Category: Reviews

Review: ‘The Venice Chronicles’ by Enrico Casarosa

Review: ‘The Venice Chronicles’ by Enrico Casarosa

The Venice Chronicles
By Enrico Casarosa
Atelier Fio/AdHouse, November 2008, $19.95

Sometimes it seems like people live in completely different worlds. For example, I live in an America where a guy named Andy can marry a girl named Chris, have a series of decent jobs in book publishing, and go on occasional vacations to theme parks.

But there’s also a world made up of people named Enrico – who have cool movie-industry jobs, like doing storyboards for Pixar – that marry equally cool-named people like Marit – a modern dancer – and go on long vacations to Venice with her parents, zoom across Italy to meet his parents, and have dinner with Hugo Pratt’s daughter along the way.

I’m thinking it’s the names: Enrico just goes with Marit in a way “Dave” or “Bob” doesn’t. If I’d been named Siegfried or Joao, my life might have been as interesting as Enrico Casarosa’s.

And, speaking of Casarosa’s life, we finally come to his new book, [[[The Venice Chronicles]]]. It’s a diary, in watercolor over pencils, of that trip to Venice (and other points in northern Italy) – which I think was in the summer of 2007. It has the look of a sketchbook, but most of the pages were drawn after the trip – though there are sketches and watercolors drawn at the time mixed in as well.

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Preview: ‘Wolverine: Flies to a Spider’

Preview: ‘Wolverine: Flies to a Spider’

Marvel has provided ComicMix with preview pages from the forthcoming [[[Wolverine: Flies to a Spider]]].  Novelist turned comic writer Gregg Hurwitz (Punisher) is paired with newcomer Jerome Opena (Fear Agents) and cover artist Tim Bradstreet for the oneshot due in stores December 12.

It’s New Year’s Eve and the meanest, nastiest, most jacked-up biker gang you ever could meet, The Road Dawgs, have gathered at a bar called the “Rat Trap.”  But tonight there’s a stranger sitting on a stool at the end of the bar. Someone who’s looking to pick a fight. Someone who’s after much bigger game than some roughnecks – and be sure, this bad boy knows exactly how to get someone’s attention!


Review: ‘Batman: The Brave and the Bold’

Review: ‘Batman: The Brave and the Bold’

Since his debut in [[[Batman: The Animated Series]]], Warner Animation has seen to it Batman gets freshened every now and then.  Animators swoop in, streamline the look and adjust the stories as time and tastes change.  The most recent Batman series was perhaps the worst as it veered further and further away from its comic book source material so we suddenly had a Rastafarian Joker who knew martial arts. That incarnation has been mercifully retired and in its place we have [[[Batman: The Brave and the Bold]]].

As the title suggests, this is a Batman team-up show and owes much to the title where Batman co-starred with other characters for over 125 issues. The designs puff up the Caped Crusader so he looks as if Carmine Infantino or Mike Sekowsky was doing the model sheets.

Fortunately, the resemblance to the 1960s more or less ends there as the storytelling is quick and adventurous.  This is a well-adjusted Batman who recognizes his place in the super-hero firmament.  For example, in the debut episode, which airs on the Cartoon Network this coming Friday night, he specifically asks Blue Beetle along on a mission to check him out.

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Review: ‘Conan: The Hand of Nergal’ by Truman and Giorello

Review: ‘Conan: The Hand of Nergal’ by Truman and Giorello

There have now been eight generations of teenage boys to thrill to the exploits of [[[Conan]]], one for each decade since he first appeared in [[[Weird Tales]]] in 1932. The oldest cohort is likely mostly dead; the youngest one will mostly wander away once they get drivers’ licenses or beer-purveying fake IDs. But Conan endures – some of those fans do stick around, and there are always new ones. And, even though Robert E. Howard – remember him? The guy who created Conan and wrote the stories about him that were actually good? – has been dead for more than seventy years, Conan stories keep appearing.

Why, I have one right here:

Conan, Vol. 6: The Hand of Nergal
By Timothy Truman and Tomas Giorello
Dark Horse, October 2008, $24.95

Dark Horse, when they got the Conan comics license some years ago, rebooted the series, to follow Howard’s hero starting with his earliest adventures and to adapt or include Howard’s original stories along the way. (The intentions of the long-running previous series, from Marvel, had been intermittently the same, but twenty-three years leaves room for a whole lot of “more or less,” and they’d gotten pretty far in Conan’s life. I’m not sure why there’s no love for the older Conan, King of Aquilonia – especially since Howard’s very first Conan story was about that part of his life – but, in comics, the preference has always been for the young, half-naked barbarian.) [[[The Hand of Nergal]]] reprints issues 47 through 50 of the Dark Horse series – along with one of those most bizarre manifestations of the modern comics scene, the “#0” issue published much later than #1 – and sees Conan still quite young.

