Criminal Macabre: Final Night - The 30 Days of Night Crossover – review

Author: Steve Niles

Artist: Christopher Mitten

First published: 2013 (tpb)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: In this epic crossover with publisher IDW, Steve Niles's greatest characters come together in a final showdown! Cal McDonald only wanted a beer, but what he got was a jaded federal agent and a story about vampires up in Barrow, Alaska. There's a new vamp in LA, and he's hell bent on bringing mankind to its knees!

The review: The third instalment of the 30 Days of Night story, which saw Eben go off the rails and embrace the darkness within, Run, Alice, Run, felt frustrating as it left too much unanswered and too many threads dangling free. This crossover event with Niles’ Criminal Macabre series answers those questions and tidies those threads in a rewarding way.

Of course, being a crossover, it has characters from Criminal Macabre, namely occult detective Cal McDonald and the ghouls he works with (the ghouls being the one type of supernatural creature aligned with humanity). If you are not familiar with that series, worry not – neither was I, but the crossover works anyway (certain aspects, such as McDonald’s consistent spewing meant little but did not get in the way of the story). The story brings Alice Blood and Eben’s narratives to a conclusion and neatly finishes the main 30 Days story arc.

As well as the story working well the art fits the story, including the Eben design pushing the character into a monstrous, vampiric visage. 7.5 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

The Munsters [2022] – review

Director: Rob Zombie

Release Date: 2022

Contains spoilers

The trouble with rebooting a beloved show like The Munsters is that it is a firm favourite. That’s not to say that such a reboot can't be done, as amply demonstrated by the 1991 Addams Family film – but that had something distinctly in its favour, which I’ll come to.

When it was announced that Rob Zombie was going to make The Munsters I was split. Known for his hardcore horror, Zombie is actually a filmmaker I rather like (and have touched on House of 1000 Corpses in a past post) but I don’t think every film he makes is a hit and certain ones, 31 for instance, are very much misses. That said, I understand he is a fan of the show and this is a love letter to it.

Wolfgang and the zombie

Starting in a graveyard we have Doctor Henry Augustus Wolfgang (Richard Brake, Bingo Hell) and his helper Floop (Jorge Garcia) breaking into a crypt. They open the coffin within but it's empty. We also see a scrawny figure walking through the graveyard and entering the tomb. It is the supposed occupant, now a zombie, and Wolfgang bops him on the noggin and, after a photo with the corpse, says he is after the fingers, alive the zombie was a world-famous pianist.

I've been making a man...

Wolfgang is making a man and grave robbing is de rigueur for such an activity. Two brothers have recently died, one a low intelligence, unfunny comedian and the other the smartest man (or second smartest according to Wolfgang) in the world. He sends Floop into the funeral home to get the second’s brain, and Floop (of course) steals the brain of the comedian. Wolfgang goes ahead and makes his creation and thinks, at first, that the procedure has failed but then he lumbers into life.

disco vampire

Meanwhile The Count (Daniel Roebuck, the Vampire Hunters Club) is being waited on by butler Igor (Sylvester McCoy, Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric & Slumber). Note that he is not Grandpa yet and neither is he referred to as Dracula. The Count asks if Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie, House of 1000 Corpses) is up yet and is informed she is on a date with Orlok. We see the date and it doesn’t go well. When he tries to woo her with a “disco vampire” routine she goes home.

The Count and Lester

At breakfast with her father Lily watches Good Morning Transylvania and Wolfgang is on to present his creation. However, instead of the talented and inciteful person he thought he'd made, the creature is at first inarticulate, then a bit of a boob, awfully clumsy but somehow woos the audience with his comedy (bearing in mind that the original owner of the brain wasn’t successful as a comic). Wolfgang flounces off to a leper colony in disgust and Floop manages the creature’s career (until he doesn’t) and gives him the name Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips, Son of Darkness: To Die For 2 & Freaks of Nature). Lily sees him on TV and tries to meet him, meanwhile Lester (Tomas Boykin), a werewolf and the Count’s estranged son, is having to get the castle off the Count for the Count’s ex-wife Zoya (Catherine Schell, Dracula (2020)), a money lender that Lester is in hock to.

