Pulp Consumption: Lovecraft Country

Cameron talks LOVECRAFT COUNTRY.

Broadswords and Blasters

In theory, Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff should be everything I want to read in modern horror – inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, but rejecting his outright racism. Maybe it would have, if I’d stopped reading after the first section. Instead, taken as a whole, the novel was merely okay.

Lovecraft Country, published in 2016, is the story of two black families living during the Jim Crow era, when the racist attitudes of much of America supported such awful ideas as sundown towns and anti-miscegenation laws. The main character of the first section of the novel is Atticus Turner. As the story opens, Turner’s father, Montrose, has called Atticus home from Florida, where Turner settled after ending his active duty service for the Army in Korea. When Turner gets home, after being accosted time and again by the white establishment, including being shot at by a police officer for violating…

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Pulp Consumption: Hard Boiled

In today’s Pulp Consumption, I talk about John Woo’s Hong King swan song, HARD BOILED.

Broadswords and Blasters

Okay, so HARD BOILED wasn’t my first exposure to John Woo’s style of film making[1], but if I have to name the one film of his I could not do without it is this, his swan song before he left Hong Kong to make movies in the USA.

Give a guy a gun, he thinks he’s Superman. Give him two and he thinks he’s God.

A quick synopsis of the plot- Tequila Yuen (Yun-Fat Chow) is the hard boiled cop of the title. He’s not great at relationships and he’s terrible at following orders, but put a gun in his hand (or even better, two) and he’s a God among men. Alan (played by Tony Leung) is an undercover officer trying to dismantle a ruthless organized crime gang from the inside. At first thinking that they are on opposite sides, the two learn to…

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