A Writers Blog

Imprint certianly leaves an impression.

2006-04-07T22:45:00.000Z

Masters of Horror - Imprint - Takashi Miike.

At last it's here, the episode that was banned in the US and shown here in the UK a full hour and a half later than all the rest at 11:30pm. They even posted an "Extreme violence" warning before the episode. Let's see what all the fuss is about...

It begins with an American traveling in Japan, on a tiny boat full of filthy peasants going to a brothel on an island. He stays under duress, unwilling to spend the night with a prostitute, and yet he ends up talking to a woman with a deformed face who tells him that the woman of his dreams, who he has been searching for to repay a promise, has died and been thrown in the river.

The place seems to be populated by a menagerie of people, twisted forms and minds plotting and going about their business in the dark. The prostitute says the island is not of this world, it is part of the demon realm and he should not leave. The American agrees and has some sake to relax, and sees a brief flash of a ghostly face that he puts down to too much drink. He asks the prostitute to tell him a bed time story about herself, so she tells him of her upbringing in the harshness of poor rural Japan.

Her mother was a midwife who also cared for her elderly father who has lung disease. The prostitute, deformed from birth, is shunned by the village but befriended by a Buddhist priest who shows her scrolls of demons and explains that if a man does anything depicted on the scroll they will go to hell. After her grandfather drowns himself, so he is no more a burden on his family, she is bought and sold until she ends up at the island brothel. A sad existence for a sad girl. She ends up doing things she saw on the scroll and knows where she is going when she dies.

The prostitute is befriended by Komomo (the girl the American is looking for). But we find out Komomo has her own problems as the other women are jealous of her looks. She is falsely accused of stealing a ring from the Madam and tortured with burning incense in her armpits and needles under her fingernails and in her gums. The pain is excruciating and the glee on the face of the torturer is very disturbing. She is hanged upside-down by her feet so everyone can see her humiliation and eventually left on the floor. The ring is never found.

Komomo loses all hope of her American ever finding her and so he hangs herself to escape this horror. The American refuses to accept this and he demands that the prostitute tells him the truth. She advises him that he shouldn't ask, but he pleads with her so she decides to tell him. She asks why the American why he loved her and he tells her that she was an innocent, a beautiful princess in his eyes who reminded him of his dead little sister.

We see the prostitute steal the ring and plant evidence in the madam's room implicating another of the women. We see that Komomo is still alive and that the prostitute killed her to put her out of her misery. The prostitute believes she helped Komomo get to heaven, Buddha would not deny a soul that had been killed by the one she trusted.

And yet the American cannot accept his, and demands more. At the moment of Komomo's death she sees the prostitutes head split and bleed and this alerts us that all is not as it seems. As the American demands a third voice comes into the room, and instructs the woman to tell the American the truth. Finally, after she seems to be at war with her own mind, she spits out her story.

Her parents were beggars, her father was a brutal drunk, and her mother helped women dispose of newborn children. She also threw her newborn daughter in the river, but after two days she was still alive so her mother kept her. She was abused by the Buddhist priest who told her if she didn't do what he told her, she'd go straight to hell. And finally, when her drunken father saw she was old enough, he started on her too. And in amongst all this carnage and sorrow the girl makes up her mind and kills her father down by the river and we see what is possessing her, with its hand protruding from her skull.

The prostitute is overcome as this story is revealed and so reveals the twin inside her, manifest as a hand with a face in the palm attached to her head. Her parents, as it turns out, were brother and sister, running from persecution. The sister bites the skin of the hand to make the prostitute do what she wants. She stole the ring and let the others believe it was Komomo. She killed her, and was glad.

And yet as they are talking we discover the American killed his little sister after abusing her. The prostitute knows this and taunts him. So he shoots her in the chest, and then in the head and as she dies she is revealed as the woman he has been seeking.

The American has lost his mind, confined to a cell for killing the prostitute, he is abandoned with all the elements of his story, the unborn child, the sister he killed and the woman he lost. Trapped in a private hell of his own creation.

This is undoubtedly the best constructed of the episodes, and has the most extreme imagery of the entire series. However, as frightening as all this imagery is, it is let down by two things that were fundamental to the story, and the impact it has on the viewer. Firstly the actor playing the American (Billy Drago) is wooden and flat, the emotions he is attempting to convey do not come across and we have no real sense of his anguish, or determination to find out the truth. Secondly, the prostitutes twin is a laughable prosthetic, the grin is goofy and the overall appearance of the face is almost cartoonish. A more twisted visage, realistically using the anatomy provided, would have been far more chilling, two fingers and an embedded eye in a lump of protruding skull, just enough to suggest a larger entity struggling beneath would have been more in keeping with the piece. I know of which I speak as far as these kinds of things are concerned, but please do not ask me to explain.

As far as the censorship in the US is concerned, I completely agree that a moral minority in the Bible belt would have seized on this and prevented us from getting a second series. The foetal imagery (taken out of context of course) would have been the basis for a badly constructed argument against the freedom of writers and filmmakers to express themselves, never mind that the writer (Shimako Iwai - screenplay adapted from his own novel) and director (Takashi Miike) are Japanese.

In closing, bravo to Bravo for showing this, and let's hope the second series sees this episode as the benchmark, not the exception.

Haeckel belongs dead.

2006-04-02T00:10:00.000Z

Masters of Horror - Haeckel's Tale - John MacNaughton.

Horrific? Without question. What on earth is Clive Barker thinking being involved with this soft-core rubbish? Well I guess he knows, he wrote it. Let's examine the facts.

A Victorian age man goes to a necromancer to get his girlfriend back from the dead, and she says no. The old witch offers to explain her decision by telling the young man a story about the aforementioned Haeckel. He is a Victor Frankenstein wannabe, a Godless scientist who wants to restore life to cadavers with electricity. He is advised to go and see a necromancer if he wants to know about raising the dead. The necromancer is performing in the park, a real snake-venom and hellfire merchant who sells what looks like a cheap magic trick with a dead dog and a wicker basket. Raising people from the dead is extra, at 100 bucks a pop.