Hand of Nergal is based on a two-page, two-part untitled fragment – the title is from Lin Carter, when he “adapted” it into one of his own third-rate Conan stories – that’s currently available in [[[The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian]]]. I’ve just glanced at it myself – it’s two bits of atmosphere, with no plot: Conan finds an unconscious hot babe on a battlefield, and gloms her with his sweaty paws, while, meanwhile, a city named Yaralet is vaguely uneasy about nothing that gets described.

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Review: Primeval Volume One

Review: Primeval Volume One

The BBC reserves its Saturday night prime time slots for genre-bending fare and it’s where shows vie for a place.  [[[Primeval]]] is one of the newer series to occupy the coveted slot on ITV and recently completed its run on BBC America.  Today, Warner Home Video collects the first 13 episodes, comprising its first two seasons, as [[[Primeval Volume One]]], which will have to tide us over until season three kicks off next year.

Totally unrelated to [[[Doctor Who]]] or other SF series, the show seems to owe more [[[Jurassic Park]]] than anything.  We’re in a world where spatial anomalies randomly open (throughout only England it seems) and objects animal, vegetable or mineral can cross through.

On the one hand, it’s a paleontologist’s dream, on the other hand it’s also a nightmare as long extinct predators arrive seeking dinner. A group of individuals, responding to what appears to the first such rift in space/time find themselves forming as a team, working for the British government to understand the rift and keep humanity from harm.

Over the course of the six episode first season, which ran late last year, we also discover that the wife of Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) went missing eight years ago and apparently went through an earlier rift.  Very quickly, we discover there’s a lot more to her and the rift than originally imagined and suddenly we have threads to tie the episodes together in an overall arc.

Cutter, who teaches evolutionary zoologist at university, is joined by in the adventure by his colleague Stephen Hart (James Murray), who just happened to have an affair with the missing Helen (Juliet Aubrey) which makes things just a wee bit tense.  Grad student and overly enthusiastic Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) brings a geeky charm to the team which is rounded out by reptile expert Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearritt). When the government figures out these guys are the answer to an unforeseen problem, they assign overly officious Sir James Peregrine Lester (Ben Miller) to run the operation, handing the grunt work over to Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown). Sparks fly between her and Cutter as they do for Abby and Connor.

While each episode is self-contained, we discover the threats both here and to the past.  This is shown in exceedingly dramatic effect at the end of season one as Helen does something in the past that changes the future, eradicating Claudia from the timeline. As season two opens, the government has figured out the team needs a proper HQ and they start working out of the A.R.C. building which is one of the niftier set designs I’ve seen since Alias. We then meet Jenny Lewis, a PR flak to help convince the public they really aren’t seeing dinosaurs.  She happens to look just like Claudia which sets Cutter’s heart a pitter pattering.

The stories range from outright terrifying to mildly amusing.  The anomalies open between today and various tomorrows so we’re getting glimpses from different parts of the world’s evolution. A great example of that is episode 8, as worm-like creatures and their toxic atmosphere find their way into a London high rise office building.

Overall, the show looks great and is well acted.  It helps that most of the episodes have been written and directed by a small team of people so there’s a consistency to look and performance which keeps the show comfortable.  The action quotient was upped in the second season so things move along more quickly which is as it should be now that we’ve learned the premise and gotten to know the characters.

And yet…the show is entertaining but not as compelling as Doctor Who or Torchwood.  The humor is a little on the juvenile end and Helen’s evil plans just aren’t feeling very dangerous yet.  The characters and relationships feel as if they were scaled for all ages and the threats, while interesting, don’t threaten humanity or the cosmos on the same scale.

The DVD is nicely packaged and has some episodic commentary plus two documentaries on the making of the show, each produced to air at the end of each season.  The latter, “Through the Anomaly”, includes neat bits on how the actors become models to their action figures and the process toy designers currently use.

Review: ‘Berlin: City of Smoke’ by Jason Lutes

Review: ‘Berlin: City of Smoke’ by Jason Lutes

Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke
By Jason Lutes
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95

More than ten years ago, Jason Lutes began serializing his long graphic novel [[[Berlin]]] in a comic of the same name. Making long-form comics is long, hard work – more like an ultramarathon than any other art form – and this year finally sees the publication of the second part of that story. Even now, the end is still probably four or five years away –although we can certainly know what will happen in Berlin, and guess what will happen to these people, as 1929 slides into ‘30 into ‘31.

