Food Court of Fear

Fangoria Frightfest Trailers Reviewed

Recently found myself at the in-laws' house, where they have that fancy on-demand feature that I don't get at my own house.  Offered on demand were all the trailers for the Fangoria Frightfest movies.  Here are my impressions.

Pig Hunt:

Pig Hunt Trailer from FangoriaFrightFest on Vimeo.

Okay, this looks just awful.  When I first saw the ridiculous animatronic killer hogs, I thought this might be good for some Thankskilling-style laughs. But the trailer makes clear this is just another tired Deliverance retread.  The only halfway decent Deliverance retread is Southern Comfort.  All the rest should be skipped, and this one looks like no exception.  

Dark House

Dark House Trailer from FangoriaFrightFest on Vimeo.

Well, this one features Jeffrey Combs of Reanimator fame, which is a plus, and otherwise, it looks a lot like the classic Westworld, Futureworld, Jurassic Park, "theme attraction where nothing could possibly go wrong goes horribly wrong" movie.  Which, all things considered, is a pretty decent movie. It's also clear just by Jeffrey Combs' presence that there's a sense of humor on board here.  I might see this one.

The Tomb 

The Tomb Trailer from FangoriaFrightFest on Vimeo.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't give a crap about being faithful to the Poe story that was the inspiration.  Or poem. Whatever the hell it was.  I mean, strange, hot woman leads innocent guy astray--I like that plot okay.  But Eric Roberts and Michael Madsen in the same movie? That's almost an ironclad guarantee of suckitude.  And a trailer that bored the crap out of me in less than 3 minutes?  I'll be missing this one.

Grimm Love

Grimm Love Trailer from FangoriaFrightFest on Vimeo.

Hee hee! This is about that German guy who placed an ad for someone who would allow him to cook and eat his penis, right?  Unclear to me how you approach such a subject with the obvious deadly seriousness of this one.  I mean, if you can't laugh at cannibalistic penis-cookers, you probably shouldn't be working in the horror genre at all.  

And, anyway, the thing I'm most interested about that whole story is the guys who answered the ad and got rejected. How would it feel to be the guy who offered to have his penis cooked and eaten and got rejected?  Now that's a movie I'd be interested in seeing.  This one...not so much.

Whew.  That's only four, and my tolerance for humorless suckage is nearly at an end.  The next four coming soon!

In Defense of Dracula AD 1972

I recently got an advance copy of IDW's Top 100 Horror Movies.
  It's a gorgeous book with lots of great photos and a cool little bite of info on each book.  I assume later editions will have remedied the problem my copy has, which is that 15 different movies bear the description, cast info, and appraisal of House of Dark Shadows.

The number one horror movie of all time, according to this book (which inexplicably excludes John Carpenter's The Thing and rates Halloween at #37!) is Hammer Films' Horror of Dracula.  The first appearance of Christopher Lee as Dracula, this is a really good movie, mostly because Christopher Lee rules as a scary, sexually ravenous Dracula, and Peter Cushing pretty much invents the category of "aged, skeletal badass". 

But it's not the best horror movie of all time.  Not even close.

In fact, I actually liked it less than its much-maligned successor, Dracula AD 1972.  In this movie, Dracula gets revived in the titular year to menace the descendants of Dr. Van Helsing. 

And, yeah, the Swingin' London stuff is kind of cheesy, but I found the whole story much more compelling than the old Hammer Costume dramas.  Perhaps it was just the fact that in this movie, Dracula menaced a bunch of hard-partying, too-dumb-to-live teens rather than uptight 19th century fops, and so I rooted for the victims more than I normally would.

But also, I found the story genuinely creepy--it starts with the whole "satanic ritual gone wrong" thing we've all been through and does a great job of establishing dread as Dracula and his young acolyte Johnny Alucard (get it?  If not, Peter Cushing will spell it out for you about 30 minutes into the movie) kill nearly everybody.  Also, the modern abandoned church is definitely a setting that gives me the willies, much more than Castle Dracula.  Because, you know, I've seen real abandoned churches.

And yeah, it's a Hammer movie, so it doesn't disappoint in the heaving bosom category.

Finally, the first modern segment of the movie is really good--it's not a party scene on par with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but no party scene in cinematic history has ever equaled that one.  But it does, I think, do a great job of establishing the milieu and doing a lot of character intro and exposition without a lot of tedious talking. By the end of this scene, you pretty much get who all the important characters are and you understand the kind of lives they lead.  And there's cheesy 70's rock, too!   And here's the party scene now!  The chap in the black hat trying to cut his departure too close to the cops' arrival is Johnny Alucard, and the young woman rocking the Florence Henderson do is Jessica Van Helsing, whose bosom will be heaving by the end of the movie.  I defy you to watch this without getting "Alligator Man" stuck in your head:

In which I review House of the Devil

Needing a horror movie the other night, I streamed  House of the Devil on Netflix.

