Review: “Us”

PEELE, Jordan, “Us”, Universal Pictures/Perfect World Pictures/Monkeypaw Productions, 2019.

“Therefore thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”

-King James Bible, The Book of Jeremiah, 11:11

I tuned in to Peele’s Oscar® winning film “Get Out” and I was suitably impressed: there were many things to enjoy about that film so I felt his follow-up effort would also pay watching. I have come away from the experience a little bewildered, a little puzzled and a little excited, so it wasn’t a waste of time by any means. Again, there were lots of things to like, but also some stuff which I wasn’t so keen about. Let’s take a look:

Firstly, the politics. I had a knee-jerk reaction to this film which stems purely and simply from my adherence to genre writing of all kinds. Most horror vehicles tend to expose a “normal” set of individuals to an outré experience, following M.R. James’s oft-quoted dictum. After years of Stephen King style horror material – and of those who pattern themselves after, or who are related to, him – “normal” has come to mean middle-class, straight and white. My genre detector was suffering at the start of this movie because while the family here are certainly middle-class and straight, they most definitely are not white. Hollywood expectations tend to cast black characters as sidekicks, or comedy second-stringers; here, our main protagonists are all African-American and this is a refreshing change. It’s not even the same as in “Black Panther” – that film posited an alternate reality wherein the black characters could smile with bemusement at others’ inability to assume their equality, while blithely demonstrating superior weapons and technology; it was not attempting to be the ‘real world’, as is the case with this film. Previously, we’ve been asked to cheer such events as L.L. Cool J. surviving “Deep Blue Sea”; however, that character was a clown, even down to the costume they made him wear, and he had little agency. Here the change is, at last, a real one, and is to be applauded.

So I re-set my genre scanners and carried on. Oddly, the music kept throwing me out. Being a black American family, of course they’re not going to be listening to loads of Joni Mitchell or James Taylor, playing in the background, or on their car stereo; they’ll be tuning in to R&B, house, hip-hop and rap. Having re-calibrated, I was okay with all this, but when the action began to heat up, there were a number of tunes playing in the periphery that seriously grated with what was going on. At some points, I was nervously thinking that there would be problems when (if!) the police arrived and that our heroes would be wrongfully accused of misdeeds – again, according to cinematic expectations – and, although this never turned out to be the case, the music was sketching in those exact scenarios that were playing in my mind. I get that playing Public Enemy while our heroes break into a white family’s house and kill the occupants – monstrous though they be – can be viewed as ironic; I question the value of it here. However, our director likes to be funny.

Jordan Peele loves him some horror material and he likes to throw his references around. We have stylistic winks and call-backs to “Friday the 13^th”, “Night of the Living Dead”, “The Lost Boys” and a bunch of other mainstays (acknowledged in the Special Features material included on the disc) but there are others which were not so highlighted - Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” for example, to which is surely owed a clear debt in terms of the premise. There’s a nice homage to Rene Magritte as well in the initial sequence where young Addy encounters herself in the mirror maze, but perhaps that’s just me projecting. This is not to say that a director should be completely forthcoming with all of the sources of their inspiration; however, having sat through the extra material on this disc I was less than impressed with the waffle and self-indulgence on display. Don’t gleefully expound on how the red jumpsuits harken back to Michael Myers, only to then drone on at length about how the wildness and untameable quality displayed in the eyes of rabbits underscores the duality of human nature – I mean, please.

The movie creeps along effectively, growing in scope as it does so. Initially, the menace only encompasses Addy – the mother of the family – and the incident which scarred her when she was young; then it begins to affect the entire family; then the neighbours and finally, the entire country (effectively ‘the world’ as far as this film is concerned). As it does so, it neatly confounds expectations about what is happening, keeping the viewer off-kiltre and on edge the whole time. Then it collapses down the rabbit-hole of its own creation.

Mr Peele’s main problem, as far as horror is concerned, is twofold: he likes to mix things up with comedy and he over-explains things. The first is not normally an issue, however a little goes a long way and when you use it a lot, suddenly you’ve jumped genres. There’s a line when the character called “Red” says that she and her partners are “Americans” that’s pure (probably unintentional) comedic gold – Peele should have left it at that. This film doesn’t really jump across into the realm of comedy, but there are moments when it comes awfully close. Somebody needs to take another critical look at “Macbeth” it seems. The second point, however, is a BIG problem.

This film opens with some unnecessary scrolling text about tunnels and other abandoned subterranean places under the continental United States. This is, frankly, useless information; not necessary. Then towards the finale there is a long expositive monologue from Red about puppet doubles and shady (possibly government) activities to duplicate every citizen in the country. Again, none of this is useful, necessary, or even wanted. There is enough going on in the background of this narrative for the audience to fill in the blanks. It wasn’t necessary in “Night of the Living Dead”; not necessary here. These info-dumps are detrimental; the information could have been parceled out in any number of other ways – this was just clunky. “Get Out” also has this issue, so it’s not just a blip.