family

That is the film then, a prequel to the series with Lily and Herman’s romance, the Count’s (half-arsed) attempt to split them up and how they end up in America. So, on the positive side, the Munsters looks great most of the time, with fantastic sets and lighting. Also, Roebuck pulls off the Count with aplomb and Phillips’ makes a grand stab at emulating Fred Gwynne. Unfortunately, there is much wrong. I had worried that Zombie, in creating a love letter to the original, would pitch the film in the same comedic tone as the original – grand for a rewatch of the series but we have moved on comedically as a homogenous audience. There is a degree of this but also the comedy is pretty flimsy in and of itself. 

She's got Lily Munster eyes

I wasn’t impressed by Sheri Moon Zombie’s take on Lily, it just felt too much of a chewing of scenery and not enough actually acting and emoting. She made the character flighty, which is just not the character, and was the weakest link of the three principle actors. There were a couple of tone-deaf moments – Lily and Herman dressed as Sonny and Cher singing ‘I Got You Babe’ didn’t broadcast the wholesome love the characters projected in the series, with them emulating a known toxic relationship, and Herman’s out of tune singing on it was entirely off. More so the character Zoya, a woman scorned and a loan shark who is looking to embezzle the castle, was coded as Romani. Now early horror often coded gypsies (to use the pejorative) negatively but those films were of a time. I understand Zombie was reaching back to those old films but, in the 21st century, he veered into a place that could be accused of racism and rather he could have had the vengeful ex-wife character without negatively coding the ethnicity like that.

Daniel Roebuck as the Count

At the head I mentioned the Addams Family and it had one thing that this is missing in entirety – a plot. Where this just seems to move from situation to situation, the loss of the house in the Addams Family is then followed with an attempt to get it back and the redemption of Fester as he gets his memory back. Perhaps it is not as convoluted as some but it certainly had more depth than this.  In this we go: Herman is made, he and Lily meet and marry, Lester gets the castle deed by tricking Herman, homeless they all move to America, immediately find and buy the house and Lester (at the very end) redeems himself by something he did off screen, though the castle remains in Zoya’s possession, and they now live in America. 

1313 Mockingbird Lane *

Queue us arriving at the TV series as the end scenes are the opening credits to the original series redone with the new actors. I’m not suggesting a convoluted ‘get the castle back’ plot, after all they have to move to America, but certainly something plot worthy wouldn’t have gone amiss – there is no ‘will they, won’t they’ with Lily and Herman, Wolfgang is just glad to be rid of Herman, Grandpa goes from not wanting them together to grudgingly accepting his son in law without an arc that creates the acceptance. This is then all wrapped into an overly long film. Still, it is very pretty. 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

*I assume the house is still on Mockingbird Lane but we only see a sign for Mockingbird Heights. 

Zero Avenue – review

Director: Daniel Frei

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

I considered that this might be a case of a film using vampire tropes but there was enough within to convince me that this is actually a vampire film – though the vampire in it is unusual. A low budget effort there is a reliance on the two main performers and the dialogue to carry the film and it achieves that.

It starts with a man, Joshua (Braeson Herold), walking through New York streets. After passing by one woman (Nancy Ozelli), the camera’s interest suggesting she may be important, he spots a woman, Veronica (Allison Siko), and heads towards her.

Allison Siko as Veronica

Veronica enters a restaurant and, after looking through the window, Joshua follows. He approaches her and spins a story about being a tourist who has left his bag on the train – including phone and money – and being unable to find somewhere. His demeanour is funny, perhaps overly chatty to hide shyness but feels sinister to the viewer. She is dismissive at first but, when he tells her where he wishes to go, she does tell him how to get there. He leaves but turns back and compliments her before leaving again. She stops him and says she’ll show him the way.

dominant

After a while she stops and points to a building and says that it is her home and invites him in. The apartment is a private one within a hotel and she offers him a drink. His goofy dialogue continues as he talks about pop/soda but she makes it clear that it is alcohol – whisky in fact – that is on offer. He drinks it and she removes her top, revealing lingerie beneath, he makes a remark and is slapped across the face… her demeanour changed she dominates, is violent, forces him to the bedroom and, straddling him, chokes him.

