Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Pixels

Okay, I know a lot of you really don't like Adam Sandler movies, but I usually do, and I'm stubborn enough to keep posting about them. PIXELS got the usual bad reviews. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The concept is pretty silly—a war-like alien civilization picks up a broadcast of a 1980s video game tournament, takes it as a challenge, and attacks Earth in the present time using light-based creatures modeled after Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, and other games from that earlier era. Adam Sandler plays the usual good-hearted sad sack who was once a great video gamer, his buddy Kevin James is the President of the United States (I know, that's a real stretch), and the always gorgeous Michelle Monaghan is a scientist who works for DARPA. It's up to them, along with fellow nerd Josh Gad, to save the planet from the alien invaders.

My experience with video games goes back even farther, all the way to the Pong game that my buddy and future brother-in-law Bruce and I fed quarters into in Angel's Pizza, our version of "Cheers" in the mid-Seventies. Livia and I had a first-generation Nintendo when our kids were little. So all the game stuff in this movie had a lot of nostalgic appeal for me, plus there's some decent music from the Seventies and Eighties. (That's kind of an oxymoron, but still...) Anyway, PIXELS is silly, the critics hated it, and I sat there smiling all the way through it. I'm good with that.

Peter McCurtin Catalog/Checklist from Lynn Munroe

Anybody who has seen one of Lynn Munroe's on-line book catalogs knows that's not your typical book catalog. His latest features the work of the legendary Peter McCurtin, and as usual it's a treasure trove of information (including previously unknown pseudonyms) and great cover scans. If you have any interest at all in paperback Westerns and men's adventure novels from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, you really do have to check this out.

On a personal note, I recall buying a copy of the Lassiter novel THE MAN FROM DEL RIO at Lester's Pharmacy, in the edition shown above, and realizing as I was reading it that this wasn't really the same sort of thing as Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Clarence E. Mulford (my main Western reading up to that point). Nice to know it was actually written by Peter McCurtin, possibly in collaboration with George Harmon Smith. If I ever come across a copy of that edition again, I'll probably buy it just for old times' sake.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, April 25, 1931

It may not be politically correct, but this is one of cleverest uses of the red sun motif on SHORT STORIES covers that I've come across. The art is by Remington Schuyler. Inside are stories by Robert Carse, Charles Alden Seltzer, Cliff Farrell, and several lesser known writers. I've enjoyed everything I've read by Carse, and I'll bet this is a good yarn, too.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, March 23, 1940

That's a pretty violent cover by H.W. Scott on this issue of WESTERN STORY. The stories inside are probably pretty hardboiled, too, with authors such as Ray Nafziger, Harry F. Olmsted, and Frank Richardson Pierce writing as Seth Ranger. There's also a story by Wilfred McCormick, famous to me as the author of the Bronc Burnett boy's sports novels that I read avidly as a kid. I had no idea at the time that he started out in the pulps.

Forgotten Novellas: Queen of the Martian Catacombs - Leigh Brackett

Since the hundredth anniversary of Leigh Brackett's birth was earlier this week, I wanted to write about something of hers. So I read a novella I'd never read in its original form (more on that later), "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", which originally appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of PLANET STORIES and has since been reprinted numerous times.

Brackett was famous for a lot of things, of course, including her science fiction. She contributed to the scripts for several iconic films, wrote some well-regarded mystery and Western novels, and was married to another great science fiction writer, Edmond Hamilton. Picking her best work out of a long and splendid career is probably a matter of personal taste more than anything else. A lot of people are fond of her science-fantasy (just like it sounds, a mixture of science fiction and fantasy), and I'm one of 'em.

"Queen of the Martian Catacombs" is an important story in Brackett's career because it introduced Eric John Stark, her most famous series character. Stark is an Earthman, but he was orphaned at an early age and raised on Mercury by a band of the primitive indigenous people who lived there. His Mercurian name is N'Chaka, meaning Man Without a Tribe. It's a Tarzan-like origin that serves as back-story here. Stark has become a pretty shady interplanetary character, being mixed up with gun-running and smuggling and serving as a mercenary soldier on several different worlds. (This is the old-style SF, where several of the planets in the solar system are inhabitable and have their own native races.)

In this one, Stark is drafted by an old friend who works for the Terran government to infiltrate a rebel group planning to start a war on Mars. Some of the barbarian tribes are about to rise, fueled by a leader who claims to have the secret of the ancient Martian mind transference process. Stark is one of the mercenary captains hired to lead them, but actually his job is to expose a plot rife with double- and triple-crosses and prevent the rebellion.

In reading this novella, I was struck by how much the intrigue reminded me of Robert E. Howard's El Borak stories. Brackett was influenced by both Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you can sure see that in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs". It races right along with beautiful women, blood feuds, scientific mumbo-jumbo, sand storms, and some beautifully described settings. Brackett often manages to be hardboiled and poetic at the same time. This is just a wonderful story, one of the best pieces of fiction I've read this year.

