"Miracle Mile"

1988; written and directed by Steve de Jarnatt

My first experience with Miracle Mile came some time during the close of the 1980s. I remember watching it on a rented VHS and being blown away -- no pun intended.

Back then it was little more than a surprisingly effective low-budget thriller about two star-crossed lovers who finally meet mere hours before the end of the world.

Twenty years later it's still a surprisingly effective low-budget thriller, one that still shocks with the strength of its convictions. But the passage of two decades has added a sweet nostalgic ache to the thing that only ratchets up the film's tragic aspects.

Anthony Edwards plays a jazz trombonist who accidentally intercepts a panicked phone call from a missile silo employee. The bombs -- yes, those bombs -- are about to drop. After convincing himself it's no joke, Edwards first tries to warn a motley collection of diner customers about the impending disaster, then rushes through the city to rescue his new-found love, the spiky-haired Mare Winningham.

All the fast-paced action takes place in a pastel Los Angeles of palm trees, monumental architecture and flashing neon lights that feels like spending a long night inside Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. In addition to its throbbing soundtrack by Tangerine Dream, the film is a showcase of perfectly preserved Reagan-era collectibles.

Denise Crosby shows up as an executrix with a cell phone the size of a Wii. A television station signs off at the end of its broadcast day to waving flags and the national anthem. Eyeglasses and earrings alike are big and round, red shirts are paired with blue suit jackets, dresses are purple and teal. Two people meet and fall in love and run from disaster through the streets of an eerily sleeping Los Angeles. It's hard to believe we once lived in a such a strange and candy-colored time.

When time finally runs out -- and it does -- two worlds are gone forever: de Jarnatt's sleek nightmare of stylish annihilation, and the version of it many of us lived in back then.

Thanks for Mentioning It

Writer and reviewer Martel Sardina professes a weakness for Pepsi. I should send a case of it to her for this mention in her review of Horror Library: Volume 3.

"In 'The Living World,' C. Michael Cook explores the motivating force behind one woman’s eating disorder, and caused this reviewer to suffer a loss of appetite herself. The scariest thing about this story was the realization that the patient’s logic is true."

Check out the rest of the review at Dark Scribe Magazine. And buy the book!

"Begotten"

1991; written and directed by E. Elias Merhige

Begotten isn't frightening because it contains violence and gore, even though there's plenty of both. Begotten is frightening because every image and sound within it is so alien. It almost seems impossible that the film was created by a human being on planet Earth, and yet, you know it was. And it's terrifying.

The synopsis does about as much justice to the film as describing the Mona Lisa as a picture of a woman smiling. But here it is just the same. "God disembowels himself with a straight razor. The spirit-like Mother Earth emerges, venturing into a bleak, barren landscape. Twitching and cowering, the Son Of Earth is set upon by faceless cannibals."

Every word is true, but falls far short of actually experiencing Begotten for yourself. Shot in the grainiest of black and white, and accompanied by a soundtrack made up primarily of nature sounds (and not a bit of dialog) Begotten seems more like a nightmare burned directly onto film than a mere motion picture.

Occasionally compared to David Lynch's Eraserhead -- the way one might compare hard-core porn to a Harlequin romance -- Begotten can be confounding and frustrating. But surrender to its bizarre rhythms and imagery and you'll find yourself in a new world, one that distorts your view of the real one long after the film's 78 minutes are done.

(Another apt comparison would be to the videotape in The Ring. Both share a similar style of images and editing techniques, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the makers of The Ring were influenced by Begotten.)

I don't expect you to add Begotten to your Netflix queue based on my recommendation alone. So take a look at the clip below. It's ten minutes long, but you should know by the end of the first whether Begotten is something you want inside your head. Because once you see it, that's exactly where it will stay.

(Some images may not be safe for work.)

"Ever Since the World Ended"

2001; directed by Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle; written by Calum Grant

What everyone enjoys about end-of-the-world tales isn't watching the world wind down, but seeing how a small band of survivors rebuild it, and imagining what it would be like to be among them.

