Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy fall, everyone!  Fall has started here in the North Hemisphere as of yesterday, September 1st, so now it's time for falling temperatures and spooky movies and cider and all all that good stuff.  I've a good amount of horror in this week's offerings so let's get to it.

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Let's start with something that might seem a little silly but really isn't  Part of the excellent run of Pocket Books that expanded on the Star Trek (original series) stories, this is a tale of Kirk, Scott, Chekov and Sulu stranded on a shuttle and desperately struggling to survive and passing the time with telling the tale of how they all tried to beat famously the unbeatable Kobayashi Maru test.  Some of it gets interestingly dark (the Sulu story is sad as hell), some of it is just plain funny (Scotty, for instance) and then there is Chekov completely misunderstanding the assignment and both winning the scenario and losing.

Author Julia Ecklar is a Hugo-winning author (I don't hold with the nonsense that the Astounding Award for Best New Writer isn't a Hugo; it is) and also an accomplished filker.  And, someone used one of her excellent filk songs to pay tribute to Ziva on NCIS and I absolutely love this intersection of my interests.

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Let's get into some horror.  Richard Matheson was one of out best genre authors who wrote a brilliant amount of The Twilight Zone, I Am Legend (which has been adapted so many times into things like Last Man On Earth, Omega Man and I Am Legend). (And let's note that the lead actors of those movies are Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith, an insane list of actors.)  How about The Incredible Shrinking Man?  What Dreams May Come?  Steven Spielberg's DUEL for goodness sake.   So now I run across a Matheson novel I've never read and I'm here for it.

Now watch the trailer for The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Or perhaps Duel?

Hell, let's check out I Am Legend.

The Incredible Shrinking Man and Duel are available for rent or purchase at the usual places.  I Am Legend is available on HBO Max.

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I have a weird liking for cheap sets of movies I've never seen and have no idea what they are.  

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Scott Smith at this point has written two novels, both of which have been adapted into vastly different movies.  This one, about terrible American twenty-somethings who stumble into ruins infected by sentient vines, and the absolutely fantastic Simple Plan, turned into maybe the single best Sam Raimi movie.  I've read this novel a few times but for some reason I a) don't own it and b) have never seen the movie.  But this novel is simply fantastic in its feel of growing dread.

So, let's check out the Ruins trailer.

But really, you all need to see A Simple Plan.  It's amazing.

The Ruins is on Amazon Prime and Paramount Plus.  A Simple Plan is also on Paramount Plus.

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The Criterion Collection has a reputation for being maybe a little snobby about their choices that I frankly don't think is deserved.  Someone there has a taste for weird, wonky science fiction and horror films and once in a while they grab something that Shout Factory and Arrow haven't gotten to.  This is from the Richard Gordon stable of films, a series of British quickies that in retrospect are important in the history of science-fiction films.  I mean, seriously, this Wiki description:

"Fiend Without a Face tells the story of mysterious deaths at the hands of a mentally created invisible life form that feeds on atomic power and then steals human brains and spinal columns to use as bodies in order to multiply its numbers"

There's a LOT going on there.

Fiend Without A Face is on Fubo and the Criterion Channel.

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This week's recommendation is something kind of silly and bloody and maybe not especially good but hell, it has Frank Grillo.  Boss Level is about a guy who keeps waking up and being attacked by assassins who are on a silly video game level of villains and him trying to survive just a little more each day to solve the problem.  That's it, that's the movie.  But it's really a lot of fun.

Boss Level is streaming on Hulu.