Movie Review: HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)

Once upon a time as a child, I wanted to work in movie special effects and at some point read about the special effects for Howard the Duck. I definitely remember a picture of one of the evil aliens, although I don't recall how exactly it was made. Although I have listened to a podcast about the film (possibly the How Did This Get Made episode), I never actually got around to seeing it.

Well, thanks to Myopia Movies, I finally did. Here's the episode. And now for the review...

The Plot

Howard (Ed Gale in the suit, Chip Zien as the voice) is an anthropomorphic duck hailing from Duckworld, a planet where creatures like him are the dominant species rather than humans. After a long day at work, Howard comes home to smoke cigars, watch TV, and read Playduck (yes, really), only to be transported to Earth by scientific accident. He soon rescues small-time rocker Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson) from punks and she introduces him to her annoying scientist friend Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins), who tries to figure out what Howard is and where he came from. Howard tries to make his way in this strange new world, including getting a job, but the experiment overseen by Dr. Walter Jennings (Jeffrey Jones) that brought Howard to Earth soon brings something else as well...

The Good

*The movie is really funny. Not only is there a lot of goofy and slapstick humor, but there're also some more thoughtful jokes, including a sequence where Howard attempts to find a job at the local unemployment office. I laughed out loud several times--I'm really glad I didn't get this movie off Amazon for the Kindle to watch at the gym. Might disturb the others.

(Even though Howard is now a Disney property, you can watch it for free on NBC's Peacock TV streaming service. For now.)

*Gene Siskel's negative review from when the film was released said that Howard wasn't a likeable character, but in-universe it does make sense. He's the only one of his species on Earth, he's a prey animal on top of that (apparently he arrived in Cleveland right before duck-hunting season), people treat him like a pet, a child, and in one memorable scene, a meal, and he's worried he'll never make it home. He's frustrated and lashes out at people, including those who are trying to help him. And that's on top of some of his personal drama from back in Duckworld--he wanted to be a musician but chose to enter medical school to please his parents, only to fail out. The opening also hints at romantic troubles as well.

*The acting is generally good. I particularly found Thompson amusing as Beverly and Robbins amusing, albeit less so, as Phil. Jones, meanwhile, spends much of the movie possessed by an evil alien. If that's really him speaking with the Evil Voice (Brian Steele is listed as the uncredited voice of "The Dark Overlords of The Universe" so it's possible they dubbed him in), props to him for his vocals.

*I did like the soundtrack as well. Also, Thompson did sing as well as act, which is another point to her.

The Bad

*The movie could stand to be tightened up a bit. There's a chase scene that takes way too long even if it does provide some of the aforementioned laugh-out-loud moments.

*Was this movie marketed toward kids or adults? If it was marketed toward kids, no wonder it bombed at the box office. This movie is not for children, at all. That's not a bad thing (nobody thinks Saving Private Ryan is intended for children), but it is something to keep in mind.

*Per my above comment, although Howard being cranky and obnoxious makes sense for the character, he is kind of a jackass early on.

*Although you do eventually get used to it, upon first seeing Howard he's rather off-putting. I wouldn't go so far as to call it Uncanny Valley, but he does look quite weird. Per Wikipedia the original plan was to make him computer-animated but the technology at the time wasn't up to it. Hopefully if they ever remake it, we're looking at something more akin to Avatar.

*There's this elaborate voice-over that starts the film that claims what's real in one world is fantasy in another. So basically Howard is real on his planet, but he's a comic-book character in ours. That's kind of lame. It's also never followed up on--what if Howard were accosted by a crazed fan who knows he's not a man in a costume? You could get really meta.

*Some of the duck puns are really bad--not funny-bad, but just stupid. And if I think a pun isn't funny, you know it's bad.

*The villainous aliens from the climax have not aged well in terms of effects quality.

