We Need to Talk About Mike

Real quick, SPOILER ALERT for Better Call Saul—though I’ve got a blanket spoiler warning in effect for this blog, since I’m not talking about a thirty-year old horror flick I thought I’d throw an extra one in here. Just to be nice. Okay, really because I don’t want to hear any whining.

Anyway, SPOILERS.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s up with Mike Ehrmantraut’s storyline this season. While I’ve enjoyed the hell out of Jimmy’s (de)volution, Kim’s internal battle for her soul, Howard becoming a hot mess and the fallout from Nacho’s switcheroo with the meds, I’ve been baffled by Mike’s plot the last few episodes. His infiltration of Madrigal Electromotive and subsequent chat with Lydia were fantastic, but his story has flagged quite a bit after transitioning to his supervised construction of the super-lab.

Why? There’s no tension.

When the super-lab was first revealed on Breaking Bad, I did wonder how Gus Fring managed to build such an expansive meth-making operation beneath his laundromat. But at the same time I didn’t need to know—I chalked the presence of the lab up to Gus’s intrinsic Fring-ness. Let’s face it, the man could make the Earth rotate clock-wise with nothing more than a steely glare (I mean maybe a raised eyebrow too).

Flash forward to BCS, where we get the origin of the super-lab, which is about as interesting as the origin story of any other building. Someone built it, the end. There’s no tension to the storyline because we know that no matter what trials and tribulations the German team face, the super-lab gets built. We also know Mike doesn’t get killed by a random falling beam, and we don’t care enough about the Germans for any of their construction-related deaths to affect us one iota (although that Kai guy is kind of a jackass).

So what the hell is Vince Gilligan doing here?

I mean, he’s doing something, right? He’s Vince fucking Gilligan, not Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Everything means something, everything has a purpose. He doesn’t have throwaway characters, as evidenced by some of the cameos and bit parts in the series (so glad to see Huell back and looking pretty damn healthy, by the way). Why is he showing us this?

Maybe because this is Mike’s heel turn.

Even though Mike doesn’t harbor any illusions about who Gus Fring is, he’s still a good guy who takes pride in his work, and wants others to do the same (see the aforementioned Madrigal montage). His word means something to him, a handshake is an iron-clad deal in his world.

He still thinks they’re going to build this lab and then the whole thing ends in Miller Time (as Mike might say).

And that’s the trick. Despite the precautions, despite the sally port, Gus Fring will not suffer these men to live once they’re done building his super-lab. Alex and Cyrus are going to slaughter them, and Mike’s going to lose his shit. He’ll confront Fring, maybe there’s even a moment where he comes close to killing him. We might end the season with a rift between Mike and Gus, but by next season that rift will be healed.

This storyline isn’t about Mike building a super-lab. It’s about the scales being pulled from his eyes, and when they are he’s not going to look away, completing his transition from cop to crook. And when we look back at these last few episodes, all the Bing Crosby montages and jackass German guys will have been worth it.

KillerCon Recap

The weekend before Labor Day, I was lucky enough to attend KillerCon in Austin, Texas. KillerCon is an intimate event for writers and fans of extreme horror and splatterpunk. Attendance is limited to a few hundred people, so you really get a chance to rub elbows and clink glasses with some of your favorite authors.

I got into Austin around 2pm local time and immediately headed for a brewery. Pinthouse Pizza had some good reviews and was en route to my hotel in Round Rock, and I’m really glad I stopped there. The Electric Jellyfish IPA hit the spot, the Pizza Rolls were delicious, and they had a Donkey Kong machine. Super cool people, too.

Next up was Austin Beerworks. They had a pretty neat outdoor area which I eschewed in favor of the air conditioned main tap room. San Diego has ruined me—I’m not built for temperatures above or below 70 degrees. The Teripax Belinerweisse was pretty tasty, but my favorite was the hilariously-named Gal-Lager Watermelon Lager. Perfect.

After Austin Beerworks I headed back to the hotel, where the front desk got me mixed up with Brian Keene (I’ll take “People I Don’t Mind Being Mistaken For” for $1,000, Alex). Then I went down to the bar, where Ed Lee and Christine Morgan were hanging out. A veritable deluge of awesome authors followed, including Mary Sangiovanni, the aforementioned Brian Keene, Kelli Owen and Patrick Freivald. I’m not saying all this to name drop, but to promote KillerCon—it’s really that kind of convention where you can just bullshit with the guests of honor all night.

