Mark Twomey

The Devil’s Candy doesn’t need a review. People set out with the best intentions and a lot of money. They made an unloved movie from a popular novel. That’s it. 

But I’ll mention that Melanie Griffith puts in a better performance in film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities than Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. Needy and damaged in the book, but dynamite on the screen.

Tom Wolfe despised the characters he wrote about in his novel. De Palma is ambivalent about the characters in his. Perhaps that’s why the book reading audience rejected the movie. The movie characters weren’t reptilian enough.

A stronger entry than Asteroid City, but it’s smaller scale than The French Dispatch. It’s a three-hander film where the interplay of three characters drives the narrative.

Benicio del Toro gives a charismatic performance as magnate Zsa-Zsa Korda. A shrewd entrepreneur of strategic foresight who is amoral. But he’s a striver, and he’s so likeable that even enemies who want to see him dead can’t help but like him.

Liesl, Korda’s 21-year-old estranged daughter played by Mia Threapleton is the morality absent in the Korva genes. Threapleton plays the role of a pipe smoking trainee Nun deadpan and it works. She has moments where she looks like her mother, Kate Winslet. That passes when she pulls a knife on someone while giving them a dead eyed stare down.

Michael Cera is an actor who can set my teeth on edge, but he gives a marvellous performance in this as a bug loving academic, Bjørn Lund. He has a Nordic accent that I’ve heard in person and the comedic intonation is spot on. While del Toro is the standout of the picture, Cera is a close second.

What’s the story? It doesn’t matter. The Korda fortune will either continue for generations or it’s riches to rags for the family. Our three characters go off and their adventure decides the outcome.

It’s a tight 105 minutes, and I appreciated it didn’t overstay its welcome. I’ll watch this again when it gets a home release.

Horror movies done well are cheap to make, pack in viewers and make much more money than they cost. The good ones leave an impression. Neither "Death of a Unicorn" nor "Drop" left enough of an impression for me to write a review but Until Dawn is different because it doesn't try to adapt the source material. It does its utmost to ignore as much of the source material as possible.

The basics are there. A group of young adults find themselves stuck in a house over the course of the night. They need to survive until dawn. When they don't, the night starts all over again but their physical and psychological wounds start to accumulate.

The video game is a butterfly effect simulator where your choices lead the protagonists down different story paths. The movie is a haunted house slasher flick with supernatural aspects. The movie director, Shazam's David F. Sandberg, has a horror background and knows better than to try and shoehorn in six hours of video game plot into a 90 minute movie.

What Sandberg has made from a video game story of young adult guilt and psychological disintegration is a smartphone era slasher movie. It doesn't try to be a young adult drama, though young adult drama sets the plot in motion. Choices do have consequences. But there's nothing here about someone's choice leading to these consequences. Are you looking for answers? You're not getting any in this movie. Enjoy the jump scares.

Jump scares are things Until Dawn does well and it looks good though you can feel how cramped the budget is through the limited number of locations. The practical effects are gruesome in a way that will please horror fans. The jump scares I mentioned before keep the tension up from the opening scene right until the end. The cast are capable but not memorable except for Peter Stormare does his usual great work of playing that unsettling Peter Stormare character we've seen in other movies.

This is a trash movie that I'd watch again only if they announced a sequel. Should you watch it? Probably not. But did this movie leave an impression? Yes it did. It was very well made for a B-movie horror flick.

Two charismatic leads can carry a lot. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are two charismatic leads and the burden they carry is the flimsy story of this movie.

There is a mist filled gorge somewhere where two concrete observation towers face each other from opposing sides. Opposed geographically and politically. Each tower has a top tier shooter responsible for maintenance of the automated defences preventing what is in the gorge from escaping. These lethal maintenance people are not to have any contact with each other.

Before the first hour has passed, romance blossoms across the divide. It is a movie about distance and communication. It’s Sleepless in Seattle with snipers facing the stuff of nightmares.

Not that there’s any real threat. The lethality of Taylor-Joy and Teller’s characters is clear from early in the movie. Indeed, it is what is in the gorge that should worry about them. Shootouts and explosions in the second half precede a predictable finale; however, the film remains an interesting distraction.

This is one of those mid-budget genre movies Hollywood used to send to movie theatres on a weekly basis. A simple story with effects and explosions that would entertain you for two hours and then send you on your way. But mid-budget movies were risky with making a profit. Streaming saved this type of movie because tech companies have goldmines of money and millions of customers to entertain.

Here we have an action director who is comfortable with what, in places, is spotty CGI delivering a picture worth a watch for its leads. If you want a romance-action mashup movie that will show you the headshots but will tastefully blur out the sex, this is the movie for you. If you are looking for anything else beyond that, this offers nothing.

By the time I had read Harlan Ellison’s work, his talent had deserted him. A lifelong career isn’t guaranteed, but watching one’s career fade must be a terrifying, waking nightmare. The Last Dangerous Visions, the irrevocable part of a once ground breaking trilogy of short story collections, explains why the talent evaporated and for those 60 pages it’s worth the read.

In this book, I found two interesting pieces under glass in a museum of the mediocre. Short story anthologies are like that, but "Dangerous Visions" was a career making anthology for emerging writers. It was such a success its sequel, “Again, Dangerous Visions”, had established authors knocking on the door to get their story in. This third book has none of the cachet of the first two and, as Straczynski points out, some people he reached out to did not want their work included.

Focusing on the key essay by Straczynski, Harlan’s long time Sancho Panza, Ellison’s crushing bipolar disorder explains but doesn’t excuse the worst of his behaviour. You empathise with the man, reading of projects large and small he was not capable of writing beyond a handful of pages. The unfinished pile of stories for the planned three volumes of The Last Dangerous Visions, few of which seem to have had written introductions even after 50 years, must have been a cacophonous failure blaring from the filing cabinets in his writing room. Like The Tell-Tale Heart, but this was the murder of stories bought but not published.

A Night At The Opera by Robert Wissner was a stand out story to me. When you realise the author was 24, you can’t but acknowledge that hard work alone isn’t enough, there has to be talent. The various single page Intermezzos got me thinking beyond the page. Besides that? Most of this left me unmoved, and I will forget it.

“Dangerous Visions”, a relic of the 60s, will be available in paperback at local bookstores for as long as there are bookstores. I have a copy that I reread a few years ago and still enjoyed it. If you see it in paperback, pick it up and see if it resonates. Its direct sequel “Again, Dangerous Visions” has some solid stories, but it’s a bloated book that needed a stronger editor. Ellison was a people pleaser to the right sort of people, other writers and Hollywood stars. His audience was not the right sort. He could say no to the audience until he dropped dead but couldn’t turn down a poorly written story from a friend he had or wanted to make. I dropped “Again, Dangerous Visions” into a book collection bag soon after finishing it. As for “The Last Dangerous Visions”, if you want to read it, see if it’s available at your local library and take it out as a loan.

As readers, we owe authors nothing more than they owe us. You buy a book or not and you get a book or not. Even if you are a fan, that’s where the contract ends. Of the Dangerous Visions series, only the first anthology is worth the exchange between author and reader. And as you’ll read, Harlan was at the pinnacle of his talent while working on the first and best of the series.