The Verdict

Worth seeing at least once. I might actually buy it. 8.0 out of 10. Generally speaking remakes should be reserved for good concepts that were executed poorly (or at least not as well as they could have been), so Disney should definitely come up with an MCU version. Thompson has already volunteered to direct, so maybe they should give her a shot. Like the article suggested, her daughter Zoey Deutch could play Beverly in this version too. That'd be hilarious, since they have worked together before and especially considering Thompson said her daughters refused to finish the movie after a...romantic interlude...involving their mother and an alien duck.

Movie Review: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017)

While I was at Videodrome renting a copy of The Abyss for a future Myopia Movies podcast episode, I saw a copy of the film Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets, which I thought about seeing in theaters back in 2017, dawdled, and ended up missing. Like my father says, if you wait long enough, "I don't know," becomes "no." I eventually got around to renting the film, and now it's time to review it.

The Plot

In the distant future, humanity is one of a vast number alien species coexisting throughout the galaxy and what was once the International Space Station has grown into a galaxy-traveling city of millions. It's also the base of operations for an interstellar police force, two agents of which are Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne). Although they both clearly have romantic feelings for each other, she isn't content to be one of his many sexual conquests and he's commitment-phobic.

Into this drops a mission to retrieve a rare "Mul Converter" from a gang of black marketeers. The two officers stumble into a conspiracy involving a planet officially erased from the records and a high-level military cover-up.

The Good

*The acting and characterization are very good. I really liked DeHaan and Delevingne playing their characters as essentially Harry Potter's Ron and Hermione, if Ron were James Bond in terms of martial capability and libido and Hermione were much more sarcastic and rebellious and had a shorter temper and more explicitly traditional views about sex and family. The two have really good chemistry and are fun to watch.

*Writer and director Luc Besson, the mastermind behind The Fifth Element, is clearly having a blast adapting one of his favorite comics to the screen. It's clearly a labor of love and very well-done. This shows in the casting--Besson put in the effort to cast well-known performers like Clive Owen and Rihanna and the costuming, art, etc. are all awesome. Owing to the obscurity of its source material, it's a hell of a lot more interesting than the endless remakes and sequels of more well-known films that dominate today's market.

*The overall plot is a lot more thoughtful than a lot of sci-fi films.

*There are some good uses of "show, don't tell," like a scene early on when Laureline uses the ship's computers to make a point about Valerian's love life.

*There are a lot of fun action sequences.

*The opening montage in which the International Space Station grows to include more and more Earth nations as well as increasing numbers of alien species to the point it becomes a city in space is very well-done, and even includes some cool science bits like how artificial gravity is introduced.

*Although this is hundreds of years in the future, religion--touched on however briefly when Valerian and Laureline are about to go on a mission and during a conspiracy flashback--is something that still exists and is respected, even by a lothario like Valerian. Valerian's offer to find a priest specifically is also a nice tie-in with Laureline from the comics--she was a medieval French peasant who was brought into the future and thus likely to be an actual Catholic.

The Bad

*The movie is about thirty minutes too long. This wouldn't be a problem if an entire subplot involving Laureline getting kidnapped--something that shouldn't be possible if her armor and martial skill are half that of Valerian's--got cut down or excised completely. Seriously, it basically came off as an excuse to have a Rihanna dance number, plus it also relies on a section of the titular space station essentially being off-limits to federal law enforcement agents. That makes no sense.

*There's a sequence at the end where a character introduces some elements that would make the overall situation much more morally gray, but it isn't handled well. And Valerian and Laureline make some ludicrous deductive leaps to figure out parts of it. More details about the war we see before we meet Valerian and Laureline would have been nice, as it would explain a villain's actions.

*There are some Chekov's guns that are put on the mantle but not fired. Valerian's promiscuity could have caused problems during the main plot--perhaps he's betrayed by a bitter ex-lover--but it doesn't really come up.

*There's also a major suspension-of-disbelief problem with a group of aliens who play a key role in the climax of the film.

*Early on some people our heroes are supposed to be close to get killed, but they don't seem to care.

The Verdict

It's definitely good and I hope that Besson eventually gets his way and produces a sequel, but it's got some flaws. Worth a rental, or buying cheap. 7.5 out of 10.

