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The House By The Cemetery – Arrow Video Blu-ray Review
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The House By The Cemetery
Director: Lucio Fulci
Cast: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni
Review by Brian M. Sammons
This lesser known (and admittedly, lesser loved) Lucio Fulci flick was released on this side of “The Pond” late last year by Blue Underground and it. Was. Good! Now it’s the Brits’ turn at bat. How does the always capable Arrow Video bring this very strange slice of Italian shock cinema our on Blu-ray? Well let’s find out.
The story behind this movie is deceptively easy to explain, but such a synopsis does very little to describe just how bizarre it is. But hey, got to start somewhere, so here we get a small family moving into a big house in New England with a sordid, bloody history. The young son, Bob, played by cherubic blond haired, blue eyed Giovanni Frezza, has a friend in a little girl only he can see named Mae who keeps warning him to stay away from the house. Not only does this bring up shades of Stephen King’s The Shining, but it’s also my biggest gripe about this movie: that damn kid. No, not the little Italian boy, Giovanni, who’s neither better nor worse than any other child actor, but the screeching, fingernails-on-chalkboard-bad voice they dubbed in for him for the English version of the film. Oh my dear God is it annoying! It’s obviously an adult doing a horrible “little kid” impersonation but the end result is every time little Bob opens his mouth I want to hit him in the face with a brick.
The second thing about this film that keeps it from being really great is the pacing. Once the family moves into the titular house the events proceed at a leisurely, strolling pace at best. The mystery behind the house’s horror (not to mention why a crazed maniac is living in the basement, popping out occasionally to behead, slice up, and rip the throats out of people) is slowly doled out a drip and drab at a time … that is until the end when there a big exposition dump. There are random bits of weirdness sprinkled throughout the film, like an unintentionally hilarious bat attack, and a few gruesome murder scenes, but sadly these seem like a far cry from the glorious gory gags in previous Fulci flicks. There’s a nice knife through the back of a woman’s head that comes out of her mouth bit, but that’s one of the few memorable kills to be found here. There is a neat rotting thing in the basement, a few genuinely creepy moments, but the film’s plot is a bit muddled and illogical, to say the least. How much so? Well when the film was first released on VHS many years ago some of the reels were played out of order and no one seemed to notice! Combine that with a lackluster ending that makes little, if any, sense and you get a movie that is long on mood and atmosphere, but short on logic. If you’re one of those people who need their films to make absolute sense, you might hate this movie. However if you can just go with it and enjoy the ride, you might dig this uneven, yet still mostly competent shocker.
Now this new Blu-ray release from Arrow Video looks pretty good in HD. No it’s not great, but it is very watchable and if you’ve only ever seen this on DVD (or lord forbid: VHS) then you’ll notice a world of improvement here. However where Arrow Video always shines is the shear amount of extras they do for their releases and once again they do not disappoint here. There are two audio commentaries to listen to, for interviews with the actors and makers of this movie, and a very cool 24 minute documentary called “Ladies of Italian Horror” that interviews a bunch of the European scream queens from all sorts of Italian fright flicks, not just those in House By The Cemetery. That special feature is easily the highlight here and is the cherry on the awesome cake that is this new Blu-ray.
The House By The Cemetery is both a bit longer and slower than it should be, and it has that damn screeching voice actor dubbing little Giovanni Frezza in it that drives me up a wall, but it’s still a good, creepy film at its rotting heart. If you’re new to Fulci films then perhaps Cemetery isn’t the best place to start. For that I would suggest Zombie, The Beyond, and/or City Of The Living Dead. But if you want to see something different, weird, creepy, and fun, or if you’re already familiar with some of Fulci’s other flicks, then The House By The Cemetery is for you. And like most of Arrow Video’s releases, this one is region free. I cannot tell you how happy that always makes me.
The Sinner – Book Review
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The Sinner
K. Trap Jones
Blood Bound Books, February 24, 2012
Paperback, $11.99
Review by Darkeva
The Sinner by K. Trap Jones is a novel broken up into seven parts, each to represent featurettes of the main character’s encounter with the seven deadly sins, an interesting narrative device. Things get off to a start with the preface, which explains “a lone farmer, chosen by God to test the boundaries of sin,” writes of his encounters with the demons who are manifested seven deadly sins. He suffers from visions that he catalogues, and he follows that up with his “translated” entries.
