THREE Cool Sci-Fi and Fantasy Movie Trailers For You!

A couple more cool trailers for movies I'd like to see have graced my laptop in recent days.

Here's the first one, the science fiction/alien invasion saga Independence Day: Resurgence. For anybody who hasn't been hiding under a rock for the last twenty years, that's the sequel to Independence Day.



Looks pretty cool. When I first saw the trailer I was wondering why there was another attack on Earth itself. One would think the aliens would have learned not to descend into a gravity well to battle the natives, while we would want to engage them as far away as possible. I was hoping for human-made City Destroyers to duke it out with alien City Destroyers in deep space.

Well, this website chronicling "The War of 1996" kind of explains that. There are bases on Mars and Saturn's moon Rhea, so either the alien attackers bypassed them (not hard given how planets orbit) or blasted through them. And now the battle has come to Earth itself, to the older survivors of the war (including a crazy-seeming ex-president) and new heroes...

And here's something that came out Monday, Star Trek Beyond.



If I remember right, the Enterprise leaves on "the five-year mission" to explore uncharted space at the end of Star Trek Into Darkness. So it seems that, not long into the mission, the Enterprise is wrecked by hostile aliens and its crew stranded. Furthermore, they're in the hands of hostile aliens intent on "push[ing] back" against the Federation itself.

I'm wondering how Kirk and friends get out of this pickle. And I also like McCoy's "isn't this just typical" line. :)

Finally, there's this Harry Potter spin-off, the film adaptation of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.



Author J.K. Rowling created a fantasy world that's so huge that there's plenty of room for more stories other than those about Harry and his friends. The fan-fic covering the Marauder Era (when Harry's parents were in school), the next generation, etc. shows that.

But all of that is in Great Britain. Here we get to see what the American wizarding community is like. There's not much here, but it looks nice.

LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) and THE BFG (2016) Trailers

Here are a couple more interesting movie trailers I found in the last couple days.



I first heard of The Legend of Tarzan courtesy of a comment a fellow writer made online. I forgot about it for a bit, then remembered it and hit YouTube to learn more. As far as I know it's been a long time since there's been any live-action Tarzan material--Casper Van Dien was in the box-office bomb Tarzan and the Lost City and there was a live-action WB television series featuring an American teenage heir to a corporate fortune instead of a British nobleman that if I remember correctly got canceled pretty quickly.

Based on the trailer the movie looks really cool. It seems to be set in the colonial era with all the steamships and Maxim guns (and even features the British Punch magazine from that era), but it also has all the unknown-civilizations stuff from an old-school Edgar Rice Burroughs story. Not sure when precisely it's coming out, but it certainly looks fun.

And now for the next one, which I was alerted to the other night by my friend Nick. It's a film adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel The Big Friendly Giant, which I remember reading in the third grade.



I like the trailer's style--they basically introduce the idea of giants and giants abducting people and end with the little girl saying that this is how the story begins. It's a good way of hooking the audience and getting them to want more.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS and X-MEN: APOCALYPSE Trailers

Over the last couple days, I've gotten a couple really nice cinematic bones thrown my way. The trailers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and X-Men: Apocalypse have just been unleashed.

If the Turtles are giving interviews to the media (the whole "we're brothers who hate bullies" thing), I'm guessing the masquerade has been broken. Of course, when it looks like there's a straight-up alien invasion happening in New York, I think people would be a lot more tolerant of "freaks" than they would be before.

And enter Casey Jones. Pretty impressive--able to take down a bunch of Foot guys in seconds and even evade a gigantic mutant. If the movie is anything like canon he and April are going to hook up. I imagine her cameraman and Michelangelo are going to be so disappointed. :)

I also like what they did with the Foot this time around. They basically seem to operate like a Special Forces battalion and even dress the part in the scene where Casey rescues April from a bunch of them. They still kept the Shredder Japanese, although with recasting he's now a skinnier guy with a goatee. Did the mutagen we see him keeping at the end of the first film make that happen? It could be a nice in-universe explanation.

My one quibble is it looks like in the trailer April is taking off her clothes in public for no reason. Given how this movie is being produced by Michael Bay (albeit directed by somebody else I think), I suspect there's his typical silly Fanservice going on. And I say this as a Megan Fox fan.

I enjoyed the first one, much to some of my friends' horror. Hopefully this new one will be fun.

I admit Apocalypse was not one of my favorite villains back when I was an elementary schooler reading the X-Men comics and watching the X-Men animated series. However, this trailer succeeds in making him really cool.

