Movies: Bird is the word.

When I first moved to New York City, I thought the Town That Never Weeps would be filled with hidden pockets of eccentric coolness. You know, tiny little restaurants ain't nobody heard of, bars that only a select group of regulars frequent, small parks forgotten by the baby-stroller pushing hordes and radio-blasting juvies – places to discover for yourself. It did take long to realize that, for the most part, the city is pretty frontier-less. Especially in the age of blogs and user-driven regional web sites, no patch of land remains unexplored, reviewed, and assigned a one- to five-star rating.

There are exceptions, sure. But they're few and far between. There was the old dive bar Siberia, for example. This place was well-known, but I found that very few of the many of the folks who had heard of the joint had ever actually visited. It was genuine hole being situated as it was in a subway stop – the 51st station on what was the old 1 and 9 line. Not that Siberia was the world's greatest bar or anything. It was actually pretty scruffy. The ambiance was heavily Gitmo, the furniture looked like it had been thrown on the street and the street threw it right back, the beer selection was strictly utilitarian, and the bathrooms were so ill-lit that you were forced to make a choice: either pee in the dark with the door closed for privacy or leave the door wide open so you could actually aim. I should add that both bathrooms had several fist sized holes in the wall, entry points for things that lived behind the walls of 51st Street stop. If you were gutsy enough to pee in the dark, you'd get treated to the sound of things creeping out of their lair to see what you were and to guess at whether or not you were edible.

Despite how dismal the joint could be, it attracted loyalists. Some of the regulars were simply maintenance alcoholics from the office building above the station. They were grabbing a bit of Dutch courage to steel themselves for the transition between grinding work drudgery and soul-destroying suburban home hell. But, aside from the chemically dependent boozers, there were people that could have easily gone anywhere and chose to be in the dungeon-like Siberia,

I can't speak for everybody, but part of the charm of the place for me was that it was a find. It was exactly that sort of word-of-mouth hideaway that rewarded a the adventurous with a story; it was in and of itself a prize for folks who would go a little out of their way for something unique or unusual.

I bring this up because genre entertainment often plays the same game: you think you're going to run into diamonds in the rough all over the place. You imagine that you'll stumble across that curious flick or forgotten book or what-have-you. The truth is that the field as a whole seems heavily weighted towards junk and what isn't crappola is usually thoroughly documented, reviewed, and rated.

So, imagine my surprise when, reading the reviews of horror-blogger Mermaid Heather (see sidebar), she gave a five-out-of-five review to a flick I've never heard of before. This lady has reviewed what must amount to a couple hundred flicks by now, and you can count the number of fives she's give on your fingers. And here's a complete unknown grabbing a five. Was this one of those elusive gems? A genuine find?

The flick in question is the somewhat cryptically titled 2004 film Dead Birds: a semi-Lovecraftian dark house horror set in the latter years of the Civil War. The movie begins with a bloody bank robbery. The perpetrators – a group of Confederate deserters, a freedman, and a nurse – take their loot and head of to a plantation their leader knows to be deserted. On finding their way to the old house, the gang finds themselves dragged in the supernatural carnage left there when the mansion's previous owner accidentally-on-purpose tore open a hole between this universe and the next, letting all sorts of otherworldly nastiness pour through. Ultimately, the flicks boils down to a simple main conflict: can this armed gang keep their crap together long enough to make it through a single night on the plantation?

I was not disappointed by Dead Birds (the title, according to the director, refers to a dead bird that appears in the yard of the plantation, evidence that suggests nothing can survive the curse of the plantation). The first feature-length flicker from director Alex Turner (son of famed jazz album cover photographer Pete Turner) plays like the work of comfortably established director. It looks polished, achieves a level of tension that threatens to leave the viewer physically spent at times, and is confident enough with its elliptical plot that it makes demands of it viewers without lapsing into lazy storytelling or easy explanations. Shot on location at an actual decaying plantation house, Turner and his crew make the most of the dim period lighting, achieving some set-ups that would be the envy of directors working with much bigger budgets.

There are some flaws in the flick. The period setting is essential to the story, which makes the occasional anachronisms all the more jarring – apparently the nurse in this gang has figured out the importance of sterilization well in advance of the rest of the medical establishment. Also, despite a pretty nifty creature design, the CGI effects distance the viewer rather than pull them in.

