Review: "Shark Warning"

Jimmy Gadd (Dir.), “Shark Warning”, The Asylum, Acme Holding Company, 2024.

After the release of “Jaws”, the summer blockbuster became a thing and film production houses were keen to capitalise on this piece of marketing success. Even the Jaws franchise was quick to jump, getting sequels, 3-D versions and three-quels into cinemas in short order. All this in the face of foreign film companies making obvious rip-offs and look-alikes which glutted cinemas in the years following. The only one who wasn’t making quick-and-dirty shark flicks in the wake of Bruce’s rampage was Steven Spielberg – he was onto his next blockbuster hit, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

Shark films have come and gone since then but recently there’s been a sharp uptick. Cruising through Tubi TV you can find a slew of the worst zed-grade shark attack movies that you could ever think of: A movie about a vampire shark that Dracula attacked en route to England? Check. A movie about humanoid mutated sharks built by Nazis that live on the dark side of the moon? Check. Phantom sharks summoned by teenagers messing about with a Ouija board? Checkity-check-check-check. Whatever your variant, there’s a movie for you and it comes with a side of fries too. I’ve often theorised that the regular influx of shark films must be due to the relative ease of building them in cyberspace, making animating them less expensive than, say, H.G. Wells’s Martians, or the average werewolf; however, even amongst these bottom-of-the-barrel scraping outings, whenever you think the bar cannot get any lower, it goes there. This rubbish makes “Sharknado” look like Oscar-contending stuff…

But let’s get on with today’s offering. There’s a warning on the tin of this film and it’s in the title.

Many of the films that poured into being after “Jaws” left the cinemas took some pains to try and distance themselves from the source material. While the basic premise remains – shark attacks people; people get eaten until they devise a way to stop getting eaten – at least there was an effort to vary the essential plot points involved. Not so here. What “Shark Warning” offers is geographical inversion rather than any plot innovation. “Jaws” took place on an island, see? This movie takes place on a lake, albeit a lake separated from the ocean by a dam, but still. Amity was land surrounded by water; here we have water surrounded by land – huzzah! Litigation neatly avoided. And they needed it too because the plot is stolen wholesale.

In the nearby sleepy tourist town, an annual fishing competition in the ocean-adjacent lake floods the township with dollars and ensures financial security for the following year. At least that was the case before the dam was foolishly left open to encourage fish in from the sea and a Great White shark slipped in unnoticed. Having devoured a young lad, the place saw a downturn in tourist visitation and now – twenty years later with the return of the young lad’s brother, still tortured by the event – the fishing gala seems doomed because the dam hasn’t been opened in all that time and the fish population is in decline. Now, this doesn’t seem a whole lot like the plot of “Jaws” but it’s necessary backstory for the ‘local-residents-united-in-opposition-to-the-reckless-mayor’ plotline that both “Jaws” and “Jaws 2” hammered away with.

Anyway, the town Mayor arranges for a shady local guy to blow up the dam to allow fish to swarm in on the eve of the fishing party. Yes – that’s the best plan she could come up with. And we’re supposed to just nod our heads and say, “sounds reasonable”.

Anyway, the brother of the young guy who got eaten – let’s call him Allan – comes back to town in order to punch his still-resident uncle – Ron – in the nose for not having thrown himself at the shark way back when. Much manly soul-baring takes place between these two and local bar owner Lisa - she with the magical talent for famous fish sandwiches – banters from the sideline. Somewhere in amongst all the nose-punching, we meet Ron’s best buddy Bobby and Lisa’s no-hoper sister Sienna, along with the Mayor’s brother Will, so we know just who is going to get eaten and who isn’t. I’ll bet most of you know already, too.

There’s a thing that the writers of this screenplay obviously missed at film school: film is a visual medium; you don’t need to tell the audience about anything that they can see with their own eyes. I blame modern blockbuster movies – especially all of the Marvel and DC stuff – for having made us lose sight of this important fact. In fact, go and watch “Jaws”: much of what we take away from that movie is non-verbal in nature. We feel upset and uncomfortable – even scared – by what we’re shown, not by what we’re told. Here, there is a terrible waste of dialogue – people yammer on about things that we get to see subsequently anyway, or which are not in any way remotely important. At one stage, Lisa rocks up with her dead dad’s arsenal of guns, thinking that they might be of use in combatting a shark, and we are treated to wasted minutes of ballistics descriptions and performance issues that might well have been better spent on something – anything – else. People verbally flag what they’re about to do and then go and do it. What? Did the director have an over-abundance of film stock that needed using up? I got very bored listening to the plot rationales and exposition drone on ad nauseam, and I became painfully aware that the distance between scenes filled with shark action were being unnecessarily drawn out.

(Also, guns are crap at shooting things that are underwater. Look it up. Why are we always being told to bring a knife to a gun fight?)

Speaking of shark action. There are some early moments where film stock of sharks underwater is used to build the tension and, while it looks a little cheap, it works a treat (in fact, “Jaws” did some of this too, so there’s precedent). But when an excess of stuff happens off camera (a la “Sharknado”), cheap starts to give way to tawdry. Then come the clunky matte shots and the remote-control sub with the attached shark fin and believability goes right out the window. You’ll notice from the film’s promotional image (above) how it looks as if there’s a girl lying on the ground with a picture of a shark on a poster behind her? That’s how most of the shark action looks here.

The pleasure to be gained from a B-grade film lies usually in seeing how – with a modest amount of cash and material – a decent narrative can still be aired. Here, it feels like the crew is desperately trying to paper over the cracks in ways that simply make them seem more obvious. To highlight the slim budget, everyone here has a single outfit, even though the action takes place across several days. Or at least, they get a single outfit and a swimsuit (with optional tattoos), despite the fact that no-one really goes in the water – on the water, in boats, yes; not in the water. I can only assume this was budgetary, meant to limit expenditure on clothes, hair and make-up, but maybe, given that this film drones on interminably, it was also a decision made to stop us being confused about who was who.