And Jennifer Lawrence is back as Mystique. I liked her better than Rebecca Romjin, who played her in the X-Men films that came out when I was in high school. She's a great actress generally, plus Mystique in X-Men First Class and Days of Future Past is a much more complicated character. And in her speech to Cyclops, we have her going full-blown Katniss Everdeen, which is always cool. We also have Sophie Turner, best known for Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, as the young Jean Grey. Interesting...

Hmm...Magneto as one of Apocalypse's Four Horsemen? Never seen that before. Given how in Days of Future Past we see an elderly Magneto lamenting how stupid he'd been as a young supervillain perhaps it's his alliance with (or subservience to) Apocalypse that's his wakeup call.

And it looks like they're bridging the gap between the 1960s/1970s First Class era and the 2000 films both chronologically (this is the 1980s) and thematically (Xavier losing his hair).

I wonder if they'll bring in, or at least hint at, Mr. Sinister? I remember reading in the Age of Apocalypse comics--in Mr. Sinister's death scene specifically--that he'd made a Faustian bargain with Apocalypse to gain immortality and the freedom to pursue his scientific research.

A Dog Video For You

For those of you among my readers who like dogs, here's a special treat. My parents' Doberman Duke, who is usually hostile toward other dogs, is chasing (in a playful way) the other dog, a little yappy terrier-mutt named Coco, around the yard.

Parental commentary included. Enjoy!

"Everybody Is The Hero of Their Own Story" -- STAR WARS and Writing Villains

On my Twitter feed this morning, I found this article in which Adam Driver and J.J. Abrams discuss the villain Kylo Ren, whom Driver plays in the upcoming science-fiction (science fantasy?) film Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The first article links to this article here in Empire, which goes into more detail. The gist of it is that according to Abrams, both devotees of the Light Side and the Dark Side are the heroes of their own story, while according to Driver, Ren is more a religious zealot who's doing what he thinks is right rather than someone who is truly evil by nature.

(I'm guessing by "evil" he would mean selfish and malicious. Someone can have the best of intentions, can honestly think they're doing the right thing, and still be evil. I was researching an alternate-history project in high school and college and, while reading about the Russian Civil War, learned about Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky. According to future Polish leader Józef Piłsudski, who went to school with him, Dzerzhinsky "did not know how to lie," another source described him as being strict toward himself as well as others, and the quotes I found indicated he was wracked by guilt about the horrors he oversaw as the Bolsheviks' hatchet-man.)

A long time ago I discovered the quote that "everybody is the hero of their own story." I have taken pains to apply the principle when I write villains, and I cited it before in my blog post about Roose Bolton from the fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire and its HBO adaptation A Game of Thrones. Dzerzhinsky thought he was building a utopia and that would justify breaking a few (or many) eggs along the way, while Roose Bolton could justify his treachery against Robb Stark by claiming it in the best interest of the North and the realm as a whole that the Lannisters win as quickly and bloodlessly as possible. The warlord Grendel of my Wastelands series wants safety, security, and power (to better ensure the first two) for his family and friends--which he seeks through imperialism and aggressive warfare. Meanwhile, the cult leader Phil from my Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods wants to protect the town of Edington from corrupting outside influences--which he does by kidnapping people he doesn't like and feeding them to an alien monster.

And now we get back to Star Wars. One of the most interesting blog posts I've ever found was called "The Tao of Sith" and was posted on a blog that's essentially the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi from the point of view of Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith and apprentice to the Emperor Palpatine.

(The post initially went to some "Star Wars Webring" site, but I clicked on it again and it went to the right place, so have faith.)

The gist of it is that Vader believes the Sith were justified in their various misdeeds and creating the Empire because galactic civilization was in danger of collapse. Furthermore, the Jedi were neglecting their responsibilities and denying their emotions in favor of idle contemplation except in a few circumstances ("trivia that offends their effete sensibilities"), despite allegedly knowing that "an age of barbarism" was nigh. The Sith, in contrast, embrace life, embrace emotions, and embrace the actions necessary to save civilization.

(Given how the prequel-era Jedi demanded their adherents forsake emotional attachments, relationships, etc. a lot of Vader's comments ring true.)

Vader as depicted in the blog post is NOT a simple monster using politics as a cover to indulge his appetite for sadism, power and control, etc. My article on how fictional villains should not be sociopaths acknowledges such people exist, but they don't make for interesting bad guys (or girls). So if you're writing a villain, try to see things from their point of view. What is their story, and why are they the hero in it? Not only will you have a much better-developed villain, but you might also have a much varied and "grayer" world if it turns out the villain has some good points.