These don't take away from the fact DB is a genuinely good flick. I'm somewhat baffled as to how this movie didn’t garner more attention on its initial release. With so much substandard junk littering the low-budget field, DB stands head-and-shoulders above most of its b-flick kin. The flick is the most promising debut I've seen in awhile and well worth checking out.

As an aside, the film also got me thinking about how odd it is that slavery doesn't play a significant role in the collective imagination of horror cinema. Our various modern wars, from WW I to the current war, have given us all manner of monstrosity. The various nightmares of the Western expansion have resurfaced in the form of cannibal flicks, sundry Native American tropes (from wendigos to that ever-popular cause of trouble: the Indian burial ground), and even camp mash-ups (see Billy the Kid versus Dracula). The Civil War makes its appearance, but most often in the form of weird Southern revenge flicks like 2,000 Maniacs and it re-makes and their sequels. Even the American Revolution has given us a single well-known icon: the Headless Horseman.

But slavery – a 400-year-old display of horror and human cruelty played out on an unimaginable scale – seems to have inspired very little in the way of horror flicks. Slavery played minor part in the Candyman franchise and I can think of minor a reference to it in I Walked with a Zombie, but otherwise it seems remarkably absent as a topic in horror cinema. This strikes me as curious. Horror often finds its greatest traction in the stresses and anxieties of a culture and I submit to you that the legacy of slavery remains one of the greatest sources of anxiety in our culture. Even from a strictly thematic standpoint, you'd think it would come up more. One of the most shopworn narrative devices in horror cinema is that the deeply wronged seek revenge in horrific ways. What group of people were ever so deeply wronged as the victims of slavery? And yet, even in Dead Birds, the fact that our ill-fated plantation owning necromancer owned slaves is a fairly minor plot point. He's cursed not by the fact that he systematically visited the results of the one of most brutal system of de-humanization ever devised upon a group of innocents, but by the considerably more spookshow idea that he dabbled forbidden magic – the latter apparently being the more sinister crime.

Perhaps the issue's too sensitive even for horror folk to touch. Perhaps people are afraid to drive off white audiences. Who knows? Whatever the cause, it seems like a conspicuous absence.

Meta: Somebody please think of the children!

For those who haven't noticed, a new link has popped up on the ol' ANTSS sidebar. If you haven’t tried it yet, clickee on over to Kindertrauma. Seriously. Do it! I promise you'll like it. Look, just click over once; if you don't like it, I promise we'll stop.

Kindertrauma is one of the most original sites in the horror-blog community. The blog is dedicated chronicling all those books, television shows, and flicks that scared the crap out of us when we were little. Some entries cover straight-up horror flicks (if the site is to be believed, the '80s slasher boom has left the current crop of 30-somethings with some pretty deep scars), but several entries cover those innocent childhood pleasures that, for some sadistic reason, turned on us: like the "space vampire" episode of Buck Rogers.

The bloggers behind this treasury of tot terror, Uncle Lancifer and Aunt John, happily take traumatic tales from their readers, so feel free to drop them a line about the bit o' media that left you permanently afraid of clowns/water/spiders/Santa or whatever else.

Comics: Who is Jenifer's legal father?

Not to long ago on this here site I mentioned that Dark Horse had snatched up the rights to the famed horror-antho titles Creepy and Eerie. Well, two bits of follow-up.

First, Dark Horse didn't buy up those two titles so much as they entered into an agreement with New Comic Company to jointly create archive editions of previously published material and re-launch the series.

This is significant because – and here's the second bit of follow up – the original writers and artists are worried that they'll be screwed by being shut out of the profits made on any re-issue of their work.

The backstory: New Comic Company was formed in 2007 by the NYC-based Submarine Entertainment and the LA-centric Grand Canal Films to handle the acquisition of the famed titles from Warren Publishing.

Warren Publishing, founded in 1957 by James "Jim" Warren, was responsible for a host of horror titles: Creepy, Eerie, Famous Monsters of Filmland, The Goblin, Monster World, The Rook, Screen Thrills Illustrated, and Vampirella. In a clever move to duck the Comics Authority Code, a self-imposed censorship code instituted in the wake of the Congressionally-lead witch hunt that lead to the collapse of the EC funny-book empire, these titles were classified as "magazines" and not "comic books." The success of these grim not-comics brought Marvel and DC back into the horror game, creating the 1970s horror comic revival. Warren's funny-book empire expanded to eventual include such notable non-horror titles as the The Spirit, a re-launch of the legendary Will Eisner character with covers by the comic master himself.

