Monthly Archives: June 2025

Halfway There

Friday, I passed 45 thousand words on my gay, cinephile, ’80s, horror novel set in the lovely city I call home, San Diego.

This has been and continues to be quite a different adventure in writing from what I have experienced with any of my previous novels. As I have mentioned in other posts, this one is being written without an outline, without a predetermined list of characters, with a terribly vague sense of how the five-act structure will work, and with only the concept of the darkest magic operating through old and dangerous nitrate motion picture film stock.

I am reaching sections of the novel where I must make definitive choices about some of the elements that have only been hinted at in the text as the characters’ investigation will begin uncovering some of the mysteries at work around them.

Because at heart this is actually a ghost story, with the ghost given ‘life’ by the old film stock, it is also essentially a mystery. Nearly all ghost stories are mysteries, often with some old and buried evil to be uncovered in order to clear the spirits’ torment and allow them to progress to whatever lies beyond life and death.

Ghost stories have always been my favorite genre of horror, and I cannot honestly say why. It is not because I was touched by death at an early age. Well before my father’s passing, I had books of ghost stories for children. One branded to Alfred Hitchcock and another of ‘Tar heel’ ghosts, Tar heel being the state nickname for North Carolina, the state of my childhood home. So, the fascination with ghosts has seemingly always been there, but I have written very few ghost stories. This untitled novel is the longest and most complex attempt at the sub-genre.

When it is completed, I will need a couple of sensitivity readers to make sure I have approached the lives of gay men in San Diego with respect and not stereotyping, but I feel I have made a good effort on that front.

Twin Peaks: The Entire Shebang

A year ago, Mike Muncer, podcaster behind the excellent Evolution of Horror series launched a new show The Detective & The Log Lady, a Twin Peaks rewatch podcast. I decided to rewatch the series along with episodes of the podcast and my sweetie-wife came along for the ride as well.

This past Sunday we completed the voyage watching part 18 of the Twin Peaks‘ third season, also known as Twin Peaks: The Return which aired on the Showtime premium cable channel in 2017.

ABC Television

It has been quite a ride. I have not rewatched the original series in decades, watched the prequel film Fire Walk With Me only once in the theaters and retained very little of it, and did not even know of the existence of Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, a feature film length collection of deleted scenes from the prequel film. Watching it all week in, week out for a year, keeping the characters and story elements fresh in my mind as I experience the 27-year journey was an entertainment journey unlike anything I had experienced.

Twin Peaks when it aired in 1990 on ABC became a national and cultural phenomenon but the second season, adrift after the creators stepped back because the networked forced them to reveal the solution to mysteries they preferred not to, lost that grip on the nation’s imagination and the series ended on a cliffhanger that would not be resolved until 2017.

Freed from network constraints and interference the series’ third and final season presented almost nothing that the fan base demanded, instead diving deep into the abstract dream-logic that so defines the work of director and co-writer David Lynch. The entire series defies easy explanation or interpretation. Is it about the evil and corruption that lies just under the surface of American life? Is it about trans-dimension beings waging a war for humanity with entities such as ‘Bob’ and ‘The Fireman’? It is merely a strange dream held by television characters where some of them are actually aware of their nature as fictional constructs?

Arguments can be made for any and all of these premises, often with all of them playing a part in interpreting the program.

What is undeniable is that Twin Peaks had a massive impact on television going forward from the 1990s. Not only did programming become more experimental in their plots and conceptions but Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost showed that it was possible to bring feature film cinema quality to television, paving the way for today’s prestige TV.

I may not understand it all, but I admire it all just the same.

I Really Like This Photo

This past Sunday there was no weekly trip to the Zoo because my sweetie-wife and I went to see 28 Years Later and there was no zoo expedition the previous Sunday because that was my weekend of migraine headaches. That’s not a recommended weekend, by the way.

However, we did go to the zoo on June 19th. My sweetie-wife has that federally recognized holiday off and I took the day off to share it with her.

The bird in this photo is a Western Bluebird and it is not an animal on exhibit at the San Diego Zoo but a wild creature that came into the enclosure with California Condors and the Common Raven. I really like the way the photo turned out. The subject is really nicely isolated from the background both by color and by the depth of field. None of the other picture I snapped that day are even close in how much I like them.

