Tuesday 18 December 2018

Review: "The Predator"



BLACK, Shane, “The Predator”, Twentieth Century Fox/Davis Entertainment, 2018.


I’ve seen some pretty stupid movies in my time. Is this the stupidest? I’m thinking it has to be Top Five.

It’s not the concept – which has been road-tested to Hell and back – and it’s not even the thespians involved, who range from ‘mediocre’ to a solid ‘good’, depending upon the vehicle; it’s the writers and the producers and the director who are squarely to blame for this piece of trash. But first: some history.

Back in the Dark Ages (1987), there was a crackpot movie that came out of nowhere and took the world by storm. It was about a bunch of tough-as-nails, top-flight-but-seriously-damaged soldier-boys who went down into South America to make the lives of some drug cartel losers extremely difficult. On the way out, they ran into some trouble: trouble with a capital ‘T’ from outer space, out to indulge its joy of a-huntin’ and a-fishin’. An alien redneck to be precise. That movie was “Predator”. It was lightning in a bottle; magic: effortlessly good.

A few years went by during which some Hollywood types tried to think of a way to capitalise on the success of this film and their overarching concern took the form of the mantra “Don’t Fuck It Up!”. In 1990, they re-located everything to the big city for 1) contrast, and 2) budgetary concerns. They lost Arnie, but they snagged Danny Glover (straight off of the “Lethal Weapon” franchise success) and they made a solid, but tentative sequel – tentative in that it didn’t really do anything new and left everyone wanting more. They hadn’t fucked it up, but as a concept it was still treading water.

What they HAD done was show the skull of H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph hanging on the wall of the Predator’s space-buggy and this set bells ringing in franchise-land. Why don’t we show the Predator macking on an Alien? How cool would that be?! Yes, yes, cool indeed but two big-budget films couldn’t do the concept justice – “AVP: Alien vs. Predator” (2004) and “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” (2007) were both snore-fests of a grand order and did absolutely nothing to boost either parent franchise (although somehow we still got “Prometheus”…). Moving on:

The Hollywood dudes then obviously decided to get back to core business and so we got… Adrien Brody? Taking on… a Predator? Well, yes (spoiler alert!), he was the big monster in “The Village”, but that was just a dumb suit. Anyway, by this time he had an Oscar tucked in his belt and a stint as King Kong’s love rival in the Peter Jackson re-make behind him, so I guess the money people felt that all that pretty much amounted to “Arnie’s successor in a Predator movie” on paper. 2+2= um, 5? Anyway, “Predators” in 2010, was, as you’d expect, Gods-awful and not even Laurence Fishburne could pull its arse out of the flames.

All the while that this was going on, there was an entire fanbase of comics readers out there who were scratching their heads and asking themselves “how could they get it all so wrong?”. After all, from pretty much the moment Arnie walked out of the jungle in the first film - spitting out a tooth and flipping the alien red-neck the bird - Dark Horse Comics were right there, buying the rights to the property and starting to pump out year after year of high-quality, kick-arse narrative about these bad boys. With all this material flying about and pumping up the fans, how could they not make a smash-success of this property?

Well, by completely ignoring everything that the comics people were doing, that’s how. “Oh but we’re Hollywood,” they sneered; “we are a cut above the four-colour world and its tedious little maunderings. We have scope; and range; and investors who want to put pressure on our creative context in order to sell more sneakers and SUVs at the expense of any plot cohesion or artistic intent…”

*Ahem*

Anyhoo, despite all this source material, they dropped the ball.

And now there’s this.

The one thing that could be said about all of the intervening films, between the first one and this latest one, is that there was serious intent behind them. In every case, the intention was to make a solid, resonant, powerful iteration of the initial movie; something that would build on that fertile ground, say something new and move the project forward in bold directions. With this movie, the writers, director and producers got together and kicked things off with the immortal lines: “fuck it: let’s just paint-by-numbers and sink some brewskis!”

The result is this piece of garbage. It’s a complete pastiche of the first film – set in America this time so product placement can easily occur – and every character on screen is a caricature, not an actual person. Each piece of dialogue is heavily spiced with every four-letter word that they could find and Thomas Jane’s character even has Tourette’s, just to dial things up to 11. They play the Maximising Card by making a bigger, badder Predator (in the style of “The Meg”), rather than just using the ones that they already have with a bit more intelligence, and the Hollywood Morality play-book is firmly on hand as regards all of the female characters. On top of everything, they even have a running gag with a ‘Dog Predator’ repeatedly playing ‘fetch’ with a hand-grenade. Finally, just to add insult to injury, any of you out there who are on the Asperger’s Spectrum will be pleased to know that your affliction is just a sign of evolution in action. Your long-awaited super-power is in the mail.

Even the font that they used for the credits is bog-standard tedious.

Miss it. With intent.

One Tentacled Horror.

Saturday 1 December 2018

Review: "The Meg"



TURTELTAUB, Jon (Dir.), “The Meg”, Warner Bros. Pictures/Gravity Pictures, 2018.


I’m not a conspiracy nut, but there’s a part of me that thinks all of these shark films are part of a movement to discredit sharks and make them seem more villainous than they are (they aren’t) in order to prop up sales of bogus Chinese medicinal cures. Sharks universally get the rough end of the pineapple simply because nature’s take on an efficient killing machine doesn’t come with big puppy eyes and snugly fur. That doesn’t alter the fact that since 2006, more people in Australia have been killed by horses than they have by sharks, and the shark stats don’t even get out of the single digits. Despite this, stupid people who think that they suddenly develop a shield of immunity when they pop on their budgie-smugglers and jump into the surf, cry out in their fear for shark culls, drift nets and other ridiculous tactics that cost more lives (human and otherwise), time and effort than simply leaving. The Damned. Fish. ALONE!

(*Ahem!*)

In this flick, the creators sought to find a way to make the sharks bigger and meaner than ever before. In doing so, they turned to prehistory and decided to revive the biggest, baddest shark of all time, the Megalodon, or “Meg” as they have contracted it (and taken from the book series of the same name). It’s at this point that they start to come undone: in order to make us believe in this creature, they have to contrive a means whereby it could have survived the millennia without our ever being aware of it. Their rationale is that the beastie has been living far below what we’ve perceived as the bottom of the deepest undersea trench on the planet, held down there by a layer of freezing-cold water which prevents it rising to the surface. The realm below this layer, or “thermocline”, has been visually obscured for us by a drifting cloud of silt caught in its chilly embrace. Now, I’m not fully conversant in the ways that sonar works but I’m pretty certain that a cloud of silt doesn’t block its functioning; so the initial premise of this movie that no-one is even sure that there is a lower depth to the seabed than previously thought is a dubious one from the get-go.

