We Interrupt This Broadcast | 11-11-11... Or Is It?

No, it is. I'm just being difficult.

That said, here on The Speculative Scotsman, 11-11-11 is going to be all about the things that could have been. If not the good times we were going to have - I mean, who am I kidding? - then the timely reviews I was going to put up today, if I'd only written them.

Thing is I haven't. You folks will just have to go in want of my thoughts on the direct-to-DVD gimmick horror movie named for the date, because I couldn't stand it.

I had hopes for 11-11-11. Not exactly high hopes, but nonetheless, I don't despise the SAW films - of which Darren Lynn Bousman directed the second, the third and the fourth - and I genuinely do adore Repo! The Genetic Opera, which I understand was something of a passion project for the talented young filmmaker.

Would that 11-11-11 evidenced even the barest suggestion of the undeniable passion Bousman brought to his macabre musical... his modern-day Rocky Horror. Alas no, not so much. It is truly a dreadful film, all ham and no jam, and half an hour of it was all the other half and I could take the night before last.

As to last night, well. We went to see Opeth and Pain of Salvation, but mostly Opeth, at the HMV Picture House in Edinburgh, which I was disproportionately pleased to see still rather resembles an old cinema. So we took our seats - oh, seats! - bought some beers and sat back to enjoy the music... which we did.

Failing the 11-11-11 movie review - in fact failing the movie, never mind the review - I was going to post a bit about the three hours I spent nursing a pint of tepid Tuborg while Opeth and Pain of Salvation played last night instead. I was going to write about how I do not disagree with Ryan of the inimitable Battle Hymns blog when he says that the lack of growlage was pretty darned disappointing.

Much as I adore Opeth's latest album Heritage, which this tour is of course in support of, the band played a fair selection of their beloved back-catalogue too, and even these songs seemed... not blunted, exactly; tempered might be a better way of describing it. And tempered is really the last thing I want Opeth to be, especially the older Opeth albums I hold so close to my heart.

Also: no Blackwater Park. What the crap, guys?

Still, had a great night, and a great day beforehand, sampling Orkney ales in the Gillie and wolfing down a plate of delicious veggie haggis in Henderson's, with the very best company to keep me company. Happy birthday, hon!

Anyway, I'm sure I've more to say about Opeth - and maybe one day I'll say some of it! - but my fallback plan for content on TSS today was also comprehensively scuttled this morning.

It was the postie what did it. Isn't it ever?

He only brought me my copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

So... give me a hundred hours or so, and we'll talk, alright? :)

Happy 11-11-11, everyone!

Book Review | Black Light by Patrick Melton, Stephen Romano & Marcus Dunstan

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

If you have a supernatural problem that won't go away, you need Buck Carlsbad: private eye, exorcist, and last resort. Buck's got a way with spirits that no one else can match, and a lot of questions that only spirits can answer.

Buck has spent years looking deep into the Blacklight on the other side of death, trying to piece together the mystery that destroyed his family and left him for dead. It's dangerous, but it's his only hope of finding out what happened to them - and what made him the way he is.

But then Buck takes a call from a billionaire, and finds himself working the most harrowing case of his career. One that will either reveal the shocking secrets of his life, or end it forever...

***

Black Light by Patrick Melton, Stephen Romano & Marcus Dunstan will do decent business, I expect, but not because of its content. Either that, or precisely because of its content.

We're three quarters through it already, so I think it's safe to say, from my vantage point, that 2011 was roughly a year long, contained almost exactly a year's worth of stuff - good, bad and butt-ugly alike - and will surely go down the in history books as the year between 2010 and 2012. A year, then, in many senses like any other -- except, for the first time since America vs. Iraq began, there was no SAW film!


Not the greatest of tragedies, truly. But I won't pretend there hasn't been a little hole in my soul since it transpired the franchise really was taking a break. The SAW films have been terrible, by and large - I'd recommend none but the first one - yet against my better judgement, I've watched every annual installment with a silly grin, a barely-suppressed snigger, and a fizzy drink so very vast I could probably take down everyone's favourite dearly-departed serial killer with it myself.

