It’s my turn to host the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival for this month, so following is a round up of all kinds of interesting spec fic related interwebby goodness. If I’ve missed anything, add a link in the comments or email me and I’ll update the post.

First off, Eneit Press interviews Gillian Polack as part of Women In Horror Month.

That segues nicely to Gillian Polak’s own LiveJournal entries which include some thoughts on characters and Good books and equal opportunity neglect. A cryptic title, but a very interesting post.

Here, Graham Storr annouces the release of TimeSplash. A novel with a single word title containing two capital letters? The man is clearly a genius.

Throughout the last few weeks a bunch of very savvy folk have been putting together snapshot interviews of Australian spec fic writers. Links to all 90 or so 2010 Snapshots have now been collated into one place for your perusing pleasure.

Horrorscope, the Australian Dark Fiction Weblog has been busy. Here’s a review of the Horror Stories of Robert E Howard. Here’s a review of The World Is Dead, a review of Zombie: An Anthology Of The Undead and Horns, by Joe Hill.

Also from Horrorscope, a rundown of the 2009 Bram Stoker Award nominees and the 2009 Australian Shadows Awards finalists. Not only that, there’s the Table of Contents for Midnight Echo #4. Midnight Echo # 5 is now open to submissions.

At Delimiter Kim Falconer talks about ebooks.

Here’s a review of the new “superhero” movie, Kick Ass, over at The Furnace.

The fabtastic convention that is Continuum happened at the end of February. This time it was Continuum 6: Future Tense. You can read my report of the con here. One of the guests of honour was the truly inspiring Mark Pesce. Mark wrote a short story for Continuum, called Both Your Houses. You can find that story here.

Brisvegas resident Joanna Penn posts here about lessons learnt from Doctor Who. And who couldn’t learn a thing or two from the good Doctor?

Talking of Doctor Who, here’s a photo by Cat Sparks of Trudi Canavan’s pantry. Why would I post that here? Look at the photo and try to contain the awesome.

And talking of Joanna Penn (my segue skills are unrivalled!) she was kind enough to interview me for a podcast on March 4th. We cover a lot in the half-hour podcast, including writing about supernatural themes, playing with religious mythology, writing fight scenes and more. And it even comes with a warning!

And talking of podcasts (yeah, I know, you’re blown away by my skills) those legendary ladies of the genre Alisa, Tansy and Alex have started a new spec fic podcast via Twelfth Planet Press called Galactic Suburbia. The first episode has just been posted with hopefully many more to follow.

On the publishing front, Tehani Wesley has announced her new project, FableCroft Publishing, and has put a call out for strongly Australian spec fic for a reprint anthology and Liz Grzyb has released the ToC for Scary Kisses, which is now available for pre-order via Ticonderoga Publications.

This one isn’t Australian, but it’s a bit of positive reinforcement for fantasy writers everywhere. On March 5th, Publishers Weekly announced that Harper Teen paid seven figures for a debut YA trilogy based around a retelling of the Greek tragedies.

The Outlandish Voices podcast (where new and established writers read their stories for the masses) has moved to a better hosting arrangement at Podbean, so you can rate and comment on the stories now.

And what’s a blog carnival without a bit of self-pimpage? I wrote a review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy here and the Bitten By Books website wrote glowing reviews of both my books, which is always nice. Here’s their review of RealmShift and here’s their review of MageSign.

Lastly, I updated a couple of new links on my Markets For Writers page. Let me know if you’d like to see other links on there.

And don’t forget to leave a comment with anything else relevant (or completely irrelevant, I don’t mind) that I might have missed.

EDIT: Very important post I missed from Cat Sparks’ LiveJournal regarding Dudcon III and the Ditmars.

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I’ll thank S F Signal for this one – how the Star Trek movie should have ended. This is originally from HowItShouldHaveEnded.com, which comes out with some pure gold. Their Lord Of The Rings one is a blinder. This one is also. Stay for the end!

I’ll be hosting the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival in March, posting up a loads of stuff on March 15th. If you have any posts you think are relevant, please let me have the links. It can be anything spec fic related, about writing, books, movies, TV or anything you can find even a vague relevance for.

You can leave links in the comments section here or you can use this fancy Google document form thing that collates everything into a neat spreadsheet for us. Spread the word and hit me up with links to include.

