Via Infocult comes word of these astonishing hidden underground temples in the Italian countryside. Started in 1978 by an eccentric businessman and built in complete secrecy beneath the earth’s surface over the course of 16 years, the temple complex is 20 times the size of Big Ben.
Shades of everything from Foucalt’s Pendulum to Coldheart Canyon.
One thing I’ll grant The Mist is that its monsters are threatening the way Hostel‘s torturers or 28 Days Later‘s infected or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Leatherface is threatening. There’s no hardy-har-har-it’s-a-monster stuff or pauses to stand slackjawed and gawk at them “wow!”-style, reinforcing that it’s just a movie, like, at all. The film convincingly articulates the idea that if you see these things coming after you, you will either have to kill them or be killed yourself. I feel like it’s been a long time since a movie did that with non-humanoid monsters–the bug sequence in King Kong stands out in that regard too, but before that you’d have go back to, what? They still weren’t scary, but you did at least feel that kill-or-be-killed panic.
Read: The Dark Tower–“The Attack on Algul Siento”; “The Tet Breaks”; “Mrs. Tassenbaum Drives South”; “Ves’-Ka Gan”
Bloodbath! Not since the shootouts in Mejis back in Wizard and Glass, and maybe not even since the massacre in Tull allllll the way back in The Gunslinger, have we seen the gunslingers cut loose like this. I enjoy that their methods go beyond the Thermopylae “pick the right place” strategy and generally dive straight for no-bones-about-it ambushing and shooting people in the back. They’re rough customers.
So naturally King starts killing them off in the least entertaining order possible, leaving my pick for “please off this one first,” Susannah, as the last non-Roland, non-Oy gunslinger standing. It certainly takes cojones on the author’s part to insert a race to prevent his real-life car accident right after the death of one of his main characters, and make it lead to the death of another. The problem is that the deaths aren’t as affecting as they’re supposed to be because, as I pointed out way back when, we’ve never been sold on Roland’s transformation from the grim hardcase who’d let a kid die rather than deviate from his quest to the loving den mother of his rag-tag bunch; it just sort of happened when King jettisoned the spare style of The Gunslinger for the busy Kingisms of The Drawing of the Three, as though the prose tics did the work for him. We’re supposed to feel this great ocean of grief overwhelming us, but I’m still not sure why. But because of this, the “King” material doesn’t bug me as much as it otherwise might. I actually like his character better than Eddie, and Jake throwing himself in front of a speeding van to save a guy is the kind of thing the kid would do, so that’s okay too. (It also helps that we’ve already had a great Jake death scene in this series.)
SPOILER WARNING. Real, straight-out spoilers this time. So if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read this, even if you’ve read the book–certain additions and changes are most definitely blown below.
So, The Mist. I went with it all the way till the end, until I got so mad that the dumb fucking studio fucking spoiled the fucking ending in the fucking COMMERCIALS (soldiers in hazmat suits using flamethrowers, um, HELLO) that I basically stormed off in disgust. It was only in the cold light of this disillusionment that I realized the movie wasn’t scary at all. Gross, sure, and intense in its gore, but never frightening, not even boo-scary. Maybe that last is because if you’ve read the novella, you know pretty much every major monster beat, with the exception of one new addition that’s such a flagrant Aliens rip-off that you know what’s coming anyway. The one thing that really succeeds on horror terms is the creature design, which takes a lot of the critters in directions that are both entirely faithful to the book and totally not what I would have expected, from the almost centipede-like tentacles to the death’s-head faces of all the insectoid beasts to blowing up the unseen lobster-monsters to King Kong size to shrinking the giant monster that walks over the jeep at the end but making it this creepy cthuloid mess that you can actually see rather than just a few giant legs that trail off into the stratosphere. But, and I stress, while some of this is cool, none of this is actually frightening, and horror movies should be scary. So, fail.