Anyway, once we’ve floated this concept of a ‘deeper dark’, our heroes blithely wander down into it in their submersibles, only to be attacked first, by a giant squid, and later, by the Meg itself. “Oh no!” they cry, “who would have thought that there would be consequences to our unthinking hubris?” Anyway, we soon have stranded submersibles on the (actual) seafloor more than 11,000 metres below the surface and the support team in the seabase up above decides to call in an expert to save them.

That person turns out to be Jason Statham who plays the hard-bitten diving expert Jonas (see what they did there?), now hard-drinking in obscurity in Thailand. In the pre-credit sequence we see that he once tried to save some submariners in a stranded vessel way down in the trench but was forced to abandon half his team and some of the victims in order to flee the Meg’s assault. Since no-one else survived who saw the bite which the shark inflicted on the sub, Jonas is considered to have contracted some kind of depth-inflicted delusion and to have recklessly abandoned the rescue causing multiple deaths. Note well that, in this part of the flick, the nature of deep-sea diving effects upon the human corpus is played for all it’s worth; they abandon it pretty quickly hereafter.

Jonas decides not to become involved, but after learning that his ex-wife is trapped down in the dark, he decides to come on board. Now, movies bend the truth an awful lot and are a mine of disinformation (not only about the savagery and vindictiveness of sharks) but here we steer a course close to being recklessly loose with the truth. If you’ve ever gone SCUBA diving, you’ll be aware that you’re not supposed to drink alcohol for a certain time beforehand; it alters your blood chemistry and can make you susceptible to various forms of pressure-related incapacity. Nevertheless, our hero goes from hard-drinking in Thailand to jumping aboard a deep-sea submersible within a couple of hours. We’re asked to believe that he’s crazy because he once saw a big shark; I’m more prepared to call him crazy for participating at all in the rescue.

From here on in the gloves are off: pressure has no place in the Meg’s universe. Giant sharks can rocket up to the surface from 11,000 metres without exploding upon breaching the meniscus and people can do likewise. Ladies and gentlemen: physics has left the building.

All this being said, the rest of this flick is simply an action blockbuster, the plotting of which has nothing at all to add to the body of lore that already exists out there. It charts a course from “Jaws”, to “Deep Blue Sea”, through to “The Shallows”, without drawing breath, nimbly sidestepping everything we learned from “The Abyss”. The only difference is that all those movies said something interesting; this one does not.

What this film does bring to the mix is an interesting non-Eurocentric flavour. We begin our adventure in the China Sea, bounce around in Thailand for awhile, and then wash up on a Chinese beach resort. Along the way there are references to Taiwan, Japan, even Australia, in order to absolutely demonstrate that we aren’t in the Americas at all. The pool of non-Asian actors is quite small and this is a refreshing change. Obviously, this is because a huge whack of the funding for this movie came from Chinese sources, showing the influence which Beijing is able to exercise over international popular culture nowadays. In an affront to my conspiracy thinking ways, the Chinese characters in this story actually deplore the brutal destruction of sharks for their fins and pseudo-medical applications, so I was genuinely pleased by that inclusion.

Not that, let me be clear, there are any Oscars about to be handed out for the thespians in this vehicle. Jason Statham began his career as a likeable enough leading-man-slash-action-dude but after wallowing in the mire of “The Expendables” for far too long, has lost all intention of bringing nuance to his roles. He pouts; he sulks; he gets his shirt off and then looks around for the girl he’s gonna get. It’s all by the numbers without a trace of subtlety but then, how subtle do you need to be to punch a shark the size of a jumbo jet? There is absolutely no chemistry between him and the heroine, Li Bingbing, and the assumption that they’ll get together after the credits roll lies entirely in all the knowing winks and head nods of the other actors around them.

In the meantime, there’s a conniving billionaire businessman, a self-sacrificing doctor, several pairs of lifelong buddies who don’t survive, a black guy who doesn’t get eaten (following “Deep Blue Sea’s” innovation here), several cute girls to throw in harm’s way and an adorable eight-year-old to provide contrast with the monster: all by-the-numbers action movie plotting, with some agreeable visuals and the inevitable girls in bikinis. At least the dog survives.

Two-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.



Review: "Occult Detective Quarterly", Issue #4 - Spring, 2018



GRANT, John Linwood, & Dave Brzeski (eds.), “Occult Detective Quarterly #4, Spring 2018”, Ulthar Press Books & Magazines (through Amazon US), 2018.

Quarto; paperback; 108pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Near fine.


I have to admit that I’d forgotten that I’d ordered this: what with one thing and another (the approach of Christmas etc.), it took quite a while to reach my front doorstep. Nevertheless, its arrival was greatly appreciated. There is much to enjoy between the covers of every issue of this magazine.

Things take awhile to develop. With something like this kind of publication, it usually takes a few issues to pin everything down and to start to perceive a sort of regular routine that can be followed in the production of each issue – call it ‘muscle memory’ if you will, but in my experience it’s a steep learning curve that only gets easier with each iteration. Gathering material, editing, commissioning artwork, proofing and pre-production are time-consuming aspects of this type of activity and, while never easy, get moreso with each turn around the block. This is issue number four in the life of this journal and the experience gained with the previous releases has obviously been taken on board to good effect. Even a shift from the original publishing entity seems not to have overly affected the production values and the result is a slick and pleasing product. And keep in mind that all of this effort is performed by people who have lives and careers to juggle as well!

Venues for amateur writing have changed dramatically since the days of the first Lovecraft Circle. These days, everyone has a computer and a word-processing program; everyone who ever thought that they had a book inside them waiting to be hammered down, can now spend the time to get it out there. Finding a place to get it published however, is the tricky part: traditional publishers are now awash with submissions and most of them get brought in by the post and taken straight out by the trash. These days, unless you have an agent and a solid publication record, getting your work into print is not easy. Fortunately, with the presence of Internet-based print-on-demand publications such as this, amateur writers can get points on the board and begin to generate the kind of fan-based interest that might lead to more substantial published works in the future. For this reason alone, “The Occult Detective Quarterly” (ODQ) deserves your attention and your monetary support.

