The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft

HP Source

The Complete Fiction
Of H. P. Lovecraft
by H. P. Lovecraft
Knickerbocker Classics - Racepoint Publishing
ISBN: 978-1631060014

I write this account of my recent researches into The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, not to serve as a caution or celebration to such explorers of literary intent who come after me but more as an accurate account of my findings that stand as testament to the slip into the mind shredding insanity that may be lifted wholesale from the sweet and slow miasma of his enthusiastic portent.

The facts simply, as I see them, are that I have been reading the works of one Howard Philips Lovecraft, off and on, for almost four decades of my life in one form or another, conveyed by various and fantastical lurid covered compendiums of his words in varying forms up to about ten years ago, when the Penguin Modern Classics published three collective volumes of his work in paperback form. However, I then came, a year or two ago, upon a handsome looking hardback tome proclaiming the entirety of his fictional output, minus the poetry which is of less interest to me and without samples of his non-fictional articles of which, I have to confess to the world now, that I know very little about. My hand was drawn to this heavy edition, comprising some eleven hundred pages of his fantastical gnarly brain windings in a foil blocked and embossed slipcase, because I felt that, despite the brilliance of the Penguin editions, this would be both everything in one venue and also may contain, which upon reflection I’m sure it does, small stories which may not have been included in the various other chilling anthologies from which I have partaken over the years.

So it was then, that I chose the two weeks of the summer recess from my working environment in the year of our Lord 2020, when the accursed Covid plague that has breached the livelihood and sanity of my fellow man lay lurking outside the city population’s front door like a shadow lurking in the whispering darkness, to further delve into these cosmic mysteries. Each afternoon, after my morning’s ponderous and sometimes sinister early activities, I organised a brief sojourn into the summer house at the far end of my garden and sat with the volume in question as the sun ate away at the day and the squirrels peaked in past the double doors of my preferred exile.

The works, I realised, as I began to devour them with less trepidation than I perhaps should have exhibited, were organised into some kind of chronology reminiscent of the order in which Lovecraft wrote these tales of other worlds and his legendary Cthulhu mythos - often peppered with the effects and paraphernalia of the Elder Gods and their alien brethren - as opposed to the ragged order in which they, indeed, found commercial publication to the general public at large, some posthumously in the long wake of success after this writer’s tragically early demise in 1937,  at the tender age of 46 and one half years old. This gives one a sense of the honing and development of both the author's skill at crafting his yarns and also of the rising degree of sophistication which such tales of questionable implication can be considered to have some great merit or accomplishment. Which, I might add, for the most part, the majority of these narratives certainly demonstrate.

As I began to approach the half way mark, where loosely recurring characters such as Charles Dexter Ward and Richard Upton Pickman, in whatever form, human or otherworldly, they appear to be manifesting in each subsequent tale, I began to realise that there was both a pattern to the general nature of his works but also, as I read further, I realised that there was one unflinching truth which was astonishing in its occurrence in the majority of this man’s work. I should perhaps hold my tongue, or at least stay my keyboard, rather than utter the central contrivance upon which I stumbled at this time. I have read various volumes in my studies of the dark worlds beyond our human recognition over the years but I had not made such an alarming discovery even in such tomes as the Liber Ivonis, the Cultes de Goules or the De Vermis Mysteriis. Nor, even, had my dabblings with a certain ‘hard to find’ French translation of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred revealed a similar ingredient to that which I had stumbled upon in my appreciation of this much ‘influential beyond the realm of sleep and death’ writer who is H. P. Lovecraft. I will not write of this again unless I feel, later in my ramblings, that I am forced to reveal this fateful ‘trick of the wit’ which I can scarcely consider without a troubled frown reshaping my outer visage.

That Charles Dexter Ward could be considered a cypher of that very writer is perhaps not problematical until one finds mention, without actually meeting, a quick reference to a character in Through The Gates Of The Silver Key... which he wrote with the help of one Edgar Hoffmann Price... known simply as ‘Howard Philips’. Of course, the fact that these are where the source of Mr. Lovecraft’s initials spring, perhaps should in no way make the former any less of a stand in for the latter, thoroughly unexplored character. I did, however, find it startling in his use of the nomenclature in this instance.

As I continued my explorations I had, as I made clear, found a pattern to his work and this seems to take the form of three kinds of tale made manifest in his writings. The first type, which tend to develop to almost unendurable lengths, a curiously intense sense of foreshadowing of things to come, are the tales of terror of either a supernatural or alien design. These I find honest and noble but, although my mind could recall almost no details of Lovecraft’s fiction which I had previously perused, they held no real surprise as to the nature of the twist in the tale... an outcome which is sadly shared by the entirety of his output, although truth be told, my revelation as to the nature of his strategy and the layers of continually creeping portent certainly doesn’t help the potency of his ultimate ambition.

The second type that he demonstrates is that which I can only think of as his travelogues. These tend to take place in the shadowy world of dreams, in which the central characters - most of Lovecraft’s aspects tend to narrate proceedings in the first person form - describe the architecture and psychological feel of certain wonderlands and forbidden places in a realm entered by sleep but with sometimes less of an obvious return in sight. These I find perhaps the dullest of affairs in all this writer’s canon although, I have to say, that I finally took some small enjoyment from his somewhat gruelling and long work The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath, where none was found before.

The third type is the happier fusion of these two styles with the travelogue nature of certain styles of the second archetype supporting and making more concrete the diabolical nature of the account and it is these that tend to make up a proportion of my favourite of his tales. I might mention here that of my two absolute favourites, At The Mountains Of Madness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the former exhibits the third type of yarn spinning while the latter is perhaps, in some ways, a much loved throwback to his earlier tales of terror, albeit one which demonstrates that a sense of humour, though not readily apparent in the po-faced nature of his written form, is certainly not lacking in the heart of the artist.

As I read through this mad mountain of erstwhile fantasy, comprising examples of varying human transformation such as of fish or ape, reanimated corpses stumbling about in varying degrees of success, body swaps from one realm to another and the hideous, lurking horrors of Lovecraft’s fantastic imagination... I also found there to be the profound influence of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, not to mention the name checking of certain friendly contemporaries and the stuff of their tales such as Robert E. Howard and young Robert Bloch. There is even a tale, ghostwritten as the popular Harry Houdini, which was a commission for the esapologist’s own magazine, where his central ‘real life’ character certainly takes up the familiar visage of a typical Lovecraft protagonist and this, too, tends to slip into the less dreamstate version of his travelogue template.

In addition to these references and, perhaps the reason for the successful incline and influence of this wordsmith in later years, was the weaving together of many of his ‘weird tales’ into a single, if loose fitting, cloth. The metatextual nature of which nobody can deny and perhaps this knitting together of different parts of his tales with the many references to the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and places in Arkham such as Innsmouth and Dunwich, is what made the workmanship so proudly displayed now an appealing prospect for the preservation of his life’s work. There's even a tale, The Thing On The Doorstep, that acts as a direct sequel to The Shadow Over Innsmouth... although the concept explored therein is much different.

All this I took in as I continued to read, afternoon upon afternoon, with a fervour no alienist could cease, until I at last reached the final tale which, once again, proved my terrifying deduction about the structure in which this consummate artist presented these antediluvian phantasmata to his potential readers. This is the one thing which made me shudder and which has haunted my dreams when I think back to those sunny afternoons of reading these chill and casually unspeakable terrors, rewarding the efforts of my matutinal activities. As Lovecraft himself wrote at the opening of his famous tale The Call Of Cthulhu, which I quote here for the understanding of the reader... “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

Alas, such correlation was not destined to be stifled in mine own case as I reveal now to you, patient reader, my one terrible discovery of this writer’s eerie and powerful works which will forever mock me when I revisit his fantastical realms - otherworldly or terraqueous. And it is this.

