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Year: 2021

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords – Premium Peplum: Top Hercs

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords – Premium Peplum: Top Hercs

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Hercules and the Captive Women (Italy/France, 1961)

The Steve Reeves Hercules (Italy, 1958) was a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic, proving there was a market for shirtless strongman movies in drive-in movie theaters across America. The Italian movie industry obliged by churning out reams of low-budget sword-and-sandal “peplum” films, many of which had heroes named Goliath or Maciste in their original forms. When they were dubbed into English, for name-recognition purposes most of these strongmen were renamed Hercules, giving us a bewildering array of Hercules and the… movies from 1960 through 1965, when they were abruptly replaced by the so-called Spaghetti Westerns. Not many of these slammed-out Herc films are worth spending 80 minutes on today, but a few of them hold up and are worth a look. Here, for your delectation and delight, are three very different examples.

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Fantasia 2021, Part XXX: Hello! Tapir

Fantasia 2021, Part XXX: Hello! Tapir

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“Inside” is a 5-minute animated short co-directed by Pohan Lee and Chun-Chien Lien, and written by Lien. It’s a simple piece, but quite beautiful. A voice-over talks about the differences within people, while the animation shows us paperlike images illustrating their various internal natures: within human silhouettes a series of pictures unfold. The idea’s elementary, but the film works quite well because the visual imagination is boundless and ultimately even cosmic, showing us the infinite bounded in a human shell.

Bundled with the short at Fantasia was Hello! Tapir. A Taiwanese film from Kethsvin Chee, it was written by Chee, Chris Leong, and Yoon Yee Teh. Ah Keat (Run-yin Bai) is an eight-year-old boy whose father (Lee-zen Lee) is a fisherman. One day a typhoon blows up, and his father goes missing. But Ah Keat refuses to accept his father’s dead. Remembering a story his father once told him about a creature called a Tapir, who eats dreams, he sets out to find the mysterious entity with the help of his friends, believing that the Tapir’s magic can return his father to him.

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Join the Corps! The Colonial Marines Operations Manual for Alien: The Roleplaying Game

Join the Corps! The Colonial Marines Operations Manual for Alien: The Roleplaying Game

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When Free League Publishing released the ALIEN Roleplaying Game, the obvious next supplement (beyond adventures) was a book about the Colonial Marines, featured so prominently in the film ALIENS and subsequent comics and books. The ALIEN Roleplaying Game core rulebook has proven to be very successful, coming in as one of the top five bestselling RPGs in 2021. Black Gate’s own E.E. Knight reviewed that book, which you can read here.

This author’s personal take on the core rules is that they are superb. They capture the cosmic-slasher-horror and cyberpunk-ish setting of the ALIEN universe as we’ve come to understand it. Combat is deadly and the stress mechanic is brutal, particularly when fighting the titular xenomorphs. Characters quickly succumb to all sorts of panic as they witness their human allies impaled by spiked tails, dragged away to become home to the alien implanted larvae, see humans metamorphose into something else as they encounter black goo or corporate experiments with it, and many more. The game is intentionally unfair and unbalanced against players (which they need to understand upfront). When all the players accept this and engage in the store, this results are exciting and memorable roleplaying. Players generally know their character are likely doomed and still work to find their way out. A sliver of hope.

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Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Present: December Tales, edited by J.D. Horn

Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Present: December Tales, edited by J.D. Horn

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December Tales: A Collection of New and Classic Ghost Stories
Edited by J.D. Horn; Foreword by Colin Dickey
Curious Blue Press (468 pages, $19.95 paperback/$5.95 digital formats, September 28, 2021)

The title of the present anthology refers to the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas time, a tradition enforced by Charles Dickens, who not only wrote the famous “A Christmas Carol” but also edited Victorian era magazines regularly featuring ghost stories in their Christmas issues.

Truth be told, ghost stories are now available throughout the year and, fortunately, modern writers are still devoted to the genre.

Editor J.D. Horn has developed the brilliant idea of assembling in one volume both classical ghostly tales from various parts of the world and brand new stories by contemporary authors.

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Robert Low, 1952 – May 31, 2021

Robert Low, 1952 – May 31, 2021

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Robert Low in Viking Reenactment Regalia

Back when there was a print version of Black Gate, Bill Ward introduced a new author by the name of Robert Low in Issue 14 (2009). Bill had good things to say about The Wolf Sea (2008), the second book in the author’s Oathsworn series, which had appeared a year after the first, The Whale Road.

Bill went on to cover subsequent installments in the series, and his reviews impressed me enough to seek them out. The Oathsworn eventually rounded out as a five book series, including The White Raven (2009), The Prow Beast (2010) and Crowbone (2012).

I recently got to thinking of Robert Low and looked him up to see what else he’d published. This sadly revealed that this talented author of historic fantasy had passed away earlier this year.

Robert Low was a Scottish journalist and author who started on a long career at the age of 17. By 19 he was in Vietnam on assignment, an eye opening experience for sure. He returned to journalism in Scotland but occasionally went on other dangerous assignments in Kosovo, Sarajevo, etc.

Later in life an interest in ancient warfare lead Robert Low to delve into the re-enactment scene, which in turn encouraged him to write the excellent Oathsworn series. By no means done, he subsequently published three other series.

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Fantasia 2021, Part XXIX: The International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase 2021

Fantasia 2021, Part XXIX: The International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase 2021

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Every year the Fantasia International Film Festival presents an International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, and every year it’s worth watching. This year’s edition gathered nine films from seven countries into one 115-minute block. Most of the films tended to the near-future and the dystopic, but still held surprises.