This is the fantasy that Ever Since the World Ended appeals to, explores, satisfies, and then improves upon. Presented as an amateur documentary, the film is set in San Francisco 12 years after an unnamed plague has eliminated most of the human race, leaving only 186 people within the city limits.

Choosing the documentary form was a brilliant move. Not only does it circumvent a lot of budgetary limitations, it allows the filmmakers to make the most of their special effects shots of eerily deserted streets, a decomposing Golden Gate Bridge, and a rusting ship in the harbor. It also gives viewers license to transform what might have been considered technical shortcomings in a big-budget film into a sense of immediacy and the feeling that what we're seeing is real.

The film opens with just enough individual recollections of the plague's history to set up the premise, then quickly introduces us to a world that is recognizable, yet radically different and sometimes humorous.

Bike mechanics are considered extremely valuable, as are those with a knack for sniffing out caches of liquor, prescription drugs and cigarettes inside the deserted city's thousands of abandoned homes and buildings. The last American Indian has grown weary of people expecting him to be some kind of mystic. Those who couldn't tolerate the demands of our current workaday world are now thriving. And everyone has lots and lots of time on their hands.

Yet people -- and their interactions with one another -- are much the same. They still enjoy dinners together, suffer petty jealousies, and engage in gossipy conversations, and it's within these very human relationships where much of the film's plot lives.

A single woman is ready to raise a child, and searching for a suitable sperm donor from the city's remaining men. A small group has decided to venture outside the city, and encounters a long-lost friend living wild in the branches of Muir Woods' canopy. A troubled community member who had left (or been chased out) has returned, presenting the survivors with the dilemma of keeping watch over him, banishing him again to become some other city's problem, or performing an outright execution.

The film's ending is both a surprise and surprisingly bittersweet, and I won't give it away here. But by the time we get there, this strange new world has become a place that looks like home. The only problem is, you have to go through hell to get there, and there's no guarantee you'll arrive. Better to watch the film and dream.

"Mama's Boy and Other Dark Tales" by Fran Friel

Much has already been said about Fran Friel's debut collection, Mama's Boy and Other Dark Tales, most of it revolving around the question of how such a nice woman could write such disturbing fiction.

While I have some issues of my own with that question (nice people write disturbing things all the time -- in fact, most of the horror writers I know are incredibly nice and, yes, even normal, people) the answer is actually pretty simple: Fran Friel is a writer, one who's not only in touch with her own vivid imagination, but has learned how to harness it, allow it to run free, and isn't afraid to go where it wants to take her. In a genre that too often relies on the tried-and-true, that's saying a lot, and it sets her apart from many of her contemporaries.

The book is composed of two novellas (including the title story), a group of short stories, flash and micro pieces; and a single poem. Friel's shorter works are both sensitive and powerful, and many of them are eye-openers in terms of proving just how much a limited number of words can accomplish. "Orange and Golden" -- a Katrina-inspired tale of a survivor and a dog -- is especially upsetting and well-done. (And upsetting has become, for me, the gold standard of dark fiction, since so little of it actually scares me any more.) "Close Shave" was another piece that, brief as it is at just 58 words, packs a visceral punch and central image that is still surfacing in my imagination several days later. "Beach of Dreams," with its glorious and hallucinatory opening of monsters washed up on the beach of a South Pacific island, was another favorite and made for a strong introduction to the collection. And "The Sea Orphan" is a well-researched tale that did what I wouldn't have thought possible after that series of disappointing Disney movies -- made me interested in pirates.

Of course, "Mama's Boy" is at the collection's heart, even though it appears at the end. The story was a 2006 Bram Stoker finalist, and I finished it awed by Friel's courage as a writer. The story's subject matter of mother/son incest is nothing less than explosive. Friel tackles the topic with a difficult mix of sensitivity and frankness, with keen observations and often fearless language. As I read it, I often found myself wondering about the questions she must have asked herself during its creation -- "Do I say this?" "Can I take it there?" "Is this possible?" Judging from the results, she answered each one with a resounding "Yes."