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Yes, you read that right. One of the mailing groups I’m on was shocked by this recently, so I thought I’d share. A young Twilight fan wrote a letter to the website latinoreview.com. I had no idea there was a Latino Review site, but there you go.

This letter writer does nothing for the reputation of “young folk today”. She’s a die-hard Taylor Lautner fan and quite, quite dumb. Who the fuck is Taylor Lautner? Yeah, I wondered that too. Turns out he’s the guy that plays the werewolf in Twilight. I thought Twilight was all about sexually confused sparkly vampires or something, but apparently there are werewolves too. Anyway, this dumb teenager tries to rip Universal a new one by writing to complain about how they’ve shamelessly ripped off Twlight with this new Wolfman movie. (Yes, the remake of the 1941 movie, The Wolfman with Lon Chaney Jr and several others since).

I’ll just repost her letter in its entirety:

To whom this may concern:

This movie was a complete waste and I feel that it offends ALL Twilight Fans around the world, that including myself. For one, it was a COMPLETE remaking of the Wolf Pack from the Twilight Saga: New Moon. It gives the werewolves a bad name and makes them look like some deformed mutation of a rabid dog. I actually started to like werewolves after seeing Jacob Black and all his awesomeness on the big screen at the movies. That was until I saw your crappy remake of what you call to be a “were wolf”. I don’t see how you live with yourself for making it the way you did. If I made this movie, I would be ashamed to even admit that I owned it. How can a werewolf be killed with a silver bullet? Better yet, have you saw the transformation of the man that is “supposed” to be the wolf? He sits in some chair and his entire body turns in to some mutated freak. If you would watch the transformation of Jacob Black, (Taylor Lautner) he doesn’t come close to looking as fake, cheap and or mutated as the wolf man. You tell me, who looks to be the better werewolf. Your stupid Wolf Movie didn’t even make the top Movie for the charts; Valentines Day WITH TAYLOR Lautner! Get that this is MY oppinion and I felt I wanted to express it because I saw that your email was on your site. I wanted to let you know this is what i thought of the wolf man that sucks.
FREAKIN LAUTNER DID!

The Poser of who could never be even if they tried : ” Aka : Rabid poser Werewolf “The Wolf Man”
[She then includes a pic from the new Wolfman movie.]

OR My favorite: Taylor Daniel Lautner aka Jacob Black
[Followed by a pic of a pretty boy and a dog.]

TEAM JACOB- cuz hes a REAL WEREWOLVE!

Regards: Kayla Patterson (kayla—-@—–.com) Feel free to reply

And oh yes, they replied. There are over 500 comments and a lot of those are from idiots too. The letter itself, regardless of the content, hurts my brain. Are they still teaching English in school? Do kids still go to school? I’m guessing this one doesn’t.

Go here to read the whole post, along with Kayla’s pics. Seriously, young people today!

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I love Twitter. The things that happen there are great, especially when the big stars show themselves up to be geeks like the rest of us. A conversation between Simon Pegg and Nathan Fillion this morning cracked me up. For those not versed in geekery, Simon Pegg is the British comic genius behind TV shows like Spaced and movies like Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. He was most recently in Star Trek, playing Scottie.

Nathan Fillion has been in numerous TV and movie roles, currently in Castle, but most famous (in geekdom) for playing Mal, the Captain of the Serenity in Joss Whendon’s series, Firefly.

On Twitter today:

@simonpegg I’m calling you out @NathanFillion. Your spaceship vs my spaceship. Last one to the crab nebula gets the beers in. Spacedock, 1 hour.

@NathanFillion Yo, @simonpegg, be reasonable! My ship was a filming set, while the Enterprise is obviously real. Perhaps a drinking contest?

@simonpegg @NathanFillion You’re on. To be honest, somebody keyed my nacelles so the old lady’s in the shop. I’ll get the first round in. Romulan ale?

Heh. Bless ‘em.

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As usual, I’ll keep this Daybreakers review spoiler free at the start. I’ll warn you before I spoil anything.

So last night I went with Cat and Rob to see the sci-fi vampire flick, Daybreakers. It’s one of those films that I was aware of but actually knew very little about. I’d seen the trailer, I knew it was an Australian production and that’s about it. From the trailer it certainly looked good.

There’s a bit of a heavy handed info dump over the credits at the very start of the movie, but once the story gets going you can forget that and forgive it. The basic premise is that a single bat started a global pandemic of vampirism back in 2008. It’s now 2019 and the world has changed. There’s a small percentage of humans that refuse to turn and hold on to being human, the vast majority are vampires and living a nocturnal life and it’s got to the point where the vamps need to farm humans for blood as supplies are so low.

It’s actually a brilliant premise – if vampirism did become the global norm, human blood would run out very quickly. What do you do then? There’s a big corporation, Bromley Marks, that farms humans for blood and is, supposedly, looking for a quality blood substitute. Of course, here we have the allegory of big corporations trying to nail demand and corner profits and repeat business. Even the undead have a marketing department.

Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a hematologist vampire with Bromley Marks. He’s a key player in the search for a substitute. He’s also a reluctant vampire, turned against his will. His brother is a vampire soldier, hunting down humans. Cue family angst. Even vampires can’t choose their relatives.

Then there are the subsiders. When a vampire is starved of human blood a physical and mental change starts to take place. It starts with elongating of the ears and eventually the vampire becomes a feral, bat-like creature, more Bela Lugosi’s Nosferatu than Tom Cruise’s Lestat. Again, this is a brilliant concept the film explores. When starved of human blood, especially when you add to that the consumption of vampire blood, these creatures become the true monsters of the piece that even the vamps are afraid of.

Then Edward stumbles across a group of humans trying to survive, discovers something that indicates a possible cure for vampirism, making the need for a substitute irrelevant. Or is it? Some people probably want to be vampires, with the immortality and everything that comes with it.

The film is beautifully shot. The vamps live pretty normal lives, taking commuter trains to work and getting a coffee on the platform (infused with blood, naturally) and so on. Only it all happens at night. Subways and tunnels are everywhere. The lighting and colours used to evoke the feeling of this new world are brilliant. As is the use of the reflective vampire eyes. The vamps look pretty much normal, except for two slightly long canines, a grey pallour to the skin and those amber eyes. You get used to it. When you then see a human with tanned skin and normal eyes, the effect is surprisingly strong.

The story is complex and interesting, with a few twists and turns that keep you guessing. The idea behind the cure is brilliant, an inspired concept. The effects are excellent, especially a few choice moments of pure splattergore like the exploding test subject and subsider attack at Edward’s place.

This film is packed with subtext. The corporation making a fortune out of criminal activity that people ignore, being primarily the horrible exploitation of humans. The blood is running out, which is pregnant with ideas along the lines of oil and climate change that we face today. There’s a sub-class of people that are becoming dangerous due to the economics of who can afford the last few remaining drops of blood and who can’t. And so on and so forth. But all of this is never hammered. It’s just explored within the story and done very well.

If anything about the film sat a little uncomfortable for me it was the date. The Spierig brothers (writers/directors) have done a great job of creating a nocturnal world with some cool sci-fi updates to things for 2019. But all this has happened in just 10 years from outbreak to present day. It seems like vampires are a lot more organised than humans are right now in getting things done. I guess exploding in sunlight is a great motivator. But given that the night hours are shorter than the light hours, it’s a stretch to see the developments. Still, I suppose a lot can be done in ten years when necessity drives you and it’s really a very small and pointless gripe.

This is a really interesting, clever and beautifully shot movie. It has a good story, it keeps hold of the classic vampire lore while still managing to put a new spin on things and combines the sci-fi idea with the horror idea very well. And there’s just gallons of blood pouring out here and there to really keep the “Ew-factor” high. Plus a quality projectile vomit moment. And this is a vampire film that, in this age of vampire saturation, actually comes across as fresh and different. Well worth a watch.

After the next picture I’ll talk about a few more aspects of the film that you’ll want to skip if you haven’t seen it yet. Spoilers ahoy!

EDIT: Thanks to Rob Hood for this clarification. I made a mistake above when talking about Bela Lugosi’s Nosferatu. From Rob: “You don’t mean Bela Lugosi’s Nosferatu. Bela’s Dracula was human-looking and famously elegant. It’s the earlier film version of Dracula, “Nosferatu” directed by Murnau that featured a grotesque rattish vampire like the subsiders.”