eyes bleeding

Afterwards we discover that she is a prostitute and this was a fantasy he paid for. The apartment is his and it was all set up to fulfil a fantasy on his birthday. She is about to leave when he becomes suddenly ill, he goes to the bathroom and vomits and she talks about getting him to a hospital – as his eyes are bleeding. He passes out but when he comes round she is still there. The film then follows them as his story comes out, and his plan, and every time it goes wrong he manipulates her into believing that things had not got weird (suggesting she slept or banged her head, thus gaslighting her). 

his fridge

So what is going on and why is he a vampire? Well, he is 400-years old (he admits this and then changes it to 40 but feels like 400) and his fridge is filled with blood – cows blood, he suggests but also says he uses it, mixed with other ingredients, as his sustenance as he dislikes solid food. He is immortal and at one point deliberately cuts his hand to show it healing (there are scars that are left behind after the heal). All his points towards a vampire or the use of genre tropes.

Braeson Herold as Joshua

The thing that made him ill was a dose of saffron in the whisky as it is the only thing that can harm him (she dosed him on instruction). When we get the backstory we discover that his mother (McLean Peterson) was a wise woman who wanted a child and conceived with a supernatural entity (Bj Gruber), the price was an annual blood sacrifice for the life of the child. She then hid him for forty years but on his 40th birthday his father gave him a choice – kill his mother and live or chose to die. He killed his mother.

Veronica and Joshua

Centuries on and he wants to die. On his birthday his father will often bring the reincarnation of his mother to him (the inference being she becomes the annual sacrifice). There is some discussion about the soul being made up of parts of older souls and this gives an out of the obvious question around how the mother could be returned year after year, in adult form, as a reincarnation. He has tried to set things up so that he can reverse the curse, bring his mother back to life and he die in her place – Veronica is, he believes, a reincarnation of his mother.

a surreal moment

It was the dialogue and performances that carried this, much more than the story. Don’t get me wrong it was an interesting tale and concept, but it probably would have fallen flat if it were not for the performances and both actors really gave their all. Quite unusual in lore and pretty surreal in places, the filmmakers might not have meant this to be a vampire film but the tropes they used were too plentiful to ignore. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Short Film: Nightingale

In the case of this 2020 short (14-minute) film by Jasper de Bruin, Nightingale refers to a member of the nursing profession. In this case Julia (Nina Fokker) who works the graveyard shift in a nursing home.

As we follow Julia she seems particularly dedicated, patiently dabbing an elderly patient’s lips before helping her drink. There also seems to be something odd going on, as though she is being stalked.

Of course, being here, it involves a vampire and not too much of a spoiler to suggest that being the nurse working the graveyard shift amongst ill geriatric patients is a great cover and opportunity for a vampire. However, if Julia is the vampire, who might it be stalking her?

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mention: Greywood’s Plot

Directed by Josh Stifter and released in 2019, this indie flick surprised me by completely turning on its axis mid-way through. As it started, following seeing a shack in the wood in which sits the titular Doug Greywood (Daniel Degnan) and Home, Home on the Range is playing, we see a table with medical instruments and something covered…

Dom (Josh Stifter) is making a retrospective video to leave as a suicide note. He lives in his mom’s (Kim Fagan) basement and has a cryptozoology video channel, which he makes videos for with Miles (Keith Radichel) but, as we get to know them, it becomes apparent that Miles has lost interest in the channel and they are getting less than complimentary comments on their videos (and a lot of down votes). Dom also has a brother (Aaron McKenna), we hear later, and although they still speak by vid call there is an estrangement because brother and mother are at odds with each other.

Dom's website

This all speaks to Dom’s depression and thoughts of self-harm – he has a gun and we see him early on trying to muster himself to pulling the trigger but not getting there. However, when an unsolicited video comes through the post, he sees a last chance to make the channel work. The footage, grainy and dark, shows what he thinks is a chupacabra. His brother, who he sends the footage to, and Miles are less convinced.

Miles and Dom

For us as a viewer it is more difficult to tell as the very dark footage looks very much stop motion but it isn’t narratively clear whether this is a suspension of disbelief thing or whether it is coding to us that this is a faked video in the film’s reality. Nevertheless, Dom contacts the man on whose land it was shot – Doug Greywood – and gets permission to camp, though Doug is purported to be bemused as he was unaware of the video. Dom convinces Miles to come with him.

chupacabra skull

What follows is a couple of guys in the woods, wandering around and drinking… to a point at least. There is a ‘found footage’ vibe up until that point, even though it isn’t that at all. They do find a couple of artifacts as they go along. A weird skull that squirts gunk (from the cavity) when Miles pokes it. We also see a skull, that they don’t, that seems to have moving fingers emerging from it and that helps add a weirdness. They then find what they assume to be a chupacabra skeleton. However, following this…

Daniel Degnan as Doug

As I say, the film turns on its axis becoming something very different – without spoiling too much let me just suggest that there is some body horror element to this and it is surprisingly well done given the budget. However, the hunt for a chupacabra has now vanished below that axis and so, from a TMtV point of view, we have a belief in chupacabra and possibly a fleeting visitation of the skeleton and footage (which is likely not real, given the film's change in direction), and also a moment with Miles where he is confronted by strangeness before we are fully aware of what is happening.

The imdb page is here.

Bite Nite (2011) – review

Director: Ernest E. Brown

Release date: 2011

Contains spoilers

I found Bite Nite available to watch on screenwriter (and actor) Adrian Horodecky’s YouTube. It is suggested that it is a satire and I guess I can see that, especially around TV as an opium for the masses (and including vampires within those masses) but, unfortunately, the TV segment in the centre of the story just snarled the pacing of the film up. It is also clear that this was one on a budget but with a sense of ambition – there is a high number of extras, there was use of cgi for powers.

priestly energy blast

It starts some time ago, we hear a priest talking with a child, asking him to say what happened. We see the kid walking through a snowy night-time street with his dad and his mom, Maeve (Tara Cardinal). They are attacked by a man, Count Vagula (Dallas Mugno), and two vampire goons. They throw the dad to one side, Vagula bites mom who, in turn, tells the kid to run to the orphanage (that sounds like really dark foreshadowing of the next two minutes, but the church run orphanage is central to the story). Vagula is enthused by the taste of her blood (such blood is later named as San Gwynne Single Strain) and goes after the kid but he gets in the orphanage (dad is dragged off to be slaughtered and Vagula declares he is keeping mom around). Vagula is chased off by the priest who can fire magic from his hand (stick with it).

Jake Cassaday as Dr Danger

Cut forward to the present day (2011) and a girl has been murdered. The new sheriff, Butter (Adrian Horodecky) pitches up. You might have already started wondering about the names of characters. Some seemed weird for weird sake, Butter was so named as a set up for a couple of gags much further into the film. He is determined to find missing previous sheriff Sameena (Caitlyn Degler) and, as part of the investigation into the new murder, he goes to see Doctor Danger (Jake Cassaday), who suggests that the victim was bitten multiple times and had no blood in her system. Later we see her shrouded body in a graveyard with the priest, Doctor Danger and the mayor (Beverly D. Asroff). The priest says some words, mentions her spirit living on and we see energy lifting up and her body vanishing.

a serum trip

So, to cut a convoluted storyline down to size, Butter intervenes when another woman, Valla (Kimberly Dixon), is attacked. He is at the hospital and Danger reveals that he has created a serum (Butter doesn’t question why she’d need one) but it has to be filtered through human blood (so Butter has to take it and it is transfused to Valla) and it is untested so might kill him and he seems quite happy about that. The serum causes a massive trip sequence and leaves him with possible residual telepathy! The serum will cure a turned vampire and kill a born vampire. Following this he discovers the town's secrets.

