavior as she picks them off one by one in revenge. The big difference here is the weird way in which our heroine begins to channel Torquemada as she creates one elaborate torture device after another to exact her retribution, becoming in the process even more depraved than her attackers. (Ms. 45 would have kissed a bullet just for this chick.) So, once again, the woman loses, and Zarchi (co-producer here) who says he once rescued a rape victim in real life, metaphorically slaps her around a little more. Followed by several sequels. ++1/2 Significant for spawning the lesbian pulp genre, important for its authentic depiction of lesbians (the novel is based on the author's experiences as a member of De Gaulle's London-based Free French Forces during World War II), but, for all that, a rather banal and depressing read. Told by a fly-on-the-wall narrator, it is about the women of a Free French barracks, each of whom is seeking her own version of love and acceptance. Yes, there's a war going on and, yes, these are patriotic women, but as Torrès points out, until the Normandy Invasion, which doesn't occur until the very end of the book, it was often difficult for the women to feel that they were actively engaged in the war effort, despite the military discipline and largely because of their routine administrative jobs. That left them to the cultivation of their social lives, which, rampant same-sex liaisons notwithstanding, come off as messy and dull. It didn't have to be this way, but Torrès, alas, is much better at writing about emotional characters than writing emotional prose, and her ideas are hardly revelatory. Too much memoir and too little fiction, we are left with character sketches that tantalize yet never fully materialize. One of the big takeaways here is that this book that was published as pulp in America but not written as pulp is lesbian pulp through and through: do not expect a happy ending. Reprinted in the early aughts by the Feminist Press, with amusingly hypocritical reference to the book's bestseller status, when, of course, the vast majority of those millions of copies sold were bought by men seeking this new brand of titillation. ++ When their little girl is abducted by malevolent spirits, the Bowen family turns to paranormal investigators to help get her back. Remake of the 1982 Steven Spielberg production manages to follow its central storyline nearly to the end, but falls short of the original in almost every other way. Much of the movie is composed of variations on scenes and ideas from the earlier film, and while some of them work, others do not. Most noticeable is the absence not of the mother's fear but of her wonder and delight for the spirit world that made the other so unique. One original idea -- that of turning the little girl's frightened brother into a hero -- simply smacks of pandering. Relentlessly updated and modernized, with flat screen TVs, cell phones, and one of those remote controlled toy drones; regrettably, diminutive medium Zelda Rubinstein is given the same treatment, being replaced by the host (Jared Harris) of a supernatural-themed reality TV show. Some of the special effects, particularly in the early going, are very good, though. With, as the Bowen family, Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Saxon Sharbino, Kyle Catlett, and Kennedi Clements. +1/2 Super-serious yet silly religious horror film starring Winona Ryder as a Catholic schoolteacher who moonlights as an exorcist's assistant; she gets the assignment of a lifetime when a possessed mathematician puts her on to the true-crime writer (Ben Chaplin) chosen by Satan to become the antichrist. If Satan were as stupid and weak as movies like this one would have us believe, we'd have no need for God. Poorly written (by Pierce Gardner) and ineptly directed by Kamiński (who, to take but one example, unnecessarily delays a dramatic reveal -- the writer finding proof that he has been marked -- then jump-cuts through it with the speed of an afterthought). Chaplin, however, plays his part well: that is, if the vacancy in his eyes is meant to suggest the emptiness of soul that makes him an attractive target for Satan's usurpation. With a few good, if ultimately pointless, special effects. +++1/2 The people who made The Philadelphia Experiment bought the wrong book (a supposedly factual account written by William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz) when they decided to turn this conspiracy theory into a film. So, instead, they (by way of Moore and Berlitz) simply ripped off a whopping chunk of the better choice -- this book, Thin Air. The echoes are so distinct in the first part of the book that to read it is to be constantly reminded of the film. But Thin Air came first, and it is superior to the film and its second-hand plagiarism. Fictionalizing the fiction, Simpson and Burger start with the so-called Philadelphia Experiment -- a Navy experiment in invisibility that actually worked, but which included painful and even fatal side-effects for the crew aboard the target vessel -- then