Superman (2025)

I heard a lot of good word of mouth about the latest Superman movie, directed and cowritten by James Gunn, who in 2022 was put in charge of a reboot of the DC Comics film franchise (his “cowriters” here are the original Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who died last century but, as with Bob Kane and the Batman movies, must have finally won an ironclad lawsuit). The word of mouth is warranted—the movie is well worth seeing for any fan of Superman and maybe even for those, like me, now good and sick and tired of superhero movies. Gunn has an intriguing resume. He is also responsible for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies and, back in 2010, Super, with Rainn Wilson and then-Ellen Page, which might be the greatest superhero comic book parody ever made. Gunn’s tongue is not as firmly in his cheek with Superman, but the picture is so lighthearted as to be perfectly refreshing, notably with its use of the super-dog Krypto, who is playful here like a dog but has those good old Kryptonian superpowers too. If this dog ever catches a car, woe to the car. Speaking of catching, this boy-scout Superman (David Corenswet) is also caught saving a squirrel in one throwaway scene. That’s how tender his heart is. Superheroes are referred to in this universe as “metahumans” and they are not always trusted, lifting a page from the mutants thing. Superman is set up by enemies as an alien invader and people start grumbling about him. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has a lot to do with it, appearing as a transparently Stephen Miller type, raving about alien immigrants. Pretty obvious, but OK, I will take it in this day and age. We also get a handful of extra superheroes, associated with a quasi-core to the Justice League calling themselves the ”Justice Gang”—the Green Lantern with a blond haircut like Moe’s from the Three Stooges (Nathan Fillion), a version of Hawk Girl (Isabela Merced), Mr. Terrific, new to me (Edi Gathegi), and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). At the very least it’s an odd but deeply informed view of the DC universe, such as it is. Another key twist on the usual is finding out early that Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) knows Clark Kent is Superman and they are basically boyfriend / girlfriend. There’s also a pretty good joke about Superman thinking he is authentically punk-rock. I dread whatever comes next because that usually means weighing down all the best stuff with unlikely explanations and doing the continuity dance for the sake of carping fans. Like the 1978 Superman, this one can be thoroughly enjoyed on its own terms and all sequels approached with caution. Better to look at this one more than once—it’s that good.

Radio Free Albemuth (1976)

So far I have not been able to make it through even the first novel in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy. It’s partly that it’s not an easy read and partly my own bad attitude about the Christian-ness of it all and of Dick’s life in about the last 10 years of it. Radio Free Albemuth is Dick’s first cut at what would become VALIS, prompted by an event he took as a religious experience in March 1974. The manuscript was rejected by publishers without substantial revisions. It’s interesting to me that a writer of his stature—Dick was a pretty big deal in SF circles in 1976—would still face such editorial rejection and impositions. I agree Radio Free Albemuth is weak, or parts of it feel undeveloped, but the concepts, as always, can be heady. Nicholas Brady and his close friend Philip K. Dick are the two main characters. Brady is receiving messages from an entity or civilization that hails from the star Albemuth and has placed a satellite circling Earth, blending in with other satellites. It is beaming messages and instructions to people like Brady. They are sleeper agents, I think, though their mission is not malicious but supporting resistance to a fascist regime in the US. VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Reading this novel at this moment inevitably brings Donald Trump to mind as the fascist US president but Dick’s intended target in 1976 was, of course, Richard Nixon. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, as Dick might put it. That may not be fair, but there is an unmistakable religious vibe wrapped into this. VALIS feels like God by another name, indeed the more Jesus-oriented Holy Trinity God of the Bible’s New Testament. The fascist regime is notably terrible, not just with violence and imprisonment, but with the kind of reality distortion capabilities seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and the Trump regime, e.g., loudly braying there is less right-wing violence than so-called left-wing, or consistently arguing climate change is a hoax). It’s fair to call Radio Free Albemuth dystopic and it makes me curious to see how it works with the trilogy. As a first draft, this one lives in a gray zone between finished and unfinished. It probably does need more work—which it basically got with VALIS a couple of years later.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Touki Bouki (1973)

Senegal, 85 minutes

Director/writer: Djibril Diop Mambety

Photography: Georges Bracher

Music: Josephine Baker, Mado Robin

Editor: Siro Asteni

Cast: Magaye Niang, Myriam Niang, Christoph Colomb, Moustapha Toure, Aminata Fall, Ousseynou Diop

In Wolof, the language spoken in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, “Touki Bouki” translates as “The Journey of the Hyena,” which helps to clarify things. The picture can roughly be described as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde story crossed with the classic Western story of dissatisfied young folks in the provinces—or, in this case, an African colony of France—trying to make it to the capital—not Dakar, note, but Paris. A lighthearted Josephine Baker song, “Paris Paris Paris,” underlines the point, coming up on the soundtrack whenever Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Myriam Niang) feel the great city and European cultural capital is within their grasp.