For the majority of these stories found in The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, the writer crafts the tale in such a way that, since we usually know the outcome of the final fate of the central character given the tremendous amount of foreshadowing employed by the artist, that character will usually make a dreadful and groundshaking discovery about two thirds or three quarters of the way through and then, after this has happened, will give excuses as to not reveal that dark secret until such a time as it needs to be truly known. Hiding this information in plain sight from the reader, he waits until the very last paragraph, sometimes the very last sentence of a tale to... REVEAL THE NIGHTMARISH TWIST OF THE THING THAT HIS WHOLE DISCOURSE RESTS UPON.

Professor Nuts4r2
Miskatonic University
Arkham

Doc Savage - Mr. Calamity/Valley Of Eternity

Repel Without A Cause

Doc Savage - 
Mr. Calamity/Valley Of Eternity
by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618273185

So in the latest, quite hefty, volume of The Wild Adventures Of Doc Savage, with Will Murray once again writing as ‘the new Kenneth Robeson’, we have not one but two new tales of the bronze giant and his companions. I was kinda puzzled as to why the company did not just put this out as two separate novels of, roughly, 400 pages and 200 pages apiece as people would surely have paid for these as separate novels. 

I can only assume the answer to that is that this book must be, in some ways, an homage to the old Bantam reprints of the original Doc Savage pulps, when they were printing some of the stories from when the magazine started cutting down the cost and going with tales which were slightly shorter than what might qualify as a ‘full length’ novel. What they used to do was to put two issues into one novel to make up an impressive and highly collectable range of two-in-one stories (although they’re quite expensive now, I think... I have only one or two of the original ‘double reprints’). What was so interesting about these was that the original cover art on those old reprints was a straight vertical split between two entirely different paintings, each illustrating a different story. Now, since it’s apparent from a black and white illustration opening the second novel in this tome that cover paintings were produced for both titles, I kinda wish the publishers had made good on this analogy (if, indeed, that was their idea) and gone for an old style, two-in-one, split painting to give it a feel for those. This avid reader would certainly have appreciated the nod. 

The other way this volume differs from those old reprints is that, like pretty much most of Murray’s tales of Clark Savage Jr, it’s quite a huge page count compared to those old stories. Indeed, this one runs to around 600 pages and, in the first story featured here, Mr. Calamity, Doc doesn’t even enter the story until around 100 pages into it. Also, both the stories in this volume are, in some ways, sequels to some of the original Doc Savage stories. Mr. Calamity is a sequel in terms of the strange force which is causing people to fly into the air to their deaths, which turns out to be the element Repel, first discovered by the man of bronze and his team in the 1937 novel Repel (sometimes known as The Deadly Dwarf). This is not Murray’s first sequel to Repel, as others of his novels have featured a specific character from that story too. The second novel here, Valley Of Eternity, is in some ways, a sequel of sorts to both the first Doc Savage adventure, The Man Of Bronze and also two others, if memory serves, where Doc Savage returned to the Ancient Mayan civilisation which affords him his wealth to do his life’s work and which features Princess Monja (played in the 1975 movie by Pamela Hensley, who would go on to play Buck Rogers' nemesis Princess Ardala a few years later). Valley Of Eternity is also a partial sequel to Murray’s own Doc Savage adventure The Secret Of Satan’s Spine (which I reviewed here) as well as mentioning a huge cast of one off characters from various Doc Savage adventures over the decades... which he thankfully verifies and clarifies in footnotes at the bottom of the appropriate pages. 

Mr. Calamity is set in the hills of Wyoming and is expertly written by Murray, as the majority of his Robeson tomes are. I especially like the way he no longer tries to fool his readers when his characters are in disguise in this one... at least I don’t think he’s trying to do that. For instance, in Mr. Calamity, you know straight away when a woman travelling through Wyoming sees a man swimming for his life in the sky that she’s none other than Doc’s cousin Patricia Savage in disguise, even though Murray doesn’t actually reveal that for a few chapters... I’m pretty sure he’s not trying to hide the fact from his readers. Ditto when Doc Savage is ‘killed’ later in the book and a new 'giant sized' character turns up without mentioning that he’s really Doc for a good many chapters. I’m glad he’s not trying to pull the wool over his readers eyes like he does with his other characters in this as it can sometimes be irritating when you think he’s deliberately holding back on you. 