Netflix Producing a LOST IN SPACE Remake?

I just found out via my Twitter feed that Netflix is putting out a remake of the classic television series Lost in Space. Given how I defended the 1998 movie for the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, this was something of especial interest. Here's the article the original one links to, which has more detail about the project.

As I said in the blog post associated with that episode of the podcast, one thing I liked was that they attempted to use Lost In Space as the basis for a serious, coherent science-fiction story. There's a dark future, the still-ruling West is squabbling with various terrorists and Third World types over what little remains on Earth, and space colonization is the only hope. I posted some ideas about how Lost In Space could have been a much better film (it was incredibly boring, despite the good concept) and most of them could be applied to a television series:

*The film touches on the family drama that a prolonged family space mission would bring--the children who don't want to leave their lives on Earth, the husband and wife separated by too much work, etc. A television series could elaborate on this aspect of the story a lot more.

*Why exactly are they going on this colonization mission? The television series made it seem like this was an ordinary space mission, but the movie raised the stakes by depicting the Robinson family as the key to establishing a hypergate that will transport humanity off the dying Earth.

*The film depicted human political rivalries--the treacherous Dr. Smith is an agent for the terroristic Global Sedition--undermining the space mission, elaborating on the original series. If they retained Dr. Smith's canonical characterization and the Robinson family tolerates him--I suggested he could be a Token Evil Teammate whose skills as a doctor are too important for them to kill him despite his treachery--we could learn more about just who wanted to sabotage the mission and why.

The second article suggests the show will be about a family of explorers trying to stay together in the face of a hostile universe. That gives off Star Trek Voyager vibes to me--although the show had the hostility between the Federation and the Maquis crews stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the main focus was surviving the dangerous, unknown universe. That could be pretty cool too. And if they encounter other humans out there, it won't be something prosaic like some random space cowboy, but something more akin to the film's time-displaced spacecraft or my idea of a group of human rivals like Global Sedition.

The article suggests that Netflix's Lost In Space is intended to be more family-friendly, unlike its offerings like Hemlock Grove, House of Cards, etc. One can still tell a cool science-fiction story without excessive swearing or violence, sex, etc. -- Star Wars is a great example, as are most Star Trek offerings -- but I'm concerned that in trying to make it more family-friendly, it'd be too much like the goofy, campy original. They'd be better off trying to make it the next Battlestar Galactica, which wasn't for the younger set.

It won't be out for awhile yet. We'll see how it goes.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Evil Dead II (1987)

For our podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we decided to watch the movie Evil Dead II, the second film in the Evil Dead series for of our usual horror-themed month of October. It's been a long time since I saw this one--I think I saw it in high school, as part of a Hollywood Video double feature with the original, in the late 1990s. I remember enjoying the film then, especially in comparison to the execrable original film with its gouts of oatmeal-gore. Considering how Starz is putting out a new television series called Ash vs. the Evil Dead, this was a rather appropriate time to do the movie...

How did it hold up? Well, here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda visit a seemingly abandoned cabin in the woods for a romantic weekend, but it turns out a professor of ancient history was using it as a site to translate an ancient evil book bound in human skin. Ash plays a recording of the incantation and unleashes all sorts of slapstick-undead horrors just as the professor's daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple locals show up completely coincidentally. All of them must now survived the murderous (and sometimes hilarious) horrors of the Deadites...

The Good

*The movie avoids the "a bunch of friends go to the cabin in the woods to smoke weed and have sex" cliche of 1980s horror films. Instead it's Ash and his girlfriend basically breaking into someone else's cabin for the weekend and then the actual owners (or at least their relatives) show up, not knowing the craziness Ash accidentally unleashed.

*Ash's first encounter with the undead is a mildly-effective "Jump Scare." Given how inured I am to most horror films, it's probably a lot scarier for most people.

*At times Ash is remarkably genre-savvy. He knows sticking around a haunted cabin where a scientist recited incantations from a book bound in human skin is a really bad idea and at first chance he gets the hell out of there. Or let me rephrase that--he tries.

*There's a fair bit of good slapstick humor in this one, including a lengthy sequence involving Ash's hand getting possessed. Who's laughing now indeed? :)

*Who knew the book A Farewell to Arms could be so amusing? You'll laugh when you see the context.

*I never really thought about what might happen if you soak a room's sole light source in blood...