The young scientist then discovers his father is ill, and on the way home through the countryside gets caught in a storm and offered a place to stay by an elderly gentleman with a beautiful young wife and a newborn baby. The wife wanders off into the night after the park charlatan shows up and the husband gives him $100. The scientist decides to follow her and save her from what ever is out there. We find her making out with the corpse of her dead husband. The old gent is killed by other corpses who seem to be doing nothing else except watching the action. Scientist gets back to the house and finds the wife nursing the baby who is "The spitting image of his daddy". Cue zombie kid biting and killing scientist, leading to the final scene of the tale, a graveyard full of stiffs gawping at the wife as she entertains another dead lover.

Back at the beginning the Victorian style young man is horrified by the tale, and then discovers that this old witch is the same woman from the story and the house is still full of her dead lovers and child. The young man runs into the night and we close on maniacal laughter from the "family".

OK. I understand that necrophilia is one of the final taboos, I understand that there are good stories about love against adversity. I know that Clive Barker likes to write about all these things, and twist them around to entertain. I'm sure he did write about this, but then all I can imagine is that a screen writer stripped the story to its essentials, added a soupcon of extra breasts, and decided that a 3rd rate set with bad zombie makeup was the best way to present this tale. Maybe the only true definition of horror is the mess that screen writers make of original works so that they will fit around the adverts and display enough cleavage to keep the boys watching.

This series has been a disappointment from start to finish, with one notable exception in John Carpenter's "Cigarette Burns". There is only one to go. I daren't hope that it will be a triumph, but if it was written and directed by Miike Takashi, then there is a small glimmer of hope, and only one chance at redemption.

However, there is one positive to be gleaned from all of this. If this is the best that the supposed "Masters" can do then there is hope for all us talented hacks. I've read essays about mixing paint that were more horrific.

Reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2...

2006-03-27T22:54:00.000Z

Right then. There is good news and there is GOOD news.

The good news is that there are two Masters of Horror left in the schedule. One of which is "Haeckel's Tale". Why am I excited by this? It is written by Clive Barker. A great story writer (not such a great director) who deserves this to be a triumph in the hands of John McNaughton.

The GOOD news is...

The UK transmitters of the Masters of Horror series have decided that we are less scared than the Americans. True, but what does this mean in reality?

Miike Takashi's IMPRINT will be shown uncut on Bravo in the UK on Friday April the 7th at 10pm.

Blimey!

Check out the relevant websites at:

http://www.mastersofhorror.net

and for the IMPRINT announcement:

http://www.bravo.co.uk/mastersofhorror/index.html

Lets see whether the promise is delivered.

Constructive critique.

2006-03-27T12:41:00.000Z

Now I realise why I joined a writers group. We met on Sunday, although Myles had forgotten and Andrew was working so it ended up being just Michael and myself.

I'd given him "Jump" to read and over the course of an hour he helped me understand all the things that he felt could improve my writing.

1. Repetition. I keep re-using scene setting elements (rain, humidity etc) and this is not required in the short story form.

2. Use of adverbs instead of powerful verbs. E.g. "Definitely getting on the night shift's nerves" replaced with "Grating on...". "Getting" is a weak verb and the addition of the adverb "definitely" doesn't strengthen it enough to convey the intended meaning.

3. Very long sentences. Speaks for itself. Some of my sentences are over 8 lines long. Think about Hemingway.

4. Author intrusion. Use of "clever" language gets in the way of the plot, and the natural flow of the story.

5. Hinting. I use hints to redirect and misdirect the reader to place them in a particular frame of mind, the suggestion was to keep the hints relevant.

6. Surprises. Don't introduce items suddenly, like the appearance of a cup of coffee. This causes a jarring of the narrative and interrupts the flow.

7. Character description. Tighten these to two lines at most, don't use the screen play trick of a complete description to get the character across.

8. Action + description. Don't present a snappy action and then add a flowery description on the end. (See "Author intrusion".)

I understand that this may not be the most fascinating thing you have ever read, but for me this deconstruction was possibly the most important conversation about my writing style I have ever had. Bravo Michael.

All I have to do now is decide what I am going to do about it.

Resurrection music.

2006-03-27T12:08:00.000Z

Masters of Horror - The Fair Haired Child - William Malone.

This episode struck me as a classic. All the elements that are required to create a creepy scenario are here, and despite my previous disappointments with this series, this episode works.

A geeky girl, unpopular at school, is kidnapped by a man in a van as she cycles home. Instead of waking up in her own State a stick thin nurse (played by Tank Girl herself - Lori Petty) tells her she is in hospital in Vermont. A call to the girls drunken mother quickly puts us in the "no hope of rescue" camp of storytelling, and we are shown that the kidnapper and the nurse are husband and wife and have someting horrid in the cellar.

Naturally, girl is thrown into the cellar, and meets a mute teenage boy who seems as terrified as she is. The girl explores the space and finds writing on the walls proclaiming "Beware the Fair Haired Child" and "Get out before it wakes up!". The girl is getting very nervous at this stage, but at least she isn't alone...

Anyone who has spotted the flaw in that safe sounding little statement, put their hands up now.

The boy is the fair haired child of the title, and he is an unwilling participant in his parents obsession. He is their son, and he had died in a boating accident on his birthday. The parents are distraught, and through the use of a book of black magic (obviously one of them has a library card for Misaktonic University) they bring their son back from the dead. But there' a catch. The "bargain" they have reached is that there must be twelve souls exchanged for his, and each time they do it a nasty little creature that looks like a cross between a tree, a lizard and a foetus will show up to do the honours. Our girl is the last of the twelve.

The boy passes out and the creature appears, hunting the girl through the cellar in a stop motion, Czech puppetry kind of way until it is apparent that there is no escape. The boy regains conciousness long enough to show the girl another black book that shows the ritual, and what is in store for her. Togther they formulate a plan,and as we see a tiny glimmer of hope appear the creature strikes and kills the girl.

Our boy is now restored to his parents, who seem to carry on their lives as before, as if their son had never died, even though the father is obviously mad with guilt and twitches slightly when he sits still. But the plan is still in effect, and the boy berates his parents for the bargain they have made. He is no musician, he tells them, but he has discovered what he is really good at. Negotiation. His parents souls for that of the girl. Two for one rather than twelve.