As for the prose, it has poetic qualities, written in verse that doesn’t rhyme, which I found distracting. Nevertheless, the story comes across well. The main character is a farmer who doesn’t know why God chose him, because he’s not religious. Admittedly, this is a nitpick, and fiction has a certain degree of poetic license, but what I questioned was, despite not knowing what era this is set in (it seemed pseudo-medieval), a farmer of the time would be illiterate. As well, the character’s voice sounded more like a philosophical monk than a farmer, but as the novel went on, some of the reasons behind this became more apparent.
Wrath tells of how the farmer’s village came under attack, and how he stood up to his attackers, who were on horses and wore armour. After he’s kicked out of jail to make more room, street life is worse than prison life, and he can’t leave the city because there are guards at the gates. The story chronicles his encounter with a wolf, who saves him from a harsh beating, and she turns out to be a pretty woman, Amon, who teaches him to be angry and kill as many noblemen as he can. His arrogance grows so high that he thinks of himself as a God, until he goes after a particular rich guy only to get a taste of his own medicine. I had a bit of a hard time sympathizing with the main character’s views that his killings were justified, even if his victims did treat him rottenly.
In the next section, Greed, the main character is a carpenter who becomes aware that a Plague is coming into town. He meets a cloaked figure, Mammon, who gives him the Plague and says his task is to spread the Plague. Mammon has the cure, and the main character can choose to dose only himself, allowing the rest of the townfolk to die, or he can give the cure to the town elders to make more cure, but in that scenario, it’s not clear how long he’d last, being infected. Eventually, the protagonist has no choice but to drink the vial to preserve himself, thereby damning others, only for the Plague to break into the town, which the villagers have made into a fortress that nothing can get out of. From there, the main character spirals even further into his descent until Mammon returns to say that had he given the vial to the elders, they would make it long-lasting, whereas the cure he dosed himself with was temporary.
In Sloth, he’s at a farm, closer to his element. He starts out with a great work ethic until an irrigation specialist, Belphegor, stops by and claims to have solutions to the main character’s problems, including more timber that his competitors don’t know about. Belphegor starts to make the farmer’s job much easier, until he takes over pretty much everything, and the farmer has nothing to do. He becomes lazy and doesn’t feel like doing anything, and is content to let Belphegor do all the work. But the farmer gets confrontational when he realizes Belphegor has the reins, they have a fight, Belphegor tells him there’s some cleaning to do in the shed, and a monster attacks the farmer, and he loses a hand.
The farmer has a choice-he can get his hand back along with his original work ethic, but he won’t be able to rest or have free time ever. Or he could keep his injury, and keep his restful, slothful lifestyle and still reap the benefits of the farm without having to work. He picks the latter, selfish option, of course, only to suffer the consequences.
Next, Gluttony showcases a butcher, who teams up with Beelzebub, his next door neighbour and a meat vendor, who convinces him to hoard the food supply he gets for both of them. When the weather gets a lot worse, he denies food to people, who starve while the butcher gains weight, gorging himself. When it comes time for his just desserts, the customers he denied have a particularly inventive punishment.
We then move into Lust, in which the main character is a peasant tailor in love with a princess. An old woman, Asmodeus, comes to him and promises that she can get him into the palace to declare his love, but when he gets in, he finds the princess’s husband, and suffice it to say, things don’t go well after that. He starts to feel betrayed, and takes it out on the girl, only to get screwed over, yet again, this time by Asmodeus.
In Envy, ore is the main character’s bread and butter as a miner. He always wants more, and makes the best quality weapons. He meets a striker, Leviathan, who he hires, and as with Sloth, the demon does all the work for the main character, seemingly with no nefarious intentions.
Things change up a bit in Pride, in which the main character is obsessed with a monument he believes can give him inner peace. He’s a misanthropic prophet who meets a tall blond in a red robe, Lucifer, who insists wanting to offer the prophet understanding and the opportunity to believe again. Lucifer says he’s there to help the prophet of God to remember his past. And so, the farmer from the main narrative arc starts remembering each of the deadly sins he went through. A prophecy is being written for him, Lucifer claims. Lucifer identifies himself as a demon serving God, which made me scratch my head as demons don’t tend to serve God, especially not him.
He suggests two possible paths-one would take him to his farm, and the other would send him back to the cave to complete his journey with God. One path would allow him to live a common life erase his sins, but the other would let him take pride in his sins and become immortal. To not sin was never an option for him.
