Movies: Crust for Frankenstein.

Here's the scene: 1997, a mountainous seaside resort town in Spain. There's a small villa on the hillside facing the sea – a white tangle of stucco cubes, irregularly punctuated with balconies and windows. On one of those balconies sits infamous Spanish schlock-horror director Jess Franco (in flick reviewed today he's billed under his Christian name, no pun intended: Jesus Franco). He sips a cappuccino. It's his second of the morning. A newspaper, perhaps the local rag, sits folded on the small table to the right of his wicker chair. He holds the rich, bitter coffee in his mouth a moment. Then breaths in slightly through pursed lips, noticing how the sea air changes the flavor of the drink. Normally, small details like this would please Mr. Franco. But not this morning.

See, Jess has a problem. He's got something like 170 directing credits to his name (names actually, he's helmed flick under nearly thirty different identities) and he's not proud of a single thing he's done. In fact, he's made it a matter of public record that he hates every single one of his films and, as far as he's concerned, he's never made even a halfway decent flick.

But he wants to. He wants to make a Citizen Kane or a Grapes of Wrath. Something enduring, something profound. A film, at last, to be proud of.

Then suddenly, it dawns on him: "I'll make a Frankenstein movie – except it'll be Frankenstein's daughter and the monster will be a woman with a sort of penis stub for a clit and they'll have lots of sex."

And the very next year – taa-daa – the world gets "treated" to Franco's Lust for Frankenstein. This is actually the second film this month that puts a kinky twist on the Frankenstein story. The first was the B-grade Italian production Lady Frankenstein. Weirdly, there's a strange Orson Welles connection between the two. The later starred Joseph Cotton who worked with Welles in Kane. The former was directed by Franco who assisted Welles during his on-again, off-again Don Quixote shoot and who later "finished" the film for Welles. This simply a coincidence and has no really impact on the film in question. I bring it up only because that minor detail is about 1,000 times more interesting than anything that happens in the film.

A plot description will, unfortunately, make this dog of a flick sound more interesting that it is. Frankenstein had a daughter, Moira (played by Lina Romey – hot stuff when she started working in flicks back in 1973). Shortly after her birth, Frankenstein's wife passed away. The doctor then remarried, but his new wife turned out to be an a-class superfreak who not only slept with the good doctor, but the help, passing strangers, human-sized housewares – you get the idea. She also, frequently, turned her attentions on young Moira (though, later, Moira in flashbacks will clearly be played by her older self – perhaps lesbian incest prematurely ages one). Then the doctor passed on. Moira married and moved out of the home. Her marriage was a lousy one and Frankenstein, from beyond the grave, decides to visit his daughter and lead her his last creation. This, we learn, he does because he wants to teach her "lust." That's right. Dad doesn't think his little girl gets her nasty groove on so he's going to hook her up with a monster. We learn all this in voice over narration. When the film starts, an older, somewhat saggy Moira is visited, Hamlet-like, by her father's ghost. He sets her on a mission to find his last monster.

Mercifully, his last monster was stashed in a glass display case in Moira's old room, in the closet. The monster is a beefy woman with sockets in her neck and several lines of baseball-grade stitches running across her body. She tells Moira that if she revives her, she'll initiate frumpy Moira into the ways of ecstasy. Personally, from this woman, I would have taken that as a threat. But Moira must be lonelier than we thought because she promptly uses the life of one of her stepmom's many young bucks to bring the creature to life.

After some creaky-on-chunky action, Moira ends up going out to a stip-club and bringing back a young dancer to fuel her monster butch. Shortly after that, Moira's hubby shows up and gets dispatched. In between, Moira catches her monster top humping a tree and she has several nonsensical flashbacks to what I guess is her childhood (though, since the same actress plays her in these scenes, Moira appears to have been in her early 50s all her life).

This movie was crap. It had visual effects that would have been considered embarrassing in the first year of MTV music videos. I've had plates of linguini with more structure than this film had. Finally, and perhaps most damning, the only time this film was scary was when it was trying to be sexy. Watching this film feels like catching your parents fumble through something they thought was sexy, but is really just embarrassing. The combination of limply clumsy un-erotic pawing and utter humiliation makes the whole misadventure doubly scarring. Dusting off my Noteworthy Canadian News Events of 1998 Film Rating System I'm giving this flick an abysmal Crash of Swissair 111, and it is only getting that because it did consist of moving pictures and, therefore, qualifies on some minimal level as a film.