In the end, everyone gets what’s coming for them and the Boy gets the Girl as an added – almost incidental – bonus. The town gets to have its fishing gala and then gets to think about electing a new mayor. You will jerk awake as the credits roll, wonder why your tea has gotten cold, then wonder if there’s any point in rewinding to catch the pertinent details you might have missed, before deciding not to bother. There is a warning on the label of the tin for this film but it’s a warning about the quality on offer, not the content: no sharks were harmed – or, in fact, were even present - during the making of this movie.

One-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors. 

Wuthering Shite...

Here’s a pitch:

“She walks like a man. She talks like a man. She wears a man’s clothes, although they barely conceal the voluptuous curves beneath. Call her Ishmael? Call her Male-ish. She steers a harpoon boat by day and shows the other harpooneers who’s boss. She sneers at rules: she’s a maverick, sailing close to the wind of insubordination. Together with her crewmates, Goose and Iceman, she courts trouble at the hands of the brooding and darkly-handsome one-legged ship’s captain. Will he curb her wanton waywardness? Or will she unleash his repressed passion and join him in command of the harpooning teams? Or will their turbulent love send them crashing on the rocks? Oh, and there’s a whale in here somewhere, too…”

Too much? How about this:

“Forensic IRS investigator, Agent Eyre, is on the case. Her target is Rock Chester, CEO of the corporation which bears his name. Warrant in hand, she gains access to his inner sanctum, a cool world of hi-tech security and glass surfaces in his towering, phallic skyscraper. For years he’s been declaring mysterious dependents on his tax returns – dependents not seen by anyone, anywhere. Are they real? Or is this the tip of some pyramidal scam with tentacles reaching who-knows-where? And what about all the shady expenses at strip-joints and payments for high-class hookers? Is he the victim of darkly lustful desires, or is he really “saving” these women as he declares? And what really happened to his enigmatic wife, the brilliant explosives expert reportedly lost in an ambitious experiment-gone-wrong in the penthouse suite? Jane’s on the case… if she can just keep her mind off Rock’s chiselled torso…”

This, it seems, is where we’ve come to. The classics are being re-created as vibes; as content; as springboards for facile reinterpretation. Nowadays, it appears, it’s enough to take the title of a classic novel and a surface understanding of the events within, transform it into some multi-million-dollar, multi-hour spectacle and call it a ‘faithful re-telling’. I thought del Toro’s “Frankenstein” was on the nose, but now we have a modern ‘version’ of Wuthering Heights which claims to hit all the markers when in fact it entirely misses the point.

There is a plethora of books being pumped out at the moment and most of them – from what I’ve been able to discern – are simply pitches, angling to be picked up for visual treatment, rather than being considered works of fiction in their own right. Everything is style over substance; flash over burn. I give you Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils as Exhibit A. It feels as though we’re back in the days when a movie executive could throw a well-known book at a producer, whack a crowd-pleasing title on the project and expect it to fly. This is how Jane Eyre got to be filmed as “I Walked with a Zombie”. I shit you not.

“Brooding, brilliant Victor abandons his offspring, declaring him a “monster” despite his tall, good looks, inventive mind and nurturing nature. As Enemies, they flee each other’s company, wandering a strangely-familiar world, while a tonne of janky costuming seems to imply that the lead actress is some kind of beetle. Finally, they meet to confront each other in an Arctic steamship, trapped in the ice, where – with the Captain acting as referee – they air their grievances, exchange forgiveness and part company, but not before freeing the ship from its icy embrace. Friends at last! Hooray!”

Books seem now to be nothing more than a series of tropes – Young Boy becomes a Hero; Enemies to Lovers - banged together to replace any sort of bothersome plot. Why have a narrative arc when you can just run a tried-and-true routine? Why not, when we know that movie-makers avidly avoid anything that hasn’t been done a million times in the past? Characters become ciphers; plot becomes expectation; climax is a well-anticipated dopamine hit. Nothing is new: everything arrives pre-chewed and without pesky surprises.

But isn’t this what we want from our literary entertainment? Don’t we want to shocked? Don’t we want to be delighted by the unexpected twist? The complexity of character? The taut resolution of narrative threads? Or do we just want to be sedated by the cozy sameness of reiterated pap?

If it walks, quacks and shits like a duck…

And now here’s a version of “Wuthering Heights” that has so little to do with Emily Brontë’s novel that the movie insists upon the quotation marks around the title to give it some plausible deniability. The director, Emerald Fennell, is on record as saying that her interpretation is based upon her recollections of the work upon reading it at the age of 14. I would argue that being 14 would allow much of the novel’s subtlety to skate way over the reader’s head, and maybe that is what Fennell is trying to capture here – a complete misunderstanding of the text. She is additionally on record as declaring that the book is “too complex” to be faithfully represented, and so her work must be considered a ‘riff’ more than an interpretation. Suffice it to say that the movie lumps a bunch of Romantasy tropes together with some sexual titillation and fails to do any justice to the original. “Hey Emerald! Here’s a copy of A Throne of Fire and Whimsy; make a film of that and call it… Hmmm, I don’t know, ‘Pride and Prejudice’?” Ba-doom! Tish!

This is quite obviously an attempt to make bank off the title of someone else’s better work. And maybe that’s all anyone is asking these days.

If the desired result of this project is that people talk it about it on social media, then I’d say that they’ve achieved their goal, and then some. Personally, I think it’s money and talent wasted. I’m imagining the pitch for this piece of tinsel and I’m thinking it went something like this:

“Personal ad: ‘Cathy, 15-year-old heiress, who likes shedding her clothes and rolling on the dewy moors, seeks tall, hunky dude with similar interests for two-hours plus of heavy breathing. Also, light bondage.’”

Can we get back to some real creation please, and less of this slop? 

Review: Crimsonstein...

Guillermo del Toro (Dir.), “Frankenstein”, Netflix/Double Dare You/Demilo Films/Bluegrass Films, Mexico/United States, 2025.