Contrast this with the constant Bible references to the Book of Jeremiah, chapter 11, verse 11. We get hit with it over and over again, but does anyone in the story ever look it up? Not once. I’ve reproduced it here at the start of this review just for anyone who might be interested and, as is clear, it’s just a cheesy homily (taken out of context, of course). This is just “some evil-sounding shit” that Samuel L. Jackson’s character in “Pulp Fiction” might crib to boost his street cred; as far as this film is concerned, it’s practically meaningless.

There is a twist at the end of the story too and I won’t spoil things by revealing it. It’s supposed to be an M. Night Shyamalan level of face-slap but it turns out to be just a squib. In “The Sixth Sense”, the twist forces the viewer to re-visit in their mind (and with the help of a short cinematic medley) all of the instances that are dramatically altered by the revelation of this new information. The “twist” here does nothing of the kind; it’s meaningless. Of the two characters it concerns, nothing is fundamentally altered about their natures and nothing is changed as a result. Their motives and actions remain intact. It’s a bit like finding out that more than one necklace was stolen at the end of “Ocean’s 8” – tacked on, ad libbed, and capable of undermining everything that the movie has built so far. Interestingly, the promotional images for this movie skate pretty close to letting the cat out of the bag…

Given the amount of time spent with the characters concerned, I was surprised that no clues were worked in to their back stories and no moments were offered that would allow us to be alienated, or to empathise with them, when the ‘shocking reveal’ is announced. These two characters have stakes in this game, and they are both extremely invested in its outcome; nothing of the real nature of that is ever shown to us though. It’s just extra information along with a bunch of other extra information (the finally-revealed premise of the entire narrative) which sounds dubious at best. For a director who claims to hold Hitchcock in such high regard, this is a missed opportunity.

What’s to like, then? Most credit goes to the actors, particularly the bravura performance of Lupita Nyong’o. Considering that, for most of the run time, there are eight characters on screen being played by only four people, this can only be called a marathon effort and an Herculean piece of work. The character design – both for the “originals” and their “tethered” opposites – is inspired and creates great sympathy and harmony on both sides. The effects are nicely where they ought to be – in the background and subtly in service to the narrative, not dominating it. Dialogue is fresh and lively, revealing personality and motivation without feeling heavy-handed. And the whole thing looks amazing.

Is this enough? I know I’m probably going to be dismissed as having failed to fall totally in love with this piece and also with Jordan Peele (the latest mover-and-shaker in the horror department of the cinema industry), but I’m just not feeling it, as the saying goes. This is certainly good; but not great. If this turns out to be Peele’s “Crimson Peak” then he can go to bed a happy man – worse things have been done in the name of horror entertainment.

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: "Penny Dreadful - The Final Season"

LOGAN, John (creator), Penny Dreadful – Season Three, Showtime/Sky, 2016.

I bought this ages ago but ennui and a sense of ‘here we go again’ killed my will to stick with it and I gave up after the first episode. Recently though, being forced to trawl through my stacks and boxes of books, DVDs and CDs for diverting narratives, I stumbled across it once more and realized that I probably hadn’t given it the chance it deserves. I bunged it into the DVD player and sat back to let it unfold…

Episode One: “The Day Tennyson Died”

Episode Two: “Predators Far and Near”

Episode Three: “Good and Evil Braided Be”

Right now, I’m three episodes in, and things are looking somewhat grim. So far, it’s been all about logistics: Rusk has dragged his werewolf back to the New Mexico Territories in the unflinching name of Justice; Malcolm Murray has returned to Africa to bury his manservant Sembene; the Creature has tired of wandering the icy wastes of the Arctic and is heading back to London; Vanessa Ives has found an alienist upon whom to cast her woes; and Dr. Frankenstein has sought out a colleague to do likewise. Meanwhile, Lily and Dorian are tearing each other’s clothes off and going on murder sprees without any sense of shame or accountability (why, I ask myself, is Rusk so intent upon the wolf when most of the House of Lords is being gunned down in back alleys by Dorian Gray and his companion? Odd). Along the way we are introduced to some new (and not so new) players – Kaetenay, Ethan Chandler’s vengeful Apache adoptive father; the half-caste Dr. Jekyll; Hecate Poole the witch, newly liberated from her indenture last season and out to ensure wolf-based prophecies take place – and each is there to bring our heroes out of their personal despair and pull them back on track.