The parents are dispatched in a suitable manner, and the girl wakes up in bed with no recollection of what happened in the cellar. The boy comes to see her and tells her that she will start to remember things from before, but they've both been there, and they can wotk through them together.

The story feels more complete than the others in this series, and the double-bluff of the girls death and resurrection is an excellent ending. There are gems in this series, and this is definitely one of them.

Bloody Mary anyone?

2006-03-20T13:31:00.000Z

Masters of Horror - Incident on and off a mountian road - Don Coscarelli.

A girl's car crashes into a stationary vehicle on a lonely mountian road, the phone doesn't work (natch), but she automatically breaks the stereotype by having a working torch in her car and going to see if the other driver is OK. All there is in the other car is blood and the viewer automatically knowswhat is coming next. Soon the girl is running for her life through the darkened woods from a maniac. Yes, it happens that fast. The maniac has grabbed the driver of the other car (also a girl - what are the odds) and is busy having a good old fashioned bug-out. However, through flashback, we find out that the boyfriend of our star is a screwed up survival nut control freak who thinks the world is about to end and has taken them both to live in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of people who are of the same mind. As the chase progresses we see that the girl is adept at making traps (a pair of scissors on a branch takes out the maniac's eye and a pit is dug to impale him as he hunts her), so the training has apparently rubbed off along the way. But the maniac, it seems, has a few tricks of his own (by using the other girl as bait and using her to set off the traps for him).

We get to the creepy house soon enough and get to see the extent of the maniacs work (eyeless corpses everywhere) but she escapes from him and kills him with a blow to the head from a very grisly weapon, a knife and then a fall down the ravine.

Back at her car we find out that her ex has been dead in the boot all along, she takes him back to the maniacs place, where she makes the corpse look like all the rest, kills the old man and leaves.

As endings go it's nice to see the girls kick some arse for a change, but the change to soulless killer from terrified survivalist girl is too abrupt. The piece as a whole is completely gratuitous, with no saving graces whatsoever. I found bits of it unnerving because of the violence but I prefer my horror to come from subtelty, not delivered like so much mincemeat.

Fans of the series will undoubtedly like this installment, but I'm afraid it left me cold.

Cocoa anyone?

2006-03-18T12:33:00.000Z

Masters of Horror - Chocolate - Mick Garris.

The latest airing for the MoH series appeared here on St Patrick's Day. Resisting the urge to give us re-runs of "Leprechaun" starring Warwick Davis (thank Heaven) normal service resumed with this hour of extra-sensory perception.

Jamie (Henry Thomas) is a single man with an ex-wife, a cute kid, alimony and an enormous appartment somewhere on the set. He works for a lab creating flavourings for food companies (forever chasing the elusive "Honeydew melon" flavour) and on his time off he watches his mad associate (Matt Frewer - anyone remember Max Headroom?) rock out in a stick-on mohican wig.

His problems begin when he dreams of chocolate. Specifically of someone eating chocolate. Specifically a beautiful woman eating chocolate. He dreams of her eating, smelling, drawing cougars at the zoo and making love. Cue this weeks gratuitous nudity. Rather than think he is going mad, especially after his ex-wife finds him having a remote controlled orgasm, he decides he needs to find this woman to tell her how much he loves her. Naturally.

After 'seeing' the woman get raped and then killing her lover he travels to Canada to confront her with his experiences and offer to help. Unsurprisingly she is a little spooked out by all of this and eventually goes along with the situation, lulls Jamie into a false sense of security, and tries to kill him when she gets back to her appartment. The girl is, frankly, nuts.

As they fight, her with a knife, Jamie with a gun, the remote sensory trick takes place and Jamie shoots the woman as he is seeing out through her eyes. He dies with her, experiences the final moments of her life ebbing away until he returns to his own body.

The episode is told through a police interview, Jamie lays down the facts in a no-nonsense style and the detective nods in a bewildered fashion. "That's one hell of an unbelieveable story" the cop comments at the end, "I can't help that" is Jamies reply. He can't help it because he is only an actor trapped in this hour. I blame the writer. The pay-off, Jamie experiencing the death of the woman he 'loves' is as good a twist in the tale as we have had this season, but the suspension of rational thought required to get to this point is a stretch to far.

As an episode it was better than "Jennifer" and "Deer Woman" but lacked the panache of "Cigarette Burns" and the outright balls of "Sick Girl". As the old saying goes, "You win some..."

The curse of Raoul Duke.

2006-03-14T13:24:00.000Z

Back to yet another writers club last night, and I am beginning to wonder what the hell I am doing there. The other members are talented in their own way but are not writing the same kind of things I am, so I am finding it very difficult to connect.

I will ponder the ramifications of this at a later date, but first I'd like to share something with you.

Hunter. S. Thompson was a genius, a sick, twisted and dyed in the wool stone bonker, but a genius. I have started writing something new about the nature of typewriters and I needed to get in touch with some inner rage, some fist in the gut vitriol that would allow me to get some full on ranting out onto the page. Not mindeless shouting you understand, but a full on coherent stream of invective littered with bizarre references and annecdotes that make the whole thing believable. Well, Hunter came to the rescue. I read a few chapters of his "Generation of Swine" last night (possibly to cure myself of the uninspiring writers circle, possibly because I'm a masochist) and found exactly what I was looking for. The way he describes people at the level of beasts, the way every thing is life-or-death, do-or-die, keep up or get out of my way, and his constant war with authority figures who aren't tuned in to the "hard drugs and rum" mindset is liberating, an inspiration. The man had his own battles with a sucession of rented typewriters, and some of those battles were lost around 3am with the hotel manager pounding on the door demanding that he release the maid, and his editor on the phone screaming about the deadline that passed three hours ago, and the man himself, speed crazy with half a bottle in him pounding at the keys. Ugly scenes. But after all, as the man reminds us constantly, he is a professional.

Why do I have this feeling that the next piece might be in a slightly different style? Now, where's the rum?

One last time, I promise.

2006-03-13T17:04:00.000Z

I'm done with the whole artwork thing. I'll just have to write someting else before I get to play in the art box again. You'll be pleased to hear that I'm going to go back to reviewing everything I see rather than posting the contents of my "My Pictures" folder.

