Film Review: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

One of the things about having read Paperbacks From Hell is that Grady Hendrix does a really solid job of laying out that for all the ways that the horror genre can be progressive, it can also be tremendously conservative as well, drawing the root of the threat of the horror from societal prejudices. The same lies with the thriller and disaster genres – a place where The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) falls. When a screenwriter or author succumbs to the temptation to make bystanders and victims into archetypes as a shorthand, what archetypes are used matter.

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Anime Review: Oshi No Ko

If you have followed the anime industry in Japan, and with it have paid attention to Japanese voice actors and the pop singers who do the opening and closing songs of the shows you like, you may have come to the realization that the Japanese music industry kinda sucks, and maltreats people (something that was also previously covered in Key The Metal Idol and Perfect Blue). This past season we got Oshi No Ko, an adaptation of a manga from the writer of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War and also the artist of Flowers of Evil, which gives its own take on this, which I think gives a different spin on some of those beats.

There will be spoilers below the cut. There is some real benefit of going into the show – at least the first episode – completely unspoiled, but if you’d rather not, that’s perfectly okay.

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Manga Review: Naoki Urasawa’s Monster

Naoki Urasawa’s Monster was the series that got him on my radar when I learned (10 years ago) that Guillermo Del Toro was trying to get a live-action adaptation of the series made for HBO (which ultimately fell through). That was enough to get me to hunt down the manga and slowly, over time, read it through my local library system (impacted by books falling out of and then back into print). Well, at long last, I’ve finished reading it.

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Book Review: The Atrocity Archive

Well, I’ve just finished reading Charles Stross’s espionage horror book The Atrocity Archive, which contains both the titular book, as well as a semi-short story sequel, “The Concrete Jungle”. Overall, the book is a very enjoyable work of fiction for those interested in semi-Lovecraftian horror, dark bureaucratic comedy, and/or espionage fiction.

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