There is so much effort here dedicated to getting the band back together that it leads me to wonder why the writers let them fly the coop in the first place. There is a strong sense of tedium: drag the Alan Quatermain analog out of Africa; bring the werewolf back to the Wild West; call the Creature home from the Arctic wasteland – it’s exhausting just to watch it, when you think it needn’t have happened at all. Why didn’t Murray just send his servant’s body home? Why wasn’t Chandler just thrown in the clink with the threat of deportation? Why couldn’t the Creature just have returned from the Arctic at the very beginning instead of having to show us his discontent with the place? Much of the set-up for this season is an indulgent waste of cash and everybody’s time. Even injecting the new players could have been accomplished in this fashion, without having to throw everybody onto ships, and trains, and back-alley souks in Algeria. So far, so indulgent.

On top of this, we are introduced to a shadowy menace pursuing Vanessa through London, using its pallid minions to track her every movement. Early on it whispers its name from the shadows – “Dracula!” – while ghoulifying a new servant named Renfield, who just happens to work for Vanessa’s new shrink, Dr. Seward. Now, all of this is cute and hearkens back to the “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” knock-off roots of this work, but it also ignores its own rules that it initially set up. In the first season of the show, the “boss vampires” were all rather alien and insectoid; here, they’re not. Dracula stalks the streets in his secret identity, whereas the earlier leeches would have had serious difficulties blending in. The other issue is that Vanessa Ives was the BFF of Mina Harker (nee Murray), daughter of Malcolm, and victim of Dracula, so she would logically seem to know him by sight, but she doesn’t. So, who has their story straight here? John Logan or Bram Stoker? Because it’s a little inconsistent no matter how you slice it.

Then there are the witches. In the special features option of the first disc, there’s a documentary about the concept of these creatures and how they were designed and facilitated. It seems that Logan wanted them to be like snakes – glamorous yet dangerous. If that’s what he was going for, then all I can say is that he missed his mark by a country mile. To me they just look like cancer-ward residents who’ve made very poor life choices in the body-modification department. I find them completely distracting and repugnant; very counter-productive to the whole narrative exercise. Like most things with this show, they are simply there as an excuse to display gratuitous nudity and violence and they pull the viewer out of the moment every time they show up. Fortunately, there’s only the one of them this time around.

So, after three episodes, we have Frankenstein and Jekyll combining their forces to tame Lily the monster; Lily and Dorian attempting to recruit all the downtrodden women of Victorian London into an army by engaging in incredibly unsafe sex with all of them (somehow they think this will work – I’ll reserve judgement for now); Chandler and Hecate fleeing Justice into the American desert with Malcolm Murray, Kaetenay, Inspector Rusk, his sidekick and a posse of Texas Rangers on their trail; Dracula closing in on Vanessa; and the Creature discovering memories lying dormant in its reanimated brain which are dragging it to an inevitably-doomed reuniting with the former family of its corpus. With so much ponderous establishment and reiteration, I’m tired already…

Episode Four: “A Blade of Grass”

*Phew!* Episode Four completed. This was no doubt intended to be the arty core of the series, seeding the revelations to come. It’s essentially just Vanessa Ives in her padded cell at the Banning Institute, returned there by the magic of Dr. Seward’s hypnotic powers. We discover that the Creature – before he got himself killed and then used for parts in Frankenstein’s mad schemes – was Vanessa’s attendant, one of the nursing staff who worked in the Institute. Or rather, we discover that he was actually Lucifer, stalking her in the hospital; and also… a large shadowy snake? Lucifer’s brother? And Dracula? What the…? What should have given this overwrought piece some room to breathe, just compounded the miasma, with a little bit of Renfield scarfing flies on top.

Eva Green and Rory Kinnear chew down the minimalist scenery here and they both do it well – for the most part, this series has got some excellent casting and two of the better performers really cut loose here. ‘Damage’ is something that Eva Green conveys well, both mentally and physically, and Kinnear is a great foil for her to bounce off. Still, the writers have constantly dropped the ball up until this point and the strident sense of flailing about trying to find a purpose for all of this – stuff – is the only takeaway.

Episode Five: “This World is Our Hell”

This is the fifth episode – the fifth of nine – and it’s only at this stage that we’re getting any kind of narrative traction. There’s a rule in writing that you should always start your piece as close to the climax as possible. This isn’t always an option with novel-length works but it’s a mainstay of writing both short fiction and – more appropriately - screenplays. The idea is that you give your audience the minimum amount of time to lose interest before the action starts. Here, they’ve thrown this notion out entirely. It’s taken the writer all this time – faffing about with excessive character establishment, flashbacks and various other indulgences – to actually get the story happening. That’s not ideal.