Is it just me? Or is Guillermo del Toro’s recent foray into the Gothic exactly the same as his previous outing, just got up in another skin? I went and saw “Frankenstein” at my local arthouse cinema and from very early on I had a creeping sense of doom… and not in a good way. At about the halfway mark I was having flashbacks to “Crimson Peak”, and I began to wonder why I was having such a strong recall to that earlier film. Turns out, they’re the same movie.

Think about it: “Crimson Peak” is a movie which, like the book Wuthering Heights, arrives in two parts. There’s a first half with a distinct tone and flavour and then there’s a second half in which the mood and set dressing all get switched. The first half of “Crimson Peak” is all Henry James; the second bit is Emily Bronte. It bothered me when I saw it because I felt that either half would have been fine as a story in its own right, but each one suffered by being shoe-horned in with its partner. Both narratives were hamstrung by being forbidden to breathe and reach its own potential. It felt as though del Toro was trying to do too much.

With “Frankenstein” it’s the same thing all over again, although here there’s actually very little happening. The story has been broken into two halves – Victor’s point of view and the Monster’s. Once again, the tone of each narrative is somewhat at odds with its partner – Victor’s tale is sumptuous and colourful, full of gorgeous interiors and all the hallmarks of urban civilization; the Monster’s story is darker and full of animals, teeth and natural scenery. The framing device that contains these two stories takes place aboard an icebound ship in the Arctic – taking a cue from the novel: Victor is rescued by the crew; the Monster kills its way on board before holing up with Victor, his quarry, in the captain’s quarters; the two of them and the Captain have a pleasant cup of tea while they talk, then they all go their separate ways, the Monster giving the ship a useful nudge back out into open water as it leaves.

Does anyone else feel that this is a bit strange? I mean the Monster murders – horribly – at least six men on its way into the ship and then everyone settles down for a cosy chat. Excuse me? I understand that del Toro probably wanted to show off the creature’s awesome capabilities early on, and needed to begin the movie with a flashy action sequence, but it stands at odds with what follows. I wanted to start this film engaged, not scratching my head and wondering if I was missing something. Turns out, this movie is all about that feeling…

We start with Victor’s side of the narrative. We enter a world of conspicuous consumption, endless finery and barely suppressed generational cruelty. Victor grows up, enamored of his mum, grudgingly accepting of his younger brother and gloweringly resentful of his father. His side of things depicts him as an impulsive and headstrong type, snatching opportunities and running with them as hard as he can, and being scornful of those who cannot, or will not, keep up with him or let him do as he pleases. He takes advantage of others and does what he likes. He doesn’t come across as a very likeable individual.

And let’s be clear: Victor Frankenstein is a real piece of shit. In the book though, he owns it. Here, he never seems to be aware that he’s in the wrong, he never seems to have the levels of self-awareness that allow him to feel shame, or guilt, or even a shred of responsibility. He just blunders through a narrative that seems fore-ordained. And here I think is the great weakness of this movie: it runs on rails. At no point do we see the characters faced with choices; we never see them make crucial choices which activate their destinies; they never display any awareness that the tragedy befalling them is of their own making. It’s as if these characters have no interior life; no ability to reflect or to feel regret. They’re just a bunch of puppets.

Right at the end, Victor speaks to his monster and says, “will you forgive me?”, but at no point do we get the sense that he’s at all regretful of his past actions and the passes to which they have led him. He might as well have been asking the creature to hand him another comfy pillow. To put it simply, the absolution is in no way earned, and yet, it’s the thing upon which the whole film is predicated. The Monster says, “yeah, okay”, he leaves, and it’s all over. Very unsatisfying.

We glide past a bunch of things during Victor’s narrative – the tenderness of his mother; the cruelty of his father; the hidebound resistance of his teachers – but none of it pays off. We are left to intuit that maybe Victor’s Oedipal hang-ups are the root cause of his issues, but we are never shown any of it – it’s all there, but it’s very hand-wavy; an afterthought. As if the wallpaper might clue us in. The actors roll around the sets quite readily, buffeted by gallons of expository dialogue, but none of them ever show us anything. It’s very pretty, but utterly bloodless. The ingredients are all there, but the director doesn’t do anything with them.

When Mia Goth shows up as Elizabeth (after having cunningly swanned about as Victor’s mother in the beginning) I thought “hello! Now we’ll get some romantic tension: a little argy-bargy from the two brothers; a twist in the slowly unspooling narrative”; but no, it falls completely by the wayside. Victor stares longingly; she jumps the gun and says, “no way, Jose”, and then it’s over. Nothing to see here: everyone just gets on with other things. A lot of time and effort seems to have been spent dressing Ms. Goth up as a kind of insect, but nothing comes of it: it seems arbitrary; capricious. In “Crimson Peak” Mia Wasikowska was similarly tricked out as a bug, and it seemed there that she was supposed be a moth, fleeing the darkness and trapped in a spidery web; here, I got nothin’. I’m left scratching my head and thinking, what was the point?

We are told that lightning rods must be pure silver or trouble will ensue; they are, and it doesn’t. We’re quite deliberately shown one of them accidentally bending out of true; nothing comes of it. There’s a whole thing about Christoph Waltz’s character having syphilis and wanting to have his brain stuck inside the creature; doesn’t happen, he gets horribly killed, and then nothing comes of that. By the time I reached the halfway point, my mind was so full of bookmarked plot points that I thought I’d have to break out a pen and notebook. Didn’t matter though: none of it was crucial to the story. If the director had an intent for all of this stuff, then it was news to me. Nothing signified; there was no weight to anything.

The only thing that I really enjoyed were the horrible confections that Victor slapped together to show that he could reanimate a corpse. These were truly distressing in their impact, and I had high hopes that the Creature’s ‘shocking reveal’ would follow suit (didn’t happen). Along with the heart-stopping brutality of Victor’s benefactor Harlander’s death, these were masterful moments in pulse-adjustment. Pity there were so few of them. Del Toro seems well-versed in bringing his own horror; he just seems unable to depict anybody else’s.

Then we shared a nice cup of tea with the ship’s captain and moved on to hear from the Monster.