The next morning, I hit the convention proper. Wrath James White was personally checking people in and had a badass coffin full of absolutely ridiculous donuts. Plus coffee. Bless you. Most of the dealers were still setting up, but I had a whirlwind thirty minutes of meeting a bunch of people I’m friends with on the Internet but hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting in real life before—Max Booth, Lori Michelle, Bob Pastorella, Rose O’Keefe, Jeff Burk, Lucy Taylor, Leza Cantoral, Christoph Paul, Joe and Kacey Lansdale, Sam Richard, Carlton Mellick III, Jarod Barbee, Patrick Harrison, Michael Louis Dixon, shit, I feel like I’m forgetting a bunch of people—sorry, you know who you are! Almost everyone I met I’d either had some interactions with online or read their stuff or even taken a class with, so the whole con very much felt like a family reunion.

Later that morning, I was lucky enough to join Wrath James White on a panel moderated by Stephen Kozeniewski on religion and horror. We discussed whether there are still more stories to tell about religion (there are) and discovered that zombie narratives are really Buddhist horror stories. Good times, and I couldn’t have asked for a better crowd.

The rest of the weekend was awesome, highlights included watching Ed Lee read, the Deadite Press Gross-Out Contest (special congrats to Stephen Kozeniewski for taking home the grand prize) complete with Mandy DeSandra guest appearance, the small press/indie publishing panel, the first annual Splatterpunk Awards (watching Ed Lee win the first awards of his career AND accepting an award for Jack Ketchum was amazing), the Clash Books reading, Max Booth’s new Hulu series, and Christoph Paul’s Blacula song.

And finally the LOST FILMS reading.

Bob Pastorella read his incredible story, and then I performed a shortened version of mine since the original would have taken too long to read. Max Booth joined me onstage as my hype man, and while I can’t disclose what actually transpired during those thirty minutes, I can confidently state that KillerCon has not experienced anything quite like that before.

By the end of the weekend, I was pretty exhausted and a little stressed as to how I was going to get all the fucking books I bought back to San Diego, but also completely stoked at how great the con was. Fantastic programming and a truly great (and damn good-looking) crowd. Special thanks to Wrath and the rest of the volunteers who made this event happen. If you get a chance next year, check it out—you won’t be disappointed.

Death by Exposition

I caught the found footage flick #Screamers last night (now streaming on Amazon), based on the fact that I enjoyed the hell out of another Dread Central Presents joint (Terrifier) and the whole "tech nerds hunting an evil viral video maker" premise seemed fun. Despite some decent performances, solid justifications for continuing to film when creepy stuff happens, and the sheer joy in seeing annoying startup gurus get murdered, the whole thing seemed like a donkey-brained waste of time. And a lot of that stems from the fact that there's too much exposition.

Something on the order of the first fifteen minutes of the film are devoted to a "documentary" where we meet the various personages involved in Gigaler, an awkwardly-named YouTubish startup (based in Cleveland because BUDGET). The employees are varying degrees of charming, their banter isn't bad, and the set design is pitch-perfect. But nothing that happens in the first fifteen minutes makes me think I'm watching a horror movie. Imagine if Blair Witch was just shopping at REI for backpacks, making GORP, and Heather doing an improv class or something and no one got to the woods until the third act. And no one MENTIONED the witch until the second.

Yeah, that's what #Screamers is doing.

Sci-fi and fantasy often (and rightly) get criticized for info-dumping on their audience, and that's basically what this movie is doing. I'm kind of surprised they didn't start with Tom and Chris signing an office lease or filling out incorporation paperwork. Point is it's the WRONG place to start the movie, and there's nothing creepy or unsettling (for the audience--Griffin whose title is probably 'social media ninja' is apparently weirded out by milk). Eventually, Griffin finds a stupid jump-scare video that was already dated in the early '00s and everyone up to the execs thinks it's going to put Gigaler on the map.

Uh, no.

Add in some nonsense about a Jack the Ripper suspect and, well, the less said the better. Since the film centers on a viral video, the best place to start would be with the video itself. Two minutes of conversation about Gigaler's finances (and that was a major missed opportunity to increase tension and justify the dunderheaded way Tom goes about, well, everything he does--they're desperate for traffic because they're weeks away from closing their doors and no one knows but the founders) and history could have supplanted fifteen minutes of fake documentary. Cut all that shit and then maybe they could have worked in a scare in the first few minutes.

Or, you know, at all.   

