Cian Gill 2

Where Bigfoot Walks by Robert Michael Pyle

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:49:00 +0000

Where Bigfoot Walks by Robert Michael Pyle stopped my recent cryptozoology obsession right in its tracks, almost as the female bigfoot with the 'pendulous breasts' stops, mid-stride, in the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage. Prior to this, I had breezed through several crypto-themed books, including Darren Naish's excellent Hunting Monsters at the usual speed I apply when I'm going through one of my periodical obsessions. But Pyle's book forced me to slow down. Not because it's bad, but because it is in fact a vast, many-chambered take on the Bigfoot mythos that simply demands that you take your time with it. It's big, yes. It's long, yes. But that's not the point. It's heavy.

Where Bigfoot Walks is unlike any book on cryptozoology you'll ever read. I mean, plenty of great books (Naish's among them) take the time to examine not only whether cryptids exist (spoilers: they probably don't) but why we need to believe in them. It's pretty common for thoughtful but science-minded writers to be skeptical on the subject of 'ol Biggie, and yet still admit a fascination with him. It's only Pyle, however, who seems to have taken this attitude to it's greatest extreme. Pyle examines Bigfoot as a real ecological possibility, as a symbol of the wild and our relationship to it, and as a classic image of mid-20th Century America. The sheer breadth of this book is astonishing. It is simultaneously a monster hunt, a psychological investigation of those who would hunt monsters, a spiritual examination of Bigfoot and the true nature of reality. How Pyle could focus on a (probably) fictional animal to create his celebration of ecology on Earth, and make this never for a moment feel inappropriate, is unbelievable. Where Bigfoot Walks is, incredibly, mostly a legitimate ecology book.

The book chronicles Pyle's attempts to hike across the Dark Divide, a mountain range in southern Washington state, a region that is awash in Bigfoot lore. He's not looking for Bigfoot per se. He's more interested in considering whether Bigfoot could be possible, from an ecological point of view. Where would it live? What would it eat? He's also interested in the people who believe. Why do they need this? Are they capable of being truly scientific? Whatever would they do if they actually caught the bloody thing? It turns out that the ethical ramifications of this are more complex than you would think. And it turns out that some believers wish to remain exactly that - believers, such that if actual proof was brought out into the cold light of day, another of the world's mysteries would be dead to them.

Pyle sympathises with this take, though he does not share it. For him, the scientific discovery of Bigfoot would force governments to place vast areas of the creature's forest home under strict protection. For Pyle, Bigfoot would be the ultimate protected species: one close enough to man to make us uncomfortable.

Where Bigfoot Walks takes many meandering strolls into a variety of realms. As I said at the top, it's a slow, varied read: sometimes light, often heavy. I especially enjoyed Pyle's takedown of conventional European religious society as an alternative to his semi-mythical, Bigfoot-centered nature worship. He believes, as I do, that for whatever reason we have taken a misstep somewhere along the way, and distanced ourselves from the rest of life on Earth, and that this separation is damaging both to nature and to ourselves. To Pyle, Bigfoot is a noble and majestic creature that has been ill-treated by decades of supermarket tabloid ridicule. And though he's writing in the 90s, before the filter bubble age and before cryptozoology became synonymous with close-minded folks who want to believe at all costs, I think he's onto something very important. Bigfoot, and an understanding (if not an appreciation) of fringe belief is more important now than Pyle could ever have guessed when he first penned this incredible book.

Wide Atlantic Werid: The Antlered Man Tape

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 19:59:00 +0000

Wide Atlantic Weird is an ongoing series of stories that explore the folkloric and sometimes spooky side of life. It's a selection of urban-legend styled stories that attempt to create that feeling you get when you come across a delicious little fragment of weirdness, a story that's so out-there it can't possibly be true, yet one which you can't dismiss out of hand. When you stumble across such a tale buried in a chapter of an old collection of 'unexplained' stories, or when you hear an unbelievable story from a listener to a podcast, that's Wide Atlantic Weird.

EXTRACT 1:Source: The West Cork Standard Magazine, Dec 2005, Article by Ken Crean

‘Mark just always wanted to make films. That’s all he ever cared about, ever since he was little. When we were ten years old, his dad brought him one of those old JVL cameras from the media department at the university. It filmed in black-and-white and recorded onto this little VHS tape that you had to stick into the side of it. That whole summer, we recorded mini horror epics. Corn syrup and food colouring for blood. Supermarket dummies taken apart for severed limbs. That kind of thing. Even then, I think, we did some recording our here in the Forgotten Forest. It just seems right that our latest film, the one we shot right here, is gonna be the one that kick-starts our career as film-makers.’

I’m talking to Edward Whelan, best friend and colleague of budding director Mark McInerney. It’s the end of a bright December day, and the so-called Forgotten Forest is just beginning to turn gold around us as the early winter sun drops below the treetops. Mark himself is standing nearby with his girlfriend Lauren Phelan, and true to form, he’s got a camera in hand.

‘The lighting is perfect,’ Mark says to Lauren, ‘Maybe we should come back here to film the sequel.’

The film he’s referring to is, of course, the unlikely smash-hit short film The Antlered Man Tapes, a 15-minute spectacular that has taken off – gone viral, as the phrase goes – on a platform that would have been unthinkable ten years ago when this team of movie enthusiasts were filming their first efforts.

‘Youtube,’ Lauren explains to me, as we trudge deeper into the forest. ‘It’s an online video-sharing platform. It means that anyone can watch our movie. We don’t need a studio to get the film out there. We don’t need connections, we don’t need to live in California and know the right people. It’s going to change how the entire industry works.’ Her eyes seem to shine with the possibilities.

The trio filmed their horror short over a one-month period, using very simple techniques. Natural lighting, improvised dialogue. Everyone wore their own clothes. Mark’s mother provided sandwiches for the crew on long days. ‘The most difficult parts were the night shoots,’ admits Mark, ‘the guys used to get pretty cranky with me. We’d be out here in the forest after midnight, in the cold and the mud, and I’d be calling for take after take. But, you know, I had a vision. Everything had to be just right. And I was right – they’re thanking me now!’ Mark smiles, then raises the camera to his eyes again, as the dying sunlight turns the woods a beautiful shade of orange.

Within four months, the film had breached Youtube’s top ten videos, becoming one of the most-watched videos of the site’s short existence, and competing with videos – both professional and amateur – from around the world. Millions of people saw The Antlered Man Tapes. Social networks lit up with commentary, the video passed on from person to person. Everybody was talking about the film. ‘We got emails from people claiming to be lawyers,’ says Lauren, resting against a knotted oak as Mark snapped still shots of her. ‘They wanted to represent us, get our work shown at festivals, deals with big companies, that kind of thing.’

But they held out – and last month, they got what they were waiting for. A major British film production company – they aren’t allowed to say which one until negotiations are hammered out – got in touch, saying they wanted to fund Lost Forty Pictures, as the group called themselves. ‘We had to register a company and everything,’ says Edward. ‘All for our little amateur viral film.’ He’s downplaying their success, and their hard work, but he can’t keep the smile off his face. Idly, he traces a symbol with his foot among the fallen leaves: a circle, bisected by a curved line that spreads like a pair of wings on either side of a faceless head.

So what exactly is The Antlered Man Tapes? Why are so many people obsessed with it? You can watch it yourself, of course, if you have an internet connection. It’s a simple but effective horror film, perhaps most effective in what it suggests rather than what it shows. The film stars the three young friends playing a version of themselves, on a mission to investigate a legendary figure that lives in the Forgotten Forest. That figure, of course, is The Antlered Man. They discuss the legend, enter the forest, get lost, and come to a mysterious end.

I think the story gets much of its power from the use of a real local urban legend. And the Forgotten Forest is the ideal home for an urban legend – earlier in the evening we came across a gang of teenagers, swigging cans of cheap lager and hoping for a glimpse of a spook. Legend-tripping, you could say. They asked us if we knew where to see the Antlered Man, if we thought he was real. Mark smiled, said he didn’t think the legend was true. The kids seemed disappointed. Then they asked us if we knew anything about the three investigators who disappeared looking for the Antlered Man. You know, the ones from the viral video. In the gloom, they didn’t recognise Mark and his crew. I told them that I didn’t think that video was real, either. And this time, they seemed not just disappointed, but annoyed.

That was some time ago. We are alone in the forest now.

‘The Antlered Man really has been seen here,’ Lauren tells me, with just the merest shiver in her voice as the woods turn dark and the air turns cold. ‘Although sometimes he’s only sensed – you know, like a general feeling of panic. Uncontrollable panic. That’s what people have reported feeling. But when he is seen –sometimes he’s just a silhouette – he’s incredibly tall, with these huge antlers coming out of his head, like some kind of pagan god.’

Behind us, Mark imitates the knights who say ‘ni’ from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but the other two are not in the mood for jokes. In fact, the mood within the group has noticeably soured. I gather that success has led to their relationships becoming strained. Much of this, I gather, is due to Mark’s decision to pass the film off as a true story.

When The Antlered Man Tapes begins, a title card informs us that the following footage is real, and that the investigators in the film disappeared and were never seen again. It’s implied that they came to some sticky, unspecified end at the hands of some terrible occult phenomena, perhaps related to the Antlered Man himself. Getting lost in this forest seems somewhat unlikely – even in the darkness, we can see the lights that signal the housing estates that brush up against it – but the way the footage is shot makes the forest feel huge, endless.

‘We had to stay off all social media,’ says Lauren, ‘Mark created fake accounts and left posts asking if anyone knew where we were. People started to take it seriously.’

‘If we hadn’t created the mystery, do you think the film would have been a success?’ says Mark, with a half-smile.

I’m starting to see things in the trees myself, now. I’m almost embarrassed to mention it, but pagan antlered heads seem to be lurking everywhere amongst the branches. I begin to ponder on the power of legends, on their ability to conjure up something and make it real.

‘The letters,’ says Lauren, ‘Tell him about the letters. Something scrawled my address in red ink and sent them to my house. I had to burn them, I was so weirded out. That symbol – how could they know?’