Mory owns a motorcycle on which he has mounted a long-horned cow skull. Life in this remote region is mostly about cattle ranching and Mory gets by working as a cowherd. It’s not what he wants to do with his life—that’s more along the lines of being a bohemian. But early scenes in a slaughterhouse set the tone and foreshadow his more likely doom. Though not a large part of the movie, these scenes are almost the first thing we see. They are intensely disturbing, as we witness pathetic cattle as they realize the danger late and fight helplessly. There’s nothing they can do. Touki Bouki is a low-budget affair and these scenes are not simulations, showing actual livestock slaughterhouse deaths (decapitated and bled out) in a little too much detail for me. But it certainly establishes, however playful events shown here may become, that there is always a desperate deadly seriousness behind the impulse to get away.

“The Dead Smile” (1899)

F. Marion Crawford didn’t write even a dozen horror short stories, but they tend to be among the best from the fertile turn of the 20th century. This one features a corpse that keeps escaping from its coffin in the family mausoleum—beheaded, too, and the head self-mobile, harbinger of Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” still to come just a few years later. “The Dead Smile” riffs on “rictus sardonicus,” a term not used in the story but an apt tag on the internet—an exaggerated involuntary grin. The condition generally comes of tetanus but can also suggest strychnine or hemlock poisoning. Ray Russell put it to good use in his 1961 story, “Sardonicus.” In this story, the unnerving grin is associated most with a bitter old man who harbors family secrets. “He smiled, stretching pale lips across discolored teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt.” What’s more, and probably the best effect here, whenever he flashes this grin everyone else in the room starts to grin the same way. It’s the source of the story’s title, with interesting multiple meanings. In the spooky family crypt most of the dead are wrapped in shrouds, except the one that climbs out of its coffin and is usually found leaning against a wall with its head rolled up at its feet. This is all great scene-setting, especially when everyone starts to grin in unison. It’s good, because the story can be unfortunately a little lame and obvious. The terrible old man with the big grin wants to forbid a marriage between his son and his niece but won’t say why (it’s not hard to guess as the story goes along). I note that the marriage of first cousins made me uneasy, but not anyone else here. “The Dead Smile” largely overcomes its flaws by its strange air and details. As it happens, the point of the story, its big revelation, doesn’t have much to do with either the escaping corpse or the rictus sardonicus. There’s also a banshee on hand (in Irish legend, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death), equally beside the point and perhaps the least interesting element of the story. “The Dead Smile” may not be Crawford’s best, but it holds its own.

65 Great Spine Chillers, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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Hyperion (1989)

The first in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos cycle of four novels won a Hugo and sits on many lists of best science fiction all-time. It did not entirely live up to the hype for me. I admit the structure is ambitious and even impressive. Lifting from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century Middle English Canterbury Tales (as noted often), it is about a group of pilgrims making a sojourn to the mysterious planet Hyperion on a specific mission. To pass the time on the long space voyage they take turns telling stories about their relations to Hyperion, whose features include the mostly unexplained but tantalizing and evocative “Time Tombs” as well as the god-like figure that appears to guard them, known as the Shrike. Along the way there is a lot of world-building about humanity in approximately the 28th century CE. Simmons has set himself a huge balancing act, between the states of technology and human politics against the background of a federation of hundreds of settled planets, on the one hand, along with many hundreds more designated for the “Outback,” i.e., not part of the so-called Hegemony, and, on the other hand, details about Hyperion and the pilgrims. The main story of the mission is barely here. The individual, novella-length stories of the pilgrims range from slightly better than humdrum all the way up to very good. Most reviewers seem to love the priest’s story best, and the scholar’s tale is also pretty good. Hyperion is stuffed with intriguing SF ideas, from time dilation to effects of faster-than-light travel to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Little comes of the mission here, but I understand that’s covered in the next novel, The Fall of Hyperion. Some like it even more, but many others don’t, and no one seems to care much for the last two (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion). I am curious, however, to know what comes of the mission, so I may get to the second. I’ve read one of Simmons’s horror novels, Carrion Comfort, also from 1989 (he’s a bit of a prolific genre polyglot) and thought it was pretty good. Still, Hyperion came in as slightly disappointing for me—nicely done, but only half a job. This is part of my problem with series in general. Hyperion is not really finished in most ways, anticipating further novels. The setup is for a mission and we’re left hanging on that. The individual tales vary quite a bit in terms of quality. The people who say The Fall of Hyperion is good had better be right, that’s all I have to say.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

