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handful_ofdustI wish I could say I was further along, but I can't. This chapter has ben like wading through molasses, possibly because it deals with stuff that's close to the bone--specifically, that because Lois Cairns ends up in hospital, she suddenly has to deal with her habits concerning pain management and insomnia, which are pretty much my habits: self-medication, mixing over-the-counter drugs, taking way beyond the amount you're actually supposed to of almost everything. And we've had to gut our budget recently, because our household expenses are frankly out of control, so that means I'm suddenly in a place where I'm down to only one core training session per week and spending (essentially) $150 on pain pills every week isn't sustainable anymore. Every new expense throws us off.
I've made some sales recently, so that's great--money pending. Had some interesting pro stuff happen, mostly slated for after I'm done with This Effing Book(tm). But the book itself skitters forward at a rate of about 500 words a day if I'm lucky--I write, then cut, then write again. Could have ended the chapter last night, but I want to get to something actually spooky, so it's going to be at least one more section before I'm done. And I've been inside for a week, probably because the weather's just so penetratingly, shittily cold that I literally don't want to go out.
So anyway, so anyway. Boring bullshit, move on.
Stuff that's been keeping me distracted: TV, mostly--probably far too much TV, but it's cheap and easily fit to your personal schedule. Fanfiction. (It amuses me to see that "This Old Death" has slowly crept up to 1,017 hits, though people are still pretty chary with the comments, and I'm not sure how many of them go on to "Death To Everyone" afterwards, because I guess there are far less people out there who want to be consistently reminded that Rick Grimes and the Governor are doing the nasty than I might have hoped. "What's The Matter...?" finally got its first comment ever, from a person who found it while looking for Milton/Philip and was happy with the result, even though Milton doesn't exactly get a happy ending in my 'verse than he did canonically.) Plus the very occasional movie, since we almost never see anything in the theatre anymore--the last one was Taken 3, my call, for which I apologize--and are thus "forced" to buy them on DVD.
Two which were very much worth the effort, however, are the last ones we got hold of: Norwegian freakmeister Tommy Wirkola's Do Sno 2: Red vs. Dead and Gerard Johnstone's Kiwi thriller Housebound. The latter comes with a front-of-the-box quote from Sir(!) Peter Jackson, who calls it "bloody brilliant," and I can see why...in a lot of ways, it reminded me of Jackson's own early work, especially in terms of certain effects, though the character-mechanics base is far more solid and the general shock factor far lower.
I'll start with Dod Sno 2, that rare sequel which A) prove to work perfectly well as a stand-alone and B) serves to retroactively redeem its predecessor, which I thought was cute but slight, all premise, and didn't stick around in my brain for more than a minute afterwards. Said premise is re-encapsulated aptly over the pre-credits sequence: hapless Martin, the Bruce Campbell of Scandinavia, went up to the mountains on a cabin getaway trip with his best friends only to watch them get predated on by a bunch of cursed Nazi zombies they woke from their hoarfrosty graves by "stealing" a bunch of gold the Nazis collected back in WWII. Martin was bitten but chopped his own arm off, then drove away with the lead zombie's arm, which was ripped off during a final struggle. Got it? Good.
Martin wakes up to find he's been charged with his friends' murders and has also received the Nazi arm as a transplant, which gives him superpowers (the arm is crazy strong, and can resurrect the dead), as well as a bad case of Can't Control My Evil Hand! syndrome. When a kid sneaks into his room to take photos of the arm and for the Zombie Squad, who claim to be a "professional" zombie-hunting outfit from the States, Martin's arm chucks the kid through a wall and Martin is able to escape. He tries to give the kid CPR but only succeeds in breaking his chest open, ending up with a fistful of organs and the kid's iPhone, so as he's driving away (covered in blood, his default state for the rest of the film), he calls said Zombie Squad and explains the situation. The Squad agrees to fly over and help.
Unfortunately, the Squad is just three geeks living with their parents in Hoboken, or wherever. Still, they have a plan: find out what sort of revenge the Nazi zombies want--"cursed zombies always want revenge"--and then find/make another bunch of cursed zombies to fight them. This is easier done than you might think, 'cause let's face it, the SS made (dead) enemies everywhere they went. So Martin has to tote his zombie-creating arm up into the mountains again, wake a mass grave full of dead Russian POWs, and hope that solves the problem...which it doesn't, of course. Because nothing's easy.
I really liked Dod Sno 2, though by the end, the surfeit of gross humour and exploding heads caused Steve to disconnect somewhat. The Squad nerds are hilarious and surprisingly effective, as is the extremely gay Norwegian goth they puck up along the way, and the first zombie Martin accidentally creates follows him around like a rotting puppy, which is sad yet horrifyingly funny. I was also fond of the running gags about Norway's cultural blandness--the scenes of Nazi zombies breaking in on mildly surprised Norwegians dressed in pastel running outfits never got old, at least for me--and the built-in inefficiency of their police system. Half of the movie's in English, too, because English is to the Scandinavian school system what French is to ours (except far more so, because they apparently actually emerge being able to speak it intelligibly).
From an entertaining trifle, however, we now switch to what I believe may become a modern classic: Housebound, starring Morgana O'Reilly as Kylie Bucknell, a not-so-juvenile delinquent we first meet while she's attempting to rob an ATM machine, breaking it open with a sledgehammer and dynamite, then extracting the cashbox and trying to flee--a plan somewhat stymied by the fact that her idiot boyfriend has parked the car on a speed-bump. So Kylie gets put on house arrest and sent "home," to the house she left when she was probably fifteen and hasn't been back to since, which is occupied by her ultra-"nice," forever-nattering mother Miriam (Rima Te Wiata) and Miriam's gentle, looming, sadly silent second husband, Graeme (Ross Harper).
Miriam is convinced that the house is haunted, which Kylie thinks is ridiculous, 'till things start happening she can't entirely explain. Luckily, the guy monitoring her ankle-bracelet--Maori security systems expert Amos (Glen-Paul Waru)--just happens to be an amateur ghost-hunter in his spare time, and becomes obsessed with checking the place over for NRE ("negative rsidual energy"). "A closed mind is no defense against the supernatural, Kylie," he warns her. "What you gonna do when a ghost comes at you, huh?" "I'm gonna punch it in the face," she replies, and indeed, that remains her methodology throughout: see something scary--a kid's toy that suddenly starts saying creepy shit to her in the middle of the night, for example--and jump on it, beat it up, kick it downstairs, burn it in the fireplace. She's a scream queen who never screams, except in anger.
What I love most about Kylie, however, is that for all her disgust with society/her Mum's suburban values/herself, she can't quite manage to not care about anything, let alone mask the fact that she's far smarter than she thinks it's cool to appear. Throughout, she become steadily more able to feel for other people, as well as for herself, so when she gets a shock bad enough to render her silent and shaking, it's like a stomach-punch. She connects the dots fast, takes action unhesitatingly, defends the weak, persecutes the strong, deceptive and immoral. And better yet, the way the narrative twists as it goes along, sliding (spoilers, I guess) straight from one genre into another without missing a beat, is as endlessly inventive as the characters themselves.
The most overtly Jacksonian touches definitely come in the back half, however, and a lot of them have to do with body horror--and while it's not quite Brain-Dead level, there's some juicy shit that goes on, so be warned. At least one of them really took me by surprise, and it comes with a further punchline that made me wince, then guffaw: the movie in a nutshell, that.
Okay, back to it.
I've made some sales recently, so that's great--money pending. Had some interesting pro stuff happen, mostly slated for after I'm done with This Effing Book(tm). But the book itself skitters forward at a rate of about 500 words a day if I'm lucky--I write, then cut, then write again. Could have ended the chapter last night, but I want to get to something actually spooky, so it's going to be at least one more section before I'm done. And I've been inside for a week, probably because the weather's just so penetratingly, shittily cold that I literally don't want to go out.
So anyway, so anyway. Boring bullshit, move on.
Stuff that's been keeping me distracted: TV, mostly--probably far too much TV, but it's cheap and easily fit to your personal schedule. Fanfiction. (It amuses me to see that "This Old Death" has slowly crept up to 1,017 hits, though people are still pretty chary with the comments, and I'm not sure how many of them go on to "Death To Everyone" afterwards, because I guess there are far less people out there who want to be consistently reminded that Rick Grimes and the Governor are doing the nasty than I might have hoped. "What's The Matter...?" finally got its first comment ever, from a person who found it while looking for Milton/Philip and was happy with the result, even though Milton doesn't exactly get a happy ending in my 'verse than he did canonically.) Plus the very occasional movie, since we almost never see anything in the theatre anymore--the last one was Taken 3, my call, for which I apologize--and are thus "forced" to buy them on DVD.
Two which were very much worth the effort, however, are the last ones we got hold of: Norwegian freakmeister Tommy Wirkola's Do Sno 2: Red vs. Dead and Gerard Johnstone's Kiwi thriller Housebound. The latter comes with a front-of-the-box quote from Sir(!) Peter Jackson, who calls it "bloody brilliant," and I can see why...in a lot of ways, it reminded me of Jackson's own early work, especially in terms of certain effects, though the character-mechanics base is far more solid and the general shock factor far lower.