There’s a nice moment in Mr. Calamity when Doc survives an experience which nearly does take his life and finds himself stranded on top of the summit of The Devils Tower in Wyoming, where Murray goes into the history of the monument and reveals, among other things, its original name. Readers might remember The Devils Tower as the very prominent plot device used by Steven Spielberg in his movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. The book reads, in some ways, very much like an old Western serial and it’s not a globe hopping adventure, as many of the others have been. This story is refreshing in that it features Pat, Long Tom, Renny and Johnny but doesn’t, for once, include the two of Doc’s most popular companions, Monk and Ham... although they were back for the second story here (although none of the companions, aside from Pat Savage, have a prominent role in Valley Of Eternity). It’s a nice pulpy adventure yarn though and up to Murray’s usually excellent standard. 

Valley Of Eternity is an adventure of a very different sort, with a letter received from Doc’s long dead father which forces Doc to go seeking the ultimate adventure, something which he has never cared to dabble in before and which could well be his undoing... matrimony. Yes, Doc Savage is charged with producing an heir to carry on his deeds for future generations and the majority of this story is definitely played for laughs... which is fine, as it happens. Mr. Calamity ends with a sentence which actually made me laugh out loud and he manages, in Valley Of Eternity, to walk a fine line between humour and ‘the Doc Savage brand of adventure’ which few have dared and certainly never succeeded as much as Murray does here. The story is an eye opener, very funny and somehow simultaneously threatening to throw everything about Doc’s adventurous lifestyle out the window and put the future of him and his companions in jeopardy. Now I’m not going to tell you what happens here but I will say that, by the end of the story, Mr. Murray does contradict, quite significantly, the current, additional Doc Savage timeline as established in comics over the years. I can't really tell you how without ruining the ending of this one but I wonder how people feel about this milestone.

One thing I will say though... and this is something I've gotten used to in the last few years, is that Murray confidently adds to the existing mythology in a respectful and, almost as importantly, highly entertaining manner which doesn't detract from the original tales. One thing I appreciate is when he adds something into little details of a long established character to help make them more plausible while similarly pushing their particular traits to the forefront. For example, we've always known that Renny has huge hands, almost bigger than his head and that his favourite trick is to punch out oak panels from doors with his strong fists but, here this is further enhanced by showing that Renny has a specially custom built candlestick style telephone to allow for his large fingers. This is nice stuff and much appreciated by this reader, for sure.

And that's me done with the new Kenneth Robeson's latest Doc Savage adventures, Mr. Calamity and Valley Of Eternity. Both are immensely entertaining and fit right in with the spirit of the original novels. My only worry now is that, with Murray seemingly concentrating on new 'Wild Adventures' of such characters as Tarzan and The Spider, that this may be the last Doc Savage adventure we see for a while. I hope not but only time will tell. In the meantime, I think regular readers of this much loved pulp adventure hero would do well to pick this one up.

Paperbacks From Hell

Page Burners

Paperbacks From Hell
by Grady Hendrix
Quirk Books
ISBN: 978-1-59474-981-0

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Paperbacks From Hell from a very good friend of mine this Christmas. It was a book I’d heard about and wanted to explore because the subject matter, as implied in the subtitle on the front of the book - ‘The twisted history of 70s and 80s Horror Fiction’ - was a phenomenon I well remember here in the UK and it was something which was timed just right for me to actively explore at the time.