the vangelz

The town is the sight of a vortex (that might be a gateway, presumably interdimensional) and the orphanage is built as a seal to the vortex over its location. The energy from the vortex makes people’s blood so damn tasty and Vagula has run the vampires in the town for years. Every year the vampires declare Bite Nite, where they rape the women of the town to create more population. This is not proving successful as the women then have abortions and Doctor Danger extracts the foetuses for his experiments (though some female ones survive and grow up in the orphanage and are known as vangelz – vampire/human hybrids trained as vampire hunters who can wield vortex energy). The narrative around the abortions etc seemed just a tad confused.

corporate vampires

A new group of corporate vampires, led by vampire Queen Taja (Andrea Lorincz), are now in play and want to build a mega hospital in town but want control of the orphanage (and intend to basically farm the town via the hospital). Doctor Danger is actually the kid from the beginning, Butter the grandson of the sheriff from back then and Maeve is now the bride of Vagula. The missing Sheriff is in a car trunk and, from what we see, has been there for ages, has had neither food or water nor has soiled herself and is still alive (though she is a vangel, so maybe that’s why). Doctor Danger seems to have inoculated most of the town and that makes the vampires who feed on them ill, flatulent and possible dead.

vampire advert

The narrative was not necessarily thought through, despite some good ideas, and the characters are two dimensional. The acting was, generally, enthusiastic-amateur. Some of the effects were just awful and the main one… the fangs. Some vampires had tooth caps that were just too bright white against the natural tooth colour, but the majority were awful, long, thin plastic affairs. I get there were a lot to provide but, really, they are a necessary part of the film where fangs are a used vampire trope. Then we get to a moment in film, half way through, where we are just watching vampire TV (a talk show, for instance, and a lesbian vampire striptease that cuts off before the rating Gods can complain) and the pace snarled. The climax saw vampires versus a bikini bowling team and the exploitation was strong with that idea.

bad fangs

There are good ideas here and there are also cardinal sins… it might have been added for laughs but the TV section should have hit the cutting room floor. If you are going to throw in bikinis wearing vampire hunters then embrace your exploitation, go the full hog and make it a longer action sequence rather than the very short scene it was. It did feel like the filmmakers struggled to know when to apply excess and when excess should be curtailed. I kind of don’t want to score this – especially as it has been put out there for free and the very complexities within narrative, large numbers of extras and ambitious effects for a budget production (such as the energy bolts) do point to a labour of love. Nevertheless, in my heart it is a 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Bite

Written and directed by Jack Pirie and released in 2018 this 4.5-minute short could feature something other than a vampire, but what we see fits into the mould and in looking at it through a vampire genre lens we get an interesting take on the mirror lore.

Valerie (Nichola Burley) is a dancer and has just received a knock back from an audition as her performance lacked bite.

the mirror reflects differently

She returns to a practice space and, before a wall of mirrors, starts on her routine. However, she fluffs it at the end. Suddenly her reflection isn’t her. The reflected Valerie mocks her and shows her the routine perfectly. It is a testament to Nichola Burley that, through expression, she sells two different yet identical characters. Eventually the mirror version shows that she has a maw of blood-stained teeth…

The imdb page is here.

30 days of Night: Run, Alice, Run (volume 3)

Author: Steve Niles

Artwork: Christopher Mitten

First published: 2013 (tpb)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Following the death of his beloved Stella, Eben Olemaun has embraced the dark side of vampirism. Armies are being raised and targets being set. All that stands between life and chaos are Alice Blood and a handful of unsuspecting federal agents. The war between the living and the undead has begun!

The review: Following immediately on from where Volume 2 left us, and the devastating attack on the FBI building, this third volume pitches headlong into Eben on a war footing. He has taken control of the American vampires, lured in the European representatives and most of the Agents from the FBI building are turned. Alice has an impossible task, to bring in a monster single-handedly.

To where it takes us, this volume was great. I especially liked the oldest vampire known to exist – a giant of a creature though perhaps it did owe a little to the Master from the Strain - though this was much bigger, by an order of magnitude.

What was more unsatisfying was how the volume ended, simply because it still had story to tell but whilst the series ends here the story continues in a crossover event with Niles’ Criminal Macabre. 6.5 out of 10.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Hollyblood – review

Director: Jesús Font

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

I had just got to the end of this Spanish film on the day of its Netflix release when I got a message off Simon Bacon asking if I’d watched it yet and what I thought. I think it was best summed up as I found it really cute.

Of course such a summary is not good enough for a review on TMtV and I will go into a little bit more depth but what we have is a teen focused horror comedy that puts across several genre nods in its run time but is primarily gently spoofing the teen girl/vampire phenomena.

feeding Frizz blood

It starts back in the 80s and a young lad, Frizz (Piero Mendez), who is on a(n obviously Catholic) school corridor when he is grabbed by three bullies and dragged to a pool. They throw him in and then are holding his head under but the attack goes to far and he drowns. Above them there is a black shadow with glowing red eyes that attacks them (off screen – though we see one spattered with the blood of a friend). Once dead we see a wrinkled arm extended, the wrist opened and blood go into Fizz’ mouth – he reawakens as a vampire. The opening felt like it had an homage aspect to Let the Right One In.

Isa Montalbán as Sara

We then get an animated sequence, with graphics made to look like stained glass, that explains about the vampire Azrael, a creature that has walked among man for millennia pulling the strings behind nations. The voiceover is by Sara (Isa Montalbán) who we then meet chatting to online friend Lidia about Azrael and vampires in a Hollyblood chat room. Hollyblood is a teen vampire/werewolf romance that riffs on Twilight. Lidia is not the girl Sara thinks she is, however.

Óscar Casas as Javi

Javi (Óscar Casas) is a fairly new lad in her school and has a crush on her and he has created the Lidia persona to talk to her (and, yes, the creepiness of the situation is raised through the film). Javi’s dad, Fernando (Jordi Sánchez), calls him for dinner and assumes Javi has been looking at porn. He sneaks a look at the laptop, sees the Lidia persona and graphics of the topless, overly ripped Hollyblood actors and thinks Javi is gay. Also active online, and in the same class as Sara and Javi, is Diego (Carlos Suárez), he has a YouTube channel that he uses to present himself as a self-styled vampire hunter.

a scene from Hollyblood

Anyway, through the film the three interact in various ways and also active within the interactions are Manu (Mateo Medina), who is the class bully but has a thing for Sara (and sees her as his property even though they aren’t together), and Carmen (Lara Boedo), Sara’s best school friend who has a crush on her too. Azrael, Sara reveals, has contacted her and will meet her at the Hollyblood premier. Also at the premier are Diego, hunting for Azrael, and Javi, hoping to tell Sara how he feels. Frizz is also there, as he has been posing as Azrael and intends to meet Sara. We see a couple of scenes of Hollyblood and it really does riff Twilight but in a way that is mildly amusing and doesn’t rely on aggressive misogyny or homophobia as many riffs of the film do.

Carlos Suárez as Diego

Things conspire to have Sara almost crushed by a sign and Javi saves her by leaping in and stopping the falling sign, but it is way too heavy and he is successful because there is a chain that impedes its fall also. Sara, however, decides he is a vampire and rather than come clean he takes on that persona for her. This, again, is a bit creepy of him and potentially harmful, especially when we learn of the reason for her vampire obsession. Frizz becomes an active player in the on-running drama, Diego decides Javi is a target and there is the actual Azrael out there somewhere also.

Javi acting as a vampire

I said at the head that this was cute and it was. It had a genuine gentle humour and, despite the fact that there was a stalkerish aspect (Javi taking on personas to get the girl can only be read negatively as manipulation and Frizz regularly uses actually being a vampire to get girls) the characters came across more as flawed, with much to learn about life and respect, than actually unpleasant. Isa Montalbán played the central role with a natural air that really worked and there was some genuine chemistry with Óscar Casas especially during a dance moment that needs a special shout out for the inspired soundtrack choice of Los Lobos’ Kiko and the Lavender Moon.