First impressions about the creature that Victor built: he wasn’t bad-looking. In the novel, Victor is so intent on the process that he fails to take in his creation in an aesthetic sense. After he steps back and takes a good long look, he realizes that what he has just made is a hideous malformation, something not fit for polite company. Here though (and this isn’t unique to this film; it’s become something of a tradition in modern times) the actor playing the ‘hideous’ creature is a buff, studly type, with a bit of latex or CGI to make him a little bit less-than-perfect. An equivocal reading of this says that a good-looking actor helps allude to the fact that – like the beast in “Beauty and the Beast” - the monster is “beautiful on the inside”, but we’ve only ever been given surface readings of everything else in this film up to this point, so why should we try to dig below the surface of this particular issue? Anyway, the monster is hunky and good-looking, not terrible at all. In fact, a short way into this movie I began to refer to him as the “Disney Princess” since all of the little birdies and squirrels and deer couldn’t wait to gather around him. I was fully expecting them to all break out into song…

Speaking of the bushland critters, let’s just pass over the fact that they were all horribly portrayed. If there was a budget for CGI in this movie, I’m guessing only about 10% of it went towards making the animals seem at all real.

Anyway, our Disney Princess encounters nasty brutish people out in the world and winds up, like the Little Mermaid, hiding and wanting desperately to be where the people are. Inevitably, he breaks into Victor’s glamorous world and breaks things before… rescuing Elizabeth…? And helping her escape from her suffocating world? Something like that. Anyway, she dies and it’s all Victor’s fault (nothing comes of it), his brother dies (nothing comes of it) and nothing ever comes of any of it. It’s the leitmotif of this film. A world without consequences…

And so, we end up back onboard the ship and the captain winds up the session. Victor asks, can I get a ‘you’re forgiven’? The monster nods, ‘I guess’, and then it’s all over, with the monster giving the boat a shove by way of making up for horribly murdering a goodly portion of the crew. We can watch the credits roll, safe in the knowledge that nothing leads to anything, nothing has any meaning and that we’ve just spent two hours watching nothing of value.

I’m sorry, but: no. This isn’t Frankenstein. I don’t know what this is exactly, but it ain’t that. I read beforehand about how this is one of del Toro’s favourite books and how he’s always wanted to recreate it on the big screen, but something went desperately wrong somewhere. This is a flat piece of cinema by any standards. The writing is cursory and illogical; the direction is casual and lacklustre, and the actors are all wooden. It looks good (except for the animals), but it’s a hollow shell containing nothing except the withered husks of several Disney films. I really feel that del Toro simply dusted off his script for “Crimson Peak” and recreated its broad strokes in a different skin for the purposes of this work. Even the water tower wherein the monster is brought to life, looks exactly the same as the titular evil mansion in “Crimson Peak”, albeit with a less gloomy paint job. If this is del Toro’s love letter to Mary Shelley’s amazing book, then it’s clear he doesn’t really think that much of it at all…

Two Tentacled Horrors.

Q: What time is Lovecraft? A: A Fish.

Franklin Rosemont (ed.), Surrealism & Its Popular Accomplices – Long Live the Living! City Lights Books San Francisco CA, 1980.

Quarto; paperback, with illustrated wrappers; 120pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; spine and hinges a little rubbed; previous owner’s name in ink to the first page. Very good.

Back in the pre-internet days, if you wanted to make a noise about something, you’d have to find like-minded folk and band together to pool resources and energies and find a way of making a statement. Things such as film or television content were usually way beyond anybody’s reach, and radio broadcasts either involved huge set-up costs and specialised knowledge, or contacts with local broadcasters – who usually had little sympathy for fringe points of view, like horror fiction from the 1930s, say. The way most people got around this was by creating magazines, which stressed little in the way of technical nous and were far more affordable.

The ‘zine’ has been with us for a long time; in fact, when most people these days encounter zines for the first time, they assume that they are a relatively new, quaint, pointedly Luddite, innovation. In fact, they have been with us since at least the 17^th century – where they were known as ‘chapbooks’ – and have probably existed in one form or another since people first got the idea to write words on something approximating paper. In all eras, and under whatever title, the purpose of the zine is to rapidly disseminate ideas and information about burning issues, at least those that the authors are particularly fervent about.

In the 1600s, printers took books and other material from publishers and prepared them for publication. This meant organising an appropriate amount of paper, preparing images to be engraved, setting text into movable type frames and readying the ink. After the text blocks were done, they were sent to a bindery (which may or may not have been an in-house department) and were bound between boards. In all of this there were degrees of waste: pages were often trimmed close, leaving miniscule margins in order to reclaim paper or conserve binding materials; plates might have been printed separately and reduced in number, or even left out of the finished book (possibly to be sold as standalone prints). Whatever the reason, usually there was a certain amount of leftover paper which could be re-purposed as something else.

These “something elses” were often ‘catchpenny pamphlets’, small, folded booklets that announced local political or other newsworthy events (such as eyewitness accounts of coronations or comets, or the exploits of highwaymen) or which contained recipes or medicinal cures – even magical treatments approximating the contents of grimoires – whatever the printers thought would ‘catch the pennies’ of people walking by. Horoscopes and Almanacs all had their start with these humble roots.

In the 1920s zines were huge (and the word originated around then), focussing mainly upon political movements – such as the support for Communism, and outrage against the proposed Income Tax, in England – and were usually distributed during strikes and demonstrations. Later still in the 1960s, zines were a way to connect various fan-based, mystical, political or artistic communities and were a hallmark of both the hippy movement and the occult circles of the later Crowleyites and the LaVey Satanists. The Underground Comix scene, with characters such as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Rat Fink, arose from these beginnings.

These publications all have a handmade feel about them, with an aura of low-tech production. It’s well to remember that such material was typed out, then cut up and pasted onto graph paper, prior to being put through a pre-press photographic process and then sent off to be printed. There were little or no computer-based desktop publishing options available to home brew publishers and fan groups. Consequently, the appearance of the pages is rough and ready – there are strange, “widow” text fragments, poorly-reproduced photographic images, odd mismatches in text styles, flat photocopied pictures. There is an amateurish quality to the production but also a lot of energy. And it’s representative of this item.

