THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 101

MOVIE REVIEW: FOES (1977)

Written, Directed, and Special Effects Designed by John Coats

. . .

“I’m going to the other side of the island.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

UFOs. Flying saucers. People see ‘em. People wonder what they are, and why they’re so mysterious, always flitting about, teasing us, never quite letting us see the goods. All the photographs and video footage are indistinct, blurry anticlimaxes-if not total damn hoaxes. Some people write books about ‘em trying to explain what they are, how they came to be-and they end up making some wildass claims about the saucers and their presumed occupants. Abductions. Anal probes. Harvesting human sperm and eggs to mix ‘em with extraterrestrial sperm and eggs to cook up some alien-human hybrid omelets. Perverse conspiracies involving government/x-tro collaboration. This is stuff people claim is true! Not a shred of actual evidence, and yet people concoct entire cosmologies around a whole array of interstellar creatures. You have people writing extravagantly paranoid science fiction sagas but they’re published as non-fiction. Some marketing genius must’ve realized right quick that these alien abduction stories moved more units if you sold them as “shocking true stories.” What a fuckin’ racket, right?

As a kid, I used to believe all this stuff was true. Like, y’know, when I was K thru Fifth Grade, elementary school. I spent hours and hours watching TV shows that presented themselves as nonfiction narrative recreations of horrifying alien invasion scenarios of the most gruesomely intimate kind: people kidnapped out of their beds by strange entities that could walk through walls; alien mind control powers that could corrupt your perceptions by implanting screen memories; women forcibly impregnated with alien fetuses and nonconsensual medical exams that could be described as a system of organized high-tech rape-and when I asked my parents about this stuff they just kind of shrugged it off, didn’t seem to have much to say about it one way or another. I started to think that my parents were in denial because they couldn’t acknowledge their powerlessness before these alien masterminds. Of course, I grew out of all this by the time I hit middle school. Around that time I got into serial killers, gangsters, and world-ending diseases, so all that UFO stuff seemed less urgent. The X-Files came along and kinda gave the game away with its overstuffed mega-conspiracy style of plots which made all the paranormal/crackpot stuff seem like plug’n’play narrative gimmicks similar to assembling a tabletop role playing adventure from a Monster Manual. Mulder and Scully would encounter one reality shattering horror after another-and Scully still wouldn’t get it. The true conspiracy seemed to be a plot by Chris Carter to make Mulder look right all the time at Scully’s expense. By the time I got to the end of high school I was pretty much an atheist. 

Which brings me to the 1977 movie Foes, a film that benefits greatly from not trying to over-explain itself. Foes is about a flying saucer that harasses a quartet of people on a small island that’s home to a lighthouse. We get some exposition laden scenes of clueless military officials whose equipment is all being malfunctioned by an energy field projected by the flying saucer. The occupants of the saucer zap the humans with strange energy beams that pick them up off the ground and/or cause them to catch fire. You ever burn ants with the sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass? Well, now we’re the ants. Eventually, we see creepy lights come out of the saucer that may or may not be living beings. Much of the running time is taken up by nondescript humans overcome with a nameless sense of dread to be in the presence of the opaque and ominous saucer. Nothing is explained. We’re never told who or what the saucer and its accompanying lights are supposed to be, nor are we reassured that the government has any secret answers. You watch what happens, and then you have to make up your own mind.

Foes didn’t scare me here in this year of 2026, but I found it utterly fascinating to watch. It doesn’t back down from being creepy and mysterious. Sure, the special effects are obviously special effects, but they’re also precise and evocative. Foes is absolutely committed to preserving the mysterious and the inexplicable without any trace of romance or sentiment. Something from beyond takes an interest in us, and we may have to accept the fact that it will always be incomprehensible to us. 

Of course . . . we may also be beyond the understanding of the saucer beings . . .

You ever got the ants' side of the story before you burned ‘em on a whim?

Probably not . . .

COMICS REVIEW: LAWNS (2018)

Written and drawn by Alex Nall

Book design by Mike Freiheit.

Edited by Jon Mastantuono.

Published by Kilgore Books in July 2018.

. . .

“The whole town is crazy right now. It’s shameful the way people are treating each other. It’s enough to make you stop going outside. Things were different-back when you were here . . . What happened to the people that used to care for one another-the sense of decency and care. I’m beginning to wonder if it was ever here in the first place-or if it’s just something I imagined."