‘Something waited outside my house for three nights,’ says Edward quietly. ‘I saw its head through the trees.’

Mark suggests that it’s time to leave the woods.

Later, we’re at Mark’s family home, watching the group in happier times on Mark’s computer. They show me their first films. Ten-year-old Mark covered in fake blood. Ten-year-old Lauren with her hand cut off. A kid’s idea of horror. Then we get to see a behind-the-scenes shot of the making of The Antlered Man Tapes. We’re back in the woods, except it no longer feels like a fun, friendly place. Mark is tying Lauren up with thick, frayed cord. Edward is already gagged and bound. A huge pentagram has been drawn on the forest floor beneath them. Mark drips fake blood on both of them, creating the symbol I saw Edward make earlier. The symbol of the Antlered Man. Darkness is falling. They’re getting ready for the climax of the film: the part where it all goes wrong for the characters. The actors, however, are laughing and joshing one another good-naturedly. They have no idea yet that their film is going to be spread across the internet, creating reality from what was fantasy. They don’t yet know about the letters that are so awful they will have to be burned.

-END OF EXTRACT

EXTRACT 2: Source – Creendubh South newspaper, May 2006

Gardaí today found three young people dead at an isolated house in the Inchigeela woods in West Cork. It’s believed that the three were filmmakers who were renting the house as a retreat to finish scripting a follow-up to last year’s surprise hit The Antlered Man Tapes. As a result of fears the trio had relating to security, the house and its surroundings were well-covered by cameras. Some images from these cameras have leaked to the press. Two of the pictures, published below, show hooded figures approaching the house from the woods and peering in the windows. There are at least six of them. Each has an odd symbol painted on their robes: a circle, like a head, with deer-like antlers above it. No evidence of the killers was left in the house. Gardaí have refused to comment on the rumours that the trio were murdered in an occult fashion, or as part of any kind of ritual. They did, however, make it clear that there was no evidence of any inexplicable or supernatural happening. This was simply a group of ordinary people in the grip of some strange, powerful idea.

Off The Wagon Podcast: The Cult Movies of Neil Breen

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 20:56:00 +0000

Before the Strange Ireland podcast, which focused on strange aspects of Irish history, I occasionally hosted a 'cast called Off The Wagon. Now it's back! It's more varied, less scripted, and lots of fun. The first episode is about the terrible, terrible movies of Neil Breen.

The movies of cult filmmaker Neil Breen are so bad they're hallucinogenic. Hypnotic, even. Cian and Ali can't get enough of them. In this 'cast they discuss all four of Breen's movies.

To feed his ego, Breen always casts himself as a super-powerful, flawless hero. Sometimes he's a genius hacker, sometimes a successful author, sometimes he's even a straight-up Space Jesus come to punish humanity for its mistakes. But you can be sure that there will always be lots of hacking of government and corporate secrets, lots of awkward canoodling with much-younger women, and lots of astoundingly bad writing, acting and dialogue.

The movies of Breen are like nothing you've ever seen before. He's the new Tommy Wiseau: if you think The Room is funny, Neil Breen elevates bad movie-making to an art form. Newbies and Breen-iacs alike will find something to enjoy in this deep-dive. Check out what happens when Off The Wagon goes full Breen.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE!

Show Notes:
The Selfish Breen, from the Bad Movie Bible
Inside Neil Breen, from LeoHunt.com
I Am Here ...Now drinking game, from Movie Boozer
All music by The Scuts

Wide Atlantic Weird: The Cult Of The Minnesota Runestone

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 21:10:00 +0000

Wide Atlantic Weird is an ongoing series of stories that explore the folkloric and sometimes spooky side of the Irish-American connection. It's a selection of urban-legend styled stories that attempt to create that feeling you get when you come across a delicious little fragment of weirdness, a story that's so out-there it can't possibly be true, yet one which you can't dismiss out of hand. When you stumble across such a tale buried in a chapter of an old collection of 'unexplained' stories, or when you hear an unbelievable story from a listener to a podcast, that's Wide Atlantic Weird.

Editor's Note: Travels in American Subcultures is a 2008 book by Irish travel writer Derry Clarke. Each chapter finds her exploring some unique element of Americana. I first read the book when in college, and I particularly recommend it for its chapter on Juggalos and white working-class Detroit culture. However, the following chapter has been chosen as it is the darkest and most mysterious. In fact, it's quite out of character for Clarke's entire career, as she is not known as an author who writes about cult or conspiracy topics.

Travels In American Subcultures Chapter 10: It Just Feels Right

Winters in the great North Woods of Minnesota are long and dark. Up here, in the tiny communities that hug the north shore of Lake Superior, people live close to nature, and are never lost for a reminder of its power. Here, the lake that fills the horizon like an ocean can still muster waves that sink ships. The lake is so big it creates its own climate, summoning ice storms that turn entire forests of ghost-white birch into bent, twisted wraiths. It’s a place that seems tailor-made for the creation of myths.

On the night of the winter solstice, I’m driving on the famous Highway 61, the lake my constant companion, to visit the tiny community of Stockholm, Minnesota. Home to only 150 souls – mostly the descendants of Scandinavians, as the name suggests – Stockholm is infamous in archaeological circles as the home of an artefact known as the Minnesota Runestone. The Runestone is said to be evidence that Swedish or Viking explorers travelled much further into the interior of America than is accepted by mainstream archaeologists. Viking runes are carved into this 200-pound piece of sandstone, detailing an expedition by Scandinavians in the region in the year 1360.

Ever since the stone’s discovery in a field outside Stockholm in 1900, experts have been fuming about it, with geologists, historians and linguists united in their scorn for what they view as a clumsy hoax.

But there’s more to the stone than a thumb in the eye of conventional history, for a curious following has built up around this artefact in the years since its discovery. It seems that folks have become very attached to the idea of European explorers being in America in medieval times. And on this most auspicious of eves, I’m on my way to find out why.

‘You’ve got to understand that there’s a lot riding on the conventional view of history,’ Saul Anderson tells me, his bulky frame covered in a skimobile jacket that’s bulging with patches and sponsor logos. He looks like a hockey dad, but he’s no dummy. He’s a local schoolteacher who tells me that he’s always been drawn to the stone because the first time he saw it, ‘it just felt right.’ We’re standing outside the brand-new Minnesota Runestone Interpretation Centre, a small but impressive building of stone and glass that sits uncomfortably in a field of snow-covered soil.

‘If we can ignore, or even cover up the evidence we’ve got here, then we can kind of cut Europeans out of the picture, you understand?’ Saul is a nice guy, but already I’m uncomfortable. A small crowd of people are filing into the centre for tonight’s event as the short day begins to die. I wonder if they all hold similar views.

‘After the stone was taken to the U,’ he continues, referencing the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, ‘The guys there did a hack job on it. They claimed that the runes were of a type that didn’t match the date carved on the stone. They claimed that the weathering on the edges of the stone proved it was a forgery. A fake.’

He casts his eyes to the birch forest on the horizon. ‘But Ole Johnson, who discovered the stone in 1900 – this was his land – he never made a dime outta it. Why would he fake it? He was a farmer, he didn’t even have any interest in history. And the stone has been examined plenty since. It’s well-known that the early research was shoddy.’

I don’t know why this line of reasoning makes me nervous, but it does. It’s not because Saul is promoting a theory that goes against mainstream science – I’ve met with many people with similar ideas during my travels. But there’s something just beneath the surface of all this that’s nagging at me.

Inside the centre, there are displays and photographs documenting Johnson’s find. There’s a sepia-tone picture of him standing beside a tree, the stone resting where it was found – among the roots. There are breakdowns of the type of runes used and examples of the alphabet. The small room feels crowded; folks are milling around, pointing out details to one another. There are families, old folks, policemen, teachers. There are no arguments or disagreements. I get the impression that this is all a well-told tale for most of them. My sense of being an outsider grows.

According to the traditional interpretation of the runes, the stone was left by a group of Scandinavian explorers in the year 1360. They refer to themselves as being a group of Norsemen and Norweigians who had travelled from Vinland in the East. They mention a great lake that took twenty days to travel across, and an endless forest on the other side. They travelled to a place where the red men didn’t live, having lost three men to a skirmish with a native tribe on the far side of the lake. They then carved the stone as a record to show how far west they had come.

Vinland is the term generally used by historians to refer to the parts of North America that were known to the Viking travellers. ‘It’s generally thought to be limited to parts of Newfoundland, far east of here, isn’t it?’ I say to Lois Erikson, director of the centre. She’s a neat, professional woman in her early thirties.

‘Um, well that’s only if you overlook the evidence we have here,’ she says, choosing her words carefully. ‘It’s known that it would have been possible for 14^th-century explorers to get from Hudson’s Bay through Lake Winnipeg, and the Red River, and on to what is today Minnesota. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have done so.’

I look around the room. The visitors are overwhelmingly white – I fact, they’re entirely white. This certainly isn’t unusual for northern Minnesota, but again, something subconscious is biting at the back of my brain. Something is wrong.

As the sky outside blackens, Lois and the other staff gather everyone into the tiny display room at the north end of the building. This is the symbolic heart of the centre: the home of the stone. Unlike the rest of the new building, this room is unchanged from how it was back when Ole Johnson first put the stone on display. It’s little more than a wooden shack; somehow its humbleness adds to its sense of the sacred. The audience quietens as they file in. The chamber is open-roofed; the stone is bathed in starlight. I zip up my coat against the freezing air. Orion, the wintermaker, beams down on us from the heavens.

The stone itself seems enormous, heavy with the weight of history, perhaps. Or maybe the weight of meaning.

Aline, another interpreter, begins a ceremony intended to welcome in the winter. On the face of it, this is why so many people have shown up tonight. In a place where so much of the year is dark and cold, giving the heart of winter a symbolic welcome can have a positive effect on the psyche. There’s an oddly pagan bent to the ceremony, though, beyond simply focusing on the seasons and the natural world.

‘…we thank Ulor, the bringer of snow, and express our gratitude for the white blanket that protects our fertile lands. We are thankful for the dead generations who tilled it before us, who prepared the land for our coming in centuries past. This is our home: this has always been our home.’