fangs on show

There is some confusing lore within the film as Javi makes a lot up. However, we do see a vampire as smoke, we see holy water burn (and the blessing of the pool at the end used an interesting methodology) and Frizz certainly wears shades and a hoody during the day (though whether there was sunscreen involved – as Javi suggests – or the sun was a hindrance more than deadly is not properly explored). We do see a shapeshift into another human form and the use of lust as a hypnotic focal point. If a vampire is killed, those turned by it become human again and this is generational, so that those turned by the one who becomes human also become human.

vampire hunting

There are other genre nods, and we can see some of the use of the pool as being like Fright Night 2: New Blood as well as the aforementioned Let the Right One In, the use of a blank in a gun was straight out of Vampire’s Kiss and Diego felt a tad like the Frog Brothers in the Lost Boys. At the end of the day, as I said, I found this one genuinely cute. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The Pallbearers’ Club – review

Author: Paul Tremblay

First Published: 2022

Contains Spoilers  

The Blurb: 1988, and puberty has hit Art Barbara hard - he's a painfully socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and bent crooked by scoliosis. Worse, he has no extra credits to get him into college. So Art starts the Pallbearers’ Club, dedicated to mourning the homeless and lonely – the people with no one else to bury them. It might be a small club, unpopular and morbid, but it introduces Art to Mercy Brown, who is into bands, local history, folklore and digging up the dead.

Decades later, Art is writing his memoir to try and make sense of it all, because nothing about Mercy is simple. It’s all a matter of trust, right? Their friendship twists and coils around the pair of them, captured in Polaroid snapshots and sweaty gigs and the freaky, inexplicable flashes of nightmare that lurk in a folded jacket at night.

Because Art is writing his memoir to make sense of it all, but Mercy is reading it too. Mercy thinks Art’s novel – because this isn’t a memoir – needs some work, and she’s more than happy to set the record straight. What if Art didn’t get everything right? Come on, Art, you can’t tell just one side of the story…

Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unforgettable and unsettling friendship.

The review: I was contacted by my friend Dave, who is a Paul Tremblay fan and was reading this volume when he realised that it may well be my sort of book. To be fair, when I looked and saw in the blurb the name Mercy Brown, my mind, of course, went straight to vampires and the New England case. Many thanks for the tip, Dave.

The book itself… I’d like to say that it was a coming of age novel – for to some degree that is how it reads at first with the socially awkward Art Barbara (not his real name) creating an extra-curricular club to help at funerals for those buried without mourners (or very few) and through it meets Mercy Brown (again not her real name). However, this goes beyond that coming of age and into adulthood and middle age. Mercy does know about the historical Mercy Brown, tells Art Mercy's story (for a school project) and wants to find evidence of vampires (through the blue orbs associated with many New England vampire cases).

The book is written as a memoir but it is then marked through with corrections and end notes by Mercy, who is clearly reading the manuscript and correcting the story as per her point of view or just adding her two penn'orth especially when she feels he is being melodramatic. This editing is to the point of constantly crossing out memoir and replacing it with novel when the former appears in text as she feels the story is so embellished it doesn’t deserve to be called a memoir. Her corrections, added in a handwriting like font, make this an even more fascinating read, with the author offering two views to his story without the need to be in dialogue together. It is very clever and is reminiscent (in cleverness not device) of Iain Banks – indeed because of Art’s place in the local punk/music scene there was perhaps the briefest touch, or an air, of Espedair Street by Banks also.

The vampirism, which Art becomes more and more convinced of, seems to be much more energy vampirism. We get the feeling of being drained, the sensation of something sat on the chest at night and a sense of ordinary objects (jackets) being used as conduits for the feed, becoming nightmarishly animate. The lore plays around what we know of the New England beliefs and Tremblay, in his acknowledgments, points to Michael Bell’s marvellous Food for the Dead as his prime research volume. Mentioned in Bell’s book, Lovecraft’s the Shunned House gets mentioned in text also.