expand it even further into the realm of science fiction by supposing that work on the project never ended. The story is built around a present-day Naval investigator, who is sucked into the case by an old girlfriend's husband's dreams of screaming men and a ship that disappears from one Navy yard only to briefly reappear in another. It's all plot (except for the de rigueur romance) -- plot and mystery (the first half), plot and action (the second). But it's fast-paced and well done, weakened only by an all-too-typical group of bad guys who turn out not to be nearly so clever or competent as their decades-long cover-up would reasonably indicate. On the other hand, Hammond, the Navy man, isn't James Bond, either, and that's refreshing. A smooth blend of suspense, science fiction, and even horror, with something as well for conspiracy and military buffs. +++1/2 Surprisingly funny gender-switch film in which a magical Indian idol swaps the identities of a bickering husband and wife (John Hubbard and Carole Landis) when their latest argument ends with them agreeing on one thing: each would rather live the life of the other. Starts out as an ordinary comedy, wisely taking its time getting to the transference so as to set up a host of later jokes and situations. None of which, let it be known, are introspective: the comedy here is strictly confined to the reversal of traditional gender roles. Its one mistake is having the characters retain their original voices, but the movie is so good-natured that this is a minor quibble. With an excellent supporting cast including Adolphe Menjou, Mary Astor, Joyce Compton, Donald Meek, and Yolande Donlan, the latter playing the couple's scorching French maid. Based on the book by Thorne Smith. +++ Entertaining gonzo Western comedy with Cleavon Little set up to fail by a corrupt politician as the first black sheriff of a small frontier town. Funny, for the most part, with a few memorably hilarious moments, such as when a black railroad gang makes their white overseers look positively childish as they trade work songs. Of course, as is to be expected in any broad comedy, the movie has its share of unappealing dead spots as well. Little, however, is personable throughout. With an ending that might have inspired the final moments of the following year's Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Also with Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, Madeline Kahn, and others. + Fawcett may have published this book as The Prey, but author Smith apparently copyrighted it under the more descriptive title Prey of the Werewolves. Smith took the part of the readers, who know quite early on what the hero is up against. Fawcett took the hero's part, for he is a man of such brainless stupidity that we can't be entirely sure he figures it out himself until very near the end. He is Morivania, and he has sworn himself to kill the man who killed his father. It's a quest that takes him across a large swath of late eighteenth-century Europe (France particularly) and during which he accepts the help of various companions, including, for no apparent reason, a girl who narrowly escapes being burned as a witch and an old scientist who manages to fall in love with a female-shaped clockwork figure. At least the beautiful woman he picks up in Paris serves a need -- that is, when he isn't rutting with an irresistible wolf-woman. The companion he needs most of all, though, is a strange old fellow who not only knows a great deal about Morivania's enemy, but how to kill him, as well. When Morivania sees him enjoying being petted like a dog, he fails to make any connection. Yet he comes by his addled wits honestly: the book itself is appallingly unglued. Smith, for instance, sees no problem with spending over 400 pages setting up a confrontation that he whimsically resolves with the words, "Seconds later it was over." One imagines he felt justified in doing this because this isn't a story of rising action and climactic release; it's an episodic journey punctuated at every opportunity with action that serves no purpose other than to frighten Morivania -- he certainly never learns anything from it. The truth is, he can't learn much: Smith doesn't have much to tell. The big revelation has to do with the specific nature of the werewolves. They aren't men who turn into ravening beasts at the full moon (which we knew all along); they are more like the Hengist character in the original Star Trek episode "Wolf in the Fold." But, true to form, resolving that revelation is the work of a mere paragraph or two. In addition to Star Trek, Smith may also have been influenced by Guy Endore's classic The Werewolf of Paris. Endore used the Franco-Prussian War to illuminate human depravity. Smith similarly builds much of his story within the French Revolution. He, however, has no higher purpose than to generate excuses for ostensibly exciting, if absurdly immaterial, unrest. In sum, a useful reminder that not all literary drivel is self-published. |
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