Just a thought, this blog would probably make a lot more sense if it's read in the the right order. Maybe a thought for this blog sites is a facility to post the last entry at the top of the page, and then place the rest in chronological order. Hey ho, techy schmechy.

Cover story.

2006-03-13T00:29:00.000Z

I said there was more cover artwork for my fiction. Well, true to my word, here are some more.

Comments are welcome.

What a bind.

2006-03-12T12:31:00.000Z

Well, just to get back onto the original subject of this blog for a second, rather than reviewing everything I see, here is a progress report on my book writing efforts.

The short story collection is almost complete, I only have to finish off the time travel piece which is causing me horrendous problems as everything I seem to do with the plot ends up as a paradox. Also, it is very hard to write in this Victorian Journal style without any actual dialogue, but I have progressed so far with this it would be a shame to stop now.

I have also been finding out about book binding. There is a little bookshop in Winchester called Wells that apparently has a back room where bookbinding takes place. Not the hobby based work you can find on the internet, but the creation of beautiful leather bound volumes and the repair of ancient Bibles and the like. I have met up with Pete, a young bookbinder who has provisionally agreed to take my work and create a set of one off books for me for a small fee. Just vanity I know but I really would get a great deal of satisfaction from seeing all my work bound together under a nice leather cover.

I have also been struggling with Microsoft Word to get it to do what I want. I have formatted the short works into pamphlet form and added nice photographic covers. Here is the cover for "Jump"

I have been working on these designs for a while trying to give my work a consistant "look and feel" with the text layout and image formatting and I think I have arrived at a point where I am happy with my work. Happy to present it to other people that is, without thinking it looks scruffy or amateurish in any way.

There are lots of other images used for my book covers that I have found from royalty free sites on the internet. I have been very careful to make sure I can re-use them without the thought police knocking on my door and asking to see my "Poetic licence". Here are a couple more.

There are lots more of these, but I will leave them for another time as it is Sunday afternoon and I think I should get on with some writing rather than spend time writing my blog. This time travel business won't sort itself out you know.

Lucky Number Slevin.

2006-03-12T00:33:00.000Z

Off to the cinema again tonight to see the aforementioned, starring Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu, Sir Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman.

Well, it's a double-cross movie. In more ways than one. It sets the audience up nicely with the asassinations of various figures, setting the tone of the hard core gangland environment, it moves on to show a failed gambler getting himself and his family killed in the late seventies, it shows Bruce Willis explaining the mechanics of the "Kansas Shuffle" to an unknown man in an airport, before killing him. So far, so Guy Ritchie.

Then the Slevin of the title appears, a case of mistaken identity, and suddenly this kid owes a lot of money to some very nasty people (The Boss - Freeman, The Rabbi - Kingsley). Various henchmen make their entrances and engage in philosophical gangster banter, while Lucy Liu tries to unravel what is going on to Slevin as everybody else punches him in the nose at ten minute intervals. So far, so Quentin Tarantino.

The Boss engages Slevin in the old "Meaningless sounding story about a cartoon - which is an euphamism for how much shit you are in" scene. The Rabbi engages Slevin in the "I may be a nasty piece of work but it's all kosher if I do things by the book" routine. Slevin accepts he has a marker to pay and The Boss recruits him to kill The Rabbi's son (aka The Fairy). Bruce Willis lurks meaningfully in the background and appears to be playing for both sides, and explains that he will use Slevin as a means to an end. Once The Rabbi's son is dead he will kill the kid and make it look like a murder suicide lover's pact kind of deal.

There is more exposition, a comparison of James Bond movies, some unnecessary cops asking dumb questions, and then, at last, Slevin goes to do the hit.

Then we get the flashbacks, the flash forwards, the double-cross, the triple-cross, the reveal, and then the explaination. So far, so Republic serial.

The trouble with all this is the fact that the explaination seems to take at least half the film. The con is not as complex as it looks, the methods used to achieve it are not as clever as they think they are, and the identity of the players is not so hard to guess as the writer imagined. So, why does it take so long? The only reason that I can think of is that the audience are being treated like children, very much like the end of Minority Report where the end of the film is presented and then replayed in slow motion for the hard-of-thinking who couldn't keep up the first time.

Frankly, I felt a little patronised. But then again this was never going to be another "The Sting" or "L.A. Confidential". That said, Josh Hartnett gives a solid performance and holds the film together, no mean feat considering how little screen time his co-stars get. I also like Bruce Willis in these kind of roles, even though he looks as if he is about to break into a big grin half the time. Since "The Whole Nine Yards" it's been hard to take him seriously. Kingsley and Freemen are wasted here, the menace thay were supposed to deliver, to give the feeling of real jeopardy for Slevin, merely seems like comicbook evil-by-numbers. But then again, as entertainment, which is the purpose of cinema after all, it works.

Aural sex.

2006-03-12T00:12:00.000Z

Masters of Horror - Sick Girl - Lucky McKee.

Here we go again with yet another in the series. Billed as a horror-comedy-lesbian romp on the satellite TV information pages, this left little to the imagination as those four words encapsulated the entire show. But, that said, the central performance from Angela Bettis ("Girl Interrupted", "May") was a magnificent exercise in frustrated anal-retention. Her lesbian entymologist falls for a girl who hangs around the university and their awkward romance is a comitragic joy to watch as it unfolds into what passes for normal in these one hour films. Unfortunately she is also sent a Bug from Brazil (the location I felt was deliberate to create a tenuous literary pun) which looks like a Replicator robot from the Stargate SG1 series without any of the formers cuddly charm. This thing proceeds to do the predictable things that monsters do, escape, eat the neighbour's dog, and finally (and thus the title of this article) infect the young girl lover with its eggs and DNA through her ear.

What happens next could have been corny, but in Lucky McKee's hands it becomes a war of manners between the lover and the elderly landlady of the building, with a grisly reveal of the monster thrown in for good measure. A couple of disposable extras serve their function until our entymologist is faced with the unstable bug-girl her lover has become, and the infection of her own body by the Brazillian Beetle.

The final scene leaves us with both women heavily pregnant, wondering who will give birth first and wondering how many cigars to send to their parents. The bug is seated behind them on the back of the sofa, its proboscis still inserted in their ears.