Comics: The good bad girl versus the bad Good Guy doll.

Hack/Slash, an irregularly released series of mini-series from Devil's Due Press, is one of those guilty pleasures that makes horror comic reading at once so embarrassing and, yet, so much damn fun.

The premise, cooked up by writer Tim Seeley, is so brilliantly obvious that it makes you wonder how we've gone through more than 20 years of slasher flicks without somebody hitting on it. Follow me here: Cassie Hack was kinda the pretty/ugly girl at high school. Apparently, regardless of how obviously hot one is, not being blonde is enough to ensure you grief. Her mother, the slightly over-protective lunch lady at Cassie's school, took revenge for her daughter's constant petty humiliations by killing and serving up several of Cassie's tormentors. Eventually, Cassie had a confrontation with her own mother and killed her.

Unfortunately for Cassie (but luckily for fans of clever meta-horror cheese), her mother came back as The Lunch Lady, a classic post-Jason style supernatural slasher. In the world of Hack/Slash, the slasher is a specific type of undead – denied the pleasures of life, the vengeful creatures hunt out youth, sex, fun and so on, killing that which they can never have. Cassie was forced to once again put her mother down. And in doing so, found her calling. Cassie (after trading in her pretty/ugly look for something with a more naughty Goth school girl vibe) travels the country with her hulking, reformed slasher-trainee sidekick Vlad, hunting down and disposing of slashers.

That's whole premise: Hot chick in naughty Goth schoolgirl outfits and heavily armed Frankenstein-looking mammer jammer hunt down and kill slashers.

Sure, The Watchmen it ain't – but who cares when you've got a hot chick in naughty Goth schoolgirl outfits and heavily armed Frankenstein-looking mammer jammer hunting down and killing slashers? Honestly. Sure, the entire character of Cassie Hack is sort of nothing more than a over the top experiement in the delivery of fan service. And sure the whole thing is often more goofy then scary. But I mentioned the whole "hot chick . . . mammer jammer . . . kill slasher" thing, right? The defense rests.

I bring the comic up now because, normally, the slashers Cassie and Vlad face (when not fighting demonically possessed toys or zombie house pets) are satiric homages to famous slasher characters and not, actually, famous monsters from filmland. However, according to an interview with the series writer, Devil's Due plans to produce a genuine franchise cross-over. That's right! My favorite subgenre of horror cheese: a freakin' Monster Mash!

The cinematic slasher in question is the pint-sized psycho Chucky. Look for the dame versus doll battle royale to hit shelves this March.

Music: In praise of gimmicks, cheese, insincerity, and everything else that makes rock great.

Something seems vaguely unfair about The Horrors. They look like a Brit version of The Gruesomes, play a sort of simplistic retro-punk that's so sloppy one imagines The Ramones would shake their heads, and they smacked of indie press approval well before they even had an EP out. Their rep was such that they even managed to lure Chris Cunningham out of semi-retirement to handle their first video – not bad for a band that, at that point, only had a single to their name.

Although all of it is instantly suspect, ain't it? Bands that seem to spring, fully grown, out of the club scene and into instant celebrity, like some rock Athena popping fully-armored out of the head of some PR Zeus, seem to have their backlash built in. And if any band was asking for it, The Horror's seem to be. The look, a sort of mod by way of Edward Gorey shtick, flirts with being a novelty gimmick. Their overly-conscious rejection of musicianship and their choice of materials - the B-side to their first hit was a cover of Screamin' Lord Sutch's "Jack the Ripper" - almost seems calculated to tick-off a musical culture that has even managed to buff even punk rock until it has a sanitized mall-ready Blink 182 shine to it. It all seems fake, too ready-for-prime-time, too pre-counter programmed.

And that, dear readers, is how I like it.

Authenticity is the biggest sham. I like my bands to dress in matching outfits. They want to pretend they're rock and roll morticians or robots sent back from the future or hard rocking 18th century French aristos, all the freakin' better. Rather than the endless rants against the state of the world or self-indulgent art pretensions, bands that show up wearing flower pots on their heads send a clear, honest, and unmistakable message. They say, "We're here to make some music you hopefully will enjoy." End of story.