Berlin is a dense, complicated story with a large cast of characters, told in a naturalistic, cinematic way, without identifying captions or explanatory notes. That keeps from slowing down the reading experience, and the characters are always recognizable – but it does make it hard to review the book, when I realize that “the Jewish orphan girl” was probably named twice in the entire two hundred pages. (And with two different names at that.)

Berlin takes place in the last days of the post-Great War Weimar Republic, and its implicit theme is the battle between fascism and communism. (Given the time and the place, one need not even pause a moment to guess which side Lutes comes down on. This is unfortunate, though – and more so the more a reader knows about history – since we all know the fascists will win, and that things aren’t going to get better for a long time. And even if the Communists flee to the Soviet Union, they won’t escape the Nazis that way – much less escape oppression, war, and mass death.) The characters are mostly at the lower end of middle-class, if not outright poor, with some secondary characters higher up the income ladder, and they also tend to be outcasts and bohemians of one sort or another: musicians, reporters, artists, lesbians, Jews, tramps, black Americans. Again, one notes that these are all people who will not fare well under Nazi rule.

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Review: ‘Popeye the Sailor Volume Three’

Review: ‘Popeye the Sailor Volume Three’

By 1935, [[[Popeye the Sailor Man] was considered more popular than Mickey Mouse and his animated exploits thrilled theater goers year after year as the Fleischer Studios continued to churn them out almost monthly. When they began running on television, the animated exploits delighted a new generation of viewers and keeping the character viable long after his comic strip passed its peak.

Warner Home Video finally cleared all the legal problems and began to restore and collect these classic cartoons on DVD.  The first volume, four discs and 60 episodes, came out to great acclaim in 2007.  A second two-disc set came out earlier this year and on Tuesday, the third volume will be released.  On this set, another 32 cartoons are collected, covering 1941-1943.

By this time, there was evolution to characters and the content.  First, in May 1941, Paramount bought out the Fleischers and by year’s end fired the feuding brothers and changed the name of the outfit to Famous Studios. Along the way Popeye was softened and made less ugly and more adorable.  His dark sailor suit was also traded in for Navy whites as he enlisted when America entered World War II (an outfit he’d wear through the 1960s).  As a result, much of the content has patriotic themes and imagery.  Interestingly, we often saw the Sailor Man confounded by the complexity of modern warships leading to much fish out of water humor. There’s one, “Many Tanks” where Bluto is seen in the Army, swapping uniforms with Popeye so he can date Olive, leaving a confused Popeye manning a tank. Being the war, of course, the depiction of the Japanese opponents are stereotypical and offensive to today’s eyes but a product of their times.

In the end, though, Popeye always comes out on top and is recognized for his heroism.

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Horror Review: [[[Last House in the Woods]]]

Last House BoxSynopsis:

All Aura and Rino wanted was to find a secluded place where they could make love in nature, but the appearance of three sadistic bullies soon sends a romantic evening alone careening into violence. In the ensuing struggle, the couple is tortured nearly to death. Mercifully, the couple is rescued by tough-talking Clara and pistol-packing Antonio. After chasing the attackers away, Clara and Antonio offer to take Rino and Aurora to their remote cabin in order to recover, an offer which the frightened youngsters appreciatively accept. Upon arriving at the isolated abode, however, Rino and Aurora quickly realize that their troubles may have just begun.

Lowdown:

Those who enjoy any type of horror flick that would normally read on a marquee “GORE FEST” will enjoy this picture. Almost derived from a [[[Texas Chainsaw Massacre]]] script, there is plenty of dismemberment, gore, and even some intense makeup throughout the film which will make you cringe-o-plenty. The title, which isn’t the original–but changed when released for the US–wants you to compare this to Wes Craven’s [[[Last House on the Left]]], and while there are a few similar elements, this needs to be taken as a seperate, gory slasher film.

The family in question might as well be related to the [[[Addams Family]]] with a Morticia lookalike and a group of deformed brothers that would scare off the cast of any Rob Zombie Flick. The most interesting thing about the film and all of it’s American Horror influences is that the film isn’t American at all, and comes from Italy. This is another case where you will have to do some reading and watch the film in Italian while reading the subtitles, as the America dubbing is pretty awful. I do issue a warning though: the subtitlers become a bit lazy in the last 30 minutes of the film, with spelling and grammar errors galore, so watch out.

The special effects and make up are pretty much what drive this gritty, low-budget film. Some great bleeding limbs after a dismemberment-by-chainsaw and nice, clear shots of stabbing and gunshot wounds. There as surely no shortage of prosthetic skin and corn syrup on this set. Another nice-but-random set of effects was the makeup on the two hillbilly brothers. One has a baseball sized goiter on his neck while the other has half of his face burnt off. Both of these were done pretty well and will make you squirm for their remainder on screen. The cannibalistic child, who was supposed to have these incredibly sharp teeth, ended up just having misshapen baby teeth, which may have still been off-putting, definitely wasn’t scary.