I was left with the creeping feeling that as soon as their "children" arrived they would be summarily eaten alive. Oh well, that's love I guess.

A good laugh, but hardly horror. We can only hope that Miike Takashi will save us and give us the good, uncut, blood-curdling stuff we all secretly hope is out there.

Mad as a spoon.

2006-03-10T13:26:00.000Z

Well I never, I heard from my old pal Mr H today, he lives in Vancouver and manages to contribute to the damaged thumb epidemic suffered by videogame addicted teenagers (i.e. the "useless" third of society), and he has professed a longing for and a lack of Dear Old Blighty in his life.

(A note to colonials, "Blighty" is a WWII Royal Air Force slang term for England.)

So, what was I to do? In keeping with my philosophy of writing every day I decided to send him a little something to cheer him up. I invented a website called ChipsInCurrySauce.Com (an English delicacy - especially at 2am) and proceeded to expound its services and benefits for the Englishman abroad. I am beginning to wish this site was real, Heinz Baked Beans anywhere in the world in 8 hours, what a dream...

And now I have decided to expand on that theme. Read on...

Dear Colonial Refugee,

Missing Blighty?
Fed up with the heathen lingo and the lack of brown sauce?
Do you long for the smell of boiling sprouts ?
Do you wish the locals knew how to put the lumps into custard?

You, like thousands of others before you, can get help!

ChipsInCurrySauce.com

We will provide you
(next day – or possibly the day after - within a week certainly)
with the things you miss from home!

Delivered in a hermetically sealed, self-warming container, carefully marked with the bio-hazard and medial waste stickers to avoid those prying fingers at customs. We can provide all the things you colonials desire!

Imagine!

Kebabs to your door!
The authentic smell of a smoke filled pub!
Proper bitter!
Audio tapes of drunken conversations!
Caravanning magazines!
Wensleydale!
Proper English swearwords used correctly!
Knitted tank tops!

Just say the word and all this can be yours for
only three times what it would have usually cost you.

Despair not, lowly colonial, Blighty
is only a suspicious leaking package away!

If this service fails to satisfy, we don’t care because you are in another country. Your home may be at risk if you leave the gas on or use it as collateral in a poker game. Martians aren’t real. Unusual terms and conditions apply. Not available in the Republic of Ireland, splitters. Gravy cannot be shipped across the international date line. We have a rude photograph of your mother, so don't even think about not paying us. Please do not ask us about bulk orders for rhubarb crumble. The views and opinions expressed in this commercial are solely those of Mr K. String. 101a Mudlark Towers, Penge. If you have been offended by the content of this message blame him, not us. ChipsInCurrySauce is a wholly owned subsidiary of ItsNotWhatItUsedToBe Ltd and is in no way affiliated with LetsTakeEmpireBackToIndia Plc. Elephant polo rules are available on request. Polos are a type of mint, polo is a sport played with a human head. This commercial designed and printed by the British Custard Marketing Board. Rule Britannia. Thankyou.

A little "Pick me up", or something more painful?

2006-03-06T23:58:00.000Z

Masters of Horror - Pick me up - Cigarette burns.

Two more of the "Masters of Horror" series have been aired in the UK and the series seems to be taking an upswing.

Pick Me Up - Larry Cohen.

The melding together of two urban legends is a curious premise. The hitchhiker that kills every driver he picks up and the long distance truck driver who kills his passengers. These two men stumble across the same stranded bus, the truck driver taking some of the passengers to the nearest hotel and the hitchhiker takes the opportunity to mop up those left behind. We are soon left with a triptych, one of the bus passengers has made it through the woods to the motel at which the two men are staying and as their territories, methods and philosophies begin to overlap the stranded passenger realizes what she is caught between.

Watching the two killers circle each other and talk of their desires and the underlying psyche of the killer is a wonderful narrative device, allowing the terror (observed though the eyes of the survivor) to build and change as the upper hand is clawed back and forth between the two men. Their eventual confrontation is brutal as the realization that the other man is a more fitting prey than the girl.

There is a twist in the tale provided by an ambulance. But I won't spoil it for you. The look in the girl's eyes will stay with you for a while.

Cigarette burns - John Carpenter.

This hour is the best so far. It appeals directly to the thoughts I have about gateways, paths we follow or are created by us that lead us to unexpected places, not always of our choosing. Doors, books, pictures, mirrors, water, the dark, all these are gateways, transports for the imagination and the body. To this list we can add one more, it is not new, but in this context it takes on a new form. It is a film. But not any film, this is the ultra rare psycho-verite of "Le Fin Absolut Du Monde", a film so powerful that it makes the audience violent, see visions and go mad. What they see is not and ordinary narrative, but a stream of images that show us a place where we have no layers of fancy to shield us from the truth. And then we meet one of the cast. With his wings cut off, he is chained to the floor and is full of sadness for the thing that has been released upon the world. He is, of course, an angel.

The characters are simple, a film finder of no small reputation, and a collector of the rare. The collector is driven by the need to see and to possess, the finder is driven to prove himself, to locate the impossible and to use the money to get himself out of trouble. The money ceases to be a motive before too long as the hunt and the tantalizing hints of the film itself become an obsession. Of course we end up with the film in our possession, and there are glimpses of the footage that only serve to underline the effect it has on the viewer. I am quite sure that I was not the only one watching that was waiting for more, I wanted to see "Le Fin Absolut Du Monde" in its entirety, and damn the consequences.

The end of this piece has it's predictable moments, a little from "Event Horizon", a little from "Hellraiser", a little from "The Prophecy", but there are so few original voices left these days and it is unfair to expect such a voice to show itself in a one hour special. All in all, it left me wanting more. The first rule of showmanship remains unbroken.

How much popcorn is that exactly?

2006-03-06T11:35:00.000Z

The Oscars 2006.

I have stayed up all night and watched the Oscars for as long as I can remember. A ritual excuse for me to eat a lot of popcorn and cheer at the things I love and boo the things I don't. But this year was different. This was the year of the shameless industry plug.

Apparently cinema receipts are down, way down, and the cure for this was deemed to be Lauren Bacall and Jake Gyllenhaal introducing clip reels that illustrated how different the cinema experience is from watching movies at home. Comments such as "When was the last time an actor finished a scene and thought - that'll look good on the DVD?" and "some of these movies are too big for TV" were liberally scattered about, as well as several references to piracy destroying the industry, "Some of these actresses can barely afford enough dress material to cover their breasts".

