The King In Yellow, The Queens In Red

Cassilda’s Song is one of the last fruits of Chaosium’s fiction line to have been primarily developed under Charlie Krank’s management of the company. (If you don’t know who that is, or hadn’t heard about the change of regime at Chaosium, I go into it here.) Editor Joseph S. Pulver’s introduction is signed off in May 2015, a mere month before Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen mashed the reset button and signalled the end of Krank’s tenure, but the actual book was released in August of that year; presumably, the new management realised that with a basically-finished book on their hands, they may as well put it out so as to get a welcome injection of income as they tried to put the company in order.

Part of that “putting the company in order” process involved getting in James Lowder to clean house as far as the fiction line went. As Lowder and Chaosium implicitly acknowledged when announcing Lowder’s long-term appointment as Executive Editor of the fiction line, the previous regime had left something of a messy situation behind, with numerous contractual obligations (and monies owed) let unmet. (Much the same situation prevailed on the RPG side of Chaosium’s activities.) Now that the bulk of that is behind him, Lowder’s been able to gear up to get the fiction line moving again – but the necessity of making good on old commitments and publicly showing that Chaosium has turned the ship around on that has meant that for a good chunk of time Cassilda’s Song has served as the freshest selection in Chaosium’s horror anthology repertoire.

It’s good that there is a solid concept underlying it, then. Long-time readers will know how on multi-author anthologies I like to give them a rating on the ol’ Boy’s-Club-o-meter, to see just how disproportionate the representation of male authors is. There’s no need this time; the idea of Cassilda’s Song is that it’s a selection of stories inspired by Robert Chambers’ The King In Yellow cosmology written by women – like a more fin de siècle take on She Walks In Shadows, Innsmouth Free Press’s collection of Cthulhu Mythos stories by women which came out at around the same time (and has a significant overlap of authors).

The Fall of the Phantom Patriot

2010: Obama was in the White House, Bin Laden was still alive, and Trump was presiding over the final season of the original format of The Apprentice. Against this background Tea Krulos was busily researching the “Real Life Superhero Movement” – a subculture of people who dressed up in superhero costumes to perform deeds of altruism and/or vigilantism. Eventually, Krulos would be able to turn this legwork into his 2013 book Heroes In the Night, but at this point in time Krulos was only a year into the project and still endeavouring to develop contacts within the movement who might provide useful interview subjects or open interesting doors.

This is where his research took a strange turn, and bear in mind that this is a “strange turn” for a research project looking into a subculture whose members ranged from people who did charity bake sales and the like with a cosplay twist to folk who drove around their home towns in full costume looking for trouble. Out of the blue, Krulos was contacted by Richard McCaslin.

McCaslin regarded himself as a bit of a forerunner of the Real-Life Superhero Movement, which had largely picked up steam in the mid-2000s. An ex-Marine, a lifelong superhero superfan, and a keen cosplayer, he had not only lived his dream in the late 1990s of actually officially being Batman (in the sense that he was one of the stunt performers in the Batman costume at an officially licenced Batman stunt show at a theme park), but he had also concocted a range of his own characters. the most famous of which was the Phantom Patriot, a menacing skull-faced figure who looks kind of like what you’d get if the Punisher joined a fascist Devo cover band.

Oh, and he had also carried out an armed invasion of Bohemian Grove in 2002.

Puritans, Purges, and Parallel Worlds

Parallel universes are real, but amidst the myriad of alternate Earths which exist, only one has succeeded in combining a high level of technological accomplishment combined with a peaceful, benevolent social structure. This particular world, on discovering the existence of parallel timelines, designated itself as Zero-Zero on the multiversal co-ordinate system and, with the aid of the super-computer WOTAN and the agents of the Valhalla Project, has commenced a process of monitoring and studying the alternate worlds.

Swiftly, it became apparent that not all was well. The Valhalla Project soon recognised the existence of another multiversal power out there – one which seemed to have preceded Valhalla on the scene, and which from its as-yet-unidentified home timeline had interfered in the development of innumerable other universes. In fact, Zero-Zero’s near-Utopian idyll was only possible because so far they had been spared from this force’s influence.