A bunch of dudes in powdered wigs or factory worker uniforms aren't going to lecture you about world poverty and then hop their private jet to their next show. They aren't going to wank away on some 20-minute prog rock sonic circle jerk and then demand you "understand" their aural sploogings. Nope. When a group shows up wearing Mexican wrestling masks and announcing that they plan to, musically speaking, give your sorry ass the atomic drop – well, now we're talking. They're here to get the freakin' job done! That's admirable, in my twisted and limited view of things.

The Horrors are a bunch of dandied-up, insincere, fakers. And that makes them a-okay in my book.

Here's what Cunningham cranked out for them, the video for their first single: "Sheena Was a Parasite."

Book: Second to the last house on the left.

With is combination of retro-50s setting, first person narration, and horrific torture scenes, Jack Ketchum's justly infamous novel The Girl Next Door seems like some nightmare version of The Wonder Years as re-imagined by the creators of Hostel.

The novel is one extended flashback, told in the bitter and brittle voice of a guilt crushed man looking back at a horrific incident from his childhood. When he was a boy, the dead-end suburban street where he lived was just the sort of American Eden that Hollywood sells, historians dismiss, and cultural conservatives morn. Kids catch crayfish in tin cans, boys sneak peaks at their fathers' hidden Playboy stashes, and the arrival of the carnival – hosted by the Kiwanis Club, natch – is the highlight of the summer season.

Into the Mom-and-apple-pie world of the narrator's youth came Meg, the proverbial girl next door. Smart, beautiful, a bit of tomboy, the narrator immediately develops a crush on Meg. Which is unfortunate as she's the chief victim of this story.

Meg and her polio stricken sister, Susan, are orphans who lost their parents in a car wreck. They've been placed in the care of Ruth, a divorced mother of three boys, known in the neighborhood for her sailor's mouth and her negligent parenting style.

At first, Meg fits easily in this Leave It To Beaver world. The carnival comes and goes. The boys debate rock and roll lyrics, read Plastic Man comics, and wonder if they'll ever actually see a real, live breast.

But, slowly, things start to sour. Ruth's carefree persona begins to rot and warp. She starts to become vicious and brutal. Meg goes from her boarder to her prisoner. Standard juvenile punishments become more intense, more sexual, more perverse. Soon, Ruth is keeping Meg bound in her basement, naked and dangling from ropes tied to the crossbeams in the roof. And Ruth's influence extends to her children and their friends. Given permission to indulge in their baser desires, the children of neighborhood become willing accomplices in the brutal tortures Ruth inflicts on Meg. As the narrator fitfully tries to develop some moral sense in a world were the adults are vouchsafing even the most horrific acts of rape and abuse, we watch as Ruth and her brood heap outrage upon outrage on their powerless teen captive. Eventually, the story reaches its climax as the narrator, alternately repelled by what he witnesses and fascinated by the spectacle of power, is forced into a moral reckoning.

The Girl Next Door is a thoroughly unpleasant book. The sustained intensity and duration of its violence is mind-numbing and, in that department alone, outdoes many more-famous "transgressive" works: next to Ketchum's novel, the excesses of American Psycho seem absurd and melodramatic. The long dark tale of what becomes of poor Meg is relentless, grisly, and unleavened by humor, redemption, or hope. This is, I think, the darkest horror novel I've ever read.

But, for all its disturbing imagery and stomach-churning violence, Ketchum's novel is still essential. Despite the detail Ketchum brings to his scenes of rape and torture, what Ketchum's really focused on, what he is really chronicling, is the terrible moral flexibility of humans. Fear, authority, desire, power, and vulnerability all clash in the voice of the narrator. Even when the narrator refuses to describe the worst that happens (in a brilliant move, Ketchum leaves many of the worst acts "off-screen"), we know that these events are keenly felt by the narrator. When the parental voice, the lawgiver of a young boy's world, goes mad, we see the narrator struggle to create his own moral sense. We see him wrestle with the better and worse angels of his nature, forging a genuine morality out of the wreckage of Meg's degradation. Ketchum's narrator is a real achievement, one of the most finely drawn characters in genre.

Ketchum's other characters, while not so well built, help bring his story to chilling life. The neighborhood children devolve from Normal Rockwell-esque icons of American youth to exemplars of banal evil. Like hardened concentration camp guards, they crack jokes while inflicting heinous tortures. When they grow bored of branding Meg or cutting her, they open bottles of Coke and watch game shows upstairs. The mad Ruth, pack leader and subversive symbol of parental authority run amok, is rendered as a sort of force of nature. Though it means she often seems a bit thin, more symbol than human, it does resonate with how one imagines the narrator would have seen her as a young boy.

