I took a chance on the 2003 movie Westender, based on the DVD cover image to the left. I love fantasy films, and this one seemed unusually somber and even (dare I hope?) thoughtful, instead of the usually mayhem and scantily-clad girls (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It turned out to be just that: a meditation on redemption, shot in … Read More
Interview: Red Reaper director Tara Cardinal
NOTE: October, 2013. When this post first ran, the director used the pseudonym “Kristen Stewart” for reasons related to financing and marketing concerns. Since then, happily, those concerns no longer apply, and the truth can come out: Legend of the Red Reaper was written, produced, partially choreographed and directed by its star, Tara Cardinal. Keep that in mind when reading … Read More
“We two are now more than us two”: messing with the rhythm
Every good work of dramatic storytelling has an internal rhythm that we, as readers/watchers/listeners, subconsciously pick up on as we go further into it. It often means we’re able to sense where a story is going before we should, based on hints the storyteller didn’t even know s/he was giving us. Sometimes it can be obvious, like the ten individual … Read More
Interview: Kim Dryden, co-director of Appalachian film “Over Home”
My introduction to Appalachian culture, which figures so strongly in The Hum and the Shiver, really took place in the late 1990s. Prior to that, I’d looked on the Smoky Mountain region of Tennessee with some of the same distant awe as anyone else. Tennessee is a long, narrow state, and I grew up on the whole other end from … Read More
Review: Mean Guns (director’s cut)
There’s a theory that silent-era filmmakers were just on the verge of perfecting movies as a legitimate art form when sound came in and took away the primacy of the image. Suddenly what people said became just as important, if not more so, than what they did. A purely visual medium entered into an uneasy symbiosis with the spoken word. Occasionally, … Read More
The best of Dracula
The Halloween season here means one thing, one name: Dracula. It’s time for my annual re-read of the novel, and to break out the Dracula DVDs. Because I love them all: Schreck, Lugosi, Lee, Langella, Jourdan, Palance, Kinski, Butler, even misfires like Oldman. So I thought it would be fun to pick my favorites specific aspects of Dracula cinema. For the … Read More
Film review: “Dawn of the Dragonslayer”
First, a digression: the SyFy Channel, much like MTV before it, has done considerable damage to the very thing it first embraced. Now the phrase, “A SyFy Original Movie” elicits the same sort of laughter as Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and for the same reason: you hear it and you know you’re in for a bad movie. And SyFy is … Read More
Meg Coburn, the forgotten action heroine
I love action heroines. I’ve even put one in my next Eddie LaCrosse novel, Wake of the Bloody Angel. But my standards require, if not strict adherence, at least lip service to the laws of the natural world. That negates the whole concept of the “ass-kicking sprite,” wherein a tiny female character suddenly has the ability to overpower people (usually … Read More