The ambit of this publication is to publish amateur writing and art focussing on the activities of investigators confronted by aspects of the supernatural: the detectives may use supernatural means in the course of their searches, or they may simply stumble across mystical hurdles in their pursuit of the Truth. However the mayhem manifests, it adds layers of interest to the standard offerings of the crime fiction genre. By this issue of the series, several standard tropes have come to the fore: the US-based investigator who mixes police procedure with various creole magical systems, such as Vodoun, Santeria, or Hoodoo; the (generally, London-based) late-Victorian William Hope Hodgson pastiche echoing Carnacki’s efforts as chronicled by that author; the Raymond Chandler stylistic knock-off; the monster, or animal, as investigator story; and the New Age practitioner thrust into a dangerous situation. Within these frameworks there are possibilities to blend these forms creatively into each other to unearth new and ever more interesting variants. Along the way there are echoes of various other styles of writing – genre and literary fiction; weird literature; Lovecraftian tropes – which get combed-over and explored in many highly interesting ways. This issue covers much of this territory and delivers some stellar examples of the form. Let’s unpack:

Putting aside regular features for the moment, let’s jump straight to the stories. First cab off the rank is Simon Avery’s “Songs for Dwindled Gods”, an examination of mental illness and substance abuse wrapped up in the hallmarks of faery weirdness. Right from the start I was captivated by this narrative: it involves a recurrent manifestation of The Little People in rural modern-day England which wipes whole hamlet-sized communities off the map – they effectively become ‘forgotten’. Our narrator is the damaged son of a man whose town was obliterated by the arrival of a 60s hippy folk group - “Box of Trees” - who showed up, performed a concert and took the townsfolk away with them afterwards. Our storyteller’s dad was saved by the fact that he and his girlfriend decided to engage upon a romantic tryst before going to the concert. Thereafter the father – doomed to foster care for the rest of his pre-adulthood – developed an obsession for the band and its trail of missing communities. After his father’s death, our narrator finds his father’s notes on the phenomenon and picks up the thread with his own damaged girlfriend in tow… Stories about faeries always tread a knife-edge between believability and sparkly kitsch: not here. The Pale Folk in this story are as ferocious as they come and our investigators couldn’t be more broken and realistically drawn. The execution is brilliant and at no point did any of the plot (replete with time slips and 60s hippy-trippiness) ring false. By the time I finished reading this I wanted to break out all my Arthur Machen works and turn this into a “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying scenario. This was an amazing and refreshing start to issue four.

Also very appealing was Davide Mana’s “Black Frog and Black Scarab”. This is a story about a group of Roman legionnaires carrying out police duties in Cairo, under the aegis of the Roman Empire. A young girl summons the vigiles and takes them to her house where a mummy has risen to seek her aid in obtaining vengeance for the theft of certain crucial parts of its multi-faceted soul. The Romans overcome their fear of the undead to seek out the sorcerer who is draining the nearby necropolis of its spiritual power and – in true, hard-nosed, by-the-books fashion – bring the situation to a satisfying conclusion. The author hamstrings himself somewhat in his narrative by insisting upon correct, triple-barrelled, Roman names for his troopers (including one distractingly-named “Troglodyte”) and by squeezing-in certain jargonistic terms pertinent to the Legion’s policing activities. This is fine if you’re writing an academic treatise on the period, or if you’re writing a longer work where such insertions can be indulged, but here it bogs the action down significantly as strange words and terms interrupt the flow of the story. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a stickler for period accuracy; but there are ways to seed these sorts of things into a fictional narrative without having to sacrifice the punch of the story.

I’m not a fan of paranormal romance. Too often it seems to me to be just Mills & Boon writing for those who are into necrophilia, or bestiality. All of the pretty-boys on the front covers turn out to be dashingly-undead, or shape-shifters who transform into hunky wolves, bears, or panthers (where are all the were-flamingos, I ask myself? Probably Las Vegas…). In “Charms” by Sarah Hans, we are definitely in this territory. This story feels like an episode of “Charmed” or, more pertinently, “Grimm”, except that the New Age, rune-casting heroine of our tale isn’t some fictive legendary animal in human guise but, rather, something far more sinister. When the son of one of her regular clients comes to her straight from gaol and demands with menaces that she convince his mother to bequeath all her wealth to him in her will, our rune-reader wavers and decides to comply. Later, when a dashing detective contacts her to ask if the son has been to her store and mentions that he has just discovered that the ne’er-do-well has taken out a contract on his mother, our rune-lore agent has a crisis of conscience. My main objection to these tales is that really interesting moral conundrums get tossed out before they’re fully examined, and everything plays out for the best – evil-doers get justice; nascent lovers unite; and even regular rune-reading clients whose trust has been sorely abused find an unlikely spirit of forgiveness. Like I said: not my cup of tea, but nevertheless engaging and amusing.

Josh Reynolds writes a series of stories featuring the character of Charles St. Cyprian, Royal Occultist and Defender of the Realm from Mystical Attack, in tandem with his erstwhile assistant, the gun-happy Cockney girl, Ebe Gallowglass. I’ve pointed out previously that – for me – these tales seem to be all flash and no substance, what with their obsession for character wardrobe, naff faux-Wodehouse dialogue and the constant name-dropping of gun brands. Nothing says ‘American author writing about British locales’ more clearly than an over-enthusiasm for period ballistics. This tale, “The Bascomb Rug”, is an attempt at a locked-room mystery set on a remote Orkney Isle that flags all of its secrets before the end of the piece’s title. Seriously – after reading the title, I knew what was coming and all of the red herrings and misdirection that followed were rendered ponderous and annoying as a result. Let it not be said that Mr. Reynolds cannot write well – there are plenty of atmospherics in this story which he captures to perfection – but the rest just comes off as too clever by half. I’ve read Neil Gaiman’s attempts at shaggy-dog stories and they don’t work either: as a rule, whenever you decide to throw down several thousand words in support of a bad pun, don’t.

Wandering into “The Burning Pile” I found myself wondering how many ventriloquists could there possibly be in the average-sized American city? A lot, if this story is anything to go by. In this tale, our hard-bitten police detectives are on the trail of something sinister that convinces professional ventriloquists to lock themselves away and starve themselves to death while kidnapping their dolls. The only clue is a transcribed ancient text in Sanskrit which our investigators decide to have translated by nearby academics. This is a genuinely creepy story and absolutely unnerving in its results and implications; however, my credulity was stretched by the fact that it took twelve – count them – twelve starving vents before the police solved the crime. I was perfectly willing to buy the supernatural underpinnings of the tale but I simply baulked at the possibility of the police being so inept.

Another return contributor, Aaron Vlek, gives us “The Case of the Black Lodge”. The idea of a cabal of British gentlemen who gather regularly to listen to the supernatural stories of a respected member of their clique is a mainstay of this type of fiction, dating back to the Victorian traditions of Christmas ghost-storytelling – a la Charles Dickens and M.R. James – and as featured in the Thomas Carnacki stories of William Hope Hodgson. This useful trope is the set-up for this tale of inter-cult intrigue and warfare, in which one London-based mystical sect attacks another and then gets their magical comeuppance. The tale suffers from being revealed in this state of several removes and it feels as if we are being told about distant events rather than being shown them. Again, the writer has a certain mastery of her craft – there’s a nice touch of tension-breaking when a brandy snifter thuds quietly onto the thick pile carpet of the room wherein the listeners are gathered – but there is no real sense of urgency from this third-hand narrative.

As a side note, the illustration which accompanies this piece, while well executed, has little to do with the story it is supposed to be showcasing. There is one female character in this story and her overt description reads nothing like the image of her – if it is supposed to be her - in the picture. Clearly the artist had no source material to work from – and it may have been that it was unavailable at the time of the piece’s execution (been there, done that!) – or they just chose to ignore it. Either way, while a small quibble – although possibly not for Ms. Vlek - it’s odd.