For want of a better term, Valhalla duly designated this force as “the Disruptors”, and began action to counter their influence. A range of individuals with unique psionic talents are capable of aiding Valhalla; for instance, the remarkable Rose Wilde has an intense rapport with her alternate selves in other universes, so the Zero-Zero version of Rose has effectively recruited the others as an extended transdimensional intelligence network. Even more amazing are the capabilities of the one and only Luther Arkwright – a unique individual among the parallels, Arkwright was born with the ability to psionically project himself from timeline to timeline without outside assistance. Kidnapped at birth by the Disruptors, Arkwright’s success in escaping them and staying one step ahead of them allowed for his recruitment by Valhalla.

Now, however, matters are coming to a head. The mysterious Firefrost artifact has been obtained and activated by the Disruptors, prompting an increase of chaos across all timelines; eventually, the entire multiverse will unravel if they are not stopped. In response, Valhalla activates their backup plan: Ragnarok. Arkwright is sent to a strategically important timeline – one in which the English Civil War has been left unresolved for over 300 years thanks to the influence of the Disruptors, resulting in an England where a fascistic Puritan regime is ruled over by the Cromwell dynasty whilst Royalists are a despised minority. Arkwright’s job is to assist the Royalists – not because their cause is all that much better than the Puritans’, but because doing so will hopefully prompt a reaction from the Disruptors, allowing Arkwright and WOTAN to track down their home timeline and put a stop to them for good…

Birds of a Feather

Goth subculture might be mostly recognised for its music and fashion sense, but let it never be forgotten that there is a geekier side of the subculture too. Vampire: the Masquerade got a bunch of goths into gaming and lots of gamers into goth stuff, and was a legitimate pop culture phenomenon to the extent of having an actual (kind of bad) TV show based on it in an era when the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon was long-since cancelled and the odds of a D&D TV show were practically nil.

Similarly, there was the crossover with comics. The most successful superhero movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s in terms of commercial performance and critical acclaim were the Tim Burton Batman adaptations, and Sandman was practically required reading for goths.

And then there was The Crow.

The Crow has been a blessing and a curse to the goth scene. On the one hand, for a window in the 1990s The Crow was absolutely huge, and the subculture that influenced it, embraced it, and was influenced in it was naturally buoyed up by that. On the other hand, the cliche of the guy who’s seen The Crow once and decides to make that their look is a cliche for a reason.

It’s worth revisiting both the comic which originated The Crow and the movie adaptation which will live forever in infamy thanks to the negligence which killed Brandon Lee to take another look at them, now that around a quarter of a century has passed since their peak of popularity. Is there anything of value to find here, or are we talking something which only made sense in a very particular zeitgeist which no longer applies?

The Comic

Give O’Barr credit: when it comes to a gothic-horror superhero origin story, The Crow has this beautiful archetypal simplicity to it that puts it in the same “OK, I instantly get what the deal is here” that all the really good superhero origin stories do. Superman is the last survivor of a dead world who is trying to be accepted in American society and use his powers for the benefit of his adoptive people. Batman was confronted in his youth by an act of violence which the wealth and privilege of his parents could not shield them against; he takes to the streets for revenge and to make perpetrators of violence feel the same fear he felt as a child. Spiderman was a cocky teen who got bit by a radioactive spider, developed a bunch of powers that he just sort of fucked around with, and then realised that if his power isn’t used for a beneficial purpose then it’s just selfish jerking-off.

And the Crow?

The Crow was once Eric Draven, just your average goth boy with your average goth girlfriend Shelly. Once upon a time, Eric and Shelly were attacked by street criminals; both would die, as Eric bled out he saw Shelly being raped by the attackers.

Then, astonishingly, a year later Eric comes back – raised from the dead by the intervention of a crow which might be more than your average corvid. Painting his face with theatrical makeup, and traumatised by the recollection of his own death and his bereavement from Shelly, he embarks on a campaign of revenge; in between his brutal attacks on the murderers, he prowls around the dilapidated house he and Shelly used to live in and reminisces about better times. The crow – the bird, not the dude – discourages him from concentrating on anything other than his rampage of reprisals, but something persistently human remains within him and makes him want to be something more than an engine of destruction. Is this even an option any more, or is it too late for him to arrive at a different view on his ruined life?

