Month: February 2024

Night Train

  By

★★
“Not trucking good.”

Danielle Ryan’s quest for a movie worthy of her talents meets another swing and a miss. I guess you have to give credit to this one: it is at least trying to go in a different direction, making the Mexican cartel the good guys. For as well as their… less salubrious activities, they’re shipping pharmaceuticals into the US, and undercutting Big Pharma, by selling them to the needy at lower prices. #SoBrave Needless to say, this can’t stand, so word comes down to FBI supervisor Connoll (Sergei), who puts agent Jaylynne Jackson (Baird) on the case. Except, you wonder how much he wants to help, since she is an alcoholic burnout, with PTSD resulting from her stint in the military.

The target is Holly McCord (Ryan), who might also be a vet – to be honest, my attention kinda lapsed. She is trucking the imported drugs to the distribution hub in Las Vegas, using her souped-up vehicle. But only because it gives her access to the medicine her sick son needs. Her contact, Renzo Romeo (Haapaniemi) was initially unconvinced, but McCord’s ability to get the job done showed him she isn’t just a girl – a point the film practically belabours. That, however, can’t stop Holly from getting ensnared deeper in the crime web, as Jaylynne closes in, both ends threatening to destroy everything Holly cares about. Which is basically her son, so she decides to make a break for the border with him and Renzo.

I’ll take misleading posters for $400, please, Alex. I am fairly sure – despite the attention thing mentioned above – that Holly never picks up a gun at any point, even during the final face-off with Jaylynne. Indeed, in terms of action, this is considerably more subdued than you’d expect. I was thinking there would at least be some hot car chases here, and the movie largely fails to deliver on that front either. It’s more of a thriller than an action film, and doesn’t work particularly well as that. If it had kept to the battle between noble criminal and ignoble cop, it might have worked, since both characters are interesting – even if Jaylynne would, in reality, have been tossed out of the FBI.

However, the film throws too much extraneous stuff in there which is either not needed, or plain bad writing. I mean, if you have to use a sick child as maternal motivation, that’s simply lazy. We also get Holly’s relationship with her father, Jaylynne’s PTSD, the creepy attraction the Las Vegas head has for Holly, etc. etc. When the two women finally meet in the desert, the battle-hardened FBI agent ends up falling to her knees and weeping, then letting Holly go, after a stern lecture from the smuggler. No, really. The words,”Who writes this crap?” may have passed my lips at that point. Some day, Ryan (and, indeed, Baird) will hopefully find a script that matches her abilities. Today is not that day.

Dir: Shane Stanley
Star: Danielle C. Ryan, Diora Baird, Paul Haapaniemi, Ivan Sergei

The Adventures of Shiela Crerar, Psychic Detective, by Ella M. Scrymsour

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Detectives as protagonists entered the realm of English-language fiction in the 19th century, especially in its later decades, and quickly captured the fancy of much of the reading public. The earliest examples, such as Poe’s Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Chesterton’s Father Brown, find their adventures solely in the natural world. But it wasn’t very long before other writers took the basic idea into the supernatural realm, to create the figure of the occult or “psychic” detective, such as Flaxman Low or William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, a solver of mysteries that involve, or at least often involve, the weird and uncanny. Like their natural-world counterparts, the occult detectives in this formative era were nearly all male.

But in Shiela Crerar, the heroine of this six-story cycle originally published in The Blue Magazine in 1920, Ella M. Scrymsour (whose full name was Ella Mary Scrymsour-Nichol) created a distaff incarnation of this type of figure, who can hold her own with any of her male colleagues. I first encountered the character in “The Werewolf of Rannoch,” a story in a horror anthology I read back in 2020. (Prior to that, I’d never heard of the character or the author.) Guessing correctly that Shiela was a series character, I tracked this book down in the Goodreads database; and having gotten it as a gift this past Christmas, I was very pleased to finally get to read all of Shiela’s exploits!

Orphaned as a child, Shiela Crerar was happily raised by an apparently bachelor uncle, a Highland laird with a lot of lineage but not a lot of money. The Sight ran in the family; both she and Uncle John were strongly psychic (her gift –or curse– as she’ll discover early on, allows her to see ghosts, something most people can’t), and she shared in his interest in and study of the paranormal. She’s a kind-hearted, frank and down-to-earth young woman who loves nature and likes to read; she’s also one with considerable determination and a strong will.