Saul, Lois, and the others echo the words, as they have done many times before. My eyes are drawn to the stone. It seems to glow in the starlight. It’s as if the stone is alive. I sense the significance of it, the connection with history. The power of being able to trace a direct line from then until now. Especially in a country so uncomfortable with its history –

I turn around and my eyes bulge.

Lois is wearing the face of an eyeless deer. Antlers rise grotesquely towards the stars.

I survey the rom, my pulse racing. The audience is composed entirely of animals. A smell of decay chokes me.

‘We thank Ulor,’ they chant. ‘This has always been our home.’

I turn for the door.

Something grabs my wrist.

‘What’s wrong? Aren’t you Irish?’ My accent has not gone unnoticed. ‘This is your home too.’ I stare into the black sockets of a crane, the little skull perched absurdly above skijacketed shoulders, its pointed beak bobbing.

I break Saul’s grip and run for the carpark. Outside, the freezing air tears at my lungs, the stars tilt crazily as I stumble towards my car. I pull a crazy donut in the snow before zooming away from the Minnesota Runestone Interpretation Centre. I hold my breath as I pass through downtown Stockholm, but I see nobody on the streets. I tear onto Highway 61 and make straight for Duluth.

Back in the city, I down a bourbon in the hotel lobby. The concierge and a few late-night drinkers listen to my tale. They don’t seem too surprised. It’s well-known that stories of ancient European explorers tend to tap into certain dangerous beliefs.

‘It’s common among the uneducated,’ says one well-meaning gentleman.’ I choke on my drink. I can’t bring myself to tell him about the teacher I met, or the policemen, the computer programmers, the families …

END OF EXTRACT

Source: Derry Clarke, Travels In American Subcultures, 2008

Book Review: The Man Who Missed The War by Dennis Wheatley (1945)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 15:36:00 +0000

My job, for odd reasons, gives me access to untold amounts of beat-up old pulp paperbacks, which gives me no end of joy. Dennis Wheatleys are fairly common, probably because here in the UK, it seems up until some point in the 70s, every house was contractually obliged to have at least a small number of them. Despite being something of an amateur expert on Britain's 'occult uncle' (I even read the mammoth biography The Devil Is A Gentleman), I'd never heard of this week's offering, The Man Who Missed The War. That's partly because Wheatley was so damn prolific, but also because it's not one of his occult-themed books, so it has been somewhat forgotten about over time.

And look at that cover, anyway, what the heck is going on with that? We all know what a Dennis Wheatley cover should look like, and this isn't it. A Wheatley cover, of course, should look like this:

Naked girl, occult trappings, A BLACK MAGIC STORY written in all caps. That's how to do it. But clearly, The Man Who Missed The War is cut from a different cloth. See, to the general public, Wheatley is mostly only remembered for his black magic thrillers and his associations with the occult. But really, only a handful of the many, many novels he wrote over the course of a 40+ year career deal with these subjects. Most of the the time, Wheatley was writing historical fiction and straight-up thrillers, many of which take the Second World War as their main source of inspiration. This is because Wheatley himself worked directly for the War Office during the war, creating plans of deception and subterfuge with which to fool the Nazis, had they ever successfully invaded Britain (one plan, seemingly simplistic but effective in pre-digital times, was to switch roadsigns all over the country to hamper Nazi transport in an occupied Britain).

The Man Who Missed The War begins with a brief missive to the effect that the Nazi-defeating plan used in the novel was in fact proposed in all seriousness by Wheatley during the war, and now that the immediate threat has passed (the novel being first published in 1945), he is at last free to use his great idea as the basis for a rip-roaring novel of adventure).

Enter Philip, an Angry Young Man who is worried that the British military elite are stodgy and old-fashioned, and that they don't understand what will be required of Britain in a new World War (the story is set in 1939) if that nasty chap Mr Hitler doesn't stop causing trouble in Europe.

Philip lectures his father and family friends, including a stuffy old Navy general and a rotund, friendly Canon, about the dangers of the German air force. It's no good to continue building giant battleships now that the enemy can simply bombard them from the air, you see. It's clear that these opinions are Wheatley's own, and it's interesting to get a glimpse into these criticisms of the British military establishment written so close to the war itself.

(WHEATLEY-ISMS: long political rants about how Germans are genetically evil and laziness is corruptive even among racially acceptable people. All while well-to-do characters indulge in lavishly-described meals, smoke fine cigars and drink expensive hock).

Anyway, Philip has a great idea: if supplies can be transported across the Atlantic from America using vast networks of small, lightweight rafts, then the Nazis will have a much more difficult time disrupting the supplyline with U-boats, and Britain will remain connected with America. But in order to prove that his idea works, he will have to test the rafts personally. The timely death of his friend the Canon provides Philip with the funds to realise this project, and the late churchman's lectures on the reality of the lost city of Atlantis led this reader to anticipate where exactly Philip's sea-going adventures might eventually lead him.

(WHEATLEY-ISMS: the Canon doesn't seem to be a particularly strict Christian, instead following Wheatley's own brand of more all-inclusive, open-minded spirituality. Instead of Christianity being THE WAY, he finds being a priest affords him A WAY to do the maximum good, as spiritual thinking is generally positive, even if the exact details of the religion don't necessarily matter. Oh, and also Atlantis, past lives and astral travel are all real as well and all AWESOME).

Philip's fleet of rafts makes it out of New York harbour ok, but then his plans are disrupted when the Canon returns to him as a ghost (because of course) with a warning: his crew are not in fact jovial Scandinavians, as he had believed, but in fact NAZIS! Before you can say 'Indiana Jones,' Philip is weighing up his options in a classic Wheatley logistics-obsessed fashion, but in the end decides to just settle things with his fists, because after all, it's still a 1940s pulp novel. He punches out the evil Nazi captain, who promptly dies, leaving Philip in a pickle. Unable to prove that the captain was, in fact, a national socialist, he could well face trial for murder in New York.

It doesn't matter anyway, because after making it across the Atlantic, Philip is blown off course within sight of Britain itself, as a huge storm carries him away from the sceptered isle. He's joined by Gloria, a stowaway. She's American by birth but unfortunately stage-Irish by diction. Begorrah! Philip and Gloria share many meet-cute awkward moments in classic 1940s screwball comedy style as their raft meanders across the desolate ocean. And if the story seems to be meandering too, well that's what I was wondering, as halfway through the book, Wheatley has his leads wash up only as far south as the West African coast for a meaningless encounter with some killer crabs (not as good as it sounds). I knew from the back cover copy that they were due to find a lost race of Mexicans living in a hidden valley in the Antarctic (I was so pumped for this) but instead Wheatley was wasting time with one-damn-thing-after-another encounters.

It seemed as though this was the second book in a row I'd read (see my review of The Abominable) that was being marred by 1) poor pacing and 2) unexpected visitations by Nazis because, who do you think shows up at this point only a U-Boat full of Fritz, in another encounter that really goes nowhere. Oh, and the ghostly Canon keeps popping up to reassure Philip (and the reader) that all of this really is leading somewhere important. Really, it is.

Eventually, Philip and Gloria float down towards the Antarctic, all the while shedding their uptight European mores, enjoying nudism, getting drunk, and having drunken sex and suffering terrible hangovers. Wheatley, as a fairly Victorian conservative in most respects, could be unexpectedly liberated when it came to certain things, and this side of him comes to the fore here. Philip also has a radio which he uses to follow the course of the developing war. Via this plot device, we receive blow-by-blow accounts of the early stages of the war, filtered through Wheatley's interpretations.

Finally, things take a belated turn in the 'lost race' direction when Philip and Gloria meet an exiled Russian Prince in Antarctica, who hints that he has discovered something fantastic on this barren continent. The two figure that he must be living somewhere relatively comfortable, so they follow him to a lost valley, temperate because it is heated by (you guessed it) geo-thermal springs. I usually love pulp lost race novels from this period, even despite their usually troubling racial overtones, but Wheatley's Antarctic kingdom is another letdown. The people here are wizened, stunted, and technologically backward. Their valley contains no wonders or marvels.

Philip and Gloria spend two years living in this weird lost valley, get kind of married, and have a kid, before they eventually find out that there's another valley nearby, and these little gnome-like people (in an astoundingly absurd twist, it's revealed that they're actually literally leprechauns) are kept as sort of cattle, Eloi-like, by a more advanced race of - you guessed it - Atlanteans. Finally! It turns out that the Atlanteans are, as is usually the case in mid 20th-century lost race novels, the originators of all the great ancient civilisations, which explains why they look like Aztecs and have step-pyramids. Unlike most lost race novels, these Atlanteans are assholes who not only sacrifice leprechauns on top of their massive step-pyramids to their dark god Shaitan (huh? Why are Atlanteans worshipping the Judeo-Christian devil but using his Arabic name? Stay tuned to find out) but they are also spying on the war and are hoping for the Germans to win. See, because the Nazis are so evil, if Hitler wins the war, the Atlanteans will benefit from the deaths of millions of people the Nazis intend to exterminate. They have the power to control weather from afar, but they believe that they need constant blood sacrifices in order to maintain it. Oh, and Philip and Gloria have to pretend to be Irish Republicans so that the Atlanteans don't suspect them to be Allied sympathisers. Somehow, Wheatley doesn't use this subplot as an excuse to bash Irish neutrality, which after the leprechauns and Gloria's dialogue, might have tipped the balance for me.

If the novel has been patchy and unfocussed up until now, it really goes off the rails at this point. I've got a HUGE soft spot for a good lost race novel, and Wheatley has set himself up with a classic LR situation here, but his interests are really not with the Atlanteans, their history, or their society. Who knows, maybe he was just bored with the concept: by my reckoning, this is Wheatley's third lost-race novel, and his second one featuring Atlanteans. We get some half-hearted details about their city and their lost valley, but Wheatley is far more interested in the nuances of the second world war, which he now ties the story back to. The Atlanteans have magical TV-like devices which allow them to keep tabs on the various war leaders, and Philip engages in detailed conversations about what's going on with the various armies. Wheatley is clearly utilising his own expertise here. We get page after page about how brave and awesome the British and Americans are, and how civilised and sophisticated the British generals in particular are. Wheatley even patently inserts himself into the narrative, palling around with the generals in the War Office, as he did in real-life during this time. He doesn't use his own name, but introduces an unnamed 'man from London' who is short, dark-haired, red-faced, born in 1897, and has a great knowledge of fine wines and champagnes. Hmm.

Poor Philip and Gloria get fairly left behind for quite a few chapters, as Wheatley(!) fawns fetishistically over the handsome, brave British generals, works on plans to stop the Nazis, and gets stuck into the buildup to D-Day. It's astonishing - I don't think I've ever seen a writer so blatantly relive his own real-life glory days through a fictionalised version of himself.

I really thought that things couldn't get any stranger, but somehow they do. It turns out that the British fighting the Nazis is only the visible, earthly portion of a much bigger conflict: good vs evil, heaven vs hell. Wheatley's own strange theology causes him not to directly invoke God very often, as he has a more nuanced take on a kind of 'cosmic good,' though of course he's not as averse to mentioning Old Scratch; in fact, as mentioned up top, he had a bit of a name for doing so.

(WHEATLEY-ISMS: Everything in life is reduced to a good or evil dichotomy; everything Wheatley doesn't like, including socialism, Germans, cheap wine, and cartoon Atlantean bad guys, is literally Satanic.)

Before the last page is turned we have characters travelling on the astral plane, fighting the hordes of Hell, and flying around the world in the twinkling of an eye. If I hadn't been aware of Wheatley's general worldview, and if I hadn't come across similar shenanigans in other books such as Strange Conflict, I can only imagine that this eleventh-hour dip into spiritual warfare would have absolutely blindsided me with its randomness and inappropriateness.

Hopefully I've managed to convey some of the madness that is The Man Who Missed The War. It has quite a few of the charming touches which I have come to expect from Wheatley, but it must certainly rank as one of his least disciplined efforts. The plot lurches from one topic to the next, with apparently no forethought or deliberate pacing. However, even such a disappointing effort from Wheatley is still never boring; it contains such an amount of bizarre and disjointed ideas that it keeps the reader following, if only to find out whatever could possibly be coming around the corner next.

Book Review: The Abominable by Dan Simmons (2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 14:08:00 +0000

I guess I have a complicated history with Dan Simmons now. His last mammoth, brick-like epic novel about survival in extreme cold, The Terror, stuck around my house for months haunting me before I could bring myself to crack into it. But once I did, I became consumed by its tale of the 1845 Franklin expedition and its doomed attempts to find the NorthWest passage. The book got me through a weird, lonely time in which I returned to my house one Christmas only to find that nobody else was home, and the heating was broken. I shivered through several days before either of these situations could be rectified, eating up the pages of Simmons' masterpiece, glad only that I was at least safe from the twin horrors of cannibalism and being stalked by unknowable Arctic monsters. The book even left me with a recurring fascination with polar exploration, and the Franklin expedition in particular.

The Terror is, by and large, regarded as a bit of a modern horror classic (it now has a well-reviewed TV adaptation too). Initial impressions of his follow-up 2013 novel The Abominable seemed to indicate that the reader could expect something, well, similar. After all, the title is similar. The cover is similar. And the premise is similar - again, we have a small group of men caught in a struggle for survival against a hostile, extremely cold environment - this time, it's an Everest expedition in the 1920s. And again, there are hints that the team are being stalked by some mysterious creature native to this frozen realm. Given the location, and the title of the book, one naturally assumes that this creature will turn out to be the Yeti.

Now, I had read reviews that tempered my enthusiasm somewhat. These reviews remained somewhat elusive about the nature of the threat, thought they implied that perhaps the creature was not a physical, flesh-and-blood Yeti, as such, and that the book held a surprise twist close to the end. I was ok with that. After all, great things have been done with the more metaphysical notions of monsters and supernatural events, such as the 1957 British movie The Abominable Snowman by the great Nigel Kneale (terrible title, but do check it out). So I trusted that, even if the team might not encounter a Yeti as we expect one to look, Simmons would find some satisfying, alternative take on the phenomenon. After all, the high-altitude world of Everest is a weird one, where oxygen-deprived climbers regularly meet with the ghosts of dead comrades, see unexplained atmospheric phenomena, and push themselves to the brink of death. The possibilities were endless.

The book begins with a framing device: Simmons meets ageing American climber Jake Perry, who later gifts him with his extraordinarily long (and extraordinarily well-written) memoirs. We learn that back in the 20s, Perry joined an aristocratic, eccentric English climber known as 'the Deacon' and a rather stereotypical Frenchman named Jean-Claude (of course) on a secret, three-man attempt to scale Everest, an expedition that has been kept out of the history books.

Simmons is known for including masses of historical research in his novels, and he doesn't disappoint here. The Deacon lectures his crew (and the reader) at length on virtually every aspect of 1920s mountaineering. We learn much about the technique and technology of climbing during this time, though the Deacon then produces so many revolutionary new technologies and pieces of equipment that his expedition, were it real, would probably have been quite anachronistic for the 20s time frame. The team bounce around Europe, climbing in the Alps and meeting mountaineering experts in Germany and Austria. We get quite a bit of detail about the socio-political forces brewing in Germany at this time - something that feels like background detail at first, though it later becomes clear that Simmons is building up to something with this. Some of this stuff is fun, and some of it is jarring and unrealistic. Perry bumps into so many important historical figures that it starts to feel a little silly.

Things improve once the expedition gets underway. The crew spend a little time in British India on their way to the Himalayas, and given my fascination with the history of the British Empire, I enjoyed this section quite a bit. It's a long time though before they get to Everest, close to halfway through the book if I recall correctly, leaving me wondering exactly how Simmons was intending to pace the book. The climbing sections themselves are great: like in The Terror, I was completely immersed in the horrors of this frozen, deadly world. Every aspect of the difficulty of climb is emphasised, from the dangers of falling to the hardships of existing where the air is thin. This was great, rousing stuff, but again, the more I read, and the more I invested in the characters and the book, the more I began to wonder what it was all leading up to. The pacing was really strange - the promised central threat hadn't shown up almost 3/4 of the way through the book. There had been a few mentions of the Yeti, but the creature, or whatever was out there in the blinding snows, remained resolutely off-stage. What was Simmons playing at? I knew that something strange was coming, but leaving the reveal so long meant that either he had to have something dynamite up his sleeve, or it was going to be a serious letdown.

There'll be no spoilers, but suffice it to say that when the threat was revealed, I was disappointed. The tone of the book changes quite a bit, very late in the game, and for me a lot of the momentum and buildup from the preceding 700 pages was squandered. Where Simmons had carefully built up this believable environment where literally every step was agony, and reaching each new camp was a hard-fought victory, now characters were romping up and down between base-camps willy-nilly to deal with this new threat. The nature of the threat itself is not necessary a terrible idea, but it feels trite and light compared to the themes that could have been explored in this environment, and out of place considered the historical seriousness of the rest of the book.

Regardless, I ploughed through, keen to finish this monster of a book, determined to make it to my own particular summit (reviewers of The Abominable have found it impossible to avoid referring to finishing the book as mounting an impossible summit). And the last part of the book proved that Simmons is entirely capable of writing great things, as well as equally capable of squandering a great situation. Returning from the mountain, Perry has a couple of truly haunting encounters that properly take advantage of the dreamlike mystery that pervaded high peaks such as Everest. In fact, he even comes across evidence that something truly mysterious and fascinating (and, from a literary point of view, quite unique) might just be haunting the mountain. It's only a glimpse, but it's a thousand times more interesting than the main threat he has just tangled with.

Simmons then went on to annoy me further by having unnecessary chapters in which Perry has meetings with an unbelievably large roster of historical celebrities, all of whom seem to have come from central casting, and who conform to a disappointingly shallow interpretation of history in which people are either heroes or villains. Yawn. Simmons even pulls some really laboured 'reveals' where he 'conceals' the identity of certain historical figures until he's ready to pull back the curtain. It's always painfully obvious who they are ahead of time.

There are some great moments in The Abominable. But I feel if Simmons wanted to go so far out of his way to make it different to The Terror, he ought not to have chosen such a similar premise. Perhaps a reader should not have expectations of a story ahead of time, but even so, the change in tone (genre, almost) that comes late in The Abominable makes it feel like some kind of failed bait-and-switch.

Wide Atlantic Weird: The Washington Sound Map

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 20:00:00 +0000

Wide Atlantic Weird is an on-going collection of stories that comment on the connections between Ireland and America - in particular, the shared weirdness that I have found in both cultures. I was going through a fairly big Sasquatch phase when I wrote this one. I've always been fascinated by the big guy, ever since I collected potboiler books of 'the unexplained' edited by Colin Wilson when I was a kid. In college, I got to do a bit of travellling and camping in California and Oregon, and this inspired this little tale...

(Received via email, August 2018)

Hi Cian,

Call me Claire Redfield. I’m a fan of the show. I’m especially enjoying the listener-submitted stories, and I have a story myself that I think will be suitable for inclusion, if you can bring yourself to believe it.

In late August 2013, I was just out of college, and I was hiking a section of the famous Pacific Crest Trail. The year before, I had read Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and like many others, I was inspired to lace up a pair of boots and follow her out into the wilderness. Also like many others, I had never even heard of the PCT before reading the book, and I was probably a bit under-prepared for the reality of it. Especially considering I’m from Wicklow town, where the biggest wilderness I had access to was the Wicklow mountains. And while it’s just possible to get lost in the those mountains (a small number of people do every year), it’s difficult to feel that the area is big enough to hide anything from humanity.

Washington State, of course, is different. Not being too ambitious, my plan was to spend simply ten days trekking through Washington’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, a solo through-hike. I didn’t have too much time, as I was on holiday from my job in Ireland, but I wanted to sample some real wilderness. Eagle Cap stretches for literally hundreds of thousands of acres, but I hit the maps, and chose a route that allowed me to reach the trail from the highway, hike for just over a week, and get back to civilisation easily after that.