Myopia Movies: Ranking the ALIENS Film (Except for The AVPs)

For those of you not in the know, I'm a regular participant in the film podcast Myopia Movies (formerly Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, but we haven't done the "defense" part in a long time) and we have a Patreon page. We did a Patreon-only series devoted to the Alien franchise, culminating in the most recent film Alien Covenant. At the end of the episode, podcast host Nic asked us to rank the films in the order we most enjoyed. I was first to go, but I was also very tired and might not have been at my most coherent, especially compared to the other three gentlemen.

(The Alien vs. Predator films have been left out because we haven't done the second yet, and the episode on Predator 2 hasn't been released yet. These are the Patreon-only films.)

So here are mine:

1. Alien-Very well-done, very atmospheric. And since the cast is so small, we can get to know them better and care more about them.

2. Aliens-Although I was visiting friends in D.C. when this episode was recorded, I remembered a lot of well-done bits from when I did see it, like Ripley's power-loader battle with the xenomorph queen, the last stand of Vazquez and Gorman, and the overall coolness of the concept. And it elaborates a lot on the xenomorph biology too, like introducing the entire concept of the queen in the first place.

3. Alien Resurrection-I found this a lot more entertaining than Alien 3, or at least the theatrical cut we saw. I also liked a lot of the concepts, like the android Annalee Call being a devout Catholic, the implied holocaust of the sapient androids, and the hilarious and super-creepy station doctor. It's also a lot more genuinely fun despite quite a number of areas it could have done better. If you sign up for the Patreon, you can read a "how I would have done it" newsletter article I wrote. :)

4. Alien 3-A ponderous boring mess that starts out by giving the audience the middle finger and killing off Hicks and Newt, the other two survivors of the first film. It's like they wanted to return to the form of the original film (no guns, one alien, confined location) but did it in a very ham-handed way. Combine it with the first Alien vs. Predator film (which I will still insist is canon) and you get into the conundrum of just whom the Bishop android model is based on. And while the earlier films used practical effects, this is where the bad CGI gets introduced into the franchise.

5. Prometheus-I'll give this movie credit for the the seriously squick-inducing "alien c-section" scene. There's not a lot in monster movies that can rattle me, but that did it. However, it suffers from idiot-character syndrome to a degree exceeded only by the next film Covenant. It also gets into "ancient aliens" theories that I have problems with on a philosophical level. To be fair, I wasn't there for this episode and the last time I saw this it was in theaters, so I might not be remembering it properly.

6. Alien Covenant-The only way the movie can be described as "character-driven" is if you focus on how absolutely moronic the characters act. Captain Chris Oram is a particularly extreme example--they visit the new planet rather than finishing repairs and continuing on their journey to the planet they'd prepared beforehand to colonize because he doesn't have the backbone to order the crew to return to their potentially-malfunctioning stasis pods. Once there, he becomes entranced with the new planet and thinks it's a perfect alternative colony than the planet they're going to even though that seems like something that would need approval from higher up. And even after killing a xenomorph the sociopathic android David was trying to tame, he trusts David even in circumstances where the most hopeful and naive person should be screaming "NO!" And although the idea of having the crew consist of seven married couples to preserve harmony on the ship during a long journey seems like a good idea, we see the dangers of that up close--characters endanger the mission by taking stupid risks to protect their spouses and the death of crew members cause disproportionate problems for that reason. Not to mention it's my recollection David was literally dismembered in Prometheus--even if he was able to help teach Dr. Shaw how to rebuild him, he's not going to be at 100% function.

(It would have been interesting if, having spent ten years with only the talking severed head of David for company, the villain was a deranged Dr. Shaw instead. She could carry his head around like Jason carries the head of Freddy at the end of Freddy vs. Jason.)

Furthermore, the cast is too large for the film to develop significantly and the movie butchers the lore by depicting David as having created the xenormorphs within ten years of the prior film, even though there are ancient murals in Prometheus depicting xenomorphs. Furthermore, the Engineer ship Ripley and friends find in Alien is itself quite old, has thousands of new-style xenomorph eggs rather than the few David managed to create, and was captained by an Engineer. As somebody (I think it was Nic) pointed out in the podcast, if they make a third film, they're going to have to get very creative to avoid it contradicting Alien.