Now that everyone’s in America – ignoring the Ives/Frankenstein/Creature/Lily & Dorian threads for a minute – it’s time for the big reveal. All through the seasons of this show we’ve had sidelong references to Ethan Chandler’s dad – Jared Talbot - and how bad he is – finally we get to clap eyes on him. Funnily enough, as this point was drawing near, I thought to myself “who would be the best actor to cast for this role?” and I made a shortlist in my mind which narrowed inexorably down to Brian Cox. Surprise! I was right. He’s just right for this role – but then so much of the casting for this show is very good – but again the writing knocked everything sideways. The whole time we’re in Talbot’s presence, Sir Malcolm and Ethan fade into the background and their personalities drain away to nothing. Sir Malcolm and Kaetenay was bad enough, with Murray being reduced to a simple bystander in the partnership; with Talbot, he’s just a spectator once more and he gets a Yankee dressing-down to boot. Ethan as well, is reduced to a snarling brat when faced with his father – and he’s supposed to be some kind of God-appointed agency of world annihilation!

Everything which we’ve seen in prior episodes to do with the American arm of this narrative is completely unnecessary; this is the point where this thread actually starts and begins to unspool. Everything else we’ve seen – Africa; the train attack; the ocean crossing; the escape from the saloon during the full moon; the murders; Inspector Rusk; the horse thefts – is all completely pointless and indulgent. Should’ve been left on the cutting-room floor.

Meanwhile, Vanessa, Lily, Dorian and the Creature go on the backburner for a bit (given the amount of time spent on them in previous episodes) while the instalment dribbles out a little bit more of the Frankenstein story arc. Completely dominating Jekyll and his research, Frankenstein adds lightning to the mix of Jekyll’s potion and succeeds in rendering the effects of the juju permanent – although ramming an electrified needle into someone’s brain through their eyeball usually has this effect anyway. Not a lot happening here, although I sense that when Mr. Hyde shows up at the end, he’s going to vent a huge amount of slow-burning frustration on Frankenstein’s head, given the racist, elitist and self-entitled treatment that Victor’s dumping on him.

Episode Six: “No Beast So Fierce”

Episode Seven: “Ebb Tide”

I doubled down and pushed through to get somewhat forwarder with this thing. It cost me a piece of my soul, but I got there.

So here we are at the end of episode seven and – who would credit it? – the series introduces another player. Just when we thought that there couldn’t be any more time wasted on character establishment and development, we get yet another character – Cat (“o-nine-tails”) Hartdegen, the thanatologist and expert fencer. Vanessa gets hooked up with this femme fatale by the seriously underutilised character Ferdinand Lyle before he slides (sadly) out of the story for good. And then, after being introduced during a suitably snappy fencing bout, she vanishes after giving Vanessa some sound advice, which Miss Ives then absolutely ignores. It’s typical of this show that they spend this amount of time and effort to do absolutely bupkis.

On the plus side, almost everyone who disappeared into the New Mexico Territories has been horribly murdered by now and those left standing are on their way home. This last group includes Ethan Chandler, Sir Malcolm Murray and Kaetenay. So, no more Inspector Rusk, Jared Talbot, Hecate Poole, or the myriad Texas Rangers that shadowed their activities – hooray! All loose ends tied up, all characters returned to where they started, and everybody ready to go. To be clear: Sir Malcolm and Ethan started in London, went to Africa, then on to the American West - burying Sembene and collecting Kaetenay on the way - only to go back – several thousands of kilometres later - to where they started in London – across six episodes. That’s a large chunk of my life I’m not getting back and, frankly, I’m a bit resentful about it.

I mean, what was the point? Nothing has happened; nothing was progressed at all and yet there was all of this work invested (and not just by the show’s creative staff). It feels absolutely like there was a contractual obligation to film part of this show Stateside and, in order to meet this, they just ruptured the narrative to fit. ‘Ruptured’? More like, ‘busted to Hell and back’.

Then there are the other characters. In Dorian and Lily land, the whore army is sent out into the streets to assault loathsome examples of the male population and divest them of their right hands. En route, Dorian gets jealous of Lily and her new friends and lets Frankenstein and Jekyll abduct her in order that she can be pacified via a lobotomy. And the Creature makes contact with his family upon Vanessa’s advice, finding that they accept him without question – such is the quality of Rory Kinnear’s acting chops, this was the only compelling part of the narrative on offer.

I’m increasingly left wondering what this show is trying to do. It shifts and lurches all over the shop, not quite knowing what it’s doing or where it’s headed. It’s completely hamstrung by the fact that it’s so clearly ripping off Alan Moore and his “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” but, apart from gratuitously clinging to this notion of pastiche, it doesn’t even start to know what to do with it. And yet there is so much money and expertise on show here, all of it utterly let down by the crap quality of writing on offer.

(Let me just qualify that. In terms of dialogue; in terms of characterization; the writing on this show is top notch – there are moments when I’ve rewound the thing just to listen to an exquisite turn of phrase casually tossed into a passing conversation. It’s in the plotting, and the construction of narrative arcs, where this thing falls flat on its backside. Witness Season One where all of the main characters had equal weight and it felt like reading seven books at once; this was addressed in Season Two, where some of the characters took a step backwards to the second-string, in order to serve a single narrative. It seems this crucial lesson has been forgotten. John Logan has no idea what to do with the material on hand, and further, fails to use any of it efficiently. Instead, the show gropes its way forward, clinging desperately onto the random ‘cool moment’ here and there and steadfastly being unable to do anything of clarity with them. It seems as though it’s deliberately seeking to become “style without substance” at random points, while leaving all of the actually interesting stuff unconsidered in its wake.)

