The Holmes Canon, Part 1: Mormons & Mutinies

Some characters and stories are so ubiquitous that you pick up on some of them even if you’ve never touched the source material. Victorian literature is particularly prone to this, perhaps in part because it was modern enough in its overall storytelling methods that it has ended up being extensively mined for cinema or television, but is often just stodgy enough in its style that many people just satisfy themselves with watching the adaptations. How many of us saw The Muppets’ Christmas Carol before reading the Dickens original, for instance? Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, and a host of other fiction from the era ends up being more familiar to us through adaptation or influence than through direct experience.

One of my own gaps has been the original Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve seen tons of adaptations – who hasn’t? – but I’ve never actually tackled Arthur Conan Doyle’s actual texts in any systematic manner. You might question whether, even if I do take the time to read it, it’s worth my while covering them in the blog anyway – after all, what new is there to say about them? It’s a series which has generated realms of criticism and analysis for well over a century.

At the same time, I think there’s value in taking a look at them. After all, precisely because they’re the sort of thing which many have been more exposed to through adaptation than through reading the originals, there’s some value in flagging whether they are actually worth your time or not. Moreover, Holmes as a publishing phenomenon is a fascinating subject, not least because the Sherlock Holmes fandom has a good claim on being the first “modern” fandom. Oh, sure, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and others were all publishing phenomena in their day, but they didn’t really have fandoms comparable to modern post-Star Trek fandoms. Holmes absolutely did: before the 19th Century was even done you had fans publicly mourning Holmes’ death at the hands of Moriarty and writing fan fiction, and shortly after Doyle’s death organised societies started forming (among the earliest being New York’s Baker Street Irregulars) for enthusiasts of the stories.

Arguably, a great many subsequent fiction-based fandoms have ended up following the same patterns and having the same arguments and conflicts and facing the same pressures that Holmes fandom has over the years – not because they were specifically mimicing the Holmes fandom, but because they are engaged in a sufficiently similar interaction which the source material which has inspired them that parallel evolution is inevitable.

So for this review series I’ve decided to, as closely as possible, read the Sherlock Holmes canon in more or less the order it was published in, so as to observe its evolution and experience the stories in more or less the same sequence that fans would have experienced it back when it first emerged. If you want to read along with me, then naturally Project Gutenberg is your friend here if you want them as ebooks; I had an urge to get them in hard copy, so I’ve picked up the complete set from Wordsworth Editions. For this first salvo, I’m going to take in the first two novels, written by Doyle before he shifted gear into short story writing.

Burroughs’ Nightmare Geography

Though the autobiographical Junky and Queer were written before it (and Junky was published substantially prior to it and made a small splash), there’s no question that Naked Lunch and the Nova Trilogy were the works which made William Burroughs truly infamous, particularly since they involved the debut of his bizarre form of prose surrealism. Likewise, though he’d put out a few pieces after it, a case can be made that the Red Night Trilogy is Burroughs’ final work of significant substance. Released over the course of the 1980s, as the HIV epidemic impacted multiple subcultures that Burroughs had long had a foot in (most particularly the gay community and the world of intravenous drug users), it’s not really about AIDS (even though a plague is featured in Cities of the Red Night) so much as it’s setting a capstone on his experimental fiction.

As much progress had been made in the intervening decades, society was still relentlessly unsympathetic towards drug users and homosexuals alike (let alone homosexual drug users); Burroughs, for his part, remained unwilling to compromise. Merely rehashing the tools and techniques developed in his glory days would just be going over old ground; for this last charge, Burroughs changed his angle of attack, bringing back more stretches of comparatively straightforward and intelligible narrative whilst reserving his more bizarre tools for when they would be most effective.

Cities of the Red Night

Burroughs introduces this opening novel of the trilogy by explaining his inspiration: reading about the pirate republics of the 17th and 18th Centuries, particularly the “Libertatia” colony supposedly founded by Captain Mission (though this one may be apocryphal), as examples of communities working on a voluntarist philosophy in stark contrast to the hierarchical societies of the time.

This prompts Burroughs to speculate as to what could have been had the pirate republics made common cause with the colonised peoples in the regions they established themselves (rather than acting as, in effect, unlicensed colonisers) as well as each other, so as to provide a disparate source of resistance against the authoritarian powers of the time. Burroughs posits that the US defeat in Vietnam indicates that the empires of the age would not have been able to root out such an insurgency any more than the US was able to defeat the Viet Cong – especially when by Burroughs’ estimate the technological gap between the pirate republics and the Spanish or British would have been significantly less than that between the US and the Vietnamese insurgents.

