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Book Review: Nostradamus Predicts The End Of The World by Renee Noorbergen

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the year 2010, I was at Half-Price Books when I came across an old paperback called Nostradamus Predicts The End Of The World.  The book was full of the cryptic prophecies of the French astrologer Nostradamus, along with interpretations of that what those predictions actually meant.  The book argued that, by using those interpretation, once could come up with a chronological narrative of the next great world war.  The book predicted that World War III was going to break out in the 90s, that New York was going to be destroyed in 1999, and that the world, as we knew it, would be over with around the year 2000.  Once I saw that the world has apparently ended ten years ago, my sense of humor demanded that I buy the book.

Since that time, a few people have told me that I shouldn’t laugh at stuff like this and that, just because the dates were wrong, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen.  Some have pointed out that the passage in which Nostradamus predicted a nuclear bomb hitting New York in 1999 could have just as easily been a prediction of 9/11 and that perhaps Nostradamus either misinterpreted the date or maybe it was originally meant to happen in 1999 but got pushed back a few years or …. well, there’s always a reason, isn’t there?  My argument, of course, is that the only time that Nostradamus gives a date for any of his predictions, he was wrong.  It’s probably not coincidental that Nostradamus picked a date that was so far in the future, he wouldn’t have to worry having to explain himself.

The thing with Nostradamus though is that his “prophecies” were so vaguely written that they could pretty much be interpreted to mean anything.  Indeed, it seems like a compelling argument could be made that his prophecies were actually meant to keep him in favor with the wealthy and royal patrons who subsidized his life.  Much of what he wrote works as Rorschach test.  Readers are going to find what they’re looking for.

For instance, the author of Nostradamus Predicts The End of the World was apparently looking for a battle-by-battle history of the Third World War.  For the author, that was found in Nostradamus’s prophecies.  The book argues that conflict in the Middle East would lead to a World War between the U.S., Russia, and China and that apparently only Australia would be spared.  Towards the end of the book, the author fixates on a red-haired general who apparently referred to in several of Nostradamus’s prophecies.  One wonders why Nostradamus would specifically tell us the year that New York was going to be destroyed and why Nostradamus would, as some have claimed, warn about an evil German leader named “Hister” but while leaving vague the identity of the general who is going to be the key to saving the world.  Indeed, what even is the point of being able to see into the future if you’re going to be so deliberately vague in your reporting that no one is going to know what you’re talking about?

Interestingly enough, even though it’s been over 22 years since the date that Nostradamus the world would end, there are still people posting his prophecies online and saying that he predicted everything from Trump to COVID to AOC.  Never stop believing, I guess.

International Horror Review: Starship Invasions (dir by Ed Hunt)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Once, during an interview, the distinguished British horror actor, Christopher Lee, was asked to name the worst film in which he had appeared.

Being a very busy actor who appeared in well-over 200 films, Lee paused for a minute to give it some thought and then eventually said that, in 1977, he had appeared in a Canadian science fiction film in which he played a mute alien who was using a suicide ray to conquer Earth. Though he wasn’t quite sure what the title had been, that was his pick for the worst movie in which he had ever appeared.

Now, considering some of the films in which Lee appeared, that’s a bold statement. Was Lee correct? Was that film — which was entitled Starship Invasions — the worst film in which he ever appeared?

Well …. maybe. It’s certainly not one of his best. Lee plays Captain Ramses, who is the leader of the Legion of the Winged Serpents. The legion’s home planet is about to be destroyed by a supernova so he has taken it upon himself to find a new planet to colonize. Earth looks pretty good to him!

Christopher Lee remembered Ramses as being mute. Actually, he communicates through telepathy. We hear his words but his lips never move. The same is true of every alien that appears in the film. And yes, this could be an example of how different and more advanced the aliens are when compared to the humans but a more likely explanation is that it was cheaper to film the outer space scenes without sound and then just dub in the character’s “thoughts” later.

For reasons that are never quite clear, the Legion of the Winged Serpent abducts several Earthlings before then unleashing their suicide ray. Prof. Allan Duncan (Robert Vaughn) is the UFO expert who investigates the abductions before eventually getting abducted himself by a race of good, gray aliens. The gray aliens are determined to save the Earth from the Legion. It’s never really explained why.

