LITERAL REMAINS

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Timmy Graco and his friends hope to spend the summer of 1984 as they usually occupy their time: in their secret dugout in the cemetery. After a personal tragedy strikes Timmy’s family, he really wants the down time with his friends, time just being a kid. Unfortunately, someone, or something has been unearthing fresh graves in their beloved playground cemetery; and worse, young men are turning up dead, and young ladies are disappearing. The titular monster here, the Ghoul, is lurking after-hours in the cemetery, picking off couples looking for a little down time of their own, or just snatching up whoever happens to be available and ripe for the picking. It comes down to Timmy and his friends to stop the ungodly monster while they battle personal demons and dilemmas of their own.

Ghoul is by far not Brian Keene’s best novel, nor a stellar example of horror itself. It’s a passable, average, effort, offering nothing to raise the bar, only an attempt to try and meet it. It should please most horror fans, and that’s all who really need apply for this one, despite the action and quick pace. There’s plenty of gore, that’s a given, but some of the personal hardships the kids go through only make me feel that the author was going out of his way to try to shock the audience. Keene has a decent feel for the era, an adequate sense of time and place, but it seems to be set in ’84 only because the author had a nostalgia trip, and so you could say, hey, it takes place in 1984.

Keene is much better than this, but every good (or better) author, entertainer, what-have-you, has some misses. Even the Rolling Stones had Goat’s Head Soup.

3 out of 5

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Sarah Langan’s debut novel centers around the small town of Bedford, Maine. Many of its citizens consider Bedford to be cursed. The Clott Paper Mill, long the beating, polluted, heart of the town has closed, forcing the majority of the citizens into unemployment and even harder means of survival. The mill closes after destroying the local environment; the water is bad, the air is toxic, and most of the fish in the rives and wildlife in the woods have been killed off due to pollution. And every year it rains for seven days striaght in the Spring; and the rain burns. The entire town has been upended. Only the futures of those planning to move to other towns look anywhere near hopeful.

The people of Bedford, though, were polluted before the mill puffed its toxins into the air. Everyone has their secrets, their deadly thoughts and grudges. And it seems nearly everyone hates Susan Marley, even her mother. Susan has grown from the pretty girl next door to the town weirdo, the local loon. Some even whisper she is a witch. Susan wanders the rainy streets at night, most often barefoot and underdressed, even in the dead of winter. People meet her gaze and have bad thoughts, so people avoid her; until Susan shows up in their dreams and shows them sights they would rather not see. It only becomes worse after Susan dies in a questionable incident involving her former teacher/lover Paul Martin, the town drunk. Not only does Susan come back, she brings all the dead with her, forcing some of Bedford’s most respected citizens to face the skeletons they thought were long buried, sometimes quite literally.

The Keeper is an intricate story beautifully written by Sarah Langan. Not all the plot twists are big surprises, but the characters are believable and you can’t help but be pulled in by Langan’s oddly poetic prose; she illustrates small town life perfectly, capturing all the melancholy and youthful yearnings of something else that some people never outgrow. The Keeper is often mind-bending, but always engrossing.

4 out of 5

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Written by Scott Smith (based on his book)

Two young couples on a Mexican vacation make friends with a German tourist. The German’s brother has not returned from a private archeological site, so the two couples go with their new friend to find his brother. At the secluded site, local villagers hold the tourists at gun point and make them climb the ancient ruins and will not let them leave, employing deadly force to make them stay. What follows should have been better.

Hampered by bland direction, The Ruins, based on Scott Smith’s excellent novel, is one of an increasing number of films that starts interestingly then just falls apart as the minutes tick agonizingly by. The cast is good, the script is decent, but the viewer has no investment in the characters and you just wait on them to be picked off. The suspense that is generated quickly dies after the menace is revealed, thanks in part to some not really good, but not too bad, special effects.

It becomes so run of the mill, the whole thing dies on the vine. Read the book instead.