What unfolds after this statement of intent is, in its own way, just as bizarre as anything from the Nova Trilogy, but the methodology taken is rather different. Burroughs’ arsenal of occult obsessions (improvised chaos magic proliferates), sexual fetishes (boners and jizz everywhere), and surreal/morbid imagery (many, many nooses and hangings) is still very much in place, but this time he doesn’t turn all the dials up to 11 and deploy everything at once.

Jodorowsky: From Surrealism To Psychomagic

Alejandro Jodorowsky has enjoyed something of a career renaissance in cinema lately, mostly thanks to the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary that related how his attempt to film Dune went totally off the rails. After becoming a cult figure in the 1970s, Jodorowsky’s career hit a speed bump after his Dune project collapsed, and he had dropped out of directing entirely from 1990 to 2015, but since then he has made three new films, each with a hefty dose of autobiography.

For a long time his work was difficult to get – especially El Topo and The Holy Mountain, the two 1970s works which really put him on the map and got him attached to the Dune project in the first place. Arrow Video have now stepped in and produced a boxed set of blu-rays providing a useful cross-section of his work: his debut feature Fando y Lis, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and his latest release – Psychomagic, a documentary about his homebrewed style of art therapy that he has been practicing in recent years.

I’m going to be honest: over the course of watching these movies I have come to seriously dislike Jodorowsky and his work. He clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the Surrealists, but I think he increasingly uses the tools of Surrealism for the sake of shameless self-promotion and creating this Messianic aura around himself. In addition, in relation to El Topo in particular there is furious controversy around his claim that he actually raped one of the participants in the film. I will cover that in more detail when we get to that, so consider this a content warning.

Fando y Lis

The Final War has come and gone and all the cities are in ruins. Well, maybe not all. When he was young, Fando (Sergio Kleiner, or Vincente Moore when appearing as a child) learned of the hidden city of Tar from his father (Rafael Corkidi). If he could just find Tar, he’d have eternal happiness – and his lover, Lis (Diana Mariscal, or Elizabeth Moore when shown as a child), would both have eternal happiness and be cured of her paraplegia.

So off they trek across the blasted wasteland, Lis sat on a trolley as Fando totes her along. As they go, they have various encounters – real or imagined – with various figures of a largely symbolic or metaphorical nature, and bit by bit we as audience members find more and more reason to worry about the duo’s relationship. It doesn’t seem as idyllic and healthy as it seemed to at the start of their quest. Fando keeps wandering off – despite the fact that this almost never ends well for him – and increasingly gaslights and lies to Lis. Eventually he does something barbaric and irreversible. Maybe there really is a city of Tar out there – but will it take in someone who’s been as senselessly cruel as Fando?

More Arrow Spaghetti Westerns

A bit more backlog-clearing now – here’s some more spaghetti Westerns rereleased in recent years by Arrow Video, a Lee Van Cleef number and the first two movies in the long-running Sartana series.

Day of Anger

Whilst Clint Eastwood went to Hollywood after his association with Sergio Leone made him an international star, Lee Van Cleef continued working in Italian Westerns for a good chunk of time off the back of his performances in For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Here he plays Frank Talby, a gunfighter who rides into the town of Clifton, Arizona and shoots Hart Perkins (Romano Puppo). As it turns out, Clifton is a town of haves and have-nots, and the have-nots are ruthlessly derided and kept down by the haves. Among the have-nots is Scott Mary (Guiliano Gemma), an impoverished lad who never knew his parents; his mother was a prostitute at the local brothel, his father some unknown customer of hers, and the fine people in town look down on such a heritage.

Young Scott is mighty impressed by Talby’s fancy shooting, and has always dreamed of being a gunfighter himself; it doesn’t hurt that Perkins was one of those who made a point of bullying Scott and his sidelined friends. When Talby moves on, Scott persuades him to take him with him and teach him the finer points of the art of gunfighting, which Scott takes to strongly (having been trained in some basics by Murph (Walter Rilla), a retired gunslinger who runs the local stable and has given Scott his rusted-up old sidearm (but no ammo) to practice his draw for fun.

