FSF, October-November 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  "Heel!” he ordered quietly over his shoulder. “Sit! Roll over! Play dead!” These were the only dog commands he could recall from the script he'd written for Socko the Wonder Dog Goes to War last autumn.

  None of them made an impression on the angry Doberman. Snarling, he leaped for the climbing writer.

  He managed to nip the heel of one of the strange shoes that Hix was pretty certain he'd bought down in Tijuana while hung over a few months ago. The dog took a hunk out of the orange-brown Mexican shoe, but Hix was not hurt.

  Hix was able to pull himself to the top of the wall. He stretched out there for a moment, facedown, and caught his breath.

  The dog continued to growl and jump down there in the darkness. Apparently everyone at the Marzloff establishment was too busy bringing the late Alex Stoner back to life to notice Hix's less than silent arrival.

  * * * *

  The thick drainpipe commenced producing metallic groans when Hix, panting as quietly as he was able, had managed to convey himself up roughly three quarters of its two-story length.

  Over on the other side of the stone wall the surly Doberman was continuing to convey his annoyance with a lengthy series of angry barks.

  Pausing to again catch his breath, the writer continued his ascent to the slanting roof and the illuminated skylight.

  "You're going to have to expand your exercise plan,” he advised himself as he labored upward. “Playing volleyball once a week with a gaggle of starlets in the Pentagram Pictures parking lot obviously isn't sufficient."

  At long last—it took him nearly ten minutes according to the radium dial on his wristwatch—Hix reached his goal. Clutching the metal edge of the sturdy gutter, he pulled himself up on to the roof.

  Sprawling flat, he inched his way over to the edge of the big skylight. Careful not to go sliding back down the incline of the roof, he prepared to take a look down into the lab/surgery.

  "Hot dog!” he exclaimed internally upon noticing that one of the large glass panels in the skylight was propped open, thus allowing him to hear what was being said down below.

  A voice that must belong to Dr. Marzloff was saying, in a thick accent that sounded like Akim Tamiroff or Gregory Ratoff on a bad day, “I am no longer optimistic, gentlemen."

  "He's alive again,” pointed out the Paramount exec who'd conked Hix.

  "True, but he's passed away twice again since you delivered him here to me."

  "I'm not ... really ... feeling so ... hot,” admitted Alex Stoner.

  Risking a peek downward into the brightly lit room Hix saw the two large Paramount men standing close beside a white operating table, considerable concern showing on their faces.

  Stretched out on the table, looking extremely pale and clad in a white hospital gown, was the late actor. He was groaning in his deep, actor's voice.

  The squat, thickset Marzloff had on a pale blue medical jacket and a stethoscope dangling around his neck. On his bald head he was wearing a voodoo headdress consisting chiefly of chicken feathers, cat fur, and rat tails. In his right hand he held a large hypodermic and in his left a maraca that had tiny skulls painted on it in bright red lacquer.

  Stoner said, “Dying once ... was bad enough ... but dying three more...."

  "Four,” corrected the doctor.

  The other executive said, “Look, Doc, we only need this guy for one more week and then it's a wrap."

  "Don't forget he has to dub a few pieces of dialogue,” reminded his colleague.

  "We can always get Paul Frees to do that. He can imitate anybody's voice."

  "Gentlemen, I very much fear he can't be kept alive for longer than a few more minutes."

  "We could settle for three days."

  "Not even three hours. I've been able, as you know, to have some luck with an initial reanimation. But—"

  "I have ... a few...” said Stoner, half sitting up on the table, shivering and shaking violently, “...last words ... I'd like to thank the Academy for ... Aargh!” Falling back with a thud, he died for the fifth time.

  "Holy Moley,” said Hix, reaching the borrowed camera out from under his sweater. Surreptitiously, he aimed it at what was going on down in the laboratory.

  "C'mon,” ordered one of the executives. “Revive this guy again."

  "I do not believe it would be of any use."

  "Try it!"

  Sighing, the doctor adjusted his chicken feather headpiece. “My exclusive blending of up-to-date medical expertise and ancient Haitian voodoo can only do so much."

  "Get going, Doc!"