Western Bluebird

A Plutonic Understanding of Some Transphobia

March of 1930 saw the announcement that astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the ninth planet of our solar system, Pluto. Despite controversy at the time of discovery concerning the object’s apparently quite small size, for the next three generations, school children learned the names of the nine planets. In the 1990s, discovery of larger bodies in the Kuiper Belt added to doubts concerning the proper classification of Pluto, followed by the discovery of Eris, an even larger body in the outer reaches of our planetary system. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) released three criteria for a body to be considered a planet: 1) It orbits the sun, 2) It possesses enough gravitational pull to be roughly spherical in shape, and 3) it must have cleared out its orbit of other large bodies. Following these new parameters, Pluto was moved from the classification of planet to dwarf planet, igniting public outrage that burns to this day.

While there is debate among the astronomers and other scientists over detailed points such as what exactly qualifies as having ‘cleared out’ its orbital volume, the most intense defenders of Pluto as a planet are laypeople without scientific expertise or training. I find this a curious phenomenon. Pluto’s status has zero impact on their lives, their day-to-day activities, or even outside of the fierce controversy, their conversations. With the body’s status so irrelevant to their lives, why do people demand its status so vigorously?

Because it’s what they learned as children. The ‘facts’ we learn when we are young are the most difficult to discard when new data or ideas come along to displace them. It doesn’t matter that classifying Pluto as a planet would mean adding a lot more planets to the roster. They do not want to do that; they want the nine planets that they learned in grade school. That’s it, that’s the entire argument and goal, to have what they were taught decades ago to be the same today as it was then.

For some, certainly not all, the debate surrounding transgender people operates on the exact same mechanism as the insistence that Pluto is a planet. They were taught that the world and people worked a certain way, a very simple model of humanity, and they find it impossible to discard the model impressed upon them in childhood. It doesn’t matter that the truth of the spectrum of human sexuality and identification is self-evident; they want the simple, but false, binary definition they understood when they were six. (For those who wish to deny the spectrum and insist on a binary understanding, that would mean you could not define the character of John Rambo as more masculine than the character of Peewee Herman. That judgment only exists if there is a spectrum of masculinity—in a binary system they would be equally masculine.)

This explains only some people’s transphobia and insistence on strictly binary understandings of gender. There are those who harbor more hateful and bigoted views. Their issue is simply being unable to unlearn what they have learned. Their views are more aligned with evil than ignorance.

I wish there were a simple and direct way to enlighten people to acceptance of others in all their dazzling diversity that life presents. We live only once. For a very brief time, we walk this Earth seeking love and happiness. To inflict pain and suffering upon others because they don’t live as you think they should is a terrible crime, robbing them of precious time that can never be recovered.

Movie Review: 28 Years Later

28 Years Later, the second sequel to pandemic/zombie movie 28 Days Later picks up where the title implies, 28 years after due to well-meaning but idiotic animal rights activists caused the release of the ‘rage virus’ the islands of the United Kingdom are under a strictly enforced quarantine populated by the infected and survivors attempting to scratch out life and community on the British island.

Sony Picture

28 Years Later is centered on a small nuclear family, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his clearly ill mother Isla (Jodie Comer). Jamie takes Spike across a causeway that keeps the island community safe from the infected for an initiation into what life on the mainland, infested with the infected, is like. The trip into the mainland alerts Spike to that his father is not entirely honest and that a man considered dangerously insane living there is in fact a physician. Desperate to save Isla Spike takes his mother to the mainland on a perilous quest to find the doctor.

Written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, the team that created the original film, 28 Years Later is a very competently crafted piece of cinema. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle handled the assignment of using handheld unsteady quite well producing the emotionally disjointed sensations without overusing the technique to the point of motion sickness. (At least for this viewer.)

That said, I never emotionally engaged with this movie. The first act, Spike and Jaime’s expedition to the mainland felt more like the introductory level of a video game that established the world and its rules and less like the opening act of compelling story. The father/son interactions are not enough to pull me fully into caring about either of them. Isla’s illness, while tragic, feels more like external motivation. The fact that she has good moments and bad moments mentally, but we don’t really, for the most part, see who she was before the illness took over her life, presents Isla as more of a hypothetical character than a fully realized one.

Without being drawn into a story that compels my attention emotionally I was left with time for my mind to wander which only exposed elements of the world building I found unresolvable.

