Jaws

Finally watched (rather, endured) The Irishman

I’m six years late to the party. Still, I set aside a massive chunk of time (not a Ken Burns documentary-length chunk that requires you to bathe when you’re done watching) and absorbed The Irishman, a mobster epic starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino, and directed by Martin Scorsese.

Gee, a mob movie involving De Niro with Scorsese directing it. I wonder if De Niro will constantly spew the F-word while shooting people in the face?

I recently rewatched Goodfellas and Casino, both 1990s classics involving most of the same players. Casino doesn’t get as much praise, but it’s a solid adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s true-crime book by the same name (the same way Goodfellas faithfully followed Pileggi’s Wise Guy).

I’ve read no other reviews of The Irishman. I had no idea who Frank Sheeran (an Irish hitman sans the brogue because De Niro would sound absurd trying one) was. Spoiler alert: He kills Jimmy Hoffa. At least he does in the flick. Whether that happened in real life, we’ll never know. Scorsese based the film on a true-crime book called I Hear You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt. Painting houses is a pleasant euphemism for murdering people for money.

The film follows Sheeran’s growth from a working-stiff truck driver to befriending Russell Bufalino, the head of the Scranton Mob. That’s right, Scranton, Pa., had a mob boss. I guess there’s hope for Morristown, N.J. Pretty soon, Sheeran proves his worth as a tough-guy murderer who also befriends Jimmy Hoffa, only to betray him out of loyalty to the mob.

Everybody’s horrible in The Irishman. It’s hard to form attachments to anyone because they’re all scumbags, Hoffa included. And let’s face it, three hours plus of Di Nero dropping the F-bomb and shooting people in the face gets a bit tiresome after a while. He’s sort of a slower version of his Jimmy Conway character from Goodfellas. Been there, done that.

Pesci surprised me the most because, for once, he wasn’t running around screaming F-bombs and murdering people like he did in Goodfellas and Casino. He plays Bufalino, a reserved and respected mob boss, kind of like Paul Sorvino’s character in Goodfellas, but a lot older, slimmer, and shorter. All that was missing from the cast was the late, great Frank Vincent, who portrayed the doomed Billy Batts (Now, go home and get your f***ing shinebox!) in Goodfellas, and who had a part in Casino.

Pacino’s Hoffa too closely mirrors his portrayals of Frank Slade (Scent of a Woman), Big Boy Caprice (Dick Tracy), and Mayor John Pappas (City Hall). I gotta hand it to Pacino, he’s excellent at shouting and waving his arms while exasperated. Hat tip to actor/comedian Kevin Pollak, who 30 years ago described Scent of a Woman as a two-hour movie about a blind Foghorn Leghorn.

There are a few movies out there that you watch until the end whenever you happen upon them while working the remote. Jaws and Goodfellas come to mind. The Irishman? To quote a line from the movie, it is what it is. And you’ll likely keep working the remote.

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Hunter Shea’s Montauk Monster Kicked My Ass!

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Finishing Hunter Shea’s The Montauk Monster is akin to reading any book about the Holocaust and then deciding for yourself which one had a happier ending.

Wait! I liked Hunter’s book (I’m giving it 5 stars on Amazon) and hosted him on my blog last week! And Hunter’s book had zero to do with WWII, let’s clear that right up. But, man, did it drain me and dash my hope in mankind.

Let’s back up: It’s summertime on Long Island, N.Y., and some of the locals have been found ripped up on the beach (Hunter’s hat-tip to Jaws), and what hasn’t been torn apart will soon melt into gruesome gooey puddles. One by one, citizens, tourists and harmless pets are torn to pieces by giant dog-like animals, and it’s up to Suffolk County Police Officers Gray Dalton and Meredith Hernandez to figure out what’s ruining summer on Montauk.

Enter, the Montauk monsters. Hunter introduces us to Plum Island, a government research base off Montauk’s coast where the scientists clearly weren’t trying to create ice cream that never melts. No, these gods in white lab coats spliced together the DNA of a bunch of different animals (boars, wolves, hawks, Philadelphia Eagles fans, you name it) to create war machines—deadly animals whose sole purpose in life is to kill. Think of a Great Dane’s body with a head that has a boar’s tusks and snout, and the mouth is an eagle’s sharp beak. Stay with me! Just think of horrid amalgamations of animals that have blackish-blue diseased skin, and whose bites transmit a deadly virus (Hunter’s hat-tip to Alien). Imagine dropping these things into enemy territory to root out the bad guys, because that’s why they were bred. However, the monsters got off Plum Island and swam for Montauk’s shore.

(Side note: AC/DC’s Black Ice album has a song called War Machine, and I couldn’t help but think of these monsters eating people to the tune of Angus and Malcolm Youngs’ grinding guitars and Brian Johnson’s werewolf howls.)

Montauk’s soon overrun with war machines. Enter the Army, FBI, CIA, CDC, HAZMAT, EPA, DHS, and just about every acronymed government agency out there converging on Long Island to try to stop these monsters and this virus that causes your infected body to bubble and explode.