Even Sid Ganis got in on the act with an impassioned plea to get off the sofa, leave the safety and comfort of your home, get out from infront of your 42" plasma TV and Dolby 5.1 surround system and go to the cinema. For the experience.

I agree with him. Sometimes in the dark I marvel at how real the coughing and crisp packets sound. And why isn't the surround sound effect of a screaming child in the seat behind me lovingly reproduced on the DVD? Maybe it's hidden in the extras somewhere.

The business of Hollywood, and let's not forget it is a business, eloquently reminded us that these films aren't made to entertain us, or tell great and powerful stories, or to the change the world (as George Clooney and Samuel. L. Jackson mentioned on the night) but to make enormous quantities of money. Clooney himself only got "Good night and good luck" made after he bribed the studio with the low brow cash cow that was "Ocean's Twelve".

In the end the night itself was a parade of "should haves". Felicity Huffman should have won the best actress award for "TransAmerica", David Strathairn missed best actor for "Good night and good luck" and even "Brokeback Mountain" missed out on best picture.

The feeling before the event was that this was going to be a night of statements. "Brokeback Mountain" and "Capote" were there to cover the internal Hollywood agenda, "Good night and good luck" was a banner for free speech, but in the end the Academy picked the extraordinary stories and individuals that were the heart of great films.

And futhermore, if the Oscars become a method to create a statement, what value is their art?

All surface, all the time...

2006-03-01T18:04:00.000Z

As we seem to be discussing TV shows for a moment here, how about Surface? Well, how about it? It crept onto our screens with the usual fanfare (see Invasion, 4400, Threshold, Battlestar Galactica - also V, Alien Nation) and promised nothing more than the usual fare except or one vital difference. The 'mysterious creatures' in this show do NOT disguise themselves as human beings to blend into the population to pursue their nefarious goals. These things are sea monsters, great big sea monsters at that. No latex masks, no appalling acting as good-looking teens attempt to get in touch with his or her inner Martian, just sea monsters that eat boats, electrocute airplanes and vanish into the red hot bowels of the earth.

The acting is above par but not extraordinary, the themes are familiar but have a couple of twists, the unemployed scientist who chases the monsters has to struggle with child care, the fisherman who lost his brother and needs answers is rapidly approaching divorce thanks to his obsession, the smart school kid is finding out what it means to defend the helpless as a juvenile monster bonds with him and takes up residence in his summer house.

There are the set pieces, of course, the evil CIA/NSA type spook controlling things from behind the scene, the mysterious mastermind who knows exactly what is going on and wants it continue to its unnatural conclusion. The government sponsored good guy, trying to be a good scientist despite the orders he must follow.

It's nice to see the chaos of real life impinging on the shores of the usually polished realities of American TV. Somehow it feels more like watching "Jaws" or "Close Encounters", the characters come first, we see the world through their eyes rather than being presented with routine plot points and "beast of the week".

Above all it is refreshing to see a show where the monsters don't have a speaking part.

As we speak we are half way through the first series in the UK, and I hope that the studio responsible has had all the monster cliches in the vicinity rounded up and shot. I want evolution in action, not man-monster hybrids, I want Gaia and niches in the ecosystem, not cloned weapons who learn to be smarter then their masters. I want hope and understanding, not war.

This could be adapted into a personal mission statement, for now it's my Christmas list for the show.

Surface - Tuesday 8pm ITV2

Masters of Horror

2006-02-25T14:33:00.000Z

Well, it promised so much and yet I still want it to be more.

The idea of the Masters Of Horror series was, on the face of it, sound. The greatest writers and directors working in the genre today would produce a one hour film to show off their talents and feed the fans starved of original fare. I had long ago switched my allegiances to the Japanese and the Koreans, having been converted by such films as The Ring, Suicide Club, Oldboy, Ju-On (aka The Grudge), Audition and others. I was hoping the US contingent would take that lead and stretch their creative muscles to show that western horror was alive and well.

Stuart Gordon's "Dreams in the Witch House" was the first I saw. It suffers from the same problem that all H.P.Lovecraft material has when it comes to transferring it to the screen, you can't. HPL's material is more concerned with the psychology of terror, the creeping dread that builds in the minds of his protagonists as each hint and briefly glimpsed monstrosity turns a rational man into a gibbering wreck. Translating those terrors to the screen by allowing the viewer to share these moments is an exercise in communication that cannot help but fail as the viewer cannot share the mindset of the characters. In this case the amount of mathematical knowledge that needs to be transferred to the viewer will bore before it allows the dawning realizations to have any kind of effect. A valiant but flawed attempt.

Dario Argento's "Jennifer" is next up. The ending is presented to us at the beginning of the hour and the rest of the show is a slide towards the obvious denouement. The title character (with a gruesome prosthetic for a face) seems to exist to titillate and repulse at the same time. A certain type of man will find themselves drawn to the body and will mentally be trading off their attraction against the repulsion of the face. It's not as if she is a nice person. She has no history to connect us to her, her motives are unknown, and animalistic at best. The character of the tough cop, Jennifer's saviour for the purposes of this hour, is two dimensional and his journey through the plot might as well be on rails. Rubbish.

Jon Landis "Deer Woman". Deer God what was he thinking. Native American myth as pseudo X-Files drama without the charm of a sympathetic lead. A female lead with no lines and two facial expressions who serves simply as eye-candy. I am so disappointed I cannot continue this review.

There is hope on the horizon. His name is Takashe Miike. His hour is called "Imprint" and as I previously mentioned I changed my allegiances to the East a long time ago. There is one problem - no network will show it because of it's content. The easiest way to get an audience to want something more than should be rational, is to ban it. It works.

Brokeback Mountain

2006-02-19T20:29:00.000Z

Went to the cinema on Saturday night. No prizes for guessing what I saw. Frankly this was not my first choice of recreational viewing, however...