So those are my thoughts on which of the Alien films are the best. If you want to listen to the podcast episodes and see the "How I Would Have Done It" article for Alien Resurrection, sign up for the Myopia Patreon. The AR analysis is in the newsletter that went out on May 4, 2020.

THE ATLANTA INCURSION Cover Art Phase #1 and Phase #2

Although my first novel The Thing in the Woods stands on its own, most of my ideas for standalone stories tend to sprout sequels. Thing is no different. I've been working on its sequel, The Atlanta Incursion, for several years now and I intend to independently publish it in the next few weeks. The complicating factors are that I'm independently republishing Thing due to changes at the publisher and waiting for the cover art to be done so I can have a full cover designed. Only after that can the print and e-book be created.

In the meantime, here's the first phase of the cover by Matthew Cowdery:

And here's the second:

I sent him some clarifications about what the Grays' eyes, guns, stargate, and other technologies should look like and he's working on them now. If you want an idea of what the finished cover will look like, here's some previous work he's done for me:

Battle for the Wastelands

"Son of Grendel" (forthcoming)

Second full novel (tentative title "Serpent Sword")

Fan Novelizations of STAR CONTROL II Online

Back when I was a wee lad, my parents bought a personal computer that ran Windows 3.1 and one of the early games I had was Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. The game had a more explicitly "fun" starship-combat simulator I remember playing with my cousins and a prolonged story-based game that I never actually finished--I just kind of wandered around in the spaceship harvesting minerals from planets to buy ships and occasionally fighting the bad aliens. Eventually, as what often happens with childhood toys, I lost interest and the original disks, if they're even still around, are buried in my parents' house somewhere.

(I eventually learned how the game ended sometime in college or post-college. I won't bore you with the details, but there is an actual storyline and sequence of events.)

Well over the last couple days I got curious about good old Star Control and did some digging online. There's actually a dedicated Wiki for Star Control and quite a bit on the almighty TVTropes. It turns out that there's actually a novelization of the game's storyline written by uber-fan Tommi Salminen. Two 400-page novels, one covering the beginning of the game where you arrive at Earth and find it under an Ur-Quan slave shield and the other covering the later part of the story, once alliances with different alien races have been made and the truth about the Ur-Quan's motivations is revealed.

Here's the first one, Groombridge Log. The second one is Eternal Doctrine. Although I'd have preferred more description of the technology, characters, etc.--that's a problem with fan-fiction, the writer assumes everybody knows what everything looks like--they're still pretty entertaining.

Enjoy!

Movie Review: Beyond Skyline (2017)

Once upon a time, I saw the 2010 science fiction movie Skyline and was probably one of the few people to enjoy it. I liked the design of the aliens, the use of nuclear weapons immediately and their more realistic effects (it's not immediate death to absolutely everything and against something as big as an alien mothership with regenerative capabilities it might not even fully work), and the unorthodox ending.

So when the sequel Beyond Skyline came out, I was willing to see it, although other things took priority and I didn't get around to seeing it until Christmas break. So here's the review...

The Plot

Police officer Mark Corley (Frank Grillo), having just lost his wife, is retrieving his troubled son Trent (Jonny Weston) from jail apparently for the third time when the alien invasion from the first film starts. Avoiding immediate abduction due to being in the subway when the harvesting starts, he and some other characters like the homeless blind veteran Sarge (Antonio Fargas) and transit worker Audrey (Bojana Novakovic) soon find themselves collected by the aliens as well. They avoid having their brains harvested to power the aliens' bio-machines and after meeting Elaine (Samantha Jean) and the alien-ized Jarrod (Tony Black) from the first movie, escape to Laos when the alien ship they're on crashes.

Now they have to team up with some martial-artist Golden Triangle drug traffickers to fight the remaining aliens from the fallen craft. Said aliens are after Elaine's baby, who might not be fully human...