One section I especially enjoyed is at the back of the book, where Friel gives notes on each story. Sort of like a DVD's bonus features, she provides readers with a behind-the-scenes look at how each piece was conceived, grew and developed, generously crediting the fellow writers and workshoppers who gave her inspiration and guidance along the way.

Friel's publisher, Jason Sizemore at Apex Book Company, also deserves some recognition for putting together a collection that's daring and out of the ordinary in many ways. They've ventured outside the safety zone in several respects with this book, and deserve credit for doing so.

Rumor has it Friel is working on a novel. Based on her work in Mama's Boy... it should be one to look forward to.

"The Dark Knight"

2008; directed by Christopher Nolan; screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan

If nothing else, The Dark Knight is loud. Throughout its hectic 2-1/2 hours bombs explode, engines roar, glass shatters, cars crash, mobs scream and characters shout at and beyond the top of their lungs. In this respect it's the perfect summer movie for both teenage boys and the hard-of-hearing.

Like all summer blockbusters, The Dark Knight excels in its technical aspects. Fans of special effects, pyrotechnics, sound design and editing, cinematography and sheer volume (in both senses of the word) will certainly leave the theater feeling they got their money's worth.

However, audiences hoping to find a compelling story amidst all the sturm und drang will leave feeling not only cold but confused, since the screenplay is little more than one massive action sequence after another.

In this installment of the series, Gotham has been overrun by organized crime. The mob is involved in a multi-billion dollar corruption ploy in cahoots with the Chinese, Gotham's crooked police force can't be trusted to fight them, and the Joker is stirring it all up -- not for monetary gain, but only because he enjoys the thrill of chaos. (Judging from the results, he surely must have been pleased.) Only Batman and the tough new District Attorney provide any hope for justice. There are several character reversals and double-crosses that seem to come out of left field, some nonsense about Gotham getting the kind of hero it deserves, and a deus ex machina device that brings the whole thing to a close. None of it amounts to much.

I was most interested in seeing the late Heath Ledger's penultimate performance as the Joker, which did not disappoint. He brings an array of vocal and physical techniques to the role that make him the most interesting and entertaining thing in the picture. He commands our attention, controlling every room he enters, filling the screen and literally crowding out the other characters. Even beneath his smeary make-up his face is so expressive, his eyes so quick and intelligent, we can almost see the synapses firing inside his head. One wishes he had not only more scenes in the film, but more roles to come afterward as well.

However, I also think a bit too much has been made of it, with some going so far as to suggest that the performance required such physical and emotional demands that death became the logical result. This is not the case. Ledger does an outstanding job, eclipsing every other actor in the film including Christian Bale, who's been known to suffer for his art as well. Ledger's performance will serve as a thrilling end to a too-short career. But this is not acting to die for.

Let me be honest. It's rare for me to go to any film on its opening weekend, especially one as over-marketed as The Dark Knight. Invariably I sit there in the theater, feeling shoveled in by all the hype, and ultimately walk out wondering why I wasted my time, patience and $9-$10.

The Dark Knight was no different. The film tells us very little about ourselves, and way too much about what Hollywood thinks of us. To quote Shakespeare, it is "a tale of sound and fury... signifying nothing."

"Jack Ketchum's The Lost"

2008; written and directed by Chris Siverston; based on The Lost by Jack Ketchum

The only reason I'm writing a review about this film is because it took away two hours of my life that I'll never get back, and I feel like I should at least get a blog post for enduring it.

Also, warning others about it may be considered some type of community service.

Here's the plot: small-town sociopathic teen kills two girls, gets away with it, and kills a bunch of other people four years later. In between, the film rambles for an hour and forty-five minutes before ending in a drawn-out scene of torture porn.

I was suckered in by Jack Ketchum's name on the front of the box. Ketchum has been writing horror fiction since the '80s and is finally becoming something of a brand name for his efforts, including the novel on which The Lost is based. I can only imagine that this book is not one of his best or, if it is, that the film adaptation was woefully botched.