Riffing the Comics

Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a geek institution (with “MSTing” entering the vernacular) for good reason. The original television show is, when you get down to it, a variant on the time-honoured tradition (which I believe to be distinct to America) of having televised genre movies in a special slot with host segments introducing the movie and maybe breaking in with little skits. This is an approach which started with Vampira – yes, the one from Plan 9 From Outer Space in the 1950s – and continued through Elvira and others up to the present day.

The MST3K difference is that the host doesn’t go away – whereas most horror hosts of yesteryear clear off for the actual movie, MST3K has its host (and their robot friends) appear in a silhouette of cinema seating at the base of the screen, cracking jokes about the (usually terrible) movies featured on the show. Anyone in fandom who has not seen the show – which is now easier than ever to access outside of its US stamping grounds thanks to YouTube and various other platforms – at the very least has reasonable odds of recognising two things: the term “MSTing” and the theatre silhouette.

Since the original run of the show closed out at the end of season 10, various “movie riffing” outlets have tried to continue this approach, with or without the silhouettes; The Rifftrax project spearheaded by Mike Nelson, final host of the original show, hit on the idea that if you went without the silhouette and just sold an audio file that people synced up with their copies of the movie being riffed, then a world of copyright headaches could be avoided. Joel Hodgson, creator of the show and the original host, established Cinematic Titanic, which tried to incorporate a few more comedians in the riffing crew with a redesigned silhouette in its first few episodes (released direct to DVD in a world where, already, some form of streaming or download setup would reach more customers), before shifting to a live show format which went without the silhouettes (because what would be the point of including them in a show where you can see the riffers onstage anyway?).

Chilling Out In the Afterlife

Catherynne Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues is a treat-sized bag of short stories set in a homebrewed but decidedly familiar superhero universe – specifically, the afterlife of said universe. The Hell Hath Club are a group of dead women who lunch together at the same infernal cafe, swapping their stories of how they ended up dead; it is these stories which are the titular monologues, offering a take on The Vagina Monologues with less genitalia (though not no genitalia) and more… well… fridging.

Valente happily admits the debts she owes to Gail Simone for documenting and shining a light on the whole “women in refrigerators” thing, but through these stories she does an excellent job of teasing out different levels of insight into the phenomenon. There is, of course, the straight up comics criticism angle, and if you know your comics – or, at least, are close enough to geek culture to have picked up some knowhow via osmosis and are happy to Wikipedia the rest – you should be able to figure out which characters Valente is analytically spoofing most of the time. Though her self-made superhero universe isn’t ragingly original, she does do an excellent job of erecting a scaffolding where Totally Not Harley Quinn, Totally Not Jean Grey and various other Totally Nots inspired by different companies’ franchises can coexist in the same world – and she also throws in just enough original ideas and twists to make her reimaginings of the stories come alive. (In this vein, my favourite is probably the way she’s able to do an undersea Atlantis realm which doesn’t rely on the old fallbacks of a) humans under a dome, b) merfolk who are basically just humans with water breathing and maybe fish tails, or c) Deep Ones.)

Underworld: Bit Awkward

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.

For this fifth Underworld movie director Anna Foerster and script-wrangler Cory Goodman decide that continuity can go take a hike. It seems like the bits of the previous movies they liked the best were the parts involving high-powered vampire politics, since in this movie they go out of their way to include both an extensive modern vampire coven based out of a high-tech manor house like in the first movie and an ancient castle where the vampires basically dress like elves like in the prequel, with most of the action happening in one or the other of these locations.

Of course, in Awakening we were told that the human authorities had found out about the existence of vampires and werewoofles and had instituted an almighty pogrom against both, and it’s made very clear in that that the vampires have suffered the worst of this – the woofles having entered a deal with the authorities whilst the vampires have been reduced to living in tiny remnants in forgotten places. There’s certainly no scope in that setting for the vampires to be operating out of a huge, fortified mansion in a major city like they do here, so Foerster and Goodman simply seem to have decided to ignore the whole collapse-of-the-Masquerade plot detail, which is not mentioned at all in the movie, not even in the opening narration.