*There's a nice bit of Reality Ensues when Ash starts blasting around with the shotgun. Sometimes you don't know where the shells will end up.

The Bad

*The first twenty or thirty minutes of the film really aren't that entertaining. To be blunt, a lot of the film just isn't entertaining, although there are certainly some good moments.

*Ash's first killing of a possessed character could be played for either horror (it's a brutal necessity that traumatizes him) or comedy (slapstick violence, hammy overreaction to the deed). It doesn't really work as either.

*The film's sense of time is wonky. It doesn't take long for Ash and Linda to get to the cabin from the Scary Ominous Bridge (TM), but Ash leaves the cabin the morning after they arrive and arrives there just in time for the sun to set?

*In the scene where Ash sees a character reanimated after having been possessed and killed, they've only been dead a day or two, if not just a few hours. It would have been better (and likely much cheaper) to have the original actor wearing zombie makeup reviving and misbehaving rather than having a mediocre claymation monster.

*For someone who starts out showing some intelligence, Ash displays some fairly stupid behavior at times, especially later in the film.

The Verdict

Not as funny as I remember and it hasn't aged very well. I wonder if the remake is more technically adept, although a friend of mine tells me it's really, really gory. Unless you really like 1980s horror, 1980s comedies, or combinations thereof, don't bother with this one. 5.0 out of 10.

Thinking of Starting a Newsletter...

I've been reading some advice on writing and marketing's ones books (like Your First 1,000 Copies) and listening to the Sell More Books Show podcast. Something that's come up a lot is to have an e-mail newsletter. My writing-group cohort Alex Hughes has a newsletter, as does small-press rock star (I didn't come up with that moniker) William Meikle.

I worked with MailChimp for a film-company internship and later for a client not long ago, so I've created an account with them. However, I have not yet sent anything out via said newsletter, in part due to a bunch of real-life obligations.

(I had the first inklings of the idea months if not years ago, but never got around to it. Let this be a life lesson--if there's a period in your life where you've got a lot of free time, don't waste it. I could have had the template set up by now and just plugged in new stuff as I went along.)

So, dear readers, I've got a question. What kind of content would you like to see in a hypothetical e-mail newsletter from me? The only ideas I've got so far are news articles gleaned from Twitter or from my blog (probably lots of movie reviews), and links to the film podcast I'm part of when new episodes appear. Alex has included original short fiction in her newsletter, which is certainly an option. Your First 1,000 Copies recommends I focus on what's in it for the reader, but a lot of the ideas there (like free workout tips) don't seem relevant to the content I can easily produce or the audience I'd like to build.

Let me know. I can take suggestions via comments on this post or via Twitter at @MatthewWQuinn.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Congo (1995)

Well, for the latest episode of the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we watched the 1995 film Congo, adapted from the Michael Crichton novel. Yours truly served as the humble defendant. So did this adventure in diamond prospecting in the heart of Africa hold up? Listen to the podcast here and find out...

The Plot

After an expedition to find blue diamonds that could revolutionize the communications industry is mysteriously massacred, TraviCom head honcho R.B. Travis (Joe Don Baker) dispatches Dr. Karen Ross (Laura Linney) to search for survivors--including his son Charles (Bruce Campbell)--and find the diamonds too. Along the way she joins forces with Dr. Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh) and the gorilla Amy, whom he taught to speak using a bracelet that translates sign language. Also on the expedition is Herkemer Homulka (Tim Curry), a Romanian philanthropist who is much more than he seems, and Charles Munro (Ernie Hudson), "a great white hunter...who happens to be black." They make their way to the lost city of Zinj, only to encounter grisly horror...

The Good

*Although I've complained about film and television adaptations of books deviating from the source material many times before, simplifying the book's complicated plot actually made sense. If they wanted to keep the entire storyline--which included a race with a rival European-Japanese team and some material about white mercenaries in Africa--it would have made more sense to make it a one-season-and-done television series the way some British shows are. Either that or it'd be something resembling The Lord of the Rings, which they might not have had the budget for.

(Oh but that would have been cool, especially if the two rival expeditions physically clash with each other the way the Fellowship of the Ring and the Uruk-Hai do and the perils of man and nature were cranked up to 11.)

*The actors generally do a good job. Ernie Hudson is the most entertaining as Munro, while Linney and Walsh performed well too.

*The opening is generally well-done and gets to the "expedition gets massacred" pretty quickly. The eyeball sequence is straight from the book.