It turns out, however, that Talby might not be the positive father figure that Scott is clearly looking for here. For Talby is here to track down Wild Jack (Al Mulock), a former colleague of his, who owes him $50,000 from a robbery the pair participated in a while back. As it turns out, Wild Jack lost the money after the town leaders of Clifton swindled him out of it – and so Talby decides to mount a coup of the town. All well and good – but when Talby becomes a tyrant in his own right and ends up shooting Murph, who’s just trying to keep the peace, a collision course is set between Talby and Scott…

GOGathon: Sierra’s 1993 Stockpile

The story so far: Sierra had pioneered a new age of graphic adventure games where the graphics were a major aspect of the game, rather than a nice embellishment on a text adventure, in the form of the King’s Quest games. The AGI engine developed for that series also kicked off other marquee series for the company – Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry – and then the object-oriented SCI engine formed the underpinning of a clutch of more technically advanced sequels. Sierra were riding high by the end of the 1980s, made the leap to VGA graphics and a purely point-and-click interface in 1990, suffered growing pains in 1991 and had a 1992 which, whilst inconsistent, at least gave us the best King’s Quest yet.

That King’s Quest was co-designed by a certain Jane Jensen, who having served her apprenticeship under Roberta Williams finally got the chance to do the gothy Anne Rice-ish modern-day occult horror series she’d wanted to do. If Sierra had done nothing else in 1993, the first Gabriel Knight game would still stand as a landmark moment in graphical adventure development, but as it turns out, that wasn’t all they accomplished this year. In fact, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers came out at the end of a year which was very, very busy for Sierra in terms of adventure games coming out under their aegis…

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation

After Space Quest IV, Roger Wilco has decided to better himself by signing up to Starfleet Starcon Academy, with dreams of becoming a fearless starship captain for the Federation Star Confederacy (uh, bad choice of name, guys). He’s miserably badly suited to the job, of course – but a computer glitch reminiscent of the one from the start of Brazil scrambles the test results, inadvertently giving him a perfect score.

Starcon can’t justify not giving Roger his own command, but super-slick space hero Captain Quirk has taken against Wilco, and pulls strings to ensure Roger ends up captain of the most unimportant, unglamorous, irrelevant ships in the fleet: the garbage scow Eureka. In the process of interstellar rubbish collection, Roger and his crew uncover a sinister plot – someone is distributing dangerous chemicals which cause people to transform into aggressive mutants. Who is behind this conspiracy, and could it have some connection to the dodgy-sounding communications your comms officer Flo intercepted on the Starcon standard channels? Under your leadership, it’s time for the Eureka crew to take out the trash and clean up the galaxy!

A Fistful of Djangos

The sloppy state of Italian intellectual property law and enforcement in the mid-20th Century enabled all sorts of cinematic shenanigans. For instance, Zombie Flesh Eaters was known as Zombi 2 in the Italian market and presented as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead (whose Italian release was called Zombi), and a number of movies came out presenting themselves as Zombi 3 when it became clear that there was a hungry audience for this sort of stuff.

Another example is the Django craze of the late 1960s and early 1970s. After the 1966 release of the Spaghetti Western Django, a swathe of Westerns came out capitalising on its popularity – often by just adding the name “Django” to their titles and changing nothing, which is awkward when the movies in question don’t include a character called Django (or even a character who resembles Franco Nero’s character in the original movie).

Some of these were dross, some are pretty good, and naturally any obscure movie craze from this period is going to sooner or later catch the attention of Quentin Tarantino and be recycled by him: thus, Django Unchained, with Jamie Foxx in the title character, came out in 2012, prompting in turn a brace of reissues of Django movies. Talking Pulp has produced some reviews of these, and here’s my take on two of them.

Django

In the first Django movie the iconic character – played this time around by Franco Nero – is introduced to us as he’s dragging a coffin through mud and filth in a miserable rainstorm, wearing the remnants of a Union uniform. He encounters and rescues María (Loredana Nusciak), a prostitute who has become caught up in a conflict between Mexican bandits and the forces of Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), a Confederate officer who, with the Civil War over and ol’ Dixie run down, has gone off West to fight his own private war against those he considers racially inferior.

A Fistful of Blu-Rays

Arrow Video may be best known for their blu-ray releases of cult horror cinema, but they’ve had a fine line in Westerns over the years; here’s a couple of releases from them I’ve found particularly interesting, both from the boom of Spaghetti Westerns that followed Sergio Leone’s classic Fistful of Dollars and its sequels. These two are particularly interesting for the very different attitudes they have – one is morbidly nihilistic and melancholy, the other is intensely moral (but not without reservations).

Cemetery Without Crosses

Our story begins with Ben Caine (Benito Stefanelli), husband of Maria (Michèle Mercier), falling foul of the brutal Rogers family; they kill him and force Maria to watch, and then go and burn the ranch house that the Caines shared with Ben’s brothers.

