The first, original
Hack/Slash story from Image Comics has arrived and
My First Maniac takes us back to the early days of Cassie Hack's career.
Collecting the four-issue mini-series into a single volume, the book charts Cassie's life from the moment she is forced to kill her mother - the back-from-the-dead slasher known as The Lunch Lady - up to the point where she meets her future traveling companion Vlad for the first time.
It's a powerful story, giving great insight into Cassie's mind and motivation, but although penned from a first-person perspective, it also gives insights into how the outside world perceives her as well - expressions that come across as 'cool' and 'moody' in the first instance being thrown back in her face as 'lame'.
Bundled together with an introduction by
Warehouse 13's Allison Scagliotti, the usual collection of gorgeous alternate covers and some notes and sketches from author Tim Seeley on the development of the story, My First Maniac is essential reading for
a Hack/Slash fan.
However, rather disappointingly, I found the companion on-shot comic -
Me Without You - which examines Vlad's life up until the moment he meets Cassie, to be not so enthralling.
It was, of course, well written by Seeley and nicely illustrated by Daniel Leister, who also did the honours in
My First Maniac, but I felt it added 'too much information' to Vlad's backstory.
I hadn't realised how, until I read it, little we actually needed to know about Vlad's backstory to get inside the character's head. He's already a wonderfully innocent soul, with pure and honest motivations, that I didn't find the complex web of family that was woven around him at all enticing.
Blood On Satan's Claw (1971): Along with
The Wicker Man and
Matthew Hopkins - Witchfinder General,
Blood On Satan's Claw is part of an exclusive, niche, sub-genre of horror that could be called "rural horror", concerned as it is with pagan goings-on in the isolated British countryside.
Set around a 17th Century village, the strangeness starts when a farm hand, ploughing a field, unearths a demonic skull - and, in the process, releases "the devil" into the local community.
An evil, corrupting influence starts to seduce the village children, led by the deceptively gorgeous Angel Blake (Linda Hayden), to form a Satanic coven 'harvesting' growths of "devil's skin" (
furry patches that spontaneously appear) from their sacrificial victims.
Beautifully shot and quite lyrical in its build-up, the movie doesn't spoon-feed its audience, instead leaving much open to interpretation. It is also quite fascinating structurally as it doesn't feature a distinct a protagonist, rather shifting focus between a number of characters as different people interact with the growing problem.
Unfortunately, the tension and mystery rather unravels in the climax when "the demon" appears - and is clearly just a man under a cape, wearing a rubber mask - and is all too easily overcome. As with many horror films of that era
Blood On Satan's Claw also doesn't really wrap anything up, rather the film just stops.
Quirky and quite Lovecraftian (
isolated communities, strange magic, unexplained happenings, tomes of forgotten knowledge etc),
Blood On Satan's Claw - you have to love the schlocky name - is almost worth watching for Linda Hayden alone who commands the screen with her evil, manipulative beauty.
Piranha (2010): Stripped of
its awful, blurry, colour-leaching 3D effects,
Piranha is a gloriously Grand Giognol parade of blood and boobies that doesn't take itself at all seriously.
From the Richard Dreyfuss-centric opening through Elisabeth Shue's overworked sheriff trying to the close the beach during its busiest season,
Piranha also wears its
Jaws homages with pride.
After an earthquake opens a 200ft fissure between Lake Victoria, Colorado, and a subterranean lake a giant shoal of flesh-eating prehistoric piranha are released - just in time for Spring Break. As hordes of drunken, sex-crazed teens flood to the water it's feeding time for the hungry fishes!
Jerry O'Connell - from
Stand By Me,
Sliders and a host of other projects - virtually steals the show as the sleazy director of online
Wild, Wild Girls porn videos - who is trying to shoot his latest 'blockbuster' - around the lake, although the ever-reliable Christopher Lloyd gives him a run for his money in his all-too-brief cameos as the eccentric, local ichthyologist (
and almost certainly close relative of Doc Brown).
A perfect beer-and-pizza movie,
Piranha is pure schlocky, monster horror for those evenings when you just want some unchallenging, titillating entertainment with large splatterings of gore, very little in the way of plot and nothing to recommend it to those who take cinema way too seriously.
The clearer, sharper image of the 2D (
normal) version of the movie does reveal the occasional shortcoming in the special effects, but at least you can get to see the images clearly and
Piranha is all about providing a feast for the eyes - not the mind.