But even this minor section of the PCT took me through the kind of open spaces I had no idea could exist. Within two days I broke out of the green tunnel of forest that had encased me, and first saw the pine-clad slopes of Caribous Canyon and the chalky peaks of Sawtooth Ridge. Emerging onto a trail that ran alongside a vast cliff, I yelled joyfully, hearing my words roll down to the tiny river far below, and up the forested hills, and come right back to my ear.

I saw many incredible things over the next week, but it was the sounds of the wild that really gripped my imagination. Here there were no engines, no electronic hum or hiss. Instead, the roar of a creek or the night howls of a distant wolf reverberated for miles, with no man-made sound pollution to muddy the aural map of the landscape.

By day eight, when I landed badly on my left ankle clearing a steep bluff, and decided it was best to head back to the highway a couple of days early, I was not too disappointed. I’d seen and heard all that I had hoped to, and I had stories and adventures in my head that I knew I’d never forget. According to the map, there was an old logging trail that would get me back to the road in about half a day.

Of course, walking with a swollen ankle turned out to be tougher than I’d hoped. It was getting dusky by the time I made it to the highway. The mosquitos were out and the crickets were chirping, and though I was closer to civilisation than I had been in a week, my sense of danger was suddenly alerted. I was a woman travelling alone, after all, and I hadn’t hitchhiked before. I wished it hadn’t been so dark, or so late. The road was deserted; I couldn’t be fussy about which ride to take. I turned on my mobile, which had been dormant for the last week. Even here by the main road, there was no signal. If I got into trouble -

I hadn’t had very long to worry about this when a pair of headlights pierced the gathering gloom. It was a pickup truck; the kind you really don’t want stopping for you at night. At first it didn’t look as though it was going to slow down, in fact it blew right past me before juddering to halt. After a moment’s hesitation, I picked up my backpack and strolled towards the vehicle. What choice did I have?

I heard angry words from within the cab as I approached. Two men were arguing. It sounded as though one of them hadn’t wanted to stop for me. I got closer, and I saw that they were an older man with a beard, and a younger man who was probably his son. Both were wearing trucker hats and flannels: the kind of guys you really don’t want stopping for you at night. In the back of the truck was something bulky and dark, covered with a tarp. As I approached, I noticed something long sticking out from under the tarp.

A foot. A big ’ol foot, with five splayed toes, shining in the moonlight.

I knew now that something was very wrong. A yell escaped from my mouth as I stepped backwards. I leaned on my bad ankle. A wave of pain shot through me and I almost fell over. The cab door swung open and the younger man, his eyes wild, charged me, wrapped his arms around me. I screamed, but pain and surprise prevented me from taking any more effective action.

The man shoved me into the cab, bashing my head off the side of the door and squeezed in beside me. Inside, it stank like an abbatoir. Both of them yelled; the door was slammed shut and the older man gunned the engine.

And then something huge and monstrous came out of the woods towards the truck, its claws stretched out towards the window, inches from my face, and the lonely road was filled with a sound that I’ll never forget. A roar that was neither beast nor man. I saw its furious face for a second, then we were away, and the white lines of the road flew under us, taking us farther and farther from that horror.

I screamed and sobbed until my heart stopped hammering, and I realised that the two men had saved me. They told me that I was in no danger. The next town was fifty miles away; we’d be there in a little while. They’d find a motel, or a hospital if I needed one. They were Taylor and his son Buck. They were locals, just back from a hunting expedition. It was clear from my accent that I wasn’t from around here, so what in the hell had I been doing out alone in the woods like that?

I started to explain, my sense of normality returning, and then I remembered the monster, the shape from the woods, and I grew excited. That hadn’t been a moose, or a bear, or any such thing. It was bigfoot. The big guy himself! Hell, we’d just had a damn sasquatch encounter, and we’d live to tell the tale. Surely, I said, that was something worth getting pumped about.

But my two rescuers remained subdued. And then I remembered the foot sticking out of the back of the truck. The absurdly big foot.

You killed one, I whispered.

They explained. Just an hour before they met me, they had been returning from a two-day hunting trip in the Eagle Cap mountains. In the early evening gloom, something big had run out in front of their truck, denting the fender pretty bad, but doing more damage to itself. It stumbled about on the road, bleeding from its forehead, then collapsed. They measured it: the thing was eight feet tall. It was broadly simian, and covered with brown hair, but it had a wide forehead like a man, and its eyes held the light of an intelligent creature before they went out forever. Choking on the stench, I reached behind me and lifted the tarp a fraction. There wasn’t much space to move, but I caught a glimpse of a hairy, domed skull.

For a moment I was sad, but a new thought filled me with excitement. This was huge, I told the others. You’ve got a bigfoot body. They were going to be the ones to finally prove the existence of this mythical creature. And I was a part of their story. Everyone in the world was going to want to hear about this. We could be famous.

I couldn’t believe it. After all the years of speculation. All the hoaxes, faked footprints, blurry 8mm film-reels. After all the dumb TV shows about middle-aged guys scaring each other in the woods, knocking sticks against trees and finding nothing. Earlier, before my hike, I had met a hunter who told me why he didn’t believe in the Big Guy: because though parts of the Pacific Northwest seemed remote, the truth was every inch of it had been picked over by hunters and rangers at one time or another, and we’d never even found so much as a skull. Now these two guys had actually had a corpse in the back of their truck. It was earth-shaking.

Only, why didn’t they seem as cheerful about this as I was?

Because, Buck said when I asked, we’re not out of the woods yet, miss. Taylor squeezed the accelerator, kept his eyes on the black road. And a chilling roar floated down from the mountain, through the trees, and washed over us. My heart drummed. The sound was primeval. It was the sound of a vast wilderness that didn’t care about man and his doings. It was the sound of unbroken forests and wild, jagged peaks. It was anguish and hatred.

It was revenge.

‘That’s the third one’, said Taylor. ‘First one happened after we killed this thing. There was more of them out there, in the trees, and we heard them roar then. That was twenty miles back. We heard another one just before we picked you up.’

I gasped. ‘That’s why it was there, waiting.’

‘Yes,’ Buck said. ‘Now we’ve heard it again. They’re communicating. Reckon they stand on a ridge somewhere, bellow as loud as they can, and on the next ridge over, there’s another one, listening to the signal. Sound carries up here. There’s no cars or skyscrapers or machines, only the sounds of nature. Maybe one can send a message to another, ten or twenty miles away. Who knows.’

‘There could be a whole network,’ I said, and at that moment an answering howl from the other side of the road turned our blood to ice. Then another, and another, till it seemed that the unseen hills all about us were thick with the creatures.

A sick feeling in the pit of my stomach finally turned into a rational thought. ‘The message is spreading faster than we’re travelling,’ I said, gasping, 'they’re going to cut us off.’

The words were hardly out of my mouth before Taylor slammed on the brakes. The truck was forced into a spin. The world tilted with a jolt. I banged my head off the dashboard. Taylor and Buck groaned: they were alive, but pretty smashed-up. One wheel still spun, squeaking on a bent axel. I saw what had caused Taylor to jam on: a row of silhouettes blocking the road, enormous, dome-headed shapes, ten or more of them. I saw them through blurry, teary eyes, and through the cracked window of a vehicle turned sideways. A smell like wet moss and grubs and dewy camping mornings crept in through the broken glass. They moved as though in slow motion, with the artless grace of animals. Some of them were small, shorter than me, and these younger ones scrambled towards us first. I could not see their faces, but I heard huge nostrils sniffing, grunting. The smashed cab rattled where their hands shook it. This was it. Our time was up. We knew the truth, and we were about to take it to our graves, our heads crushed by beings who could communicate over hundreds of miles of forest faster than we could –

A roar shook the truck. One of the animals was closer that I had thought. In fact, it sounded as though it was inside. Then a tuft of putrid hair filled my mouth as a gigantic elbow pistoned, attached to a thrashing arm. The beast from the back of the car bellowed again, so loud this time it felt as though it was rattling every tooth in my head. It was alive. In the confined space, the stench was unbearable. The arm plowed upwards, tearing the metal like a knife through tinfoil. Injured, but furious beyond measure, the nightmare beast pulled itself through the hole. All I could see was a heavy brown bulk. The side of the truck crumpled as it crawled out, and I squashed myself further into a corner to avoid being flattened.

Outside, a chorus of hoots and growls filled the night air. Feet scraped, inhuman voices bellowed. And, I swear to God, someone or something knocked on a treetrunk with a stick. Maybe those middle-aged idiots were onto something all along. The racket reached a frenzy, then a drop of rain splashed my face, and quickly became a torrent, the kind of rainstorm the Pacific Northwest is famous for. Soon I couldn’t hear anything except the hiss of the rain. Even when it had finished, and silence yawned outside in the dark woods, I waited a long time before I dared to call for the others, and climbed out of the wrecked truck.

Turned out we were all OK, though none of us were too sprightly getting out of there. The rain had turned the forest floor on either side of the road to mud, but we found a single footprint and took some pictures of it. We got out of there, limping and stopping frequently. About six in the morning, a passing Chrysler picked us up. We told the driver we’d been in a wreck, didn’t say much about anything else.

I never told anyone about what happened. My own pictures of the footprint didn’t turn out so good. Blurry, like all the best bigfoot pictures, I guess. I took contact details for Taylor and Buck, said I’d keep in touch, but never did. A couple weeks later I flew back to Ireland, and my bigfoot adventure seemed pretty irrelevant from then on. I occasionally check out bigfooter websites: the communities seem to vary between well-meaning and idiotic, though none of them strike me as being particularly well-informed. Taylor and Buck have posted on the message boards of some of the bigger sites, and I’ve seen a couple videos on Youtube ‘debunking’ their photographs of the corpse and the footprints. I’m sure you can find them if you look. And if you’re ever in the Pacific Northwest, be nice to any strange creatures you meet there – in case they call their friends.