Meanwhile, the suicide ray is causing chaos on Earth as people all over are driven to kill themselves and others. And the ray has just been aimed at Duncan’s wife (played by Helen Shaver) so Allan and the good aliens better hurry up and defeat Ramses and the bad aliens!

Is Starship Invasions really that bad? Well, it’s certainly not …. great. Christopher Lee is properly imposing as Ramses but even he occasionally has a “What have I gotten myself into?” look on his face. Most of all, Starship Invasions is very much a product of the 1970s. When Ramses visits a space station, it looks a lot like an incredibly tacky mix of a fitness center and a cocktail lounge. The fashion of both the Earthlings and the aliens is very much of the era. Robert Vaughn wears a turtleneck that just screams “community college history teacher.” The special effects are rather cheap and the plot never makes much sense. The scenes with the suicide ray, however, are surprisingly effective and the film does have a certain campy charm to it, especially if you’re into low-budget 70s sci-fi. Starship Invasions is probably not Christopher Lee’s worst film. It’s just one of his cheapest.

Horror Film Review: Night Tide (dir by Curtis Harrington)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Long before he became Hollywood’s favorite quirky character actor, Dennis Hopper was a young performer who was known for his devotion to the method and for being more than a little difficult. In fact, directors like Henry Hathaway had gotten so frustrated with Hopper and his refusal to “compromise his art,” that, by the time the 1960s rolled around, Hopper had gone from being a promising young star to being virtually blacklisted.  He had gone from scene-stealing turns in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant to struggling to get anyone at the major studios to even admit to knowing who he was.

Unable to get a job on a mainstream film, Hopper teamed up with another unconventional talent, director Curtis Harrington. A film critic-turned-experimental filmmaker, Harrington was talented but, like Hopper, he had a reputation for being an eccentric.  An openly gay artist who was living and working a time when that was still a crime in some states, Harrington gravitated to other outsiders so it was perhaps inevitable that he and Dennis Hopper would become early collaborators and make a film together.

That film was 1961’s Night Tide. Harrington directed while Hopper played Johnny, a naïve young sailor who, while in on leave in Santa Monica, meets a mysterious woman named Mora (Linda Lawson). Mora works as a mermaid at a sideshow. Her boss is the overly possessive and somewhat brutish Captain Samuel Murdock (Gavin Muir). Captain Murdock makes it clear that he doesn’t want Johnny to have anything to do with Mora. Is it because he’s worried about losing Mora or is there another, more supernatural reason?

Johnny hears rumors that the men who fall in love with Mora tend to disappear. Mora, herself, explains that she’s a Siren. Her destiny is to lead sailors to their doom. Johnny tells her that’s ridiculous but what if she’s right?

It’s a strange film, one that moves at its own slow and rather deliberate pace. As Mora, Linda Lawson delivers her lines hesitantly, as one might expect from someone who is having to pretend to be a human being. Meanwhile, Dennis Hopper gives a compelling but nervous performance as Johnny. As written, Johnny is a pretty bland character but Hopper plays up Johnny’s sense of isolation. He’s far from home, he doesn’t know many people in town, and the woman he loves just explained that she’s a sea monster. One can understand why Johnny is a bit jumpy. There’s a few scenes where Hopper’s devotion to the method works against him. He’s convincing when he’s at the center of the scene but a bit too fidgety in the scenes where he just has to listen to other people speak. But, ultimately, Hopper’s performance works. He plays Johnny with a mix of fresh-faced innocence and hints of instability.

As I said, it’s not a conventional film. It moves at its own dream-like pace. The film was shot in black-and-white and that’s the version to see. Avoid the colorized version, in which the colors are so garish that they ruin the film’s surreal atmosphere. Night Tide is an experiment that won’t be for everyone but, when taken on its terms, it’s definitely intriguing.

Horror on the Lens: Faust (dir by F.W. Murnau)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s Horror on the Lens is a silent German film from 1926. Based on the legend of the alchemist who sold his soul to the Devil, Faust was dismissed by European critics when it was initially released but it has since been recognized as one of the greatest cinematic examples of German Expressionism.