-caption text from Lawns (2018)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Lawns is a creator-owned black and white comic book or graphic novel that depicts a contentious small town mayoral contest. If I may resort to a vapid cliche I would sum up Lawns as “deceptively simple.” It’s a little over one hundred pages, and everything you need to comprehend it lies between its two covers. This is not like the endless corporate superhero soap operas of Marvel and DC. The art style is, at first glance, studiously unimpressive in its depiction of dirt poor working class people playing out their existences in a rural Illinois no-place. But if you read it through to the end you may find these lives rich with struggles, delusions, and hopes for the future.

There’s a town of 187 souls in some kind of nowhere-doesn’t even have a name. You have to drive sixteen miles southeast to a town called Sandbag for a grocery store. This is all according to the handy worldbuilding map on the back of the cover. Not a castle or a dragon in sight.

Allegedly, everybody knows everyone . . . but it’s not really like that. Everyone’s in close proximity, sure, but everyone’s also a prisoner of their own perceptions. 

There’s a guy named Chuck who has run unopposed and been elected and re-elected mayor over and over again. Chuck owns a tile and lumber store. Chuck’s hair is white, now, but it was still black when he first got sworn in. Aside from that-and a developing heart problem-not much has changed for Chuck. At one point, according to Chuck, the state was going to build a landfill nearby, bring in a bunch of decent paying sanitation jobs. But Chuck claims he argued against it, not wanting his beloved hometown to be defined by trash. This was, seemingly, Chuck’s last notable achievement as mayor, his last great stand, but that was a minute ago. Now, he faces a set of challenges to his long tenure in office. 

There’s a rogue canine shitting on people’s lawns. A kid has been bitten by that dog-or maybe it was some other mutt. The weird guy who owns the shithound-Roger-also refuses to properly maintain his yard. Roger’s next door neighbor is Carl, who installs windows for his living. Carl is tired of Roger’s recklessly pooping dog and his overgrown lawn. Carl also thinks Chuck is weak shit as mayor. Carl decides to run for office. 

Of course, weird guy Roger has his own perspective on things. He wouldn’t describe himself as weird. He just knows what he wants out of life. Roger likes his dog. Roger likes dogs in general. Roger does not like it when kids torment dogs with bottle rockets. Roger likes his overgrown lawn. Roger isn’t put off by bugs and wild animals. Roger isn’t looking for a fight, but he just does not give a fuck what other people think. We find out about Roger’s past, and why it is he values what he values in life.

The kid who got bit-Joshua-seems to have needlessly provoked the dog into attacking him. Joshua’s injuries cost his father eight hundred dollars at the hospital. Joshua’s father ends up beating him with a belt in frustration. I guess Joshua’s dad is fine paying for the injuries he himself inflicts. 

Joshua and Roger have quite a bit in common. Roger grew up with an abusive father and a mother who didn’t have much interest in him. So Roger struck out on his own, developing self-sufficiency at the cost of social graces. Roger lives in his head most of the time aside from the connections he makes with dogs and the natural world. Joshua, too, seems to be on track to become a runaway as the story unfolds.

Mildred, an impoverished elderly woman with back problems, is Roger’s one substantial human connection. Mildred spends her days writing letters to her long dead husband, Walter. Actually, it isn’t entirely clear if Mildred and Walter were ever married, or if Walter even actually existed, but her letters are sincerely written. Mildred’s nostalgic for a kinder, gentler past that she fully acknowledges might be a total fantasy. She has a car. She drives herself and Walter to the grocery store in Sandbag at regular intervals.

Carl runs a mean-spirited campaign against Chuck. At one point he stands by the road holding up a sign that says, “FUCK CHUCK.” One of Carl’s supporters puts up a more politically correct sign that says, “F**K CHUCK.” Chuck’s tough messaging seems to strike a chord with people who are tired of the same old cheese and crackers year after year.

But other people in town appreciate the benign stasis of Chuck’s eternal reign as mayor. Chuck’s super nice, after all, brings people cookies as part of his campaign outreach, doesn’t stoop to Carl’s gutter politics. Still other potential voters simply do not care. I won’t reveal the outcome, but the election ends up having the lowest turnout in the nameless town’s history. Amusingly, it might be the case that we end up seeing all of the participating voters over the course of Lawns’ 101 pages, so the turnout might be in low double or high single digits. 