(As well as wanting to revert to the intricate vampire politics of the first film – or, at least, the appearance of intricate vampire politics that the first film tried to create the illusion of – Foerster and Goodman also seem to have followed the lead of the first movie when it comes to the woofles, who once again dress like homeless people and middle class approximations thereof and live in out-of-the-way places. In this case, they are hanging out in a rather cool disused railway yard, and seem a far cry from the elite corporate woofles of Awakening. Then again, the collapse of the corporate conspiracy at the end of Awakening could have believably driven the woofles back to the margins of society, so that feels like less of an overt retcon.)

That opening narration extends into the opening action scene, which is so chopped up and edited that it feels like the edited highlights of a much longer sequence, just as the preceding footage constitutes the edited highlights of the earlier movies. The film’s plot is sufficiently messy and convoluted even in this final form that it feels like it’s gone through a range of different rewrites, never quite reaching the point where it worked the way it was intended to.

The Self-Hating Pantomime

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.

There’s no particular reason to review Batman and Robin at this point; the consensus that it’s awful is pretty much settled. At the same time, I think there’s scope to ask just why audiences turned on it so hard.

The movie does, of course, have some major flaws. The rainforest themed party sequence with its appalling racial caricatures is, of course, hugely problematic – as is Uma Thurman’s entire arc as Poison Ivy, with the voice of ecological concern being an extremist anti-human strawman and all those nasty “nerdy woman suddenly becomes sexy” and “sexy equals evil, especially if it comes in the form of a woman” tropes coming out in full force. Unfortunately, whilst we might consider these issues problematic, none of them really constituted dealbreakers for cinema audiences in 1997 (and sadly wouldn’t today for a lot of people), so whilst they may be a reason for individual viewers to dislike the movie, they don’t constitute explanations for why audiences as a whole turned against the film.

Yes, it’s absurd, campy, ridiculous, silly… but the 1960s Batman was all of those things, as is the 1980 Flash Gordon, and people can’t get enough of those. Why can’t Batman and Robin slot into the same sort of niche?

A Good Game, Or At Least An Incredible Simulation Of One

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.

The general rule that even-numbered Saint’s Row games are much better than their odd-numbered counterparts remains true. For both the first and third games, developers Volition cooked up entire new cities to play with and seemed to rush the rest of the content, leaving game 1 feeling like a generic Grand Theft Auto clone with better character customisation and game 3 feeling like it was trying way too hard to play up the comedic aspects and over-the-top disregard for realism that had spiced up Saint’s Row 2.

The second game, of course, had the advantage that by setting the action in the same city as the first game they could get away with just giving the map a light update and concentrate more on stuffing the game with interesting content that gave a fresh spin on the concept. The fourth game repeats the trick by reusing the map of Steelport from the the third game and adding a whole new dimension to the game.

Specifically, it gives you superpowers.

Underworld: Not Big, Not Clever, Not Even Once

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.

So I’ve covered the third and fourth Underworld movies here, but I never got around to reviewing the first two. Believe it or not there’s a fifth film being filmed in Prague this month and pencilled in for release about a year from now, and Len Wiseman talking about a sixth movie and a TV series in the pipeline, so I may as well take this mad October article marathon as a chance to catch up.

Underworld

In a poorly-specified Eastern European city occupied mostly by Americans, in a world seen through a blue filter, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is a Death-Dealer, a vampire tasked with hunting down and destroying Lycans – the werewoofles who are the vampires’ sworn enemies. The Lycans are supposed to be on their last legs, but Selene is perturbed when a group of Lycans she and her short-lived partner Rigel (Sandor Bolla) ambush shoot back with highly-advanced ultraviolet ammunition. Moreover…

…what?

Oh, you’re confused about the ultraviolet ammunition? Well, it’s ammunition filled with a fluid which has been irradiated with ultraviolet light, so the light dissolves in the fluid and destroys vampires when they’re shot with it as sure as if they were exposed to sunlight. Not a fluorescent liquid which emits UV light when it’s struck by X-rays or gamma rays or more extreme UV rays or something, just as most fluorescent liquids emit visible light when struck by ultraviolet light, mind – the dialogue in the movie makes it very clear it’s the former. Of course, the vampires who are examining the ammunition at the time are staring right at it whilst it’s supposedly emitting vampire-killing UV radiation, but sssh, quiet, just let it go. You’re going to have to deal with much greater leaps of logic if you’re going to sit through an Underworld movie to the end.