I started the movie late, as I often do with horror movies, since only one of my children has any kind of stomach for my beloved genre. 

Mrs. Cooper and I settled in, anticipating a creepy, retro-flavored horror movie. 

Thirty minutes into the movie:

Seamus: Can we finish this tomorrow?  I'm really tired.

Mrs. C: No.  We have to watch until something happens. 

Forty-five minutes into the movie:

Seamus:  Seriously. I'm totally falling alseep here. We'll just watch the rest in the morning.

Mrs C: I was tired and ready for bed, and YOU were the one who insisted on starting this thing.  Now we're going to watch until something happens.

Seamus:  Fine. 

One hour into the movie:

Seamus:  I know that was just a flash of something that the protagonist didn't actually see it, but it was creepy as hell, so I think that counts as something happening.  Can we please watch the end tomorrow?

Mrs. C: Okay, okay.

So, yeah. Here's what's frustrating about this movie.  It's actually very well-made.  The acting is good, the dialogue is good, and the scary stuff, once it finally, finally happens, is creepy.  Also, there are two "Whoa!  Didn't see that coming!" moments, which are really pretty rare when you've watched a lot of horror movies.

But still.  Cripes.  There's building up dread, which I support, and then there's building up tedium.  It got to the point where I was rooting against the protagonist, not because she was stupid and annoying, as so many horror protagonists are, but because I knew she was heading for trouble, and I just wanted something to happen.

In the end, Ti West is a talented director, and possibly a talented screenwriter (as I said, the dialogue is good, but the aforementioned tedium and a couple of plot holes you can drive a truck through make me reserve judgment here), and I will definitely see his next movie.  If you have Netflix streaming, I recommend starting this at about minute 65. You'll find it a pretty riveting 30-minute feature.  As a 95-minute movie, though, it simply doesn't work.

Here's the trailer, which will do a great job of getting you caught up with the first hour of the movie:

A Tale of Two Haunted Houses

Yesterday I paid my first visit to Ocean City, MD.  And it was awesome.  And when I say awesome I mean charmingly tacky and crass in that particular way only an American beach town can be.  Ripoff carnival games, hand-cut french fries, fudge, and mildly dirty t-shirts were all on display.

But this is a horror blog, so let's get straight to the haunted houses.  The first one we rode was at the Jolly Roger Pier, a pretty standard low-rent, overpriced pier amusement park.  Their haunted house is called Morbid Mansion 3D, and it looks pretty cool from the outside--lots of very threatening demons and such.  Of course, I did worry about the 3D part.  Because, um, shouldn't it be in 3D just by virtue of us using our two eyes to perceive it?

My fear turned out to be justified, as this was one of the single crappiest rides it has ever been my misfortune to ride.  3D stickers of demons on the wall and lots of loud sounds.  That was pretty much it.  I mean, you expect to get ripped off with stuff like this, but this was just so transparently cynical--if you put some cars on a track and run it through the dark, you can sell it to suckers as a haunted house.  Even going in with very low expectations, I was disappointed.  Avoid.

Undeterred, we walked down the boardwalk to Trimper's Haunted House.  Apparently this is a classic attraction with historical significance and stuff.  Here's a great step-by-step tour of the attraction. Our entry into this attraction was delayed by burly men trying to fix a mechanical problem.  At one point we saw smoke pouring from the second level.  Fortunately they got the ride back up and running in short order.  And let me say this thing has seen better days.  It's beat up and just kind of barely in working order, and there is the foul stench of decay throughout.  (Not sure if this was due to the aforementioned mechanical problems or what, but it definitely added to the creepiness.) (Also adding to the creepiness was the craggy-faced, silent and decrepit man working the ticket booth.  The children were initially convinced he was a scary mannequin meant to frighten children who wanted to buy tickets. But he was a real man who unintentionally frightened children and adults who wanted to buy tickets.)

Even still, this attraction was everything the other one wasn't. There was attention to detail--the wooden cars fashioned to look like coffins, for example--there were some clever gags, and there were two actual scares.  Overall, this is an attraction that was made with a lot of heart.  The beat-up and busted nature of the thing doesn't really add to the appeal--I'd love to see an infusion of cash get this thing in tip-top shape, but even still, this was a great attraction--tons of fun, my daughter and I both screamed, and it was well worth the 3 buck admission.

Definitely worth the trip.

Night Shade Flap Update

Well, thanks to Liz Williams, Rose Fox at Publisher's Weekly, Niall at the Speculative Scotsman and all the other bloggers that picked up the issue, (Here, Here,  Here, and Here and I'm probably missing some--apologies) there are developments in the dispute with Night Shade Books.

Here is Night Shade's apology. 

Q: So, what do you think of Night Shade's apology?

A: It's pretty good.  I am encouraged by the fact that they've hired someone new to work on royalties.  I hope this will lead to improvements in this area.  I also like the fact that they've acknowledged their need to communicate more.  Those of us who write this kind of fiction are fans of this kind of fiction and want this publisher to succeed.  It's easy to cut someone some slack when they tell you what's going on; it's difficult to interpret silence.

Having said that, I do take issue with a couple of points. "The issues that have come up today, at their core, are really ones of communication."  Well, no.  Communication is definitely part of the issue, but when the ebook rights thing was pointed out and an agreement was reached and no check was issued for over ten months, that's not a communication problem.  That's a "not paying your bills" problem.  I guess we could argue about whether providing accurate and timely royalty statements is at its core a communication issue.  I wouldn't characterize it as such.

"That said, this has been a wakeup call for us." Ah.  I know I shouldn't complain about an apology, but, I mean. My displeasure and my agent's displeasure have been clearly communicated.  My original entry is over a month old, and my page views showed it was accessed from Night Shade's email system.  So they were well aware of the problems on my end. I know Liz Williams has made no secret of her problems. So why didn't they wake up any sooner?  I know, I know, I should be happy they're awake now.  But this part feels disingenuous, as does the call for other writers with problems to step forward.  I imagine if they check their email and voice mail, they'll find some that stepped forward a while ago.

Q: So, are you guys cool now? 

I have email from Night Shade telling me, literally, that the check is in the mail.  Given that this has become a high-profile issue, I'm inclined to believe it.  As long as they're honoring the contract we signed, I'm cool with them. 

Q: Are Night Shade still the good guys?

I've seen a lot of stuff about this.  People who read the kind of fiction Night Shade publishes are inclined to root for them because they publish beautiful editions of really cool books, and because they are an independent publisher with an obvious love of the genre(s) they publish. And, whatever their intentions, they simply have not been running their business in a professional manner.  It seems to be their authors who are affected most by this lack of professionalism.

As a reader and a fan, I will continue to buy from them unless an author or editor specifically asks me not to.  We who care about this kind of fiction can and should root for Night Shade and other small presses to succeed. And, as I've said before, they took a chance on my book, hired a fantastic editor and cover artist, and put together a really stunning edition of it that I'm really proud to have on my shelf. 

As a writer, I am pretty much of a whore, and I will never say never about working with anyone. After I took our dispute public, I kind of doubt they'd want to work with me again, but even so, right now, I can't see submitting to them again.   The headaches of dealing with them are simply not worth it. Even to have your book be both widely available and beautiful.

Dog Walk of the Dead, Part 2!

Hey everybody.  I've been ridiculously busy of late, but I did want to thank you all for the incredible outpouring of support for both the free Mall of Cthulhu ebook and the free chapters of the sequel, Dog Walk of the Dead. 

So here, for your reading pleasure, is another big chunk of Dog Walk of the Dead.  Yours absolutely free!  Posted as before under the ol' Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license:

Dog Walk of the Dead, Part 2 by Seamus Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Also as before, feel free to donate anything to keep this project going.  A buck is about what I would earn in royalties on the sale of a hard copy (if, you know, I were working with a publisher who actually reported and paid royalties, so if you could swing a buck, that would be a huge win for me.

Finally, here you go!  PDFs are easy, but let me know if you'd like it in another format.

Download Dog_Walk_of_the_Dead,_Part_2

Free Mall of Cthulhu Sequel, Part 1

Hi folks.  So here's part one of the sequel to The Mall of Cthulhu. 

I call it Dog Walk of the Dead, and the action picks up a couple of years after the end of The Mall of Cthulhu.

I welcome your feedback, and if you like it, please tell your friends to come and grab a copy too.  The more people who read this, the more I'm going to want to write.  (I've already got about 80 pages in the can, so there are at least two more installments coming.).

Seriously, this is my first attempt to try to get my work out in a new and nontraditional way, and I will really need your word-of-mouth support to make it work.  If I can point to lots of downloads, I may even be able to secure a contract for a paper edition.  You never know! 