His sudden death when she’s 22 leaves her the owner of his smallish estate, Kencraig, but it’s heavily mortgaged. Not willing to sell a place that’s profoundly dear to her, she rents it out on a five-year lease, resolved to find a line of work that will ultimately let her pay off the mortgage (while providing for her in the meantime). When nothing else offers, she hits on the idea of offering her services as a psychic detective. (All of this is presented to the reader in the first few pages of the first story, “The Eyes of Doom.”)

As we learn in the last story, “The Wraith [the back cover copy incorrectly gives that word as “Wrath”) of Fergus McGinty,” her mission takes her five years to complete. That she completes it isn’t really a spoiler; from the beginning, I think that most readers would surmise that she will. Her career as an occult detective involves her in some very intense and dangerous experiences, well titled as “Adventures.” Besides the ones already mentioned, the other stories are “The Death Vapour,” “The Room of Fear,” and “The Phantom Isle.”

Her clients are mostly well-to-do Scots gentry, and her travels will take her to various Highland locales, including the Isle of Skye and its environs. She’ll deal with mostly supernatural phenomena (one story centers around what proves to be a case of very grim psychic imprinting), including murderously vengeful revenants, a homicidal “Elemental,” and lycanthropy. The latter is explained here as astral projection, in which the sleeping werewolf’s astral self projects –sometimes unknown to the projector, but in some cases deliberately– and can take on the substantial form of a ravening human-beast hybrid.

Scrymsour’s tales are plot-driven, straightforward, suspenseful and intense, with a real sense of danger and menace. Her prose style is direct and (along with the relatively short length of the collection) makes for a quick read. Most of the stories involve a backstory rooted in fictional (but realistic) events in Scotland’s long and often bloody history, including savage clan warfare and the failed Jacobite rising in 1745 and its vicious repression. I felt this exhibited some affinity to M. R. James’ “antiquarian” approach to the supernatural tale, which for me was a plus.

There’s some effective reference to Celtic and other occult lore. Scrymsour furnishes her heroine with a love interest introduced in the first story, Stavordale Hartland, so there’s a note of clean romance. If we picture the stories as taking place from 1915-1920, it’s not clear why Stavordale’s not in the military; but the Great War isn’t reflected anywhere in this corpus at all. Shiela packs a pistol and can use it effectively (the author describes it as an “automatic revolver,” which tells us that she knew virtually nothing about handguns!), but that plot element only appears in one story.

There’s not a lot of directly described gore here, but there is reference to mostly off-stage past grisly atrocities, and to present-day violent deaths of animals and humans, both adults and children; and in one case the murder of a two-year old child in real time, though it’s not described in detail and is over in four sentences. Unfortunately, Shiela’s heroic qualities don’t include quick reaction time; my biggest peeve with the book was that she failed to act in time to prevent this! Scrymsour’s characterizations are not sharp; Shiela is the best-drawn character, but Stavordale isn’t developed as much, and the chemistry between the two doesn’t come across as strong.

He also tends to address her with phrases like “little woman”, which I found irksome. But I didn’t find the message of the story cycle to be sexist; he wants her to give up her detective work and marry him, but she won’t do that until she completes her self-set mission. And though one reviewer holds the theory that Shiela’s psychic powers depend on virginity, so that marriage will destroy them, to my mind the conclusion of the last story suggests the opposite; Stavordale comes to realize that her Sight is a permanent part of her, whether she uses it to further a paid career or not.

Author: Ella M. Scrymsour
Publisher: Wildside Press; available through Amazon, currently only as a print book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

God is a Bullet

  By

★★★★
“God, faith, mayhem and a lot of blood”

To be honest, I never read Boston Teran’s novel. I wasn’t aware of the story until this movie came out here on DVD – but then the book was also never released in my country. I’ve every intention to read it and have already ordered it in English. However, I can’t make any comparisons between the book and the movie adaptation, directed by Nick Cassavetes, son of John Cassavetes.

It seems that when Teran’s novel came out in 1999, it caused quite a stir in Americas crime literature circles. Most agreed about the literary quality of the book: it won several crime novel awards and was nominated for even more. At the same time, its dark outlook on life, as well as the strong violence, were criticized. Teran’s style has been compared to that of Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Thompson and Cormac McCarthy. The author himself, who writes many different sorts of novels, is seen as some kind of mystery: few people seem to know him personally and he doesn’t give many interviews. But maybe he is just not interested in being a public personality (and why should he?), constantly standing in the limelight as some “star authors” do.  The movie rights were quickly bought by Hollywood and Nick Cassavetes planned an adaptation.

