After finding myself considerably more than pleased with writer/director Scott Frank’s 2014 adaptation of modern noir master Lawrence Block’s gritty PI drama A Walk Among The Tombstones, I decided, in spite (or maybe because?) of its 0% Rotten Tomatoes score, to track down the only other cinematic take on Block’s work (and, more specifically, on his legendary protagonist, former-cop-turned-unlicensed-gumshoe Matt Scudder), 1986’s 8 Million Ways To Die. As things turned out, I had to go the Blu-ray route with this one since it’s not available for streaming anywhere so far as I can tell, but hey, things could have been worse — the Kino Lorber Blu (and,I presume, DVD, although I didn’t actually check to see if it’s available in that format) is actually a semi-recent release, dating back to October of 2017, and if I’d been determined to track this flick down before that, I may have…

There’s one in every school — the kid with the depraved imagination. The kid with no reservations about tapping into the deepest recesses of his or her id and displaying the contents for all to see. The kid who’s something more than just a garden-variety oddball. The kid who hears, at least once every day, “dude, you’re sick” — and, fortunately for us all, for whatever unfathomable cosmic reason, those kids can usually draw.

They may not be especially good at it, mind you, but it’s more about ideas than execution. It’s about using paper and pencil as their instruments for self-exorcism, as interpretive devices for channeling what’s within to the outside world. About cooking up the sickest, most extreme shit imaginable not just because they can, but because they must.

Max Clotfelter was one such kid, and in his 2016 self-published mini, The Warlok Story…