Episode Eight: “Perpetual Night”

Episode Nine: “The Blessed Dark”

That’s it: I’m done. It turns out that this series is actually only two episodes long – the last two. Everything else is just fluff. If you want to save your existence, just watch episodes eight and nine – that’s all that the season has been about, and the rest is just obfuscation. There’s a mammoth gunfight at the end of this story which everything has led to: if, like me, gun battles are way up there on your tedium list, then you have every reason to avoid this show.

Everything resolves here. This means that all of the male characters survive and feel good about themselves while all of the female characters die and discover that pushing against the patriarchy is fruitless. On top of all this, the dialogue gets extremely syrupy and maudlin and all of the good writing (such as it has been) vanishes under a treacly, sentimental veneer. I was literally yelling at the TV screen by the time this was all over. If you value your time here on Earth, avoid this garbage and all that it stands for. My only sympathy is that great – truly great – thespians have been dragged into the miasma of this abomination – Simon Russel Beale, Eva Greene, Josh Hartnett, Rory Kinnear, Billie Piper. Even Timothy Dalton was poorly-served here – this role was perfect for him and yet they took away anything that was even vaguely defining for his character, leaving him with an inexplicable murder and a mild chat with Dracula as his ‘gun’ moments. I’d be asking for my money back.

What else? There was no Mr. Hyde moment. Dracula gets away. Catriona Hartdegen does nothing – absolutely nothing – of importance by the last act. And the Hallmark greeting card people obviously have some kind of authoritative power over the script in the last episode – let’s hope no-one with diabetes lasts this long in watching this vehicle! Of all the ways that this thing could have ended – even if it had to have ended this way – this was the clunkiest, worst way that they could have done it. John Logan – j’accuse!

*****

One thing that this show has been tentatively striving to do – an underlining theme if you will – is to give some kind of agency to its female characters. This is fine and to be lauded, as far as it goes. However, as it gets applied here, it’s rather sneakily ingenuous and ends up being rather backhanded. Oddly enough, the entire narrative arc of Dorian Gray and Lily is emblematic of this thought process: women are to be supported in their efforts to become empowered and to act as free agents, only within the scope of those men with whom they associate. Lily can dream of liberation as long as Dorian supports her; Vanessa can live free of guilt and domination by dark forces as long as she accepts the protection of Sir Malcolm and Ethan Chandler; even her status as Dracula’s “equal partner” is equivocal since she has to submit to him and his established system of ghouls and subordinates in order to become his “bride”. On the one hand, Logan seems to be highlighting the Fallen Woman trope of Stoker’s original novel, but it’s a fine line between homage to the source material and kowtowing to the patriarchy. Every woman in this show gets broken down and re-combined in some more useful capacity to the status quo – that is, if they don’t simply get discarded out of hand for being non-conformist.

The most telling thing about this show is that Dorian Gray – icon of the patriarchy as he turns out to be – ends his performance by telling the estranged Lily that “he will always be here” whenever she decides to return to him. If that’s not a chilling manifesto about where this show’s politics lie, then I’m no commentator!

It’s obvious too, in the way that the female cast of this show are treated. The female characters get covered in latex or drowned in blood; they are made to wallow in filth, or spew long and caustic streams of invective; and then there’s the gratuitous nudity. Even the costuming (which is gorgeous, by the way and, like everything to do with this show, is wasted upon an unworthy vehicle) is designed to treat the women like porcelain dolls, objectifying and belittling them. None of the men are treated like this; even the werewolf transformations – which you’d expect (given everything else going on) would be as over-the-top as the witch costumes – are as lacklustre, and pedestrian as possible. It’s more than obvious that there are double standards here which an abundance of pretty frocks just can’t ameliorate.

You might say that Penny Dreadful, in the sense of its murky sexual politics, is just being true to its source material*, but even then, it shies clear of actually paying dues to those sources. It wants to bend the rules, but it also tries to avoid making clear those rules for itself (and, thereby, us, the audience) to follow. This is what makes “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” so good – it has rules; those rules are shared with the audience; and they are stringently followed. Too many of the narrative elements here are undefined and unclear: what is going on with Vanessa - exactly? Who is Dracula - exactly? Where is Lucifer in all of this? How is Ethan important in the greater worldview of this reality? What exactly does Sir Malcolm Murray bring to the table, apart from the single pro-active moment of the cold-blooded murder of Jared Talbot? John Logan obviously loves his Victorian narratives and – to be fair – some of those narratives pose more questions than they answer (The Beetle; The Jewel of Seven Stars); but they were narratives of their time aimed at an audience of their time. This is a story written and filmed for a Twenty-first Century crowd and we don’t like things to be vague and nebulous. Being slipshod about this stuff is easy and sloppy; just saying “that’s how Richard Marsh and Bram Stoker did it, so I’m doing it that way too” is a cop-out. And this is where all of the truly gifted and dedicated actors, photographers, editors, costumers, casters, set designers, dressers and builders - in short, everyone involved in something like this - get let down.