Meg and Susan are perhaps the most important weak points in the Ketchum's characterization. Besides being thinly built characters, Ketchum's inability to fully humanize them becomes the book's sole moral misstep. For all attention given to the narrator's inner being, Meg and Susan never come to life. As soon as the action begins to pile up, Susan drifts into the background to never fully resurface. Meg, on the other hand, is blandly "good." She's smart, funny, kind, caring, trustworthy, dignified, strong, etc. etc. She's tiresomely one note. I presume Ketchum wanted to make her unquestionably good to emphasize how undeserved her fate was, but this in a mistake. First, she seems less human, and therefore her fate less important, for her lack of characterization. Second, isn't the real point here that nobody, no matter who they were, would ever deserve what happens to Meg? Finally, and most importantly, the dehumanizing lack of characterization and the dehumanizing psychological aspect of torture dove-tails uncomfortably. For all of Ketchum's compassion for the narrator, he seems weirdly incapable of sympathizing with the victim. This compassion for the narrator/witness rather than the victim comes dangerously close to authorial self-indulgence, as if it was the narrator who is to be pitied for having to watch Meg's torture and not Meg.

Still, the uneven characterization does not dull the impact of the book's main idea. Though its violence makes it unsuitable for younger readers, this books nearest literary relative is not American Psycho, but The Outsiders. It is actually a finely detailed and emotional valid depiction of the birth of a truly moral individual. It's this theme, this important moral center, that redeems the novel's excesses, makes them necessary, and elevates them to the point that Ketchum makes the whole miserable trip worth taking.

The Girl Next Door is rightly viewed as one of the most brutal works of modern horror. The label is fair. And it would be possible to read it as the literary equivalent of those cinematic endurance tests that so capture the indie underground's attention. But to do so misses the achievement of what Ketchum's done. If you've got the stomach for the dark stuff, I recommend subjecting yourself to The Girl Next Door.

NB: Ketchum's inspiration for The Girl Next Door was a actual 1965 murder case dubbed "the single worst crime perpetrated against an individual in Indiana's history". Follow the link for details, but be forewarned that they are, if anything, even worse than what happens in Ketchum's novel.

Movies: Stumped.

Little Otik, a 2000 film from Czech surrealist auteur Jan Svankmajer, is one of those nearly unclassifiable films. It is a horror flick, a dark comedy, a surrealist parable, and an updating of a children's fairy tale all in one.

The plot of Little Otik is simple and devastating. The begins with a young Czech couple, Karel (who looks like an Eastern European Mark Mothersbaugh) and Bozena (who bears no resemblance to Mark Mothersbaugh) finding out that they will not be able to have children. This seems like a minor disappointment Karel, but the news totally destroys Bozena. She plunges into a deep depression, obsessing over the child she will never have. Karel, in an effort to get his wife's mind off of the slowness of his sperm and barrenness of her womb, purchases a weekend cabin in the country.

Sadly, the cabin does not improve Bozena's condition. Karel, in an attempt to please her, carves a tree stump he dug up from the property into the rough shape of the baby boy. Unfortunately, the mock-baby works too well. Bozena begins to care for it as if it were a real baby boy. Karel, worried his now clearly insane wife will take the baby home and start introducing it to folks, convinces her to leave their "son" in the country where they can visit it on weekends. Appealing to her obsession, he warns her that the sudden appearance of the child would be taken as evidence that they kidnapped (stump-napped) the boy. Again, Bozena runs with this, faking eight months of pregnancy to fool the neighbors. (It is only eight months because she grows impatient and decides their "son" will be a premature birth.) Strangely, despite the fact that Bozena is only faking it, she gets morning sickness and the like, as if she were really pregnant. In one particular poignant scene, she refuses he husband's sexual advances because she's worried about crushing her baby.

Eventually, the child is "born" and Bozena moves into the country cabin to spend more time with her tree stump. Karel visits every weekend and, one horrific day, finds Otik, the stump son, nursing at Bozena's breast. Not pretend nursing, but nursing nursing. Bozena's love for Otik has made him come alive. He still looks exactly like a roughly shaped tree stump, but he cries, and moves, and eats. Mostly eats.