The story isn’t bad up until the last act, in which things become a bit foggy and confusing. There is yet another attempt at a twist ending, but it gets lost in the fray with the tremendous bodycount that accumulates by act three. The final twist, which is really supposed to irk the audience, is a child with prosthetic stumps for limbs, but it is pretty easy to see through the trick, and only looks like a bad Halloween costume. Overall, it may be worth a watch, but if you’re weak at heart, I wouldn’t recommend the film.

Overall Rating: 5/10

Scare Factor: 4/5

Horror Review: ‘Brotherhood of Blood’

brotherhood boxSynopsis:

In this claustrophobic thriller, a team of vampire hunters who must infiltrate a nest of the undead to save one of their own. A beautiful vampire slayer is held prisoner by a powerful, blood-drinking king who is preparing to do battle with a force that sends even the children of the night scurrying into the shadows.

Lowdown:

Much of modern cinema was built on awful horror films of yesterday, from Ed Wood to Roger Corman and even to an extent John Carpenter, so it’s almost reassuring when you hear about a box set of direct-to-dvd horror films, and a film like [[[Brotherhood of Blood]]] is included. The film couldn’t have cost more than $50,000, and most of that had to go to the “big” names attached like Sid Haig, Ken Foree, and even TV’s Victoria Pratt. The film isn’t exactly cinematic art in any way, but still fills the quota for “bad horror films”.

The premise is pretty hard to follow, seeing as how from before the opening titles to the end of the film, there are randomly placed flashbacks to the previous 48 hours. Of course, because of the bar that has been raised by the genre today, there is a twist at the end of the film, which in this case was pretty predictable. No killing or gore was shown on-screen and done with a cut and corn syrup thrown on a wall, which is fine considering the quality.

The acting would be fine if it weren’t for the only two decent genre actors attempting to spit out their lines through the prosthetic vampire teeth. Foree and Haig both sound like they are doing a bad Nixon impression, and come across as cartoony when trying to be haunting and intimidating. The angrier they got, the funnier they became, much like a drunk baby. The dialogue is pretty bad as well, which would be, given that this isn’t [[[Gone with the Wind]]], but even still, it’s almost impossible to sit through.

In an interview done with Rob Tapert, he explained that though the box set is being slated as “hand picked by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert”, there were a few exceptions. It’s almost definite that this was a pick by the pair. Not only does the film give off the same feel as Evil Dead in it’s campiness, but it stars Cleopatra 2525’s Victoria Pratt. A show that was the brainchild of both Raimi and Tapert. Sadly, Pratt attempts to bring her tough-chick persona to the film, but it fails somewhere in the middle, and leaves her confusing and whiney.

The film comes through as a campy, low-budget, vampire flick, and should really be taken as such. Foree and Haig may come together for the first time in years, but they get no screen time together, and as mentioned, it’s pretty hard to understand them when they are drooling through fake fangs. There is bad acting, poor special effects, a convoluted plot, and an even more confusing twist ending. On their own each of those sound pretty awful, but together they make up just about any horror film released in theaters in the past few years, and should be treated as such.

Overall Rating: 3/10

Scare Factor: 0/5

Review: ‘The Night of Your Life’ by Jessie Reklaw

Review: ‘The Night of Your Life’ by Jessie Reklaw

The Night of Your Life
By Jessie Reklaw
Dark Horse, September 2008, $15.95

For the last thirteen years, Jessie Reklaw has been turning dreams – mostly those of strangers – into comics, on his website and in a growing number of alternative weeklies nationwide. (Not to derail my own train of thought, but are there any non-alternative weeklies, to which those “alternative weeklies” are the actual alternative?)

Each comic is a four panel grid, two over two: distilling a dream to its essential elements and telling however much of a story there is to tell. The stories are all bizarre and strange – they’re all dreams, after all – but, boiled down to four panels, they also have a lot of similarities. There’s a reason people call it “dream logic;” that’s the way the human mind organizes itself, so the same kind of transitions and imagery come up in many different people’s dreams.

[[[The Night of Your Life]]] collects about two hundred and forty of those “[[[Slow Wave]]]” strips, in black and white. The strips are printed one to the page – large enough to be clear and readable, but only slightly larger than on the web, so they don’t look blown up in the book. The strips are divided into ten parts, each part named for the first line of text in the first cartoon in that part…but the strips don’t otherwise seem to be organized. It’s clearly not by theme or imagery, and the strips aren’t dated, so there’s no way to tell if they’re in chronological order.

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