The Good

*For all its foolishness--I'll get to that later--it's a very fast-moving, entertaining film. I watched this on Netflix on my Kindle in three elliptical sessions at the gym and it kept me nice and focused.

*We once again see human counterattack in Los Angeles from the first movie, including a grounds-eye view of "the little UCAV that could" (there was a funny meme about that I'd link to if I could find it) that nukes an alien mothership and temporarily grounds it. They even throw in a bit of nuclear strategy--the homeless veteran Sarge, despite being mostly if not completely blind, knows that it's a short-ranged, low-yield nuke. A military commander seeking to destroy armored alien ships the size of the Astrodome without killing the hundreds of thousand of human survivors in the immediate vicinity would start with small tactical nukes and only break out the city-killers if the city and its population was irretrievably lost and there was no other way to protect the rest of the country.

*When the Los Angeles characters meet the Southeast Asian ones and hide out in what I'm pretty sure is Angkor Wat, I liked how the Laotians describe how the temples that were once built to honor the gods are now bases to fight them. Good line. I also liked how (I assume) the children of the Vietnam War generation, when the Americans claimed they're in the middle of the apocalypse, viewed the aliens as just another "apocalypse" they could survive. The various wars in Southeast Asia, if you include WWII, lasted from 1941 to 1990 and killed millions of people. An alien invasion, at least at first, might seem like more of the same.

*There are martial-arts battles between the Asian characters (and some of the American characters who have police experience or simply use handguns) and alien infantry that, despite the ridiculousness of the whole situation (the alien infantry are armored, at least 1-2 feet taller, and at least 50-100 pounds heavier), are still quite entertaining to watch. And occasionally pretty funny.

The Bad

*During the early sequences in Los Angeles it was hard to keep track of some of the lesser characters' names.

*Too much reuse of clips from the original film. It was difficult to tell when they were doing it for the nuclear-attack sequence, but it was obvious when Elaine was talking to Mark about how Jarrod was able to retain his own personality (despite being transplanted into an alien body) due to repeated non-terminal exposure to the alien hypnosis.

*The childbirth sequence is rather poorly done and entirely too short. They could have prolonged it to build suspense--perhaps alien-Jarrod is fighting off other creatures to keep them off Elaine--but it's completed in-universe in maybe five minutes and Elaine somehow has her pants on the entire time.

*The alien attack on Hawaii is a major a missed opportunity. If Hawaii was bypassed during the initial invasion, that leaves the US navy base at Pearl Harbor untouched. That's a crapton of navy ships with long-range missiles (the submarines and cruisers/destroyers all carry substantial cruise missile complements and the subs can launch cruise missiles from underwater) that could engage the aliens from beyond visual range (i.e. their crews can't be hypnotized). The military brass in Hawaii has no doubt been sitting out there getting reports from the mainland about the aliens' strengths, weaknesses, and what isn't working and planning accordingly. Instead, all we see are some of the big warrior-aliens landing at Honolulu Airport and smashing up some buildings before the alien ship moves off toward Asia. If depicting the battle is too expensive, they could just depict the Los Angeles ship arriving to clean up afterward--lots of sunken Navy ships, sailors getting sucked up from the water, some of the alien ships damaged and repairing themselves from local materials, etc. The Los Angeles ship could simply supply some extra warrior-critters to help mop up the area around the base and then move on.

(Somebody write a fan-fic called "The Second Battle of Pearl Harbor," since I don't have time. There's so little Skyline fan-fic out there you'd be a big fish in a small pond.)

*Given Sarge's apparent age, there's a missed opportunity when everybody ends up in Laos. He could easily be a Vietnam vet and could possibly recognize the place from the smells and sounds despite not being able to see. Hell, he could serve as an interpreter between the English-speaking Americans and the Laotians.