  After administering the shot in the hypodermic to a thin, pale arm of the dead actor, Marzloff began to dance around the body, shaking the maraca and chanting, “Damballah. Ioa. Damballah-Wedo. Gato Preto. Damballah."

  Hix, chuckling silently, clicked off shots. “What an expose this is going to be. I'll be the darling of the press and ... Oh, crap."

  He'd discovered he was swiftly sliding toward the edge of the sharply slanting roof.

  Flipping over onto his back as he slid, Hix managed to stuff the big camera under his dark sweater and, at the same time, use his heels to try to brake his descent.

  He succeeded with the camera, but he kept sliding ever closer to the drop.

  Hix made a grab for the gutter edge as he went over. As he caught it, the jerking halt of his drop sent pain all across his shoulders and back. He hung two stories up for what seemed like more than a minute.

  Then he caught hold of the drainpipe and went down to the ground, quite a bit faster than he'd gone up.

  Limping, he scurried to the wall. After inhaling enthusiastically a few times, he got himself to the top. He lay stretched out on the stones. Nobody had noticed his departure.

  Wheezing, as well as panting, Hix let himself down on the other side.

  Waiting for him, silently, was the big mean-minded black and tan dog.

  * * * *

  The next morning, the new secretary at his agent's office pretended she didn't know who Hix was. “Who?” she inquired in a voice that was both nasal and snide.

  "Hix. Bernie's most successful client."

  "Surely, you're not John O'Hara."

  "Tell him that terrific idea we talked about has come to fruition. We're all in the money."

  "I'll try to contact Mr. Kupperman. Hix, was it?"

  After three and a half long minutes Bernie came on the line. “Hix, how many times have I warned you about using profanity with my secretaries?"

  "I merely stated my name."

  "She apparently though Hix was a dirty word."

  "A common mistake, yeah. But the purpose of my call is to alert you to dust off my brilliant I Waltzed with a Zombie treatment, Bernie."

  "Why in the heck would I do something like that?"

  "Because I am on the brink of turning into an international celebrity due to my exposure of insidious zombie trafficking in Tinsel Town,” he announced. “I'll be exposing a major Hollywood studio that's featured a dead actor in a starring role in their latest Technicolor historical epic."

  "Baloney. How can you do that?"

  "Soon as I sell my exclusive story to the L.A. Times. And possibly give it to my old pal Johnny Whistler, too."

  "What sort of proof do you have? Photographs would be nice."

  Hix hesitated. “I had a whole stewpot of great shots, Bernie,” he said. “Unfortunately my camera fell out of my sweater while I was running through a section of Santa Rita Beach."

  "Exercising, were you?"

  "Well, actually, I was running for my life."

  "So why didn't you pick up the camera?"

  "The ferocious dog that was chasing me over hill and dale stopped to eat the camera. Or at least take a couple of hefty bites out of it,” he explained. “But I can still provide the press with a first-hand account of my witnessing a noted actor being resurrected. An attempted resurrection maybe, because I fell off the roof before—"

  "Who was, according to you, being revived? And who was
doing this?"

  "The actor in question was none other than Alex Stoner, Paramount's star of The Holy Grail. The first time this old ham died was back three months ago and they—"

  His agent made an exasperated sound. “Don't you read the newspapers, Hix? Don't you listen to Johnny Whistler's seven-thirty a.m. broadcast on Mutual?"

  "I overslept because ... why?"

  "Alex Stoner didn't die three months ago. He died last night of a massive heart attack,” Bernie told him. “Paramount Pictures announced that early this morning."

  "I fell off the roof too soon. Looks like they couldn't revive him this time."

  "Actually, Hix, they're burying him at Forest Lawn on Friday,” the agent informed him. “Paramount says they've got enough footage in the can to put The Holy Grail together."

  "I Waltzed with a Zombie is still a terrific idea."

  "Tell you what, I'll try it on Monogram,” said Bernie. “I hear they're thinking of doing some cheapie musicals. Maybe we can get six thousand dollars out of them. What say?"

