Talk to Me (2022)

Australian horror picture Talk to Me is packed full with a busy agenda: themes of grief and depression interwoven with a propulsive premise involving wild teens on the lookout for kicks. There’s a ritual to understand here a bit like the one in The Ring. Here’s how it works. Somebody got hold of an embalmed hand (so they say), which is encased in plaster or porcelain or something and all marked up with signatures and tags. They say it’s the severed hand of a medium. And it’s a left hand—yes, oh, the “sinister.” You take it in your own left hand, like shaking hands with it, and you say, “Talk to me.” Then you say, “I let you in.” What could possibly go wrong? Novices to the bit are strapped in to their seats because the visions are intense, different for everyone, and basically anything can happen. And lots of things do. In the clinch, what it reminded me of most were 13-year-olds at a summer camp I was sent to who had figured out how to “faint” one another, via hyperventilation and chest compression. It was dangerous, of course, but we whooped it up as each wanted a turn and slumped to the ground. I’ll never forget the sensation of being out for a few seconds that felt like weeks or months and a trip abroad. I’m not sure whether this Talk to Me routine is more dangerous—well of course it is. It concerns matters beyond our ken and severe things happen to these wanton experimenters. That’s why it’s horror. Times being what they are, it gets all mixed up with some stuff Mia (Sophie Wilde) is going through. Her mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) recently committed suicide and her father Max (Marcus Johnson) has not been honest with her about it. As anyone might have predicted, the spirits these teens are conjuring at the other end of the hand do not mean any of them any good. Talk to Me is actually quite good on that point and there are some appalling things these spirits do—not just physically knocking some of them around, but even worse lying to and manipulating our favorite teens just when they are most vulnerable and likable. You hate to see it but you love to see it. Talk to Me is a bit muddled about its directions, but worth a look for the high-octane energy.

“Esmeralda” (1944)

I thought this story by John Keir Cross was pretty good, a basic and perhaps early version of the homicidal spouse story that seemed to be quite popular at midcentury, a staple of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show and any number of short stories. Our main character, Felix Broome, is a 45-year-old man who runs a news and tobacco shop. He’s unhappily married. As the story opens, he is lying awake in bed in the middle of the night and his wife is snoring beside him. He has only his thoughts for company. He thinks about how much he hates her and how much better his life would be without her. He’s otherwise content with his work, which he obligingly thinks about too for the sake of exposition. And he thinks about a 13-year-old girl named Esmeralda, his imagined daughter—or tries to. Thinking of her somehow makes him happy but he is soon interrupted. An upstairs neighbor playing the piano wakes his wife, who insists he go pound on the ceiling with a broom handle to make the neighbor stop. The music was a Strauss waltz and we learn the neighbor is a piano teacher. His wife spoils even his harmless nighttime reveries when he cannot sleep. Can’t even appreciate small pleasures when they are in her face. Cross has other ways of making her seem gross and unpleasant, such as close discussion of her perfume. Anyway, this is the night Broome snaps and murders her, smothering her with a pillow and then choking her to death. He buries her in the basement and makes plans to disappear by train that night. After he closes the shop and is packing, he is visited by a vision of Esmeralda. She seems affectionate, but a little taunting, calling him “Father” and talking about “Mother.” It’s something more than idle daydreaming. I’m not sure it makes sense but I’m not sure it has to, or even should. The obvious explanation is probably the right one—Broome is simply cracking up from having made a murderer of himself. Overall I thought this story was a good one in the homicidal spouse category, maybe even a little above average.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
Story not available online.
Listen to 1980 BBC radio adaptation.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

USA / Italy, 127 minutes

Director/writer/editor: George A. Romero

Photography: Michael Gornick

Music: Dario Argento, Goblin

Cast: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, Tom Savini, Michael Gornick, George A. Romero, approx. 233 zombies, a suburban mall

I was surprised when I went looking for all-purpose filmmaker George A. Romero’s original 1978 Dawn of the Dead to find it virtually unavailable on streaming, at least for the moment. It’s September so maybe that means they are holding it back for October, which I guess makes some sense. Instead, I kept running into Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake in search results, which reminded me I hadn’t seen that yet. I was thus forced to turn to my battered old VHS copy, acquired some years ago. My VCR remote is long gone, if it ever had one, which means watching a VHS has become something of an in-home drive-in experience: the picture and the sound are noticeably crappy, no English subtitles are available (often a necessity, sad to say), there’s no jumping back 10 or 30 seconds at a time to pick up dialogue and/or plot points I might have missed (I’m starting to miss this in theaters too), and my living room is full of the moral equivalent of randomly honking horns and flashing headlights.