If you're looking to be bored for an hour and forty-five minutes then grossed out for fifteen, The Lost will probably be your bucket of blood. If you're looking for something else -- and honestly, who isn't? -- I recommend letting The Lost stay that way.

The best thing I can say about this film? The DVD cover looks mighty nice against my site design.

"Odd Thomas" by Dean Koontz

I've never read a Dean Koontz book. I've always been a Stephen King reader, supposing, incorrectly, that you could only be one or the other.

But when someone recommended Odd Thomas to me after hearing my novel idea, I knew I had to check it out.

Odd Thomas is the first of what is currently four Odd novels and a comic book slated for publication in June of 2008. After striking gold with one stand-alone book after another for years, it seems Koontz hit platinum with this character, and is more than happy to keep mining the vein for as long as it produces.

Good on him, I say, even though the publishing industry's desire for -- or insistence on -- series books is a trend that leaves me cold.

Odd -- whose name was supposed to be Todd before it was botched on his birth certificate --
is a twenty-year-old fry cook in Pico Mundo ("little world"), California. He's adjusted to his strange talent for seeing the dead by limiting himself to a small-town existence, where ugly deaths from murders, suicides and car accidents -- and the restless spirits they produce -- are a relative rarity. Life, for him, is just more peaceful that way, and Odd confesses he could never live in a large city, where unhappy souls are produced by the dozens on a daily basis.

And yet, despite Pico Mundo's picturesque calm, the disgruntled dead have a way of finding Odd just the same. The book opens with the appearance of a murdered twelve-year-old girl and Odd's heroic pursuit of her assailant through the town's tract homes and swimming pools.

Because of thrilling captures like this, Odd is trusted by the local sheriff as someone who can help solve -- and occasionally prevent -- crimes. So when a stranger arrives and Odd gets a whiff of his less-than-savory plans, it's practically no time at all before he and the reader are on another chase to get to the bottom of things and save the day.

Though Odd is a likeable character with a good head on his shoulders, a girlfriend to whom he's eternally devoted, and a strong desire to do right by the wronged spirits he encounters, his actions often strained my own suspension of disbelief. He laments getting involved in crime and punishment, yet seems eager to break into a suspect's house in search of clues. He enjoys the sheriff's respect and friendship, yet when confronted by a dead body in his apartment he goes to great lengths to conceal the evidence, as if the police wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt.

Koontz tries his darnedest to justify these odd reactions in order to keep everything moving swiftly forward, but in the end it required more than a bit of indulgence on my part. However, when it comes to learning from an author who's got the mechanics of plot and story down cold, there are plenty of worse examples out there to follow.

Though his writing and character work seem less polished than King's, Koontz doesn't get bogged down in the drive for literary importance that has marred some of his contemporary's latest efforts. (This may have changed, however, with the release of The Darkest Evening of the Year, which appears to be chasing some of the same ambitions.)

Still, the book is a satisfying enough read, and even though I saw the ending headed down the tracks from miles away, it still managed to be a surprisingly emotional moment for me. This was my first Dean Koontz book, but I'm pretty sure it won't be my last.

"Southland Tales"

2006; written and directed by Richard Kelly

It's hard not to open up a review of Richard Kelly's second film without mentioning his first, Donnie Darko. Released a few months after 9/11, Darko's strange and swirling mix of time travel, teen tragedy and a giant rabbit named Frank was just not the movie America wanted to see at that point in history. Even given the presence of an unknown Jake Gyllenhaal in what is still one of his best and most appealing roles.

But time passed and the film caught on after its DVD release, becoming a cult hit that challenged viewers to solve the puzzle inside a high-school romance within a satire that was all part of a larger and lovingly recreated late-eighties period piece. What audiences ignored shortly after 9/11 became, a year or two later, a very necessary and relevant film for a lot of people in their twenties and thirties.