Carl may put some readers in mind of Donald Trump, but remember that Carl actually works for a living. Trump inherited his fortune. Carl installs windows, and he seems to be good at it. Trump, who occupied the White House back in 2018 when Lawns was published as he does in the present year of 2025, has never had a real job, nor has he demonstrated any bankable skills aside from seeking attention from mass media outlets. Carl’s a jerk in how he goes after Chuck, but he can only exert so much influence in an impoverished town of 187 people. When Carl comes back down to earth after the high of his campaign, well, he has to be able to look other people in the eye. These limits are, perhaps, stifling, but they arguably put guard rails around a man tap dancing on the border between being a public servant and mutating into a demagogue.

All of this seems to be taking place in some hazily defined early 1990s. No internet. No (anti)social media to stoke conspiracy theories and online hate mobs. People gossip. People talk shit on the (landline)phone or in person. But they still have to face their neighbors. Even Roger and Mildred-oddballs who live in their heads-have to leave their houses to buy stuff and socialize. Carl’s girlfriend ditches him over his self-absorption and gutter politics. Chuck’s wife questions whether or not being the Forever Mayor is worth the stress. People are accountable to other people in their actual meatspace lives in Lawns, as opposed to an algorithm, a cadre of billionaire Dark Money puppeteers, or a rigid ideology. 

Lawns is not romantic in its depiction of its sparsely populated no-place. I think writer/artist Alex Nall is taking the “warts-and-all” approach. But Nall is also reminding us of how things might work in a world where you could not entirely deny the existence of the reality external to your perceptions and prejudices. It’s something worth considering.

F.A.Q. #16:

Q: Which video game should be adapted as a disappointing big budget movie?

A: Metal Slug. I would recommend Sylvester Stallone for director. He could apply the same bullet-riddled style he used for the fourth Rambo flick which always gave me Contra vibes but could be tweaked into Metal Slug territory with a little effort.

F.A.Q. #10:

Q: What’s your favorite song titled after a name?

A: For me it’s a tie between “Lucille” by Little Richard and “Debbie” by Architecture In Helsinki.

COMICS REVIEW: BIG QUESTIONS (2011)

by Anders Nilsen

Published by Drawn and Quarterly in August of 2011.

. . .

“You and I fulfilled our roles in the drama. Whether I was right about the egg is not important. The greatness of these events will be born out. We can’t expect our small minds to always get the details right in advance. You must have faith that it’s all profoundly for the good.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Why must the finches and crows fight? 

Why do humans insist that animals talk in human languages in their stories?

Is it dumb to seek higher spiritual purpose when all you need is material cause-and-effect?

Can you ever trust a talking snake?

Why is the owl so mean?

Are the finches secretly stupid despite all their heady philosophical/religious investigations?

Are the crows using humor to obscure the fact that they’re just callous assholes?

Are donuts really so evil, or are we dealing with strident anti-donut propaganda?

Is it possible for humans not to fuck everything up?

Big Questions is a graphic novel that asks . . . eh, heh . . . that makes some fairly large inquiries about the problems of existence. The answers are a mixture of the amusingly surprising and the punitively obvious. The punitively obvious is that humans are seemingly destined to fuck themselves and the planet to death with their macho insecurities and technological boondoggles. The surprises have to do with the array of chatty animal characters who end up unintentionally replicating much of humanity’s philosophical heritage in an off the cuff manner as they respond to various intrusions, mysteries, and disasters. 

There’s a large grassy wilderness area. A bomb gets accidentally dropped on it. But it doesn’t go off right away. Talking finches identify it as a huge egg and regard it with wonder. Wonder engenders intense philosophical/religious speculation among the finches. These speculations continue even after the bomb explodes. Later, a human jet pilot crashes his jet. The pilot survives, but he is tormented by nightmares of swans. The pilot wanders in a daze, perhaps suffering brain trauma from the crash, trapped between sober consciousness and hallucinatory whimsies. 

There’s a seemingly mentally disabled man who lives with his grandmother in a small house out in this wilderness. I say seemingly because by the end of the story he actually seems more able to survive in a world of disasters brought about by dangerous military technologies than the allegedly mentally able pilot and the pricey state funded system that permits his Top Gun existence . . . but that’s one of those “large inquiries,” isn’t it? 