It seems to have been a passion project for him. But for whatever reason, it needed a quarter of a century until the movie, filmed in 2021 in Mexico City and New Mexico, would see the light of day. The main character is Bob Hightower (Coster-Waldau, best known as Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones), a police officer searching for his daughter. She was abducted by a violent sect who also killed his ex-wife and her husband. A former member of the sect, Case Hardin (Monroe) declares herself ready to help him. According to her, he would never have a chance to find the gang by official means, without his daughter getting killed immediately. Bob accepts her assistance, though doesn’t know how trustworthy Case is. Does she really just want to help him rescue his daughter, from the fate that Case herself experienced 12 years ago? Or does she have other motives?

That’s the story in a nutshell. But it’s much more complicated than that, and you also shouldn’t expect this to be a non-stop action movie: it isn’t. I think you could maybe call it a road movie. The search for the young girl, while actually leading there in the end, is more a “McGuffin”, in that it moves the main protagonists forward – but under the surface, a different story is being told. There is an evaluation or discussion about faith, belief, God and values between Bob and Case. He is a believer in God and Christian convictions, while she is essentially atheist. Inevitably, they clash in the beginning until they develop an understanding. They come from two different sides of the spectrum. It’s the cruel descent into a man-made hell, where there is hardly any law except what you make for yourself, like an old-time Western, which makes them partners who rely on and save each other again and again.

It’s the most fulfilling part of the movie. In a way, Case is Bob’s guarding angel; she knows about those people, how they behave, how to deal with them, also the danger that they embody as human life has hardly any value for them. Bob goes “undercover” to find his daughter which also means he has to look and appear like these people, so gets a full-body tattoo by “The Ferryman” (Foxx in a larger supporting role). The aim is to contact the sect, whose cult leader Cyrus (Glusman) is a specific piece of human scum, and deal with him. All of what has happened ties back to Bob’s father in law and his superior at the police office, though he doesn’t know this.

It’s an exciting and I’d even say great piece of film work, though regrettably, will probably never get the attention it deserves. As far as I can see the film never ran in German cinemas, and only I was barely aware of the movie coming out on DVD and Blu-Ray. As the movie wasn’t produced by one of the big studios, the money for marketing might not have been quite there, I assume. The film was criticized for the amount and intensity of violence and so-called misogyny, due to the fact that the movie doesn’t hold back. But bad things happen to everyone in this story, regardless if you are male or female, black or white. In that respect the film is truly democratic, mistreating everyone equally. There are no safe spaces for anyone here.

While I personally have seen worse, a little word of warning. The movie includes rapes, vicious murders, child prostitution, drug addiction, poisonous snakes, slashed throats, head-shots, and people getting killed with flame throwers or suffocated with a plastic bag. You name it, the movie has it. That said, the depiction of all the carnage listed is not gratuitous. I never had the feeling that Cassavetes indulged in violence for violence’s sake. However, if you belong to the more squeamish, this might maybe not be the movie for you.

That said, the movie feels honest in showing a different side of America: the ugly, dark side you usually don’t see in all these feel-good Hollywood movies anymore. You get the sense this is about real people experiencing real pain. Despite the violence, that is stretched over two and a half hours, giving the movie a certain kind of calmness and tranquility. Cassavetes gives his characters time to develop and it pays off handsomely. Scenes can breathe, and unlike a lot of movies today, it’s not all cut-to-the-chase. In the end, Bob and Case are just two lonely people who find each other, during their journey through backwoods towns and the desert, a trip that has something of a cathartic quality.

In the end – and that’s why it’s here – it’s in the main Case’s story. Yes, Bob hopes to find his daughter but he always appears a bit bland compared to her fascinating, broken character. The movie begins and ends with her. There are flashbacks and you start to realize that she is not just lost, she has been robbed of her childhood, that no one really cares for her. She may be on a journey to her own death as Case has no real place that she can call home. The whole depiction reminds me of characters like Revy from Black Lagoon or Lisbeth Salander. Or maybe it’s just my imagination running wild.

In any case, I was highly impressed by Maika Monroe’s performance and the movie as a whole. I personally had no problem with the depicted violence, and think this movie deserves more exposure. All told, if you want to see something different from the typical Hollywood entertainment, this might be of interest.

Dir: Nick Cassavetes
Star: Maika Monroe, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jamie Foxx, Karl Glusman