  Hix was silent for a moment. “Sure, give it a try, Bernie,” he said, and hung up.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: FILMS by Lucius Shepard

  ANTI-TREK

  The idea that the poorly written, hastily conceived, sketchily realized, terminally old-fashioned characters of James Tiberius Kirk and company may live on and on while generations of our descendants wither and die seems fairly appalling. Still more appalling is the possibility that some of the less celebrated genre films I've seen recently will have a similar longevity. For instances: Terminator Salvation (Transformers with a heaping helping of grim), which has already been around for twenty-five years; Wolverine (one hundred and seven minutes of dull, dull, dull, and inane, exclamation-pointed dialog such as “Nobody kills you but me!"), which has been around for a decade, but promises countless sequels, and then there's the new kid on the blockbuster circuit, Angels and Demons (the Illuminati's out to kick Vatican butt and only Forrest Gump can stop them!), a film to which I would urge you to escort a drunk and encourage him to make rude noises throughout. Star Trek, though basically an action picture that stops every so often for a spot of sketch comedy, is a variation on a minstrel show with white guy actors in Kirk- and Spock-face impersonating white guy actors (not to mention the occasional Uhura and Sulu), speaking lines whose musty familiarity provokes cheap laughs, lacking only a Mister Interlocuter (unless the original Mr. Spock—called Spock Prime in the cast list—is evolving into that role). Nevertheless, it towers above these other films like a dragon among hippopotami or, more aptly, like a streamlined super-monster truck with badass rims and Satanic flames on its side panels among a bunch of battered, nondescript family sedans—you see, Star Trek is a legitimate thrill ride, something the others only aspire to be. Of course being a thrill ride doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, merely a forgettable one. It's like Space Mountain or the Tower of Terror, fun while you're on board, but afterward the kids start whining that they want to go again, the littlest one ralphs all over your shoe, there's a snarling australopithecene in line in front of you who keeps bumping into your wheelchair-bound mom and accusing her of bumping into him, and you just know punches will be thrown at some point and nothing you've taken from the ride can sustain you against or divert you from the hell ride you're on.

  Given the all-pervasive feelgood neon splendor of the splat pop culture made when it was hurled against a bathroom wall in Studio City and someone decided, Hey, that crap's good enough for the proles, I find it refreshing now and again to watch a science fiction film that actually has more to say than Pow, Varoom, Zap, and derives its wit from a vein of humor a tad more sophisticated than pantsing the newest Scotty. So I'm downright pleased to call your attention to Moon, a neat little science fiction thriller co-written (with Nathan Parker) and directed by the artist formerly known as Zowie Bowie, the son of the Thin White Duke, who now calls himself Duncan Jones (I bet the dude has some serious daddy issues), and starring Sam Rockwell, an actor skilled at impersonation and farce, as his role in Galaxy Quest will attest, but also capable of great things, something Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, who incarnate the Kirk and the Spock respectively, will likely never have the chance to prove. Rockwell plays the role of Sam Bell, a mining engineer, the caretaker and sole human occupant of Sarang Station owned by Lunar Industries. As an opening commercial informs us, Earth's energy crisis has been solved by the harvesting of Helium-3 from rocks on the dark side of the moon. The job of overseeing the automated operation (four mobile refineries) falls upon the shoulders of one man who signs on for a three-year tour of virtual isolation—his only companion is GERTY 3000, a robot who communicates via emoticons that render ersatz expressions and a soothing voice (Kevin Spacey's) that can't help but remind you of HAL in Kubrick's 2001 (elements of the film remind of other science fiction movies, such as Outland and Silent Running, although the picture feels in the main original). Sam is two weeks away from the end of his tour, desperate to return to his wife and three-year-old daughter, but his time at the station has affected him deleteriously and he's not doing well, sleeping poorly and hallucinating. It's the latter problem that lands him in real trouble. While chugging along in his lunar buggy, making a routine maintenance inspection of one of the giant factories, he's distracted by the vision of a girl standing on the surface beneath a shower of rubble and the resultant accident leaves him unconscious. When he wakes in the station's infirmary, GERTY tells him he may have suffered brain damage. Not long thereafter, a healthier version of himself, another Sam Bell, puts in an appearance.