Big Questions is more of an experience than a thesis statement. The five hundred eighty something pages of black and white art takes you on a cinematic ride through philosophical dialogues, underworld explorations, gruesome violence, and no easy answers. The finches aren’t really able to fully understand humans. Humans aren’t even trying to understand anything except how to dodge responsibility for their latest techno-cataclysm. And there’s no God to pray to for an easy exit strategy, but pray if it makes you feel good, I guess. Finches and humans and crows and snakes and owls and worms and dogs and grandmothers and grandsons and fighter pilots and strange accumulations of black dots that Voltronically form into pants and intermittent mandalas must figure it all out for themselves. Only those of us that actually exist are permitted to take a crack at the Really Huge Interrogatives. It’s an honor, I guess, but also . . . kind of a huge pain in the ass.

THE NEW DREAM #33:

stepping carefully through total darkness

debris, obstructions, junk, boxes packed with whoknowswhat

banging my knees

catching my toes against an unyielding corner, wrenching them out to a wrong angle

I stumble and fall right onto my face

keep getting tangled up in wires

walking for miles and miles

‘til a screen lights up

fills my sight

scrolling, searching, self-diagnosing

“find a steep hill, ascend until you heal or you can no longer move”

the perils of AI search results online

THE NEW OBVIOUS #14:

Proust bites into a madeleine, writes a masterpiece.

Trump tears into a bucket of KFC, gives a ninety minute speech full of racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, nonsensical word salad defenses of tariffs, and threats to deploy the military against people that disagree with him.

Therefore . . . keep on reading Proust, and don’t vote for Trump.

MOVIE REVIEW: LABYRINTH OF DREAMS (1997)

Written and Directed by Gakuryu Ishii

From a novel by Yumeno Kyusaku

Photographed by Norimichi Kasamatsu

Edited by Kan Suzuki

Music by Hiroyuki Onagawa

Production Design by Toshihiro Isomi

Starring

Rena Komine as Tomiko

Tadanobu Asano as Niitaka

. . .

“You must never, ever become a bus conductor.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Boredom in a small town out in the sticks. 

You’ve got to make your own fun.

Even if it’s all in your mind.

Or maybe it all starts in your mind until you find a real life adventure to displace your boredom.

Either way . . .

Tomiko works as a bus conductor. She punches tickets. She offers an additional pair of eyes at dangerous crossings-especially train tracks. This is in some vaguely delineated Japanese past-1930s? 1940s?-in which the monotony of existence in a small town is all-consuming. No significant reference is made to the world beyond this town. Tomiko’s job as a bus conductor is explicitly presented as a job for women. Only men are permitted to work as bus drivers. Tomiko narrates her story by way of a series of letters to her best friend. We find out that she had great expectations that this job would be more of an adventure, but, alas, it’s a grind like all other things. It becomes exciting only when Tomiko takes on the role of a civilian detective.

Another bus conductor dies in a suspicious accident. There’s a rumor that she was murdered by a bus driver who manipulated and seduced her into becoming a victim. The implication is that this predator has insinuated himself into the job of bus driver because it allows him proximity to his prey. Whether this is the truth or just a creepy folktale is the mystery at the heart of Labyrinth of Dreams. 

A prime suspect emerges: the sullen yet handsome bus driver Niitaka, whom Tomiko first sees taking a nap right on the train tracks. This sets up a core ambiguity: is Niitaka just a deeply depressed person, or is he a monster? Maybe he is a monster but also feels remorse over his killings which drives him to various antisocial and self-destructive behaviors. Tomiko takes a very black and white perspective on things, casting herself as a dogged seeker of justice right out of a paperback thriller. She’s convinced that Niitaka is the murderer. But the film outside of her constructed narrative allows us to see Niitaka in other ways. Labyrinth of Dreams uses close-ups of Tomiko’s relentlessly suspicious face to remind us that we’re supposed to be on her wavelength even while other shots create a static of uncertainty. Niitaka himself is so emotionally closed-off that we end up projecting whatever pleases us onto him. 

