[book - review] Duma Keys (2008)

The King is always the King...

After a really long career and a huge list of books (many of them masterpieces, really few the bad ones) he is still able to pull out from his hat a wonderful book written in a simply amazing way.

By now all the people who were criticizing him are quiet, impossible to still confine him inside a single genre : he is complete and he create masterpieces outside horror's fences too, touching sides like fantasy, science fiction and even adult novelty like in Stand By Me.
There are also people who accuse him to be verbose... well, I must admit that happens quite sometimes but it's a venial sin.

Like Duma Key's beginning... for the first 50 pages I have been in  complete ecstasy for the prose and the unfold of Edgar Freemantle's story (for everyone of you who is a Kingophile this name summons something, right? ;)), and it seems also kinda of autobiographic : an horrible accident is near taking the main character's life, leaving him alive but without an arm and with a blind eye; King has been more dead than alive after a tremendous accident with his motorcycle, undergoing 7 surgeries and months of therapies.

The book is a sort of diary of Freemantle himself and talks about all the stuff that happened (fantastic/mysterious/tragic) after his move to the Keys for a rehab after the accident. And in Duma Keys he will receive a gift, but the prices will be truly high.

As always the characters are truly exceptionals, like the story that will reveal the paranormal side really far deep into the plot.
One of his masterpiece for me!

[book - review] Dracula unbound (1990)

Like many, I'm fascinated by the sensual and violently primitive figure of the vampire, even if I'm not a big lover of Stoker's book.
Over the years I had the chance to read many books about vampires, some truly masterpieces (Carmilla of Sheridan LeFanu, The Vampire of Polidori) some enjoyable (Kalogridis' Diaries of the Family Dracul or the Anita Blake's series) and then some really horrible (one word... sparkling) to finally find this one.

As like the previous book from the same author I reviewed (Cryptozoic) an alternative theory (that's funny, a new theory about a imaginary character) about vampires' existence is proposed but this time is plausible, it has a logic that goes beyond the book's plot... more, it would be even believable in our own reality!

The characters are well described, sometimes even extremely and the storyline is catching with just some low points now and then.

A book for both lovers of true vampires and sci-fi.

[movie - review] Halloween - The Beginning (2007)

Finally i got to see this Rob Zombie movie.
You know, I'm not so keen on remakes (okay, i hate them!) and this matter even regarding an artist i really like, both for his music and cinematographic production (House of 1000 corpses and The devil's rejects are two hell of movies!) and there are so many bodies in the sea of horror that i have always found a good excuses to avoid it.... but than it happened.
Truth to say, Rob didn't just made a rip-off of one of the most important and iconic movie of the last 40 years but he tried to expand the story going somewhat deeper into Myers' childhood to open a window for us to see how and, maybe, why everything's started.
The first part is all about little Michael's troubles within the family, at school and with other kids but also shows an already kinda of rotten soul who enjoy killing little animals. Was Michael a mind-weak victim, a mere product of what he had to suffer? Or it was a ticking bomb who was just about to explode, no matter what? Hard to say (not only for a work of imagination but it would have been also in reality) what's matter is that now we know something more about a legend as MM really is.
Honestly I didn't found that part that interesting or like something I needed to know... Michael Myers has been (and still is) an incarnation of pure evil, a charismatic presence, a towering concetrate of destruction... This is what our minds, hearts and guts needs to know about him!!
Usually I really love to learn something about the past of the villains that populates our microcosm, I'm eager to see from which pit of hell he/she came out, watching how things decay but Myers ...He is a presence that need no presentation, it's like the boogeyman that lives in your closet : you don't need to know why or what it is to be scared as shit. Michael Myers IS.
Apart from that the movie is enjoyable, with the classic old-style photography and direction that is Zombie's trademark but is clearly way below the grandeur of the original Carpenter flick (maybe this was useless to say).
The cast isn't bad and there are more than one known face, many of them from the previous works of  Rob (Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, William Forsythe, Ken Foree, Leslie Easterbrook, Lew Temple, Danny Trejo) plus other big names like Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif, William Forsythe and Udo Kier.
Probably the biggest "defeat" is for McDowell, that even with a more complex and deeper character lose his comparison with the original Dr. Loomis portraied by the great Donald Pleasence while the new Myers (Tyler Mane, Troy and X-men) is kinda of anonymous.