The problem with Otik is that, for an inanimate object, the boy sure puts away the grub. At first he's content to eat heroic portions of formula, but eventually he devours the family cat. His parents find a well worked over feline corpse next to the crib. A few months after that, a nosy mailman becomes Otik food.

As Otik grows and his appetites become more monstrous, his parents must decide whether or not to destroy their uncanny off-spring.

Little Otik is not your traditional horror flick. It's closest American equivalent is something like Edward Scissorhands, with its premise of the fantastic suddenly spilling into everyday life. Only, in this case, the magical figure at the center of the story is a whole sinister presence. In true surrealist form, Svankmajer shots the film with lavish detail (the surrealist always presented their dream-scapes and fantasies with crisp detail – not blurry edges and wavy lines for them). Only Wim Winders can invest the emotionless blocks of the modern European city with such loving beauty. The characters are carefully drawn and even the minor characters get serious time to develop. The SFX used to bring Otik to live are primitive by the CGI standards of contemporary American movies, but Svankmajer uses them to emphasize the alien otherness of the monster child. I could easily imagine some American filmmaker creating a seamless, "better" Otik and the effect would actually have less punch.

The pace of the film is a bit slow, though this may be more due to the fact that I suspect the film was not created as a traditional horror flick, and is instead a dark update of a traditional Czech fairy tale (which is read to viewers in the film, so you'll be up to speed on the cultural references). Rather than building suspense, the film is more interested in following its own fairy tale logic to its conclusion. Consequently, we get the horrific without getting the scares. If you're prepared for this going into the flick, it isn't so bad. If, however, you crave suspense, you and this flick are not playing at the same game.

Like They Came Back, Little Otik is a movie that uses horror elements, but ultimately is not really a horror film. It is smart, creepy, moving, and brilliant – but it is not scary. Still, it is a great flick and worth watching on its own terms. Using Land Conditions as Described in the Beaufort Wind Force Scale Movie Rating System, the ranking system that's taking the nation by storm, I give Little Otik an excellent "widespread structural damage."

Contest: We have a wiener.

It was a close race that ultimately came down to a choice between a touching and heart-felt ode to notable actor and a haiku that mentioned carrot rape. And carrot rape won out in the end. Because, I think, that's how Basho would have wanted it.

The books go to Screamin' Dave!

Thank you Screamin' Sasquatchan and Screamin' Cattleworks (especially for your innovative Alien life-cycle series) for sounding off. And Scared of the Television – who is actually my old lady and was therefore disqualified – thanks for the poem anyway.

Stuff: What I should have asked for this Christmas.

More proof that there's a horrible conspiracy afoot to ensure that the youth get all the neatest stuff - leaving adults nothing to play with except tax forms and spider derns.

From Archie McPhee's fan-toy-bular site of funtastic random stuff comes perhaps the greatest battle ever staged between small, easily lost plastic figurines.

Ghouls and gals, I give you . . . Frogmen vs. Radioactive Octopus!

Though I want the octopus to win, smart money is on the frogmen. There are 12 of them, so even if the octopus gets each of its tentacles around one of these tricky bastards, there are still four frogmen free to torment it. Unless, of course, radioactivity has given the octopus the ability to shoot deathrays from its eyes or something. Then all bets are off.

Stuff: Monsters out of the closet?

Here's one of the cooler horror sites I've stumbled across in my young, but storied and thrilling, un-career as an un-professional horror blogger.

Punningly titled Camp Blood, this site is a one-stop source for those interested in all things queer and horrific (well, maybe not all things – I couldn't find any mention of Mary Cheney's book on the site). Reviews, news, and other features; all written in an insightful and often funny voice that deserves attention regardless of how you may (or may not, as the sad case may be) get your bad groove thing on.

If you’re a horror fan, it is well worth a visit.

Contest Update

We now have a three horse race for ANTSS's first ever contest: the horror haiku whoopjamboreewho!

Never has the Internet seen such a battle of literary titans! This is why poetry was invented!

And there's still time to get in on the action! It is still anybody's game!

And the winner – besides becoming the toast of the intellectual elite – will get not one, not two, but THREE, that's right THREE, as in the magic number, horror novels free of charge! I won't even charge you shipping.

What are you waiting for? Go clicky on the linky and read the embarrassingly simple contest rules. Then go haiku the crap out of the competition and claim your prize already. Your books await.