Tomiko finds herself attracted to Niitaka. Niitaka seems to take an interest in her. Tomiko possibly sees their romance as an undercover operation to ferret out the truth, but she also seems to sort of like him. The key scene between these two happens over two glasses of wine. I won’t spoil what exactly occurs but Niitaka challenges Tomiko to play a game of “chicken” involving the two glasses. This is all deeply suspicious . . . but ultimately it's as ambiguous as everything else. The most that can be said for sure is that Niitaka is a deeply troubled person . . . but is he a monster?

Labyrinth of Dreams uses black and white cinematography to evoke harsh feelings of isolation and fear as well as a dreamy romanticism. Everyone that appears in front of the camera is an actual human actor, no deep fakes, no computer generated sidekicks. All of the props, costumes, locations, the bus, the train, the train tracks, the trees, the fog-it’s all there, it all exists, even if it’s all lit, framed, and assembled into a stylish set of sequences that defy easy explanations. Ultimately, Tomiko and Niitaka’s lives are very, very small. They each try to leave their mark upon the world-for good, for evil, maybe just to beat back the oppression of insignificance, maybe they don’t actually know why, maybe they can’t ever know.

Maybe Tomiko’s just inventing a narrative-any narrative, even a ghastly one-to escape a tightly constrained existence in a world that looks down on poor working class women.

Maybe Niitaka’s depression drives him to minimize his own narrative to reduce the surface area of emotional vulnerability.

There is an ending that points to some possibilities, but much is left up to We the Audience to sort through, assemble, discard, and/or frame as significant.

Labyrinth of Dreams asks a lot of its audience, and I respected and admired it for doing so.

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 21

 

MANGA REVIEW: SHUNA'S JOURNEY (1983, 2022)

Written/Drawn/Colored by Hayao Miyazaki

English language translation by Alex Dudok de Wit

Edited by Mark Siegel and Kara Valdez

Cover designed by Kirk Benshoff

Interior design by Kirk Benshoff, Sunny Lee, and Angela Boyle

American edition published in 2022 by First Second

Original Japanese language publication in 1983 by Tokuma Shoten

. . .

“Spotting the slave traders’ vehicle, Shuna got in front of it and unleashed a burst of fire at point-blank range. The attack caught them completely off guard. Shuna kept firing with wicked composure, as he would when hunting snow leopards. By the time he had run a ring around the vehicle, he had shot them all down.”

-text from page 62 of Shuna’s Journey

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Shuna’s Journey is a manga-adjacent work from the master animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose most recent feature length film is The Boy and the Heron, and whose other works include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I refer to Shuna’s Journey as manga-adjacent because even though it will most likely be shelved in the manga section at the bookstore it apparently is considered an emonogatari-an “illustrated story”-as per translator Alex Dudok de Wit’s afterward. Indeed, Shuna’s Journey is much more “compressed” in its storytelling than other manga works which often allow the action scenes to play out cinematically-almost moment to moment-across many pages and panels. Shuna’s Journey evokes the widescreen majesty of John Ford and Sergio Leone, as opposed to the hyperkinetic action of contemporary shonen sagas such as One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and Kaiju No. 8. Having said all this, I still personally found Shuna’s Journey to be very manga-like: it’s fast-paced, full of beautifully detailed environments, and inhabited by incisively stylized humans coexisting with fearsome, outsized monsters and bygone ruins of forgotten empires.

A boy named Shuna leaves his fading village to seek power and adventure in a vast, harsh world full of magic and cruelty. Shuna wanders the ruins of dead empires, battles slave traders, and comes face-to-face with bizarre powers which humankind can never hope to tame. Shuna’s main quest is for some magic seeds-a fairy tale element-but he is forced to do battle with the evil forces of the world using a variety of guerilla warfare tactics. All this is rendered in evocative watercolor art in a sort of storybook style which lends a peculiar grace to this hard-boiled fantasy adventure. Long time Miyazaki fans will perhaps see in Shuna’s Journey a kind of roadmap for many of the themes, character designs, production designs, conflicts, and strange creatures that would go on to achieve global pop culture iconography status. Shuna’s Journey is so dense with the primal material of Miyazaki’s subsequent work that it almost seems like the artist conjured a prophecy of his future glory via the power of a maniacal work ethic. 

Shuna’s Journey also works as a story all unto itself. It is not merely of interest to Miyazaki obsessives and collectors. If you have never even heard of Hayao Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli Shuna’s Journey offers an experience complete unto itself. The main ideas here have to do with survival and power. Shuna leaves his fading agrarian village to seek a better life for himself. Shuna is also tantalized by the prospect of finding the source of magic seeds which promise a future of abundance beyond subsistence farming, beyond hunting and gathering. To this end, Shuna manufactures his own bullets to feed the rifle handed down from the previous generation. Shuna’s a very model of rugged self-sufficiency, and yet he seeks ever more power. This restless seeking comes at a terrible price. Shuna’s adventures are grand: he kills slave traders with the bullets he himself crafted; he liberates slaves; he stands his ground against ghoulish night raiders; and, much like the player characters of The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, he’s persistent and intuitive enough to see the way forward through bizarre, formidably occulted terrain. The cost is that Shuna suffers trauma from violent battle, sleepless exhaustion, exposure to the elements, and deprivation of nutrition. Shuna’s capable, yet also mortal. 

Late in the narrative, there’s a change in perspective which suggests Shuna’s single minded pursuit of the magic seeds must be tempered by ethical connection to other people. His personality and agency are evacuated by his experience of a terrible otherworldly power which requires him to enter another’s care. This level of hardship and the complexity it entails brings a sense of gravity into the fantasy. Unlike with Marvel Cinematic Universe products-where endlessly malleable computerized action figures get iterated across endless potential product outputs- in Shuna’s Journey great power comes with both great responsibility and consequences. The power Shuna attains might be wielded responsibly, but it will always do some violence to its wielder. Shuna’s hope lies in his allying himself with the oppressed who endure injustice while also fighting to expand their domain of autonomy.

Shuna’s Journey is an engaging fantasy about power, self-reliance, and finding a place in the world against oppressive regimes of both nature and humankind. Its seemingly happy ending is shadowed by a certainty of future conflicts against the powers of the world. One is left with the sense that Shuna and his allies will endure no matter the hardships.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #63: LONGLEGS (2024)

I’ve seen longer.

MOVIE REVIEW: ZEDER (1983)

Directed by Pupi Avati

Photographed by Franco Delli Colli

Music by Riz Ortolani

Edited by Amedeo Salfa

Written by Pupi Avati, Maurizio Costanzo, and Antonio Avati

Starring

Gabriele Lavia as Stefano (Novelist)

Anne Canovas as Alessandra 

. . .

“Don’t you realize I’m telling you about insane things!”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

There are places known as K-Zones. If you bury the dead in one of them then they will come back to life. A conspiracy involving academics, priests, police, and politicians evolves to conceal the existence of K-Zones since they kinda transform the basic reality of existence. A civilian investigator-a struggling horror novelist-chances upon the secret of K-Zones and tries to unravel their secrets. 

Zeder lays it all out for the audience pretty directly, and then lets us observe its protagonist sink deeper into danger. The horror novelist isn’t hapless. He’s actually quick to realize people are lying as part of a vast cover-up. A would-be whistleblower fails to appear at a secret meeting. Everybody he talks to is obviously choosing their words a little too carefully. Most people, if confronted with the situations in Zeder, would simply go home, but the horror novelist cannot resist becoming a Full Protagonist just like he’s been trying to write in one of his rejected manuscripts. It felt to me like his failure as a pulp author had metaphysically displaced his mundane reality with a genre reality. Artistic frustration might be the truly eldritch power at work in the deepest background of this low key saga.

Zeder is a horror mystery centering on a fantastic premise that’s set exclusively in concrete, real world locations, which are all photographed with an unnerving clarity. The look isn’t nearly as shadowy as one might assume. It ends up being about how a t-shirt and jeans Everyman navigates mundane spaces that have been infused with otherworldly dread. It’s light on the blood and gore. Zeder leans into dialogues of interrogation and atmospheric traversals. By accident it resonates more with point and click adventure games than contemporary horror movie trends. The soundtrack emphasizes a tightly looped motif of tension and danger much like a video game soundtrack. It also vibes with trendy Terminally Online aesthetics: Urbex, Dead Mall shit, Liminality-I wouldn’t be surprised if a YouTube or Nebula grifter has done a video essay on Zeder. 