The subject of this book is the idea that surrealist forces are universal and can be found within much popular content; that popular entertainment somehow ‘enables’ Surrealist dissemination. Every form of popular investigation of artistic creativity, from Shaker art to the Flying Saucer phenomenon, they argue, is redolent of Surrealist forces, whether extant in their intrinsic material or imposed through various means of transmission (like being shown on free-to-air TV, with intercut ad-breaks, for instance). The tension between generating art with surrealist intent and of the art generating further surrealistic impulses – either deliberately or accidentally – is fully discussed with many disparate examples. And one of those is Lovecraft.

The Lovecraftian material is relatively small. There are two “articles” (if such short pieces can be so termed) reprinted from a similar French publication (above), and a longer piece which examines HPL’s views on Surrealist Art as touched upon in his last unposted piece of correspondence (below). The article claims that this letter is here reproduced in full, while the text itself is presented as a series of “excerpts”, so the true state of affairs is open to debate by those creatures with greater access to the material than I. Essentially the wording here is a bit loose, but that’s kind of expected as a feature of this style of publication. There is a bit of background discussion taken from the private papers of Frank Belknap Long trying to pin down whether HPL was even aware of the Surrealist Art movement and whether he allowed it to influence his stylings. It boils down to a resounding “Maybe?”, as most of these discussions inevitably resolve, but it’s an amusing examination for those inclined to explore such stuff.

After 1980, when this book was produced by City Lights Books in San Francisco, the ability of single individuals to generate this kind of niche exploratory material for a wide audience grew exponentially. Nowadays, such material is the province of blogsites or Reddit threads and the notion of being produced in a hardcopy format like this is almost an alien concept. Still, it’s good to get hold of something like this and feel a connexion to an older style of fan discussion and to see that – in all the ways our talk has changed over the years – it’s still the same game.

Rip It & Run! Super-powered Characters II...

If you look at pulp fiction and its various tropes, you’ll see that, every now and again, there’s a character who has supernormal powers, abilities beyond the strictly normal, which help push forward the stories in which they’re involved. Characters like this aren’t a bad thing: they’re usually gateways into the extra-natural and are often value-added members of a campaign. In my career as a Call of Cthulhu Keeper, I’ve often run supernaturally augmented characters and they’ve been a boon every time. Here’s how it’s done...

Each of these character types needs to grow from discussion between the Keeper and the player. The character in question ends up with an unexplained talent that would potentially give them an edge in the story to come. In each case, discussion of what benefits the character will have, along with all of the possible side-effects such ‘powers’ would entail, should take place. In every instance, the players should expect to take the rough with the smooth. Every ‘power’ should be defined in terms of its extent and capabilities – this is crucial: each side of the equation needs to know the rules in order for this to work.

In most cases, the character with super-powers will be generated at the creation phase; sometimes however, the acquisition of such capabilities can arise from encounters and accidents that take place within the unfolding narrative. The Keeper may decide that a character may well adopt the extra capabilities listed below as part of their collective storytelling and may decide not to allow such characters to be generated ‘on the fly’. Equally, shorter story arcs may invite such characters to be generated at the inception. It really depends upon the requirements of the narrative.

(Cunning readers will observe that this list is a continuation from a previous post. For other strangely-powered character templates check out that other listing.)

Character Number Seven: The Prognosticator

A common trope among Call of Cthulhu characters is the magical practitioner who sells knowledge for cash. Often these characters are simply con-people, carnies or the like, preying upon the gullible in order to fleece them of their pocket change, who stumble inadvertently into Mythos goings-on. Most of the time such characters bumble their way along using skills like Psychology or Fast Talk, but what if they actually had powers? What if they could really read the future?

Mechanics: This requires that the character choose a shtick, something around which their powers crystallise. This could be Tarot cards, a crystal ball or reading the stars. However they do their thing, have them roll their skill (this will probably be an “Art” of some sort, listed on their character sheet) and then give them some kind of cryptic insight that they can then mull over at leisure. Depending upon their level of success, the information they receive should be more-or-less solid, but it should always be somewhat nebulous. For instance, a poor roll might reveal that the party is in danger from ‘something red’; a better roll might reveal that danger is approaching from something that is coloured red; better still, there is a door that is red behind which there is danger; or even better, the door is not actually red, but the flashing light from a nearby police car makes it seem to be so. There are endless iterations… Needless to say, in this instance, the party is free to interpret things as they see fit when they stumble onto a crime scene with flashing police car lights and a suspiciously lit door nearby…

Essentially, the Keeper can use these sessions to drip feed information of greater or lesser credibility to the party in order to help them find their way forward. It requires a little forethought and some ingenuity to interpret the rolls of the player, but such detail adds a great sense of “weight” to your game.

Character Number Eight: The Old Soul

The character is the reincarnation of an ancient entity and subconsciously carries information and knowledge within their psyche to which they ordinarily would have no access. Alternatively, the character contains within themselves a second consciousness – magically imbued from a distant reality - that occasionally vies with them for control of their corpus. Whatever the reason, in the context of the relics of ancient civilisations or realities, these individuals become remarkably capable and reflect knowledge of things which they absolutely should not have.

Mechanics: This is a common trope of much Mummy fare. Movies like “The Mummy” (there are several with this name, starting in 1932) and books like The Jewel of Seven Stars and She (along with its sequel Ayesha) really dictate how this kind of story unfolds. Essentially, the character is a reborn ancient with stakes in a conspiracy which has manifested in the present. This is usually something along the lines of the re-emergence of an ancient evil in the present day. An old trope has the reincarnated character as the revived romantic interest of the ancient evil being, but this is a tricky path for a novice player to negotiate well. More dependably, the reincarnated character is a protector of some ancient knowledge or artefact that will destroy or deter the evil one and they will have insights as to where the object or knowledge currently resides, along with an innate understanding about how to use it.