  Is this second Sam an hallucination, a doppleganger, a product of brain damage, or perhaps all three? And why is GERTY having those clandestine conversations with Earth? These and a number of other questions beg to be answered.

  At first the interloper is hostile and keeps Sam One at arm's length, but gradually they become friends or something like, and together they set out to unravel the station's mysteries. The solutions to those mysteries may seem predictable to some, but this is not a typical thriller, and neither are its satisfactions predictable. Your patience will be rewarded, though not, perhaps, as you expect. There's plenty to think about here, and while it's not entirely new territory, it's handled in such a surprising way, examined through the lens of a more-or-less utopian society (at least it's a utopia by contrast to the prevailing dystopian view of the future), that it feels fresh.

  The exteriors of the lunar base and the harvesters are done with models treated with a single layer of CGI, and this achieves a very sophisticated and expensive look for such a low-budget film. The wide shots of the models combine with the antiseptic white interiors to create an appropriately menacing atmosphere (this is not a horror movie per se, but it deals with existential and metaphysical horror), and Jones's direction is remarkably deft, considering it's his debut. Moon could have become just another corporate nightmare, with Big Brother bogeymen, but Jones is too smart to go that route and focuses instead on Sam and Sam Again, their traumas, trials, and tribulations.

  Above all, this is Sam Rockwell's movie. Rockwell made his bones in indie comedies such as Lawn Dogs and Safe Men (both very funny movies, in case you haven't seen them), displaying exceptional comic timing, and has gone on to act in studio farces as well as more serious fare, notably his turns as Charlie Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a black comedy wherein he plays a man on the verge of a breakdown, anticipating the brilliant work he does in Moon. Since he's essentially the sole character in the film, the weight of the entire script is on Rockwell's shoulders and he does far more than carry it. He manages to illuminate every cranny of the two Sams’ psyches as they struggle with their mutual and variant dilemmas. Alternately funny, desperate, and sad, his performance is a tour de force. In a different world he'd receive serious considerations for awards, but we all know how that goes.

&nb
sp; If Moon is the anti-Star Trek, a movie that earns its credentials as a science fiction thriller not by explosions and tag lines, but by exploiting intricacies of plot and character, then The House of the Devil might be seen as the anti-Halloween; but really it's not. Truth is, House has a lot in common with the original Halloween. The plot of the film is an ‘80s cliché—an elderly couple (Tom Noonan, Red Dragon in Manhunter, and Mary Woronov from Night of the Comet) hire a couple of college girls to babysit a big, sinister-looking house in the country while they watch a lunar eclipse; the girls arrive and, after a slow build-up, bad things begin to happen. It sounds clichéd, and it is, but director Ti West, an aficionado of ‘70s and ‘80s horror cinema, is playing with his audience's expectations. His new picture effects a character study of the house and, incidentally, of one of the girls, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), as she pokes about the place, exploring, thinking about this and that. The film proceeds at a crawl and, though I enjoyed its deliberate pacing and the slow creep of the tension, those accustomed to filmmaking that depends on jump scares and gore may lose interest early on. House has its fair share of gore mind you, along with an ending that's not up to the rest of the picture, but if you relish films that generate suspense the old-fashioned way, and if you want to catch horror cinema's next big director before he becomes a household word, this makes an excellent starting point.

  Last year's Let The Right One In brought fresh blood to the vampire genre—this year, that trend continues, though in a different vein (okay, I'll stop), with the release of Chan-wook Park's (Oldboy) vampire picture, Thirst, a kind of vampire-family drama-sometimes comedy-noir. Featuring Kang-ho Song, Korea's leading actor (the mentally challenged father in The Host), it tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest who contracts vampirism while engaging in a medical experiment intended to fight the outbreak of a deadly plague in Africa. All those who take part in the experiment die, but Song returns to life and, to his amazement and disgust, soon realizes that he has become a vampire. We've had our fair share of reluctant vampires, notably in Kathryn Bigelow's classic, Near Dark, but never one so complexly reluctant as Song's priest, who is conflicted by matters of ethics, conscience, and his questioning of God, and goes the extra mile to avoid surrendering to his nature, as for instance, drinking out of hospital IVs.