Zeder is an engaging film experience if one doesn’t get too caught up in the plausibility of the K-Zone idea, which is not overtly explained in detail-nor should it be. Zeder works best as a chronicle of a t-shirt and jeans guy’s odyssey into the unknown despite the best efforts of creepy, aggressive gatekeepers-the church, the cops, the academy, the state-to keep him puttering about upon the surface of things. It might not even be a conspiracy about policing the borderline between the worlds of Life and Death so much as it is about enforcing the border between being a Protagonist of a grandiose narrative and just settling for being a nobody in the great crowd of nobodies.

MOVIE REVIEW: WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (1956)

Directed by Fritz Lang

Written by Casey Robinson

From the novel The Bloody Spur by Charles Einstein

Cinematography by Ernest Lazlo

Edited by Gene Fowler, Jr.

Music by Herschel Burke Gilbert

Starring

Dana Andrews

Ida Lupino

Vincent Price

Rhonda Fleming

George Sanders

Howard Duff

Thomas Mitchell

Review by William D. Tucker.

While the City Sleeps opens with a creepy sequence in which a serial killer gains access to a woman’s apartment. We see the perpetrator full-on. This is not a whodunit. He’s a delivery man for a corner grocery in New York City. His job gives him access to people’s homes. He’s killed before, he’ll kill again. He preys on women, exclusively. We get a first person murder sequence of the woman we just met. We’re seemingly set up for a character portrait of a twisted psychopath and the hunt for him that will no doubt ensue. We get those things, more or less, but they end up being told from the perspective of the employees of a media empire who compete with each other to transform atrocity into profitable front page headlines. It’s this perspective that makes While the City Sleeps modestly intriguing.

Because it’s not a mystery. We know who the perpetrator is from the jump. This puts the emphasis on how and why questions as opposed to inquiries into who. It engages with the how a little more substantially than the why.

It’s not much of a character study of psychopathy. We quickly come to understand that the killer targets women. Sure, there’s some pop psychology prattle offered up to explain his works, but in 2024 misogyny is widely understood to be a motive force all on its own. 1956 was, I guess, a simpler time, but this movie more or less presents a predator who would make sense yesterday or today. He’s a creep. He’s dangerous. He’s also kind of a bore.

It’s not much of a police procedural. The cops are on the case, but we basically interact with them from the journalists’ side of things. So no super detective stuff. No reassuring Law and Order routines. What is interesting is how While the City Sleeps depicts the porous flow of intel from cop to reporter. Everything hinges on insider contacts. There’s an unofficial yet normalized understanding that the public desires both the reassurance that the police are on the case and the lurid come-on of true crime infotainment on a daily schedule plus extra editions when something dramatic breaks. The cops and the reporters have worked out the give and take. Some journalists get favored access, some don’t.

It’s not much of a thriller save for three key sequences-which are efficiently set up and paid off. This mostly ends up as a character drama about the employees of the media empire, and how each one chooses to chase the big scoop. There’s a not entirely convincing gimmick built around the death of the big boss of the media empire. The big boss’s wastrel son takes over and pits the division heads against one another to drive up productivity. This struck me as superfluous: a New York City media operation is already going to hit the ground running to win the scoop on a local serial killer saga. Which is what happens, anyways. The wastrel son element is, well, wasted. 

It’s not much in the visuals department. It’s not terrible. But it is directed by Fritz Lang of Metropolis and M among other masterworks. While the City Sleeps can’t compare to Metropolis in terms of city visuals, nor is its creepy killer near as memorable as Peter Lorre’s depraved predator in M. It’s certainly competent and concrete, nothing too arty or conceptual I guess, but it lacks atmosphere. 

While the City Sleeps works best in how it depicts a media machine responding to an extreme series of crimes. The true fascination here is with how the different employees of a media empire work at cross-purposes even though they’re all part of the same outfit. But this is a modest achievement at best. The story loses momentum a good ten or twelve minutes before the finish. The ending is a betrayal of all that has been established about the cutthroat gamesmanship within the media conglomerate. At the last it tries to sentimentalize what has throughout  been depicted as a hard-boiled zero sum game, thus shitcanning its last bit of credibility. While the City Sleeps is far from the worst thing ever put to film, but it's off-puttingly mediocre for the talents involved.

LOST POSTER BLURBS #5:

“If the filmmakers cannot be bothered to even spell the main character’s name correctly in the title of their movie, then I reject the expectation that I am obliged to show any sort of customary civility towards the admittedly pitiable illiterates dominating Hollywood of late.”