To make such a character work, the referee needs to seed their campaign with events that create moments of déjà vu or create dream sequences that are sparked by events that touch upon the ancient lore with which the character is associated. Does the evil manifest behind the symbol of a crescent moon? What happens when your character is served a croissant one otherwise uneventful breakfast-time? When a photo of a long-unclimbed sacred mountain – along with the report of a mountaineer who seeks to be the first to conquer it – manifests in the morning ‘paper, how does the character react? Why is it that, when presented with a cluster of clay tablets covered in cuneiform script, there is one that the character can read as easily as a primary school text? There are many possibilities…

Character Number Nine: The Time Jumper

The character comes from the far future and has travelled bodily (or has taken over an existing body) in the current temporal location. They may be fully conversant with the experiences which led them to this pass, or they may be suffering a species of partial, or total, amnesia. Either way, certain temporal events, either impending or transpiring, fill them with trepidation or outright horror.

Mechanics: Depending upon the requirements of the Keeper’s narrative, this character might be an alien being (with the ability to shapeshift) or a human being from the far future, who has bounced backwards in time to escape some kind of impending disaster. If the former, then the character is generated according to the creature specifications listed in the rulebooks. Whenever they fall unconscious or go to sleep (or are otherwise required to do so), they must ensure that their true forms are not witnessed by their possibly unwitting associates. Races such as the Serpent People are an ideal choice for this character type, although the Keeper might insist that the character has arrived from the distant past instead of the future, for reasons of canon sense. Another useful species is the technologically advanced Nug-Soth who are able to shapeshift. Finally, the Great Race can crowd out their host’s consciousness during a time-bridging mind-swap, in order to have their way.

If the character is human and has contrived to travel back in time, it remains for the Keeper and the player to decide if they have travelled with their memories intact or not. Depending upon the needs of the narrative, the other party members may know of the character’s disposition, or it may be a surprise for them to find out. This character is one that is a good fit when trying to insert a new character into an established party, especially if it serves the unfolding story arc.

The important element that makes this character work is the establishment of crucial temporal milestones which drive and compel the character. Of intense interest to the character (whether they are consciously aware of it or not) are certain moments in time which give rise to the sequence of events that caused them to jump backward (or forward) along the timeline. The development of certain technologies; the assassination of an influential personage; the discovery of a long-hidden locale – these are all things of which the Time Jumper might be aware and which they might try to hinder or assist. The character might be drawn by dreams or forced to make Idea or Know Rolls when confronted with pertinent information, if they are overtly ignorant of their status; or, if they are cognisant of their purpose, they may seek to influence those around them to examine or investigate things which will help them to avoid the disastrous future events to come.

The canon of time traveller fiction is wide-ranging and comprehensive – most referees will have several examples at their fingertips. Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” is a prime example and H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes is another mine-able work from an earlier generation. “City on the Edge of Forever” by Harlan Ellison, the twenty-eighth episode of the Original Star Trek series, is a great example of a character from the future travelling into the past with pressing narrative concerns. Any or all of these could be mined to great cosmic effect for the purposes of a Call of Cthulhu game.

Character Number Ten: The Savant

Due to some kind of inborn neural incapacity or accident, the character has gained uncanny intellectual skills and capabilities; these come, however, at the expense of certain other areas of expertise.

Mechanics: We’ve all seen “Rain Man”; we know about savants and their reputed capabilities. This is the character that embodies these notions.

To begin with, there are a number of truisms about these sorts of beings that must be defined in tandem with the player and they boil down to the following: do you want to reinforce the stereotypes established by Dustin Hoffman in the movie, or do you want something that skates a little closer to the truth? If the former then there is little to do other than to select a range of skills – related or randomly selected – and double them to a maximum of 90%, while simultaneously reducing all social skills (Bargain, Fast Talk, Psychology) by 50 percentiles to a minimum of 5%.

In addressing how these characters might arise in reality, we have to look at how savants emerge in the real world. Some savants are genetically spawned; that is, due to an accident of biology, a person might arise with an array of extraordinary abilities, but with a commensurate lack in certain social areas, as outlined above. Other savants manifest as a result of extreme accidents: electrocution, suffocation, birth trauma, blows to the head. Oftentimes such individuals are found to have capabilities or knowledge that they never had previously. Such skills can range from piano playing to the speaking of foreign languages to which previously they had no exposure. It must be noted that such abilities often do not last, often tapering off after as little as a handful of months. We've all read Flowers for Algernon...

Genetic savants may simply be individuals who are on the autism spectrum and who display certain high-functioning adaptations to the condition. They might have certain skills—or areas of specialised knowledge—which they execute at superhuman levels of capability but are prone to catastrophic collapse in the face of setbacks or failures. Keepers should make such personalities roll Sanity whenever they fail in the performance of one of their enhanced skills, especially if the failure is a critical one, or one that is crucial to the advancement of the party’s narrative goals. The loss of confidence and the ability of the character to conduct themselves appropriately in society, critically affects them, rendering them catatonic or otherwise incapable as if they had failed a typical Mythos-initiated Sanity encounter.

Character Number Eleven: The Survivor

The character faced an encounter with an extraterrestrial or supernatural entity which has left them with certain sensitivities to further contact. These may be physical—such as a type of allergic reaction—or psychic, allowing the character to sense when members of the alien species loom.

Mechanics: How this effect might work depends upon the type of creature selected for its instigation. Many Mythos creatures are slimy and disgusting, comprised of unearthly elements to which an average human entity might well be allergic: mere proximity might be enough to instil a physical reaction in a person who had adversely encountered the entity in a past episode. Alternatively, if a person had once been psychically, or mystically, dominated by a member of such a paranormal race or entity, they may well be predisposed to “hear” psychic or occult resonances of the beings if they come into proximal range. Either way, the Keeper and the player need to decide what horror was the cause of the attack and how the resulting character detects the presence of these entities when – or if – they appear.

It needs to be said also, that contact with alien beings for an extended period, allows the Survivor to have insights into how these alien minds work. Whenever the character encounters strange phenomena or random clues left by their past nemeses, allow them an Idea Roll (or maybe a Cthulhu Mythos Roll) to be able to infer that their old foes might be at work once more.

