{"id":10884,"date":"2017-09-07T21:44:09","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T01:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=10884"},"modified":"2017-09-07T21:44:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T01:44:09","slug":"abnormal-beauties-short-horror-reviews-films-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2017\/09\/abnormal-beauties-short-horror-reviews-films-book.html","title":{"rendered":"Abnormal Beauties: Short horror reviews (films and book)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I recently got to live out a childhood dream. My best friend sent me to the South Salem Wolf Conservation Center<\/a>, where I got up close and personal with Canis lupus<\/em> (and sort of far-off and WASPily reticent with Canis rufus<\/em>). We heard tales of wolves battling for dominance (and super losing\u2013the wolf who had failed to become alpha was still skulking around in the back, and didn\u2019t get to eat his venison sausages until the alpha and his sister had got theirs), wolves peeing on TV sets, wolves walking through Manhattan on a leash and failing to rattle jaded New Yorkers. We saw a wolf delicately eat an egg, leaving the shell. We heard them howl in broad daylight and I suspect we all shivered.<\/p>\n

But we were not afraid! Not because they\u2019re cute\u2013wolves are powerful creatures, they can bite through your thigh bone!, and that lithe muscled alpha wolf was definitely licking his chops at us as he paced behind his fence. But wolves don\u2019t attack people unless they\u2019re desperate, and the basic reason is that we are what they fear most. We are the apex predator (we even eat the ozone layer!) and while man is wolf to man, man is also, absolutely, wolf to wolves.<\/p>\n

On that note\u2026<\/p>\n

Corpse Bride<\/strong><\/em>: This was fun! Too much of the wispy wafting hero and heroine who don\u2019t have any personality at all, and the whole \u201cYour cup will never be empty, for I will be your wine\u201d faux Eucharist marriage-idolatry struck me as flatly blasphemous. But Tim Burton\u2019s gleefully gothy, childishly ooky totentanz aesthetic is at its peak here, and genuinely delightful. A cute little Halloween cupcake.<\/p>\n

Last Shift<\/strong><\/em>: Endearing rookie cop is supposed to spend her first night on the job monitoring the cleanup and closeout of the old police station. But when the strange noises start, and the inexplicable phone calls, she starts to wonder if the local cult who killed her father (also a cop) has come back for more. Or maybe, come back from the dead\u2026.<\/p>\n

This was very effective while I was watching, and Juliana Harkavy is lovely as our rookie. But I saw this after reading The Deadly Doll\u2019s review<\/a>, and I agree with her that we never get quite enough of the cult. We get hints, and they\u2019re creepy hints, but I would like more cult and much less<\/em> cliche whiteface makeup and crowded pointy teeth. Also, man, someday they\u2019ll watch this movie as an example of how much American cinema took police violence for granted. Our sympathetic, audience-identification cop heroine threatens a homeless, mentally ill man, then throws him out into the street shoeless, then later roughs him up and iirc tases him. That worked for me as a script choice, in the same way that Kima getting in on a beatdown on the first episode of The Wire<\/em> worked, but she\u2019s callous and cruel to a guy who at that moment is acting like a sad sick person.<\/p>\n

Ab-Normal Beauty<\/strong><\/em>: A Hong Kong\/Thai joint about an art-school student who becomes obsessed with photographing death. This was all over the place, and it almost all worked for me. It\u2019s a movie with a fairly clear moral, and that moral is: Brutal art is evil, and pretty art is good. This from a movie which borders on torture porn toward the end! It should be simplistic, even saccharine, and disingenuous\u2026 but it\u2019s (almost) all done so well<\/em> that I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

The direction by Oxide Chun Pang is so hot, so aggressive in its lighting and cutting. There\u2019s a sequence where the art student is taking photos of the moments before a death, and we realize what has happened by the movement of her camera\u2019s muzzle. There\u2019s great use of the space outside the frame. There\u2019s great use of color. Race Wong sells our complex, haunted main character, while Rosanne Wong is delightful as her soft-butch girlfriend.<\/p>\n

The climax does go too far toward torture porn for me, in its lingering depictions of sexualized violence, but maybe that makes sense given the point it\u2019s making. And the film creates terrific tension around one of the central questions of horror: Should you kill the monster or love the monster<\/a>? If you like films that attack their audience, or hot highly-stylized direction, you might find this pretty enthralling. The one definite criticism I\u2019ll make is that there\u2019s too much backstory. Maybe people don\u2019t have reasons for what they do! Have you ever considered that<\/em>, contemporary horror filmmakers?<\/p>\n

Gillian Cross<\/strong>, The Dark Behind the Curtain<\/strong><\/em>. This is a children\u2019s book from 1982 about an elementary-school production of a play about Sweeney Todd (! welcome to the time before parental consent forms, my friends), in which Victorian ghosts begin to invade the theater\u2013and the actors\u2019 souls. I revisited it recently, having forgotten why I had such fond feelings toward it, and it was excellent.<\/p>\n

I can recommend it to all of you on the grounds that it captures the anger and hostility of children. These kids are so constantly awful to one another, and so resentful toward adults, and yet the two main characters are still so endearing. Cross does a great job of showing you their grudging respect for one another, their tense and mistrustful attempts at friendship. Theater nerds will love it. The prose is transparent but not childish. I will say that one of the characters starts out as one of those painful children\u2019s-book comedy fat characters. This turns out to be misdirection, and her role is complex and significant, but even as misdirection it\u2019s clumsily-written (I think at one point she even speaks in a fat voice!) and it was the only aspect of the book I found unpleasant to read.<\/p>\n

On a more personal note\u2013when the book starts, our hero, Colin Jackus, is on the outs with basically everybody because he got caught stealing at school. Not everyone knows exactly what happened, but he\u2019s mistrusted; he deserves it, and he knows it. His feelings of guilt and resentful alienation, the way he casts around for self-justifications and can\u2019t quite find any, were things I know I intensely related to when I read this as a child. And his underlying decency and loyalty were consoling to me: Maybe you\u2019re like that<\/em> part of him too. That feeling of having done something wrong, for which you bear actual personal guilt, before the story even starts\u2013well, I guess you can see why I found the doctrine of Original Sin a relief.<\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s denouement (ah, spoilers for a 1982 children\u2019s novel?) Jackus is basically vindicated, and the novel\u2019s primary villain actually repents and wants to make amends. And Jackus won\u2019t let him. It\u2019s a fairly shocking choice for freedom over<\/em> forgiveness. It leaves the villain with the same unresolved and unbearable guilt Jackus carried for most of the novel. It\u2019s totally understandable in context, it doesn\u2019t even speak poorly of Jackus; and yet it may be the darkest moment in a book about the murderous ghosts of starving children.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently got to live out a childhood dream. My best friend sent me to the South Salem Wolf Conservation Center, where I got up close and personal with Canis lupus (and sort of far-off and WASPily reticent with Canis rufus). We heard tales of wolves battling for dominance (and super losing\u2013the wolf who had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[17,21,119,16,122],"class_list":["post-10884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-children-will-listen","tag-childrens-books","tag-horror","tag-on-beauty-and-being-dust","tag-totentanz"],"yoast_head":"\nAbnormal Beauties: Short horror reviews (films and book)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I recently got to live out a childhood dream. 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