-William D. Tucker dissecting MaXXXine on the Shindig Institute’s secretive member’s only film culture podcast rumored to be called Cinespersal.

COMICS REVIEW: BATMAN & ROBIN ADVENTURES #25 (1997)

“DEMON IN THE SKY”

Cover Art and Script by Ty Templeton.

Penciled by Bo Hampton

Inked by Rich Burchett and Terry Beatty

Colored by Lee Loughridge

Lettered by Tim Harkins

Associate Edited by Darren Vincenzo

Edited by Scott Peterson

Published by DC Comics/Time Warner in 1997, cover date December ‘97.

. . .

“Up until this moment, I was uncertain of the limits of this technology. Now I’m certain it has none.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Batman gets abducted by a flying saucer.

Who’s piloting the flying saucer?

Ra’s Al Ghul.

How did Ra’s Al Ghul get a flying saucer?

Well, aliens abducted Ra’s Al Ghul. 

Ra’s Al Ghul refused to be a prisoner. 

Ra’s Al Ghul killed the gray aliens onboard, and hijacked the saucer for his own use. 

And then Batman comes along in his Batplane. 

That’s when Ra’s Al Ghul used his new extraterrestrial vehicle to abduct Batman in midair. 

Impressive how Ra’s turned a stressful situation to his advantage, isn’t it?

Of course, Ra’s fucks it all up by monologueing to Batman about his new toy, and his new scheme to use an alien death ray to melt the polar ice cap to drown industrial civilization. 

But Batman’s a skeptic who doesn’t believe in UFOs and alien abductions and crap like that, so he thinks Ra’s is bullshitting him. This is funny . . . because Batman’s a longtime friend and colleague of Green Lantern, Superman, and the Martian Manhunter-but maybe he’s never crossed paths with the probe-happy grays before? 

Still, Batman’s obliged to chase Ra’s around the block yet again since it’s obvious the seemingly immortal evildoer is up to no good.

That’s Batman and Robin Adventures #25. It mixes 1990s Batman the Animated series shit (mainly the visuals) with The X-Files shit (alien abduction, MIBs, skeptic v. believer themes). It even has one of those ambiguous-but-not-really endings that The X-Files is notorious for-you know, where skeptical Scully is pretty much always wrong? This time around, Batman is Scully to Robin’s Mulder. It’s a trifle, but it’s fun.

The flying saucer is controlled by brain waves. Ra’s Al Ghul’s 700 years of martial arts and esoteric meditation practice enables him to easily assert his willpower over the dronelike mentality of the gray aliens. Ra’s is into an eco-terrorism trip of late, and so he monologues about using the flying saucer’s death ray to bring on the collapse of industrial civilization. Once all that capitalist bullshit’s properly scuttled, he’ll be able to enjoy fresh air and clean water just like in the old days. It’s a commendably ambitious plan. (FAN FICTIONAL DIGRESSION: I like to imagine that Ra’s got inspired by playing Final Fantasy VII on the original hardware. Ra’s seems kinda old to take up gaming, so I figure Talia Al Ghul-who doesn’t appear in this issue-hipped him to FFVII off panel. “Dad, I know you don’t like technology, but this game is totally your vibe!”)

You even get a scene where some John Keel-style Men In Black exhort Bruce Wayne to investigate Groom Lake. The implication is that the MIBs know that Bruce Wayne is also Batman. This is an amusing wrinkle in the Batman mythos. Maybe this thread could pay off in future “Extraterrestrial Hunter” adventures where Batman and Robin get tasked to interdict anal probes and cattle mutilations and the like.

My favorite panel depicts Ra’s as having bloodshot, unblinking eyes. It’s like Ra’s mindmeld with the flying saucer has turned him into even more of a sleepless power addict. No rest for the ambitious.

Batman and Robin Adventures #25 is a perfect dollar bin find. It’s a double-sized issue. It’s a quirky, self-contained episode in the endless Batman saga. It’s also on-trend with the escalating 1990s nostalgia wave of late. Read it once, read it twice-read it ‘til you get bored, and pass it on to someone else. Or keep on reading it ‘til it falls apart. Just don’t leave it entombed in a polybag with a piece of cardstock.