Archive for the ‘anomalies’ category
May 14, 2018
Watching a late episode of The Terror series is somewhat like regarding a mummy; there are things here that are distinctly unpleasant to see, but not only can’t you not look away, but you keep on going back for more! As someone who is also reading Dan Simmons’ novel as they watch the series, you might even say that I’m double-dipping, a true misery porn junkie. This is depressing and disturbing stuff, but I can’t stop returning to it because it’s so well done!
As people with an understanding of what actually happened to the historical Franklin Expedition, we know what the characters do not know as the story unfolds, namely that they are all doomed and that this doesn’t end well for them, regardless of what they do. When faced with extreme and desperate conditions, we are shown the polarities of how people can respond to dire circumstances in the now separate camps of Captain Crozier versus the mutinous and psychopathic rebel leader, Hickey. Crozier has become elevated as the series has progressed, whereas Hickey has gravitated towards the bestial. Whereas Crozier has remained a civilized man and become almost a spiritual leader, for Hickey cannibalism is now literally on the table.
We say goodbye to Commander Fitzjames in this episode, his condition deteriorating rapidly and an assisted suicide conducted by Crozier. Captive in Hickey’s camp and witness to a murder, surgeon Goodsir (pictured) is forced to butcher the body for consumption lest Hickey kill another for failure to comply. And Ice Master Blankey, already minus a lower leg from a previous confrontation with Tuunbaq, goes out solo in a suicidal mission against the creature to buy his compatriots some time. Ingeniously, the guy wraps himself in forks so as to make the monster’s job less easy, and perhaps enact revenge from within should he be ingested…the guy’s going down, but you gotta love his spirit!
Betrayed by a double agent in his own camp, Crozier is captured by Hickey’s men, with the final outcome to this and other hanging issues to find resolution in episode 10, the last of the season.
Categories: animals, anomalies, anthropomorphic, creature features, furry, paranormal, television
Tags: the Open C, The Terror
Comments: 4 Comments
May 8, 2018
With all hell breaking loose both within and without on episode 8 of The Terror, Captain Fitzjames unleashed a rocket on the rampaging Tuunbaq running amok in their camp, hitting the over-sized, long-necked polar bear-like creature a good shot but basically just changing its course. This was a very cool use of retro technology, and Fitzjames looked good while deploying it, showing courage under extreme duress. Mid-19th century weaponry just wasn’t up to the job, sadly…
The climatic battle scene followed an episode fueled by paranoia and rebellion in which seaman Hickey almost staged a successful mutiny after blaming his slaughter of two crew mates on an Inuit family who were then killed in reprisal by the Erebus/Terror crews. Hickey then whipped the camp into a frenzy by rumors that an Inuit counter-attack was imminent, using it as justification to seize arms and distribute them among his followers. When Hickey’s ruse was discovered and countered, we were fixing to see a hanging when a cocaine-addled crewman Collins posed a distraction, staggering in and closely followed by the Tuunbaq monster, who was either irate that natives had been killed or was uncontrolled by the departure of the shaman-like Lady Silence.
Anyways, Hickey escaped in the confusion of the Tuunbaq’s killing spree together with sympathizers and captives, and in alienating the Inuit population the expedition’s members have lost their best remaining chance of survival. With their bodies becoming covered with loathsome sores from scurvy and lead poisoning, things will continue to go downhill from here in the two episodes remaining of The Terror…
Categories: animal presence, anomalies, anthropomorphic, creature features, paranormal, sci fi, television
Tags: Terror Camp, Tuunbaq
Comments: 2 Comments
April 23, 2018
When the going gets tough, it’s time to throw a party as a counter to the growing anger, despair, and psychosis growing among the crews of Erebus and Terror, as we are shown in Episode 6 of the series. The party is a wild one, thrown in an enormous tent rigged by the seamen, complete with drinking, hot tub bathing, and men wearing dresses, ahem! There are seamen wearing animal head masks…yes, 19th century furries! Rum is even being fed to the brain-dead crewman Private Heather, his skull torn open in an earlier Tuunbaq attack.