Along with these sensitivities, the character might be affected by a number (1D4, say) of phobic responses that inadvertently afflict them. If their alien foes were mostly blue in colour, the character might have a phobic reaction to overwhelming occurrences of that hue. The sound of clicking knitting needles might put them in mind of alien claws, or the smell of cigarette smoke might have the same reek of alien breath – the Keeper and the player should confer on which catalysts might set the character off.

Of course, the main source for such a character is Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As his psychic domination of her takes hold, her ability to win free becomes increasingly undermined. As well, she becomes privy to Dracula’s methods and activities through dreams, intuition and other manifestations of his psychic presence in her mind. While this is a good template for a supernatural form of domination, there’s no reason that such scenarios could not be rooted in the alien or other paranormal sources such as those the Mythos provides.

Character Number Twelve: The Promised One

The existence of the character has been pre-ordained and their presence in the world has unexpected meaning for members of a certain race, group, or species. Whether the character is happy about this state of affairs depends upon the exact circumstances of the condition, however some unexpected benefits of the role may be discovered.

Mechanics: For the purposes of this character type, the Keeper and player should consult the specifics of such people as the Dalai Lama or the Mahdi, either according to factual record or by narrative means (by watching the 1986 Eddie Murphy movie “The Golden Child” for example). Other instances from pulp literature are also useful to mine – Barbara Hambly’s Bride of the Rat God is an excellent source. The defining trait of such a character is that a certain section of human society perceives them to be an object of some cosmic significance, either a herald of the End Times or an Agent of Change. Even if they aren’t.

One way of instigating this trope is by having the character bear some outward sign of their inherited destiny, such as a birthmark or other odd pigmentation. This means that the character is obvious to the Faithful wherever they go. A more subtle manifestation might be an astrological significance of their birth, coupled with a peculiarity of birth location – over water during an eclipse, or such. If the Mark of Destiny is not immediately obvious, then it will lurk like a time bomb in the character’s back story, awaiting the right moment to detonate.

This trope can also be manifested in a random fashion too. Have the party of characters go about their adventuring, foiling cultist plots and garnering mystical and occult spoils until one of them picks up an object of seemingly benign supernatural consequence. If the character meets a specific requirement (high POW; high APP; whatever) the object becomes spiritually bonded to them, marking them as significant to a particular Mythos crowd. And it might not mark them out as a new high priestess; it might simply identify them as a worthy sacrifice. The object won’t be literally glued to them either; it will just follow them serendipitously wherever they go, blithely defying all their attempts to lose or dispose of it (the Keeper can have a lot of fun with this…).

However the Mark of the Promised One manifests, it comes with some useful side-effects. Firstly, the cultists excited by the Mark will have plans for the Promised One and will not allow harm to come to them (at least, harm not of their own devising); secondly, the Promised One – within certain strictures – has a degree of control over their followers, demanding – if not freedom of movement outside of cultish oversight – a certain degree of luxury and gilt within their cage; and thirdly, a possible ability to command the cultists to perform certain duties or to leave certain associates unharmed.

It’s possible as well that assumption of the mantle might come with a few magical abilities of a low-level consequence, such as a random psychometric skill, allowing the Chosen One to understand the general intent of a touched individual, or a low-grade healing ability of some kind – the Keeper is free to decide.

*****

Some might say that having such characters in your game will unbalance the gameplay. That’s indeed a possibility, but only if the Keeper allows that to happen. There are two mitigating factors. One, characters in Call of Cthulhu don’t last very long: if a super-powered character seems to be distorting the action unnecessarily, rest assured they won’t be doing it for long (or you’re doing something very strange as Ref.!). Second, it may not be immediately apparent, but almost all of these “powers” are narrative-based and only work because the Referee allows them to. For the most part, these players are only going to be responding to the cues that the Keeper gives their characters; it’s not as if they’re actively facilitating their role in the transpiring events (in most instances). In essence, no matter how outré these “abilities” are, they’re no more or less damaging to your story than lobbing a copy of The Book of Eibon at your assembled party members would be. The characters will react as their players see fit.

So, if you want to walk on the spooky-side for awhile, let your players take on some super-powers and see how it shakes up your game!

Announcing: “Shadows of Razorhurst”

“Are you afraid of the dark?”

Well, it’s taken awhile, but this is finally finished.

About ten years ago I started writing this series of short stories based around the idea that, if supernatural investigators existed in Sydney during the 1920s, what would that look like? The result is this noir-ish, gumshoe-y, collection of occult detective fiction. These are the tales of Private Investigator Patrick Dolan and his partner Anton Vadász, taken from their crime files, as they pursue the other things that go bump in the night – the supernatural things.

Raised in Catholic poverty, Patrick Dolan is a hard-as-nails private investigator. Six feet and eight inches tall, weighing over 300 pounds, he trained as a boxer and wields a savage right hook. He works the mean streets in which he grew up and walks both sides of the Law, looking for Justice wherever he can find it.

Anton Vadász hails from Hungary and is the last surviving member of an ancient lineage. After the undead destroyed his family, he devoted his life and his considerable fortune to hunting down and destroying supernatural evil wherever it may be found. Even under the hot, antipodean sun.

Together, they form an unlikely but highly effective team, along with their friends, associates and various experts in strange and mystical fields of esoteric endeavour. They battle sorcerers, Hell-hounds, vampires, ghosts and many other spooky entities, in their quest to rid the Silver City of its paranormal menace.

*****

Copies are available through Amazon – ebook versions are also available – and most other online outlets. Or go to the publisher’s website – www.oceaniacom.com – to get a copy straight from the source. You can always ask your local bookseller to whistle up a copy for you too. Don’t forget to leave a review after reading! Enjoy!

*****

“Things shed their skins in the dark; they split out of their husks; they crawl up from beneath the earth and they shift their bones to become things that shouldn’t ought to exist.

It ain’t the dark I’m scared of; I’m afraid of what’s in it.”

*****

PS: Just received notification that I'm a finalist in the 2025 Australasian Horror Writers Association Shadow Awards with this book! Watch this space!