So it's difficult to dismiss Southland Tales as a fractured and uneven piece of political criticism and speculative storytelling, put together by a hot young writer/director who suddenly found himself the Next Big Thing with a budget to match. Even though it is all of those things.

The film opens with the 2005 nuclear bombing of Abilene, Texas, but takes place three years later in a 2008 that is both comfortably familiar and eerily different. America the brave has become a country where governments and corporations profit from a climate of fear. Interstate visas are required of all travelers, black-clad cops roam the streets of Los Angeles, and a new federal entity, USIdent, now patrols television and the Internet in an effort to combat terrorism.

Dwayne Johnson, AKA "The Rock," plays a movie star named Boxer Santaros who's married to a woman with strong connections to the Republican party. Only he's been missing for three days and has a girlfriend, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Geller) who's a porn star with a public access TV show and a thriller script she's shopping around town.

Meanwhile, a radical left group known as the New Marxists has kidnapped one of the new cops named Roland Taverner, played by Sean William Scott, who also plays Roland's twin brother Ronald. Oh, and there's a new source of energy powered by ocean waves called "Liquid Karma" that has also become a hot new street drug.

And there's a presidential election going on. And a conspiracy to release video of Boxer and his girlfriend. And the whole thing is narrated by Justin Timberlake, playing a wounded Iraq War vet.

Or at least, I think so.

Through most of Southland Tales I felt like I was seeing a fantastic mess unspool in front of me. It was strange and beautiful and smart, like a date with a hottie who's a great conversationalist but doesn't always make sense and might just be more than a little crazy.

At times, I felt like Kelly wanted me to feel like I was watching a David Lynch film -- specifically Mulholland Drive, which also takes place in Los Angeles, plays with time shifts and dual identities, creates a mood of accelerating dread, and features a vocal performance by Rebecca del Rio. At others I saw glimpses of The Fifth Element, Soylent Green and Network.

It's not a film for everyone. But as a friend of mine occasionally says, "If you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like." And I did.

Yes, to some Southland Tales might seem like a picture put together from the parts of two or more separate jigsaw puzzles. (It's not an unfair criticism). But just as psychologists say that fear and excitement are two different responses to the same stimulus, so too is your reaction to Southland Tales. You may find it confusing or mysterious, sharply observed or blunt, surprising or bumpy. So much depends upon who you are and what kind of mood you're in when you see it.

One thing that's clear: Kelly's obsessions are on full display in Southland Tales, and some of them make Donnie Darko's questions about time travel seem like high-school stuff. Politics and the drive for power, entertainment and the desire for fame, the existence of the soul, personal freedom versus safety, even a character that gets shot in the eye like Frank the giant rabbit -- they're all here, writhing together beneath the heat of the California sun and under the eye of a vast and chaotic universe.

The cast -- led by Dwayne Johnson looking like he just stepped out of a video game, and Seann William Scott looking better than I've ever seen him -- is largely made up of a dozen familiar faces from television sketch comedy shows: Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri, Nora Dunn, Will Sasso and John Lovitz, just to name a few. I have to wonder why Kelly chose these actors to people his universe. Is he making a statement about the improvisational nature of political actions and their responses, a comment on the humorous nature of life during even the most troubling times, or merely saying the joke is on us?

Like so much about Southland Tales, I don't know the answer to that. I may have to see it again to make up my mind. Or a third time, or even a fourth.

"Being Dead" by Jim Crace

Joseph and Celice are zoologists, scientists and academics. They harbor few illusions about the meaning of life or death, seeing both as just two points so far apart on a continuum that they could conceivably be touching somewhere on the other side.

Married for 30 years, they've traveled back to the bay where they met and first made love, when a stranger finds them on the beach and brutally murders both of them.

So begins Jim Crace's Being Dead, which is both a detailed study of what becomes of two corpses left to the elements and a surprisingly tender love story that begins and ends in death.

Crace is a British writer with some half dozen well-regarded novels to his name and, judging from this book, someone who's both horrified and enraptured by humanity's place in a world that cares little for its fate.