The role call of folks who worked on these titles is something like a who's who of modern comic art and illustration: Joe Orlando, Neal Adams, Gene Colan, Frank Frazetta, Alex Toth, Russ Heath, Wally Wood, Dave Cockrum, Richard Corben, Frank Frazetta, Vaughn Bodé, H.R. Giger, Basil Gogos, and Boris Vallejo among others.

Film-fans who have never picked up a comic book have been exposed through the work of Warren Publishing creators through Showtime's Masters of Horror series: Jenifer and Pelts, two of the series' best episodes, were adaptations of stories from the magazines.

Here's the problem: ever since Warren shuttered its doors, people have debated who truly owns the rights to the work Warren published. This week, New Comics and Dark Horse sounded off with an odd: "We do, but we're willing to share."

Here's the press release:

The publication rights to ‘Creepy’ and ‘Eerie’ were lawfully and properly acquired in 2007 by New Comic Company from the original copyright holder and publisher Jim Warren and Warren Publishing. Those publishing rights have been reasserted by the renewal of the original copyrights by New Comic Company.

Further, the chain of title was cleared after a bankruptcy of the original Warren entities and subsequent to a lengthy litigation between Warren and Harris publishing.

New Comic concluded a deal with Dark Horse Comics in the spring of 2007 to republish the original editions of ‘Creepy’ and ‘Eerie.’ New Comic Company and Dark Horse have always intended to compensate original creators and welcome their participation in the creation of the archives and in new editions of Creepy and Eerie and look forward to a good working relationship with any reasonable human beings who present themselves. The principals of New Comic Company are devoted fans of the magazines since boyhood, are firmly supportive of artists rights and look forward to re-connecting with former Creepy and Eerie artists and writers.

The take home lesson kiddies? Hold on to those rights.

Movies: Lovely Bones it ain't.

In some alternate universe, a better place perhaps, there are federal laws about when shops can start playing Christmas music and if you can find just one person – a single human being – who thinks you're swell, then all your food is free and all you can eat forever. In this wonderful place, the Internet is made of whiskey (somehow) and you can access it for free anywhere. There, in this perfect place, the better a food tastes, the thinner it makes you. Children are born cute instead of purple and wrinkly and they grow normally for the first year and a half – then they sudden become college-age and vanish except on holidays. There are no political parties and all of our leadership positions are filled via a jury-duty like system. In this blessed universe, sleep is not only always completely restful, but it acts as a rigorous form of physical exercise. And there's such a thing a beer ice cream and it's good somehow instead of utterly gross as one imagines such a thing would really be.

When they have the Academy Awards in this place, they don't give out a prize for Best Supporting Actor (an award for supporting, please, they're just lucky to have work and that should be reward enough). Instead, they give out the much-coveted Most Gooey Feature Award. And every year, the award goes to Peter Jackson's 1992 splatter-fest Dead Alive (née Braindead).

(The Best Actress Award is replaced by the controversial Best Reference to an Episode of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, Award – but that's a different blog entry.)

Taking the slapstick gore antics of his '87 alien invasion flick Bad Taste to giddily surreal heights, Jackson delivers what must be the one of the slimiest flicks ever made. According to that source of all knowledge – the Great IMDB – more than 300 liters of fake blood was spilled all over the climactic final scene. The site reports that Jackson's crew was pumping the stuff all over the actors at a rate of nearly 5 gallons per second. Lordy.

Despite how bloody and deliriously unhinged the flick becomes, the film starts out rather modestly.

The first surprise of Jackson's flick is that it is a period piece. It is set in New Zealand during the 1950s. Period cars, trolley trains, and so forth all add the setting. Why set it half a century back in time? I have no idea. It does allow Jackson to send up the sort of wooden acting one equates with melodramas of the period – which also helps him cover for the fact that his actors aren't that great. But that's a lot of effort to go through for a few era-dependent gags. I can't explain it. It is what it is.