Among other things, it means I may not have been able to give a fair chance to a movie I have always struggled with. Dawn of the Dead is one of those sequels many consider better than the original (see also Bride of Frankenstein, The Godfather Part II, and The Road Warrior) but for me all the best of the franchise and indeed the zombie project at large is in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead. This includes the invention of the modern zombie template as we understand it today. It’s frequently given various untoward reworking, as I would see in the Snyder remake (which I did get around to looking at, not least because it’s conveniently on streaming). Dawn of the Dead boasts a fair amount of visible growth in Romero’s filmmaking abilities but in general they are turned toward making an action / adventure / disaster picture as opposed to a horror. In this particular case I will say that tone added to my in-home drive-in ambience, as most of the relatively few drive-in movies I ever went to always seemed to be of the disaster ilk, e.g., The Poseidon Adventure.

“A Ghost Story” (1870)

In approximately 1870 everybody wanted to write a ghost story—it was a lifelong side obsession for snob Henry James, who envied Sheridan Le Fanu. How could Mark Twain be any different? He was as skeptical and above ghosts as James but more forthright. Paradoxically, he lets himself go for the effects, which work better than anything James did (except, maybe, The Turn of the Screw and “The Jolly Corner”). Twain makes it clear where he stands on the paranormal by making this the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, which hoax and all attendant hysteria had happened just the year before, in 1869. A worthy target for excoriation, no doubt. What may be most interesting in this story is the way Twain’s first-person narrator describes all the abandoned buildings and homes in New York City, where he takes up residence. He writes, “I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came.” Another word for it might be “squatting”—it’s hard to tell. But it’s all spooky and there are cobwebs and such. He comes home to “a cheery fire in the grate.” Not sure how that happens. It’s really pretty strange the way the story goes and makes me wonder how much Twain was aware of Poe. I would guess he knew Hawthorne and Irving. The strange scene-setting is part of what makes the effects work—remember, Twain is formally skeptical of the whole thing. But he is committed to the ghostly air even though his ghost is explicitly the ghost of a hoax, of a nonentity by definition. The ghost manifests as heavy footsteps and something pulling his blankets off him in bed—not bad! It continues as “night in a haunted house” stuff until our guy is face to face with the ghost or thing or whatever, at which point it becomes very silly as intended. It’s interesting to me how reputable writers approach horror, as a surprising number of them have done. On one level it’s about the commercial success, the reason James envied Le Fanu. But I also think horror can be more palpably, vitally experienced than most literature, and of course that’s a fascination to many writers. Charles Dickens was absolutely a master at it, as is Joyce Carol Oates going on 200 years later. Henry James missed more often than he hit. As far as I know—am I missing something?—Twain never did much more with it. His main targets remained the authors of the Romantic era, of which fantasy and horror may nonetheless be considered subsets.

Read story online.
Listen to story online.

My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (2006)