Before the disaster, Ben and his siblings seem to have scammed the Rogers somehow; the surviving brothers make sure to split the loot between themselves and Maria. She takes her share and brings it to Manuel (Robert Hossein), who used to be a good friend to Ben and her. Manuel is a strange, haunted gunslinger who lives in a ruined ghost town and who always puts on a single black glove before he’s about to get violent. Maria commissions him to help her get revenge – which comes in a form she didn’t expect, but is more than happy to exploit if it will twist the knife in her enemies’ hearts. In the long run, a terrible confrontation is inevitable.

Kickstopper: Back Book 2

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Webcomics are great when they’re not terrible, and two of the most consistently not-terrible webcomic creators of recent years have been Andrew Clark of Nedroid Picture Gallery fame and the much-memed K.C. Green, creator of series like Gunshow and He Is a Good Boy, with breakout hits including that doggo who doesn’t think things are all that bad, Anime Club and the comic which inspired the “magical realm” meme.

But do these two great tastes taste great together? Luckily, a recent Kickstarter of theirs lets me offer the answer in Kickstopper form.

Usual Note On Methodology

Just in case this is the first Kickstopper article you’ve read, there’s a few things I should establish first. As always, different backers on a Kickstarter will often have very different experiences and I make no guarantee that my experience with this Kickstarter is representative of everyone else’s. In particular, I’m only able to review these things based on the tier I actually backed at, and I can’t review rewards I didn’t actually receive.

The format of a Kickstopper goes like this: first, I talk about the crowdfunding campaign period itself, then I note what level I backed at and give the lowdown on how the actual delivery process went. Then, I review what I’ve received as a result of the Kickstarter and see if I like what my money has enabled. Lots of Kickstarters present a list of backers as part of the final product; where this is the case, the “Name, DNA and Fingerprints” section notes whether I’m embarrassed by my association with the product.

Towards the end of the review, I’ll be giving a judgement based on my personal rating system for Kickstarters. Higher means that I wish I’d bid at a higher reward level, a sign that I loved more or less everything I got from the campaign and regret not getting more stuff. Lower means that whilst I did get stuff that I liked out of the campaign, I would have probably been satisfied with one of the lower reward levels. Just Right means I feel that I backed at just the right level to get everything I wanted, whilst Just Wrong means that I regret being entangled in this mess and wish I’d never backed the project in the first place. After that, I give my judgement on whether I’d back another project run by the same parties involved, and give final thoughts on the whole deal.

Jim Jarmusch Via Germany, Part 1

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

If you like arthouse cinema – or even cinema which veers fashionably close to arthouse but which scratches the sides of the mainstream here and there – you probably run into Jim Jarmusch at some point, the man having more or less never released a film which wasn’t at least interestingly ambitious.

At the same time, getting a high-quality collection of his work can, depending on what market you’re in, be a pain. For instance, one of my favourite films of his is Dead Man, and – at least the last time I looked – you just couldn’t get a blu-ray of it in the UK.

After some poking about, however, I found Jim Jarmusch: the Complete Collection, a German release of all his movies from his debut, Permanent Vacation, to 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive, on blu-ray (with the exception of Year of the Horse, which is provided on DVD). What I didn’t account for was the fact that the German blu-rays would not necessarily have the full range of subtitles on; sure, the actual original English-language soundtracks were all present and correct, but Jarmusch’s movies are often multi-lingual, and the absence of English subtitles for segments of non-English dialogue could sometimes be a problem.

On the whole, I think the set was still worth the money – for most of the movies, the subtitle issue is not too bad, especially if you understand a few scraps of German. And there’s few other ways to get a really complete overview of the man’s work.

Back From the Brink

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

A while back I ranted about my disappointment with the plot of Red Dead Redemption – in particular, the way it went out of its way to make you care about the protagonist, John Marston, and then expected you to be satisfied with playing is irritating son Jack for the epilogue. Well, John’s back in Undead Nightmare, an expansion which provides a complete additional single-player story for the game and which not only makes the flaws of the core game’s plot better, but also improves a number of gameplay features from the original.

The plot of Undead Nightmare picks up close to the end of the original game, during that period when John has retired to his farm with his wife and his irritating kid and kooky old farmhand. Suddenly: zombie plague happens, both John’s wife and kid get bitten, John hogties them and leaves them with some big plates of stake to indulge their undead hunger on whilst he rides off to look for a cure. This search leads him to catch up with many of the people he encountered during the main storyline in the original game, which is usually taken by the writers as an opportunity to get some closure on those relationships by depicting the people in question dying horribly – a technique that’s actually quite effective, since if you’ve played the main plot you already know all these people quite well and therefore already have some sort of investment in whether they live or die.