The story, what there is of it, starts on Skull Island. Yep, that Skull Island apparently: in a curious bit of career foreshadowing, Jackson's first visit to the home of King Kong can be found in the opening scene of Dead Alive. There we watch as a New Zealand zoo official eludes a tribe of not so PC-natives in an effort to deliver his captured Sumatran Rat Monkey to a zoo in kiwi-land. The less-than-great white hunter doesn't quite make it, but the rat monkey, and effectively nasty bit of stop action animation, does. (To bring things full circle, a crate labeled "Sumatran Rat Monkey" appears on boat in Jackson's Kong remake.)

Our hero, Lionel, a goofy dweebish sort who suffers under the oppressive tyranny of his particularly unpleasant mother, starts the film by developing an awkward romance with a local shopgirl. His mother, in an effort to nip her boys amorous adventures in the bud, follows him and his lady love to the zoo. There, she's bitten by the rat monkey. This is bad news as the rat monkey has some sort of zombie-making sepsis going on. The beast's bite slowly turns Lionel's mom into an undead creature that craves the taste of human flesh (and, occasionally, porridge). A dutiful son, Lionel tries to keep his mother and her people chomping tendencies under wraps. This puts a terrible cramp on his romancin' and, ultimately, fails to prevent the spread of undead-ism.

Things go from bad to worse, reaching the aforementioned blood-soaked climax wherein Lionel and his babe are caught in a house full of zombies and must battle it out with the shuffling horde using things like lawn mowers (a source of a good portion of the 300 some liters of fake blood used). Jackson's zombies aren't slouches in the undead department. They take absurd amounts of abuse and just keep coming. At one point, Lionel is menaced by the animated innards of a zombie that, despite falling out of their body casing, still pursue our hero. In this flick, the only way to stop a zombie is to thoroughly pulp it – which our hero does with much gusto in a final fight scene that last a good half hour or so.

Many reviews of Dead Alive mention is as a "disturbing film." This, I think, gives the wrong impression. This film might upset your stomach, but that's about as far as it aspires to go. Sure this flick pushed boundaries, but they are simply boundaries of taste rather than ethical or aesthetic boundaries. It's a gross-out comedy that uses zombies and blood instead of potty jokes (well, as well as potty jokes, let's say). It has more in common with flicks like Army of Darkness - though it is considerably more gory than that film – than it does with endurance test flicks that leave you feeling hollowed out. The real question here isn't whether or not you'll be shaken and disturbed by the flick as whether or not you'll find it nauseating and pointless. Dead Alive is a very specific kind of joke and, if that humor isn't your speed, then the whole thing will just seem like a clumpy meaty mess that goes nowhere fast. I enjoyed the flick, but even I started to glaze over near the end there when the gore-gags were coming so fast and furious that the cumulative effect was more numbing and boring than distressing or exhilarating. Still, the movie isn't overly long. Jackson knows he's pushed the limits of his audience's humor and wraps things up neatly and quickly before it all gets stupid of tedious.

So, how do you know if Jackson's pic is right for you? There's one scene in the flick in which a young woman's head splits open and out of her ruined cranium crawls a zombie baby. It had tunneled up through her and emerged at her face. Having read that description, pick the option that most describes your reaction:

A) "Yeah, I could see that being done in a funny sort of way."

B) "I just threw up in my mouth a little."

If you answered "A," then queue this sick little puppy. You're in for a treat.

Meta: Flatulating my gassy bloviation all over the Internets.

Hell truly hath no fury like an Internet reviewer.

This one comes from a user going under the nom de Net "Scone Mason." Get it? Scone Mason. See what he did there? Watch out, Sconey Maloney kicks it up to a whole 'nother intellectual level in a second.

This is a review of House of Leaves, the cult hit spook story that used concrete poetry techniques, stunt layouts, and other tricks to tell the story of a young man obsessed with a manuscript purporting to detail the contents of a documentary about a haunted house.

Let's let the Sconester take it away.

This book was incredibly dull pseudointellectual gimmickery.

"Dull" count: 1

Bret E. Ellis's much touted blurb should be embarrassing to him, but more so to those who buy his books.

I'm not sure what exactly he means by "much touted" here. In standard English the phrase means to hype something up, to make much of it. Ellis's blurb is just stuck on the book like several others. The blurb itself isn't made much of. Perhaps he meant the blurb itself was doing the touting - but that's what blurbs do so it would be sort of like saying "the Crest add, which shamefully promotes Crest toothpaste . . ."

I can't say whether or not Ellis is embarrassed by the blurb. I can say that, as a person who has purchased some of Ellis's books, I can't seem to muster the proper amount of shame. My therapist and I will work on the crucial Ellis blurb issues in the future.