Unfortunately, one of their own, Dr. Stanley, has quietly gone mad, and he seals off the tent before dousing it and himself with oil, and igniting both. Stanley’s arms-spread self-immolation is evocative of a scene from The Thing from Another World, and is perhaps the most horrible thing in the episode, rivaled only by Lady Silence‘s staggering bloody entrance, her tongue self-removed in an attempt to forge a shamanistic bond with the Tuunbaq. We do see the creature briefly, his face a disquieting mix of ursine and human features.
With their food supply starting to run low and the canned food producing recognized symptoms of lead poisoning, expedition leadership now plans to abandon both their mission and their vessels in a risky trek on foot hundreds of miles south to civilization. The ill-fated party was an effort to boost morale prior to food rationing, climatic suffering, and the further predations of their Tuunbaq adversary, although clearly it had the reverse effect, adding also to the mounting body count.
With only four episodes left to run, we unlike the poor devils in the Royal Navy know that this will end badly, because as Captain Crozier observed, “The place wants us dead…”
Categories: animal elements, animal problems, anomalies, anthropomorphic, cryptozoology, furry, furry horror, horror, sci fi, television
Tags: A Mercy "The Terror"
Comments: 4 Comments
April 17, 2018
Well, the Royal Navy would appear to have fully engaged the Tuunbaq on Season 1, Episode 5 of The Terror, with blood drawn on both sides but the British at least putting on a good show for Queen and country.- –Well played, Lads! We are given a bit more of a glimpse of the creature, which is set on fire, hit with a cannon shot, and survives just to run off into the snow mist! “He’ll be back,” we can almost imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger saying…
I like to watch this show in a darkened room to heighten the atmospheric effects, with the pursuit and battle sequence of the episode taking place at night in a blinding snowstorm in the bitter cold. The filming techniques almost make you feel like you are there as part of the beleaguered crew, about to receive a severe thrashing at the paws and claws of something incomprehensible that moves on its own terms, and may not even be destructible by mortal weapons. A vicious and cunning predator is not the only problem the crew faces, having flesh cut off due to frostbite, an alcoholic captain, and the matter of spoiling and lead tainted food that is slowly poisoning them. The enigmatic Inuit woman named Lady Silence breaks her reticence to convey that she doesn’t control the creature, and is really as afraid of it as the English are. “It’s bound to no one,” she says…
Dread is a difficult emotion to convey in horror, and many horror tales fail to convey it at all. It is a refined, rarified sense of fear. Dread is subtle and builds slowly out of bits and pieces, taking its own good time. The Terror is developing a sense of dread as effectively as about anything seen in recent years on television, and I look forward to the upcoming matches of the Royal Navy versus the supernatural Tuunbaq…
Categories: anomalies, anthropomorphic, cryptozoology, furry, furry horror, paranormal, sci fi, television
Tags: First Shot a Winner, The Terror
Comments: 4 Comments
April 11, 2018
I’m glad that my cousin, Ralph, finally made it to the big screen! He always had dreams of going to Hollywood, and deserved it after all those years of parking cars, pumping gas, and hanging out at furry and video game conventions. It was annoying to him that people would pull at his costume only to discover that it wasn’t one. – – Ahh, his mother would have been so proud of him! On the other hand, I wasn’t granted Ralph’s athleticism, being only a bookish writer…fortune, thou art a cruel mistress!
I suppose it was inevitable that they’d make a movie loosely based on the vintage video game, Rampage, and starring Dwayne Johnson. After all, Doom turned out so well! In the long-ago, I can remember playing the video game, and never doing terribly well…such is the the story of my life! Anyways, in his latest action film outing, the Rock plays primatologist Davis Okoye who is attempting to intervene on behalf of his albino silverback gorilla, George, the object of a rogue genetic experiment gone awry. – –Tell me about it! George, Ralph, and other mutant animals grown to enormous size are, well, rampaging through North America, and causing big trouble and general mayhem. It’s up to Dwayne Johnson and others to find an antidote…
This sci fi/fantasy offering sounds like good brainless fun, and is opening April 13th at a theater near you! A CGI-heavy movie, it also features Jeffrey Dean Morgan of The Walking Dead, minus his Negan bat, Lucille. I expect that Ralphie will give a memorable performance, and even if he doesn’t, I’m still proud of the big lug… 😉
Categories: anomalies, anthropomorphic, creature features, fantasy, furries, furry, furry horror, movies, scalies, sci fi
Tags: Ralph, Rampage the movie
Comments: 4 Comments
April 10, 2018
To dispense with what the episode title refers to, it appears that when you’re “punished as a boy” on a 19th century British ship, you’re flogged on your bottom rather than on your back, complete with all of your shipmates watching for both pain and humiliation. We do get to see this, unfortunately, complete with blood spattering, agonized grunts from the punished, and the man’s behind resembling raw hamburger following his ordeal.- – Hey, horror isn’t pretty!