Rob’s quite right. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror or simply Nosferatu is a German Expressionist vampire horror film, directed by F. W. Murnau, starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok. Released in 1922. This is the film I was thinking of when I made the comment above. Thanks Rob!

OK, so on with the spoilers. I don’t have any real gripes about this film. The storytelling is actually really good and there aren’t any gaping holes. At least, none that I noticed. The idea behind the cure – burning out the disease with sunlight – is inspired. The way it happened to Willem Dafoe’s character was also very cool. However, and this is a small, pedantic gripe, when he burst through the windscreen and into the water he was exposed to sunlight for a lot less time than Edward in the tank. Yet he came out all scarred and cured. They ended up exposing Edward for longer, and he came out cured and unscarred. I found that a little bit annoying.

Sam Neill as Charles Bromley was a bit of a disappointment too. For a film with such great performances, especially from Hawke and Dafoe, Neill’s overtly evil corporate overloard was a bit too comic book for my liking. The film was grounded with a strong sense of realism, so the Bromley character’s two dimensionality was a bit of a shame. The savagely bloody death in an elevator was, however, a very fitting end.

The product placement was a bit heavy handed. I’m really pleased that we’re getting films like this and they would never be like this from Hollywood. I’m extra pleased that it came from Australia (all filmed in Queensland apparently) but the intense placement of Chrysler over everything was a bit annoying. Still, if that’s the price we pay for a film like this, fair enough.

One last gripe. The film opens with a board meeting about the lack of blood. The corporation, Bromley Marks, is a leader in human farming and synthetic blood research, yet they claim that there’s not enough blood left to last a month. OK, first off, if this is a global phenomenon, why is it just Bromley Marks that we’re seeing? This is something that should be global priority number one with governments all banding together. The climate change allegory is clear, but with blood remaining for only a month, surely more than one company is working on the problem.

Secondly, regardless of the outcome – whether they find a substitute, whether the cure starts to work or not – we know that blood deprivation causes subsiders. Given the size of the world, the size of the “third world”, which persists as the film makes clear, the end result is bound to be a global subsider takeover. No way, with only a month of blood left, could people hold back the tide of subsiders.

The feeding frenzy at the end of the film with wave after wave of soldiers attacking their fellows as they turn back into humans, becoming human and being attacked in turn, leaves us with one scenario: eventually the whole population will be massively reduced with those surviving being human. If a subsider attacks a cured vampire, are they cured too or are they too far gone? This is a question that, to me, has massive implications for the resolution of the whole story.

Then again, the way the film ended is a wide open, gaping hole for a sequel, so maybe these ideas will be addressed. Whatever, I loved it and I’ll probably see it again if I get a chance. Go forth and support Australian indie films. It’s well worth it.

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The greatest movie of all time is Blade Runner. I’ve said it before and nothing yet has changed my mind. No, not even Avatar, which today toppled Titanic as the biggest grossing movie ever. I’m so pleased that a sci-fi movie has replaced Titanic in that spot.

Anyway, back to Blade Runner. The film’s director, Ridley Scott, has announced that there’s a new division of his commercials company (RSA Films) working on a web series called “Purefold”. The series will be a bunch of linked 5 to 10 minute short films, initially targeted at the web under a Creative Commons licence.

Given that the movie took its inspiration from the Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, and given that Scott and co. don’t have rights to that book, they can’t actually make a Blade Runner series. The episodes are set prior to the 2019 date of the movie and will be “inspired by Blade Runner.”

Says David Bausola, founding partner of Ag8, the independent studio working with Scott, “We don’t take any of the canon or copyrighted assets from the movie. It’s actually based on the same themes as Blade Runner. It’s the search for what it means to be human and understanding the notion of empathy.”

I can’t help thinking that they’re pretty much using the Blade Runner name to get attention for a near future series that doesn’t really have much of anything to do with the movie or Dick’s book. The use of the Creative Commons licence is interesting though, giving fans the chance to remix and redistribute the films, making the whole concept a very public domain exercise. Scott and co. are also planning to use viewer input on storylines, using the FriendFeed website.

Sounds like an interesting concept, worth keeping an eye on.

(Sources: Dogmatic, New York Times.)