It was after directing this film that Murnau traveled to Hollywood and directed his masterpice, Sunrise: A Story of Two Humans. (Murnau was also responsible, many years earlier, for directing Nosferatu.) The role of Fasut was played by Swedish actor Gosta Ekman, who tragically developed an addiction to cocaine while making the film and who would die as a result in 1938. Playing the role of Mephisto is German actor Emil Jannings, who would later go to win the very first Academy Award for Best Actor. Unfortunately, with the advent of sound, Jannings — who had no interest in learning English — returned to Germany and, after making some classic films with Marlene Dietrich, spent the rest of his career appearing in Nazi propaganda films. Whether or not Jannings was a committed Nazi or just an opportunist remains a point of contention but it’s still undoubtedly not the career path that one would hope for one of the very first Oscar winners.

Here is Faust:

October Positivity: A Matter of Faith (dir by Rich Christiano)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Does your mother look like a gorilla?” Evan (Chandler Macocha) demands of one of his fellow college students.  “Do your grandmother look like an ape?  WHO IN YOUR FAMILY IS THE MONKEY!?”

Normally, you might think that Evan sounds like a jerk but, since he is a character in the 2014 film A Matter of Faith, he’s presented as being a hero.  No one can come up with anything to say when he demands to know why no one in their family looks like a gorilla.  Because Evan is apparently the first person to ever use the “Why don’t humans look more like apes?” argument, he wins every theological debate that he gets involved with.

A Matter of Faith is all about a theological debate.  Professor Kamen (Harry Anderson) is a popular college biology professor who teaches that evolution is the only possible way that life could have been created.  He even brings a rubber chicken to class to illustrate that the egg came before the children.  However, one of his students, Rachel Whitaker (Jordan Trovillion), has always been taught that the chicken came first because God created the chicken.  When Rachel’s father, Stephen (Jay Pickett), discovers what Kamen has been teaching and that Rachel hasn’t even opened her Bible since going off to college, he heads down to the campus.  When Stephen objects to what Kamen teaches, Kamen challenges Stephen to a debate.  Stephen agrees, though you have to wonder why a college would sponsor a debate between a professor and some random guy that no one has ever heard of before.  It would be one thing if Stephen were an activist with a huge following.  But really, Stephen is just a guy who no scientist background and stepped into a professor’s office and was challenged to campus date.  Is it even ethical for Kamen to debate the father of one of his students like this?

Soon, the Evolution vs. Creationism debate is the hottest ticket on campus, because apparently it’s a very boring campus.  Everyone is planning on attending!  Rachel wishes her father would just drop out while Evan, who works for the school newspaper, tries to help Stephen prepare.  Evan discovers that the college’s former biology professor, Joseph Portland (Clarence Gildyard, Jr.), lost his job when he refused to each the theory of evolution as established fact.  In fact, Kamen was the one who got Portland fired.  Can Stephen convince Portland to set aside his bitterness and help him win the debate?  And can Evan help Rachel see that her jock boyfriend, Tyler (Barrett Carnahan), is a no-good frat boy who doesn’t even go to church?  And will Rachel ever develop a personality beyond sitting in her dorm room and studying?

Yes, this is a Christiano Brothers production, with all of the awkward dialogue and heavy-handed sermonizing that one would normally expect.  Rich and Dave Christiano wrote the script while Rich directed.  The debate aspect of the film will undoubtedly remind many viewers of God’s Not Dead, though the film deserves some credit for not resorting to the old trope of having Professor Kamen be a former believer who became an atheist due to family tragedy.  That said, the debate itself is a bit of let down as neither side makes much of a case for itself.  When Kamen uses Freud to dismiss the existence of God, Portland shouts out, “Freud was wrong!” and the stunned gasp from the audience made me laugh out loud.

The actors playing the college students are all fairly boring.  Watching the film, one wonders when the last time was that the Christianos ever talked to anyone under the age of 40.  Not surprisingly, the best performances in the film come from Harry Anderson and Clarence Gilyard, Jr.  Anderson, in particular, deserves a lot of credit for bringing some nuance to the role that was probably not present in the script.  (Sadly, this was his final acting role.  He died four years later.)  Gilyard, as well, has a good moment towards the end of the film when Portland apologizes for his previous refusal to only teach creationism, saying that the job of the college is not to push either creationism or evolution but to allow both sides to be heard.  That’s not a sentiment that you would necessarily expect to hear in a Christiano film.