*There are some good quick bits of exposition, including Dr. Ross's and Charles' previous relationship--they were engaged ("I almost married him!"). If it weren't for the melodrama afterward, that would have been great. Amy's nightmares are also explained quickly without undue info-dumping, as well as a tribal revolt breaking out in Zaire.

*There are some nice little bits of comedy, including an African security official who doesn't know who Kafka is (and gets very upset), a corrupt African soldier, the "great white hunter" joke, and, "I don't have a price. I'm not a pound of sugar, I'm a primatologist." Yes, I liked that line. Here's a YouTube video of the detention scene, which has a lot of the comedy.

*The film has a very good orchestral score.

*Amy is played by a person in a suit, but she generally looks good and not, well, fake. The gorilla suit can even manage facial expressions.

*Once they actually get to Africa, everything moves along at a nice quick pace. It's never boring.

*Instead of Checkov's Gun, we have a Checkov's airplane. :)

The Bad

*The National Geographic-style opening of the film in which we see a bunch of picturesque shots of the African savanna and are gradually introduced to the original expedition rolling in aboard their vehicles got to the vehicles a little too slowly. They could've saved a couple minutes depicting the vehicles from the get-go.

*Although the opening is generally well-done, Bruce Campbell's scream of terror was not well-delivered.

*Back in Houston when the TraviCom head people learn about what happened to the expedition and decide to send a follow-up team, things get melodramatic. Dr. Ross is apparently still touchy about Charles and since she was engaged to him, she's probably privy to a lot of father-son issues, but it didn't come off well. Openly berating and threatening one's employer doesn't seem like a good way to stay employed, let alone get sent off on an important expedition. Maybe if the senior Travis had thrown some zinger about how he wouldn't put up with that if she weren't almost his daughter-in-law that might be better. Dr. Ross is a cool character (in both senses of the word) generally, but on the subject of Charles she gets really irrational and destructive.

*The senior Travis is a cranky jerk with few to no redeeming qualities. A bit two-dimensional.

*There's what comes off as an obvious product placement for the game Doom--yes, the original--pretty early in the film.

*Tim Curry's Romanian accent sounds rather annoying. Fortunately you get used to it pretty quickly.

*Why is the ape flying in the passenger area with everybody else? Maybe it was a private charter and so the ordinary rules don't apply, but I would think animals would generally go with cargo.

*The scene where some natives perform a ritual to recall the soul of a catatonic man goes on for too long. The point--a nice bit of local color and "we're not in Kansas anymore"--is made pretty quickly, but the ritual goes on for at least twice as long as it needs to.

*A character is wounded but dies for no apparent reason. Another character who survives in the books dies in the film. Not sure why they needed the change--either way, he's still not going to be joining the group, nor would the group stop for him.

The Verdict

A nice jungle adventure to see once. 8.0 out of 10.

Book Review: The Hellbound Heart (1986)

I've recently become interested in the Hellraiser franchise after many years, writing a review of the first movie and how I would have done the movie. The first movie, for those not familiar with the franchise, was inspired by the novella The Hellbound Heart. Recently my friends James R. Tuck and Danielle Tuck started a new podcast and they gave a glowing review to The Hellbound Heart. Danielle strongly recommend I buy it, so here goes...

The Plot

A solid but boring man named Rory (Larry in the film) and his bored wife Julia move into a house previously owned by Rory's late grandmother and now jointly owned by Rory and his brother Frank. Frank, however, has been missing for some time. A selfish hedonist, Frank had grown bored with the usual debauchery and sought out a certain puzzle box rumored to contain wonders and pleasures beyond human comprehension. Unfortunately, he should have been careful what he wished for, because the demonic Cenobites' idea of pleasure and his don't really overlap.

Freed from Hell by an accident--albeit as a skeletal skinless monster--Frank manipulates Julia (with whom he had a brief affair before her wedding to Rory) into murdering people for him to feed on and regenerate his body. Unfortunately for him, Rory's friend Kirsty is onto them...

The Good

*Barker is very good at writing vivid, descriptive scenes. The story opens with Frank solving the mystical puzzle box has a lot of really good descriptive imagery, including a bare light-bulb pulsing with the mournful toll of the bell that heralds the Cenobites' arrival. Another scene from Frank's point of view in which he recounts his year of sensual torment at the Cenobites' hands is also well-done.

*The multiple scenes from Frank's point of view confirm my earlier observations from my film review. Frank is so totally depraved that even a year of torment in Hell by beings he summoned thinking they'd bring him new extremes of pleasure hasn't turned him from his course. Rather than being sobered by the experience and wanting to turn over a new leaf, Frank definitely intends to resume his immoral lifestyle once he's freed. And some of his thoughts toward Julia suggest that the whole "pleasure that becomes pain and pain that becomes pleasure" that this story's Hell is full of have given him some ideas about what to do with her.