Love,

Claire Redfield

Wide Atlantic Weird: The Legend Of The Inisfola Broadcast

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 20:19:00 +0000

Wide Atlantic Weird is an on-going collection of stories that attempt to create that feeling you get when you come across a delicious little fragment of weirdness, a story that's so out-there it can't possibly be true, yet one which you can't dismiss out of hand. When you stumble across such a tale buried in a chapter of an old collection of 'unexplained' stories, or when you hear an unbelievable story from a listener to a podcast, that's Wide Atlantic Weird.

Source: Strange World, B.W. Bourke, 1995

Though Ireland was neutral during World War 2, the Irish government maintained a radio outpost off the coast of Kerry in order to monitor both Allied and Axis military radio chatter. The location of this facility was Inisfola Island, about fifty miles off the Deargalagh peninsula. A radio tower was built, as well as several maintenance and residential buildings, and the facility was staffed by Irish Army officers who were formerly stationed at the Curragh, where both British and German POWs were held, so they themselves were fluent in German. During their three years of operation, they recorded no definite evidence of military activities that threatened to breach Irish neutrality. However, in January 1945, they received a transmission that remains unexplained to this day.

At five minutes to midnight, January 2^nd , their instruments picked up a faint broadcast. There was a lot of static, but the officers recognised the language being spoken as German. They scrambled to transcribe the narration, which appeared to be that of a German officer named Koch, who was leading some sort of overground expedition. This seems remarkable, as the Inisfola receiving devices has a range of only a few hundred miles, and so were used to picking up radio broadcasts from aircraft buzzing the Atlantic, the Irish Sea or the English channel. By 1945, with the way the war was going, it seemed extremely unlikely that any German land expedition was making its way over Irish, British, or northern European territory. Besides, the details didn’t match – Koch spoke frequently about the challenges of passing through ‘jungle’ and seemed concerned with avoiding local wildlife, ‘lizards’ in particular. Where was this phantom expedition? The coordinates Koch occasionally provided made no sense either; they seemed to imply that the group was travelling over a concave surface, rather than a convex surface, as when we move across the surface of the earth.

According to Kavanagh, one of the army language specialists, some of the transcript read as follows:

Koch Report, Day 62:

‘The men have been almost driven crazy. Over sixty days travelling in this place. The trail is years old, now overgrown, and the jungle is reclaiming its own. Strange growths, rainbow-coloured, creep across our path. Their branches wriggle, and some of them bite. Doctor Hinter has a gash on his leg that will not heal; his encounter with the creature may yet prove fatal… Everywhere we hear the buzz of unknown insects and the distant roar of the lizards. Until today, I had despaired that we would ever make it. I thought us lost. We had all but lost faith in the compass; the coordinates we reported to you were guesswork. Nothing works as you’d expect down here. Up isn’t up and north isn’t north. The light, too, is so strange: the sun never sets, and too many sleepless nights in this endless twilight have taken their toll on the men. And to look ahead and see the forest and mountains rise into the very air – it’s almost too much to tolerate.

This morning we reached Stanleystadt. The men were relieved to see its radio tower peeking above the jungle, in a valley surrounded by terraced fields: the hand of man visible at last in this savage wilderness. I made a full report to acting Commander Schultz, then had my team sent to the hospital to recooperate. We are to be put up in the bunks on the military side of Stanleystadt. The settlement has grown noticeably since the last reports were made. The depredations of the lizards have lately been less of a problem. A vast bamboo fence has been constructed around the town. Tell Himmler –‘

At which point the report became corrupted by static, then the sound faded entirely. Kavanagh’s complete transcript was sent to the G2 office of the War department in Dublin. There, it appears to have been shelved, and was seemingly lost by the end of the war. The only information relating to the Inisfola broadcast comes from rumours leaked from G2, and the fragment revealed by Kavanagh himself.

Given that the Nazis capitulated shortly after the supposed broadcast took place, it’s tempting to wonder if this subterranean outpost was left stranded, cut off from its parent nation on the surface of the earth. Or, if the suspicions of conspiracy theorists are true, whether the later sightings of UFOs from 1947 on are evidence that this inner society instead thrived, using advanced technology to visit us and fill our skies with more mystery.

-END OF EXTRACT (Strange World, BW Bourke, 1995)

Wide Atlantic Weird: A Phone RInging In A Deserted Hotel

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:49:00 +0000

Wide Atlantic Weird is an on-going collection of stories that attempt to create that feeling you get when you come across a delicious little fragment of weirdness, a story that's so out-there it can't possibly be true, yet one which you can't dismiss out of hand. When you stumble across such a tale buried in a chapter of an old collection of 'unexplained' stories, or when a friend reluctantly tells you an impossible story in the small hours after a night of playing Resident Evil, that's Wide Atlantic Weird.

Source: An email from a friend I will refer to as ‘Chris Redfield.’

Hi Cian,

We’ve been talking a lot recently about the subject of the supernatural, and I know you’re looking for some stories to read on your show. Well, I’ve got at least one story I can share with you that I think would be suitable. I haven’t told it to you before because it’s from a somewhat dark time in my life, and it brings up some bad memories. I don’t know for sure that this is because of the unexplained event that happened to me, but this strange happening and my dark mental state at the time are inextricably linked for me.

You may remember that about 2009, an enormous, new hotel built right next to the river Lee on the Western edge of Cork City, flooded. I’m sure any listeners who are familiar with the city will know which hotel I’m referring to. One of the ironic things about this story is that the setting is a brand-new building, on the face of it a not-at-all scary place, while directly across the river from it is an old abandoned Victorian asylum – surely a more likely spot for a spooky encounter. Oh well, such is life.

The 2009 flooding was catastrophic. The entire basement and ground floor of the building were ruined, and every car in the underground car park was destroyed. The company paid out millions in insurance, and the hotel shut down for two whole years while refurbishments were taking place. I took a job as one of the night watchmen during those two years.

Every night, I started my rounds in the lobby. The lobby had been refurbished first, and all the facilities there were working fine. There were glass doors looking out into the blackness, a walnut desk, and a bank of phones that connected with each of the guest rooms. Early in the night, I had to shoo away junkies who tended to hang out at the back of the building, where the hotel backed onto the river and some scrubby woodland. After that, I was alone in the building for the night.

Now I’ve said that the building was new, and not particularly spooky-looking. But it was still and enormous, three-wing, five-story building, and being in an empty place like this all night can do things to your mind. The lighting in most of the corridors still didn’t work, so I did my rounds with a flashlight shaking in my hands. All the usual empty-house noises made an appearance – dripping taps, mice scurrying, that sort of thing, and I scared myself silly a few times, but never came across anything really scary.

Until the third night, and room 106.

As I approached the room at about 2.30am, a tinny sound filled the empty hall. A telephone ring. It was coming from room 106. I buzzed the lock with my skeleton card and entered the room. It was, of course identical to every other room on the floor, and empty. The phone was ringing. I picked up the handset. A bizarre, distorted dial tone buzzed in my ear. After about a minute, it died. I returned to the lobby and thought no more about it that night. The phones mostly worked, but there were still a lot of problems with the electronics in the hotel, so it wasn’t that surprising that they might behave oddly sometimes.

The next night, the memory of the phone came back into my head as I began my checks of the first floor. I passed room 106, closer to 1am this time, and wondered if it would freak me out to hear the phone again.

As I passed by, the phone rang. Again I entered, again I got the strange dial tone, louder this time.

I sat in the lobby, trying to figure out the mystery. The phones were only connected to the lobby phones. There was literally no other way to call them – not even a mobile could do it. And if there was some kind of programming error that made the phone go off every night, wouldn’t it happen at the same time each night?

On the third night, I was so spooked, I started doing my checks from the top floor and making my way down. Again, the phone rang as I approached, at 2.50 this time. I ran straight down to the lobby to catch whoever it was was pranking me. The lobby was empty.

As I stood, panting, the lobby phone rang. Shaking, I approached the desk to read the green LCD screen that showed which room was calling.

Room 106.

Soon after that, I began to drink heavily while on the job. I didn’t care. I needed the job, it was easy, and 99% of the time nothing happened, so it didn’t matter if I was drunk. I carried a bottle of vodka around with me on my rounds, I yelled loudly to warn anyone – or anything – that might have been in that empty building with me – that I was coming. But I never saw anyone. And the phone continued to ring. Sometimes I’d get a night or two of reprieve. But it would always come back. I played loud music – heavy metal – down in the lobby, terrified that in the seconds of silence between the songs, I would hear the tinny wail of the phone in room 106. But, of course, it only rang when it knew I was nearby.

So that’s my story, Cian. I’m sure there’s any number of explanations for it, but for me, none of them quite fit, and by the end of two years on the job, I was a wreck. The hotel is now long back in business, and I’ve never heard that anyone had anything to say about Room 106. All I’ve got is a memory I wish I didn’t have.

Irish Horror: The Lodgers (2017)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 16:11:00 +0000

The Lodgers is a 2017 Irish film directed by Brian O'Malley, stars Charlotte Vega, Bill Milner and Eugene Simon, and was filmed almost entirely at the infamous Loftus Hall in County Wexford, a real-life source of many urban legends and the location of much legend-tripping.

I first heard stories about Loftus Hall while I was was in college. Many of my colleagues from the southeast side of the country knew of this place. Today it has been reinvented as a tourist attraction (dark tourism, I guess) but back then it was dilapidated, rotting, and hella spooky. Pretty much everyone who spoke to me of the place had visited with their friends upon a dark night on a 'dare.' There are myriad local legends about the place, some of them unique to Loftus Hall, others seeming to be the kind of generic myths that get attached to any spooky old building. In particular, it was most often said that a gentleman visiting the Hall centuries ago was revealed to have been the Devil himself (he revealed a cloven hoof when a lady bent over to pick up a dropped playing card), upon which he disappeared through the roof in a pillar of fire. The patch where he burst through the roof was said to be still visible. Suffice it to say that Loftus Hall is a unique location in which to set a period ghost story movie, and I heartily approve.