This is grim stuff, but things are getting pretty grim indeed, with the Tuunbaq creature shredding members of the expedition brutally and pretty much at will, leaving some as only bloody smears on the ice, removing part of another’s skull to expose his brain (“It looks like pudding!,” remarks the ship’s surgeon), and tearing two others in half to crudely reassemble their bodies together. The Tuunbaq has also demonstrated that it can move onto the English ships pretty much at will, and escape unscathed. We’re kind of at the stage now that we were in The Thing where the men realize that the alien is inside the camp, and they’re relatively ineffective at countering it. Composure and discipline are beginning to fall apart, just as some of the men’s gums are starting to turn black from lead poisoning brought by their spoiling and badly- packaged tinned food.
I’m not going to go on about the many complexities and layers of character and plot going on in the story, which can be appreciated on a variety of levels; we limit ourselves to just a few paragraphs here. But central to the story and ever growing in importance is the enigmatic and appropriately-named Lady Silence, the Inuit woman whose father was accidently shot by the English in an earlier episode. She was seen engaging in some kind of interaction with the Tuunbaq, perhaps a ritual. Is she controlling the creature, or what is the nature of her relationship with it? Hmmm…we’ll just have to wait and see!
Categories: anomalies, anthropomorphic, creature features, cryptozoology, fantasy, furry, horror, predators, sci fi, television, unexplained
Tags: " Punished As A Boy, The Terror
Comments: 3 Comments
April 3, 2018
Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming! Season 1, Episode 3 of The Terror was almost a snooze fest until three quarters of the way through the hour when the Royal Navy’s tent station to catch the creature attacking them is set upon from above by the crafty Tuunbaq, who snatches one of the men and scatters them all, including Captain Franklin (pictured), who was basically paying the men a morale visit, and enticed to stay so as to share in the glory of the kill…
…bad career decision! Curse the creature for not playing by the rules, and walking up to the lures to be shot! Defenseless, isolated, and disoriented, Captain Franklin staggers about the polar wastes before being seized by the creature, separated from his leg, and then jammed through a hole in the ice. It was not the kind of retirement plan he had in mind from the Royal Navy. Only a leg left to bury, too…
Good horror doesn’t play by the rules, either. It builds up a sense of tension and dread, and then springs something on you that you weren’t quite expecting, often while you were anticipating quite another outcome. While ironically the men set out to slay the monster had been told to show it no mercy, it was they who were shown none. Horror’s vehicle here is to overwhelm and then subsume prideful men.
Alas, Captain Franklin, we barely knew you, but you seemed to be a likable if vain man. And in the Of Ice and Men scenario, the ice seems to be winning…
Categories: animal presence, anomalies, anthropomorphic, creature features, cryptozoology, furry, furry horror, paranormal, sci fi, television
Tags: The Terror "The Ladder"
Comments: 4 Comments
March 26, 2018
Watching The Walking Dead Sunday night, I was unexpectedly treated to an unannounced and unadvertised preview of The Terror. Quite a change of scenario, but I’ll take two hours of horror over one any night!
“An adventure for Queen and Country!”
Probably, not everyone will be able to get into The Terror because of its period drama aspects. The pilot episode (Go for Broke) was mostly set-up and mood-setter, and some will be turned off by the rather trudging pace initially prevalent. I love this kind of thing, however, and enjoy its attention to detail and atmosphere. It’s all there; the dim lighting, the creaking of the great wooden ship, and the magnificent desolation of the arctic. Life was far more elemental in the mid-nineteenth century in a way that we early 21st century folks can only dimly imagine.
Executive producer Ridley Scott brings a touch of Alien space horror to this tale, however. All of the elements are there; combine a bunch of superstitious sailors in close quarters in unknown and dangerous situations, and you’re bound to get a body count. Even the first episode, Go for Broke, brought us death, disease, delusion, and even a “space walk” in the form of deep sea diving.