To explain... on 7th September 1981, almost two years after it’s original US broadcast, the first installment of a two part US TV miniseries based on a book by horror writer Stephen King and called ‘Salem’s Lot, was broadcast in the UK. Now I would have been 13 years old when I saw this and was traumatised, like many young ‘uns at the time, by the cool ‘vampire kid' floating outside the bedroom window and the scene where the black shadow pops up from the bottom of the screen with an over the top musical stinger. So... yeah... all us kids loved it and it started me off acquiring Stephen King novels from my local W. H. Smith And Son Ltd.

And, of course, naturally, once you start buying this well written horror stuff, other writers in the same shelving sections come to your attention. How do you judge which ones you want to read next? By that very same thing you should never judge a book by, of course... it’s cover.

So it wasn’t long before I was also devouring the slightly less ‘up market’ but still very well written novels by James Herbert, the most popular of the UK horror writers at the time. So... King’s ‘Salem’s Lot... The Shining... The Stand and then sliding into Herbert’s The Rats... The Fog... The Jonah etc. However, at that age, horror isn’t the only thing your hormonally challenged mind is into and... there was a fair amount of sex included in the majority of the Herbert books. Those well read passages which soon became the first thing you kept an open eye and open fly out for when the latest purchase was brought home.

And then, of course, it’s a slippery slope and you find yourself reading the full banquet (or whatever you could afford on the small amount of pocket money which was somehow your true birth right) of horror novels which combined out and out gory mayhem coupled with extremely experimental and well thumbed sexploitation. Some of those novelists were still very much masters of the craft of writing... I might mention Dean R. Koontz or John Farris here... and others more than made up for in creative, over the top, gory sexiness what they may (or may not) have lacked in terms of their ability to turn a good sentence and write decent prose... so we had people like the beyond prolific Guy N. Smith with his crab books or John Halkin with his killer jellyfish or Shaun Hutson with his bloodthirsty slugs (see my review of the movie of that one here).

What I didn’t realise when I was given this grand tome, is that this particular love letter to the trashy, horror fiction paperback genre of the 70s and 80s was also written by the very same person who wrote a novel which I really liked when I read it last year... Horrorstör (reviewed here)... by Grady Hendrix. So you have him to blame for bringing to our shelves this extremely nicely designed and enormously entertaining volume.

The book starts off with his introduction where he talks about finding a used copy of a book of that era called The Little People by John Christopher. This is a book which features, amongst its many grotesque elements, a bunch of Nazi leprechauns called Gestapochauns who are heavily into S&M (as it was called before it was sanitised, somewhat, to BDSM) and who are created from the unborn foetuses of Jewish concentration camp victims. After hearing this absolutely bonkers concept, I did try to get hold of a decent copy of this book online at proper old school second hand prices (which seems to have gone up from the 30p standard these things used to be picked up for in musty, old book shops of the 1980s, for some reason) but, alas, the prices for this one on ebay etc are fairly high... presumably as a result of people reading Paperbacks From Hell, no doubt.

After the intro, Mr. Hendrix splits his exploration of this delightfully hellish landscape of well thumbed paperbacks by splitting his tome up into eight chapters. These are Hail Satan, Creepy Kids, When Animals Attack, Real Estate Nightmares, Weird Science, Gothic And Romance, Inhumanoids and a mouthful of a final chapter called Splatter Punks, Serial Killers & Super Creeps. He further explores each of his categories with different sections to highlight different types of sub genre and these mini sections, with titles such as Salad Of The Damned, Starry Starry Nightmare and The Vampire Strikes Back, should probably tell you pretty much the tone of the reading experience here than anything else I might add.

But... if it doesn’t... let me spell it out for you.

Hendrix’s take on the genre is fun and irreverent and reflects perfectly the writing style which made his earlier novel Horrorstör so great. It’s also pretty informative as he takes us from the point, starting with gothic romances, where the popular horror novel of the period was properly born to the point of its regrettable demise a couple of decades later. Now I obviously haven’t kept up with times because I didn’t realise the horror novel wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it was during this time. I honestly thought you could still buy really trashy literature like this from the shelves of your local book store but... I guess not so much.