Ditto Mrs. Carmody. Never the most nuanced depiction of religious fundamentalism, she works in the novella because–well, because I read it for the first time when I was in 7th grade, probably. But let’s be generous and say she works because of the deliberate, lurid, pulpy quality that was King’s stated aim with the piece. By casting the younger, thinner, less central-casting Marcia Gay Harden, they had a chance to do something really precise and nasty regarding the apocalyptic fervor that lies beneath your garden-variety evangelical, but instead she chews the scenery like Elmer Gantry with the occasional “hi I’m actually a nutball” tic thrown in for seasoning. (I found her oddly sexy, though. I actually think this was a deliberate move on the movie’s part–as time passes and she exerts more influence on the survivors, her hair comes down and her behavior gets more and more passionate.) Tom Jane’s star turn as David Drayton, the lead, is hit and miss. His tough-guy act feels like just that, but he’s oddly excellent at conveying grief and horror. The supporting cast shines, though, I’ll give the movie that. Andre Braugher is just perfect as Brent Norton, better than the character is in the book; I didn’t see the racial subtext coming at all, and he played it brilliantly. Toby Jones’ Ollie is precisely the lovable little guy he’s supposed to be, William Sadler’s Jim is convincing in his journey from blustery douchebag to repentant would-be good-guy to broke-down cult member, and William DeMunn, who’s really given the single most important bit of acting in the whole film as he’s the first person we see to really react to what’s lurking in the mist, aces the assignment.
It’s actually the filmmaking that’s the best part of the movie. And I don’t mean the CGI, which actually gets a lot better than that opening tentacle salvo (shame they had to lead with the least convincing visuals). Frank Darabont uses jump cuts, zooms, hand-helds, fades, and an extremely judicious application of score to create a ragged, urgent rhythm. In terms of camerawork and editing it’s one of the more impressive horror films to come along in quite a while, simply because it’s doing stuff I can’t remember seeing in a horror film, and doing it pretty well. The best illustration is probably that initial panicked run through the parking lot and into the supermarket by DeMunn, which again is depicted in a way I wouldn’t have anticipated from reading the novella yet fits perfectly with its sense of unexplained, impending chaos.
What about the ending, then? I don’t have any problem with the mist dissipating and humanity coming out on top, since I’m actually pretty fascinated with the idea of apocalypses that end before the world does. Nor do I have a problem with Dave mercy-killing his companions, including his son; this was set up in the book and it’s completely believable. And as I mentioned, shock and sadness are handled really well by Jane, who’s given an awful lot to sell to the audience in this scene and does it. The problem is just that the ending feels like what it is, which is slapped on. First of all, it cuts the entire affair short–the mist is gone, there’s no cryptic radio message from Hartford, perilous journeys to Connecticut, eking out a living with a band of survivors tirelessly searching for a solution, or all the other good stuff that your imagination unfurled before you when you reached the end of the novella. That’s that. Secondly and more importantly, we haven’t really gotten to know these characters beyond their stock roles. Unlike the comparable units in the first two George Romero Dead movies, for example, none of these five has done anything surprising, nor have they grown and changed from the people we first met, really. They’re just there, so this horrible ending that befalls them is just there too. Finally (and I’ll admit this just may be where I’m at right now) all the King-fan in-jokes–from the fact that Dave starts the movie painting the poster for a movie of The Dark Tower to Mrs. Carmody’s quoting the Trashcan Man’s catchphrase to the Castle Rock Gazette on the newsstand to various King idioms and neologisms peppered throughout the dialogue–naturally undercut the movie’s effort to earn the seriousness of a quadruple murder/infanticide and attempted suicide-by-monster that turns out to have been completely unnecessary.
Ultimately, I’ll just say it’s not as good as the book. Sometimes that doesn’t mean much. In this case it means a lot.
SEMI-QUASI-SPOILER WARNING FOR THE MIST. What I’m about to say isn’t itself a spoiler, it’s more like a clue that could lead you to intuit a spoiler. But I would still heartily recommend that you DON’T READ ANY FURTHER if you haven’t seen The Mist.
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Okay, everyone gone?
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Okay, right. Now then.
Is it too much to ask that when a movie adaptation of a book changes the book’s ending in some top-secret fashion, they don’t SPOIL THE FUCKING NEW ENDING IN THE FUCKING COMMERCIALS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
My wife is emetophobic, which means she’s afraid of vomit. In order to go to the movies she needs to get a reliable “vomit-check” first to make sure she’s in the clear. There are a few trusted friends we use as sources–paradoxically, they tend to be the people who find vomiting hilarious, which means they’ll remember it if they see it–but there’s also a great website called Kids in Mind that non-judgmentally lists any questionable content (down to its most minute, like someone sneezing) so that parents can judge whether a movie’s appropriate for their kids. They’ll list vomit as part of their “violence/gore” subcategory, but of course they list everything else. So I’m sitting here as Amy goes through the listing for The Mist to see if she can see it, and while there’s apparently no vomiting in it she just keeps going “Eeeewwwww…eeeewwwwwww…eeeeeewwwwwwwww…OH MY GOD EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!”
Needless to say, I’m pretty psyched to see this movie now.