The ‘Infected’ present the same narrative issues as the ‘reavers’ did in 2005’s Firefly sequel film Serentiy. I simply cannot picture how they function when they are not on the screen chasing down and killing the non-infected. In the original film it was presented that the virus, acting far too quickly for any actual infection, activated the emotion of violent rage in its victims. Rational thought vanished and whenever an infected person noticed an uninfected one, they chased them down with murderous intent. That’s all fine and dandy but after a few weeks there will not be any more active infected. If you are not maintaining yourself, food and water, you will die.

Okay, so maybe, just maybe, the infected possess enough of their faculties take care of such matters. 30 years later there should be no infected. In the course of this film, we witness an infected woman giving birth. That means that there has to be sexual relations between the infected, not a product of the emotion of rage. For there to be generations of infected that means the infected must be raising children and the raising of human children is a labor and cognitively intensive task. I simply found it impossible to suspend my disbelief for the basic core concept of the movie.

Others feel differently. 28 Years Later is being hailed among the horror community as a great film and you may find it so, I, however, while not repelled by it found it less than interesting.

Movie Review: Fountain of Youth

In 1981 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas released the box-office-busting adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark earning $354 million dollars and setting off a wave of copycat movies hoping to reproduce that lightning in a bottle financial effect.

Most of the copycat productions were of limited budgets, lacking major stars, and frankly poor-quality scripts. As with Alien before it, Raiders of the Lost Ark is singular and stands out well ahead of any imitators.

Now, 44 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, comes another imitator trying to capture that sense of adventure and fun that so marked the original film, Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth.

Siblings Luke and Charlotte Purdue (John Krasinski and Natalie Portman) the children of an

Apple TV+

adventure-loving archeologist are estranged because Luke continues their father’s adventuring ways while Charlotte has settled into a routine mundane existence as a museum curator. Luke pulls Charlotte out of her dull life and onto a globe-spanning hunt for clues hidden in historical artifacts for the location of the fabled Fountain of Youth. They are being bankrolled by billionaire Owen Carter seeking to avoid an untimely death due to liver cancer. Along the way they are pursued by both Interpol for the crimes they are committing and a shadowy secret society.

With Guy Ritchie directing and Apple producing Fountain of Youth is no cheap, hastily thrown-together production of a movie. It boasts an impressive list of talent, shooting locations around the world, well-crafted action and chase scenes, but still fails to be engaging.

The characters are reflections of archetypes seen over and over again. Attempts to give them rich inner lives that might elevate them from flat to people with depth utterly fail and no chemistry exists either on the screen or the page for the enemy to lovers subplot between Luke and the woman representing the secret society determined to stop him.

At no point was I ever really caring about the characters or events on the screen, which is not how I always feel about Guy Ritchie’s work. He has directed some very entertaining and engrossing films, but this is not one of them. It does strike me that anytime Ritchie strays from modern criminal London his odds of producing a movie I really like drops considerably.

Fountain of Youth is streaming on Apple TV+.

Luigi Mangione & Vance Boelter: Brothers in Arms

On December 4th, 2024, the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, while walking out of a hotel in Manhattan was shot and killed. The alleged assassin Luigi Mangione has lain in wait for the corporate executive to depart the hotel and killed him on the sidewalk leaving behind shell casings with the words ‘delay, deny, and depose’ inscribed upon them. Five days later Mangione was arrested and faces charges for the apparently politically motivated murder.

Following the assassination Mangione and his alleged actions became the focus of online activity with ironic supportive memes going viral and people debating the ‘justification’ of the murder due to the nature of the victim’s business. For some, Mangione became a sort of modern folk hero for murdering the ‘right’ sort of people.

I shall not get into a healthcare debate here, UHC is a company I have detested for more than a decade, and I am well-aware of the failings and evils of for-profit healthcare.

In the early morning hours of June 14th, 2025, Democratic state politician John Hoffman and his spouse were shot in their home, the spouse suffering gunshot wounds while shielding their daughter from the assailant. A short time later, the leader of the state’s Democratic Caucus Melissa Hortman and her spouse were assassinated in their home by an assassin posing as a police officer. The next day, Vance Boelter was arrested and charged with the murder. Once again memes began being shared online, dark, ironic and dismissive of the victims, with some coming from Republican Senators.

These two alleged assassins, though from very different ends of the political spectrum, are, in effect, the same. In both cases these people felt that the ‘injustice’ they perceived justified their murderous actions. That they held a moral authority to deal in death and judgment against whom those that they ascertained to be their enemies. If you celebrated one and condemned the other, even in mocking ironic memes, you are part of the problem. You are part of the culture that nurtures, encourages, and provides the justifications for such horrid actions.