After I started reading “The French Lieutenant’s Gurning” I had to stop and look closer at the details: once I clocked that the writer was Rhys Hughes, I settled back in with better understanding. Mr. Hughes is a long-time member of the ergodic literature crowd, particularly of the Oulipo group based in France, which has included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec in its roster. These authors play with the structures of writing, seeking not only to provide a piece of fiction, but to come up with one that springs from carefully-formulated arbitrary restrictions and manipulations – Perec wrote a novel in French several hundred pages long, for example, that deliberately doesn’t use the letter ‘e’ at all. Spring-boarding off the title of the well-known John Fowles novel, this piece has our Paris-based detective chasing the ghost of a disembodied face – sliced from the head of a French officer by means of a super-sharp scimitar - through the city in an attempt to prevent it occupying such things as clouds and drying bed linen, from which to leer lecherously at passersby and harass them with its gurning – a traditional form of face-pulling. It’s an unusual take on the occult detective form which is wacky and mildly humorous; not everyone’s shot of bourbon though, I suspect.

“Those Who Live in Shadow” by Paul M. Feeney is a story of the monster-detective variety. True to its type, our investigator conceals his monstrous nature behind a human-seeming exterior and only breaks out the beast when the plot requires. This is a classic film noir cross-and-double-cross plot which fires on all cylinders although we never get told just what kind of a monster our narrator is. Whatever he is, he seems to take lower billing behind a second-string barman character with no mystical sensibilities whatsoever, apart from an unholy affinity for guns and gym-piggery. While the story is serviceable enough, I just wondered who it was about at the end of the day.

“Abduction in Ash” by Dale W. Glaser is a story from a collection of tales concerning the supernatural detective Kellan Oak, scion of druidic parents who deplore his desire to walk the urban landscape and truck with the failings of industrialised humanity. Our hero gets called in on a missing persons case by the absent girl’s distressed mother – she hires Kellan after being told by the police that they can’t open a file on the incident until after 72 hours have passed, something that by now, I’m sure, we’re all aware is a fallacy, right? Time is crucial in these cases and the 48- or 72-hour limit has never been anything other than a convenient literary concept to gain time. Anyway, moving along, it turns out that an Archura, a horned and toothy woodland spirit of great strength, has abducted the teenager with the intent of sacrificing her to its deities at a later stage. Kellan sets out to pin down the perpetrator of the crime driving between an abandoned housing estate and his mother’s herbarium before finally identifying the miscreant and working out what to do with it. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on here – how did he get a dryad to work as his receptionist, for example? – and these glimpses into a wider magical world serve to help the tale become grounded in its own reality.

There’s a large slice of Lovecraft – or, more correctly, Robert W. Chambers – in Aaron Besson’s “Yellow Light District”. The set-up is pure Chandler: femme fatale mother employs hard-bitten P.I. to find her wayward daughter where others – including the police – have failed. Our detective, is jubilant to get the cash, and mutters pointedly about the need to pay his rent in the manner of all such detectives. He hits the streets of the seedier side of Seattle and turns up – bupkis. A whingeing conversation with a shot-glass polishing barkeep reveals that the daughter is now a torch-singer at a nightspot that you can only find if someone tells you about it. Having thus been told about it, our detective finds the bar and has his worldview massively interfered-with. This is meat-and-potatoes gumshoe detection, spiced up by the fact that our private dick bears the name “Rex Giallo” (“King Yellow”), his pale-faced albino nemesis is called “Leroy Jean” (also, “King Yellow” – Jean is a play on the French jaune, or “yellow”), his pub is called “Dim Carcosa” and the mother and daughter are “Cassilda and Camilla Lake”, respectively. How many Kings in Yellow do you need exactly? The story is moody and engaging with some interesting song-lyric poetry, but, apart from giving us a private-eye Everyman to follow about, what was the point? My experience with Hastur-based fiction is often that there’s no point – something happens; everybody goes mad; chaos ensues. In fact the best example of this Mythos trope I’ve encountered was T.E. Grau’s “Monochrome”, re-printed in Volume One of this magazine. Besson’s story strongly reminded me of Kim Newman’s novel The Night Mayor which has an identical set-up; however, in that instance, the device has a solid raison d’être which plays out across the narrative. Here, it just seems arbitrary and in service to some more bad puns, more’s the pity. This tale was re-printed with permission from an earlier journal – perhaps it had greater relevance in that vehicle?

Now for the regular features. First up, the ever-delightful “Borkchito: Occult Doggo Detective” by Sam L. Edwards and Yves Tourigny. What’s not to like about a Chihuahua private-eye dealing with cross-dimensional presences who are messing with his canine clients? The artwork is endearing and the story quite serious in its intent; it takes a couple of reads to get into the swing of the doggy patois in which all of the characters speak (and monologue interiorly), but once you’re there it’s absolute magic.

The ongoing series of linked stories entitled the Occult Legion continues in this issue with a contribution entitled “Faultlines” by publisher Sam Gafford. After this, the Reviews section – a bit light-on in this issue and with an absence of articles which were a pleasing feature of previous entries – gives us an overview of new and thematically-pertinent literature available in electronic form and also hardcopy. James Bojaciuk then continues his column of audio material and podcasts – “Aural Apparitions” – with a review of the latest series of “The Omega Factor” which started life as a televisual property of BBC Scotland in the 1970s – lasting only one season due to opposition by Mary Whitehouse and her gang of prudes - and which has been revived as a series of audio plays for a modern audience. This kind of trawling through the archives of past efforts is one of many places where, for my money, ODQ really comes into its own – I had completely forgotten about this show, but now I’m intent on tracking down all of its iterations.

*****

The body of lore that can be termed supernatural is a vast pool of information and the current focus of fictional and speculative writing teases this ball of twine into many and varied configurations depending upon the aims of the storyteller and the needs of their story. The multitudinous ways in which the writers come at their subject and use the vast expanse of mystical lore available to them to gain their ends is revealed nowhere so well as between the pages of this magazine. Each new story reveals slants and creative cogitation on many levels and leads to fascinating avenues within the canon of supernatural lore. All I can say is that I’m looking forward to more!

*****

Contents:

“Borkchito: Occult Doggo Detective”, Sam L. Edwards & Yves Tourigny
“Songs for Dwindled Gods”, Simon Avery
“Black Frog and Black Scarab”, Davide Mana
“Charms”, Sarah Hans
“The Bascomb Rug”, Josh Reynolds
“The Burning Pile”, Justin Guleserian
“The Case of the Black Lodge”, Aaron Vlek
“The French Lieutenant’s Gurning”, Rhys Hughes
“Abduction in Ash: A Kellan Oakes Adventure”, Dale W. Glaser
“Yellow Light District”, Aaron Besson
Occult Legion: “Faultlines”, Sam Gafford

Reviews:

Deal or No Deal (eBook), William Meikle
Hex-Rated (paperback, eBook), Jason Ridley
Monster Town (paperback, eBook), Bruce Golden
Quest for the Space Gods (paperback, Kindle), Jim Beard & John C. Bruening
“Aural Apparitions” by James Bojaciuk: “The Omega Factor” - series 02 (2017)

Sunday 18 November 2018

Rip It & Run! No, REALLY Bad Guys!



