[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.