Still the best opening credit sequence on television though…

*****

*In fact, the show never mentions anything that can remotely be called a ‘penny dreadful’; it springboards squarely off classic Victorian literature, following Alan Moore’s example. It never references Varney the Vampire, or The Monk (which is Gothic literature, strictly speaking), or even Spring-heeled Jack, which were actual penny dreadful mainstays. Annoyingly, the show has spawned a US-based version – “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels” (so much for “final season”); however, the term ‘penny dreadful’ was never used in American publishing, where the preferred term was ‘pulp fiction’. Too many potential entanglements with Tarantino's lawyers there, I guess!

Review: "Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination"

“Edogawa Rampo” (Tarō Hirai) (James B. Harris, trans.; M. Kuwata, illus.), “Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination”, Tut Books/Charles E. Tuttle Co. Inc., Rutland VT, 1985.

Reprint: octavo; paperback; 222pp., with many monochrome illustrations.

Minor wear; light sunning to the spine; some spots to the text block fore-edge. Very good.

After seeing the “Japan Supernatural” exhibition recently, I was reminded of this book and so I ferreted it out and immersed myself in its murky depths once more. Japanese strange tales are very dark and are enhanced by a distinct psychological depth which lends them a more chilling aspect than other forms of the weird tale. Rampo’s work captures this psychology and most of his stories (at least those presented here) are suffused with a psycho-sexual darkness which means that, when they’re strange, they’re very strange indeed. First some backstory:

Tarō Hirai was a writer and critic living in Nagoya before moving to Tokyo in his later life. He was born in 1894 and died in 1965. He was greatly impressed by the mystery writing of the West – particularly Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – and tried to write Japanese stories which incorporated the tropes and ideas of those authors. The first of these to be published was "The Two-Sen Copper Coin" (二銭銅貨, “Ni-sen dōka”), a Holmesian Japanese mystery involving the unravelling of an obscure code. His pen name is a Japanese-styled form of Poe’s name (if you say it quickly enough, you’ll see what I mean. Go on; I can wait). He started his writing career publishing his tales in magazines aimed at the younger reader and generated a bunch of tales under the banner “The Boy Detectives Club” (少年探偵団, “Shōnen tantei dan”) mentored by his erstwhile sleuth Kogoro Akechi, a sort of modern Japanese Sherlock Holmes who uses many of that character’s methods to uncover crimes. He also translated the works of Conan Doyle, Poe and others, into his native language.

While much of his own work is of the crime detection variety, there are also a slew of strange tales in his oeuvre the best of which are contained in this collection. The best known outside Japan is “The Human Chair” (人間椅, “Ningen Isu”), which has been anthologized fairly widely in the West. This is the story of a strait-laced government worker who sneaks himself into a sturdy wood-and-leather chair belonging to a local eminence. Thereafter, he spends his life hidden within the house, sneaking out occasionally to eat, and meanwhile enjoying the sensation of being sat upon by the household members, especially the mistress of the dwelling. More notorious in his own country is “The Caterpillar” (芋虫, “Imo Mushi”) which is the tale of a young woman prevailed upon to act as the nurse of a highly decorated general, missing all four of his limbs due to an explosion. The story turns upon the woman overcoming her fear and disgust of the once powerful and respected man and coming to terms with her physical and sexual power over him. The story was banned in 1937, despite being successfully published only a few years earlier, because Wartime censors felt it portrayed Japanese military commanders in a poor light.

Sometimes his stories jump right into the realm of cosmic horror and the best of these is “The Hell of Mirrors” (鏡の地獄, “Kagami no Jigoku”). It involves a Japanese man of independent means and a scientific turn of mind who creates a hollow sphere completely lined with polished mirrors. Having a fearful aversion to reflections and reflectors, and questioning to what strange realities they might be portals to, he girds himself to enter the contraption and shuts the door… The rest is madness.

Much of what takes place in Japanese stories of the macabre stems from guilt, obligation, or fetishistic sexual deviation, and how these things run afoul of “correct” social behaviour and expectations. Rampo is fully onboard with this sort of material and pushes it as far as he can, taking a line from his idol Poe and creating some extremely weird situations. He often takes the point of view of the villain – like the guy in “The Human Chair” for example - taking us into their twisted worldview and allowing us to see their meticulous planning and freakish results. To this end we inhabit a world replete with slinking murderers and watch horrified as they unfold their wicked schemes against those who unknowingly stand in their way – the elderly; siblings; strangers: anyone.

