the small hand

i like horror theatre, but mostly i come away wishing it had gone further. i saw ghost stories, which was cool, but i really expected there to be more audience interaction. i went to see a punchdrunk production of faust that was in this spooky archive building and used all these horror tropes, like there was this one moment where one of the characters was killed, and i stuck around to watch what happened because the performance runs on a loop so i figured the actor isn't just going to lie there for the next hour. and he doesn't, he sat bolt upright just like michael myers from halloween and then the staggered towards me like a zombie and tried to touch my face. that shit was cool! but i needed more of it.

the closest i ever got to really being scared by a show, outside of a horror maze, was the woman in black. i know it's been around forever and it's a movie now so it's old news, but the staging of that play is fucking amazing. it's like watching a live haunting, and it's fucking terrifying! so when i found out that there was a stage adaptation of another susan hill story (susan hill wrote the book what the woman in black was based on) i was really excited.

the small hand is about this art dealer named adam snow who goes to this creepy old house by mistake and is then haunted by the ghost of a 5 year old boy. as the haunting becomes more and more intense he begins to unravel the boy's story and to understand why he is the target.

the play is really fucking intense. andrew lancel's performance as adam snow starts frantic and becomes more crazed with each scene. by the end he's throwing himself on the floor and pulling out his hair with what feels like a genuine display of a man insane. he's sympathetic too, and he needs to be because like the best ghost stories he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. there's an m r james quality to the story; this idea that once the ghost sees you, you're fucked. there's no digging up the bones and giving them a christian burial or some shit, you're just fucked. japanese horror films use this idea as well. here, the sense of impending doom is presented really well from the start.

the supporting cast are great too and the story moves along at a quick pace, using a simple set to great effect with some really seamless scene transitions. the non-linear narrative is a bit confusing at first but makes sense by the end. overall, it was a great story well told.

my only niggle? i wasn't scared. sure, it was creepy and there were some good uses of big bangs and screams. there was one really creepy moment, reminiscent of woman in black, when snow is outside the house and you can see the silhouette of a woman in the shadows behind him. but there is a rule in horror, particularly ghost stories, that you absolutely must follow if you want to scare your audience. don't let them see too much of the monster. woman in black gets this right, jaws gets it right, alien gets it right...here, it's a problem. that ghost kid is fucking everywhere! and yeah, he's a creepy little bastard but he appears so often he just stops being scary. if they had held off having him appear until the final scene of the play i swear i would've lost my shit. if for the whole play you thought it was in snow's head and at the last moment you see what he sees...that would have been amazing. instead, the kid punctuates every scene and it's never truly scary as a result.

that said, the story is cool and there are some great moments. there are a few more performances in brighton and i think there are still tickets so you can still catch it if you have chance. otherwise i think there are still a few stops left on the tour so look out for it.

horns

horns. its a bit like harry potter woke up one day and decided "fuck it. let someone else deal with ralph fienes, I'm going to join slitherin and be a badass". so the film follows ig who has been accused of killing his girlfriend. a year after her death he wakes up with horns that give him the power to hear what people really think, and look into their darkest secrets. after a few random encounters ig decides to use his new power to find out who really killed his girlfriend.
 

overall its cool seeing the boy wizard in a darker role. he plays the anti hero well, with a pretty convincing american accent. the horn effects were cool and although a bit on the grim side, i was happy to follow the story along on his crazy, twisting and turning mission, to reach its goal. it's quite a depressing tale though, told through a fluid timeline as ig learns the truth through human contact.

directed by alexandre aja, director of the fucked up switchblade romance (high tension to the rest of the world), he does a good job of bringing quite a twisted narrative to life. at no point did i lose interest, a definite highlight being a trippy sequence in the second half.

although not quite a complex thriller, nor psychological horror, it is different. i can recommend it to anyone wanting something slightly different than the usual slashy affair.

plus horns make harry potter look awesome

y: the last man

so i finally finished reading y: the last man. my feelings about finishing it are kind of ambivalent. i mean, i loved it, i loved the characters, i loved going on this journey with them and now it's over and i have to carry on with my life. and that's kind of what the story is about.

the story is about this young dude called yorick who is the last surviving man after a plague wipes out all the other men in the world. he then travels the globe with his bodyguard, 355, and a scientist, dr. mann, hoping to find a cure for the plague and also be reunited with his girlfriend. the series is collected in ten books, which is how i read it.

there are some really clever and interesting ideas about gender in this story. for example, one problem the characters have to deal with is how to move between countries when there are no planes. why are there no planes? because most of the pilots were men so most of the planes fell out of the sky when the plague hit. the world without men setting provides a constant source of questions and notions about how men have shaped our world and what it would look like without them. at the same time, the writer, brian k vaughan, never seeks to answer these questions outright, it's more about giving the reader something to think about. it is never suggested that a world without men is somehow better than the world we have now, and in some ways there seems to be many of the same problems, but it's certainly no worse off.

the thing is, the story isn't really about that. mostly it's a love story, and it's not the love story you think it's going to be. i'll try not to spoil it, but i cried a lot at the end (and i was in public, so that's awkward). it's the characters that really make the story work. they're cool people to be around and i grew to love all of them. the story is so epic that they all feel like they've changed so much since first appearing. they have suffered tragedy after tragedy but they keep moving, and that's what it's all about. this isn't a story about the world ending. it's about what you do when you think the world ended. it's about how you carry on and build a new world. it's not about survival, it's about evolution, and that's something everyone should be able to relate to.

somehow you must find a copy of this comic-book series and read it immediately. it is that good.

graywalkers

graywalkers is a 3d rpg about the survivors of an apocalyptic event that caused parts of heaven and hell to be merged with our world. if that's a difficult concept to get your head around, here's a handy video.

so basically there are demons and bad things and you fight them with guns and swords and stuff. there is a combat demo you can download from the official site, which is well worth checking out. the characters are pretty out there in terms of style, one carries a ghetto blaster that you wouldn't imgaine being all that practical in a post-apocalyptic world but it says all you need to know about the visual style of the game. although xcom is the most cited reference point, the characters make it feel more like the recent shadowrun reboot. this isn't a bad thing and it's nice to play something new that still feels familiar. it's easy to get into the demo and understand how it all works within a few minutes. it also has an awesome metal soundtrack.

i have to say, i mostly play games for the story and though the combat demo is shiny and fun i'm more interested in the world. the idea of hell opening its gates is one that has been explored in countless games (most notably clive barker's jericho, although a more interesting take was in the point-and-click adventure game hell which took place in a world where demons were just part of society. that game had some fantastic concepts, like there was a character who was mapping out hell, and there was a demon who ran a nightclub played by dennis hopper. anyway, check it out if you're interested). this device allows the developers to include lots of supernatural bad guys like vampires, zombies etc. but what's really interesting about this story is the inclusion of heaven in the cataclysmic event, so humanity (and by extension, the player characters) are caught up in an eternal war, with the game taking place in a neutral area appropriately named purgatory. i'm interested to see how this storyline plays out in the game as it has potential for some epic narrative moments. there is also mention on the site about emergent gameplay, with the actions of the player being able to affect the story and the world, i guess a bit like mass effect. and with heaven and hell in the mix the story certainly has the potential to be as epic and existential as the one in mass effect.

based on the concept art, the demo and the details about the game on the website, graywalkers is shaping up to be something very fucking cool indeed and is definitely worth checking out. right now the developers are seeking extra funding on kickstarter to help speed up the development process. if you're interested they have some awesome rewards. you can check out their page here.

gotham

so in case you missed it, gotham is a show about gotham before batman, told mostly through the eyes of a young jim gordon. it features younger versions of all the famous batman characters (in the first episode we had riddler, penguin, catwoman, poison ivy and probably some others i missed) that kind of play like cameos even though they're not famous actors. it sets up the killing of bruce wayne's parents as a central mystery and also corruption in the police force as jim gordon's ongoing challenge, although because of it's roots it plays more like a comic book than a police procedural.

it's hard to know how to review a tv show from the pilot, because it will obviously change and develop from here, but here are my thoughts on the first episode. for a start i struggled with the concept a bit. i always loved the idea that batman created the villains in his world, an idea that's been explored in the comics but also in the nolan trilogy (which i fucking love to death) and even tim burton's film. so the idea that these villains already exist in the world and batman will come into existence because of them was tough to get my head around at first, until i realised that obviously that's how the story was originally. the villains only existing because of batman is a kind of post-modern, revisionist (yes i did some film theory at uni) idea that only really exists when you try to write a batman story that takes into account the entire history of batman. gotham is really taking it back to the beginning. the end of the series, presumably, will be batman existing and i think what's interesting is, is that a happy ending or a tragic ending? what i mean is, if batman has to exist then our hero, jim gordon, must fail. so it's a series about watching someone fail? i'm overanalysing, i know, but i think it's really interesting.

i also thought the idea of this corrupt police force and cops being worse than the bad guys is interesting in a post-ferguson world. there's a lot of mistrust of the police in the real world these days, and whether it's a good thing to have a tv show that reinforces that idea is a good thing or not, i'm not sure, but it does raise some questions. and i like the more adult approach to the show, despite a lot of what is happening being a bit fantastical and silly. i never really got into smallville, i always found it a bit too lightweight, whereas this at least has the illusion of darkness and substance even if at its heart it's just a show about cops hitting people.

my only criticism is that it moves a bit too fast. i know it's a pilot so they had to try and tell a story in one episode but i would've liked to have maybe understood the role of the waynes in the world before they were killed, and maybe get to know a bit more about gordon before he arrives. even the penguin seems to go from henchman to psycho in record time, although i am interested to see how that plays out. i guess that was my main feeling after the credits rolled - i want to see how this plays out. that has to be a good thing.

the wolfman

it's a bit too late to be writing reviews but i wanted to get this out while it's fresh in my head. however, i'm really tired so this may be a bit rambly. i watched the 2010 version of the wolfman and it was quite an odd film. parts of it were amazing; the casting for one. benicio del toro is awesome as laurence talbot, anthony hopkins and emily blunt are both on good form and hugo weaving is amazing as inspector abberline (a historical cameo - abberline was one of the lead investigators in the jack the ripper murders, like in real life, not just that johnny depp film where jack the ripper is played by bilbo baggins and depp's abberline has to team up with hagrid to stop him). it looks great, like if a hammer film was made today, all massive, spooky houses and fog-drenched woodlands. some of the effects were great too. but it didn't hold together all that well and i think that may be down to stealing it's plot from teen wolf ( the 1985 movie, not the tv series). i mean it's a less violent version of teen wolf but the moment (***spoiler***) when anthony hopkins tells del toro he is a werewolf is almost exactly the same as the bathroom scene in teen wolf where michael j fox's dad reveals himself. it's like teen wolf with more deaths, and without the riding on top of a truck scene. it was also really difficult to sympathise with anyone. del toro's character can't be held respsonsilbe for killing people as a wolfman but the violence is so extreme it's hard to really sympathise with him, which leaves abberline but our feelings towards him are mixed because we know he's out to get del toro. other films have got this right, like the original wolfman or an american werewolf in london, but it didn't work here for me. it was also way too long for a story which, in terms of plot points, could have been done in half an hour. that said, i'd still recommend checking it out. it's definitely interesting and there's enough that's good here to make it worthwhile. it does a good job of capturing the spirit of vintage horror movies, although it definitely feels more hammer than universal.

two boys kissing by david levithan

i actually finished reading this before 'looking for jj' but didn't get chance to blog at the time.  actually thinking about it, this is another ya book that's not that fluffy either but it is an excellent read.  it's the story of several different, unconnected gay teenage boys, all watched over by a chorus of men who died of aids.  (can you say aids victims?  you wouldn't say cancer victim, would you?)  i really liked this part of the book, i suppose i'd never really thought about how it must have felt for those men, and you probably wouldn't get teenagers to read a novel about what it would have been like to live through it in the 80s and 90s, so its quite a good way of sneaking the subject into the novel.  it could get a bit abstract and over-poetic at times, but i thought it was a cool idea.

but the main action of the novel centres around the two boys kissing, craig and harry, attempting the world record for longest kiss.  all the action takes place from the night before the record attempt to the conclusion of the kiss, and it drives through a story which otherwise might feel quite bitty.  i was there with them, cheering them on but also experiencing the tiredness, the aches and pains, the bladder discomfort... alongside their stories we also meet avery and ryan, from their first glance across the room to their second date; committed, comfortable couple neil and peter; tariq, friend of the would-be longest kissers and victim of homophobic violence; and isolated, desperate cooper who needs a way out.  what's striking is that there is something for every single teenager to relate to, gay or straight or bi or whatever.  I wanted to race to the end of the novel because i wanted craig and harry to be able to take a break and sleep, but also i didn't want to leave the characters, i wanted to find out what happened to everyone else afterwards - not just in the immediate future but what kinds of adults they turned out be.  the only negative thing i can say about it is that, unsurprisingly given the subject matter, it was really male-centric, to the point of excluding women and girls, and i keep asking myself whether this exclusion was justified - a question i haven't been able to answer yet. but this is one of those books that you think everyone in the world should read, it would be a better place if they did.

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