I'll start with Dod Sno 2, that rare sequel which A) prove to work perfectly well as a stand-alone and B) serves to retroactively redeem its predecessor, which I thought was cute but slight, all premise, and didn't stick around in my brain for more than a minute afterwards. Said premise is re-encapsulated aptly over the pre-credits sequence: hapless Martin, the Bruce Campbell of Scandinavia, went up to the mountains on a cabin getaway trip with his best friends only to watch them get predated on by a bunch of cursed Nazi zombies they woke from their hoarfrosty graves by "stealing" a bunch of gold the Nazis collected back in WWII. Martin was bitten but chopped his own arm off, then drove away with the lead zombie's arm, which was ripped off during a final struggle. Got it? Good.
Martin wakes up to find he's been charged with his friends' murders and has also received the Nazi arm as a transplant, which gives him superpowers (the arm is crazy strong, and can resurrect the dead), as well as a bad case of Can't Control My Evil Hand! syndrome. When a kid sneaks into his room to take photos of the arm and for the Zombie Squad, who claim to be a "professional" zombie-hunting outfit from the States, Martin's arm chucks the kid through a wall and Martin is able to escape. He tries to give the kid CPR but only succeeds in breaking his chest open, ending up with a fistful of organs and the kid's iPhone, so as he's driving away (covered in blood, his default state for the rest of the film), he calls said Zombie Squad and explains the situation. The Squad agrees to fly over and help.
Unfortunately, the Squad is just three geeks living with their parents in Hoboken, or wherever. Still, they have a plan: find out what sort of revenge the Nazi zombies want--"cursed zombies always want revenge"--and then find/make another bunch of cursed zombies to fight them. This is easier done than you might think, 'cause let's face it, the SS made (dead) enemies everywhere they went. So Martin has to tote his zombie-creating arm up into the mountains again, wake a mass grave full of dead Russian POWs, and hope that solves the problem...which it doesn't, of course. Because nothing's easy.
I really liked Dod Sno 2, though by the end, the surfeit of gross humour and exploding heads caused Steve to disconnect somewhat. The Squad nerds are hilarious and surprisingly effective, as is the extremely gay Norwegian goth they puck up along the way, and the first zombie Martin accidentally creates follows him around like a rotting puppy, which is sad yet horrifyingly funny. I was also fond of the running gags about Norway's cultural blandness--the scenes of Nazi zombies breaking in on mildly surprised Norwegians dressed in pastel running outfits never got old, at least for me--and the built-in inefficiency of their police system. Half of the movie's in English, too, because English is to the Scandinavian school system what French is to ours (except far more so, because they apparently actually emerge being able to speak it intelligibly).
From an entertaining trifle, however, we now switch to what I believe may become a modern classic: Housebound, starring Morgana O'Reilly as Kylie Bucknell, a not-so-juvenile delinquent we first meet while she's attempting to rob an ATM machine, breaking it open with a sledgehammer and dynamite, then extracting the cashbox and trying to flee--a plan somewhat stymied by the fact that her idiot boyfriend has parked the car on a speed-bump. So Kylie gets put on house arrest and sent "home," to the house she left when she was probably fifteen and hasn't been back to since, which is occupied by her ultra-"nice," forever-nattering mother Miriam (Rima Te Wiata) and Miriam's gentle, looming, sadly silent second husband, Graeme (Ross Harper).
Miriam is convinced that the house is haunted, which Kylie thinks is ridiculous, 'till things start happening she can't entirely explain. Luckily, the guy monitoring her ankle-bracelet--Maori security systems expert Amos (Glen-Paul Waru)--just happens to be an amateur ghost-hunter in his spare time, and becomes obsessed with checking the place over for NRE ("negative rsidual energy"). "A closed mind is no defense against the supernatural, Kylie," he warns her. "What you gonna do when a ghost comes at you, huh?" "I'm gonna punch it in the face," she replies, and indeed, that remains her methodology throughout: see something scary--a kid's toy that suddenly starts saying creepy shit to her in the middle of the night, for example--and jump on it, beat it up, kick it downstairs, burn it in the fireplace. She's a scream queen who never screams, except in anger.
What I love most about Kylie, however, is that for all her disgust with society/her Mum's suburban values/herself, she can't quite manage to not care about anything, let alone mask the fact that she's far smarter than she thinks it's cool to appear. Throughout, she become steadily more able to feel for other people, as well as for herself, so when she gets a shock bad enough to render her silent and shaking, it's like a stomach-punch. She connects the dots fast, takes action unhesitatingly, defends the weak, persecutes the strong, deceptive and immoral. And better yet, the way the narrative twists as it goes along, sliding (spoilers, I guess) straight from one genre into another without missing a beat, is as endlessly inventive as the characters themselves.
The most overtly Jacksonian touches definitely come in the back half, however, and a lot of them have to do with body horror--and while it's not quite Brain-Dead level, there's some juicy shit that goes on, so be warned. At least one of them really took me by surprise, and it comes with a further punchline that made me wince, then guffaw: the movie in a nutshell, that.
Okay, back to it.