*Just how fast is the alien ship moving? It gets from Los Angeles to Hawaii (2,558 miles) in what seems like an hour or two (an airplane flight would take around 5.5 hours) and then travels the 6,500-ish miles from Hawaii to Laos very soon after that. Something that big moving that quickly shows how advanced these aliens are (after all, one of the Los Angeles ships is able to repair itself and fly again after being grounded by a nuclear strike), but it came off to me as the writers not having much of a sense of scale. Especially the latter part. They could have had the damn thing crash in the Philippines, except even that is still over 5,000 miles from Hawaii. The Pacific Ocean is freaking big, people.

*Where are they getting the clothes for the rapidly-growing baby? She gets from a newborn to looking like a preschooler halfway through the film--in-universe that's only in a day or two. Are they stopping by houses along the way to trade clothes?

*And speaking of the baby, she becomes a Macguffin with a bunch of science so weak it would make Star Trek blush.

*There's a big time skip at the end and events taking place after said time skip that don't make a lot of sense.

*There's a weird flashback/flash-forward thing that doesn't really work that ties in with the above.

The Verdict

An improvement over the original if you don't think too hard. Will see the upcoming sequel (yes there is one). 7.5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Guyver 2: Dark Hero (1994)

Although the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood did an episode on the film The Guyver on my suggestion, it didn't seem like there was much of an interest from anybody in doing an episode on the sequel Guyver: Dark Hero. Given the film's iffy quality, I can't exactly blame them. Since movies and e-books are very helpful in getting me through otherwise-dull elliptical sessions, I snagged this one off Amazon Prime for a pre-Thanksgiving workout and off we went...

The Plot

It's been a year since Sean Barker (David Hayter) bonded with the Guyver, a suit of biomechanical armor of alien origin. With the evil Kronos Corporation and its alien Zoanoid warriors defeated, the armor's urge to battle evil prompts Sean to fight (and oftentimes kill) drug dealers and other criminals. This alienates him from his girlfriend Mizki (Billi Lee) from the first film, who thinks he's going insane and has no time for his "I don't kill, it kills" excuses. Plagued by strange dreams and seeing news on television of "a werewolf attack," Sean sets off for an archaeological dig in Utah overseen by Cori Edwards (Kathy Christopherson) and her father Dr. Marcus Edwards (Stuart Weiss), a pair of renegade scientists investigating things like Bigfoot, crop circles, etc.

Unfortunately, the Kronos Corporation turns out to be involved, as are a bunch of even more skilled and dangerous Zoanoids. Sean is in for the fight of his life...

The Good

*It's a fast-moving and entertaining film--most of the time.

*The script and the dialogue, although they have their issues, represent a significant improvement over the ponderous original. Watching clips of the original on YouTube (they've taken down the full movie since we watched it for Myopia, it seems), it's clear just how clunky the original was and how improved this one is.

*The opening narration is a vast improvement over the original, which had a laughably obnoxious combination of a Star Wars opening crawl ripoff and a ponderous voice-over. Instead we get a quick introduction complete with the image of the Guyver unit flashing and doing its thing and then we cut to a bunch of drug smugglers murdering a security guard.

*Replacing Jack Armstrong with David Hayter in the role of Sean is a vast improvement given how poor Armstrong's acting was in the original film. Even though Mizki is absent for most of the film, Billi Lee is an improvement on Vivian Wu. No unintentional hilarity, hard-to-understand accents, and overdramatic silliness from these two.

*Cori is a much stronger and more driven character than the passive Mizki.

*The fight choreography has improved quite a bit over the original film. In-universe I suppose it's because Sean has had more time to train in martial arts and learn about his armor and these Zoanoids aren't just Kronos's hired gang-banger muscle, but regardless it's much less silly to watch.

*We finally figure out just what Kronos's master plan is besides "conduct grossly unethical medical experiments to turn people into shape-shifting monsters."

The Bad

*There were several parts of the movie, particularly those taking place at night or in the cave system where the archaeological stuff was taking place, that were difficult to see. This might've been because I was watching it on my Kindle at my not-as-well-lit apartment gym (the LA Fitness didn't have that problem), but I don't think I've had that problem before. Something to keep in mind.

*Toward the end of the film there are some parts where it dragged.

*Given all the crap Sean and Mizki went through together in the first film and how they're still together a year afterward despite her knowledge of what Sean does with the armor, I would have liked more acknowledgement of their relationship. Instead Sean moves onto a new love interest relatively quickly--the film seems to take place over the course of only a few days, meaning that he and Mizki broke up at most a week before. It would have been much more interesting if he'd written her a letter or called her from the archaeological site indicating that he had found Zoanoids and she followed him there, with the Kronos Corporation taking note that she's the daughter of the traitor Dr. Segawa. Given the need to keep the run-time concise, throwing in a full-on love triangle might not fly, but Sean just forgets her too quickly.

*Speaking of Sean, in the first half or so of the movie he's really self-absorbed and aggravating. Somebody really needs to read How To Win Friends and Influence People and commit it to memory.

*Given how the Zoanoid Striker (Jimmie Walker) from the first movie survived and is implied to have defected to the CIA, it would have been amusing to see him again. Although he was easily the weakest of the Kronos Corporation's minions and didn't seem overly dedicated to the cause ("JUST DOING MY JOB!"), he did rough up Mizki and I imagine Sean would not be pleased to see him again. Furthermore, given his outlandishly stereotypical antics in the first film, perhaps fellow African-American Atkins (Christopher Michael) finds him embarrassing and has forced him to get his 'hood tendencies under control, including no longer letting him speak entirely in rap.

(I'm now imagining a scene where Atkins unleashes Striker against Kronos's Zoanoids and he relapses into his ghetto persona in front of Sean. An embarrassed Atkins has to chew him out.)

*The opening credits after the battle with the drug dealers are way too long.

*There are some unintentionally hilarious slow-mo scenes and scenes where Barker is trying to yell. Although Hayter is an improvement over Armstrong, he still has his Narm-ish moments.

The Verdict

An improvement over the original, but still not exactly great cinema. Worth renting or streaming, but not really worth buying. 7.0 out of 10.

Three of My Digital Fiction Publishing Short Stories Are Now "Wide"

Once upon a time, I independently published a bunch of short stories on Amazon.com for the Kindle. Digital Fiction Publishing took a liking to many of them and bought the rights to re-publish them as standalone stories and in collections for a generous royalty package. However, since the short stories are often available elsewhere as part of collections, they and the DFP collections are not part of Kindle Unlimited. This means they can be published anywhere.

After checking with the publisher to make sure he had no plans to publish the stories outside of Amazon (having "his version" and "my version" of the stories on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, etc would just be silly), I have published several of my DFP stories "wide" beyond Amazon's borders. They come with their original cover art courtesy of Alex Claw, using the mighty Draft2Digital.

"The Beast of the Bosporus"-This is cosmic horror in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft, but instead of being set in rural New England (as his stories typically were) or in rural Georgia (as my novel The Thing in the Woods is), this is set in the early modern Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans have rebuilt their navy after the defeat at the (Battle of Lepanto), but the empire's decline is already beginning. What is Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha to do? It might involve a creepy book bound in human skin. Non-Amazon links here.

"Beast" also had some tie-in short fiction on the blog to go with it. One piece is a faux historical journal article about Sokollu's death that also ties in some incidents in real-history that might be explained by what happens in the story itself. I also have journalistic interviews with Sokollu himself, as well as his rival don Joseph Nasi.

Picking Up Plans in Palma-This is an alternate history novelette set in my Afrikanerverse, in which an earlier Dutch settlement of the Cape of Good Hope leads to a world where the United States and the League of Democracies face off against the apartheid-like Afrikaner Confederation and its illiberal allies. You can see the mostly-completed timeline here. Connor Kelly, an American defense analyst of Irish Catholic background, has to infiltrate the Confederation to retrieve plans for an orbital battle-station. Problem: He has only the most minimal training in espionage fieldcraft and he's romantically involved with an Afrikaner emigre. This is going to be fun. Non-Amazon links here.