As to the plot: a pair of young-looking twins live together in a decrepit, decaying house somewhere in rural Ireland. They have upper-class, British-inflected accents, and it is clear that they are the remnants of a once powerful and influential line that has fallen upon hard times. In some mystical way, they are tied to the house, cannot leave the immediate area, and must live according to a series of arcane rules, lest some unstated but horrible force that seems to have power over them become angry. Their interactions with the local villagers, as well as their English lawyer, lead to them breaking the rules, and having to deal with the consequences.

At first, I wasn't sure exactly when or where this story was happening. The house itself seems stuck in a timewarp, with gaslamps and candles being used instead of electrical lighting, and by loading on the gothic tropes, the film seems to be setting itself up as a classic Victorian-era ghost story. Similarities to The Woman In Black are unavoidable. The film looks amazing, it's decadent and sumptuous, in an almost over-the-top manner (almost Guillermo del Toro levels of gothic unreality). The lead actors' British accents almost lead me to presume that this film was yet another example of an Irish storyteller setting their ghost story in England to account for prevailing tastes of audiences (a la Sheridan leFanu and Bram Stoker). But once it became clear that the film is happening in Ireland sometime after the end of the First World War, and that the twins therefore sound British because they are representatives of the old Anglo-Irish ascendency, I realised that the setup was being used to make a far more unique, and a far more Irish, point.

How interesting to see the plight of the Anglo-Irish represented in fantastic fiction, and using the traditional British haunted house setting to do so too. There's nary a town in Ireland that doesn't have a 'big house' (apart from the ones that burnt their Big Houses down after independence, of course), the place where the land-owning gentry lived with their servants in a kind of Upstairs Downstairs scenario, acting out a bizarre facsimile of their British counterparts, though never being truly considered as the same breed. (For a great take on this under-represented topic, check out this episode of The Irish Passport Podcast). In The Lodgers, what else do our spectral, inheritance-cursed due represent but the liminal Anglo-Irish, neither fish nor foul, not of this world nor the next, wedded to ancient, once-great lineages and beholden to restrictive, arcane rules and laws? It's no accident that the story is set about 1920 or so - Irish independence is just around the corner, and the lifestyle that these two represent, already in terminal decline, is about to end forever. 'How can fate be wrong?' wonders one character, referring both to the inevitability of their ghastly family inheritance (a classic Victorian ghost story trope, with hints of Lovecraft too) as well as the distinctly 20th-century rise of nationalism that's on the horizon.

'I have come all the way from the mainland,' says the family's lawyer, the aptly-named Mr Birmingham, referring to England, presuming this to be the pair's spiritual home. 'This is our mainland,' replies the girl, showing that they are at least as separated from their cultural cousins across the sea as they are from the local, Gaelic Irish who resent their presence and curse the locals who return from the trenches, having served the British Empire. The lawyer even mentions that though his family has attended to the financial affairs of their own for generations, none of his own forebears have ever troubled to actually visit the property: they are paternalistic, absentee landlords, dealing with their half-forgotten ward in the manner that England dealt with Ireland.

None of this is made too overt, and viewers unfamiliar with the reality of these two different classes of people living in Ireland will likely miss the subtext of the film, diluting its effectiveness.

Regardless of how you feel about the politics on show here, The Lodgers tackles a difficult, and uniquely Irish, subject head-on here, using the vestements of the classic gothics. It's a film that could only have been made in, and about, Ireland.

The Lodgers is available on Netflix as of the time of writing.

Irish Horror: Wake Wood (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 21:26:00 +0000

I took the time last week to watch a couple of recent (ish) Irish horror movies, and while I probably won't have time to record my thoughts on them for the podcast, I'm instead going to scribble a few ideas here. I figured that I'd be covering more Irish horror on the 'cast, especially as there are now more and more entries in this once thinly-populated category, but between one thing and another, I haven't got around to covering many yet. Anyway, here's my two cents on 2011's Wake Wood. There'll be no spoilers, and these are not really reviews as such, more a collection of analytical notes, if I may use so grandiose a term.

Wake Wood is a part British/part Irish production. It's British part is due to none other than the then-recently revitalised Hammer Studios. Yes, Hammer, the infamous studio that dripped blood, etc - ok, if you really don't know much about them, then I'll just say that they were responsible for the rebirth of the classic movie monsters in the mid-to-late 20th century; they took over the care of Dracula, Frankenstein et al after their Universal Studios days. Hammer were a hugely important and influential studio who re-popularised horror, giving it a lurid, big-budget feel that competed with anything Hollywood was doing at the time.

Circa 2011 though, Hammer was in a new iteration and was just getting off the ground with a small number of low-budget horror movies that, at first glance, don't seem to owe a ton of their DNA to their over-the-top ancestors. Wake Wood was one of the first, made in conjunction with the Irish Fantastic Films and also the Swedish Solid Productions. Its director is David Keating, and it stars Timothy Spall (who I remember as the sleazy roadie in Rock Star), Eva Birthistle, a young and amazing Ella Connolly, and Aidan Gillen (who I am super pumped to see in the upcoming History channel UFO mythology sure-to-be shlockfest Blue Book). The production was mostly filmed in Donegal, with some parts filmed in Sweden.

A couple lose their little girl when she is mauled by a German shepherd. Crippled by grief, they leave their home and move to the town of Wake Wood, somewhere in Ireland. There, they slowly discover that the townsfolk are mixed up in a somewhat pagan-seeming ritual. As it turns out, this ritual may hold the key to reuniting them, in a fashion, with their lost girl, though as usual in situations like this, it just might come at a terrible cost.

Ok, so first thing to get out of the way: the general plot reminds me massively of Stephen King's Pet Semetary. The basic storyline setup is very similar. But this storyline is older than that: it goes all the way back to Edwardian Times (at least), with W. W. Jacobs' story The Monkey's Paw. The grieving parents, the dead offspring, the compromised opportunity to bring the beloved back: it's all there in this 1902 tale. If you've never read The Monkey's Paw and only know it from its Simpsons spoof, then go find it online right now and read it. It's a classic. Basically, yes Wake Wood is playing on a previously-used horror trope, but it's a classic one, and one that has a very respectable pedigree.

Secondly, Wake Wood is folk horror, and wow am I delighted to see Ireland getting in on the act with this sub-genre. For the uninitiated, folk horror is basically a type of horror that is preoccupied with natural or agricultural landscapes, ancient traditions or religions, and our relationship to the land itself. The genre is generally said to be typified by three classic British horror films - Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, and The Blood On Satan's Claw (godawful title, great movie) - and it must be said that it's generally seen to be a bit of a mostly-British phenomenon (Kill List would be a more recent addition), though The Blair Witch Project and Children Of The Corn could be seen as American variants on the genre.

So where are the Irish entries? Well, check out my podcast episode on the short Irish horror film Foxglove for the skinny on that. Certainly, as an ecologist myself, I feel that here in Ireland we're somewhat disconnected from nature. It's true that we're mostly an agrarian nation, but we have the lowest forest cover in all of Europe, and though we do have a strong folkloric tradition that peoples our denuded landscape with all manner of imps and sprites, the notion of actually getting lost in any kind of wilderness here is somewhat more than a filmmaker can conjure up and pass the suspension-of-disbelief test.

So Wake Wood, dealing with a primarily rural landscape and some well-realised, ancient-seeming cult activities, does fit nicely into the folk horror category. As in Foxglove, landscape in Wake Wood is an incredibly important theme, with characters becoming literally and figuratively tied to the land by participation in the mysterious rites. This ties into the very Irish preoccupation with ownership of land (we've had it taken off us so many times in the past) and the very Irish notion of 'blow-ins' - people who are still considered 'outsiders' despite living somewhere for a long time. And as in Foxglove, there's a preoccupation with wind turbines (of all things) as boundary markers. This fits into various currents that run through all folk horror, especially the 70s Nigel Kneale-influenced stuff that deals with the effect of modern technology on ancient powers inherent in the landscape. There are hints of psychogeography here for sure.

Speaking of belonging, I'm going to talk about Timothy Spalding's presence here, playing himself as (of course) an Englishman. Now, on the one hand, Spalding is here because he's a great actor and he delivers a perfect performance. He's a tweed-wearing, respectable gentleman farmer, and he's perfect for the role of an older character who knows exactly what dark secrets are going on in this little town. BUT, his character being played by an Englishman in this context (something which is never addressed directly in the film) is, to me, definitely of note in a film made by Irish folks that so overwhelmingly concerns itself with the theme of belonging to a particular place. See, making your character English in this setting can come with connotations. It can be a loaded decision. Think about John B Keane's The Field, in which an English-living 'outsider' arrives to take possession of the titular land, and the film version, in which the outsider is American, removing the subtext from the story. Just a thought, and perhaps not one that anyone involved in Wake Wood intended beyond getting a great actor on board.

The film's connections to folklore are not laboured, but they are definitely there. For merely by moving a story in the mould of Pet Semetary from American to Ireland means that we are invoking the concept of a changling. It's common in Irish lore to fear that if one irks the little people, they may steal your child and replace it with one of their own. This cuckoo child (shades of John Wyndham) may at first look like your own, but clever trickery can fool the creature into revealing itself to be an unnatural abomination with the power of adult speech and the face of a wizened old person. None of this happens in Wake Wood of course, but the concept of a child who is not what she seems is doubtlessly mined from this folkloric vein.

Wake Wood is a welcome entry into the annals of Irish folk horror. Its folk horror elements are a natural part of the setting and they story; they're understated, not laboured, and feel like the natural part of an ancient belief system. The film is taut and tight, it doesn't pad itself with complex breakdowns of how the pagan or ritual elements operate, instead only presenting what is necessary to fuel a tale of heartbreak and people pushed to extremes by love and loss.

Off The Wagon: The New Barbarians

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 17:09:00 +0000

During the 80s, the Italian movie industry went crazy imitating certain big-budget movies. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior somehow earned more Italian rip-offs than most, so to learn more about this bizarre fixation, Cian and Ali decided to check out 1983's The New Barbarians. If you dream of a post-apocalyptic future in which bands of 'Templars' in tight white uniforms drive around quarries wielding awkward weapons from tinfoil vehicles, then this might be the film for you!