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The Australian speculative fiction blog carnival is off to a galloping start for 2010. You can find the January collected posts at Egoboo WA.

There’s loads of stuff there, including a few bits by yours truly. Things about Continuum, Natcon, feminism in spec fic and the furore surrounding it, reviews, fiction, interviews, publishing news, giveaways. By Odin’s Mighty Bollocks, it’ll take you till next month just to get through it all.

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I’ll discuss the general plot in this review but I’ll give you a warning before there are any real spoilers.

I was very dubious about this film. I really wanted it to be a great movie, but it could so easily have just been a tacky display of special effects without any substance. I try to keep faith in James Cameron, the writer/director. After all, he’s given us Terminator and Terminator 2, Aliens, True Lies and Strange Days. He’s also given us Titanic. It’s not a spotless track record.

In truth, this movie lies somewhere between eye shatteringly, brain stunningly awesome and Meh, it’s all right. It actually has aspects of both. The basic story is this: It’s some time in the future and Jake Sully, a paraplegic Jarhead war veteran, is shipped to the planet Pandora, which is inhabited by the Na’vi. Jake’s brother was trained to interact with the Na’vi, but was killed. Jake, as his twin, has the necessary genome to take over his brother’s role. That role is to lie in a box, remotely operating an artificially grown Na’vi body or Avatar. Of course, the humans are actually there for a rare and valuable resouce and moral dichotomies ensue. The rare resource itself nearly made me get up and walk out right away. It’s called, wait for it…

Unobtanium.

Fucking really?! I was appalled at that. It’s worse than Adamantium in the X-Men movies that my wife can’t hear as anything but Adam Ant Ium. Unobtanium. Man, that’s really, really bad.

Also, there’s something kinda weird about the whole Avatar concept itself. The planet has a toxic atmosphere for humans and the Na’vi are about twelve feet tall and the planet is all hostile and so on. So I suppose that’s why they’ve gone to these ridiculously complex lengths to interact with the natives. It does sort of work, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was a bit like white people going into Africa with boot polish on their faces saying, “We’sa here to um-help you, bongo bongo.” That aspect of it all was a bit uncomfortable for me.

The Na’vi are a race absolutely in tune with their green and vibrant planet. The humans are a bunch of yahoos desperate for this rock and want the Na’vi to move so they can mine the best of it. The Na’vi want nothing from people, so the people decide to muscle in and take it. Jake manages to get deeper into Na’vi culture than anyone ever has before, he learns about how they’re just lovely folk and falls in love with one of them. Naturally, even though he said he would report back to the army with intel, he ends up siding with the scientists and trying to save the Na’vi from the marauding humans. There are heavy and obvious overtones of looking after your mother planet, the humans not understanding the Na’vi’s deep bond with all of nature and so on.

So you can see that we’re following a story by numbers here and this is where it’s hard to call this movie good or bad. On the one hand it is visually fan-fucking-tastic. The world building, the scenic backdrops, the native life, the whole vibe of the planet Pandora is absolutely beautiful. The use of 3D is clever, without trying to shock the audience all the time. There’s very little stuff-flying-at-your-face-to-make-you-gasp 3D and a lot of just normal, well shot cinema that just happens to be in 3D. The 3D does have some flaws. In fast action sequences the focus is sometimes lost, for example. Also, everything seems to have a slight sheen over it and you are fundamentally watching a movie with your sunglasses on. Taking the glasses off, the film, while blurry because of the 3D effects, is actually brighter and more vibrant. You’d think they could crank the brightness up a bit for 3D to account for the fact that everyone is wearing shades. Small gripe though. The futuristic nature of the human’s vehicles and computers and stuff like that is well thought out and interesting to look at too. There’s no doubt that as pure cinema this film is a stunning achievement.

It would have been really nice if the story had been as powerful and mould-breaking as the technical extravagances. But, even though the story is predictable potentially to the point of boredom, it’s very well done. It’s painting by numbers but they stay very neatly within the lines. There’s nothing here, nothing at all, that will surprise you. You can see the major plot points coming like one of those massive hammerheaded bull things smashing through the forest (you’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em) but that somehow doesn’t spoil it. Although it’s cliche, it’s well-scripted cliche. There’s enough going on that it doesn’t seem like a kid’s film and by the time it all starts coming to a head there are very few punches pulled and that helps to lend it credibility.