Read: The Dark Tower–“The Last Palaver (Sheemie’s Dream)”
The thing in the world that makes me the saddest is roadkill. Roadkill makes me so, so sad. This is because when an animal is hit by a car on its way someplace else, that animal isn’t dying for a reason–not even for a bad reason, like avarice or ignorance or cruelty. That animal dies for no reason. Its death is literally pointless.
With Sheemie’s beautiful nightmare King has finally sold me on the threat to the Dark Tower, and why maybe neither Flagg/Walter’s death nor the lameness of the Crimson King and Mordred as villains ultimately won’t hurt the sense of urgency to stop the Tower’s destruction that much. Different people may have their own reasons for helping the destruction of the Beams and the Tower along–the Crimson King and Blaine and Jack Mort because they’re crazy, Mordred to spite Roland, Walter/Marten/Flagg to try and sneak in and take over at the last minute, Pimli and Finli because they’re hard workers and get satisfaction from that, the Breakers because they need to feel appreciated and can’t face the truth of the circumstances behind why they’re appreciated, the low men out of religious fundamentalism, the vampires because they like killing things and eating them, Rhea for revenge and cruelty’s sake, Balazar’s mafia and the Big Coffin Hunters because it pays well, Ben Slightman Sr. because he wants to protect his kid and maybe get something out of it himself, Andy the Robot and the Wolves because they’re programmed to, John Farson and his followers because they hate the prevailing order that props the Tower up–but what it all adds up to is nothing, no reason. The Beams are being broken, the Tower is being knocked down, reality is being destroyed, joy and beauty are being torn apart and replaced by the sad, meaningless entropy of the first few books which itself will then be replaced by nothing at all, all ultimately for no reason at all, other than that’s what happens to good things in this world.
That dream is one of the best things King’s ever written.
“It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jellyfish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing.”
–John Russell, managing director, Northern Salmon Co. Ltd., “Billions of jellyfish wipe out N. Irish salmon farm,” AP, CNN.com
Read: The Dark Tower–“Tracks on the Path”
This brief interlude with Roland and Jake hinges on two of the characters’ most endearing traits: Roland’s near-inability to be caught by surprise, as it turns out he’s known Mordred has been tracking them; and the sad love between Roland and Jake. The latter was the emotional heart of the series’ first and best book, and while it’s depressing that the prose here is not that volume’s equal, it’s at least comforting to see some weight given to the deepest, darkest, most complex relationship the main characters have established. As I’ve said before, if these books starred only Roland and Jake (and Oy), they’d be better.
There’s a cameo by the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, who goes by the nicknames Tony Starks and Iron Man and has sampled the old IM cartoon heavily, and is basically the exact kind of smooth, rich, talented badass Iron Man should be. Someone on this movie gets it!
Bonus points to Ghostface for referring to himself in the third person as “the kid” throughout the interview.
(Via Pitchfork.)
Read: The Dark Tower–“The Shining Wire”; “The Door Into Thunderclap”; “Steek-Tete”; “The Master of Blue Heaven”
So that’s it? He’s dogged the forces of good through The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, and six and a half volumes of The Dark Tower, and how does Randall Flagg–the villain formerly known as Walter–go out? Like a punk. Like a sucker. Popping up again only to be hoodwinked and eaten by stupid spider-baby Mordred, a character he’s at least an order of magnitude more interesting and more frightening and more established and funnier and cooler than. Boo! Hiss!
To make matters worse, this account of Flagg’s demise futher mucks up King’s already shaky (that’s an understatement) continuity. One of the few clarifying revisions King made to The Gunslinger was to spell out that Walter/Marten/Flagg wasn’t a servant to John Farson, Walter/Marten/Flagg is John Farson. So what does King do just a couple years after writing that? Ignore it and say Walter/Marten/Flagg and John Farson were indeed two separate people. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Ditto the new assertion that Walter/Marten/Flagg was once a full-fledged human being and is approximately 1500 years old, rather than the indescribably ancient demon he’s tagged as in The Stand, a book superior to this series in every way including positing an interesting origin for Randall Flagg.
The thing that really rankles here is that we King readers have been following Randall Flagg for just as long as we’ve been following Roland Deschain, and through better books for that matter. To punk him out like this just plain feels like a rip-off, and once again displays a shocking lack of understanding of what is interesting about these books. Having your new big bad kill the former big bad is the oldest trick in the book writers have for making the new villain look dangerous, but that’s not what happens here. Here, you just wish there was no new big bad, because the original one was just fine, especially after King informs you that no matter who he’s nominally working for, Flagg is always looking out for number one. That’s the kind of villainy I can get behind!