The movie: 2.5 out of 5
The book: 5 out of 5

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Written and Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Time upon time ago, a Goblin built an unstoppable clockwork army of 4,900 soldiers for the King of the Elves which could only be controlled by those of royal blood, via a gold crown, as long as they went unchallenged. The King used them in his war with the humans, and the Golden Army annihilated the humans to such a degree the King made a truce with the humans: mankind could keep their cities, and the elves and other creatures would retain the forests. The crown was broken into three pieces, one for the humans and two for the elves so that the Golden Army could never be raised again. The King’s son, Nuada, didn’t agree with the truce and chose to live a life in exile. In the present day, the Prince has declared war on the humans for breaking the truce, for invading the forests and expanding the human cities, and all but destroying Nature. Nuada steals the first piece of the crown from the humans at an auction house and then kills his father for the second piece. Nuada’s sister, Nuala, escapes with the third piece and by luck she is assisted by Hellboy and his team.

The first Hellboy movie was an overlooked gem of a film, a nearly perfect exercise in fanboy excitement and thrills. The Golden Army takes a distant Silver. The best thing going for Hellboy II is Ron Perlman who was born to play Red, and definitely seems to relish every cigar chomp and one-liner; Perlman is Hellboy as Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones and Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates. The second best thing going for it is the creature design. As with the creatures of the first feature, the monsters here seemed to have popped right out of H.P. Lovecraft’s wet dreams. The action is fast and furious, and del Toro builds a mythology that is interesting and relevant.

What doesn’t work for The Golden Army is how hard everybody seems to be trying to make this movie work. The first film’s charms came with relative ease, Hellboy II feels forced. Bigger, better, more jokes, more monsters, more worlds of fantasy. Sometimes too much is too much. For all the action, the actual battle with the Golden Army is very anti-climatic and pales with everything that came before it. And a deeper issue of Hellboy siding with the humans instead of the creatures is raised but never explored to any significant length.

Hellboy II tries, but is only so much hokum and hex.

3.5 out of 5

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Screenplay by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan

Ignore the hype or whatever the boffo box-office might be trying to spin: The Dark Knight is not the movie to end all movies. It is, though, one of the best superhero movies ever made, and if you were to strip away all of the comic book costumes and Bat toys, it would still be one of the best crime films of the decade.

Batman’s presence in Gotham City intimidates some of its criminals to go the straight and narrow path. His presence also attracts the attention of other criminals, drawing them from the underworld to the surface. One such criminal is the psychopath calling himself The Joker. The Joker not only takes on the Batman, the police, and the mob, he wants to let chaos loose through the streets and watch the world burn to its very foundations. Watching the Joker’s schemes and plans unfold isn’t just plot developments being counted off on the fingers, it’s a menacing Wagnerian opera unfolding against the backdrop of a city and its citizens trying not to be overrun by decay, a rot that doesn’t regard social status.

If there is one thing you should not ignore about The Dark Knight, it is the late Heath Ledger’s performance. To compare Ledger’s Joker with Jack Nicholson’s Joker would be to compare apples to oranges. Where Nicholson’s performance was clownish and over the top, Ledger’s is a lunatic time bomb and you hold your breath waiting for the eruptions of violence when he is on the screen. He is creepy, he is real, and he is to be feared. The Joker preys on the people of Gotham, pushing them to cross the line. In one intense scene, the Joker places explosives on two ferries (one carrying convicts, the other civilians), and informs the passengers on each ferry that the only way to save themselves is to blow-up the other ferry before midnight, or he will destroy both by remote detonation.

There are some predictable moments in The Dark Knight, but there are also some surprises that leave your jaw hanging. This is a masterful and compelling film.

5 out of 5

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Written by Sebastian Gutierrez

There is no reason for movies like this except to eyeball leading ladies like Jessica Alba.
In The Eye, for whatever reason, the aforementioned Alba plays a classical violinist blind since childhood. A donor has become available and she undergoes surgery to restore her sight. It isn’t long before she begins having visions. To sum it up, this is The Sixth Sense crossed with The Mothman Prophecies with a little Final Destination sprinkled in the mix. And it is not as good as any of those movies, even for just plain guilty pleasure.

The Eye is a boring Americanization of a Japanese horror film in a long line of sub-par Americanized remakes of Japanese horror films. What has The Ring wrought? God help us all. At least with this movie there is no long-black haired chalk white chick harrying victims down. The Eye does have some little Asian boy lurking the hallways looking for his homework or book or something–believe me, it doesn’t matter.

It apparently required two directors to suck the life out this steaming pile, but it only takes one person to not watch it. Friends don’t let friends watch The Eye.

1 out of 5

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