The novel is structured as two interwoven halves. The first opens with the murder of Joseph and Celice and catalogs with detached specificity the changes their bodies go through as they first die and then succumb to the forces of nature over the course of six days. The second chronicles their meeting 30 years earlier as graduate students doing fieldwork at the same spot they would later die.

Just as their meeting was not a typical -- or even entirely romantic -- story, nor is their life or death. Crace describes Celice as something of an Amazon, tall and muscular, with a prickly demeanor; Joseph is smaller physically, but the superior one when it comes to intellect and career. These complementary aspects -- or imbalances, depending on how you want to look at it -- combine to make a marriage that is not always happy and passionate, but one built on mutual respect, understanding and, most of all, enduring love.

Reading Being Dead I was often reminded of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, another novel composed of intertwined stories that move forward and back in time and somehow manage to merge so completely that it seems everything is happening to everyone. Eventually the connections between the characters -- and by extension, us -- become so overwhelming that they almost completely obliterate the differences separating them.

Though told on a much smaller scale, Being Dead has the same effect, especially once the couple is noticed missing and their daughter, an unsteady combination of both parents' physical and emotional make-ups, strikes out to discover what's become of them.

Crace's emphasis on the decomposition of Joseph and Celice's bodies is a fitting tribute for two scientists who have always believed that death is simply another stage of life. He follows them in precise, but never gory, detail as their bodies first give way to a great darkness, then become food for crabs and gulls, grow stiff and bloat, and finally begin their return to the earth.

And yet, this clinical tone sets the reader up for some very emotional moments, such as when police are removing Joseph's hand from around his wife's ankle, which he reached out for in the last moments of life. But six days of decomposition have caused their flesh to meld, and the two must literally be torn apart. It's an image that manages to be both sickening and unspeakably sad at the same time.

Crace's British vocabulary did cause me to scratch my head on more than a few occasions. For example, I have no idea what an "unmetalled road" is, though several of them appear throughout the book. But the world he describes -- one in which nothing on earth lasts or matters except for love -- is one I'm familiar with, and it brings me a small measure of comfort to learn I'm not completely alone in it.

"Bully"

2001; directed by Larry Clark; written by David McKenna and Roger Pullis; based on the book Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge by Jim Schutze

When eight teens in suburban Florida kidnapped and beat a classmate on video just so they could post it on YouTube, America was outraged and riveted.

I was too, but less than most, because I'd already seen Larry Clark's Bully.

Clark is also responsible for the equally controversial Kids.
Like its predecessor, Bully is populated by soulless adolescents with too much time and hormones on their hands. The few adults who are present are too clueless and consumed by their own lives to do much more than pretend an interest in their kids' lives, and so they grow wild. But while Kids takes place in a grimly oblivious New York City, Bully is set in a dystopian Florida suburb of middle class tract homes and downscale strip malls.

Based on a true story, Bully revolves around a group of high-school students and dropouts who decide to kill an emotionally, physically and sexually abusive classmate. The cast -- led by Nick Stahl as the bully and the late Brad Renfro as his best friend, with Bijou Phillips, Rachel Miner and Michael Pitt -- are a fearless bunch, who meet the demands of the script's blistering story and dialog as well as Clark's own coldly erotic and slightly creepy directorial style.

Disturbing and titillating, shocking and even occasionally funny, the film progresses from one scene of graphic sex, violence and/or drug use to another, yet never feels exploitive. It's more like hanging out with the worst kids in school, watching as they have sex, get high, play video games, and plot to kill the guy everyone hates most.

After inexpertly bludgeoning, stabbing and shooting Stahl's character, everyone discovers just how difficult killing someone actually is. Almost immediately the characters begin unraveling as they struggle with fear, guilt, paranoia and the impulse to avoid responsibility while assigning blame to everyone else in the group.

Bully isn't a horror film, but it is horrifying, with young and attractive monsters who turn out to be something both more and less than human. They're seductive and repellent, ignorant and far too worldly. Lost, angry, cruel, and everywhere.