[book - review] Cryptozoic (1967)

There's something that I think is essential when I'm reviewing a scifi book : its verisimilitude.
Obviously in a gender like Sci-Fi to work with feet strongly bound to earth or to not claim wonderful technological inventions or astounding evolutions would be nonsense, but I can't completely leave aside the fact that explanations should have a logic (within the book's microcosm) and a verisimilitude that the writer should have given to it.

And this is the biggest lack of this Aldiss' work.
The writer talks about mind trips, flowing of time and begin/end of the world by giving to us a really interesting theory on time itself but, other than being really extreme (a thing that it's not such an invalidating thing for scifi stuff) lay its basement on a lists of theories and conjectures that have the same stability of a cards castle built upon an awaken cat!

The book itself, although, is enough enjoyable but some paragraphs are a bit hard to follow, both for author's writing style and for the notions ("realistic", so based on our world like description of mental illnesses, or "imaginary", like those previously mentioned theories on time and stuff) they're filled with.
The characters are not badly described but none of them have that sparkle of genius that will keep it in your mind after the book's end.

[book - review] Enclave (Razorland book #1 - 2011)

This is a book about a world after an holocaust, with survivors that is now divided into tribes with different kinds (and levels) of societies ancient-style and with dangers that comes from mutations and violent behaviours.
All these things rang more than a bells in your mind?
Indeed, there are plenty of books that tells similar stories : some are good, many are fair, some are really bad.

Well, here we're talking about the first kind because Aguirre's post holocaust world is alive, deep and full of interesting stuff and situations.
The story caught me from the beginning, kept my eyes on the pages word after word, eager to discover what Deuce and her friends will face after the next corner, waiting to see how the things (and characters) will develop.
Talking about the characters... they are well and deeply defined but not still. They grow pages after pages, shaped by the events and absolutely well written by the author, most of the times with just few well chosen words.
Can't wait to go on with the series!

[movie - review] Cold Prey II (2008)

I saw recently the first one and found it really good so I was really after this one.
The big question in my mind was "which road the director will follow?".
To clarify, the first one ended in a way that was clearly an opener for a sequel, but what's left open was how the hell this would happen?
It would follow the path of Jason, creating an immortal killer? Or trying to create something more realistic?

I'm not here to say which way it has been followed here, it's enough to say that they have chosen correctly (for my tastes) and this second episode (at the moment it's a trilogy, still missing to see the third one) kept the great things that made me love the first one.

This time Jotunheimen is just a cumbersome presence and the Hotel has been replaced by an hospital... but the creepy feeling and the anguish is still high, thanks to the storyline and the great work made by building up atmosphere and sense of anticipation.

The plot isn't absolutely something so original but it's solid and even if you will surely guess so many things it won't disappoint you how the story unfolds itself.

The director of this sequel is Mats Stenberg (this is his first work) while the main actress is still Ingrid Bolsø Berdal and her performance is greater than before.

(gifs aren't mine)

[movie - review] Cold Prey (2006)

I love Scandinavia... I'm mad about their culture, history and mythology from when I was really a small kid.
And I've been in Norway, I've been on the Jotunheimen and I found everything simply awesome.

Recently I discovered also a really interesting and lively movies scene (Troll Hunter, Let The Right One In, Dead Snow... talking about the firsts that comes to my mind).
And now this Cold Prey.

A group of friends found themselves trapped in an old abandoned hotel after one of them had a bad accident with the snowboard... trapped because they're hunted by someone.

The white, cold and immense Jotunheimen is a perfect place for a thriller/horror like this the big, creepy hotel the movie is located. Both of the become main characters of the story.

Roar Uthaug and his teams of writers created a solid story (even if not that mind-blowing... you'll guess everything from about the start) and directs a movie where the tension is always high on level and where there's a balanced amount of violence and blood.
It's clear that the main inspiration behind the evil character comes from movies like Halloween (and its Michael Myers) and from Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhee. The hunter in Cold Prey is a good one, but there's no match at all against those two legendary horror icons, especially on the charisma level.

All of actors performed at a really good rate. Between them, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal (that will be in Chernobyl Diaries) and Tomas Alf Larsen, already in Troll Hunter.