The last time I wrote one of these it was to look at the possibilities involved with running a game where the team was flying close to the outlaw side of things – flouting the law in order to bring their enemies to Justice. Today, I want to push that envelope a little bit further: what if your team of players was composed entirely of cultists?

To provide some back-story, a lifetime ago, I was running my team through the Chaosium campaign “Shadows of Yog-Sothoth”. The first adventure in that linked series of scenarios is called “The Silver Twilight Lodge” and it requires that one or two members of the party infiltrate the cult and learn what it is that they are about to do (hint: it involves ‘Destroying Something’ and ‘The World’). Anyway, once the party decided who the best member of their team was at pretending to be a cultist, they began their mission in earnest.

In order to maximise the roleplaying and to heighten the tension, I split the group up. In one room, I had the infiltrating player going one-on-one with the cult leaders, withstanding their scrutiny and background checks and surviving all the pointed questioning; in the other, I had the remaining party members, doing research and preparing to leap into action. According to a pre-determined timetable, they met up to exchange information and to take stock of how they were progressing.

Finally, it all came down to a huge confrontation, an ambush devised by our cult-busters that went horribly awry after it transpired that the infiltrator had turned to the dark side and sold out the other party members. It was a huge eye-opener.

Obviously we didn’t get too much further along with that adventure, but it did make me aware that there are other ways of playing this game (“Call of Cthulhu”, obviously, but it would possibly also work for other horror games too). Why not try batting for the baddies?

If you look at any scenario, particularly one that involves a cult and its hidden activities, it’s easy to see how you can go about this. Cults have agendas – there are things that they want to achieve. In order to attain these goals, they need to collect information, hire personnel, obtain certain material components of their master plan and then put everything into action. Think about the well-known Keith Herber scenario, “The Evil Stars”: in that adventure (spoiler alert!), the cultists are a famous heavy-metal rock group on a national tour which is a front for them preparing and casting a time-consuming spell to summon Hastur to the planet. The spell requires an enormous arrangement of standing stones to be created and emplaced in a gigantic “V” configuration; each stone has to be consecrated and activated before the final ceremony to summon “He Who Must Not Be Named”. To this end, the band members employ roadies as muscle and groupies as handy sacrificial material, all the while travelling from gig to gig, recording new music and dealing with all the headaches of being a rock band on the road. Now imagine your players are those rock stars.

Essentially, this is just the flip-side of what your players would normally be doing in the course of the game. In chasing this cult, they would be doing research; scoping out the head honchos from the hired hands; learning the background to the band’s formation; and tracking down former associates for whatever insights they might have. Then they would start preparing their own magical response to the summoning ceremony, finding ingredients and preparing all the other requirements of spell-casting.

Of course, it needs to be said that the Bad Guys in a “Call of Cthulhu” campaign are all hopelessly insane, so how do you finesse that part of the equation? In essence, you don’t. Just as when, in “Dungeons & Dragons”, you are just Chaotic Evil if you choose that alignment, so too, if you’re playing the Bad Guys here, you just choose to be mad. Think of your cultist character’s SAN points as ‘negative sanity’ points and run them just as you would normally. Mad or not, cosmic entities and processes still affect human psyches in the same way – seeing a Byakhee is going to blow your brain, insane or otherwise; the difference is how your mad brain deals with it, ie., accepting its presence rather than attacking it, or fleeing from it (which might happen on a bad roll anyway). The penalties for SAN loss affect the good guys as well as the bad ones and it is at these crucial moments that your narrative will stand or fall regardless of your group’s moral code.

Of course, you need to think about such things as seeing a dead body. For the Good Guys, this is usually a shot to the brain bucket, especially if the corpse is someone that they knew. Bad Guys don’t have this issue since, in the normal run of things, they are the ones making all of the dead bodies. Consequently, other things have to impact the villains, such as having an element of their plan thwarted, or a major setback taking place. Think about the baddies in movies: what sends them off back to their hideout to lick their wounds and pout about their lack of success? Those things are what you need to throw at your team to rattle their sanities.

The potential downside of playing in this mode is that your players will be mucking about in the dark areas of the Mythos and a few sessions might leave your players feeling a bit morally grubby. Running this version of the game should – depending upon the players involved – be used sparingly and be just a palate cleanser for when the normal fare seems to have lost its sparkle. Intriguingly, if your cultist team isn’t successful in its endeavours but manages to get far enough along that other twisted entities might pick up the ball and keep trying, you could have your Good Team try to take them on, having put in all of the hard work for you as Keeper. Wicked, huh?

Thursday 25 October 2018

Rip It & Run! Bad Guys...



I have just waded through Season 13 of “Supernatural” which has left me feeling somewhat – meh. Occasionally shows like this need to do some house-cleaning and put things back in order and this is definitely the season where they do all of that (I thought about posting a review, but the whole thing can simply be summed up with the following: “this is prep.; stay tuned for Season 14!”). The good bits are fourfold – Rowena; Bobby and Charlie are back; Mark Pellegrino; and “Scooby-natural”; the bad things were par for the course – the Winchesters emoting; Kevin Tran getting killed (again!); soporific angel politics; and the egregious error of failing to pick up a “Wayward Sisters” spin-off show (I would have watched the Hell out of that!). Along the way, I threw a DVD into the ‘player entitled “Frailty”, starring Bill Paxton (who also directed), Powers Boothe and Matthew McConaughey; the film isn’t really anything to write home about, but it – along with the ‘Whinge-chester’ farrago - got some cogwheels turning in my brain.

When we embark upon a new campaign of “Call of Cthulhu”, there’s an unspoken automatic expectation that the group of players are going to be the ‘Good Guys’. The assumption is that our team will be going up against the Dreamer in Rl’yeh, taking names and kicking butts, but why should that be the case? Are they fighting a Good Fight? In Lovecraft’s universe, things such as an ethical disposition are entirely superfluous – the Universe doesn’t care whose side you’re on, or even if you score points for your ‘team’; it’s entirely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The “Delta Green” source material for “‘Cthulhu” touches on this issue, but I don’t see why it can’t be brought wholesale into a mainstream version of the game.

Getting back to “Frailty”, the synopsis for this film is as follows: the American Midwest father of two young boys receives a holy vision/has a brain snap (your choice), and suddenly perceives that many people walking around the countryside are actually “demons” from “Hell”, working against God and His angels. A set of coincidences leads him to his ‘holy weapons’ – a length of steel pipe; an axe; and a pair of heavy-duty work-gloves – and he convinces his children to go with him to remove these monsters from God’s Creation. One child is fully on board with the plan; the other… not so much. And thereby hangs the tale. It’s an okay set-up as far as these things go, but it got me thinking: what if it was true?