So yeah, it’s a pedestrian story but an incredible spectacle and worth seeing on the big screen, especially in 3D. After the next picture there are SPOILERS and what I really thought of some parts of it. There are some problems I had that I can’t discuss without spoilers. Read on if you’re interested or go and watch the movie and then come back and see if you agree with me.

You must learn the ways of the forest. Feel the Force, Luke…

I mean, draw the bow, Jake.

Seriously, Unobtanium. FUCKING UNOBTANIUM?! I’m still offended by that name. It’s almost like Cameron said, “What does it matter? Call it anything. We just want mad blue dudes diving around in a glowing forest anyway.” Which is a shame. Unobtanium, for fuck’s sake… all right, let it go, Al. Let it go.

There are other problems with this flick. The whole Avatar concept I’ve mentioned up above and that is a bit weird, but we’ll just accept that because it’s the foundation of the entire movie.

The other major problem I had was this. Jake and the scientists, with one rogue chopper pilot, decide that what the company is doing is just plain wrong and they take a stand against it. Would no other people there stand against it too? Why would just one tiny handful of people decide genocide was wrong while the rest of the humans there go along with it? We’ve reached out to the stars, but we’re still that dumb? And that then leads on to another problem. Against all odds (naturally) Jake and the Na’vi stop the humans from destroying the Soul Tree, and round up all the remaining people and ship them back off to Earth. So you’ve just handed the US Marine Corps (which appears to have taken over as the entire Earth army) a massive spanking. These tall blue hippies with their bows and arrows have sent the Marines packing. So those Marines get back to Earth and tell everyone what happened. You can imagine what happens next. Avatar 2 would be a very short film – Earth arrives with multiple battlecruisers, hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, massed gunships and tears through the Na’vi population like a teenage boy through his prom date’s knickers.

Or are we supposed to believe that the humans “learned a lesson” and will leave the Na’vi alone from now on?

Hmmm.

Also, the biggest deposit of Unob… you know, I just can’t bloody say it. I’m going to call it Plot Device Stone. So, the biggest deposit of Plot Device Stone is right under the big old Home Tree. Or was it under the Soul Tree? Whatever, basically, it’s exactly where the Na’vi are. But there’s an entire planet out there – what’s the rush? Why couldn’t the company mine all over the place where there weren’t any indigenous populations and let the Avatar program spend months or years more interacting with the Na’vi. They might have learned more, might have negotiated mining rights or whatever. If nothing else the slaughter would have been delayed by a fair chunk of time. More realistic than it was presented in the film anyway.

Still, that sequence where they blow the shit out of the Home Tree was pretty damned impressive.

Lastly, something that simply did my head in. What the fuck was it with Sigourney Weaver/Grace’s nose?! All the Avatars were essentially Na’vi people that resembled their human operators. Except Grace. She was an Avatar with Sigourney Weaver’s face. That was just bloody freaky, especially a Na’vi with a human nose. Imagine how much that would have freaked out the Na’vi when she first showed up, especially as she was one of the first. She walks in and the entire population screams, “What happened to your face?!”

There are other small plot issues that I have. The usual convenient story events, the blatant set ups (like him flying the big orange dragon thing) and so on, but we can ignore those. It is a shame that such an incredible looking film had such a predictable story, but there you go. It wasn’t all bad and I have to be honest – I sat in the cinema and lapped up every second of it. (Except Plot Device Stone and Grace Face – they were both just wrong.)

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I picked this up from S F Signal and enjoyed every minute of it. Essentially it’s a review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. We all know that the prequel movies took the original Star Wars trilogy, one of the best things ever committed to film, and shat repeatedly all over them, forever tarnishing something wonderful. But why exactly were those prequels so bad? Well, Lucas pissed all over his legacy by relying on CGI and completely nonsensical plots as a vehicle for selling merchandise and computer games, along with trying to further his own interest in symbiosis, among many other travesties. But fundamentally the prequels were really, really bad storytelling. All the other stuff is awful, but the story just made no sense at all.

This series of seven ten minute videos is a review that completely deconstructs The Phantom Menace and does a great job of explaining just how bad the storytelling is. The review is also very funnily and creepily done. It’s worth 70 minutes of your time.