I did, though, learn a fair amount from this book... such as where some of the trends which the author has chosen to bundle up into specific categories first started or were influenced by. The popularity of such things as the demonic possession horror tales or the blaxploitation terrors obviously coining it in after their cinematic counterparts found an audience for them. Various influences and trends are lovingly explored and it’s illustrated throughout with full colour reproductions of various covers.

There are also randomly placed sections for the works and mini biography of various specific cover artists. Usually it's only a page long but it’s a nice thing to add and it even, on occasions, includes unused versions of the cover in question or an original, pre-painting preparatory sketch for these.

Another nice thing was the inclusion of some books (sometimes by name drop only) which I didn’t think anyone else had even heard of or, indeed, had read these days... such as Satan - His Psychotherapy And Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S. (by Jeremy Leven), which was one of the best books I remember reading from that era... or Rona Jaffe’s book Mazes And Monsters which, to be fair, Hendrix seems to hold in far less regard than I.

Above all, though, the writing style is extraordinarily entertaining throughout and I loved little gems of passages about, for instance, how to best raise your possessed, homicidal or downright stabby evil kids. Or the warning about the dangers of keeping demonically possessed toys up in your attic. And a brilliant bit about the typical ‘horror man’ (who is immensely ‘chiselled’) and the typical ‘horror woman’. I especially loved this little bit about the ‘horror woman’...

“The most expressive parts of her body are her nipples. They noticeably harden when she is aroused, surprised, confused or meeting new people. They are practically prehensile tentacles, capable of lengthening, thickening, unfurling, budding, flaring and swelling.”

Yeah... I have to say, I’ve read a few books like that but it’s kinda funny, to be sure.

If I had one caveat with the book... and this is in no way a criticism... it’s that the writer is pretty much coming at this stuff from a mostly American angle when it comes to the cover art. Now a lot of the British cover art was often more sexually exploitative or photographic...or often a thrilling combination of the two... with the UK covers of books like John Halkin’s Slime and Dean R. Koontz Whispers and Night Chills, with their naked ladies in peril or at sleep, something which was often more memorable than the printed words between said covers. It might well be in the interests of Mr. Hendrix to maybe look at doing a sequel to his current tome where he can explore the UK landscape of the time... a Paperbacks From Hell In The UK, if you will.

Like I said, though... not a criticism, more an observation and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this writer's journey into a time I had almost forgotten. Much recommended to both the oldies like myself who will find themselves on a trip down memory lane and also to the younger audience who were maybe never exposed to this stuff before. The book is beautifully designed, well researched/written and is an absolute treasure trove of trash for anyone’s book shelf. Check it out when you can.

Deep Rising

Rise Guys

Deep Rising
1998 USA
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Entertainment In Video 
DVD Region 2

This film had pretty much been off my radar up until a month or two ago. I'm almost afraid to admit, once again, that my route into this one was through the music but... what happened was that Intrada released a limited number of an expanded edition of the score and it was a Jerry Goldsmith score I didn't already have. Now I've always loved the music of Jerry Goldsmith (even as a kid when I hummed his stuff before I knew who wrote it) and I was lucky enough to see him in concert maybe six or seven times in his lifetime. I don't buy all his scores but I have a good deal of them and so, once I'd listened to the sound samples, I decided I'd have to get that one soonest as it's a fine score from his late period.

This, of course, meant I wanted to find out about the movie and, when I saw two specific things about this film, I ordered a cheap DVD copy off amazon for a couple of quid. So, the two things which had, more or less, decided me on an instant purchase, asides from Jerry's marvellous action score? They were the words "sea monsters" and "Stephen Sommers".

Now, before this, I'd only seen four Stephen Sommers Movies in my life but three of those I hold in very high regard and the fourth one, GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra, was at least enjoyable enough, if somewhat silly. I really loved this director, though, for the three movies I'd seen him do which, in all respects, were basically fun, retro B-movies but made with fairly large budgets - The Mummy, The Mummy Returns and the much maligned but equally groovy Van Helsing.