I'm reminded of the distinction commentators on 2 Corinthians 7:10 make over "godly sorrow" vs. "worldly sorrow." Frank regrets his bad decisions that lead to him being kidnapped by a bunch of extra-dimensional leather freaks but has no sorrow for his bad behavior generally. This behavior, among other things, caused great grief to his parents, included him cuckolding the brother from whom he was once inseparable, apparently caused him to run up a lot of debt, and even involved smuggling heroin and doing "small favors" to get his hands on the puzzle box. These "small favors" are implied to be immoral or criminal in nature, but he doesn't regret those even though he clearly regrets getting involved with the Cenobites. He is clearly, totally 100% selfish.

*I saw many scenes, concepts, etc. that I recognized as the nuclei of scenes from the movie. Obviously they'd be there since the movie is an adaptation of the book, but Barker, who was in charge of the whole movie, was able to develop his imagery, story, ideas, etc. more fully.

*The book introduces the idea that the prisoners of the Cenobites are aware of and interact with each other. Frank apparently learned of the possibility of escape from "whispers" of other inmates. I don't remember this in the original film, although you see a bit of in Hellbound: Hellraiser II (the only sequel Barker was involved with).

*At 164 pages long, it's a pretty quick read.

The Bad

*Some of the scenes are far more bony and could easily be elaborated on. This is especially disappointing considering the vivid description he employs elsewhere in the story. Contrast the opening damnation of Frank Cotton with Kirsty's initial confrontation with the Cenobites in the hospital. The former scene is very vivid and well-described, but the latter is, well...

“You can’t do this,” she insisted. 

It moved toward her nevertheless. A row of tiny bells, depending from the scraggy flesh of its neck, tinkled as it approached. The stink it gave off made her want to heave. “Wait,” she said. 

“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.” 

“The box,” she said in desperation. “Don’t you want to know where I got the box?” 

“Not particularly.” 

“Frank Cotton,” she said. “Does the name mean anything to you? Frank Cotton.”

The Cenobite smiled. “Oh yes. We know Frank.” 

“He solved the box too, am I right?” 

“He wanted pleasure, until we gave it to him. Then he squirmed.” 

"If I took you to him . . .”

"He’s alive then?” 

“Very much alive.”

"And you’re proposing what? That I take him back instead of you?” 

“Yes. Yes. Why not? Yes.” 

The Cenobite moved away from her. The room sighed. “I’m tempted,” it said. Then: “But perhaps you’re cheating me. Perhaps this is a lie, to buy you time.”

“I know where he is, for God’s sake,” she said. “He did this to me!” She presented her slashed arms for its perusal. 

“If you’re lying”— it said—“ if you’re trying to squirm your way out of this—” 

“I’m not.” 

“Deliver him alive to us then . . .” 

She wanted to weep with relief. 

“. . . make him confess himself. And maybe we won’t tear your soul apart.”

Compare the above, in which I only got the vaguest notions Kirsty was frightened or the Cenobite was something terrifying, with the movie adaptation below. The Cenobites make their appearance at around five minutes in...



The movie scene displays Pinhead in his dark grandeur and shows Kirsty's visceral terror. The sequence in the books is so monotone, especially in comparison.

*It has some of the same flaws of the film, including a lack of on-screen confrontation between the undead Frank and his brother.

*The e-book is rather expensive for a novella, around $6 or so. I've gotten full-length novels like Marko Kloos' FRONTLINES novels Terms of Enlistment, Lines of Departure, and Angles of Attack for a fair bit less. Is Barker's talent worth the higher price? It's good, but worth that much? The Hellbound Heart isn't even a full novel.

*I liked the film's dynamic of Kirsty as Larry's daughter and Julia as her stepmother better than Kirsty as a platonic friend of Rory (who seems to have romantic feelings for him) who doesn't like Julia. Kirsty knowing Frank as her uncle is a lot less forced than Kirsty having met Frank during the preparations for Rory and Julia's wedding four years before. The familial dynamic also makes Frank even more revolting, as in the films he seems to have incestuous intentions toward his own niece.

The Verdict

Generally good and a worthy seed for which the very creepy tree known as the film Hellraiser grew. However, it's not as good as its reputation, even though it does have a surprisingly high amount of reread value.

8.0 out of 10.