In many ways Mike McGonigal’s entry in the 33-1/3 series feels like a template for how to do it, but I’m not sure I can put my finger on why exactly. For one thing Loveless is not so obviously a classic album, at least within the boomer frame that is inevitably a big part of this series and my own perceptions (by default if nothing else—boomer albums have just had more time to grow classic). McGonigal mixes up the structure so many of these authors take: 1) a history of the artist, and 2) the album track by track. His rundown of the songs is fast and high-level, for example, showing up in the second chapter of 17. The rest of the book does involve a history, specifically of how the album was recorded, why it took so long, and why nothing else (at the time the book was published in 2006), or very little, had been recorded and released by My Bloody Valentine since. I never saw MBV but I owned Loveless in the early ‘90s, which struck me itself as a certain template for shoegaze and maybe some aspects of grunge: a thundering bottom, on top of which floated lovely melody in the high register, ghostly, ethereal, and often quite striking, heard through cacophonies of distortion. I played it a lot. Listening again with more perspective, it’s apparent MBV was something unusual and special. It was as if they took the dynamics formulas and smeared them sideways slightly, like fingerpainting. McGonigal gets into MBV principal Kevin Shields’s use of the guitar tremolo bar, an auditory concept Shields applied to every part of the project. The lyrics are swallowed up and work more like rorschach if you’re inclined to pay attention to lyrics. The band was legendary for deafeningly loud concerts. Some of the effects McGonigal and others have described veer alarmingly close to physical damage. It often sounds like evidence of tinnitus but at the same time with spiritual overtones. I especially like the way McGonigal deals with this aspect of the album and band. He’s not overtly claiming spiritual experiences but read between the lines. He circles the album and its impact, somehow managing to keep it all straightforward, lucid, and compelling. I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time, but there’s little question now of the status of Loveless as classic. McGonigal was among the many faithful. He almost casually, deceptively makes the case for how the album works, which is remarkable given that most words simply fall short in this kind of heady realm. This book is not necessarily as classic as the album, but it comes closer than you might think it could.

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

“A Thin Gentleman With Gloves” (1943)

Here’s a pretty good story by August Derleth, writing under the name of Simon West in a pretty good anthology he edited, When Evil Wakes. In a way it’s part of an editor’s cheat, because Derleth also includes another story by himself, “The Tsanta in the Parlor” (also pretty good), writing as Stephen Grendon. There’s a third story credited to Derleth with H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shuttered Room,” although word is that Derleth wrote it from sketchy notes by Lovecraft some 20 years or more after Lovecraft’s death. It’s the weakest of his three stories in the anthology. But it’s a good anthology overall, and the other two Derleth efforts under pen names contribute nicely to it. “Thin Gentleman” is fairly obvious, involving a shady lawyer who defrauds his clients to support a gambling problem. In this story he is at work on cheating a woman named in the will of a man who recently died. We come to understand this man is a warlock. Her inheritance was to be 50,000 pounds (a lot of money in 1943) but the shyster boldly whittles it down to 1,000. The “thin gentleman” is basically the warlock’s enforcer. In life his constant companion (just behind and slightly to the side, with bowed head), he shows up on the peripheries anytime the lawyer gets out to the racetrack or is otherwise committing malfeasance. Seeing this mysterious thin gentleman makes the lawyer nervous, something about him seems familiar (no pun intended), but he never figures out what’s going on until too late. We’re way ahead of him. There are some nice notes toward the end, as when the thin man’s face is revealed. The lawyer disappears but eventually his body is found and that’s a nice gruesome grace note too. Take it home, man. Take it all the way home. I’ve read a few stories by the prolific Derleth, who preferred his reputation as the poet laureate of Wisconsin, author of Sac Prairie Saga, a collection of multiple volumes of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and nonfiction nature writing. But he is also the man who arguably kept the pilot light burning on Lovecraft’s career, establishing Arkham House as a publishing home for the work of Lovecraft and many others. There’s little of the sludgy Lovecraft mythos in this story. It’s efficient, setting up the tension right away with the appalling amorality of the lawyer, and then layering in the witchery, which has much the air of the urbane yet slightly rancid Rosemary’s Baby movie. Civilized horror, suitable for teeming metropolises like Rome, London, and New York, anonymous masses, old brick buildings, and everybody minds their own business. The clues may be all but printed in red capitals in “Thin Gentleman”; the surprises are more in how it’s done. I wish more of these 20th-century writers were public domain so we could get more of them in one place.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.