That said, once you get past Anderson and Gilyard, you’ve still got Evan demanding to know if anyone has a monkey in their immediate family and one gets the feeling that, despite all of the talk of letting both sides be heard, the film has more sympathy for Evan’s abrasiveness than Portland’s fair-mindedness.  As well, it’s hard not to feel that, as a character, Rachel is never really allowed to make up her own mind about anything.  At first, she looks up to Kamen.  Eventually, she looks up to her Dad.  At first, she wants to spend all of her non-studying time with Tyler.  By the end of the film, she’s falling in love with Evan.  In the end, Rachel’s decision is never about what she believes but instead about which man she’s going to follow.  For Rachel, it’s less a matter of faith and a more a matter of, “Hey, he’s cute!”

In the end, when I think about this film, I’ll probably think less about the debate and mostly just remember Harry Anderson and the rubber chicken.

Horror on TV: Circle of Fear 1.21 “The Ghost of Potter’s Field” (dir by Don McDougall)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

While doing research for a story at Potter’s Field, a reporter (Tab Hunter) sees a stranger who looks much like him.  At first, the reporter thinks that it’s a coincidence but then the reporter starts to run into the stranger everywhere.  His friends think that he’s getting upset over nothing.  His girlfriend thinks that he’s in danger.  The reporter knows that he has to figure out who the stranger is and why he’s haunting him.

The second-to-last episode of Circle of Fear aired on March 23rd, 1973.  Tab Hunter is a bit of a bland hero but the episode still had creepy moments.

Enjoy!

A Blast From The Horror Past: Georges Méliès’s The Monster

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s blast from the past, we have a film that has often been described as being France’s first horror film.

The Monster is 2-minute silent film from 1903.  Directed by the pioneering French filmmaker, Georges Méliès, The Monster tells the story of an Egyptian prince who brings the dead body of his wife to a sorcerer who apparently likes to hang out in front of The Sphinx.  The sorcerer attempts to bring her back to life and, as so often happens in any film directed by Georges Méliès, things don’t quite go as planned.

In my opinion, this is one of the most charming of Georges Méliès’s surviving films.  From the simple but crudely effective camera trickery to the nicely surreal Sphinx in the background, The Monster is a chaotic delight.

Retro Television Reviews: One World 2.2 “Flushed With Love” and 2.3 “How Neal Got His Groove Back”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Fridays, I will be reviewing One World, which ran on NBC from 1998 to 2001.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

The Cast of One World

One world, we’re living in one world….

Episode 2.2 “Flushed With Love”

(Directed by Mary Lou Belli, originally aired on September 18th, 1999)

“I love men who work with their hands,” Marci says, “Plumbers, sculptors, hitchhikers….”

Yes, hitchhikers are notoriously sexy and cool.

Marci is saying this because she and Sui are competing to see who can get a date with the totally hot plumber who has shown up to fix the house’s pipes.  There’s no water coming through the pipes.  Earlier, that interrupted Ben’s shower and he was forced to come down to the kitchen while wearing a towel.  “Whoooooo!” the audience responded.

While Marci and Sui compete for the plumber’s attention, Cray, Neal, and Ben try to fix the van that their father has just given them.  The van is …. well, it’s frightening.  It has shag carpeting.  “Chick Mobile” is painted on the back of it.  It features a beaded hippie curtain between the driver’s seat and the back of the van.  Does it have a strobe light?  It really looks like it should have a strobe light.  Is that van a’rocking?

Marci ends up getting the date with the plumber, who says that he likes the way that Marci’s eyes light up whenever “you talk about your childhood trauma.”  My eyes do the same thing!  Woo hoo!  Sui freaks out over her “younger” sister dating an old guy (there’s only a year difference between them) and the plumber does turn out to be a bit too aggressive.  Marci says that she hates her sister but, fortunately, things work out in the end.

Anyway, the van stuff was kind of silly and a little creepy but the Marci/Sui storyline reminded me of my relationship with my sisters and Alisa Reyes and Michelle Krusiec did a good job of portraying Marci and Sui’s complicated feelings towards each other.  So, this episode gets a solid B.

Episode 2.3 “How Neal Got His Groove Back”

(Directed by Mary Lou Belli, originally aired on October 2nd, 1999)

This episode is all about having a job.

Neal, the smartest kid in the house, quits high school so he can work with a tech millionaire who is obviously based on Bill Gates but who is, for some reason, headquartered in Miami instead of Silicon Valley.  Unfortunately, Neal discovers that he doesn’t like working 24 hours a day and he misses school so he quits his job.  The audience applauds, little knowing that, in just a few years, Silicon Valley would start to make millionaires and billionaires out of all sorts of dropouts.