Crying Werewolf

One of the hardest parts of constructing a solid horror narrative is giving your characters a reasonable motivation to stay in the location where the terror happens--even casual fans will snidely ask, "Duh, why don't they just leave LOLZ" the minute spooky shit starts happening. Other then setting your story in the proverbial cabin in the woods (or going post-apoc), the most effective way to believably put your characters through the ringer is to employ the apocryphal (and false)  fable of the boiling frog. Start with innocuous but ambiguous happenings, ratchet up the tension and severity, and by the time your characters realize what kind of story they're in it's too late. One way to do this is to have a character cry werewolf--they are the only ones experiencing the most severe manifestations of paranormal activity (hey-oh), but for whatever reason the other characters don't believe them.

Hell House LLC almost gets this right.

In HHLLC, a crew of professional haunters crashes a creepy, abandoned hotel in order to turn it into the haunted house to end all haunted houses in time for the Halloween season. Head haunt-cho Alex has directed Paul to document their efforts, ostensibly to make it easier for them to replicate the experience when they rebuild everything the next year. Paul's the first one to notice anything out of the ordinary going on, and Alex blows him off when Paul tries to talk to him about it.

So far, so good--we've got a character experiencing crazy shit that would make most of us run screaming out of the house, but he's not the one in charge. Alex isn't seeing or experiencing anything other than being woken up in the middle of the night by his annoying friends/crew members, so he's got no motivation to leave. Paul does, but doesn't have the ability to make it so. This dichotomy gives them a realistic reason to stay in the hotel until everything goes well off the rails.

Unfortunately, there's one moment where everyone's motivation falls apart, and the damnedest thing is it's eminently fixable.

Paul captures a sequence of film that's undeniable--the immobile clown dummy from the basement standing at the top of the stairs, the dummy moving its neck (which the characters have repeatedly stated it could not do), and then disappearing. In the sequence of film everyone in the house is accounted for. Paul plays the film back for the other characters, who all go oh shit and then quickly assume it's just Paul fucking with them.

Which almost works, but there's a problem. It's clear from the footage that none of the guys could have dressed up in the clown suit--we see them seconds later on the other side of the house. In order for Paul to be pranking them, the footage would need to be doctored, and that particular plot point isn't set up well. There are moments where Paul is portrayed as an irreverent slacker, but not as a master prankster--if his character had been set up as a hipster Loki it would have worked. But given what we're shown, I'm not buying the reactions of the other characters to Paul's footage.

To fix this moment, and by extension the reasons why the characters choose to stay in this haunted hotel, a quick scene could have been inserted earlier in the film showing Paul executing a serious practical joke on the rest of the crew. Preferably involving video editing. That's all it would take for me to buy the other characters' dismissive attitudes.

So, to recap--have your character cry werewolf. Have a relatively powerless and reputationally-challenged member of the group bear witness to the real horror. Give the other characters plausible reasons for not believing him or her. And then let the terror ensue!

Building a Better Robo-Twist

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is an awesomely-80s movie about the daughter of a murdered mask salesman and an alcoholic doctor* who looks like the love child of Tom Selleck and Charles Bronson fighting a Celtic Bond villain and his robot henchmen to the tune of the most insidious jingle** this side of It's a Small World. This movie literally has it all--mustaches, shitty parenting, schlubby leading men, indoor smoking--all the things that made the '80s great. BUT it's also got a serious robo-twist at the end that doesn't quite work. 

After defeating the evil Conal Cochran*** and speeding away from the mask factory, the amazingly-named Ellie Grimbridge and Dr. Challis crash into a tree where it's revealed that HOLY SHIT ELLIE IS A ROBOT. It's a crazy, jolting twist, but one that doesn't quite work.

What makes for a good plot twist? The ideal plot twist is one that is completely obvious in retrospect but that the reader or viewer did not see coming. It's a delicate balancing act--the writer has to provide enough information for the twist to make sense and to be justified, but also has to misdirect even the most astute observer so that the game's not given away too soon. There's a reason why people bring up The Sixth Sense when talking about plot twists--it's highly effective. Sure, everyone has that one jackass friend who claims they totally guessed the ending (after drinking thirty-seven beers and getting a handjob from their super hot girlfriend who lives in Canada, no you wouldn't have met her), but for most of us it landed perfectly. 

So what of H3's robo-twist? Why doesn't it work?