The next section, Realization, shows the main character’s decision, which contains “the big reveal,” which I didn’t find surprising as it seemed like that’s the direction the author was guiding the reader in. It does get a bit long-winded toward the end, and although I found some of the mythology and variations a bit confusing, it’s a great read for fans who like the lyric style of epic poems like The Inferno as previously mentioned, and for those who are big on biblical demons.
No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories
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Prior to the first American Publication of Brian Lumley’s ground-breaking, dead waking, best-selling Necroscope in 1988—the first novel in a long-lived, much-loved series—this British author had for twenty years been earning an envious reputation writing short stories, novellas, and a series of novels set against H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic Cthulhu Mythos backdrop. In addition and for a further twenty years Lumley’s non-Mythos Fantasy, SF, and Horror stories have been appearing on a regular basis in some of the world’s most famous publications; for example The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Weird Tales, along with anthologies such as Karl Edward Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror Stories, Charles L. Grant’s Final Shadows, and Kirby McCauley’s Frights, among others.
With his multiple-award-winning literary career now spanning over four decades, Lumley continues to write his superior fictions, examples of which from each of those decades can be found in this current collection, where Weird Tales itself is represented by no less than five stories!
And so, to complete a trilogy of volumes begun with the Lovecraft-inspired The Taint and Other Novellas, and followed by Haggopian and Other Stories, Subterranean Press is now offering No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories, a handpicked collection of Brian Lumley’s best macabre tales…
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Fruiting Bodies
- The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream
- The Picnickers
- The Viaduct
- The Luststone
- The Whisperer
- No Sharks in the Med
- The Pit Yakker
- The Place of Waiting
- The Man Who Killed Kew Gardens
- My Thing Friday
- The Disapproval of Jeremy Cleave
Pick up a copy directly from Subterranean Press: No Sharks in the Med
Bottled Abyss Coming
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Redrum Horror #5 is coming in June — Bottled Abyss, the second novel by Bram Stoker Award winning author Benjamin Kane Ethridge.
Description: Herman and Janet Erikson are going through a crisis of grief and suffering after losing their daughter in a hit and run. They’ve given up on each other; they’ve given up on themselves. They are living day by day. One afternoon, to make a horrible situation worse, their dog goes missing in the coyote-infested badlands behind their property. Herman, resolved in preventing another tragedy, goes to find the dog, completely unaware he’s on a hike to the River Styx, which according to Greek myth was the border between the Living world and the world of the dead.
Long ago the Gods died and the River dried up, but a bottle containing its waters still remains in the badlands. What Herman discovers about the dark power contained in those waters will change his life forever…
Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award winning author of the dark fantasy novel Black & Orange. He lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter, both lovely and both worthy of better. When he isn’t writing, reading, or guitaring, he’s defending California’s waterways and sewers from pollution.
Wild Justice – Book Review
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Wild Justice
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Ash Tree Press, $6.99 (Kindle)
February 15, 2012
Review by Darkeva
Formerly published in the UK under the title Lethal Kisses in 1996, the first edition of Wild Justice featured a decidedly more erotic cover than the amazing re-design, which is much truer to the stories of revenge included in this anthology edited by the reigning queen of horror anthologies, Ellen Datlow.
The introduction to this reprint is fantastic, and explains why Ellen chose the title wild justice, which is from a Francis Bacon quote. We’re all obsessed with revenge, how to get it, and how to make others suffer for what the wrongdoings they’ve caused us, but most of us know better than to pursue it, because we’re civilized. Well, at least some of us.
I will say that the stories of revenge contained in this volume are definitely unconventional to say the least. Nothing is black and white, concretely good and concretely evil. There are many shades of gray in each of the characters contained in the tales of Wicked Justice, and nothing plays out the way you think it will, so I would advise readers not to approach these macabre tales with the expectation that they’re going to be obvious, typical, or in any way fun. These tales are not for the faint of heart, as is often said when describing horror fiction, but in this case, it’s really true.
“Warmer” by A.R. Morlan kicks the anthology off with the story of a girl who is an extra in music videos (an ’80s hair metal band seemingly); a mogul record executive wants to use her in an upcoming video, and when she visits him, she finds three cacodemons, old spirits, in his office, and although I didn’t quite put two and two together in terms of why he wanted to get revenge on her, or what for, it was an entertaining tale.