The showcase started with “Mark II,” an 8-minute piece directed by Brent Howard, who co-wrote with Pride St. Clair. Mark (John Ennis) is an office worker in a reality where technology’s taken an odd route: 90s-style PCs and CRT screens but advances in other fields, especially robotics. Mark, despairing at the limitations of his human body, is drawn to the possibility of an upgrade. But will he get what he wants? This is a fine short film that easily could have gone wrong, if the viewer had been left thinking Mark was the butt of a joke; that doesn’t happen, thanks to an excellent performance by Ennis. He brings out Mark’s profound depression, his despair at his body, and in one well-delivered voice-over line seals the film perfectly. I thought it was solid enough when I saw it, but Ennis’ performance has left it haunting me since.

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New Treasures: We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen

New Treasures: We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen

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We Have Always Been Here (DAW, July 2021). Cover by Yurly Muzur

We’re back! Well, we never left, but a corrupted database table made it…. challenging to publish new articles. That happens when your site is 20 years old and has half a million subscribers. So they tell me.

I’m sick of looking at database tables, let me tell you. What do I want to look at? Books! Come on, that was an easy one.

So tonight I settle down with a new science fiction debut, a creepy novel of deep space exploration by Lena Nguyen. Kirkus Reviews calls it “claustrophobic and dark, full of twisting ship corridors and unreliable characters…. A promising, atmospheric debut,” and The Chicago Review of Books praises it as a “multi-layered ghost story in space… [set in] an increasingly horrific labyrinth.” Here’s the publisher’s description for We Have Always Been Here.

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Fantasia 2021, Part XXVIII: Indemnity

Fantasia 2021, Part XXVIII: Indemnity

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One of the more chilling films I saw at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival was “Please Hold,” a 19-minute short film directed by KD Dávila and co-written by Dávila with Levin Menekse. It’s not chilling in the way of a horror film, but of well-done near-future science fiction. In a North American city not too far away from now, a drone arrests a guy, Mateo (Erick Lopez), on his way to work. Mateo hasn’t done anything, but he can’t argue with the drone. He’s stuck in a cell with a computer screen, and has to try to navigate unhelpful menus just to place a phone call and find a lawyer and find out what the hell he’s doing in jail in the first place.

The film manages to find ways to make a story that’s basically a man interacting with a screen visually interesting. But the cleverness of the script is really what makes the story work. Mateo has to struggle with a system that’s clearly not designed with justice in mind, but with extracting money from anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in it. Unreadable terms and conditions scroll past as he tries to figure out what’s going on. The system forces him to labour in order to have a prayer of getting anywhere. The movie’s in all an extremely sharp look at the way various technologies are converging with the noxious for-profit prison system to create a new kind of hell, and it’s well worth watching.

Bundled with the short was Indemnity, a South African action-thriller. South Africa’s been developing quite a genre film culture in recent years — beyond science-fiction like District 9, consider previous Fantasia offerings like Five Fingers For Marseilles and 8, to say nothing of Fried Barry. So I was looking forward to seeing what this movie brought. If it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, at least it satisfies expectations in the way you want from a good honest genre tale.

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Goth Chick News: I Finally Made It to the Stanley Hotel, and It Was Perfect

Goth Chick News: I Finally Made It to the Stanley Hotel, and It Was Perfect

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The Stanley Hotel

Personally, I have two bucket lists. One is filled with experiences that sound familiar like “learn a new language” or “ride in a helicopter.” The other is my goth bucket list, filled with things that cause my parents to ask, “why can’t you just go to Vegas like a normal person?” Quite high on this particular list was a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO. I say “was” because due to attending a wedding in Boulder, I was less than an hour away. That meant a gracious “no” to the invitation to a ladies brunch the day after the nuptials, and a great big “yes” to a giddy 55-mile drive.

Stephen King’s book The Shining is one of my favorites, and the Stanley Hotel was King’s inspiration. That much I knew, but exactly how much of an inspiration I was about to find out. To clarify one thing, the Stanley has no connection at all to Kubrick’s film. The hotel which represented the exterior shots of The Overlook Hotel in the movie, is actually the Timberline Lodge in Oregon. All the interior shots were filmed at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, outside London.

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Fantasia 2021, Part XXVII: What Josiah Saw

Fantasia 2021, Part XXVII: What Josiah Saw

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“The Gloom” (“La Penumbra”) is a 14-minute short from Spain’s Dani Viqueira, written by Luis Sánchez-Polack. It follows a young family with a mother, Laura (Lorena Hidalgo), who is in the middle of intense studies to earn her medical degree, potentially useful as her husband Joaquin is a hypochondriac. After a car ride marked by the squabbling of their children Tomás (Jaime P. Barahona) and Rosa (Lucía Hidalgo), Laura is menaced by what appears to be the incursion of the supernatural into the family home. But more may be happening here than meets the eye. In fact the ending’s fairly simple but emotionally effective, especially as it follows an atmospheric and involving horror sequence. The movie’s a very solid piece of work.

Bundled with it was the American feature What Josiah Saw. Directed by Vincent Grashaw and written by first-time screenwriter Robert Alan Dilts, it follows the family of one Josiah Graham (Robert Patrick, the T-1000 himself). Josiah’s three kids are adults now, in their 30s or thereabouts, and they’ve taken different paths in life. The movie opens somewhere in the southwestern US, with oil men talking about buying the Graham homestead; we then follow the youngest child, Thomas (Scott Haze), living on the old family property, overseen by the patriarchal Josiah. This first act establishes an uncomfortable, horrific atmosphere with some notably disturbing moments.

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