Trick or Treat

It's Halloween time, so I thought you might like a suggestion or two about something scary to watch, as if the current times weren't scary enough.  Oh, well, what's a few more scares, right?

The other day I watched The Blackcoat's Daughter on Netflix and found it well worth my time. Now streaming on Netflix, this 2015 slow-burn horror film is beautifully shot and acted, only occasionally outright scary, and leaves it up to the viewer to piece together exactly what happened when it's over. 

I often find movies like that somewhat frustrating, but this tale of two girls stranded alone at their boarding school during a semester break because both girls' sets of parents were delayed in picking them up is so well crafted and has such gorgeous cinematography and lighting that I just ate it up. Besides, it's not too hard to figure out what happened.  And, at only a little over 90 minutes, the movie doesn't overstay its welcome.

If you'd like something a little more rollercoaster-ride scary, without all the arty ambiguity, try out the 2006 version of The Hills Have Eyes, now showing on HBO. Mutated townspeople hiding out in the desert in the American Southwest terrorize a family when their RV breaks down in that same desert (creepily, the RV is actually sabotaged by those who want to make an offering to the mutants).  It's a pretty brutal movie, but also exhilarating and exciting when the family members refuse to just get picked off one by one and start to fight back.  It's a fast, fun, and scary 90 minutes or so.  HBO is also offering the sequel, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and that's okay, too, but not as tense and involving as the first. The sequel features an army unit sent into the desert to take on the mutant threat.

Anyway, there are tons of other horror films out there now to stream at the moment, so I'm sure you'll find something else appropriate to the season, if these suggestions don't wow you. But whatever you end up watching, I hope the scares of a good Halloween movie will nicely distract you for a while from all the real-life scares we're inundated with every day. Happy Halloween!

Discovering Scudder

Thanks to a new deal at Audible.com, which now lets members access a vast library of older titles in addition to the one book a month its basic membership previously allowed, I've been getting into some new series I've always meant to check out.  In particular, lately I've really been enjoying Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series.

With a character name like "Scudder", I always thought this series was about a "tough guy" detective who engaged in fisticuffs, gun play, and all that gritty P.I. stuff. But no, Matthew Scudder is an introspective type, who quietly interviews those involved in the cases we accepts, then thinks about those interviews, usually over a drink or two in a quiet bar, while he puts the pieces together.

It's almost like author Block writes his Scudder novels (well, at least the first three I've experienced so far) as if they were meant to be adapted into community theater productions with limited budgets.  There are no action scenes, no jet setting, nothing "big".  The first three books are basically Matthew Scudder getting his case, interviewing people in their offices, apartments, or on the phone, then finally figuring things out and confronting whodunit. And no, despite the talkiness, none of this is dull. These efficient little novels move along nicely and the cases feature interesting puzzles.

Two other elements were also compelling in the first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, and the two follow-ups I've read (actually, listened to) so far. Scudder himself is an interesting guy who carries some guilt on his shoulders from his time on the police force (with him possibly being too hard on himself), and that guilt informs his musing and mulling over his cases.  The other thing is that, despite the general quietness of the books and the Scudder charcter himself, Matthew Scudder is a kind of avenging angel who in his own way demands eye-for-an-eye justice from those he ultimately confronts with their crimes, and he does so in ways that can make you feel bad for the accused, even if what they did in the first place was pretty bad. But again, his retributions, memorable as they are, are done in quiet, introspective ways. That's not something I've seen a lot in other detective novels.

I'm glad I'm finally getting into this series that's been around since the early 1970's.  I have a feeling that as I move along it's going to go into some intertesting places.