And I'll kinda miss that feeling. The Paranormal Activity films which appear to have picked up where SAW left off have just been too good to date to fit Jigsaw's slippers in the inimitable, awful way he wore them. So when news of Black Light broke - not so long ago at all, in truth - I admit it: I breathed what must have been the strangest sigh of relief I've ever experienced.

Black Light is for its part almost exactly what you'd expect from a first novel by three dubious screenwriters variously behind the most execrable of all the SAW movies (from SAW IV through last year's "final chapter," if you must know), Piranha 3DD, the monster nonsense of the three Feast flicks, and an episode of Masters of Horror, may its much-maligned memory rest in peace: it's silly, horrible, set-piece driven torture porn... just with ghosts instead of puppets, or hunchbacks, or whatever.


So I enjoyed it, obviously.

Buck Carlsbad is a freelance ghost hunter a la Most Haunted riddled with token affectations: he's a cat-napper, a self-mutilator, and he carries a Walkman everywhere... because iPods, right? They're just too cool for school. Mysteriously, however, Buck doesn't remember any of his first seven years, except that he emerged from that dead zone in his head down two parents but up the gift-come-curse of second sight. He can peer into the Blacklight, you see; where the lost souls roam, dead but not yet gone.

"We call it the Big Black. It might be where they all go in the end. Might be heaven and hell, all rolled up into one endless stretch of nowhere. Not that heaven and hell were ever real to being with. That's another thing people don't understand. Everything you think you know about life and death and some sort of God that loves you or a devil that hates us - well, guess what. You're wrong about all that. And what I do ain't about blessings or rituals or holy symbols, man." (p.43)

Oh no. What Buck does is slice and dice and grind and pulp and generally kick the living you-know-what out of the myriad malevolent spirits he hunts down like lice. He's practically Batman. And the Dark Knight seems to have fallen on hard times, as of the moment Melton, Romano & Dunstan deign to introduce us, so when a call comes in from billionaire extraordinaire Sidney Jaeger offering our capeless crusader employment tailored to his area of expertise - and linked somehow to the disappearance of his folks so long ago - Buck swallows his suspicions and jumps at the chance to exorcise the Jaeger Laser, a bleeding-edge bullet-train to Vegas, of the nine horsemen of the apocalypse. Or something.


Black Light is a lot of nonsense, needless to say, and it needs focus like the hole in its head it wears so unashamedly; a relatively slow start gives way to a lot of attention-seeking antics (a single page references Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia) with tips of the hat over the duration to everything and everyone from Elvis to Paranormal Activity, To Live and Die in LA through the continuing adventures of Scarlett Johansson. Black Light is proudly and at times desperately self-referential, ludicrous enough as to beggar belief on numerous occasions, and so bloated as to seem in dire need of a take-no-prisoners line edit. I started to miss proper paragraphs very early on, I'll say. And in light of the pointed absence of descriptive prose, the screenwriting heritage of these three kings is laid bare as a hairless babe.

As a pop. horror novel, however - particularly one so beholden to its torture-porn cinema lineage - it has its moments, and in those moments it is poised to chill and thrill in the mode of early John Connolly or middling Michael Koryta. Fans of another of Mulholland Books' imported authors - namely Duane Swierczynski of Fun and Games fame - will find lots to like in Black Light, I think, if they, as we, can find it in themselves to overlook the same self-seriousness in the face of absolute farce that was such a plague on SAW.


I did. And I'll be doing it again next October, no doubt, because you know what? "Cheese works if you mean it," (p.252) and Melton, Romano & Dunstan surely do.

Though that may not be a pearl of pasteurised wisdom applicable to all things...

***

Black Light

by Patrick Melton, Stephen Romano

& Marcus Dunstan

UK & US Publication: October 2011, Mulholland Books

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Film Review | Insidious, dir. James Wan

The one-sheet for Insidious tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the latest in a line of collaborations between writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan. Creepy kid? Check. Spooky suburban dwelling? Yep. The suggestion of some sort of supernatural evil?