Review: Two Shark Flicks - "Bait" & "Mako"

 

Kimble Rendall (Dir.), “Bait”, Bait Productions/Media Development Authority/Pictures in Paradise/Blackmagic Design Films, 2012.

There is little worse in this world than a bad stab at an accent, especially when the accent is trying to be an Australian one. It’s a tricky manoeuvre. What’s worse is listening to a bunch of Australians trying to replicate any other accent: it’s just awful. Before seeing this flick, therefore, be warned that, since this was a joint Australian/Singaporean production with an eye towards selling on to the US, this is a hodge-podge of Asian and Australian speakers all trying desperately to be understood by people of other nationalities - and failing miserably.

At one point, after the situation has been set up and all of our cast are taking stock, one of the actors declares that, after the tsunami, there will most likely be “effter sharks”. At this point I stopped the film and looked over to my fellow viewer: we, both of us, are fairly clued-in to the many varieties of sharks that populate the world’s oceans but neither of us was aware of this particular species. After some pointless Googling and discussion, we rewound the film and listened to it again: “there’s bound to be effter sharks”. We suddenly realised she was trying to say “aftershocks” – from the depths of her Cronulla twang – in a way that she thought the average Yank would understand. And that’s a fail, folks. Sheesh!

So it went: the cast of this movie are all alumni from “Neighbours”, “Water Rats”, or “Home and Away” with Julian McMahon – he of “Fant4stic” and “Charmed” – thrown in to grab some serious actor cachet. All of them drop the ball when it comes to putting on a cod-Yank accent. In fact, the Singaporean cast members managed to do better at a semi-Aussie twang than the Aussies did at their Stateside drawl. It’s just awful and distracting.

Then there’s the plot. I imagine at the pitch meeting for this someone just said, “you know Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, yeah? Well, like that, but it’s sharks, not zombies!” And that’s about it. A tsunami hits a supermarket in the Gold Coast of Australia just as two goons are holding the place up and they all get trapped inside the ruined building while ENORMOUS SHARKS patrol the half-sunken aisles looking for snacks. Various attempts at escape/signalling for help are tried and fail until a last desperate push sees everyone – almost – win free. Applause.

Of course, some folks don’t live to see the credits and their fates are determined by the Hollywood Morality Playbook. The hold-up crook who regretted his actions (and is played by the best-known actor) survives; his bad-to-the-bone buddy gets chomped. The new boyfriend of the girl who used to live in the town but moved away after her brother got eaten by another shark, dies while valiantly attempting rescue, but – hey! – her old boyfriend gets to win her back and survive. The vapid boyfriend of the airhead girl with the little dog gets eaten, just because he was forced to choose between saving himself or the animal: in an increasingly common trope with these films, “the dog survives” is becoming a mainstay. And of course, the rules-conscious manager of the supermarket gets horribly devoured too, because – authority figure.

I remember when this film was first released, there was a lot of promotional pushing with critics saying it was “not bad” and “pretty good”. I thought at the time that this might have been an example of the Aussie propensity for understatement, but it turns out that they were just damning the whole enterprise with faint praise.

*****

Mohammed Hesham el-Rashidy (Dir.), “Mako”, Netflix/JL Vision Film, 2021.

This one was perplexing. This movie is an Arabic Netflix piece, made with finance from China, and destined, I’m guessing for an Egyptian audience. I was interested going in, because I thought that this would be one instance where the damned Hollywood Morality Playbook wouldn’t be running things and that this absence would bring something fresh to the brand. I was right… but also, I was completely wrong.

My assumptions about watching a shark flick are generally along the lines of the following: people will gather together to get into the water for some particular purpose that has relevance for them as a group; once there, mayhem ensues, either as a direct result of unanticipated shark activity, or from a non-shark vector that is compounded infinitely by the unanticipated presence of sharks. In this case, the presence of the sharks is almost completely incidental.

The fact that this is called “Mako” started my imagination running. Makos are quick sharks that are known for their ability to jump (this was crucial to their presence in the first “Deep Blue Sea”). Since this thing is set in the Red Sea, I did a check of the local species – Tiger Sharks, Bull Sharks, Hammerhead Sharks… There are Shortfin Mako Sharks but they’re in the minority. I asked myself “why these particular sharks?” It turns out that there’s no real reason. Perhaps it was felt that more people have heard of Makos and that Bull Sharks have been done to death. Whatever – obviously, a shark is a shark is a shark. They could have gone for the standard Great White – if you can stick one of these in the Seine in the middle of Paris, then I guess they can go anywhere – but maybe they just thought the word sounded cool. Anyway: makos it is.

The premise is this: a documentary producer is announced as the winner of a prestigious award and she steps up to accept it before a huge audience. Turns out, it was her husband who won the gong and she gets humiliated on the world stage, even falling off the stage at the awards ceremony. Eager to save face, she demands from her production crew that they come up with a concept that will erase her shame and win them accolades in future. A newcomer to the team informs them of a sunken cruise ship in the Red Sea – now picked over by SCUBA pirates in the year since the tragedy – and says that “an aura of sadness” hangs over the wreck. Next thing you know, the team is hotfooting it down to the beach to catch this “aura” on film.

Sketchy is as sketchy does: as soon as they hit the surf, the team is sprayed with mutiny and division. The filmmaker and her husband fight about the award ceremony and who should have done what for whom; one of the team is high on drugs and turns psychotic; his brother is a coward and panics; another team member has diabetes and has forgotten to take his meds; there’s a murderous rapist on board the support boat up on the surface; and finally, the newbie to the crew has engineered the whole situation in order to return to the place where her family perished so that she can die alongside them. Given the size and range of this mess, the sharks are simply there to clean up the splatter. The makos are simply the punchline to every story arc.

Maybe all of this – the superabundance of impossibly-groomed fashion-plate actors; the agonising, the weeping, the wringing of hands and the pointing of accusing fingers – is par for the course for Egyptian action films. I don’t know. I was just impressed that the water didn’t turn bubbly during the event due to all of the soap. What I do know is that it wasn’t for me.

One-and-a-half tentacled horrors.