Barbie (2023)

I was already tired of people’s opinions about Barbie even before the movie opened—they don’t like the color scheme, they don’t understand what it has to do with feminism, they think it’s too woke, etc. (in the latter case, I’m always tired of that opinion now). Director and cowriter Greta Gerwig seems to be on a mission to reclaim the popular and reviled Mattel toy doll world and make it all fun again and also, maybe, righteously feminist. Mattel is on a mission to break open a movie franchise. The 2001 homage / parody / rip-off in the overture basically explains it all, before whipping up Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Barbie, there’s a Barbie world and there’s the real world. The Barbie world is a matriarchy whereas the real world is still a patriarchy. When a portal opens between the two worlds—because reasons reasons—things start to go awry. Barbie (Margot Robbie) loses the high flex of her arches from wearing heels and then starts to show signs of cellulite. These are terrible things and must be set right. Ken (Ryan Gosling) stows away on the expedition to the real world, where he is utterly entranced by patriarchy—thinks it’s a great idea, wonders why no one ever thought of it before, and takes it back to Barbie world, where things go further awry. Barbie is an affable enough mess, trying hard. Gerwig’s humor comes through, most noticeably in the performance of Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie, and Gerwig’s hipster instincts for music as primary signifier remain as detectable as ever: Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Khalid, Cyndi Lauper of course, Aqua’s “Barbie World,” the Spice Girls, Indigo Girls, Tame Impala, etc., etc. They’re all here. Mattel itself is on board and featured heavily. Will Ferrell, for example, is the Mattel CEO. Nice to see a corporation that can laugh at itself (cough-cough), but it’s more plain they’re more interested in raking up dough. There’s a dark side to all this too, though dark in the style of the TV series Wednesday, that is, not really dark. Maybe Barbie addresses depression in a good-humored way when one character works up variations of the doll like Irrepressible-Thoughts-of-Death Barbie and Crippling-Shame Barbie. But you already know what you think of Barbie. Don’t let my opinions annoy you further. Broey Deschanel over at youtube says it a thousand times better than I ever could.

Deliverance (1970)

Poet and novelist James Dickey’s first novel was much better than I expected—and from its reputation I expected it to be pretty good. It is first and foremost a great story of outdoor adventure. It is full of description, but its thriller-like plot keeps it clipping along. The first-person narrator Ed Gentry is a middle-aged guy who runs a small ad agency in Atlanta with a partner. His best friend is Lewis, a back-to-nature guy in the survivalist mode. Lewis develops skills like bow-and-arrow hunting. It is his idea to take a weekend canoe trip with Ed and two others down an isolated stretch of river thick with rapids, falls, and danger. One of Dickey’s themes—which seems positively prescient now—is the contrast between urban and rural lives and lifestyles. Both are represented here and neither comes off well. The city dudes are shallow users, crass usurpers of culture and intruders in the wilderness, with their slick fast-talking ways. But the backwoods characters are worse, ignorant, suspicious, and prone to brutality of a notably bizarre type that plays to big-city judgments. You know what I’m talking about, maybe like me exposed to this story originally in the film version by director John Boorman (from Dickey’s screenplay)—the rape of one of the city dudes by a backwoodsman. He’s perfectly anonymous, a monster out of our interbreeding fantasies of them, only perhaps based in part on reality. It’s pretty strong stuff in the movie—I basically watched the rest of it in a semi-traumatized daze. It’s not the punch in the face in the book that it was in the movie, but I’m not sure whether that’s because it’s handled differently or because I was braced for it. Again, what impresses me most about this novel is the way it moves through nature and uses it. Scenes in the gorge of the river are insanely vivid. It may be sort of corny to say you feel like you are there, but you feel like you are there. Deliverance feels like a missing link between Faulkner’s “The Bear” and Cormac McCarthy. It’s full of the blood and gore that appeals to contemporary sensibilities but it’s all in the service of these various meditations on so-called civilized humanity. I should note women are here barely at all, which is good considering they get a kind of distasteful, leering Playboy treatment when they are. Like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Deliverance is best when it’s on the river.