I don't think I have been so surprised by such fantastic acting performances from people who I usually associated with much lighter material. Annie Proulx and Ang Lee have fashioned a wonderful fable, an extraordinary tale for our times that addresses the 'taboo' surrounding the 'comfort' of cowboys too long from home and the hidden lives of a (in this context) despised section of society. The conflicted feelings, repression and regret portrayed here is completely tangible and all the more powerful for its understatement.

Heath Ledger is a revelation. From "A Knight's Tale" he has become unrecognisable, this performance capping a short career, with the promise of even greater. His character, Ennis, is a monosyllabic miracle, portraying his deepest desires with his face and his eyes, and a very occasional word. The scene in Jack's childhood bedroom is one of the most heartwarming and powerfully sad scenes I have ever seen on screen. His tortured psyche is laid bare, each grunted word, each silent stare opens a door in to a man troubled by who he wants to be, and his war against who he ought to be.

Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhall) is less of an enigma, and more of an honest character as a result; he is at home with his duality, even though he rages against the unavailability of the ultimate object of his desire. His journey though the years is punctuated by increasingly unfashionable haircuts and the enevitable descent into polyester as we watch his family life unfold, with each passing year highlighted by his inevitable return to the man he loves.

A moving and passionate film with an important lesson for us all, life is short and sometimes it is necessary to make the hard decisions before too many people get hurt.

Breathtaking.

Cars, colds and certificates.

2006-02-15T10:05:00.000Z

Well, it's Wednesday the 15th of February and finally, my insurance certificate from the AA has arrived. (Note to US readers, the AA is the same as TripleA - not AlcoAnon). However, as I have a steaming cold and am wrapped up in a blanket I'm not entirely sure that I will be getting the benefit of my new car just yet. Driving around in my new car could well be fatal, convertibles were not designed for cold sufferers. Oh well, back to the Max strength LemSip and flying helmet for me then.

Despite this sorry state of affairs a pal of mine who I have known since I was a foetus thinks he can introduce me to an agent (large pinch of salt applied to common-sense gland at this juncture), and so I wait to be amazed if it all comes together. Any lead at this stage is a good lead, as I am too new at all this to know good from bad as far as agents are concerned. (Note to watch for fangs dripping blood, glowing eyes, and a propensity to twirl his moustache while laughing maniacally.)

The writers circle has moved it's date to accommodate my absence (bless them) and I should get another agent lead from Analise when I finally meet her. A little devisive I know, but this is goal number one for this year as far as my private life is concerned.

As far as the writing goes, I will post an update once I have stopped sniffing and spending days on end in finance reviews and zooming backwards and forwards to the Plymouth bunch.

Happy belated Valentine's Day to everybody, may you all be executed after having a brief platonic affair with a 13 year old gaoler's daughter (look it up if you don't believe me).

Writers Block

2006-02-13T15:53:00.000Z

The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy: Page 113984938206040009

Entry - Writers Block.

Writers block is a widely documented phenomena, resulting directly in the "dumbing down" of all media everywhere. Writers employed by fabulous magazines or lowly tabloids are usually so glad just to be working and have an indoor job with no heavy lifting that they are scribbling down any old thing just to ensure that they still have a job tomorrow. Writers block is the combination of three documented phobias:

Kenophobia- Fear of voids or empty spaces.
Graphophobia - Fear of Writing
Perditolaborophobia - Fear of unemployment.

This means that these fears, taken in combination, can lead directly to a compulsion to write a thousand words of gibberish, with only the standard get out clause of "Insert Celebrity Name Here" that makes the comissioning editor think there there is something of merit in the pages of guff that have just landed on his desk.

However, we have it easy. Consider the priests of the forests of carnivorus plants that have their final test consisting of writing a single word on the inside of the giant venus flytrap. Naturally there is a little unwillingness on the part of the weaker neophytes to end up as a tooth-pick for a plant.

Gives a whole new meaning to Papyrophobia - Fear of Paper, doesn't it?

Entry ends.

Central Park or bust, it's in the cards...

2006-02-13T14:55:00.000Z

Well, the next writers meeting will be a bust for me, as I won't be there. I am being sent to Plymouth to see a corporate client and act as an Enterprise Architect for their new online projects. However, there is such a plus side to this I can hardly believe it. Work have given me an excellent raise, allowing me to get the car I've had my eye on for a while, it is a Volvo C70 T5 GT convertible, and I can't wait to drive it all over the place with my hair (singular, not collective noun) blowing in the wind. I'm beginning to enjoy the mid-life crisis, all the toys you wanted when you were a kid, but now you've sold your soul to a zaibatsu, you have the money. Is youth wasted on the young? No. Not as long as you remember what it was like.

Apart from that life has been full. I have finished plotting the Tarot piece called "A fool in the world", and the only problem that now remains is the setting, either a medieval landscape or a hotel next to central park are the current front runners. Both seem to work equally well as all the necessary characters are there for me to play with. The hotel idea is favourite at the moment as it takes the underlying story structure away from its medieval roots and shows how all stories can be mapped onto any situation, also, it allows me to twist the hotel staff stereotypes away from themselves by revealing them to be something completely different in this context. Something for me to ponder tonight over a pint I guess.

Back to work. (Sings: "Whip crack away!")

A slow start, like an avalanche.

2006-02-13T11:22:00.000Z

Well, the writers club is grinding to a start with the absence of Michael Lawler from last weeks meeting. A bit nervous as he has a copy of "Jump" to review. I feel very uncomfortable when my writing leaves my posession. I half expect it to crop up elsewhere, or win prizes for a plagirist. Maybe I worry too much, but I have worked too long and too hard on all of this for it all to go wrong now.
On a positive note it sounds as if there will be more members joining next time. Annalise Barton and some of her friends wil be joining us. Just so long as one of them writes fiction, rather than poetry or children's fiction. Not that I have anything against these forms but I would like someone to have a little common ground, and share the direction I am going in. Maybe I expect too much and should take my chances as and when they present themselves. Hey ho.
Re-reading the Robert Rankin "Brentford" books at the moment. He has such a knack with characterisation and gentle humour it makes me sick. People should have the decency not to make writing look so easy, it's not depressing, but it's close. Makes a nascent writer realise how far they have to go. But, let's be fair, the man has style.
That's it for now. More soon.

The Thung

2006-02-13T11:19:00.000Z

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Page 113982965451328178

Entry: The Thung.