So, as I started watching, I was pleased to notice that this starts off in B-movie territory right from the outset, with a bunch of heroes for hire, providing a boat and cargo shipping and headed up by Treat Williams. They have been retained by a crew of villainous hijackers (including Jason Flemyng and loads of modern character actors) and their target is a cruise ship captained by another villain who is working in cahoots with the hijackers. A villain who has just caught a cat burglar type lady, played by the always lovely Famke Janssen, trying to rip off his own haul.

This already sounds like a collision course for a boys own adventure, of course, but remember that other word I said made me want to take a look at this movie? The two ships/boats (whatever) are both completely crippled by... oh yeah... sea monsters.

Great, many tentacled sea monsters resembling, somewhat, a cthuhuian elder race best spoken of in hushed tones in an old H. P. Lovecraft story. And so the film goes all The Poseidon Adventure for a little while and then you're left with two or three quarreling factions constantly at each others throats while everybody is trying to find their best chance of escape while avoiding being swallowed and slowly digested by the "tentacle of the week", so to speak.

And the best thing about this movie... apart from pretty much everything I've mentioned up until now?

Benny is in it.

That is to say, the wonderful modern character actor Kevin J. O Connor, who payed the weaselly Benny in The Mummy and the weaselly Igor in Van Helsing... plays the weaselly grease monkey on the side of the good guys (for once) named Joey. And, as I predicted, Sommers gives him some of the best lines of the movie. My favourite being a moment when the good guys, bad guys and the lovely femme fatale are stuck inside an elevator playing "canned music". Suddenly, a sinister and ominous sound is heard from outside the lift. "What is it?" asks Treat Williams' character John Finnegan. "The Girl From Ipanema" says Joey, referring to the elevator music. I think I chuckled just a little too gleefully at that one... even though I kinda knew he was going to say it.

Actually, one of the strengths of the writing of the movie is the way Sommers uses stereotype characters who don't need a lot of explaining. He hits the ground running and gives you just enough quick character info so that you can work out the dynamics of the relationships without feeling, at any time, shortchanged by the fact that there’s no real character development in the movie. It's formulaic writing but it does its job well and it does it quick... this is the essence of pulp writing and this is essentially a pulp movie we have here... and that's not meant to be in any way a derogatory comment.

Deep Rising is beautifully filmed with lots of long, slow swooping camera shots and appropriately placed dutch angles. A lot of it is set in dark or dimly lit, claustrophobic spaces but you never really fail to notice everything in shot and, luckily, the editing is anything but confusing too, although I think there were a couple of little "sequential errors" with the continuity.

Unlike the aforementioned Sommers' Universal Monster reboots, this has a higher BBFC classification and so the director is able to play the horror elements a little more edgier than I was used to seeing him do... backing up some of the suspense scenes with a few well timed pieces of goriness thrown into the mix. The CGI work on the tentacle monsters themselves is pretty good but the few smatterings of assorted nastiness also has some great effects work, with the walking, groaning, half digested former crewman being a particularly interesting achievement... if you're into that kind of thing.

So... a great ensemble cast of actors, glorious B-movie writing with some cool one liners, good camerawork coupled with more than competent editing, some nice effects work and, also, a pace that never really lets up. The cherry on top of the cake is, of course, that late period Jerry Goldsmith score which captures his style of writing from films like The Mummy, The Thirteenth Warrior, LA Confidential, Star Trek: First Contact and dozens of others of his later works which shared the same kind of building, rhythmic drives and sweeping, melodic invention. In other words, one of the great composers giving a larger than life B-movie action/horror score for a work that celebrates that kind of stylistic influence and which is wholly relevant to the proceedings (not to mention being a darned good listen away from the movie too).

If you like old, pulpy B-movies with cliched but likeable characters and a predictable but enjoyable storyline, not to mention a wet bike being chased through the decks of a flooded ship by a giant sea monster thingy... then you should probably put Deep Rising on your "to watch" pile. I'm really glad I did.