So here you go--part one of Dog Walk of the Dead. Tell your friends, comment on twitter, @seamuscooper,send me an email, click the facebook "like" button, whatever you feel like doing!  Unless you hate it.  In which case, just tell me. But I don't think you'll hate it.

Posted under the good ol' Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.  Feel free to redistribute, post on your own site (just please send me a link so I know it's happening), etc., but nobody gets to sell this but me.  And I'm not selling it yet.

Dog Walk of the Dead, Part 1 by Seamus Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Download Dog_Walk_of_the_Dead_Part_1

And finally, if you feel so moved, please consider making a monetary donation to keep this project going!

In Which I Review Survival of the Dead

Let us now praise George Romero.  If you have enjoyed anything zombie-related in the last 30 years--not just George's own movies, but everybody else's zombie movies, zombie comics, zombie fiction--you have been playing in the sandbox that George Romero created. (pretty sure I stole that metaphor, but I can't find the source).

George is the originator, and the director of at least two of the best movies of all time. 

So I was very excited to see his new one, Survival of the Dead.

I'm interested in the way they're promoting this one--releasing it to pay-per-view and, in my case, one of those free HD movie channels way up in the Dish Network lineup that rarely plays anything good before the limited theatrical release.

In the end, I think this was a bad strategy.  Because they gave the movie away to people like me who will tell you not to spend your money on it because it sucks. 

To some degree, I think George may be suffering because of his own success.  Because, at this point, how do you make the zombie apocalypse new and interesting? In this case, you set it on an island off the coast of Delaware that's inexplicably populated by two feuding Irish families.  I don't mean Irish-American families.  I mean guys with Irish accents. In Delaware.

Which I could accept if this movie didn't suffer from boring characters, slack pacing, and a recycling of themes George has done much better elsewhere. (the takeaway from this one--people suck.  Done to perfection in Night of the Living Dead.) Oh yeah, and a bunch of CGI gore in the beginning, which to me just felt like a betrayal of all George Romero stands for.  The CGI gags are inventive, but their cheesy, SyFy Original look totally took me out of the movie.  The guys chomping on animal guts they're pretending to pull from a human stomach at the end look much better and more horrifying. 

The last 15 minutes of this movie are ok.  There's decent gore, a really cool last shot, and a really interesting attempt by George to expand his zombie mythology. 

I'm going to tell you what it is.  Be warned.  This is a spoiler.  Don't read it if you plan on seeing the movie.

Basically, the end of the movie shows that zombies, if starved of human flesh, can be made to eat animals.  This is a potential game changer in the zombie apocalypse.  Or it would be if the living humans weren't too busy shooting at each other to notice.  See, there's just enough hints of George's genius here to make it really frustrating.  Irony, satire, and gore are all present in the end.  It's just that the excellent last fifteen minutes are attached to 75 really crappy ones on the front end.

Here's the trailer.

Mall of Cthulhu Sequel Update! (Now Updated!)

UPDATE: Read the update to the whole thing here.

I've gotten a lot of inquiries about the sequel to The Mall of Cthulhu.

So here's the update:  the sequel is partially written and completely plotted and is in limbo.

Here's why.

Basically, despite the great things Night Shade Books has done for this book, this is not a publisher I can do business with anymore.  They are either unable or unwilling to honor their contracts.

Night Shade has stolen the ebook rights to The Mall of Cthulhu.  They do not own them and are offering an electronic edition for sale through webscription.net, which is affiliated with Baen Books, a real publisher who should know better.  Nine months ago, Night Shade made a verbal offer to pay me a small sum for the rights.  I agreed. They've never paid me.  They claimed their unauthorized edition was an oversight, and that was somewhat credible at the time.  Nine months later, it's clear that this is not an oversight.  It's a theft of my intellectual property.

I've given away the ebook of Mall of Cthulhu in hopes of cutting the legs out from Night Shade and webscription's piracy of my work.  (Guess what, Cory Doctorow?  My problem is piracy and obscurity!) If you'd like a free electronic copy, scroll down here, or go to scribd.  If you like it, please consider buying the Kindle edition, published by me and sold by Amazon, who pay me regularly for the copies I sell through them. (It's only 3 bucks!  Less than a latte!)

I was due a royalty statement from Night Shade Books on March 1.  Some time in April, they sent an inaccurate royalty statement. It listed a smaller advance and a higher cover price than was accurate.  My agent told them they had made errors in my favor, and they agreed to send a corrected statement.  We're now staring down June, and I have no idea how many copies The Mall of Cthulhu has sold or if I'm owed any money.  I would not be owed anything other than the revenue from the stolen ebook rights if the sales figures on the first royalty statement were accurate.  But since none of the other numbers on that statement were accurate, I don't have any reason to trust the sales numbers.