I thoroughly enjoyed this; crisp and intelligent writing that kept you interested and, primarily, explored the characters and friendship, with the text veering into an uncanny and occasionally horrific space used effectively but sparingly. The prose felt, due to it being Art’s words, drawn out in places but was also beautifully constructed to keep the reader engaged. I suppose, however, that the text's ability to engage you depends on how much the character of Art engages you and some might feel the horror was too sparse. That said, it has unusual vampirism and strange lore that could be distorted by insobriety, poor memory, melodrama or, on the other hand, perhaps Art’s memoir is more accurate than Mercy would have us believe. 7.5 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Firebite: Season 1 – review

First aired: 2021

Directors: Warwick Thornton, Brendan Fletcher & Tony Krawitz

Contains spoilers

This Australian TV show had a really interesting opening premise and a beautiful setting. Some may not call the Australian dessert (the show is set in a desert opal mining colony) beautiful but I have a soft spot for dessert set productions, thinking the natural lighting offers a dramatis that is pleasing to the viewer eye.

I also probably had the wrong expectations going in. I sort of expected something madcap along the lines of the magnificent Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead – I don’t know why – what we got wasn’t madcap and punched, unfortunately, under its weight.

story of the eleven

But, as I say the premise, is really interesting. Tyson (Rob Collins) is a vampire hunter and also the legal guardian of Shanika (Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Wyrmwood Apocalypse), or Nika, a teenage girl who also hunts with him. The hunting often makes her late for school and after we first meet her on a hunt we see her in class – as the white kids in the class celebrate Australia Day, she gives her perspective. For her, and her people, it is Invasion Day but, not stopping there, she tells how the British brought 11 vampires to the land (as well as guns and smallpox). She then says that the vampires became addicted to “Blackfella” blood.

Tyson and Nika

This then is the premise – that the vampires came, became addicted to indigenous peoples’ blood and then, as we discover later, a group called Blood Hunters developed – with their own set of rules but the mission of wiping out the vampires. In the class the white kids react badly to the story, and a racist incident sees Nika retaliating and getting suspended. So, whilst the premise of racist vampires (they only turn white people to maintain the bloodline) and indigenous hunters was good, the series takes that premise and is very on the nose with it, perhaps a tad too on the nose – though perhaps the bluntness of message was necessary, particularly in Australia where I suspect a bludgeon is probably needed to break through an underlying institutional racism in the culture.

Callan Mulvey as the vampire king

The other societal message in the series is one of misogyny, and this was dealt with using a little more panache. When a Blood Hunter (Kelton Pell) shows up, he berates Tyson for training Nika – hunting is for men. The attitude of the Vampire King (Callan Mulvey) also displays an undercurrent of misogyny – it turns out he is the last of the 11 originals, though he doesn’t necessarily appear as powerful as one might expect. Only the 11 could turn – something they call the Firebite, and so tuning is a deliberate choice.

hunting in the tunnels

Tyson was to be a Blood Hunter but he left them when they intervened in an attack and he rescued Nika (played young by Nyunmiti Gibson) as a little girl, rather than abandoning her in the outback. Her mother (Natasha Wanganeen, Dark Place) was taken and, when Nika discovers that not all victims are killed but some – Bleeders – are kept she wants to try and find her and it is in things like this the show became weaker. Her mother is alive – but the length of time (whilst unspoken) seems long for someone being consistently bled to be able to survive and it isn’t addressed.

Tyson fighting

Another issue is around the Tyson character – now I have to say, in the first instance, that Rob Collins’ performance was bob on, but they pushed him to antihero with the character flaws they presented the character with and then carried on pushing. I think they pushed too far and despite a (drunken) redemption confession the character was too flawed. Nika put it best when she says he is “Hero. Blood Hunter. Dickhead.” That dickhead part was really laid on a bit too thick and the character drawn too thinly – that was the issue with most of the characters, they weren’t developed enough.

Nika and Kitty

The story could have been condensed or perhaps nuanced a bit more. That said, I certainly didn’t dislike it. I have mentioned Rob Collins but there were several good, key performances, despite thin characters and I’d loved to have seen what the cast could have done with more rounded characters. The narrative commentaries were necessary no matter how blunt the application. The idea of vampires using the disused mine shafts (they are burnt and killed by the sun) was a good one. I think 6 out of 10 is a tad generous but anything less seems churlish.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK