Zero The Hero: A Review of Brad Meltzer’s The Zero Game

As I think I’ve mentioned before I am a very slow reader. I also have a tendency to get really into a book and then let it sit on my bedside table for a while as I switch to comics and trades for a while. Well, I picked Brad Meltzer’s The Zero Game a while ago on the discount table. I started reading it a while back and have been on and off for a while.

But I’ll tell you what, Meltzer really killed it with Zero Game. I don’t know if I enjoyed it quite as much as I did The Millionaires, but it still had a lot of the elements of his writing that I’ve come to recognize along with a few new tricks, which is always impressive.

Meltzer is the master at short, action filled chapters that keep the pages turning. And just about every chapter ends with a cliffhanger of some kind and then the next chapter picks up with another character, so you’re drawn back into THAT story.

But I can’t start talking about my favorite aspect of this book without SPOILER ruining a twist about a quarter of the way through. So consider yourself warned. We start seeing this tale of political intrigue through the eyes of one character in the first person and then the unexpected happens. That character dies. I was shocked. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where the first person narative changes in such a manner (it switches to the victim’s friend). It’s a very effective storytelling element because you’re really not sure if our new hero, Harris, or his inadvertent sidekick Viv will really make it through to the end.

Aside from our main characters, Meltzer also serves up one of the coolest villains in the form of Janos. He’s the unusual kind of super slick criminal that doesn’t let anything stop him. He’s got enough experience under his belt to handle any and all situations and does so. The fact that he’s being given the runaround by a government dude like Harris only lends to Harris’ credit as a smart, creative hero.

Oh, there’s also a bunch of name references for comic book fans. There’s characters named Dinah and Barry. I feel like there were a few more (like three on one page) but I forget what they are now. It was actually a little distracting, but I can appreciate his homage.

If you’ve only read Meltzer’s comic book work, I highly recommend you check out one of his novels. Even though his Green Arrow arc is one of my favorites, he seems to have a hard time translating the break neck speed and super fast pacing of his novels into his comics (especially his JLoA work). There’s a reason he’s a big time author folks and you should check out one of his big time books. I’m also looking to add Book of Lies to the huge pile of books next to my bed.

Halloween Scene: Halloween 5 (1989)

This might sound funny, but I keep watching the Halloween movies expecting to not like each subsequent sequel. But I’ll tell you, I dig H5 for the most part too. Sure it has it’s problems, but I Michael Myers is still my favorite slasher and I just love seeing him skulking behind clueless dudes and dudettes. And you know what? Danielle Harris is awesome as Jamie. She’s 12 in this one (she was 11 in the previous one) and I think she does a damn good job of acting scared. It might seem easy at first thought and I’ve never personally been chased by a maniac with a knife, but I feel like her fear fills up the screen just as much as the images. Good for her.

The basic idea behind H5 is that Jamie’s getting hunted by her uncle, Michael Myers but folks like Dr. Loomis, Jamie’s step sister Rachel and Rachel’s friend Tina are standing between The Shape and this little girl. But as you might remember from the very end of H4 Jamie stabbed her step mom. They kind of explain that away by saying Jamie was influenced by her uncle. In this flick, Jamie’s got some kind of psychic connection to her uncle that gives her a kind of Spidey Sense when Michael’s killing someone.

Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis gets even crazier in this sequel and it’s awesome. Watching the transformation from movie to movie has been pretty fun. In this one he threatens another police officer and grabs Jamie as bait. It’s a great bit of business because we’re not sure if Loomis is really nuts and wants to end the madness by letting Michael kill Jamie or if it’s a trap for Michael.

I also really like the opening credits. You get treated to scenes of a knife slashing through something that turns out to be a pumpkin. There’s just something so brutal about the knife work. It does a good job of setting the sometimes brutal tone that the movie has.

But it’s not all love and hugs for H5. There’s a character that he only see in profile or at ankle level dubbed The Man in Black that breaks Michael out of jail at the end. He seems to have only been introduced to do just that. He’s not a character he’s just a plot point.

Another problem I have is how easily duped the Haddonfield police department is. For a force that now has a SWAT team (hey, it’s about time, if for no other occasion than the yearly murderfest, they should get their own tank) they make a really stupid mistake. They’re all camped out at the Myers’ house until Jamie has a vision of Michael attacking the children’s hospital. Loomis and the cops actually listen, but then ALL OF THE COPS leave the house and go to the hospital. Really guys? You’ve never heard of a bait and switch? Sheesh. Loomis knows right away.

Sure there are stumbling blocks along the way, but I think H5 looks pretty good for a movie rushed into production a year after H4 came out. And yet again, I find myself not looking forward to Curse of Michael Myers, except for the performance of a young Paul Rudd. After that I’ve got H20, Resurrection and, huh, the remake. I’m REALLY not looking forward to those three.

Halloween Sccene: House (1986)

I went to Blockbuster last night looking for something without really know what. I went through the new releases and there wasn’t really anything I wanted to watch on my own (Em hates horror movies, so I watch them after she goes to bed). I found myself in the not great, but not awful horror section looking around and found two movies I wanted to check out. One was Halloween H20 which I still haven’t seen. That was going to be the pick until my eyes panned down and I saw a DVD copy of House. I knew nothing about this movie, but remember seeing it all the time when I used to go to the video store with my parents. The creepy hand always freaked me out. I’m not sure why I never rented it once I turned 16, but that’s another story. The cover I remember seeing is below:

House won out over H20 (partly because I haven’t watched H5 or 6 yet this year), but I ended up falling asleep around 11:30 last night. I did wake up around 1:30, tried to watch it then, but kept getting freaked out by the old lady as I fell in and out of sleep and decided to just call it a night and go back to bed.

I lucked out today and Em took a nap, which gave me time to check House out and I kind of love this movie. It’s not a great film and it’s not all that scary, though I do really like the practical demon/monster/zombie make up and effects. It’s kind of creepy, well acted and just well put together, but it’s also fun.

Just check out the people who helped put this movie together. It’s directed by by Steve Miner who also did Friday the 13th Parts 2 and 3 and Halloween H20 (weird coincidence, huh? that I was choosing between two Miner movies). The script was based on a story by Fred Dekker, the dude who wrote Monster Squad and Night of the Creeps (a former Manly Movie Mamajama pick). Plus you’ve got William Kat who used to be the Greatest American Hero, Cheers’ George Wendt and Night Court’s Richard Moll in starring rolls. Seeing Richard Moll in a monster roll kind of validates all of the weirdness he gave off on Night Court (anyone else remember the series finale where he got beamed up by aliens?).

House is basically a haunted house movie with some monster, zombie and Vietnam War moments thrown in as well. Katt plays a writer who decides to live in his aunt’s old house after she hangs herself. It’s also the house that he and his wife lived in when their son mysteriously disappeared. He’s there working on a book about his experiences during the Vietnam War, but also getting hassled by a very cool looking monster in the closet and other tricks the house is playing on him to get rid of him. Meanwhile George Wendt plays his nosey neighbor who gets pulled along for the ride because he can’t mind his own business. Moll plays Katt’s army buddy who he refused to kill and ended up getting captured by the enemy. His ghost comes back later and looks AWESOME. We’re never quite sure why the house is being such a jerk, but it doesn’t really matter as the story focuses on Katt beating the house and eventually getting his son back. It’s kind of a fist pumping ending which I appreciate. And you know what? I don’t need an explanation. As long as the movie makes enough sense to not make me mad, I’m happy with it.

House isn’t Jaws, Halloween or TCM, but it is a fun movie that kept my attention the whole time. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a movie like this nowadays. It’s somewhat lighthearted, funny when it’s supposed to be, happy, sad and sports some of the coolest looking practical effects I’ve seen in a while.

Halloween Scene: The Last House on the Left (1972)

I had been warned to actually not watch Last House by fellow horror fan Rickey Purdin (follow the link to check out some of his recent horror related artwork), mostly because of the multiple scenes of rape, sexual assault and violence against women. He actually told me about this moments after Blockbuster sent me an E-mail letting me know Last House was on its way (when I really wanted The Strangers!). I asked if it was worse than I Spit On Your Grave and he said no, so I figured I’d watch it anyway, it being Wes Craven’s first flick and all.

Here’s the thing about the movie, it’s completely all over the place. It starts off as a couple of teens having a good time, then jumps into horror territory as they get snatched by four escaped criminals (killers, rapists, thieves and junkies). You’d think it would stay pretty serious after that, but Craven throws a number of curve balls at the viewer. The most prominent ones to me were the musical choices. You’ve got some pretty intense scenes followed by really upbeat pop music. I’m not sure if it’s there to undermine the mood of the movie or to lighten the mood.

The other curve ball comes in the form of two lazy, bumbling police officers. I thought they would get vindicated when they quickly realize the criminals are in their jurisdiction only to be shown as complete jokes when they run out of gas and later try to get a ride in a chicken truck. Huh? They show up at the very end but all the damage has been done by then.

And by damage I mean that the criminals leave the city with the two girls in the trunk of their car. As they’re driving through the sticks, the car just happens to break down right in front of the main girl’s house. Maybe I missed the reason why they were heading in that direction in the first place, but that just seemed ridiculous. The criminals then do terrible things to the girls in the woods and eventually make their way up to the main girl’s parents’ house where they plan to rob and/or kill them. The parents figure out what’s up and take their revenge on the criminals. All the while the film seems real in the same way that Texas Chainsaw Massacre does with the graininess of the footage. There’s a remake coming out soon, that I’m sure will look like all the other horror movies coming out today. The closest modern filmmakers get to this is shooting on video or handheld digital, but it just doesn’t feel the same. But, hey, maybe in 30 years when movies are implanted directly into our corneas it won’t matter.

Like Rickey, I found the sexual assault scenes to be sickening, but most of them happened off screen. In a weird way, it’s hard to stay focused on any one terrible thing these terrible people do as the mood keeps bouncing around. I wonder if Craven was playing with his audience or just not really sure what he was doing. I’m guessing the former.

The one element of this movie that I did enjoy immensely was the fact that the parents got revenge on their daughter’s SPOILER killer. So often with horror movies, all you get are scenes of the bad guys slaughtering kids and whatnot, with the kids getting away for a short time just to get recaptured or getting away from the trouble. It feels good to watch someone actually get revenge all in the same movie instead of waiting for the sequel.

Last House is not the kind of movie I’d watch over and over again, but I am glad I saw it, if for no other reason than I want to see all the works of Wes Craven. I also can’t really recommend it, unless you too want to see what Wes Craven was working on 24 years before he did Scream and 12 years before Nightmare on Elm Street. Next up on the Craven train will probably be Last House on the Left unless I break down and buy the new Nightmare on Elm Street four packs this Halloween season.

Society Pages: Mr. Terrific

Okay, I was going to show off my Dr. Mid-Nite sketch first, but Mr. Terrific here didn’t turn out so well, so I kind of want to get him out of the way. Wow, this one went wrong. I re-drew almost everything except for the torso a number of times and I probably should have re-drawn that as well. He’s kind of lopsided and one hand is bigger than the other. Ugh.

Here’s the awesome Johnson original:

Then my lumpy, lopsided pre-colored verision:

And the final, colored piece, yeesh:

Haha, the finished product definitely looks like the kind of thing I would have drawn when I was about 10. Oh man…

Halloween Scene: Last House in the Woods (2006)

As you can probably imagine, my expectations were pretty low going into tonight’s Ghost House Underground flick Last House in the Woods. I actually only chose to check this one out tonight because it boasted the shortest run time of the stack of newer DVDs I’ve gotten from work. But, I’ll tell you what, I was pleasantly surprised.