The creepiness factor slowly started to ramp up in the second episode, Gore. Locked in ice, the two ships send out expedition teams to seek the best passage through the ice, one of which meets with severe mishap when the tense group spooked by a night storm shoots an Inuit man in the company of his daughter. A member of this team shortly later is seized and carried off by a creature that they think is a bear, but most likely is a Tuunbaq. Taken back to the ship, the Inuit male succumbs to his injuries, his daughter advising the commanding officers (who profess that they want to help despite having shot her father) that they must leave or will vanish…
The sci fi/horror themes of malfunction, isolation, and paranoia that factored into such classics as The Thing are beginning to kick in here, and I’m on board for this arctic nautical nightmare!
Categories: anomalies, anthropomorphic, cryptozoology, furry, furry horror, paranormal, sci fi, television, unexplained
Comments: 3 Comments
March 23, 2018
After leaving explicit instructions that I was not to be interrupted, I sat down to watch the Season 11 finale of the X-Files. I seldom exclaim “Wow!” at anything that I see on television, but this episode was truly cathartic. It was one wild ride that took me in unexpected directions, leaving me feeling dazzled, wrung-out, and yes, satisfied if saddened. — Thank you, series creator Chris Carter!
The episode had everything, from Fox Mulder in his Mustang to Mulder impossibly prevailing over three armed men to the freaky powers of Mulder’s “son” repeatedly deployed. I haven’t seen this much blood on the screen since The Walking Dead, with Mulder himself dispatching several people and son William causing other despicable baddies to literally explode…unexpected gore (a “Wow!” moment), but I don’t begrudge them that, as long as I don’t have to clean it up. We got to see several deaths including those of several core characters, and one startling resurrection that testifies to the regenerative powers of alien DNA. Death is not necessarily final in the X-Files world, where the impossible happens. We also saw the deep love and bond between Mulder and Scully, all without a single kiss being exchanged. More than kisses were exchanged, however, as Mulder is told he’ll really be a father by his partner…
Although Gillian Anderson has said she will not be returning to reprise her Dana Scully character, there are plenty of hooks here upon which a series reboot could be mounted. We true X-Philes will only accept a season finale, and never a series finale. If Fox Television is sold to Disney as is apparently in the works, we might even learn of a connection between alien-infused William and Disney’s character Stitch…”The impossible is happening, Mulder…”
Categories: aliens, anomalies, paranormal, sci fi, television
Tags: the X-Files, X-Files season finale
Comments: 10 Comments
December 24, 2017
How would you like to live right by a cemetery? The neighborhood has been a bit dead lately, you say?! Well, on the Season 1/Episode 7 installment of Terror in the Woods, we are first told the ghostly story of Annie in Ohio, who when visited by her two sisters (Amy and Mary-Beth) at her Ohio house decided that it would be spooky fun to go on an after-dark graveyard walk in the adjoining cemetery. This they did, complete with loud joking conversation and picture-taking. It was all fun and games until the night seemed to darken, and a presence was felt. The sisters retreated to Annie’s house, where one felt a hand touch her when retrieving something from the car. Returning to the cemetery the next day in broad daylight, they found graves of people sharing their names. Looking later at the pics they had taken the previous night, a blurry but full-body image of a revolutionary war soldier was seen. It seems that the cemetery was the final resting place of folks born in the area in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s. Annie swore that she later momentarily saw a revolutionary war soldier in the cemetery from her window, and she would never again return to the graveyard.
The second segment, Creature in the Woods, involved a couple in Nebraska (David and Laura) and their two children who went on a deep woods retreat to a cabin constructed by one of the lady’s relatives. The woman had been going to the woods in general and that cabin in particular since childhood, and was not a nervous Nellie. While fetching water, the family heard a deep grunting in the forest together with stamping on the ground which sounded aggressive. They later heard resonant growls and thumps while preparing lunch. Banging on wash tubs and an oil drum near the entrance to the camp was also heard, at which point the family decided to pack it in and fled in their car, afraid. While no sightings were made, the inference was clearly made that they had encountered one or more Bigfoot-type creatures…
Categories: animals, anomalies, anthropomorphic, controversial, cryptozoology, paranormal, television
Tags: Creature in the Woods, Revolutionary soldier ghost, Terror in the Woods
Comments: 1 Comment
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