To mention Danielewski's charade in the same sentence as Pynchon, Wallace, and Ballard shows only that Ellis hasn't read any of those other writers. King, who is indeed the King of Hacks, is a proper comparative I suppose.

Ouch. I should add though that Pynchon once blurbed a Tom Robbins book - so treating blurbs as if they were anything other than a sort of cheap round agents force their writers to pay for now and then is, I think, a somewhat sterile exercise.

In Infinite Jest Wallace used copious footnotes to help tell the story.

Actually, the notes in Infinite Jest are endnotes. 'Cause they come at the end of the book. Hence the "end."

In House of Leaves there is one footnote that helps tell the story, and that is the group of letters from Johnny Truant's institutionalized mother. Those letters are the best part of the book. The rest is typing. 99% of the footnotes can be ignored, and as you approach the end, you can pretty much skip every other paragraph to the finish. Fake scholarly works inserted into a rewriting of The Amityville Horror (or pick your haunted house story) do not make it scholarly.

I assume he picked Amityville and then added the "or whatever" because the house in Leaves really doesn't do anything that the house in Amityville does. The latter is haunted by the residents who were murdered there previously, has imaginary friends appearing and disappearing, possesses its inhabitants, has swarms of flies buzzing everywhere, rotting meat smells, and so on. There was, if I recall, a mystery room the Amityville folks found in their basement - a sort of crawl space behind their washing machine. Still, that doesn't seem to explain why the former house - with no ghosts to speak of, no flies, no blood and ooze running down the walls, no demonic voices or pig-like imaginary friends, no any Amityville-ish traits - is a copy of the latter.

I think what the Scone Ranger meant to say was something along the lines of "I'm pretty sure this is an unoriginal rewrite of something that, if I had read it, could point to at this very moment." And who can argue with that?

Lots of Latin and Greek references do not make it intellectual, and telling a story within a story does not make it literary when you don't care about the people involved.

Damn right. French is the language of vapid intellectuality. And the measure of all literature is whether or not you care about the people involved. Everybody knows that. That's why The Velveteen Rabbit is the cornerstone of Western literature.

None of these characters is particularly endearing, and putting the words on the page in imitation of the geography the characters are experiencing is impressive only to those easily impressed.

So, yeah, fuck you readers! I should point out that the funniest thing Scone-and-Rag Man does here is shotgun wedding to completely unrelated ideas into a single sentence, stretching the power of the poor comma until it screams. Check out this sentence. The first clause - dependent? who cares? - is about how none of the characters are endearing (not like, say, the endearing Oedipa Maas or those lovable wheelchair-bound assassins in Jest) and the second - is this the dependent clause? are there any dependent clauses? at least give us a sanity clause - is about layout issues.

High school kids probably love this book. Or college business administration majors.

Yeah. What the hell are you? Some sort of business administration major? Get a life!

Actually, I'm a little embarrassed by Here-I-Go-Again-On-My-Scone here: he clearly pulled his punches. I think he wanted to say something like "only poor and uneducated people" or "only blacks and Chinamen" would be impressed, but he was worried that this would make him sound like some sort of jackass who used stereotypes as an intellectual crutch.

Anyone who wants a challenge or to read something experimental should try Robert Coover's The Public Burning or John Hawke's The Beetle Leg.

Again, he's pulling his punches. I recommend sending several books through a shredder. Then taping them back up in random order. Read that mess, you mammer-jammer. Now we're talking about R-E-A-D-ing, baby. Anything less rigorous than this and you're just one of those pussy business administration majors that reads for pleasure or the sensation of novelty or escape or whatever pathetic excuse you cling to. You don't want people to think you're a pussy business administration major? Well, do you?

If this book changed your life, you need to get out more, go to a bookstore, then get in more.

This might be true. The only reason I stop to mention this line is that I don't believe anybody in the comment chain mentioned anything about this. If we're going to attack fanatical readers that don't exist, let's really make them crazy, right? Say: "I've heard that some people have been trading away their own infant children for copies of this book. I think those people are daft!"

There is nothing deep or deeply intellectual about this book, it is not a difficult read, unless you are unable to physically turn the book to read upsidedown or sideways, and there is certainly nothing to lead any well-read person to compare it to Wallace, Pynchon, or Ballard.