From the early 30s onwards, Rampo’s work veered sharply into the realm of what the Japanese termed “ero guro nansensu” (“erotic, grotesque nonsense”), a decidedly ‘genre’ and incredibly popular style of writing, focusing upon sexual deviancy as a main theme. Many of Rampo’s stories and novels – outside of his detective fiction which has a definite “Hardy Boys” feel to it – deal with issues of sado-masochism and homosexuality, with a hefty dose of fetishism and horror thrown in.

There are supernatural elements in some of these tales but, like all of these narratives, they are firmly rooted in the psychology of the actors which lends them a nice ambiguity. The most Japanese of these tales (in the sense of the Japanese supernatural tradition) is the last one in this collection which concerns a random encounter with a strangely Victorian old man on board a train, carrying a picture made of pieces of rag and other material pasted onto a wooden board. In showing this work to the narrator the old man unfolds a strange tale of hopeless love and magical transformation that leaves his audience wondering if they have both slipped across the border into madness. The unique qualities of the scenery through which they pass onboard the train help ground this slippery story in a moody ambience.

While Rampo’s weird stories owe a clear debt to Poe and such tales as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-tale Heart”, Rampo takes the essence of such wordcraft and makes his own creations out of it, creations that are unique, fascinating and horrifying on their own terms. Many Japanese movie makers have turned to him for inspiration and there are a lot of films out there based on his works or inspired by his life and offerings. “The Human Chair”, as mentioned above, gets hauled out occasionally to fill the pages of horror anthologies but – freaky and idiosyncratic as this tale is – it’s just the tip of Edogawa Rampo’s towering iceberg of terror and madness.

Seek him out. Five Tentacled Horrors from me.

*****

Contents:

Translator’s Preface

“The Human Chair”

“The Psychological Test”

“The Caterpillar”

“The Cliff”

“The Hell of Mirrors”

“The Twins”

“The Red Chamber”

“Two Crippled Men”

“The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture”

Review: "Red Billabong"

SPARKE, Luke (Dir.), “Red Billabong”, Sparke Films Productions, 2016.

“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolabah tree…”

-“Waltzing Matilda”, A.B. “Banjo” Paterson

That piece of doggerel, which at one time traded as our unofficial national anthem, is typical of many appropriative exercises which are the hallmarks of white history in this country. The poem and the song were pinned down by Paterson – it has a mongrel kind of origin – but its appeal to city-based, white residents of Australia lay mainly in all those funny words which seemed so foreign and yet were part of these folks’ daily lives. It’s the novelty of language which was the appeal here, and a kitsch appeal it is. This is why we’ve moved on to another national anthem with different funny words.

A “billabong” is not a foreign phenomenon anywhere in the world. When a meandering river erodes its way to a point where the curve in its trajectory gets cut off from the main thrust of the waterway - leaving a stagnant, crescent-shaped lake in its path – it has made what in the US is referred to as an ‘oxbow lake’ (and probably by other terms elsewhere on the planet). It is, in other words, an ordinary geological event, and unremarkable as such. Calling it by an exotic-sounding word like “billabong” however, makes it sound kinda funky and that is what this poem trades on. It’s also why it’s in the title of this movie - to catch the ear of the uninitiated.

(The word “billabong” itself probably doesn’t appear as such in the vocabulary of any indigenous collective – most likely, as in most cases, it is a corruption of an original word, mis-heard by some white settler… unless it derives from the Scots Gaelic, which has also been speculated. See other instances, like “kangaroo” and “goanna”.)

Back in the day, it was considered okay to just grab things from other cultures and use them as one saw fit in whatever creative endeavours were to hand. Australian culture is replete with instances of such borrowing, from the novels of Arthur Upfield, to the books of Patricia Wrightson, to some of Peter Weir’s movies. Many of our best-known artistic innovators have, at some point or other, dabbled with some aboriginality in their work, setting tales, cinema and art in indigenous contexts, often without more than a surface examination of the subtleties. In these more enlightened times, we try to rise above such cultural appropriation; sometimes we fail in that attempt. Thus, we have “Red Billabong”.

It’s a cheesy and simplistic trope in horror flicks to simply lay the source of some ancient evil at the door of some indigenous civilization and leave it at that. Stephen King does this all the time – look at Pet Sematary and It (the “Ritual of Chüd” – sheesh!). I’m constantly amazed that native Americans never call him to task on this, but maybe it’s because they have bigger fish to fry. Meanwhile, we’ve had “The Ninth Wave” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and you’d think that would be the end of it, but no. We now have this.