Meanwhile, Sui gets a job playing with Ben’s band but it turns out that they just want her to stand on stage and look cute.  Sui is initially annoyed that she won’t be allowed to sing but eventually, she realizes that it’s just as much fun to make money for doing nothing.  It’s a good lesson.

At the start of this episode, it’s revealed that Mr. and Mrs. Blake use report cards to determine which one of their kids will get good food and which one will have to settle for whatever’s left.  That’s kind of messed up.  Some people are just better test-takers than others.

This episode gets a C for failing to predict the tech boom.

Book Review: All-Night Party by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

You may remember that, when I reviewed R.L. Stine’s The Overnight, I commented that it seemed odd that Fear Lake would have an island sitting in the middle of it and I even wondered if this was a location that Stine used frequently or if it was just something that he randomly tossed into the book.

Well, 1997’s All-Night Party features yet another group of teens spending a long night on Fear Island so I guess that answers my question.  Fear Island is real!  And apparently, it’s a dangerous place.  This is the second book that I’ve read about an act of violence taking place on Fear Island.  Both books not only featured people getting attacked on the island but they also both featured people randomly falling down hills and stuff while walking around the island.  The island is not safe!  Maybe it’s time bulldoze the cabin and build a barrier around the island or something.  Of course, that’ll never happen because that would require too much commitment from the adults of Fear Street.  I’m not all that sure that the parents of Fear Street really care that much about any of their children.  I mean, someone gets murdered every week and yet, no one ever seem to move.  Instead, almost every book seems to start with a new family moving in!  The Shadyside High School yearbook has got to be 75% in remembrance ads.

As for All-Night Party, it’s perhaps the laziest R.L. Stine book that I’ve ever read, which is really saying something when you consider that R.L. Stine wasn’t exactly known for the great care that he put into coming up with his plots and characters.  This is a novel that, for all I know, could have been written by a computer program.

The plot involves a group of teens who decide to throw an all-night party at a cabin on Fear Island.  They’re celebrating Cindy’s birthday.  Cindy is kind of a bitch and after she assures everyone that she hates their presents, she’s murdered in the kitchen.  Who committed the murder?  Was it Patrick, the member of the group who has a big blood stain on his shirt and who keeps getting caught in obvious lies?  Or is the escaped lunatic that Patrick swears is on the island with them?  Or was it someone else in the party, like the seemingly creepy kid who is actually nice and nerdy or maybe the temperamental rebel who has long hair and drives a motorcycle.  This answer is so obvious that it will totally blow your mind when your realize how little effort was put into creating any sort of suspense.

The book feels a rushed and uninspired.  It was published in 1997 and it’s probably not a coincidence that it was one of the last of the original Fear Street books because it’s obvious that either Stine or his ghostwriter were just going through the motions at this point.  To be honest, the solution is so obvious and the plotting is so lazy that I nearly threw the book across the room after I finished with it.

Oh well.  What can you do?  It’s Fear Island.

Non-Fiction Book Review: Killer Cops by Michael Newton

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The late Michael Newton was quite a prolific author, publishing a total 357 books, which included 258 novels and 99 nonfiction books.  His novels were largely pulp paperbacks, the types with the covers that my sister often features here on the Shattered Lens.  His non-fiction was largely made up of encyclopedias concerning unsolved crimes, serial killers, conspiracies, and that sort of thing.  I own quite a few of this encyclopedias.  He was a good writer with a good knowledge of the macabre.

Killer Cops takes a look at men and women who took an oath to uphold the law but who then turned around and committed the worst crime of all.  Some of the people profiled in this book were serial killers who hid their crimes behind the badge.  Some were cops were just snapped one day.  Some were obviously crooked while others had spotless records.  Some of them were punished for their crimes.  Some of them are still revered for being justice to the frontier.  It makes for interesting and disturbing reading.  For the aspiring horror, thriller or crime fiction writer, Killer Cops is full of potential inspiration.   If there’s an overriding theme to the book, it’s that those in authority should be held to a higher standard and that certainly includes the police.  The killer cops portrayed in this book thought they could hide behind the badge and the uniform and, sadly, a few of them were right.  Newton warns against idealizing or blindly trusting anyone in authority, saying that it’s the individual’s action that matter more than the uniform they wear or the badge that they carry.