I’ll get this out of the way in the beginning, this flick seems heavily influenced by Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now, I didn’t initially get this vibe as you start off with a car accident and then a car kill followed by some character development stuff. It’s kind of funny because as the poop was starting to hit the fan I thought “Hey, this has kind of TCM vibe to it” mostly due to the shaky camera that added to the realism of the film. Then, not more than 15 minutes later, I’m watching a dinner scene and a mentally challenged killer wearing an apron hoists a chainsaw and hacks into someone. But, really, aside from these few minutes, the movie draws more from the feeling and themes of TCM without directly swiping. I haven’t seen Last House on the Left yet, so I’m not sure how much it pilfers from that or if it’s just a title nod.

I really wasn’t sure what to think about this flick as it started. After the initial kills the focus switches to our heroine who’s having boy trouble. It took me a few minutes to really start paying attention, so I’m not sure if she’s dealing with the same guy the whole time, but there’s a weird scene where the dude she’s with wants to have sex with her while she draws, to see what she’ll draw. Those crazy kids. Our main girl Aurora ends up in the woods with her boyfriend. They’re driving and stop to make out or something and then have yet another talk about sex (Italians are romantic, remember).

Meanwhile we get a view of three meathead dudes driving in a car talking about drugs and having sexual encounters with the ladies. The funny thing is that I swear I’ve seen these dudes while driving around Jersey. Anyway, I kind of like them right off the bat because they’re total jerks and don’t care and just seem kind of funny. That lasts about three minutes until they pull off so one of them can pee and then decide beat the crap out of Aurora’s boyfriend and nearly rape her. Jeez.

Luckily this slick looking dude who looks like a combination of Larry from Perfect Strangers and Ethan from Lost shows up and pulls a gun on the meatheads. They take off and the dude and his wife take Aurora and her boyfriend back to their place. Things seem okay for awhile until the dude hits on Aurora and then his freaking ugly kid shows up. And man, this kid ranks up there with the kid from The Ring as far as creepiness goes. He’s got blood on his face and sports a set of gnarled teeth that look more like fans. From here we’re treated to a game of cat and mouse as Aurora tries to escape only to run into some truly disgusting looking hillbillies (or the Italian equivalent) who are in league with the bad dude.

Enter the TCM scenes which are quickly followed up by the true game changer as the meathead dudes’ care breaks down and they end up at the bad dude’s house and decide to rob it. It’s really nice to see a new element injected to these kinds of movies. I may hate these guys, but the movie flips and makes them the heroes as they take on the bad guys. And there’s a real sense of dread as they wander through the house, having little-to-no idea what’s going on or how many people are in the house. And I really like the turnaround of the worst of them becoming the de facto hero.

I don’t want to get into the ending too much, but it offers up a kind of explanation for these characters and why their ugly, evil-looking child eats human flesh that at least makes sense. I’m not quite sure if I buy the resolution to the conflict, but I liked the movie enough to give it another view.

I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the gore is AWESOME. There’s a “dude trying to put his intestines back in” scene and a tumor popping scene. Oh man, they are squirm-inducing and awesome, but are never the sole focus of the action just a great addition to it. Oh and as a complete sidenote both of the main women in this flick (Aurora and the crazy kid’s mom) are HOT!

I do have a few complaints though. One is the lighting. It’s really weird. Even when it’s dark out there seems to be a lot of light. I don’t think it’s day for night, but it definitely does seem natural. The other thing that bugged me is the dubbing. I know that’s two dubbing complaints in one week for one film series, but it’s SO distracting. And I’m not even talking about the voices themselves but the way they’re integrated into the soundtrack makes them sound like they’re floating around and not nailed down in the film itself. They just don’t sound right and it has the potential to take viewers out of the movie. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t get absorbed right away.

So, here’s the current rundown of Ghost House Underground movies. Things are starting to look up!

MUST SEE
Dance of the Dead
Last House on the Left

CHECK OUT
Dark Floors

MEH
Trackman

GAH, NO!
Brotherhood of Blood

Halloween Scene: Silent Hill (2006)

Silent Hill is one of those movies that make me wonder about who the intended audience for this movie is. Now, obviously, they’re trying to market this thing to the millions of people who have bought the Silent Hill games over the years. That goes without saying. And I think it can be safely assumed that a large number of the people that like getting the crap scared out of them while playing a video game also probably like scary movies. But what about those of us who don’t play the games, but do see the movie? Do the filmmakers think there’s enough in the movie for Silent Hill virgins to understand?

For the most part, Silent Hill does a good job of explaining the world the movie takes place in. I actually like the explanation for why Silent Hill (it’s the name of a town that’s been closed off due to a coal fire burning under the city) is so full of terrified religious folks and warped monsters. The one thing that leaves me puzzled though is the pyramid head guy. He’s got such a crazy design element to him that I love, but I don’t think he ever gets explained. Now, I have no idea if he’s given a back story in the games and he doesn’t really have much to do in the movie, but it just got me thinking.

For the most part, I dug Silent Hill. There’s definitely flaws, but overall the effects were pretty great, the few deaths we get to see very graphic and the story interesting enough (I haven’t seen something like it in a while).

But there are problems. One of them is the inciting incident. There’s this girl (the creepy one on the box above) who draws these crazy pictures and has terrible dreams about a place called Silent Hill. So what does her adoptive mother do? She freaking takes her daughter to said town, even though everyone (including a lady cop) tries to stop her. I’m guessing this is the plot device used in the game, but it just flies in the face of logic. I understand wanting to help your child, but is taking her to the place that terrifies her really the best idea? Methinks not.

Oh well, once she gets into the town, there’s a slow build to the craziness and monsters that eventually fill the screen. But it doesn’t just go all out crazy with the monsters as they introduce the quasi-religious element I mentioned before. It’s got a pretty good sense of pacing, though it does clock in around two hours and can drag a little.

My biggest pet peeve with the movie is that when it’s dark, it’s very, very dark. And I’m not talking about the mood, I’m talking about the visuals. The first time the mom encounters something supernatural you pretty much have no idea what they are until the little bastards start glowing like embers and even then they’re hard to get a read on.

Again, these are just little problems, Silent Hill is worth checking out I think. It’s not an A+ movie, but it’s on the better side as far as the video game-based movies I’ve seen (Super Mario Bros., House of the Dead, DOOM). I’m not one of those people who think that video game movies are a lost cause. I think a good writer can look at any kind of source material and find something really compelling about it and create a wonderful screenplay around it, maybe we just haven’t seen that yet because the movies are trying to just recreate the games. Really, I’m just waiting for someone to pick up my Roadblaster and Burger Time scripts. So if you’re interested, drop me a line.

Halloween Scene: Trackman (2007)

Trackman’s not a great movie. Really it’s not even that good. It’s a Russian flick about some bank robbers who take their hostages underground and start running amok of (if the legend is true) a guy who is related to the Chernobyl incident somehow. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really paying much attention to this movie as I was finishing up the coloring work on the Dr. Fate sketch below (you don’t need a link, just scroll down a bit) and then posting the blog. It’s your run of the mill slasher flick, but this time with a really cool looking killer who has a thing about removing eyes with a machine he seems to have built for that express purpose and the gore looks great. Aside from that there’s not a lot going on even though I usually love the “normal people doing their thing until their lives are interrupted by/they stumble into something insane. In this case it’s a hostage situation gets interrupted by a crazy slasher.

There is a great scene where one of the guys actually gets to fight back for a pretty extensive amount of time (a minute or two, maybe). Usually there’s that one or two punches before the bad guy just axes you or whatever. This time he got hit with a blowtorch which is even worse.

A problem I had with this movie which actually doesn’t reflect back on the filmmakers is the dubbing. Oh man, I swear I’ve actually heard one of these guys in a Hong Kong action movie. The double edge sword here is that I usually fall asleep when watching a movie with subtitles (cause I’m lazy), so I’ll often put the dub version on. In this case it’s the default setting, but man is it distracting. I could barely finish coloring! But it’s not just him, there’s even a dude who they gave a kind of urban voice too which doesn’t seem to fit. Why can’t they ever get convincing actors to do this stuff? I think it would have jumped up a bit in my opinion of the voice over work was a little bit more subtle or just emoted more. Ah well.

That brings my current Ghost House Underground ranks as thus:

MUST SEE
Dance of the Dead

CHECK OUT
Dark Floors

MEH
Trackman

GAH, NO!
Brotherhood of Blood

Society Pages: Dr. Fate

I was talking to my buddies Ben
and Rickey about one of their many train rides in to their big time city jobs. They had been talking about picking a superhero team and drawing that team’s members one by one. They told me about the idea, so I piped up that I wanted to draw my favorite team, the JSA. For more on their sketches, keep an eye out on their respective blogs.

Seeing as how I’m not much of an artist, I must resort to looking at an existing image and drawing it out. Basically copying it, but not tracing. I actually started on a Dr. Mid-Nite that I’m pretty happy with, but I left it at work and haven’t had a chance to finish coloring it. Well, tonight Em and I were at Target and I picked up a 50 pack of Crayola Super Tip Washable Markers so I could really show off the JSA’s vibrant costumes (there’s even 12 Silly Scents markers!). Well, I was pretty excited about my new markers (like I used to get as a kid when I got a brand new box of crayons) so I decided to give another JSAer the Dietsch treatment. Dr. Fate won the spot and here it is, first the image I copied, then the black and white and finally the colored version.

For what it’s worth, I start off with a pencil, sketching out the details and even where the shadows fall. Then I go over and outline things with a thin Sharpie. After that I fill in the shadows with a thicker black Sharpie.

After finishing the outlines and erasing any leftover pencil marks, it’s time to color. Crayola markers are a bit light and don’t saturate the paper as well, but they’re cheap and I really like seeing the drawings in color. Black and white is cool, but I love seeing those basic colors come to life. If Sharpie made a full line of cheaper markers, I’d be all over that. Of course, the problem would be the headaches. At least with the Crayola’s I’m guaranteed not to get a headache.

With the drawing over all, I skipped the cool hand effect which removes the light source. Even so, I still kept the shadows, but ditched the light spots in the original. I think this one came out pretty well. Em helped give me a second pair of eyes which helped. I’ve still got no idea what I’m doing and should definitely study anatomy or at least get a super poseable action figure that I can use as an artist model. Heck I could even use one of those How To Draw books, wonder where I could get one of those…

Halloween Scene/Book Vs. Movie: The Stepford Wives (1975)

Sometime this year I picked up a copy of The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin at the fantastic Building 19 (one of the best things about New England, as I’ve talked about before). I’m a slow reader but the book was pretty short, so it didn’t take me too long to get through it. And it was a good read. I was impressed with how much Levin was able to fit into (I think) less than 120 pages. Not really knowing more than the basic “something’s weird about the women of Stepford, they’re TOO good at being house wives” idea, I was pleasantly surprised as I read through and found a building sense of dread as Joanna loses friends and a little bit of her mind as all the women around her either are or are turned into the “perfect housewife.”

It also hit on one of the themes that I personally find to be the scariest in fiction/life, which is the main person telling the truth, but no one believes them (as I mentioned in the my riveting review of Dying to Belong). You really get a sense of that as Joanna’s liberated female friends start joining the clean house club.