"Queen of the Martian Catacombs" was expanded into the novel THE SECRET OF SINHARAT, which was published as half of an Ace Double. According to my friend Morgan Holmes, Edmond Hamilton did the expanding, which I guess makes the novel version an uncredited collaboration between Brackett and Hamilton. I read that version more than thirty years ago and remember nothing about it other than that I liked it. But it's hard to imagine that it could beat the original novella.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I also read Brackett's post-apocalyptic novel THE LONG TOMORROW, in which the United States returns to an agrarian society following a nuclear war. I didn't care for it. I thought it was slow and dated and I never really bought the premise. It's certainly not terrible, but gee, "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" is so much better. This could well be because at heart I'm still a 12-year-old boy (as if you haven't long since guessed that, what with all the posts about monster movies and comic books and pulps), and 12-year-old me would have gobbled down this Eric John Stark yarn in one breathless gulp. At this late date, I doubt if I'm going to change...so I might as well enjoy my lingering adolescence.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, January 8, 1938

I like all the Park Avenue Hunt Club stories by Judson Philips that I've read in DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. I haven't read this one, "The League of Disaster", but I'm sure it's good. Somebody needs to do a complete collection of this series. While they're at it, a collection of the Morton and McGarvey stories by Donald Barr Chidsey would be welcome, too. This issue also has a Bulldog Drummond story in it, as well as part of a serial by T.T. Flynn. DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY was a fine pulp featuring many of the best authors.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Fifteen Western Tales,June 1946

I like this cover! Busting into a saloon on horseback with guns blazing! That's my kind of Western pulp. Lots of good authors in this issue of FIFTEEN WESTERN TALES: Walker A. Tompkins, Joseph Chadwick, Giles A. Lutz, Walt Sheldon, Lee E. Wells, Rod Patterson, Thomas Thompson, Art Lawson, and more. I like that title, too: "Texans Don't Eat Crow!" Damn straight.

Forgotten Books: A Haven for the Damned - Harry Whittington

Harry Whittington has never disappointed me. Oh, sure, some of his books are better than others, but I've never read a bad one, or one that failed to pull me along with its breakneck pace, tight plotting, and brooding sense of desperation.

A HAVEN FOR THE DAMNED is one of Whittington's rarer books. At least it was in my experience. I never owned a copy of the Gold Medal edition, and I kept my eye out for Whittingtons in used bookstores literally for decades. Recently it was reprinted by Stark House as part of the Black Gat Books imprint, in a very nice edition with a fine introduction by David Laurence Wilson. And now I'm glad I never found it before, because I had an excellent, new-to-me Whittington novel to read.

A HAVEN FOR THE DAMNED is a "Grand Hotel" book, although the hotel in it is far from grand. In fact, it's a dusty, rundown place in a ghost town called Lust, New Mexico. (Whittington is one of the few writers who could get away with setting a book in a town called Lust and not have it come across as silly.) The only regular inhabitant of the town is a prospector named Josh Carrdell, but as often happens, a number of other people with back-stories of their own show up at roughly the same time: a couple of bank robbers and their wounded hostage; the hostage's wife, who gets roped in on the robbers' scheme; a middle-aged businessman running away with a woman thirty years younger than him so she can get a divorce in Mexico and marry him; and the woman's husband, following his wife and her lover and carrying a gun so he can have his revenge when he catches up to them. There's one other character, the prospector's dog, but he's not exactly cute and cuddly.

With a cast like that, you know there's going to be lots of angst and drama going on, and the way Whittington packs most of the book into a span of less than a day just increases the tension. Nobody was ever better at milking a plot for every bit of suspense in it, and he does a fine job of that in A HAVEN FOR THE DAMNED. I had to heave a sigh of relief (but in a very good way) when I came to the end of this novel. If you're a Whittington fan and haven't read it, you should grab it right away. If you've never read his work, it would be a good place to start. This is a top-notch suspense yarn and gets a high recommendation from me.

Small Change: A Casebook of Sherer and Miller, Investigators of the Paranormal and Supermundane - Andrez Bergen

I’ve said many times that I like a book with a distinctive voice, and Andrez Bergen’s work consistently hits that mark. Not only that, he’s never been content to write the same book twice. His latest, SMALL CHANGE: A CASEBOOK OF SCHERER AND MILLER, INVESTIGATORS OF THE PARANORMAL AND SUPERMUNDANE, ventures into the realms of occult detective fiction. Set in Melbourne, it’s a collection of short stories and one novella narrated by private detective Roy Scherer, who along with his partner, the beautiful blonde Suzie Miller, investigates cases involving zombies, mummies, werewolves, immortals, and other sorts of bizarre creatures. There’s a bit of jumping around in time as well (not literally), as the novella explains how Roy came to work for Suzie’s father, who founded the agency.

All this would be fine and entertaining by itself, but Bergen’s fast-paced prose also includes a steady stream of pop culture references. For someone like me who grew up watching movies and TV and reading comic books and hardboiled paperbacks, this is great fun. Bergen even provides an appendix explaining the references, in case you missed any of them. (I didn’t, I have to say.)

SMALL CHANGE is perhaps the most traditional of Bergen’s books so far, and being a traditional sort of guy for the most part, I think it’s my favorite. I hope we haven’t seen the last of Roy and Suzie, because I really enjoyed this volume and would love to read more about them.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Tomorrowland

TOMORROWLAND bombed at the box office and got mostly bad reviews, and I think I know why both of those things happened. This film is pretty much a love letter to anybody who grew up reading science fiction from the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, and Fifties (one of the supporting characters even uses the name Hugo Gernsback!), and that description probably doesn’t fit many film critics these days, or a vast portion of the movie-going public, either. But for those who are the target audience, like me, it’s a wonderful little film.

The plot’s kind of hard to describe. It involves Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, alternate universes, and killer robots from the future. It’s complicated, but it all makes sense in the end (I think). George Clooney is a disillusioned inventor, Britt Robertson is a brilliant teenage girl who has to save the earth, and a little girl named Raffey Cassidy sort of steals the show as a visitor from the future.

TOMORROWLAND was directed and co-written by Brad Bird, who did THE IRON GIANT and THE INCREDIBLES, so it’s not surprising there’s a sense of wonder and an optimism that are missing from a lot of contemporary films. Though clearly in the minority, I think it’s great, and if you’re a science fiction fan, there’s a chance you might, too. Highly recommended.