The Thung are an amazing species, resilient, resolute, enterprising, and, fortunately for everyone else, extinct. They are, or were, the most violent species in the universe, and as you can imagine they were up against some fairly stiff competition. Their onomatopoeic name came simply from the sound their long hollow metal weapons made as they took the burden of existence from some unwitting tourist. They had evolved from crabs on their home world of Unh, and had come to the aid of the jewelled crabs of Vogsphere mistakenly believing that they were long lost brethren instead of, as we all know, delicious. Having liberated these delicacies from the Vogons there was a brief diplomatic stand off involving 3 senior Vogon diplomats and one Thung. Millions Died, the Thung having developed a trans-dimensional pole to, and I quote, “hit people everywhere.” Such cleverness could not go unrewarded and the Thung were allowed, by the Vogons, to keep their traditional weapons on the understanding that they used them on each others shells as they marched to let the aforementioned unwitting tourists know they were coming. This became so popular amongst the Thung community that each warrior was seen as “a bit foolish” if he couldn’t “Thung” while he marched. And so the inevitable happened, Thung columns formed into marching circles, so each Thung could “Thung” another until the holes that they wore in the soft earth became so deep that a building firm was called in to fill them with Megacrete. These days we say they’re extinct, because no one wants to volunteer to see if they are still down there.

Entry Ends.

Splatstic

2006-02-13T11:18:00.000Z

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Page 113982955194075420

Entry: Splatstic.

Plastic, as we all know, is a marvellous thing, preventing right-thinking people from getting all that gooey “oil” stuff all over their shoes. It has been used for millennia to create sturdy, purposeful objects, such as Cyrius Cybernetics Robots, but its primary use has been in thoroughly destroying ecosystems. Many a civilisation has owed its hasty discovery of space travel to the fact that their planet is up to its knees in bin liners full of crisp packets, and consequently intergalactic commerce and goodwill flourished. Ecologists, at least the ones who haven’t been shot by the banks that represent the Galacti-merchants, say that plastic is still a bad thing. And so, in a fit of technological pique, Splatstic was invented to shut them up once and for all. Splastic, as all bad ideas are, was very simple. If items need to be biodegradable in order to avoid the “crisp death” of an ecology, then an item that is spontaneously biodegradable should, theoretically, please everybody. Splatstic was designed to simply revert back to its component molecules every time that it was subjected to a sharp knock, the individual molecules unwind and become the oil that they were built from, thus covering right-thinking people’s shoes in goo and anything else they were carrying. Ecologists were ecstatic, but people who bought shrink wrapped dingo’s kidneys were not, especially when they tucked their purchase underneath their arms to flag down a bus. After the gunfire had died away, ecologists found that they were becoming an increasingly endangered species, but thanks to the philanthropy of a suddenly wealthy dry-cleaning firm, they were given a fast ship, shovels and a mission to cure “crisp death” by any means necessary. Unfortunately the engines of their spaceship ignited the mountains of bags on the first planet they went to “rescue”, destroying it utterly. They are still out there, somewhere, running for their lives.

Entry Ends.

Cubons

2006-02-13T11:16:00.000Z

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Page 113982947255989592

Entry: Cubon.

The Cubon is unique in the universe as it is the only particle that's perfectly square. This elegantly stackable particle revolutionised the transportation of fruit and vegetables in some of the poorer regions of the galaxy, the resultant savings making some wholly vegetarian societies immensely rich, allowing them to afford the softer, scented toilet tissue that they had their eye on. It was near to the checkout, next to the Cubon particle generator. However, Nif Dink, widely recognised as an irritating know-it-all, famously commented that "It's always a bad idea to tell clever ideas to complete idiots" and was proved spectacularly right when his machine to make square stars blew his eyebrows off, as well as wiping out the nice little corner of the Magrathean factory floor he had rented to 'have a bit of a tinker'. The "It might look simple, but you're too stupid to use it." advertising campaign successfully consigned the Cubon generator to the cut price junk catalogues until Zaphod Beeblebrox bought one when he was bored to make ice out of comet trails, and to make his lemons easier to slice. He re-launched it, made millions, and spent all of the next year almost terminally drunk at other people's parties. Afterwards, the square painkillers he'd made nearly killed him, and he spent the next decade trying, unsuccessfully, to sue himself. As he bankrupted two major law firms (both acting for and against Zaphod) in the process, the Cubon generator was awarded "Most useful product ever!" by the Encyclopedia Galactica almost immediately, an award that was quickly backdated when the "Nif Dink Incident" was brought to its attention.

Entry Ends.

Start Here and Read On....

2006-02-13T11:10:00.000Z

"Out here in the Perimeter, there are no stars." - Jim Morrison.

Well, here we go. My own little online shed to write and ponder in. Just to let you know, I am a budding writer (with a proper job) who's aim this year is to get an agent and something in the works to get published. Unsurprisingly I will not be putting complete manuscripts on line, but I will let you know where I'm going, and what thoughts I have along the way. For example, the other day I was thinking about writing some more background in a story centered on the crusades and jotted this in my notebook.

"The major failing of the human race as a species is our inability to accurately interpret the will of God." More and bloodier wars have been caused by faith than by anything else.

This came about during a conversation with a friend of mine about how long the Bible would be if only the first hand accounts of his words and works were left in. We both agree that the book is filled with the holy ramblings of the devout, but it is not the pure message, there's a lot of noise but no signal. I'm not an overly religous person, I was educated a Catholic by Jesuits and raised a human being by my parents. I have always thought about my nebulous faith, and what the reasons behind these things are, so, instead of standing on a street corner shouting the odds at bemused tourists, I write.

I write mysterious existential tales, letting the reader follow the logic but leaving enough symbols to give a greater canvas to the work. Sometines I write about the nature of faith, the participation in biblical events (from the sidelines and always using minor characters), and wrap them up in tales that are more mysterious than normal. (See "Recording Device" when it gets published).
Apart from that the aim is to just write. I have pages of ideas ranging from the Tarot to Sculpture to Restoration to Pergatory, so I guess I'd better get on with it.

Occasionally I write little Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy entries. These short bits of silliness help to break me out of a block. I'll put one on line in a minute.

Good-bye, for now..