Since it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, I’ll talk more about the movie which watched yesterday, though the movie follows along pretty closely. In the movie version, which was written by the insanely brilliant screenwriter William Goldman, Joanna and her family move from New York City to Stepford, CT. Everything’s fine at first, though you start to see some cracks in Joanna’s relationship with her husband. It seems like he’s been making a lot of big decisions without really consulting with her, like moving and joining up with a men only men’s club in Stepford. As she meets the other women of Stepford, Joanna comes to realize that they’re all the poster children for good housekeeping, worried more about the appearance of their homes and children than any real social issues. This doesn’t sit well with Joanna or her new friend Bobbie who also recently moved to Stepford. Both women try to find other like-minded women in town, but come up short with one exception, Charmaine (played by Ginger from Gilligan’s Island!). As time goes on, Charmaine goes from free wheeling to kitchen cleaning, which completely freaks Bobby out. Both Bobbie and Joanna try to get their husbands to move out of Stepford because they’re genuinely scared about what’s going to happen. Then Bobbie “goes away for the weekend” with her husband and comes back Stepford-ized. Now Joanna’s really freaked out. She goes to an out-of-town shrink who tells her to go home, get her kids and get the hell out of Stepford. When Joanna does, she’s met with hostility and her kids are missing. From there she’s making a mad dash around town to find her kids, but comes face to face with the real reason why the women of Stepford seem so perfect. SPOILER, they’re robots.

It’s actually cooler than that might sound. The set-up is that a bunch of the men in the men’s club are genius scientist type guys. One is an animatronics expert from Disney World, one’s a famous artist, one studies voices and tricks the women into recording a list of words for his “private study.” There’s also a number of companies like General Electric and other computer companies. It’s actually kind of a brilliant plot element, as dreamed up by Levin in the book and put on screen by Goldman. The men even go so far as to steal Joanna’s dog and keeping it in their clubhouse (a huge old mansion), presumably to get the dog to become familiar with the Joanna-bot. There’s some really great touches in there that you can thank both Levin and Goldman for.

I can’t remember the exact ending of the book, but in the movie SPOILER Joanna comes face to face with her robot replacement and the robot (presumably) kills her. The robot then takes her place and you end on the bleakest shot of beautiful women walking around the supermarket you’ll ever see. It’s just so hopeless, which is the real gut punch for me. There’s also such a sense of betrayal that feel towards Joanna’s husband. He seems like an okay dude in the beginning, but then he signs up with these dudes who want to kill his wife and replace her with “the perfect wife.” Jeez, man, you’ve gotta be stone cold to do something like that. The whole point, from the men’s perspective, is that you work hard, you might as well have the perfect woman who will have awesome sex with you, clean up after you and never give you any problems. Or have independent thought. I think it’s a cool commentary on the time that it was written but can still be read and watched with an eye towards today.

The movie was longer than I expected, almost two hours, but it does a great job of doing the slow build. I can see how it might be boring for some people, but, even though I hadn’t seen it before, I knew what to look for because I had read the book (like when the men are meeting at Joanna’s house and one of them draws her, the drawing is like the kiss of death, once you’ve got it and have finished the word recordings after living there for four months, your donezo). So it was kind of like I had seen the movie. All the major beats are still there. I think the main differences are the seasons, I remember there being snow in the book, but it’s rain in the movie. And like I said, I can’t remember the specifics of the book’s ending, though Joanna does end up getting replaced.

The big question for me is, what do they do with the original wife. Do they get flat out killed? Do their memories get erased? These dudes are basically mad scientists who run a small town, so they’ve got a good amount of options. I’d also like to see someone like Dirty Harry roll into town and offer up some justice. Maybe I’ll start writing my script treatment…

Oh, one last thing, I forgot to mention initially. According to IMDB Goldman’s original intent for the movie adaptation would be that all the women would be walking around looking like Playboy Playmates, wearing short shorts and what not. So how did the movie end up feature what look like Southern belles in big floppy hats and long dresses? Well one of the producers agreed to finance the film only if his wife could get a role in it. And, while she was pretty, she wasn’t the type that Hef would put on the cover of his mag, so they had to switch the WHOLE look that they were going for because this woman looked homely. I know they just remade this move with Nicole Kidman a few years ago (haven’t seen it), but I’d like to see a remake that’s more of a period piece, set in the 70s with this look. Mostly because 70s Playmates were super hot! Who’s with me?!