This is another one of those great pile-on sentences, like Scone-some Dove was trying to get the most out of some one-trip critical term salad bar. Does something have to be difficult to read to be "deep or deeply intellectual"? Wouldn't that make the instruction manual to the Airport wireless router I've got more "deep or deeply intellectual" than, say, Darwin's Origin of Species, which is written in a pretty straight forward style? Doesn't this make Edward Lear a more "deep or deeply intellectual" author than Pynchon, because Pynchon at least makes sense?

THere was not one sentence in this book that made me laugh the way Wallace does, or marvel at its genius the way Pynchon does.

Ballard has suddenly dropped out of the running. I don't know why. As for laughing, Leaves isn't really a comedy. I don't want to suggest that its not being a comedy could possibly account for lack of ha-ha's. Indeed, maybe it is a sign of just how crappy a writer Danielewski is that he was unable to write a drama-horror book that didn't send Pay-Scone into paroxysms of school-girlish twittering. Or, you know, maybe he didn't write any gags. I'm just saying it's a possibility and we should keep our options open.

As many have pointed out, it is simply dull. I think a lot of people probably love the fact that they can say they read a 700 page book that is actually about 100 pages long if all the nonsense is removed and there aren't 20 pages with only one sentence or one word on them.

"Dull" count: 2

This is true, I know many people who regularly say, "I read a 700 page book that is actually about 100 pages long if all the nonsense is removed and there aren't 20 pages with only one sentence or one word on them." They've got a club that meets regularly at the Brooklyn Central library. The coffee is free. I recommend it.

Most of all it's dull.

"Dull" count: 3

Right. We got you. It's dull.

I usually toss aside a book this boring, but I wanted to be able to review it in its entirety.

Um, what? He read the whole book solely so he could produce this? He thought his crucial insights into the book - limited mostly to a discussion of a single footnote, the layout, and one of the marketing blurbs - was so essential, so important, so vital to our needs that he sacrificed himself for our greater good.

Wow.

Now I feel kinda like a total asshole for making fun of him.

I mean, I don't feel like as big of an asshole as Give A Dog A Scone is for finishing a book he hated just so he could flatulate his gassy bloviation (look it up, Sconed Age) all over the Internets. But still, I feel a bit bad.

I don't know Danielewski personally, but as a writer he and Ellis are a good pair, all hype. Two literary big hats with absolutely no cattle.

I like that touch. I do that myself when I'm reviewing Dickens. "Dickens and I don't travel in the same circles, but . . ."

Is it possible to negatively review something on the Inter-web and not sound like a jackass? This is actually a real question. I've done my fair share of trashing product I thought was subpar. But then I read some crappola like this and, aside from giving me yet another reason to hope the terrorists win, it makes me wonder if I shouldn't adopt a Believer-style review policy: only write about stuff you like.

What say you, loyal readers? Should ANTSS adopt a "if you can't say something nice" policy?

Books: Reheated leftovers.

"Well, I'll tell you, the reason I think we've got another go-round, George, is what's not here. All the meaty bits, if you catch my drift. Familiar?"
- From Jack Ketchum's Offspring

Horror-blogging icon, tastemaker, wit, humanitarian, Charles Nelson Reilly fan, philosopher, and all around swell human Stacie Ponder of "Final Girl" fame once opined that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise suffered greatly from the odd tendency of that particular product to produce sequels that were more remakes than sequels. Instead of extending the storyline, each sequel would be the first flick with more or less gore as the filmmaker's tastes determined. Perhaps family members would be added or dropped, but you could expect to see teens stumble across the old homestead. Several would get quickly processed and one of them, the final girl, would end up at a surreal feast with the family. To be fair, I'm not certain that TCM's sequels are any more derivative than the sequels of other franchises (barring Jason's recent space adventures, which possibly show how being utterly non-derivative is no guarantor of success). I think TCM sticks out because no matter how the story template shifts, something like the dinner scene always seems to pop up as a sort of showpiece scene. Since the dinner scene was one of the most memorable scenes in the original, its constant reappearance strikes us as especially glaring. Take the second TCM: with its bizarre carnival setting, almost slapsticky humor, and neon color scheme it is about as far from the original as you can get and still get away with calling it a TCM flick. But, despite all this, when the overly long and too familiar dinner scene pops up, a dragging and weary sense that we've seen it all before takes over.