It Follows (2014)

USA, 100 minutes

Director/writer: David Robert Mitchell

Photography: Mike Gioulakis

Music: Disasterpeace

Editor: Julio C. Perez IV

Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Sovatto, Lili Sepe, Olivia Luccardi, Jake Weary, Bailey Spry

Strictly speaking, It Follows is not a horror show in the slasher mode. Supernatural elements abound. It’s set in Detroit, not some forest with a nearby campground. There is no final girl. Even the big bad knives that give the slasher subgenre its name go missing here. But It Follows is fully onboard with the idea that no teen sexual activity should ever go unpunished. The equation is simple: teen sexual activity leads to swift and brutal death, no exceptions. Or, as IMDb puts it in a pithy summary: “A young woman is followed by an unknown supernatural force after a sexual encounter.”

But there’s more than just that to this moody doomy premise. An additional wrinkle provides that the unknown supernatural force tracks you to your death. It might look like a stranger. It might look like someone you know. It moves slow but sure. You can run away from it but it never stops coming for you—unless you have sex with someone else, in which case it goes after that person. However, if it gets that person, murdering them in some suitably grotesque way, then it’s coming for you next. That’s all there is to it. You’re back where you started.

“The Black Cat” (1843)

[spoilers, content warnings] This Edgar Allan Poe story is an absolute classic on a few different levels. It has Poe’s claustrophobic neuroses on full display. Walling things up may have worked better in “The Cask of Amontillado” but it’s fine here too. Certain paranoid parallels are also obvious with another famous story of his from the same year, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” And layering on folk superstitions around black cats and/or their wicked supernatural powers basically makes it a wind-up-and-go winner. But my favorite part is the way those elements are not the greatest horror in this story. That belongs to the first-person narrator, an unrepentant abusing monster. He’s what’s most scary in this story, not the business with the cat and the revenge. Poe obviously knows what his narrator is and plays to it. The misdirection from the self-pitying narrator is chillingly easy to see through. That he cannot see it himself makes him even worse. He’s about to be put to death as he writes—and we know it’s the only thing that’s going to stop him. He is a drunkard as well, which exacerbates his abuse, which is shocking. He is married and though they had no children they were happy tending to a small menagerie: “birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.” But when our guy drinks he can get mean and in one such fit he tears one of the cat’s eyes out. It’s hard to express how shocking this is. The cat survives and stays with them, but now he's fearful and not so friendly. I know using pets in stories like this is blatantly manipulative and even a crutch for writers, but they can still work on me, and I think Poe knows what he’s doing here. It gets worse. Now our guy can’t stand the sight of the cat and in another fit solves that problem by hanging it from a tree limb. After which his house burns down and a mysterious scorch mark appears in the little that survived, a scorch mark that looks like a cat with a rope about its neck. Unbelievably, it continues. He murders his wife in yet another fit of rage and thinks he can get away with it by walling the corpse up next to the fireplace in the basement. However, in his haste, he walls up another cat in the household, which was black like the previous cat and showed up shortly after that demise of the first. Hmm. When police show up investigating his missing wife, the walled-up cat raises a ruckus and the corpse is soon discovered. Yes, there are lots of unlikely aspects here, but Poe’s overheated tone and the rapid-fire series of events get us past all questions, even if in a slightly numb state from some of the shocks. I went to ISFDB and rated it 10 out of 10.

65 Great Tales of Horror, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

I’m still not sure what to think of the fantasy subgenre that updates fairy tales with modern sensibilities, usually done in the horror mode. Other than Angela Carter’s exercises in this realm (her treatment of the Little Red Riding Hood tale is a near-perfect short story trilogy), I haven’t liked a lot of what I’ve seen, which admittedly is not much. This Norwegian-language swipe at Cinderella has a batch of surprise switch-ups to the original story and way too much body horror for my taste. I admit I like the idea of seeing fairy tales roughed up like this, but I was looking at The Ugly Stepsister through my fingers for minutes at a time. I like the way the story is approached here, basically offering up its twists in a prequel to the original. By the time one of these stepsisters has earned the name “Cinderella,” the prequel narrative had overturned most of my expectations. The nominal ugly stepsister, Elvira (Lee Myren), seems sympathetic at first. She never seemed ugly to me but most people in the movie think she is, starting with her mother, who subjects her to plastic surgery procedures such as they existed in the time and place of the movie, which I’m assuming is approximately Middle Ages Europe. It’s all about winning the prince at an upcoming ball. There’s a nose job involving precise work with a chisel, enhanced eyelashes (couldn’t watch it), and resizing her foot to fit a slipper. For the latter, I spoke aloud to my screen and begged her not to do it. There’s also some extraordinary business with a tapeworm. Elvira is such a punching bag of circumstances here that it starts to verge on comic, like her regular lusty screams of pain. I was kind of sorry this one decided to go jokey, but I also have to admit it was relief from a lot of the unpleasant action. Notwithstanding the unpleasant action, much here is lighthearted fun. At the ball where the prince will choose his lover, the whole thing is more like a variety show or beauty pageant. Elvira’s dance number is straight out of Busby Berkeley and/or Edgar Degas. The story stays focused on Elvira, even as, in the background, Cinderella wins the prince and presumably embarks on living happily ever after. What’s left for Elvira appears to be the opposite of living happily ever after. In the end the crows get the tapeworm and Elvira and her sister Alma flee.