Illegal Alien-This is a story about a group of Mexicans trying to sneak into the United States in search of better lives, only to encounter actual extraterrestrials instead. What can I say? I really, really like bad puns. :) Non-Amazon links here.

This story also has some short tie-in fiction. One is a faux report on the aftermath of the incident from a government agency of some sort, while the other is an interview with Patrido Guzman, the story's protagonist. The latter gets into what's going on in Mexico that pushes Guzman to try to emigrate to the United States--NAFTA, the Mexican drug war, mistreatment of women in factories, etc.

Two of my remaining DFP short stories--"Lord of the Dolorous Tower" and "Lord Giovanni's Daughter"--aren't wide yet because they were first-rights purchases and don't have cover art. I'll need to commission some if I want to release them wide as well. The same applies to "Coil Gun," the first story DFP purchased for Digital Science Fiction #3: Pressure Suite, since it was never released as a standalone either. I'll let you know.

My 2019 Hypericon Schedule

Ever since my debut Lovecraftian horror novel The Thing in the Woods premiered in 2017, I've been selling books (both Thing and the collection The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Vol. 2, in which I have a short story) at conventions in the Atlanta area. I feared I've been reaching the point of diminishing returns and so I started looking for conventions or events outside of Atlanta I could sell at until I've got more books available. Thanks to the Southern Fandom Resource Guide's calendar I found Hypericon, which is usually in Nashville but this year is in Murfreesboro. I've never done any authorial business in Tennessee, so this will hopefully be lucrative.

Here's my schedule for the convention, which will be July 5-7 this year. All events are in Central Time and will take place at the Clarion Inn in Murfreesboro.

Friday, 7 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "In The Cauldron Boil and Bake." This is a panel dedicated to mixing genres. Think The X-Files, in which we had a wider science fiction plot involving alien colonization mixed in with "monster of the week" horror plots, more conventional crimes, and fantasy plots like the episode involving voodoo to raise the dead and another one featuring the ghost of a charismatic preacher who set out to forgive the man who murdered him. On my end, although The Thing in the Woods is straight-up monster horror, I drop some hints about the creature's otherworldly origins in a scene from the creature's point of view. The sequel I've sent to the publisher (and will self-publish if he doesn't want it) gets into the Grey/UFO/MJ-12 mythology and the third novel I've just started writing is more "small town creature horror," only with an old-school nuclear-test monster instead of something from another world. We'll get back to the alien-invasion stuff in the planned fourth book.

Friday, 8 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "My History With Horror." This is an autobiographical one-man show in which I discuss my own history with the scary stuff. It goes waaay back, beginning with watching Earth vs. the Spider on TV in pre-school, not being allowed to see Gremlins 2 and Arachnophobia in theaters (probably a good idea on my parents' part), seeing Jurassic Park when it first came out, and those elementary school staples, the Crestwood Monsters books and Calvin and Hobbes. I'll also discuss my first attempts at publication in high school, my first sale (the short but gruesome "I am the Wendigo"), and ultimately Thing itself.

Saturday, 1 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "Building a Better Beast: Monsters and Other Things That Go Bump in the Night." Something I've realized recently with the rise of "torture porn" is that I don't necessarily like horror movies per se, but monster movies. "Monster" being defined broadly to include things like dinosaurs, aliens, etc. After all, serial killers and depraved pervert torture types are real and should be feared, but giant bugs, alien energy beings building bodies out of human technology, vampires, formerly human S&M monsters, etc. aren't. I've written a lot of monster stories, so I think I'll fit in nicely here.

Saturday, 5 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "World-Building." This is an area of writing where I'm very good, if I do say so myself. And members of the different writing groups I'v participated in have said the same thing. :)

Saturday, 7 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "Marketing and Social Media For Authors." This is where I can discuss things like blogging, Twitter, newsletters, etc. This is an area where I need to improve, so hopefully I'll be able to learn from this panel as well.

I'm also going to be allocated slots at the author table to sell my books. Those haven't been finalized yet, but when they are, I'll update this post with the times. I'll also bring some books with me to each panel for anybody who's interested.