I was paid my advance for this book, but I have no confidence that I'll ever know if I'm owed more money.  If I were to be owed money, I have no confidence that I'll ever be paid. Night Shade's business model appears to be disappearing for months at a time, offering elaborate apologies, and then disappearing again.

In short, I can't do business with Night Shade Books anymore, and, despite the beautiful editions they put together, I strongly advise other writers and agents not to do business with these guys either.  I would ask that anyone who hasn't yet bought a copy of Mall of Cthulhu please take the free copy and pay $2.99 for the Kindle Edition if you'd like to see me get paid for my work.  Given Night Shade's unwillingness or inability to provide an accurate accounting of sales, I don't believe I'll see another dime from hardcopy sales.

(Liz Williams, author of the fantastic and wonderfully inventive Snake Agent, has been having similar problems with this publisher.  Her comments are here. I know other people are having similar problems but have yet to take their complaints public. I hope they will.  Night Shade has built their shaky business on producing beautiful books that they are able to place in Borders, but they've also gotten a lot of talented editors and writers to work for them, and all professional writers and editors need to understand that getting into business with this publisher is an incredibly risky proposition.)

So what about the sequel? 

Well, as you can imagine, it's unlikely that another publisher would want to put out a sequel on its own. I may be able to wrest the rights back from Night Shade given their multiple breaches of contract, but who knows whether I could get Mall placed with another publisher anyway?

But I am thrilled beyond belief that people enjoyed this book enough to want more.  I do write for money, but I also write for love.  I wrote Mall mostly because I just wanted to read a book like that. It's the book I have wanted to write since I was twelve years old.

So I would like to make the sequel available.  Knowing that I won't get paid for it, I'm going to have to make it a back burner project.  (I've got 3 kids, a dog, and a mortgage, so the remunerative writing projects are going to have to wait).

So here's my current thought:  I'm thinking I will put the sequel, entitled Dog Walk of The Dead, up in installments.  I can do it both here and on scribd.com.

Here's what I need from you:  since this project runs on love, not money, I'm gonna need people to show some love for the book.  This can take the form of comments here, tweets, facebook posts, comments on scribd, emails to mallofcthulhu at gmail dot com, or pretty much anything that lets me know I'm actually writing for an audience and not just amusing myself. 

I'll put the first installment up in the coming week and future installments pretty much as I get time.  (I've got about 80 pages done so far, so that should hold us for the first 3 or 4 installments, I'm thinking)

A caveat: Night Shade did hook me up with a great editor, Janna Silverstein, and a great cover artist, Scott Altmann.  I can't afford to pay either of them to work on this project, though of course I will welcome feedback on what's working and what's not as the project goes along. And I guess fan art would be cool too and would certainly be posted here.

So, whaddya think?  Is this worth doing?  I welcome your comments below, your twitter thoughts @seamuscooper, and your emails to mallofcthulhu at gmail dot com.

Free Mall of Cthulhu Ebook! (updated)

UPDATE: My dispute with Night Shade Books has been resolved.  While I'm leaving this post in place as a record of what went on, I have sold the ebook rights to Night Shade and can no longer offer my own editions of Mall of Cthulhu.  This is as it should be--I'm a writer, not a publisher, and I really prefer to leave all the business stuff in someone else's hands. 

My heartfelt thanks for the support everyone has shown me and the other writers who went public with our dissatisfaction. 

You may still enjoy the first two parts of Dog Walk of the Dead, the Mall of Cthulhu sequel, for free on this very blog!

Hi folks.  I've been absent for a while and am resurfacing with this limited-time offer.

Right now there are two ebook versions of my novel The Mall of Cthulhu available.  One is the kindle edition, the other is the version on webscription.net.

Though it's priced higher, I know some folks may want to buy the webscription version because of concerns about Amazon's DRM.  Here's the problem, though-- the webscription.net version is an unauthorized edition.  Nobody connected with that edition has the right to sell an electronic version of my book, and at this point, it's not at all clear that I will ever get paid for what amounts to the theft of my intellectual property.  Nobody's returning my emails, and let's be honest--we're not talking about big money here, so it's not worth anybody's while to involve attorneys or anything. 

So my way of standing up for the principle of the thing is to give you this free electronic edition of the Mall of Cthulhu.

(LIKE I SAID ABOVE--IT'S NO LONGER AVAILABLE HERE.  SORRY!)