Caitlin R. Kiernan provides a borderline stream of consciousness offering in “Anamorphosis,” which can be a bit hard to follow at times. The main character, Deacon, is in some kind of trouble with the law. He encounters the handiwork of a monster and fear it will come for him. It’s written in an almost experimental style, heavy on the hallucinations, but the afterword helped to provide Kiernan’s inspirations for this dark, twisted fairy tale.
“A Grub Street Tale” by Thomas Tessier shows two people discussing how overrated a certain writer, Patrick Hamm, is, something essential to the female character’s task, as she’s writing a biography of Patrick. This story was one of my favorites, inverting and turning the tables on who is the aggressor and who is the victim, as well as incorporating some neat back-story that comes full circle well.
Joyce Carol Oates treats us to the tale of a disturbed woman who goes off the rails in “Leave Me Alone, Goddamn You,” and the title, as you can imagine, is pretty self-explanatory. She suffers from loneliness, and has strange markings on her, but has to wait to show them to the men she elects to sleep with. She has a string of one night stands until she meets a guy that she really cares for, and gets an unexpected surprise.
One of the other standouts is “Rare and Most Exquisite” by one of my favourite horror writers, Douglas Clegg. The main character works in a retirement home and relishes working with the elderly, because he wants to feel needed. When he meets one particular old man who says he will give him a seventy year-old rose that he has carried around if he promises to take care of it, the tale becomes gripping and powerful. The old man says love is the darkest gift as it takes all that we are and destroys us, an impactful statement that resonated with me.
I loved the historical elements and the framing story structure – and it’s ultimately a tale of a grand deception, steering the reader in one direction and then doing a complete 180. The old man has a few surprises up his sleeve, which makes for a creepy ending.
“Martyr and Pesty” by Jonathan Lethem is also a great story about an embittered guy watching his ex-music partner on TV, plugging his newest project. How bitterness turns people into such slaves is a fascinating but disturbing descent-definitely read this story.
“Foreign Bodies” by Michael Marshal Smith has a funny tone, and is about two guys who are friends and one of them has to go on a double date with the other one to bail him out of something. Only the main character has met his best friend’s girl, Tamsin – but her real name isn’t Tamsin. He seems to have memory loss, and the downward spiral that he goes in until he remembers everything and sees the truth is gruesome and sad indeed. Definitely an ominous surprise ending.
In “Ships,” Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann introduce us to a main character who says he was dead and thus his third eye opened. He meets a guy, Starbuck, on a ship, and there’s also an odd creature on-board who starts out as a male, but then goes female. This particular tale contains two instances of revenge, both equally intriguing.
“A Flock of Lawn Flamingos” is also one of my favorites, from Pat Murphy, about a woman, Joan, who moves into a neighbourhood only to encounter its resident Oscar the Grouch, Mr. Hoffer, who is an absolute uptight atrocity of a human being. He’s so anal retentive that he makes Woody Allen seem relaxed. Joan puts up a series of flamingo ornaments, much to Hoffer’s ire, who calls a neighborhood meeting and amends the neighborhood lawn ornament code to force her to get rid of them. It soon escalates and turns into a war of seeing who can get back at whom first, who can turn the neighbors against the other person, etc, and the ending will definitely surprise you.
“The Screaming Man” by Richard Christian Matheson, not to be confused with his legendary father, relates the tale of a man inside the protagonist, Bob’s chest, but there’s also a woman’s voice, and they argue. The voices mount and multiply, and no matter what Bob does, or what kind of specialists he sees, he can’t shake the voices. When he has a good day, the voices are quiet, but when he has a bad day, they scream. It will make you question whether there really are monsters in this guy’s head.
“Rare Promise” by M.M. Driscoll shows Vincent, who is pretending to be dead in order to slow time with his friend, Bear – he hangs out with Bear despite his parents’ admonitions, but when his cousin comes to town, things get complicated. Although I enjoyed the first half of this story, the second part I became a bit confused as to what was going on, although the end capped things off nicely.
Overall, this is a great anthology that has good potential to be rediscovered by a new audience, particularly with its availability on the Kindle platform and with the re-packaging, which definitely suggests “horror” far more than the previous edition.
An Interview With David Wellington, Author of 32 Fangs
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David Wellington is an author of horror, fantasy, and thriller novels. His zombie novels Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet(Thunder’s Mouth Press) form a complete trilogy. He has also written a series of vampire novels including Thirteen Bullets, Ninety-Nine Coffins, Vampire Zero, Twenty-Three Hours, and 32 Fangs. His werewolf series comprises Frostbite and Overwinter, known in the UK as Cursed and Ravaged. In 2004 he began serializing his horror fiction online, posting short chapters of a novel three times a week on a friend’s blog. Response to the project was so great that in 2004 Thunder’s Mouth Press approached Mr. Wellington about publishing Monster Island as a print book. His novels have been featured in Rue Morgue, Fangoria, and the New York Times.