Many “Call of Cthulhu” teams are established around the notion that the members of the group are seeking out evil within their communities and expunging it. They tend to band into organisations – ghost-hunters; private investigators; newspaper/TV reporting teams – which give them a rationale to be together and a means to be drawn in to their investigations. Alternatively, they become a loose confederacy of fellow-travellers, striving towards their goal while keeping their activities on the down-low. But what if their actions forced them out into the daylight and made it difficult to keep their fight completely sub rosa?

Sam and Dean are on an FBI hit-list; wherever they go, if they get noticed, they will get pursued (although the threat of this ever happening has faded absolutely into the background at this stage in their career!). The story outlined in “Frailty” is, in essence, the effort of one of the abused sons to throw off an active FBI pursuit that is closing-in uncomfortably on the ‘family business’ of demon-slaying. In both vehicles, the crusade against the Evil infecting the world requires that a whole bunch of misdirection and avoidance of the Powers That Be has to be undertaken in order for the Good Fight to keep going. Here is a way to lift your campaign from a simple string of escalating “Monster Of The Week” (MOTW) killings and to re-locate it into a narrative containing some Real World bite.

Let’s assume that your team is based in New York. It transpires that a cultist conspiracy has infiltrated City Hall and certain key figures within the government – the Mayor; the Chief of Police – have been replaced by leading cultists, or by shapeshifted/mind-controlling/body-swapping alien horrors and only your players’ characters know about it! Suddenly, your team’s focus shifts sideways – how do we confront the menace when the menace is an upright pillar of the community? You can’t just bowl into the Mayor’s press conference, toss the Powder of ibn-Ghazi in his face while he’s on the podium, gun him down with magic bullets while chanting in Senzar, decapitate his body with your holy blade and then calmly re-assure the members of the Press watching all this that he was “an evil entity who dripped down onto our planet as cosmic pus” and that things will all be fine from now on. No – we all know exactly what happens next and it doesn’t involve a photo of the party on the front page of the next day’s ‘paper receiving the keys to the city beneath a banner headline screaming “HEROES!”; it has more to do with white coats, electrodes and high-dosage injections of insulin.

An investigation of a local haunted house becomes fraught with difficulty when the ‘ghosts’ are cultist enforcers using the ruined building as a base of operations and the local cops are in on the scheme, as would be the case with a spooky mansion in, say, Dunwich, or Innsmouth. In such an instance, the stakes are raised: the investigators need to factor-in the idea that any sources of information that they access might be guarded by those with a vested interest in keeping nosey-parkers away and, if things go pear-shaped, the option of just dialling 911 is no longer available.

Take our ‘Invasion of City Hall’ concept above. Say that the invaders are the Insects from Shaggai, bent upon summoning Azathoth into the middle of New York. The Shan possess people by phasing into their heads and riding them around in order to do their evil deeds. Suppose one of our investigators discovers a certain type of lens, or photo-emulsion process that allows the viewer to see when a human being is possessed (all those wings and legs and neural whips don’t always fit neatly inside the victim’s cranium!). Now our players can target the evildoers, identifying them easily much as Sam and Dean do with a splash of Holy Water, or as Bill Paxton does in “Frailty” with an angel-provided written list of names. Suddenly our heroes have a long line of individuals to break down into an efficient MOTW timetable.

But identifying the enemy is just the first step and it’s arguably the easy part. What comes next is difficult and leaves the party open to punishment under the auspices of the Law, which doesn’t have ‘magic glasses’ to let them see the Truth and, even if they did, would probably not just say, “well, that’s okay then!”. When your team pits itself against an Enemy, they’ll suddenly discover that they have a three-way fight involving a de facto third front – the pesky Rule of Law and its enforcers.

What this all means is that your players will become outlaws. They will no longer have free access to the things that make life cool and dandy. They will have to curry favour with fixers, use connexions and employ cut-outs and dupes. They will most likely – initially, anyway – not have access to a base of operations. Some teams might enjoy this more desperate style of play; others might find it too gruelling – it depends on your players.

Of course, none of this is at all surprising really – most campaigns have a tinge of this sort of thing going on at some stage or another, moments when the characters skate a little too close to legal repercussions for comfort. However, dialling it up to 11 could be the thing that catches your players’ imaginations and brings them back for more!

Friday 12 October 2018

Review: "X-Files - Season 11"



CARTER, Chris, “The X-Files – Complete Season 11”, Twentieth Century Fox, 2018.


After the non-event “event series” that was 2016’s “The X-Files - Season 10”, I was a little cautious about pushing my way into this new iteration. That previous run had some interesting things to say – some of them extremely heavy-handedly – along with some welcome returns to form here and there. Between that season and this however, there’s been a slump.

Season 10 shuffled about a bit, updating itself for a new reality, but seemed to be gaining some narrative traction by the end of its run. Here, there’s nothin’. The cliffhanger we were left with vanished into an ad-break somewhere and everything in the X-Universe had seemingly been re-set: Scully and Mulder had gone straight back to work with the FBI; Skinner and Cancer Man were conducting shady deals in a sinister back office; Scully was getting weepy about the whereabouts of her abandoned child, William; and Mulder seemed at a loss for something to do. The first episode manages to shoe-horn in a reference to Agent Einstein – Scully’s tacit replacement – but not Agent Miller who – I presume – got tired of waiting around. We were back in the basement office with the poster and the badly-abused pencils, ready to do… something…?

This was a huge issue with the original nine seasons of this program: whenever things reached a tipping point, the table got cleared and everyone went back to their corners, regardless of the nonsensical, but disregarded, ramifications of doing so. When Scully and Mulder stop pushing on with things, everything stops pushing back. In this instance, a global outbreak of mutant anthrax coupled with mass alien abductions, goes back into the bottle because Scully and Mulder get a little weary about it all. Apparently, it was all just a dream. Or something. That old chestnut.

So, back in the basement office, our intrepid X-Filers settle in to blandly experience what the next few episodes will bring. And that’s no joke: much of this series consists of our heroes’ bemusement at what rockets out of the blue to confront them. They smile wryly; they shake their heads in jaded disbelief; they shrug their shoulders and roll their eyes at one another. Then they struggle up out of their recliners, strap on their Sig-Sauers and get stuck in once more. This reaction is so prevalent and obviously rehearsed that it seems as if Duchovny and Anderson are no longer contractually required to act anymore. Scully just moons her way through the stories while Mulder always seems to be taking everything as though it’s a huge joke.