My point is not to argue with Final Girl or defend the TCM franchise as it is to suggest that sequels are hard to pull off. People want more of the same, only different. Give us too much of the same and we horror fans will bitch that we got nothing but a re-shoot of the original; change too much and we'll bitch that you lost the spirit of the original. I almost feel bad for the suckers that end up helming sequels. Almost – they've made too many utterly disastrous sequels to excuse them completely, right?

Unfortunately, Offspring, Jack Ketchum's sequel to his cannibals of Maine thriller Off Season, is on of those sequels that tries to give fans more of the same, only different, and somehow misses the mark.

The plot is remarkably similar to the original: the residents of a Maine shore house will be attacked by a tribe of feral children tuned cannibals. Jack adds a joker to the deck in the form of an ex-husband psycho who may turn out to be more dangerous than the cannibals and ups the ante by putting a couple of children in harm's way. Aside from that, we've got pretty much the same book. After a few chapters of character development and some ominous foreshadowing, the house is attacked. Some of the cast dies. Some are dragged to the tribe's cave. Some give chase. We've seen it.

Not that Jack doesn't try. I might be splitting some very fine hairs here, but this outing seems a little less gory than the first book and the extra inches freed up by the dialed down splatter are given over to developing the characters in the tribe. In the first book, the cannibals were basically monsters or animals – not so much characters as crisis that must be dealt with. In the sequel, Ketchum sketches out a sort of Search for Fire-esque social structure. The cannibals have also developed language use, something I don't believe they had in the first book.

Offspring is a perfectly serviceable thriller. It lacks the gravity of Ketchum's Girl Next Door and the ruthless simplicity and exhilarating bloodthirstiness of the original. After all, we're talking about a book about a bunch of cannibals chewing their way through coastal Maine. If you're looking for Proustian introspection or the psychological rigor of Henry James, you should probably stay away from mass-market paperbacks featuring a meat cleaver and a human skull hanging above a soup pot on the cover. The book delivers what you'd expect. The only complaint is that Ketchum often delivers more than what you'd expect and, this time, readers don't get the A-game.

Music: What can't you find on Youtube?

Honestly. What did people do before Youtube? I don't recall. Did we all just sit around wishing we had some place to go where you could find videos of Bowie performing his mega-stellar-deluxe-super-plus-ultra-maxi-heavy-flow-with-wings hit "Putting Out Fires (The Theme from Cat People)"? I shudder to think.

Admittedly, the live version's got a little more petrol than the all-cheddar recorded version, but you'll get the idea. Plus, Bowie apparently told his hairdresser, "Can you get it to go a little more Gary Glitter, man? Yeah? Far out."

Far out, indeed, Mr. Bowie.



Since we're on the topic of Bowie's cinematic highpoints, here's his fine work in 1986's Labyrinth:



Good times, good times.

Movies: The cat came back.

Of all the movies produced by Val Lewton during his now legendary stint as the horror-show unit head at RKO, perhaps none has inspired more tributes and caused more ink than The Cat People. This 1942 flick, directed by Jacques Tourneur (the finest of Lewton's stable of directors – which also included Robert Wise), was named dropped in The Kiss of the Spider Woman, remade and tarted-up by Paul Schrader in 1982, and is a staple of horror revivals, film studies classes, and discussions of noir style.

As an aside, if you really want to know horror, listen to every painful second of David Bowie's "Putting Out the Fire (The Theme to The Cat People)," one of the White Duke's least impressive and most gratuitously '80s outings. Several medical studies in Europe have actually linked a pattern of repeated listening to "Putting Out the Fire" with increase incidences of rectal cancer; that's how bad the song is. It appears on the 2002 two-disc Best of Bowie. I specify the year here because, realizing that the word "best" carries a specific meaning to most of the English-speaking world, EMI dropped the tune from the 2004 release of the set.