No?

I'm only pulling your legs: but of course there's the suggestion of some sort of supernatural evil!

Insidious is, first and foremost, a movie "from the makers of Paranormal Activity and SAW," so count among its guiding forces the pair aforementioned, in their usual roles, and found footage aficionado Oren Peli, whose exact involvement in Insidious is impossible to gauge. On board as one of three producers (not to mention an array of co-producers, executive producers, and one lonesome line producer), Peli's fingerprints are all over Insidious, smudged though they are; and in any event, I would not swear that he put them there.

Actually, I would not swear that I particularly care whether we have Peli's involvement in Insidious to thank for, for instance, its basic premise - which is to say the haunting of a person rather than a house - or the foreboding creaks and rumbles which are in the first half of the film the primary source of scares, because Paranormal Activity, if you can cast your minds back to a time two whole Halloweens ago, wasn't exactly an original film in itself. The Blair Witch Project meets Poltergeist was and still is, I think, appropriate shorthand for a film which more than anything else demonstrated the cinema-going public's dissatisfaction with SAW VI. Paranormal Activity was ingeniously executed, technically speaking, and narratively surprisingly strong... but no, not at all new, or even particularly innovative.

Nor is Insidious. It, too, is an example of craft over art, and cleverness before invention; of a practiced, indeed accomplished eye where one might wish for vision.

You mustn't mistake me: I had a great time with at least half of Insidious -- and the rest was tolerable enough, if utterly at odds with itself. You should absolutely see this movie. But whatever you do, don't see it expecting anything you haven't seen before.

Insidious is the very definition of a film of two halves. The first part - thankfully the more substantial part - is basically Paranormal Activity without the found footage gimmick. Renai and Josh Lambert are just settling into a nice new place with their three children, Dalton, Foster and a nameless baby; but never mind the latter two. You see, early on, Dalton - that's the creepy kid on the one-sheet - ends up in an inexplicable coma. The lovely Rose Byrne's Renai takes to caring for Dalton full-time, while Josh (Watchmen's Patrick Wilson) shirks his share of the burden by working late a lot. But as he snoozes over tests and essays, Renai becomes increasingly convinced that an uninvited guest has taken residence at the Lambert ranch. Someone - or (gasp!) something - which means her and hers harm. 

It's all so very familiar that you may wonder if you haven't somehow seen this film before. But no, you haven't -- I mean, unless you have. Anyway, never mind the narrative; it's nothing to write home about. Not even to your great-aunt, and she hasn't seen a film since The Exorcist scared her half to death back in the silly 70s. What works in the first half of Insidious - and I should say it works tremendously well - is the unbearable sense of tension wrought from Wan's suggestion of an unseen but ever-present threat. The director takes no time at all to establish this excruciating atmosphere, and finds ample assistance in composer Joseph Bishara, whose lovingly throwback score - though overbearing by modern standards - does as much to dictate exactly where on our chairs we should sit as Wan.

Had Insidious simply sustained this state of affairs for the duration, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. However, in its second phase, Insidious takes... we'll call it an odd turn, ending up somewhere between Dead Silence - the delightfully daft puppet horror Wan and Whannell last collaborated on - and The Frighteners; both of which films I'll be the first to admit adoring. But spliced onto an hour approaching the exquisite in its implication of some unspeakable evil lurking just off-camera? Uh...

So it is that Insidious ends a very different film than it begins, with Lipstick-Face Demon, Long Haired Fiend and Doll Girls #1 and #2 (I kid you not) prancing about in "the further" like painted bloody ponies while a man who's been beside the point for the duration stumbles about shadowy, pseudo-Silent Hill sets dodging monsters because he's secretly a total monster-dodger. He is, you hear? Poor Rose Byrne, who holds the rest of film on her heroin-chic shoulders, doesn't even get a look-in.

Oh: there's a twist, too. And it's terrible.

Still, I had my fun with Insidious. I just wish the filmmakers had had perhaps a little less...