WTF Movie of the Week: The Cabin in the Woods!

"There's zombies and there's Pain-Worshipping Zombie
Red Neck Torture Family. They're two very different things."

Okay, so I'm a busy man. Or maybe I've just been lazy lately. But last night I finally got to see what the rest already discovered ages ago: The Cabin in the Woods is a surprisingly good movie. And I say 'surprisingly good movie' because I think it's too early to use 'effing modern classic'.

Expecting to see some teenagers get slaughtered in a ...yes... cabin in the woods, I settled myself in front of the TV only to find the movie opened with a couple of middle-aged button-down office clerks (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) talking about their private lifes. Flashes from Severance came to mind, but that was all quickly disspelled when the teenagers actually showed up and they actually went on a weekend retreat to a ...yes... cabin in the woods.
They quickly meet the odd stranger telling them the cabin isn't safe... blablabla... but they go anyway. In the cabin they find a strange book with words in Latin that they read out loud and ...wait for it... the undead rise... Since you're here on a horror blog I guess you can fill in the rest of the movie.

BUT... snap back to the two office clerks who take bets over which of the evil monsters the teenagers are actually going to conjure up, who seem to orchestrate the whole damn mess and who pull mysterious levers when one of the teenagers die. So, there should be something more to this movie than meets the eye, right?

Right! The movie ends about half an hour early when the last of the teenagers supposedly dies and the office clerks open up a batch of brewski's and champagne. All is well. But wait, the mysterious red phone rings and one of the office clerks feels the blood drain from his face (one of Bradley Whitford's finest moments). And then all hell breaks loose. Literally!

Trying not to give away too much: the rest of the movie I watched with open mouth!

Everything about this movie is just right. The tension and suspense in the Cabin holds a candle to Halloween, the deaths of the teenagers are done in gory, 80's-style, the humour is on a par with Scream (remember that one?) and some of the most beloved characters in the horror genre make their appearance including a very ominous version of Pinhead holding not a cube, but a puzzle sphere.

The movie's most lovable character has a huge roll, which is a joy to watch (Donnie Darko's Fran Kranz) and the office clerks are well over-acted, especially Bradley Whitford who keeps complaining he would've liked to have seen the kids killed by a Merman.

For once I DID NOT get the feeling the writers dug themselves in a hole of which they couldn't dig themselves out anymore, as so often is the case with these type of movies. You can clearly see the writers had a clear vision and goal as to where they wanted this movie to go and they had a lot of fun making it. And it shows!

A solid movie. Don't be surprised to find this on the classic list one day.

Marcel

Emergency Post: Cyberdyne Systems created HAL?

"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't let you do that."

Okay, so maybe I went a little overboard with my sci-fi emersion lately, but I came across this and it just freaked me out so much! Have a look...

http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/robotsuithal/

I've went over this every which way, but I just don't understand it. Maybe the CEO is a sci-fi buff or something, but even then... to name your company after one of sci-fi's most evil icons of the last four decades is... a bit out there. And I'm sure there are stock holders who 'just don't get it'. What are gonna say when your intranet is trying to take over the world?
"We never saw it coming," is definitely not going to work!

And then the suit. The suit will actually be used to clean up Japan's contaminated areas after the meltdown of the nuclear reactor near Fukushima, so THAT'S alright. But to name it HAL? Isn't that cutting it a bit too close? Especially since your company name is already Cyberdyne.

To use one of the English language's most giggle-inducing descriptions, I was flabbergasted. And I'm sure I could spend hours trying to explain to you exactly how it made me feel, but I'll just leave with these two excerpts and be done with it.

BTW, check out the bottom of the page, where it says Domestic Rental. I guess you can rent this suit as a private person as well. You know, for heavy lifting around the house.

Marcel

The Wait is over: Night Gypsy is out now!

Look, my name is in there!

I know I may be preaching to the choir, since I'm sure all of you already pre-ordered this after my previous post (of course you did!), but....


Woohoo! The Night Gypsy: Journey into Darkness anthology which features two (2!) of my stories is out as of this week! It is available on Amazon (click! click! click it now!)

Beside my own contributions it will feature some of the latest and best in horror literature from Australia, Holland and the US. The overall theme of the anthology will be the descend into homicidal madness, since long a favorite theme of horror writers everywhere (Lucy Comes to Stay... by Robert Bloch, anyone?)

But it's not just for horror buffs. The tagline mentions 'suspense, drama and horror'. Even drama and suspense afficionados will get their fill.

I would highly suggest you check it out! You don't want to miss some of the up and coming authors of this moment. And while you do, hit the Like-button on the Facebook-page.

Indie Gypsy, the publisher of the aforementioned anthology, is a small publishing company with a wide variety of movie, music and literature projects in production, but that's just the way they like it! The tastes of the editors are plenty and wide, ranging from literature to cooking, so there will always be something interesting going on. Have a look at what they're all about at www.indiegypsy.com.

So, ahem, so far for the shameless self-promotion, but I'm very excited about this!

Marcel

Ps. Seriously, check it out...

What We Found in the News: Honey Bee Brains in Robot?

Plans are already in motion!

Somewhere last year I bought Asimov's The Complete Robot; a collection of his short robot stories. I took it with me on vacation this year and was completely hooked. I've never been much of a sci-fi fan, but lately the genre has been calling me more and more.

I had just finished reading '...that Thou art Mindful of Him' in which George 10, a sentient robot, tries to wrap his positronic brain around the conundrum of how to make humans like robots. For those of you not familiar with the works of Asimov: in most of his stories robots are not allowed on Earth, but just work on industrial sites on the Moon or other planets. Something Asimov calls the Frankenstein-effect. This story is about negating that effect (i.e. making people accept robots as a valuable assett in their daily lives (for the sake of big bucks, I might add)).