Listen to the podcast here.

Off The Wagon: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 14:28:00 +0000

In the late 80s, legendary egotist William 'Captain Kirk' Shatner finally got his chance to direct a Star Trek movie, to the horror of the rest of the Trek cast. For years he had tyrannised them on the sets of the original TV show, and had barely held back his frustration that fellow cast member Leonard Nimoy was getting to direct the Trek movies that followed! Now was his chance to show them all what he could do - and he had a typically bold and ambitious story to tell, too. The result was one of the most hated of all the original crews' cinematic adventures. Join Cian, who still has some love for this mess of a movie, and Donal, who really doesn't, as they find out exactly what went wrong during the making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Listen to the podcast here.

Off The Wagon: UFO Special

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 16:05:00 +0000

Why do we think of flying saucers and little grey men when we think of aliens?

Inspired by too many late nights skywatching (and X-Files watching), special agents Cian and Chris get spooky once again as they tackle the topic of Unidentified Flying Objects. And as the age of fake news and conspiracy thinking is upon us, it's more important than ever to know why people continue to believe weird things!

Chris has been doing some field research and brings several sightings from the Cork area to our attention. Then Cian brings us down the rabbithole to discover the details of the very first true 'flying saucer' sighting as well as the first 'alien abduction' report to find out what we can learn from studying these cases. In between, we learn that the Victorian age had its own UFO-style 'phantom airship' hysteria. We round things off with a discussion about looking for alien civilisations and Dyson spheres.

Listen to the podcast here.

SHOWNOTES:

The Jan 2017 Dublin UFO.

The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe. Early in the 'cast I mistakenly refer to him as 'Allen Keyhoe,' probably because I'm confusing him with J Allen Heynek, also a UFO researcher.

UFOs in 1556 seen in Basel, Switzerland

1929 cover by Frank R. Paul

Here's a video of the American white pelican. I've never been too impressed with the pelican theory as an explanation for Kenneth Arnold's sighting - I'd like to think that an experienced pilot would recognise a flock of birds when he sees one - but upon looking closely at the way he described the shape and movements of the objects he saw, I've got to wonder.

Kenneth Arnold with the objects he saw.

Our incidental music is by Purple Planet music. Other music: X-Files Theme by Mark Snow, Mulder & Scully by Catatonia.

Off The Wagon: Conan The Barbarian

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 18:59:00 +0000

WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE? The Off The Wagon podcast crew bring you the answer to this age-old question in this big-budget, large-cast, epic-length extravaganza of a review. It all began in the very early days of 2017, in the age before the oceans drank Atlantis, when four movie fans gathered in snowy Toronto to have a few beers and discuss 1982's Conan The Barbarian.

It soon became clear that this movie meant a lot to most of them, and the discussion took many an unexpected turn: the career of right-wing gun-nut director John 'Red Dawn' Milius, a comparison of the careers of both Schwartzennegar and Stallone, religion, philosophy, Niezche and Ronald Reagan. Whether or not you're a fan of Conan, there's much to enjoy here, as this seminal movie turned out to be ripe for more analysis than anyone thought possible!

The participants: Cian, Donal, Matt and James. Check out James' amazing band Villainest by clicking here!

Check out the podcast here.

Off The Wagon: KISS Special

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 15:42:00 +0000

Here we bring you a VERY special episode of Off The Wagon. Cian is reunited with his brother Donal in snowy Montreal to talk about the history of the band KISS. Donal has long been a card-carrying member of the KISS army, and Cian has had to live with the results of this obsession, so there's a lot to talk about! And the guys have come up with a special concept just for the occasion: instead of reviewing a book or movie, they each read two of the four KISS biographies (along with a few other books for good measure, as they just couldn't stop themselves) and now they discuss the story of the band's career through the often-conflicting lenses of the four members.

Even for those with no interest in the music, it's a fascinating trip into the world of four conflicting personalities who decided to dress in leather, paint their faces white, tour the world and fight bitterly with one another for over 30 years. These guys wrote awful things about one another on a regular basis, remember events differently and big themselves up in their books to a hilarious degree. Rock 'n roll excess, spectacle, terrible business and artistic decisions: there's something for everyone here, and as KISS would say themselves, you wanted the best, you got the best!

Get stuck into the podcast here!

Off The Wagon: Fatal Deviation

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 15:09:00 +0000

For the first time in a long time, Cian is joined in person for a podcast by messrs Ali and Tom to take down Ireland's first (and only?) homegrown martial arts movie, 1998's Fatal Deviation. There's no shortage of kicks, punches, Londis tarts, elderly gangsters or kung fu druids in this epic. A film made with considerable heart and effort. I think it's fair to say that not every punch landed, so to speak, but clearly everyone involved gave it their all. If you've ever wondered why winning a local fighting tournament would automatically give you control over a small Meath town ... well, you won't really find out exactly why this is. But when Jimmy Bennett goes head-to-head with unscrupulous drug runners in the fabled Bealtaine Tournament, he soon finds that there's everything to fight for!

Listen to the podcast here.

And, for the brave, find the movie here.

Off The Wagon Halloween Special

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 18:57:00 +0000

At last, it's time to gather round the campfire with Cian and Chris and get into the Halloween spirit! In this episode, our hosts share some of the finest true creepy stories they were able to gather from Cork and abroad. Many thanks to all of our friends who contributed their own personal tales of terror. Find out the truth about Clonakilty's terrifying 'creaky tree', discover what really scares our intrepid hosts, and travel with them on their own ghost-hunting escapades.

Listen to the podcast here.

Another Michael Crichton Podcast: Congo (1995)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 14:54:00 +0000

Join Cian and Chris for (they finally have a title) 'We Need To Talk About Michael,' a podcast in which they watch the movie versions of Michael Crichton novels and compare them to the original books, if they can remember anything about them, at least.

This time around it's 1995's Congo, a tale of diamonds, killer apes, and sesame cake. Listen in to discover why you never want Jimmy Buffett to fly your plane, why Tim Curry should never play a Romanian, and whether a pound of sugar is more expensive than a primatologist.

Like the movie itself, this 'cast had something of a troubled birth. Recording issues plagued the episode, so Chris, being a tech wizard, used some supercomputer thinking machines to piece the audio back together. Though there are still some audial oddities throughout, the banter is worth listening to, so click below, journey in search of the lost city of Zinj with us, and STOP EATING MY SESAME CAKE.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Off The Wagon Reviews: Name Of The Rose (1986)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 16:52:00 +0000

If you've ever asked yourself, 'I wonder what Sherlock Holmes would have been like if he was a medieval monk played by Sean Connery,' then you've come to the right place! Cian and Eoghan don their robes to get medieval on 1986's The Name Of The Rose. Along the way, Cian gets schooled on historical matters and Eoghan learns the shocking truth that Hollywood likes to change the endings of your favourite books. Stay tuned for medieval murder mystery madness.

Listen to the podcast here.

Watch the trailer here.

Podcast Book Review: Neanderthal by John Darnton

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 12:20:00 +0000

In this episode of Off The Wagon Reviews, Cian and Andrew return to what they remember as a bad book from their college days: Neanderthal by John Darnton, only to find, to their horror, that they actually quite liked it! No question about it, this is assuredly the best book about psychic neanderthals you will probably ever read. And I doubt either expected to be drawn into a (somewhat) philosophical discussion about evolution, socialism and society, but that's what happened! So tune in for a more sober than silly take on a book that probably only got released due to the success of Jurassic Park. Oh, and special thanks to my dad, Kevin Gill, for the harmonica snippet at the beginning.

Listen to the podcast here.

Off The Wagon Reviews Jurassic Park Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:58:00 +0000

Cian and Chris return to finish off their T-Rex-sized rant about Jurassic Park, and they once again spare no expense in bringing you the analysis that was so big it needed two podcasts! Revel in the trivia; discover exactly what Dennis Nedry keeps on his desk, why Chris wanted to run like a Gallimimus, and choose your side in the infamous 'Tyrannosaur paddock moat debate.'

Listen to the podcast here.

As promised, we've now added some show notes. Below is a pretty good map showing someone's idea of how the Rex got out of her enclosure. Click here for a pretty good discussion about the confusion people have experienced watching this scene.

And here is Chris' map of the same scene. This is how we both imagined it went down when we were kids. Don't say we aren't good to you!

Off The Wagon Reviews: Jurassic Park (1993)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 18:05:00 +0000

Well, it sure is nice to review a good movie for a change! I'm joined by long-time JP devotee and all-round good guy Chris Joyce to look into this seminal movie from our childhood. We take Spielberg's dinosaur opus apart to see what makes it tick in intense, scene-by-scene detail. Discover where I now keep my battery-operated screaming raptors, why Hollywood doesn't know what an eagle sounds like, how much Jurassic Park scientists earn, what the name of the amber-digging guy is, why you should never hire a single disgruntled employee to run your entire security system, and a whole lot of other things you've never wondered about!

Listen to the podcast here.

Off The Wagon Reviews Podcast: Ghoul School (1990)

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 19:44:00 +0000

This week, Ali gets misty-eyed reminiscing about kindly New York broadcaster Joe Franklin, Cian gets confused by plotlines that make no sense (underage janitors? mysterious zombie gas?) and the listening audience learns why the Blood Sucking Ghouls never hit the big-time of 80s hair metal bands.

Listen to the podcast here.

And if you're brave, watch the movie here!

Off The Wagon Reviews: Night Train To Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Steampunk) — Mon, 16 May 2016 00:37:00 +0000

Here's a new podcast in which I'm joined from across the Atlantic by bad movie expert Ali Keane to discuss our personal history with bad movie-watching before we tackle the 1985 mess of a movie Night Train To Terror. Podcasting via Scype is presenting some difficulties with keeping background noise down, but the quality is not bad! A hand injury is still keeping my artwork at the level of a preschool child, but I'm doing my exercises and I promise that you can look forward to some quality illustrations as soon as I can produce them. Take a listen here.