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Month: February 2015

WhiskeyHorror Double Feature: Dead Snow 2 and The Woman in Black

There have been two WhiskeyHorrors since my last report: one last Saturday, and one on Tuesday night. So much horror. So much whiskey. (Well, the usual amount of whiskey.)

Both times we mostly drank the 10-year-old Bulleit reserve, which is delicious. Also a bit of Monkey Shoulder blended Scotch, which I hear is hit-or-miss depending on which batch you happen to get, but our bottle is very good with soda and even tasty by itself over ice.

Saturday we watched Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead, which was an improvement in pretty much every way over the first one — funnier, more lively, equally gruesome with better effects. It picks up immediately after the end of the first film… except all the Norwegian people now inexplicably speak English. (Guess it was a condition of giving the director actual money.) Martin Starr was amusing as the leader of an American “Zombie Squad” (though I wish the two women on the squad had been better written and fleshed-out) and the business with the tank was great. Recommended if you like funny zombie stuff and dead Russians hitting dead Nazis with shovels and, uh, generally enjoy films that involve snow.

Tuesday was rather more serious: we saw The Woman in Black, with Daniel Radcliffe being pale and sad in the English countryside as blank-faced children committed suicide all around him and in the past also. As the father of an adorable blond moppet myself, the film certainly gave me some terrible twinges. Stately and deliberate without being dull, with a good mix of jump scares and tension-building-dread stretches. At one point when Radcliffe’s character was Making A Plan to deal with the supernatural menace I complained that in many old ghost stories there’s not a damn thing you can do; the ghosts are just there, and will remain there, and there’s not a ritual you can conduct to put them to rest. I suppose I’ll adhere to local norms and avoid spoilers but suffice to say, I was pleased with how Radcliffe’s plan turned out. The ending is an utterly bleak downer — and yet because it’s not as bad as it could have been, it actually manages to feel weirdly hopeful!

We’ve also been watching the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series, which is total gonzo fun, very cinematic, well directed, engagingly acted, gross, grotesque, funny, smart, pulpy, and narratively complex. We’re four episodes in, and I can’t wait to watch more. (Note: not for ophidiophobes.)

Queen of Nothing Kickstarter

As springtime grows near, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of… Kickstarting another Marla Mason fantasy novel.

I just launched the campaign to fund Queen of Nothing, which will be the ninth full-length book in the series (tenth if you count short prequel novel Bone Shop). (At this point, I’ve crowdfunded more of these novels than I published traditionally, which is frankly mind-blowing to me. My readers are amazing.)

If you want to contribute, or learn more, you can check it out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timpratt/queen-of-nothing-a-marla-mason-novel

QoNimage

It’s going to be a grand blend of mythic fiction and contemporary fantasy, with a lot of evil-god-punching, and all the usual snark and jokes and moral ambiguity and ass-kicking and calamitous mistakes that characterize the rest of the series.

Want to read about Marla? Here are links to some free stories set in her world.

Thanks, as always, for your support.

 

WhiskeyHorror: The Den

WhiskeyHorror report:

We drank Larceny, a wheated bourbon from Heaven Hill distilleries, with ice and the odd splash of bitters. Pretty tasty stuff.

We watched The Den, a recent found-footage (sort of) horror movie, quite tense and disturbing, with a nice mix of mounting discomfort, dread, jump scares, and graphic horror. (Plotwise it’s basically “Chatroulette, with murderstalking,” or “Hostel Online,” though it’s less torture-porn-y than the Hostel movies; which isn’t to say there’s no gruesome violence, because there is a bit.) The lead character was a bit passive/ineffectual for much of the film, to the extent that I said, “Wow, I wish she’d do something,” but as things became more imminently dangerous she did step up and make some impressive moves, and I ended up liking her character a lot. (I’m not saying things turn out well for her — it’s a horror movie, not a thriller where order is restored at the end — but at least she made the bad guys feel a degree of her pain.)

As we finished watching American Horror Story we needed a new show to add to the rotation, and after poking around Netflix a bit found Darknet, which even fits a bit thematically with The Den. It’s a Canadian anthology horror show (non-supernatural, for at least the first few eps anyway). Each episode has several intersecting storylines, with a non-linear approach to chronology, and an emphasis on twist endings which range from the silly to the delightfully creepy. (Of course, once the twist-ending thing was established, we started to see the twists coming, or at least to look for them.) It’s an amusing show, organized around the common thread of a website devoted to the macabre and murderous and disgusting. (Sort of 4chan meets the Morbid Reality sub-Reddit.) Fear Itself is still the better Canadian anthology horror series, but Darknet is fun.