So. Now the guy who teleported out of Las Vegas in time to avoid a nuclear bomb blast has been eaten alive by a psychic spider, and we’re left with–what, exactly, as an antagonist? Nothing all that frightening, to be honest. The Crimson King is by all accounts crazy, and no more an “antagonist” for Roland than late-seasons Uncle Junior was for Tony Soprano. His minions, as represented by Pimli Prentiss and Finli o’ Tego, the head honchos at the Blue Heaven telepath gulag, are basically working stiffs; I know this is King’s attempt to say “and the Nazis were just regular people too,” but I don’t care, it’s still an incredibly uncompelling set-up for the books’ big climax. I guess Mordred is kind of a villain in the classic sense, but not really–he’s a grumpy kid who hates his dad and likes to eat. I want Randall Flagg’s gleeful, giggling nihilism and swagger.
Finally, I don’t care about Ted Brautigan.
1) I saw No Country for Old Men.
2) Okay, I saw most of No Country for Old Men. Almost all of it, in fact. Except for the ending, during which I had gotten up to go to the bathroom.
3) I did not spontaneously combust upon returning from the bathroom and discovering I had missed the ending of No Country for Old Men. This is an achievement in sheer willpower.
4) I got to know this gentleman:
Future horror icon and Halloween-costume perennial. Guaranteed.
5) I read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s infamous review of No Country for Old Men. Perhaps this is just the brain damage incurred upon discovering that I’d missed the film’s ending when I got up to take a leak, but I am partly convinced this review was conjured from my unconscious mind as an embodiment of the stupidest possible way to engage with a violent genre movie. It’s not just, and it’s not even mostly, the unintentionally hilarious, outraged insistence that everything be about one’s own politics, perhaps best represented here by the straight-faced statement that a reference to a serial killer’s dog-collared victim is a “particular allusion to Abu Ghraib.” Nor is it the inevitable factual error made while ignoring all other concerns in favor of getting everything point in the direction the reviewer wants it to go, in this case lambasting a character for refusing to help a dying man when it is precisely helping that dying man that gets him into the mess he’s in in the first place. No, the review’s philosophical core is what I’ll have no truck with, and that is this:
The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is by contrast so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity.
To which I can only reply (twelve months ago):
There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That’s what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn’t understand the belief at all.
6) I saw a trailer for There Will Be Blood, which with a combination of its title, its music by Jonny Greenwood, and post-Bill the Butcher Daniel Day-Lewis may have been the most ominous trailer I’ve ever seen.
The new Cloverfield trailer is out. It looks like it will be a scary movie.
(Via AICN.)
This week’s Horror Roundtable is all about great horror-movie taglines. I only mention my very favorite, but for completeness’ sake, here’s my rundown:
1. Who will survive and what will be left of them? (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre)
2. To avoid fainting keep repeating, it’s only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie…only a movie… (The Last House on the Left)
3. When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth. (Dawn of the Dead)
4. In space no one can hear you scream. (Alien)
5. We are going to eat you! (Zombie/Zombi 2)
Brilliant one and all.
–Sgt. Tyler Ziegel, USMC, from “Wounded warriors face home-front battle with VA,” Emily Probst, CNN.com
Read: The Dark Tower–“On Turtleback Lane”; “Reunion”; “The Devar-Tete”; “The Watcher”
As he nears the finish line King’s begun to directly address the reader more frequently. It reminds me of how at a certain point in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien started throwing in the occasional “and lo!” or “and behold!”, as though he himself was getting super-excited about what was going down and wanted to share that with us.
This reader is still surprised by how much crazy sci-fi/fantasy/horror stuff King’s firing at us all of a sudden. I should point out that all of it’s written in the usual King style and as such doesn’t constitute a return to the lean-and-mean style of the original Gunslinger, as I sort of wish it would. I just can’t help but feel there was another, much better Dark Tower series in some other world that kept playing in that prose playground. This, on the other hand, just feels like “Stephen King does Star Wars,” which is fun but not so different than what you’d expect from him. I think part of the reason I keep pulling for more shoot-outs and bloodshed like Roland and Eddie’s massacre of Jake’s pursuers is that they momentarily restore that no-nonsense feel to the story.
Two quick points:
1) What happened to LaMerk Industries? Looks like they’ve been dropped from the North Central Positronics/Sombra Corporation evil-conglomerate roster.
2) King’s mentioned the notion of evil being “outside” in several of his books, and now we learn what he means by that as Mordred contemplates Roland and his gang as they gather in a circle. It basically means that evil feels no connection with anyone else, and wants to destroy those connections because it resents that.