32 Fangs is the fifth and final installment in the Laura Caxton vampire hunter series. Laura Caxton has been fighting vampires for seven years. It’s cost her everything: her career, her relationship, the lives of her mentor and so many others. But it’s finally paying off. She’ll get one shot, just one, to take down the last surviving vampire, Justinia Malvern. But Malvern’s been around a lot longer, and has had plenty of time to learn some deadly tricks of her own. And she’s never been one to fight fair…
HELLNOTES: 32 Fangs wraps up your Laura Caxton vampire series (13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, Vampire Zero, and 23 Hours). Before we get into the final book, tell us about the origin of the series and if it unfolded the way you originally envisioned it.
WELLINGTON: The series really started as a reaction to what I was reading at the time. This was back in 2003, 2004, and I read all the horror I could get my hands on – including the burgeoning subgenre of Paranormal Romance, which was just a euphemism for Sexy Vampires. Back then it was still in its infancy but I could see what was coming – True Blood and Twilight were right around the corner. I was kind of upset with what one of my favorite monsters, the vampire, was being turned into, so I decided to write a short story about the nastiest, most evil, least romantic vampire I could imagine. The story turned out to be one of the most fun things I’d ever written. It was just a few thousand words about a vampire hunter named Jameson Arkeley who would go to any lengths to kill vampires. When it came time to turn it into a novel I knew I needed a foil for him, someone who thought he went too far. Laura Caxton was the result; a highway patrol trooper who had no business fighting vampires. I thought she was just going to be the “straight man” to Arkeley’s Van Helsing, but it quickly became apparent she was the real star. Her story, the story of a woman slowly losing her humanity because she’s too busy fighting monsters – became the whole point of the series. The other half of the equation was Justinia Malvern, the vampire who couldn’t be killed. I loved the idea of doing a sort of Silence of the Lambs where instead of being in jail, the helpful serial killer would be in a coffin. She had to be smarter than the vampire hunters, and she could make plans that spun out for years, even centuries – that was her big advantage. About a third of the way through 13 Bullets I knew that the series would be about the two of them squaring off, and I knew how it would end.
HELLNOTES: Knowing that 32 Fangs was the final book, was it difficult to write?
WELLINGTON: I had it all outlined in my head for years before I wrote the first sentence, so in some ways it was very easy. The hard part was letting go of these characters. I’ve lived with them for nearly a decade; they feel like old friends. Accepting that their story had an actual, definite ending was tough. But we’ve seen far too many series recently that just go on forever. Series that get so lost in their own subplots that the writers die before they can finish the story, and somebody else has to pick up where they left off – usually to graft on an unsatisfactory conclusion. I always knew I wanted the 13 Bullets series to have a complete arc, an ending that wrapped up everything and left the reader feeling like they’d had a compete experience.
HELLNOTES: What territory does 32 Fangs explore that was new to the series?
WELLINGTON: We get to see a lot of Justinia’s life and undeath, in flashback. We get to see what it was like to be a vampire two hundred years ago, back before the advent of effective firearms. We also get to see Laura at her absolute low point, the moment when she has accepted that she’s not a normal person anymore, that she can’t afford to be. She’s given up so much, and she knows there’s no way back, not without a massive sacrifice. We also get to spend a lot more time with the Witchbillies – before, in the series, we met Urie Polder and his family of witches and wise men living in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Now we get to see how they actually live, and what they get up to far away from the civilized parts of the state. I really got a chance here to flesh out the 13 Bullets universe, and I think fans will love this aspect of the book.
HELLNOTES: What’s the next project on your plate?
WELLINGTON: Zombies! It’s been a long time away, but I need to get back to my roots. I’ve got a big epic zombie story in me, still, and I finally have a chance to tell it. But of course my fans know I can’t just write one book at a time. I’ve been branching out into other genres, as well. Last year I wrote a trilogy of fantasy novels (under the pen name David Chandler); this year I’m doing a thriller, one that thriller readers will love just as much as my horror fans. It’s going to be an exciting year!
Find out more about what Wellington is up by visiting his website.