There are two different options here:

1. Ellie was a robot all along.

2. Ellie was replaced with a robot double when Conal Cochran kidnapped her.

#1 doesn't make sense, because why would she bring Dr. Challis to Santa Mira in the first place? Challis has nothing Cochran needs to make his plan work, having the doctor drink and fuck his way through little Dublin until he wastes Celtic Blofeld and his robo-goons is just an unneeded irritation. Why introduce that element of risk? Unless of course Cochran has a literal sexual fetish for having his plans fucked up and catching a laser to the brain. But that seems unlikely to say the least. Occam's razor dictates he wants his plan to succeed, so why purposefully try to fuck it up****?

#2 makes even less sense than #1. Why didn't Robo-Ellie stop Dr. Drunkass from making it rain witchy laser buttons and taking out Cochran and his robo-goons? And while the robots all look lifelike, none appear to have the capacity to act human or even speak. Robo-Ellie would be like six generations beyond the goon-tech. Not to mention the fact that there's no history of replacing characters in the movie with robots. Maybe if they'd telegraphed the reveal by having Marge come back as a robot, it would make sense.

So how would I fix this robo-twist presuming I, as the H3 screenwriter, left it in and didn't have Michael Fucking Meyers pop up from the back seat ready to paint the interior of the car with Dr. Challis' .23 BAC blood?

Simple. Ellie's a robot from the beginning. Her job is to lure Dr. Challis to Santa Mira, but Dr. Challis isn't a medical doctor anymore--he's a world-renowned optical engineer. Once in Santa Mira, Cochran and Ellie manipulate the good doctor (not too difficult, since he's drunk AF the whole time) into helping refine the designs of the chips that go into each Silver Shamrock mask. This change makes Ellie's robothood make sense, AND serves a more important function--now when Challis tries to stop the mass murder of trick-r-treaters, the stakes are even higher because HE'S PARTLY RESPONSIBLE!

If David Gordon Green goes on to remake Season of the Witch, he better fucking hit me up.

*Dr. CHALLIS=chalice, GET IT? 'Cause he's a DRUNK.

**Happy, happy, Halloween, happy happy Halloween, happy happy Halloween, SILVER SHAMROCK! Boom, now it's in your head too. 

***I kept hearing it as "Colonel Cochran" and the Blu-Ray doesn't have subtitles, thanks assholes

****And if you're really into having your plans shit-canned, why recruit an alcoholic doctor instead of like an actual James Bond type?

Dead Herrings

Currently reflecting on a particular narrative choice made in The Belko Experiment, and can't decide how I feel about it. So maybe you can help, dear reader.

In Belko, a mysterious voice orders the various office drones employed by Belko Industries to off each other or face dire consequences. When these ordinary people understandably balk at this bizarre order, the voice demonstrates the power it holds over them by detonating explosives implanted in each employee's head--implants they agreed to when they took their positions with Belko, thinking they were tracking devices to be used in the event of their kidnapping. The voice also uses the explosive implants to prevent employees from removing cameras or from hanging banners from the roof asking for help. As a plot device, the explosives are highly necessary, as they provide an incentive for these otherwise normal people to murder their fellows.

Except there's one employee who doesn't have an implant.

Early on, we meet Dany Wilkins. It's her first day at Belko, a narrative device in and of itself--a way for other characters to deliver the exposition the audience needs by explaining things to the newbie. In her on-boarding meeting, co-worker Vince explains the tracking implants and tells her to make an appointment to get one.

Out of 80 people in the building, Dany is the only one who DOESN'T have an implant and isn't beholden to the instructions of the voice. She can disobey his commands at will, and not have to worry about getting her head blown up from the inside. 

Except she doesn't.

The movie positions Dany as a potential final girl, and then unceremoniously offs her. Dany's trackerless status is never brought up. It never matters. Instead we get a bit of a deus tech machina from good guy Mike Milch (after he beats the COO to death with a tape dispenser to become the last Belkite standing*). 

So is Dany's lack of tracker meant to be a red herring, a clue to confuse us and make us think she's the survivor? Or is it more of a dead herring--a plot point that gets dropped later in the narrative?

I'd argue it's more of the later, as her trackerless status isn't engaged with--less a misdirection than a dead end. If she'd been sent on a mission only she could accomplish, only to get dispatched in the elevator, I think her arc would have worked better for me. Making something matter, making someone matter, and then having them fail? That's so much more of a dagger to the heart.

*Bonus rant: wouldn't this have been an even better movie without the guns? Imagine if all the employees had been forced to kill each other with whatever they could find around the office. The movie would have been that much more gleefully gruesome. The gun cabinet made things way too easy.  