“Franny” (1955)

It’s fair enough, I suppose, to call J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, a novel. Certainly the two narratives are related. But they were originally published two years apart. “Franny” is more like a short story, albeit a longish one at 40 pages. “Zooey” is four times that length, which makes it more like a short novel. “Franny” is an example of how good Salinger was getting, almost exponentially by the year. All his subtleties, however, worked against him a little this time. He is showing Franny Glass—yes, this is core to the Glass family tale—in the midst of a spiritual crisis of meaninglessness. She is meeting her shallow frat-boy boyfriend in some college town for a football game and party weekend. He is a Holden Caulfield version but one who can keep it together for college antics. Most readers, apparently, and there were a great many of them for the 1961 bestselling book, took the crisis to be one of pregnancy. I don’t know if I have ever read it that way, but now that you mention it I can see how people would. I never thought of pregnancy because as a teen I read the Raise High the Roof Beam book first (notably with “Seymour, an Introduction”), and knew all about the Eastern woo-woo it is marinated in. And/or that Salinger was. In many ways Franny is a stand-in for him, quivering in the face of meaninglessness and flailing for help. It’s sad, in a way, when you see Franny’s crisis as Salinger’s own. Franny has recently read a 19th-century Russian Christian devotional text (Eastern Orthodox the primary frame?) called The Way of the Pilgrim, which speaks of a technique called ceaseless prayer. At story’s end we see that Franny seems to be practicing it. It doesn’t exactly fit with the pregnancy idea, but doesn’t entirely undermine it either. Anyway, most of Salinger’s primary religious preoccupations, as I recall, are much further east—Buddhism and Taoism. The Way of the Pilgrim suggests much wider reading and implies, with the rest of the Glasses (chiefly Seymour and Buddy), a spiritual crisis of Salinger’s own, which in the most likely if pedestrian way is related to PTSD. The Glass family is decidedly middle-class with all the usual middle-class privileges. It’s unknown where Franny will go next, but she will always have a place to go. On to “Zooey.”

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
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Pre-Millennium Tension (1996)

Tricky intended his second album as a departure from the “trip hop” label with which he was not only associated, but indeed tagged as inventor, going back to his work with Massive Attack. His claim was that he wanted to draw closer to punk-rock. I don’t hear much of that here, which maybe lands closer to postpunk as he stalks through welters of spooky sound with his filtered Spiderman vocals. The album bears some of the biggest hits of his career: “Christiansands,” “Tricky Kid” (trite confessions of celebrity by some lights), and the almost wistful “Makes Me Wanna Die.” I don’t think I like Pre-Millenium Tension as much as his first album, Maxinquaye, but it benefits from some spillover effects of that mighty debut. I’m in agreement with rock critic Robert Christgau that key collaborator Martina Topley-Bird tends to get short shrift in the Tricky annals. She’s there on the first four Tricky albums, and then gone, never to return, after their personal relationship ended. Weirdly, Wikipedia offers no songwriting credits for this album, but, according to a Discogs listing, Topley-Bird had no hand in writing any of the songs on Pre-Millennium Tension, and the same is true per Wikipedia for Maxinquaye. But she still has a lot to do with what makes Tricky’s early albums work. Her vocals are a clarion counterpoint to Tricky’s more prowling style, bringing home points of these songs in ways that make them work uniquely. While Tricky rumbles and spews on the lower rungs of the mix in “Christiansands,” for example, Topley-Bird floats in along the higher registers, enlarging the track. And she does that a lot all over the album. I do think Maxinquaye is the better set—the songs are more fully imagined, with the trip hop production that sculpts phantasms into the mix. But I still find enough to like on the follow-up—restrained and understated, it can recede uneasily to the background, reaching out at random with its various hooks and a mood that entirely suffuses any room where it plays, at practically any volume. Lower it, and conversation may still be possible, with lights turned down low. Yet you are never entirely free of it under any circumstances where it plays.