As to the material – and it’s a question as to whether or not this is the root cause of Duchovny and Anderson’s apparent apathy – it couldn’t get anymore postmodern or self-referential. Darin Morgan has been left to run roughshod over everything and it’s a case of a little going way too far. Almost every episode is laced with call-backs to past material and populated with Actors From Before Time, either reprising their roles, or playing with a new funny hat. It’s all a bit coy and knowing and, while I enjoyed it to begin with, I was definitely rolling my eyes by the finish, along with Scully and Mulder.

As with Season 10 (which wasn’t going to be called that, but now…) there are a mix of different types of standard X-Files stories book-ended by “Mythology Episodes” hammer-handedly entitled “My Struggle” – yes, we get it Chris ‘Pile-Driver’ Carter; now please stop. Most of these are actually X-Files pastiche, cheerfully cannibalising the stories and tropes of earlier seasons and – outrageously! – even providing us with a clip show episode, proving that the Carter/Morgan machine is not above stooping to the trade tricks of 60s and 70s TV. Let’s unpack:

The introductory episode – “My Struggle III” – is a monotonous voice-over while footage of toothpaste oozing from a tube is played backwards – metaphorically, that is. All the chaos left hanging at the end of last season is undone and tidied away, the product of a brain seizure in Scully’s head, while Mulder roars off into the distance in order to murder the Smoking Man, himself being pursued by the hired assassin of another secret cabal of wrongdoers: ‘turns out that Cancer Man’s anthrax assault upon humanity is taking a backseat to another group’s Apocalypse plan. Anyway, there’s a lot of talk; it transpires that Cancer Man is actually William’s dad; Monica Reyes is working for him; the Moon landings were faked; and Mulder’s brother is still alive and he spills the beans about William’s whereabouts. Or something like that – it’s a bit hazy.


Leaving the soporific mythology behind, we turn to “This”. During a sleepover at Mulder’s place, the duo is attacked by Russian-accented thugs who attempt to take them prisoner. During the mayhem, Langly of The Lone Gunmen communicates with Mulder via his telephone and seems to be still alive somehow: ‘turns out that he had his brain electronically duplicated and put to work in a huge inter-Governmental agency think-tank (as you do). His artificial consciousness worked out that the world in which he ‘lives’ is synthetic and is designed to seduce him into Working For The Man, so ‘he’ busts out to contact Scully and Mulder and ask for help – which they do. There’s a lot – a lot – of talk about how modern alphabet agencies – FBI, CIA, NSA – are working hand-in-glove with their equivalents from other countries, thus explaining the glut of Russians, and there are some hired thugs in Ramones drag throwing monkey-wrenches into the works. Keeping the insomnia cures firmly in place, this is a multi-layered and dense premise that fuzzily lurches along while everyone talks about overseas agencies trampling all over America with impunity. The ending is weird also.

There are a bunch of X-Files episodes which are told from the point of view of the villains, usually a duo of malefactors who try to outsmart Scully and Mulder before they get caught. “How The Ghosts Stole Christmas” springs to mind, as does “Lazarus”. The next episode “Plus One” follows in this vein, detailing the ongoing games of ‘Hangman’ played by a pair of twins – she’s in a mental facility; he works as a custodian in the local prison. Both of them have invisible, intangible ‘other selves’, capable of acting out their collective dark impulses and relaying information telepathically from one set of siblings to the other. They identify targets, guess their names by playing the game and then psychically kill them once they’ve learned their identity (interestingly, all of the twins are played by the same actress – it’s a bravura performance in a season that’s short on thespian skills). Scully and Mulder become involved and mutter in the background about ‘fetches’ and ‘doppelgangers’ while the twins slowly weave their evil around them. Our heroes are saved by a commonality peculiar to the spelling of their names and we hear a lot about the mechanics of auto-erotic asphyxiation as a hark-back to “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” (eye-rolling). It’s the third episode and only the first which has any kind of zip.


Then this happens – “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat”. Not only does Darin Morgan go full Jose Chung on the proceedings but he does it by re-animating “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” in almost every particular. I guess, why write something new when you can just dust off an old episode and change the names, right? There’s a bunch of batting around of the idea of Trump’s fake news shtick and how it manifests itself through the Mandela Effect, wrapped up in all of the actors from Morgan’s best episodes of yore and all of the bait-and-switch narrative techniques which we’ve come to expect. But then it turns into a clip-show! A tired old network device used to pad out a season run that’s short on ideas by re-playing excerpts from previous stories (as in “How The Ghosts Stole Christmas”, again). Have they no shame? Apparently not.


“Ghouli” is where Scully and Mulder wrestle with the creepypasta effect. Rather than court litigation by manifesting the Slender Man, the Filers of X engage with the eponymous tentacled-and-toothy internet-generated monstrosity which messes with people’s minds, rousing them from hypnagogic states to wreak mayhem. It transpires that the creature is William, manifesting alien powers to do… something. He gets shot in the head; Scully has a meltdown; he comes back to life; Scully’s spirits revive; he disappears into the woodwork once more, sans foster parents. In real life some people ditch their guardians and their annoying girlfriends with far less hassle than this kid…!

Ever since Mitch Pileggi got his name in the credit sequence of this show, it’s become a requirement that he gets an episode each season which focuses peculiarly on Skinner and his personal peccadilloes; “Kitten” is that episode. I was eagerly anticipating this one as it stars Haley Joel Osment of “Sixth Sense” fame. Sadly, it turns out that, no matter how fantastic an actor you are, if they give you dreck there’s just not a lot you can do with it. The premise is that Skinner disappears without explanation (as he does in practically all of the episodes which focus on him, because of reasons and because it’s apparently more manly to vanish than ask someone else for help when anonymous correspondents send you a human ear through the mail). Scully convinces Mulder to help find him (Mulder’s having a pout about Skinner at this point, probably because Pileggi is aging more gracefully than Duchovny; however, there could be something else at work, buried somewhere and heavily soft-pedalled in the preceding overly-wrought narrative mess). They discover him in the town of ‘Mud Lick’ where Skinner’s old Viet Nam buddy - code-name: ‘Kitten’ - has run amuck: we flash back to the conflict and see Kitten get gassed by some experimental military ordnance that makes people see monsters. The townsfolk of Mud Lick are having memory lapses and are losing teeth – no-one seems compelled to ask why – and no-one has seen Kitten for awhile. Skinner goes to Kitten’s hovel, meets his son Davey (or is it?) and promptly falls down a hole onto a punji stick. Enter Scully and Mulder who follow in Skinner’s footsteps, run afoul of Davey, narrowly avoid a Viet Nam death trap which kills its perpetrator, and rescue their boss – but not before Mulder also falls into the hole and onto a punji stick (is it a metaphor for something?). Along the way there’s some talk about nightmare-inducing chemicals being put in aeroplane jet-streams but Haley Joel started playing this really cool song on his record player at that point and I zoned out…


Finally, we get an episode that isn’t as dense as a brick and overloaded with knowing looks and stagey winks. “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” starts with Scully and Mulder dining out at a sushi restaurant which is completely run without human staff – robots prepare the food and all transactions take place via the internet and mobile telephone. I have to admit that I found it a bit disheartening to discover that our dynamic duo are the sort of people who go out on a date together and spend all their time on their ‘phones but that’s the set-up here and it’s necessary for what happens next. After inadvertently ordering the inedible blob-fish, Mulder refuses to tip the ‘staff’ and the automated world goes on a rampage in order to extort a gratuity from the pair, the alternative being their deaths. The rest of the episode is a Buster Keaton-esque farce involving home security systems, Roombas, drones and Übers, all Hell-bent on destruction with a minimal amount of dialogue from any of the parties involved. After the heavy verbiage of the preceding episodes, this was a great palate-cleanser.