But enough about Bowie's less-than-greatest hour and back to the flick in question, the original Cat People is the first flick on a two-feature disc, the first of five double features in the TCM Lewton collection. The story is a classic boy-meets-girl, boy-marries-girl, girl-turns-out-to-be-a-cursed-cat-monster story. We open on Irena, a raven-haired beauty sketching the black panther in its cage at the Central Park Zoo. Irena's played by French import Simone Simon, whose Marseillesn accent is sufficiently non-Parisian enough to sound suitably exotic without being quite identifiable. Irena catches the eye of Oliver Reed: All American. Played by square-jawed, hyper-vanilla Kent Smith, Ollie is a sort of Everyman in the Grey Flannel Suit. Ollie puts some smooth moves on our foreign-born beauty and soon they're dating. Eventually Ollie wants to do some light consensual lip wrasslin', but Irena puts the kibosh on any physical contact. She explains that she descends from a long line of cursed villagers. The cursed women of this village, when they "fall in love" (read: "do the naughty"), have the tendency to turn into cat monsters and claw up their men. How this has lead to there being a long line of such women is unclear. My admittedly scant knowledge of Darwinism suggests that this particular trait would pretty much ensure the extinction of folks carrying it – but let's not dwell on this as it is a mere bump in the road compared to the narrative obstacle I'm going to ask you to leap next.

Ollie, after being cock-blocked for their entire dating history (or kiss-blocked, as it were), decides that he just can't take it anymore and does the reasonable thing: he marries Irena. That's right. Without so much as exchanging a smooch, Ollie decides that Irena's cat people story is just a manifestation of some erotic frigidity. And nothing heats up the sexually frigid like marriage – it's a well-known fact! He figures that he's a patient guy and he can just wait out whatever deep-seated psychological trauma makes human contact so horrifying to Irena. Our heroes get hitched and settle into married life. Sure, things are a little weird: Irena's obsessed with cats, has the tendency to scare pet birds to death, and enjoys chasing bits of string maybe just a little too much (okay, not that last bit). Ollie's hottie blonde coworker (the blonde = good, dark haired = bad correlation in these old flicks is remarkably consistent – it's like there was some clause in the SAG contract) suggests Irena should see a shrink, which introduces the pompous and sleazy Dr. Judd, who starts taking a more than strictly Hippocratic interest in the exotic Irena. Everything comes to a bewhiskered head when Irena's jealousy over Ollie's blonde "um-friend" and the creepy attentions of the good doctor make her "break all kitty on this ishi, yo," as the gentlemen down on the corner phrase it.

Admittedly, the story is a bit clunky. In the 1940s and '50s, American cinema became utterly enamored with what was a strangely mechanistic misunderstanding of psychoanalysis. Flicks like The Snake Pit and Dark Voyage reworked horrific mental illnesses into fodder for weepies. Shrink doctors popped up in film after film, conveniently provided exposition at reasonable hourly rates. Hitchcock seems to have used the DSM as a screenwriting handbook, hanging on to his paperback psycho-babble for an embarrassingly long time after others had moved on to more trendy characterization crutches (see Marnie). Cat People is a clear product of that decades long infatuation with the monster that Freud built. It's a film unashamed to include dialogue like "Find me a psychologist, Ollie. Find me the best one there is." This is all a little curious insomuch as the shrink turns out to be a bit of a sleaze-bag and the existence of a sequel called The Curse of the Cat People should give you a pretty good indication of just how rooted in psycho-pathology Irena's problems really are.

Still, despite the leaps of logic required by Hollywood censors and the screenwriter's love of Freud for Dummies, the director and actors manage to make the film hum along. Visually, the flick is a shadow-soaked noir treat. One scene in particular – when Ollie and his blonde are trapped in his office with the only light coming from a series of tabletop light-boxes – is a standout. The acting won't stick with you, but the cumulative effect is to make the viewer pity Irena. Despite the oddity of the character, she seems genuinely trapped on all sides. The film's dramatic tension comes almost entirely from our concern about Irena, even though she's supposed to be the "monster" in this particular feature.

For many modern viewers – as well as for the folks behind the remake - Cat People may go a bit slow. Lewton created this curious hybrid genre of the horror-melodrama. His flicks were stylish, thoughtful productions intended for adult audiences – in stark contrast to the teen-centric fare that's dominated the horror genre from the '50s on. This unique fusion's pace and detailed characterization aren't for everybody. Personally, I dig this flick and think it well deserves its status as the gem in Lewton's crown.

The second feature on the disk is lackluster sequel The Curse of the Cat People. Despite reusing the same characters, the title's deceptive as the cat persons plot is pretty much jettisoned for a whole new set of psych-influenced problems. The film marks the first director credit for Robert Wise (he served as co-director) and contains a few nice scenes. But, overall, the film's a disappointing follow-up.