Either her husband is crazy, or he is lying, or he is telling the truth and can really communicate with spirits of the deceased. Each possibility is more frightening to Evelyn than the prior, for she holds a dark secret that Robert or his Spiritualist medium companions might discover from a ghost and memory that still haunts her.
Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris) are two Millennial (Gen Y) friends/roommates who slip through life in a codependent relationship that avoids past trauma or current responsibility in shared coping mechanisms of alcohol, vaping, and dark humor. Until Joey meets the bizarre and entrancing Brian, a tracksuit-wearing self-professed extra-terrestrial who can calm Joey’s anxiety with a simple touch. Brian tells Joey that he is an orphan and refugee from a planet lost to climate change, but that he brought with him special trees that will help rescue Earth before it is too late. Joey rapidly falls under Brian’s seductive spell, until a moment of intense tentacle-filled cross-species sex drives her from him in fear. Joey relates this story in an engrossing, almost-ten minute monologue that opens Touch Me (2025) as the camera slowly zooms in on Joey’s face as she responds during a psychiatry session to her therapist’s suggesting of combating anxiety with absurdity. Then the film gets weirder.
From 1939 until 1975 Spain existed under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, general of the Nationalist forces during the preceding Spanish Civil War. For close to four decades Spanish citizens lived under an oppressive, authoritarian regime that governed in cooperation with the National Catholic Church to promote and enforce a conservative Roman Catholic society and to censor or suppress anything deemed transgressive and deviant. Absolute state control extended into artistic endeavors such as film production and release. However, by the early 1970s an aging ruling system and Franco’s waning health emboldened voices and action of dissent and resistance, including filmmakers who were able to start pushing against the limitations of state censors, at least in cuts of films produced in Spain for release in foreign markets (national cuts for release in Spain remained heavily censored.) Upon Franco’s death in 1975 the floodgates of suppressed societal emotion opened, relaxing censorship more as the nation tried to find political footing in a post-Franco reality. Depictions of violence and sex in films increased, both for their own transgressive sake under new freedoms and to use for exploration/reckoning with atrocities going back to the Spanish Civil War and past, events that were all but ‘erased’ from mention under the fascist state. By 1977 in this Transition period, the political powers in control decide to create an “S” classification rating system to label films being released that might offend public sensibilities. After decades of suppression, most of the Spanish public seemed to crave all the “S” classified films they could get. A label meant to be stigma quickly became a badge of honor and guaranteed commercial success whether simple titillation or provocative artistic works. Eroticism and horror flourished in particular. Plots could now include criticism of Catholicism or the State, painful historical memories avoided could now be confronted. Characters outside ‘traditional’ family structure or heterosexuality could be included.
Eerie Whispers is a nonfiction title from last year with the subtitle: Exploring Canada’s Reluctant Relationship with Its Ghostly Lore. Despite my scientific profession and general skepticism, I’ve always been fascinated by and enjoyed ghost stories or any other paranormal or strange tale under the folklore umbrella. And people with that kind of interest are included among those for whom journalist Brian Baker (founder of The Supersitious Times) specifically wrote this book: “those who have an honest interest in Canadian ghost stories and feel at home with the spooky: historians, folkorists, archivists, anthropologists, investigators, mediums, parapsychologists, journalists, and enthusiasts.” The Canadian focus of Eerie Whispers drew my interest from among all the other similar books that get published each year, especially because of that word ‘reluctant’ in the subtitle. Canadians are reluctant to talk about their local ghost stories and experiences? The major focus of the start of Eerie Whispers is about this question, and the related question of why. Being in Buffalo, which at times feels like South Canada (and at times we might really wish it were), I hadn’t heard about or experienced this sentiment of paranormal discomfort from our Northern friends and neighbors. In fact, the only ghost tour I’ve ever gone on in my life was just across the border in Ontario. Now, the reluctance is of course a generality with certain exceptions, but apparently there is more of tight-lipped hesitance to delve into and dwell upon spooky ghostly claims with any remote suggestion that they may reflect a reality. Eerie Whispers is interesting to the ghost or general folklore enthusiast just in that regard alone.
An unnamed lonely gravedigger (director Grace Glowicki) from a long line of gravediggers (Family Motto: Dig deep. Dig hard. Never stop digging.) yearns for a worthy man to love, a good man to love her back. The problem is that her dedication to the job makes the gravedigger smell of corpses; her flesh, hair and clothes emit a putrid rot that would turn aside any potential suitor. She experiments with botanicals whose scents might mask the stink of death, but to no avail. Her loneliness builds until the untimely death and burial of a famous opera diva (Leah Doz) brings the deceased’s mourning brother (Ben Petrie) into her graveyard. Catching her gaze, the brother professes a strong attraction to the gravedigger’s malodorous state, rather than the repulsion she’s used to. An intense relationship follows, but the man admits to the gravedigger that he has sterility issues that make their desire for children and a family difficult. He elects to travel abroad for a new experimental procedure to treat his infertility, but en route home he is lost at sea, only his ring finger bearing the symbol of their love retrieved to be returned to the stunned and heartbroken gravedigger. Dig deep. Dig hard. Never stop digging. The gravedigger refuses to give up on her love, and sets out to use her botanical skills to grow her lover back from the severed. Which only succeeds in growing an exceptionally elongated and comical animate finger that desires a body. Thankfully, there’s the dead body of her lover’s opera-singer-sister just outside. Only the aristocratic former husband (Lowen Morrow) of this corpse might object, and the creature the gravedigger forms might be more monster than lover.
The fourth novelization from the Strange New Worlds show of the Star Trek franchise, Ring of Fire takes place between the episodes “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” and “What is Starfleet?” from this past, third season. It’s the first novel from regular franchise writer David Mack to feature the cast of Strange New Worlds, but incorporates elements from throughout Star Trek canon as is typical for recent novels from the shared, expanded universe. As expected when writing this type of novel, Mack has limitations within the framework of what the show-runners are doing with specific character arcs in the cast. But Mack has also proven very successful at working within the boundaries of the sandbox to create compelling and entertaining stories that make optimal use of all the objects and details that sit inside that very large sandbox that is Star Trek. Ring of Fire continues that success. Fans who didn’t care for certain developments in the third season of the television show won’t be able to completely escape those here, but they will be able to enjoy the unique aspects of this particular story featuring the Pike-era USS Enterprise crew. Ring of Fire has a character-driven plot that focuses largely on an investigation by Security Chief La’An Noonien-Singh, but manages to give significant development to other characters, particularly Helmsman Erica Ortegas, who gets an opportunity to step up and shine as acting Number One. But the novel is equally plot driven as a mystery that involves espionage, sabotage, murder, and central speculative elements that make this more science fiction than a standard adventure that just happens to be set in space.