Political violence is a terrible beast, never dead and always seeking to escape the chains of civilization do not saw at those links for your side’s benefit; it never pays off well in the end.

Overtures: Vanishing Cultural Knowledge

One of my brain-resting pastimes is watching ‘reactors’ on YouTube. These are generally millennials viewing classic films, which depressingly are often from the 80s & 70s, for the first time. As a boomer born in the early 60s these are movies I have seen many that are close to my heart and among my favorites. It is surprising just how successful some of these channels have become. One Canadian lady now in the US, who until she started this project described herself as a rom-com and comedy gal, had her channel, Popcorn in Bed, become so large that Tom Cruise’s production company invited her to the premiere of a Mission Impossible film.

One of the fascinating aspects of watching these channels is seeing how some things that were once common knowledge slip away into obscurity. It makes me feel like Galadriel’s narration at the start of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: “…some things were lost because none now live who remember it.”

I have written before about how these younger people have no context for the little white nitroglycerin tablets Father Merrin takes for his heart disease in The Exorcist but another larger thing on my mind this morning: overtures.

Taken from ballet and opera, an overture in film is a piece of music played before the start of a movie used to set a mood. They were never common, but overtures were once employed much more often, usually of grand elaborate productions such as Gone with the Wind (1939) or Ben-Hur (1959). I can’t recall when I learned about overtures in feature films, but it was long ago, so much so that it is just part of what I know about movies. I think the first overture I experienced before a film was for the original release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

So many of these millennials, coming to adulthood in a world so unlike mine own, have never encountered an overture nor have they learned what they were from some text or book. When these people, who are not dumb or stupid, encounter an overture it is a period of confusion as they sit through several minutes of sometimes a black screen, neither Star Trek: The Motion Picture nor 2001: A Space Odyssey employed a title card with their overtures, with only a score playing. Aside from people who manage to see live Broadway-style productions, and the rare film that still employs them, the overture seems to be slipping out of all knowledge.

M3GAN 2.0

I cannot recall ever being this uninterested in the sequel to a film I enjoyed as I am with M3GAN 2.0.

2022’s M3GAN was not in any way a classic of cinema. The premise was quite simple, Gemma ( Allison Williams) a designer of advanced robotic toys following a tragic accident, becomes the guardian of her niece. Unsuited to the sudden role of substitute mother Gemma effectively turns the task over to her newly created and quite untested android M3GAN, which, taking its instructions far too literally, ends up becoming a murderous machine.

M3GAN leaned heavily into camp with occasional forays into violence that for the theatrical cut were toned down and not explicitly graphic. The resulting movie was one that was fun, did not take itself too seriously, and provided a brief, in not predictable, period of escape from the dreary world of 2022. The fact that the movie grossed more than 10 times its modest budget, and that the script deliberately left this door open, doomed the cinema landscape to a sequel.

Now, three years later, that sequel has arrived and the lackluster, paint by the numbers approach devoid of camp nature makes it one of the least interesting trailers I have seen in quite a while.

As has happened with previous horror franchises, M3GAN the character has developed a fanbase not unlike Michael from Halloween, Jason from Friday the 13th, and Freddy, from A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monsters have become the heroes and M3GAN now follows that dull and trite path as a new evil artificial intelligence arrives and, in one of the least surprising concepts, only M3GAN can counter it. Of course, if she is to be more of a protagonist then M3GAN required an upgrade that transformed her from a little girl to something with a disturbing amount of sexuality.

This is a horror movie that not only will I miss its theatrical run, I shall also miss its video on demand release, and its streaming debut.

Not The Weekend I Wanted

I had plans for this weekend. Saturday evening I was to run my Tabletop Role Playing game of Space Opera I even toyed with the idea of going to a ‘No Kings’ march. Sunday was supposed to be a trip to the Zoo, a Mexican Horror flick, and in the evening my online writers group.

None of that came to be.

I awoke Saturday morning to migraines and while medication abated them for a few hours here and there they pretty much persisted throughout the weekend.

The attacks were not so intense that I needed to retreat to my bed and hide entirely from light, but they were more than strong enough to keep me indoor and away from even indirect sunlight.

The headaches are not yet entirely history, but the one I am suffering this Monday morning is insufficient to keep me home and away from my day job.

I hope to have better things to write about tomorrow.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur