Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
To qualify everything that comes next: while I’m a Star Trek fan, there’s a lot about Trek I cannot stand. I’m talking about the various TV incarnations and the current reboot, just to be clear. It’s the earliest memory of TV I can recall, and according to the dedicated Star Trek wiki, Memory Alpha, I likely caught it in the final season of its first run on the BBC (September – December 1971). I loved this show, and a big part of me still does.
Man, I wanted so much to like this movie going in. I hadn’t heard the name of Joe Begos before, but as anyone who’s been following my recent reviews will know, I’ve sort of fallen in love with the indie horror genre. Go back and read my scribblings on Carnage Park, Darling, Pod, Jug Face, and Southbound and you’ll see that trend develop before your very eyes! In addition to that, I’ve come to enjoy the screen work of Larry Fassenden, and in particular Lauren Ashley Carter – but I won’t gush here in my review of The Mind’s Eye.
In 2002, Christian Longo was arrested in Mexico for the December 2001 murders of his wife and three children. In the month or so he’d been hiding out there, he used the alias Michael Finkel. Not uncommon for fugitives to do that, but in Longo’s case, the name was that of a specific person. It wasn’t someone he knew – not a neighbor or a friend or a fictional character. Michael Finkel was the name of a contributing editor at the New York Times who was fired by the paper around the same time as Longo’s arrest for writing a well-meaning, though fictional account of the African slave trade. When Finkel learns of Longo, he is intrigued enough to contact Longo directly to ask why the accused murderer used his name, of all people. True Story is the movie adaptation of Finkel’s resulting book that detailed their relationship.
Stephen King, in his celebrated non fiction work Danse Macabre postulated that the Werewolf was one of the three major archetpyes of horror. The other two being The Thing With No Name and the Vampire. In the 36 years or so since he wrote that, horror changed a lot, but these archetypes – as broadly stated as King intended – still hold up more or less. In terms of recent horror movies I’ve reviewed, Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno is a Vampire movie, and Darling, by Mickey Keating is a Werewolf movie. I would add one to this list, however, and that is the Zombie. Sure, many Zombie movies are just that, but their proliferation as the most ubiquitous creature in horror fiction and movies (all you need to do is look at the sheer volume of books on Amazon – every new “writer” seems to produce nothing BUT zombie fiction – and the depressing array of low-budget movies on Netflix to see that) deserves a place at the table – it’s gone beyond being just a play on the Vampire archetype.
If there’s a worse big-budget action movie screenplay than Paul Greengrass’s Jason Bourne, I haven’t seen it. That’s not to say that the movie is an out and out stinker, but it comes really close, and for me, it clocks in as the worst of the series.
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 