That's NOT How You Anti-Hero

Don't watch Anonymous 616.

Or maybe do, this post will probably make more sense if you've seen it, but I'm definitely not recommending this thing to anyone, so when you've sat through an hour and half of pure what the fuck don't look askance at me, okay?

As with everything I do here, SPOILERS.

I write about horrible people that do horrible things. Theoretically I don't have a problem with a movie about a pervert who smokes DMT, tortures his friends to death, and then cuts out a twelve-year old's heart and eats it in a misguided bid to become God, although with something that extreme it's got to be handled very, very carefully to be effective.

THIS MOVIE IS NOT EFFECTIVE, for one primary reason: this is not how you anti-hero.

Anonymous 616 follows Sgt. Hipster (I can't remember any of the characters' names and I don't want to give this thing's IMDB entry a single fucking click) and a bunch of cannon fodder including Director's Wife*, Bland Realtor, Other Chick, and Daughter. Oh yeah, and Reverend What the Fuck there at the end. None of the characters are interesting--Bland Realtor's main distinguishing feature is that he likes to play shitty butt-rock at a high volume because he can, Other Chick is Vaguely Ethnic™, and Director's Wife has godawful taste in men in both the movie and real life. We learn nothing of consequence about any of these people, and none do anything of note other than die miserable deaths at the hands of Sgt. Hipster.

I've got no problem with a morally ambiguous lead. I fucking grew up in the '90s, where every single character was an anti-hero including Superman for a hot minute. But anti-heroes need to have some sort of unorthodox morality, an interior code. Think the Punisher or Dexter Morgan--neither kills wantonly, both have certain types of people that they won't kill, selection criteria, etc. Dexter wouldn't have saran-wrapped Rita (RIP) to a table because of a paranoid suspicion that she was cheating on him.

Sgt. Hipster isn't an anti-hero, he's a creepy POS from the beginning, and there's really no conflict. His own personal Tyler Durden IMs him and tells him he can do whatever he wants, and he does--Jesus Christing his best friend to the wall with a nailgun conveniently left lying about, smothering his girlfriend with a plastic bag, and much, much worse. It's like if Hostel followed Saladhands for the whole movie. What the hell are we supposed to be cheering for?

If Sgt. Hipster had struggled with his destructive impulses in a meaningful way, this movie might have been kind of interesting. If Director's Wife, Other Chick, or Daughter had turned into the typical Final Girl and put a few nails into Sgt. Hipster's skull, this movie could have been a run-of-the-mill horror trifle. As it is, the movie forces the viewer to sit in an irredeemable garbage person's POV for an hour and a half with no one to root for. The good guy's don't have to win, and we don't have to follow them, but if the monster's front-and-center we need to be able to glimpse the humanity under all those teeth.

And here? There's not even teeth, just dentures and the meat that gets stuck in between.     

*Not 100% on this but pretty sure.

UPDATE: If you want to debate, great. I'm wrong about all kinds of shit. But don't fucking post your own movie reviews here or links to your blog, they will be deleted.  

Watch This

Editing the tenth or so draft of the latest novel and identified a new pet peeve of mine--the verb "watch" and all its iterations. While the word has its uses, most of the time it just doesn't belong. 

"Watch" is what I call a distance word. It creates unnecessary space between the text and the reader. We don't need to know that a character watched something happen, if we're in their POV it's implied. Here's an example from my novel:

"Jan watched sparks from the fire crackle in the night sky, drifting on a light, early summer breeze."

But how about just "Sparks from the fire crackled in the night sky, drifting on a light, early summer breeze."

The second one's better, right (maybe not good but better)? "Jan watched" doesn't add anything, but it does take up space. And it filters the image a bit, right? Instead of giving us the pure, unadulterated version, we have to picture someone else looking at the thing that's being described.  

Of course there are times when you have to throw a "watch" in. If a character's watching something is integral to the story, it might make sense. For example:

"Rock watched his friends laughing and hanging out and wished he felt like doing the same."

Here the "watching" is closely tied in to the way he's feeling. There's probably a more poetic way to put this, and I would never argue it's the best sentence I've ever written. But it does feel needed here. 

Or this one, maybe:

"Rats nipped out of their hidey-holes, watching carefully for the thing that stalked the hallways"

Here it's a description of rodents watching, not a character watching something. Which I think works. 

But most of the time, it's just not needed. Do we need to "watch" a monster creep closer, or can the monster just creep closer? I think it can, and should.