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

Oranges & Lemons (1989)

After these 50+ years I think we all find trying to define “psychedelic” like the six blind men and the elephant. XTC arguably hit their lysergic trails in the mid-‘80s, when principals Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, and Dave Gregory formed a side band, the Dukes of Stratosphear, who released two albums in 1985 and 1987 (25 O’Clock and Psonic Psunspot). They found their sources in Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” and Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle,” the side of psychedelic with short songs, trippy lyrics, and child-like scenes. Because of the timing, it seems likely the Dukes were inspired at least in part by the ongoing so-called Paisley Underground, a California-based neo-psychedelic moment in the ‘80s featuring such acts as the Bangles, the Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, the Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock, and others. Between the two Dukes albums came XTC’s Skylarking, produced by Todd Rundgren, which is fairly classed as psychedelic itself. But Partridge and Rundgren reportedly chafed in the studio on that one—though it is considered by many to be the single best XTC album—and it’s possible Partridge & co. saw Oranges & Lemons as a kind of makeup corrective opportunity. Or maybe, as the band’s second double-LP after English Settlement, it’s a dumping ground at large for another of their bigger tranches of musical ideas. The album looks and sounds to me like Peter Max and the Beatles circa Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour. In a year that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming of Stone Roses, Oranges & Lemons fit, but it also felt more awkward and mannered. It’s explicitly the buoyant, colorful side of psychedelic. Not entirely innocent—album opener “Garden of Earthly Delights” winks broadly with the lines “Just don’t hurt nobody / ‘less of course they ask you.” But, in general, the word is: playful, thy name is Oranges & Lemons. It might have benefited from a trimmed-down 40-minute version (like some other or many other XTC releases), but it does have good stuff, and when it came my way at some point between the earthquake World Series and the Berlin Wall it was approximately just what the doctor ordered. Now it seems to me less psychedelic, when you take it closely song by song, and more just an XTC goof with the usual ups and downs and perhaps little agreement about which is which. So keep it shaggy and long—that’s psychedelic too. Some curious details here (scrutinizing synchronicity also psychedelic): three consecutive songs on the vinyl side 1 (bearing in mind I knew the album and I bet most do as an hour-long CD) put political offices in their titles: “Mayor of Simpleton,” “King for a Day,” and “Here Comes President Kill Again” (which, despite harking to LBJ and/or CIA black ops, still feels playful—paranoia as just another goof). Perhaps more strained, “Poor Skeleton Steps Out” and “Scarecrow People,” separated by “One of the Millions” on side 2, lend some vibe of Washington Irving and a cartoony version of an already cartoony 19th-century American horror. “Across This Antheap” has a notably solid groove. “Pink Thing” is another libertine note that makes me go hmmm. I seem to hear a lot of Beatles every time I play Oranges & Lemons lately, and it’s hit and miss, but, as with most XTC albums, there’s a lot to unpack here.

La Ciénaga (2001)

Argentina / France / Spain / Japan, 103 minutes

Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Hugo Colace

Editor: Santiago Ricci
Cast: Graciela Borges, Mercedes Moran, Martin Adjemian, Andrea Lopez, Leonora Balcarce, Sofia Bertolotto, Juan Cruz Bordeu, Silvia Bayle, Diego Baenas

“La ciénaga” translates from Spanish as “the swamp,” a title used in Canada for this picture as well as for global promotion. But it was released in the US as La Ciénaga, reasons unclear, perhaps for concerns it might be confused with horror pictures like The Fog or The Mist or maybe Swamp Thing movies. Director and writer Lucrecia Martel’s first film might be suitable as horror, in a way, but it is more focused formally on the swampy, undifferentiated mix of personalities in big families, two of which are featured. As IMDb puts it, in one of the more laconic film summaries I’ve seen, “The life of two women and their families in a small provincial town of Salta, Argentina.” Salta may be provincial but it is also the medium-sized city (ca. 600,000 today) where Martel was born and raised.

La Ciénaga is not an easy movie—the first time I looked at it took two separate sessions to finish and even then I wasn’t sure what the picture was supposed to be. Did it just catch me in the wrong mood? A couple more tries have clarified some of its murky points (as murky if nothing else) and in general the picture seems to get better with some familiarity and close study. It offers up a swirling style of narrative (“swirling,” one of my favorite adjectives), an equally liquid, probing camera, and a big cast with many small notes. But you’ll have to decide for yourself what kind of recommendation that is. I tend to greet such evaluations with skepticism myself. Maybe it would help if I listed all the honors and awards it has received, from film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, Havana, and elsewhere—or maybe that would be equally off-putting. If I have to say whether it’s worth seeing, I can only say yes, cautiously.