SPURGEON: So what’s next?
COTTER: No staples. At MoCCA people would come to the table getting books for review, and people would say, “We don’t want staples.” Chris maybe printed up 1500 of this and we just sold out of #1. I hear people say that when there’s a collection they might be interested in it.
It’s pretty striking to hear distaste for the pamphlet format expressed that nakedly, apparently by the sorts of people who write about comics for the world at large.
Read: The Dark Tower–“In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle”
Jake’s adventure in the bowels of the Dixie Pig made me think of video games again, and it occurred to me that their multi-environment “go here, do this, beat that” structure isn’t quite as unique as I thought. They’ve actually got a lot in common with children’s fantasy stories, which in my experience involve a kid who gets thrust into a series of situations with no real logical ties to one another, and has to “solve” his or her way out of them through actions that also frequently wouldn’t logically achieve that result. Think of The Neverending Story, for example: Atreyu and his horse ride through a swamp that makes you suicidally depressed to get acquire information from a centuries-old giant turtle who’s allergic to youth, then after the horse bites it the kid gets rescued by an albino luck dragon. Or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe–open a closet, meet Mr. Tumnus. Or Alice in Wonderland with “Eat Me/Drink Me” and the rabbit hole. Not all that different from Mario jumping on evil mushrooms to save a princess, is it? Nor is it all that different from a private-school kid beheading half-man, half-animal cannibals with dinner plates, then switching bodies with his pet in order to dodge a giant cartoon triceratops conjured from his imagination by mind-reading movie projectors. Fun stuff.
Read: The Dark Tower–“Dan-Tete”
I’m starting to feel like King saved up all the weirdness and horror stuff for the final 1.25 volumes. After all that it’s starting to feel like an odd gear-shift, but I’ll take it. Watching a newborn baby with a boner mutate into a giant cannibalistic spider with a baby face growing out of its back like a tumor and then eat its own mother? I’ll take it indeed!
Susannah, of all people, gets the first big bloodbath against the Crimson King’s monstrous minions, massacring the motley maternity-ward crew. (Alliteration!) I was glad to see Flagg-manqué Sayer go down. I feel like King should have come up with a better reason for Susannah not to have killed Mordred the spider-baby than “she missed a few times,” but still, a pretty good showing. Even the uncredited cameo by C-3PO, aka Nigel the Robot, was a hoot.
Hey, here’s something that just occurred to me: After the age of magic ended, North Central Positronics built mechanical means of preserving magical phenomena such as the Beams, right? Like, at Shardik’s den, they built the big metal generator thingy, not to mention Shardik himself. But if North Central Positronics is a front for the Crimson King, and the Crimson King’s goal is to break all the Beams, why would they have preserved them in the first place?
Read: The Dark Tower–“Callahan and the Vampires”; “Lifted on the Wave”; “Eddie Makes a Call”
Three elements combined to put me in a good mood in starting to read this, the final volume in the series. (The journey’s almost over.)
1) The last quarter of Song of Susannah was really good.
2) The inside front jacket copy starts thusly:
All good things must come to an end, Constant Reader, and not even Stephen King can make a story that goes on forever.
Despite appearances to the contrary, it only feels that way!
The tale of Roland Deschain’s relentless quest for the Dark Tower has, the author fears, sorely tried the patience of those who have followed it from its earliest chapters.
You don’t say! All kidding aside, this level of self-awareness is refreshing, as well as funny.
3) In addition to a passage from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (obviously) and Bad Company’s “Bad Company” (knowing King’s taste in music, also obviously), the epigraph page also contains this:
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
–Trent Reznor
I did not see that coming! NIN quotes always put me in a good mood.
Now I’m three chapters deep, and so far, so good. I’ll admit that I wanted to see Callahan go down in a bit more of a blaze of glory. His demise was fun and dramatic, but it might have been nice to see him take the whole room full of Grandfather Type One vampires (and by the way, how fucked-up and awesome are they?) with him. As far as the wonky todash concept goes, the “todash tidal wave” that Roland and Eddie get swept up by ain’t half-bad. And I even kind of dig the idea that this random John Cullum guy (note the initials) will suddenly step up and save the day, like the Arliss Howard character in Natural Born Killers. Would I spend so much time in the conclusion of my epic Western sci-fi/fantasy quest series arranging land deals and organizing corporations? That’s a big negatory, but, y’know, it’s not super-distracting at the moment.
More monster shoot-outs, more unimaginable battles, more winding of horns and storming of towers, kthx. But so far so good.