(Incidentally, the title of the episode is Base-64 code for the word “Followers” and the tagline for the episode is “VGhlIFRydXRoIGlzIE91dCBUaGVyZQ==” which informs us that the Truth – and this episode – are both out there.)

Throughout its run on television, “The X-Files” has made a point of delving into content that can only be called distressing. They broke new ground with the episode entitled “Home” which was one of the first prime-time TV show episodes to be hit with an ‘R’ rating (and which threw many network programmers into a loop because they then couldn’t show this instalment in the usual time slot). Thus, in trying to hit all the marks of What Has Gone Before, we get served with this televisual nasty entitled “Familiar”. It’s an apt title as there’s little here that we haven’t seen before in seasons past: small town witchcraft; infidelity among the town leaders threatening to be exposed by the illegal activity; suggestions of lycanthropy; strange figures in the woods. The story involves the awful death of a small child – ostensibly by animal predation (coy-wolves - coyote-wolf cross-breeds - this time) – and Scully and Mulder come to check it out. There’s a lot of chat about Occam’s Razor, John Wayne Gacy, the divide between high- and social justice when it comes to paedophilia, the nature of Hell and its guardians, all of which serve to obfuscate an otherwise straightforward narrative. A highlight of the episode is the creepy Mr. Chuckleteeth – a kid’s show creation come to life – scampering evilly through the strangely recognisable Vancouver woodland: that mask is enough to give anyone nightmares. This tale has a bleak, bleak premise, but fundamentally, it’s business as usual for the X-Filings.


In trying to hit all the markers for a ‘classic’ X-Files experience, the guys wander into a pure body-horror moment a la Cronenberg. In this story – “Nothing Lasts Forever” - an actress from the 60s has cheated death by means of a radical surgical therapy, devised by a doctor untrammelled by notions of ‘ethics’, or ‘standard procedure’. Surrounding herself with youthful followers, she and they devour harvested organs from unwilling donors and then she has herself periodically sewn onto one of the cultists in order to drain all of the nourishment from them, causing the aging process to reverse (or something like that – there’s some techno-babble involved). Into their cosy world vaults a Marvel-esque avenger, sister of one of the cultists, who sets about dismantling the whole evil mechanism, impaling its operatives with the fencing spikes from outside of the church which she attends in her secret identity (definitely a Netflix-y level Marvel character, like a Jessica Jones or Daredevil, rather than a Black Widow or Captain America). Amid an icky mash-note to 60s and 70s television, Scully and Mulder wander in and (literally) expose the rotten heart of the situation, ending the sickness while finding time to contemplate their own aging and to consider Roads Not Taken. Oh, and Scully takes a four-storey dive down a lift shaft onto a pile of garbage without getting a scratch. ‘Could happen.

“My Struggle IV” closes the door on the season and, in comparison with everything that’s gone before, it stands up pretty well (surprisingly, for a “Mythology Episode”). The first episode set up the situation and “Ghouli” pushed it along a little: this is where it all comes together. We’ve learnt that Cancer Man is really William’s father (not Mulder) and that William and Scully have been sharing visions about the future (i.e., everything that happened in the last episode of Season 10); we know that William can affect people’s perceptions and look like other people, or even alien horrors; we also know that a bullet to the noggin won’t slow him down. Mulder goes in pursuit of him while Scully stays put and runs interference against Kersh before hitting the road with Skinner to back her partner up. Of all the goons and shadowy puppet-masters chasing them, Mulder kills almost everyone; William kills everyone else (spectacularly); Skinner kills Reyes; Cancer Man kills Skinner and Mulder kills Cancer Man. William slinks off into the night and Scully reveals that she’s pregnant with Mulder’s actual child. After all the dialogue-heavy musing of the previous instalments, it’s a relief to have nothing but action to round things off.

*****

What’s left to say? This feels like an exercise in reminding us why we spent so much time with this program in the past, but it doesn’t really say anything new. There is a lot of waffle about the new state of the conspirasphere and some interesting thoughts on the new, post-9/11 ‘X-iness’, but little to captivate. It feels as though Scully and Mulder have become bemused spectators of the world that they once used to actively inhabit. Once, we were concerned about these two; now they’re just bloodless.


I’m not averse to density of writing but I have indicated such density as an issue marring several of these stories. Oftentimes in these narratives, I felt as though I was being lectured at, and my first instinct in such situations is to avoid the grinding of axes. If there is a point to your stuff, show me; don’t tell me: it’s a visual medium after all. Throughout this season there’s a heavy-handed attempt at skewering Trump and its ilk – I have no issue at all with that – but it all feels as though the need to ‘info-dump’ has taken away the lightness of touch which was a hallmark of the best “X-Files” moments. Too, there’s a heavy sense that this show is resting on its laurels, what with flashbacks to past shows, the dragging-in of actors from ages past (which I’ve since read was a deliberate choice) and the creation of stories which parody, or are a pastiche of, episodes that have already screened. I can understand the desire to ‘get the band back together’ (and these short, 10-episode compendia are a cool way to do that) but if there’s nothing new to say, why bother? It just feels like it’s staking out territory and taking a cheap shot against the programs that came later, like “Supernatural” – ‘stand aside kiddies: let me show you how we grown-ups deal with things! No school like the old school!’

Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the look of these programs – making a show like this must be second nature for the Canada-based companies involved in such productions. However, the ham-fisted writing calls all of this into question too: if the stories are just re-tellings of old material with a Po-Mo spin, is all of the production just geared towards parody also? When you blur one line, all the others start to get fuzzy as well. In fact, I’ve taken a second look at the six episodes that comprise Season 10 and it actually stacks up a lot better than this one, which is kind of telling.

Perhaps this is all just a case of everyone being too much inside their comfort zones: certainly Anderson and Duchovny are simply ‘phoning it in and the creators are all re-hashing their best tunes and putting them out again with a solid dose of over-production – much like a late-era Pink Floyd album. There’s substance here amid all of the flash but it’s buried deep under a candy shell of dubiously-combined flavours. Sad to say, I’m only one step away from saying that this is for completists only.

Two Tentacled Horrors.