Hunter’s novel never slows, but that doesn’t stop him from developing characters you want to survive—and that’s tough for the heroes to do in The Montauk Monster. It’s like riding a roller-coaster through hell because of what’s happening to those poor people in the book. Spoiler Alert: Don’t read this sentence if you don’t want to know that you should not get attached to any character in The Montauk Monster.

Here’s what I enjoyed the most about the book: You loathe the monsters because of what they are: merciless killing machines. The only way you could like them is if they were deployed inside the Kremlin to root out Vladimir Putin. But I soon found myself loathing more the faceless people who created the beasts, and the indifference these men and women show toward the innocent men, women and children they just prefer to firebomb rather than rescue if it means stopping the monsters from escaping Montauk. It dawns on Gray and Meredith that monsters need not have fangs.

Montauk Monster Scribe Hunter Shea’s Take on Horror

Courtesy: the Leviathan known as Amazon (which could also pass for the thing on the book cover).

Hunter Shea’s a busy guy and–from an author’s perspective–is having an awesome summer. Pinnacle released The Montauk Monster (TMM) last month, and earlier this month my publisher, Samhain Horror, released Hell Hole.

Courtesy: Samhain Publishing

I’ve yet to read Hell Hole, a horror Western that’s queued in my Kindle, but have tackled TMM, and this much stands out to me: Hunter must’ve loved the original Jaws.

I couldn’t help but think of the 1975 blockbuster upon reading the first chapter of the book, which involves a man and woman with raging hormones and a desire to act on them on a Long Island beach. Now, I’m not gonna say what happens, but if you saw Jaws, you know two things:

1. The movie opens with a man and a woman frolicking along a Long Island beach, and the woman goes skinny dipping–resulting in the summer not ending well for her.

2. Based on Jaws’ movie poster,  you know what happens to her:

Courtesy: the Internet

Courtesy: the Internet

Now, I’m not spoiling anything when I say that a shark is not responsible for any shenanigans at the start of TMM. But something is. Something indescribable. No, really, Hunter does a great job masking what the hell is running (and swimming) around Montauk causing all sorts of problems. Hunter lives in New York, and you can tell through his writing that he knows and loves the area. He also creates likeable protagonists in Suffolk County Police Officers Gray Dalton and Meredith Hernandez, and animal control officer Anita Banks, who are tasked with trying stop these ravenous monsters (that’s right: monsters–plural), whose origins reside on nearby Plum Island, a mysterious U.S. research base where scientists play god and brew up strange creatures with gruesome faces like this one!

Courtesy: Google search

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

I’m sorry. Did I just get slightly political? Let’s avoid any unpleasantness and move along to a question I asked Hunter–a question I ask of all horror authors: What makes a horror novel? It’s one of those genres that encompasses so many things, making it tough to pin down. Here’s my take. And now, we welcome Hunter Shea!

montauk monster headshot 
OK, Matt has asked me for my definition of horror as a genre, which by no means is the definitive explanation. Perception is unique to the perceiver, so as a species, we can never have full consensus on anything. That’s what makes us so darn interesting (and frustrating).

Look, I’ve been a horror hound since I was a little kid. When bookstores took down the horror section years ago, I nearly wept. How the heck was I supposed to easily find my horror fixes? Do I really have to get on my knees to find John Saul’s books crushed under the weight of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye?

As I’ve gotten older and supposedly wiser, I’ve come to realize that horror shouldn’t be segregated at all. Horror is everywhere. It wears a multitude of disguises. So while the general public will deem anything supernatural, paranormal themes, monsters or crazed killers as horror, it goes much deeper than that.

Horror is about evoking an emotion. Those emotions can be fear, dread, suspense, anticipation, revulsion and on and on. Anything that picks at those scabs, makes us face our worst nightmares or discover new ones has entered into the realm of the horrific.

I was just at an author panel where we had to reveal our favorite horror movie, book and story. For me, the movie choice was easy – Alien. To me, this is the greatest horror and sci-fi movie of all time. Yes it’s set in space, but damn, nothing scared me more than watching Dallas crawl through the ventilation shafts searching for that creature. Talk about dread and fear walking hand in hand.

Someone on the panel brought up a book about war from varying perspectives. Sure, it would never be officially categorized as horror, but the theme and the scenes sure should. Horror can be found everywhere, from the Bible to the most far out fantasy novels and movies. Game of Thrones is bursting with great horror moments, but no one would ever categorize it as such. Zombie armies, The Imp going on a killing spree, the terror of the Red Witch’s hellspawn. You can’t tell me that’s not horror in its most classic form.

You don’t have to turn on the news to know that horror is all around us, waiting for those brave enough to plunge headlong into our most hidden fears. Open the pages of any book and you just may find it, hiding behind a senseless genre classification.###

Thank you, Hunter! Well stated. As for TMM, it’s the ultimate beach read because it never slows, makes you wonder what the hell’s out there stalking Montauk, and people literally get ripped to pieces on the beach! And elsewhere.

The characters in Jaws can be heard screaming, “Stay out of the water!” It doesn’t matter where you’re staying in TMM, because they can, and more often than not, will get you.