Now, here a spoiler!

The answer George 10 comes up with is to make the robots less human-looking so people will not feel so threatened. Of course, people would also will be threatened by a talking robot dog, George 10 goes on to dumb the intelligence of the robots down. The idea being that once people have accepted dumb, animalistic robots, they will later on also accept human-shaped, smart robots. Well, as it turns out the animal robots will so dumb they cannot comprehend the Three Laws of Robotics anymore (where it states that a robot cannot harm a human being) with obvious disastrous results.
 Now, I come to my point. The first dumb robots they're going to make are small birds and insects like bees.

Please keep in mind, this story was written in 1974.

Last week, I read this article: http://zeenews.india.com/news/eco-news/honey-bee-brains-can-help-make-robots-smarter_803471.html

I'll give you a moment to read it....
....
....
....

Freaky? I think so.

Since long I've been fascinated with the concept of art imitating life imitating art, etcetera. There are numerous examples, from philosophical tractates inspiring revolutionaries to early 1950's sci-fi stories inspiring later generations of scientists. But this was a little too literal for me. Although in this case there is no direct link to the research and the Asimov story, Asimov has been credited as being the inspiration for numerous scientific discoveries. Not in the least the story that the US company Unimation Inc. who supply assembly robots to automobile factories around the globe. The founder of the company admitted that he was so inspired during his time as a student at Columbia University by Asimov's stories that he founded the robot company.

And why not? Asimov was a great writer with also a great insight into the human psyche. I read the book back to back in one week and I totally get why this guy is credited as one of the best sci-fi writers ever. Young scientists will definitely be inspired by this.

But this confirms that, to some extend, the future will be shaped by the visions of speculative writers and well-shaped stories. This inspires me no end to keep writing, but it also has a dark side.

Numerous stories tell us of a dark and dystopian future. And some of those are just far-fetched, but some of them could serve as warnings. Maybe in 300 years we will regard one story or another as being especially visionary. Or maybe we will shape the world wittingly or unwittingly towards one of these stories.

The only problem is we will not know if this is true until years (centuries) later. So it's all pretty much a non-issue.

All I want to say to all young writers is, KEEP WRITING! Your visions could be more than gold!

Oh, and read some Asimov...

Wanna know more about this issue: iO9!

Why it Kicks Ass: Attic Clowns by Jeremy C. Shipp!

Clowns never really were
funny, weren't they?

Keeping in touch with my horror roots, I decided some time ago to rekindle my fondness of evil clowns. The original obsession with this type of monster had nothing to do with Stephen King's iconic translation of the theme; I just don't like clowns. I don't get them. Honestly, why would anyone think that children would like to see some guy in oversized dungarees with a parody of a human face... for a face! How can this be anything BUT horrifying to any kid? Therefore, in my view all clowns are evil, even the ones that cry.

So, coming back to my original point. Lately I've been seeing a lot about this writer who apparently ran off four (4!) volumes of clown horror stories. Not wanting to run the chance of encountering a 'too much of a good thing' sort of situation, I just ordered the first volume from RedRumHorror (again with the Stephen King, see?)

The book contains 13 stories (of course) of varying lengths, but all of them deal with clowns and/or attics, although the whole gamma of horror creatures makes an appearance (living soap men, for example). Now, here's the kicker: none of them actually deal with clowns in the traditional sense! AND THAT'S JUST WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT THEM!

At this point I'd like to remind you that the 'Why it Kicks Ass' section of Floating Robes is NOT a review section. I'd just like to explain why I think this book kicks the proverbial ass.

Having said that, none of the stories are actually horror, none will give you nightmares unless you're like me and have an inborn fear of going crazy. The clowns in the stories are often representations of fears, personas, complexes or other psychological phenomana in the mind of the protagonist. Jeremy C. Shipp created with this a map, if you will, of the dark side of the human mind! With evil clowns!

For example, take the story of the man stuck in the attic with a dead clown (called A Quivering Gray Fog). There's a hole in the floor which leads to Hell. And there are a bunch of photographs on the desk which depict the same photograph. Every night, our protagonist takes a photo of the photo. On the original we'll probably see why he's here and what is going on, but by now the photo of the photo of the photo is so far removed from the original that it's hard to figure out. Well, without giving away the plot, the solution involves an underling demon who feasts on human feet.

Without getting to pretentious (or maybe it's too late) the man obviously feels guilty about something and the dead body probably has something to do with it. He feels he's halfway down to Hell and furiously tries to find out what he did wrong and why he's there. The story eminates an array of loneliness, guilt and confusion with not only redemption at the end, but also an overwhelming sense of human foolishness.

As you can tell, the stories are mostly bizarre and weird and certainly not for people who like to hang on to horror in the traditional sense. There'll be a lot of people who 'just don't get it'. But to anyone with an interest in psychology (like all horror writers should have, I'm sure), the stories are just great!

Mr. Shipp's style is terse and almost without any adjectives which makes the stories even more tense and gloomy than they would be otherwise. An ironic sense of humour surrounds most of the stories although I never found myself laughing out loud. Reading the book puts the reader in a strange mood, though, and I found it hard to shake the type of thinking that this kind of writing instills in the reader. Even now, long after I've read the book, I still think about it, much like I do with some of the classics I used to read when I was younger. I guess that means that Mr. Shipp has created some sort of post-modern clown punk horror classic or something!

Okay, so now he's got me rambling about it. If you haven't read the book and are into some weird stuff, go buy it. If you like your vampires sparkling, please forego this one. If you've read the book and 'just didn't get it', re-read it and remember 'It's all in your head!'

Marcel

Mr. Shipp's Blog
To the Book!