“Red Billabong” is a horror take on that old Bush stand-by, the Bunyip. Legends of this creature abound in the early tales of white settlers. There’s a notion that stories about this beastie were invented to keep Aboriginal children away from dangerous waterways and that, later, they did extra service in keeping white men away from indigenous hunting areas and sacred sites. In the early days of Federation there was a low-level fever amongst rural and scientific communities to find a specimen of the creature but these usually led nowhere (to the skull of a deformed sheep in one notable instance involving the Royal Society in London and the Australian Museum in Sydney). Descriptions of the monster are diverse, with nothing really coherent about them and this ambiguity should really have given the early monster hunters a clue:

There’s a feature of wilderness bogeys that holds true across the planet in all cultures – the closer you get to something, the more you pin it down, the better the net you cast, the more elusive the entity becomes. In the Congo, people have hunted for the monster known as the Mokéle-mbêmbe for decades – for over a century – and nothing has come of it. Initially, the creature was described as a flesh-and-blood animal – something you could take a potshot at with a rifle – but soon it became less concrete, more magical, until, as Roy Mackal found out, nowadays it’s a phantom, an intangible animus with spiritual capabilities which can no longer be tranquillized, netted, or captured on infrared film. It has become the ghost which it always was. So it is with the Bunyip.

Paleontologists have ruminated that perhaps the Bunyip was originally some kind of extinct gigantic marsupial, like Diprotodon or Thylacoleo carnifax, the memory of which has lingered in indigenous communities long after the creatures themselves passed from view. That’s entirely possible; however, as it is in the Congo, the most likely rationale is that it was always a fairy-tale, designed to keep children and unwanted intruders away from harm.

Here, the writer/director of this piece of fluff has taken the quick and easy options on everything to do with indigenous legend and spirituality. The monster - in this iteration - is real; it is being monitored by an aboriginal sect intent on keeping it out of the common view; it is also being hunted by a foreign, hi-tech agency intent on weaponizing it for corporate gain. So far, so ho-hum. This is by-the-numbers plotting for action-based horror flicks and it was done to death in the 80s. But it doesn’t stop there: our main actor is the eldest scion of the family who owns the property upon which the eponymous billabong is sited, who inherits said property but has to share it with his younger brother who hates his guts. One of them wants to sell it; the other wants to preserve it, in order to ensure that no-one interferes with the indigenous interests of the place. One of them has money troubles that a drug-peddling associate can ameliorate with a quick injection of cash; the other is shrouded by secrets about his family which he has decided not to make public. They both have girlfriends. They are all attractive. They all, for the most part, get their shirts off. It’s as formulaic as it gets, folks.

Before you’re even halfway through this experience, you become distinctly aware that it was always the intention of the director to make a cookie-cutter version of an 80s horror flick; there was absolutely no intention to break any moulds or to innovate at any point. Let me be clear: this is not pastiche; it’s not even homage; it’s paint-by-numbers. When the (inevitable) no-good mercenary dad walks back into view; when the (predictable) British bad guy pulls out his chrome-plated automatic pistol; when the (yawn-inducing) chop-socky henchmen stalk towards the camera cocking their AK-47s, you may as well go and make yourself a cup of coffee because it’s nothing you haven’t seen a thousand times before. And I suspect that is merely the point: Mr. Sparke is just showing us that he can make this particular kind of film. But do we really want it? Does anybody? I’d suggest not.

Is there anything of value to take away from this? Unusually – and it’s the only unusual thing about this film -  none of the female leads gets killed, and certainly not in a wholly gratuitous fashion which is what you’d expect; however, they do rather gratuitously get their gear off and then wander around semi-clad for large chunks of the proceedings. The rest of the Hollywood Morality Playbook is firmly in place, you can rest assured, and this one deviation doesn’t spare them in any way. The effects are a few notches up from completely ordinary – although the younger brother’s hair colour changes rather alarmingly throughout the runtime - and there’s some nice camerawork, but it’s all in service to this narrative dreck, more’s the pity. If you’ve even been paying a minimum amount of attention to the contents of this review, you’ve probably grasped how you could write a better Bunyip movie script yourself in a single afternoon.

This is a completely disappointing movie. I suspect the only reason that it was ever made was because someone dared someone else to do it – “Look at those Hollywood wankers: bet I could make a better flick than they could”; “Bet you can’t”; “Okay you’re on…” – and the rest was beers and the inevitable piece of crap which was this waste of time. The reek of cashing-in and selling-out coming off this project is so raw that it’s almost eye-watering. I’m positive that the sole purpose for making this film was the lure of cash, tax breaks and the associated glamour of the movie-making lifestyle; I hope those involved have enjoyed rolling in their bathtub full of money. Meanwhile, that elusive phantom of the cinematic wilderness, the compelling and genuinely haunting bunyip film, is still out there somewhere waiting to be found…