Author name: shaunduke

Dr. Shaun Duke is an instructor at DMACC and the Director of the Portolan Project at the Speculative Literature Foundation. He received his M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Florida and a B.A. in Modern Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies science fiction, digital fan cultures, Caribbean literature, literary canons, postcolonialism, and digital rhetoric. In addition to his academic work, he wears many hats. He is a writer of genre fiction and a freelance editor at The Duke of Editing. His fiction has appeared in Curiouser Magazine, Stupefying Stories, and elsewhere. He also hosts and produces The Skiffy and Fanty Show, a four-time Hugo Award finalist podcast dedicated to examining the literary, cinematic, and cultural world of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His podcast work has sent him around the world to participate in conventions, conduct interviews, and more. When he's not podcasting, he can be found on his Twitch channel, AlphabetStreams, or Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and other social media places.

Blog Posts

Retro Nostalgia: Mortal Kombat (1995; dir. Paul W.S. Anderson) and Ruining Your Childhood

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I’ve just re-watched Mortal Kombat, the less-than-stellar 1995 video game adaptation directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.  The same director who would two years later direct a far better film, Event Horizon (2007), which has the unfortunate reputation of being a movie most people hate. Why did I watch Mortal Kombat…again?  Two reasons.  First, I needed something to write about for this column, and it just seemed fitting that a 20-year-old film from my childhood happened to be streaming on Netflix.  Second, I wanted to re-experience something from my childhood to see how well it would hold up.  An experiment, if you will.  And while other films from the 90s (and 80s) have not so much held up as become interesting in other ways as a result of age, Mortal Kombat is one of those gems that, frankly, has always been ridiculous.  I just couldn’t see it when I was 11.

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Around the World: Ms. 45 (1981; dir. Abel Ferrara); Trauma, Gender Violence, and Revenge Fantasies

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(Trigger warning:  this review involves discussion of sexual assault, trauma, and gender violence.) Two years after the release of his gritty and noisy murder-fest, The Driller Killer (1979), Abel Ferrara returned to the director’s helm with Ms. 45 (1981), a revenge “fantasy” film.  Though Ms. 45 still demonstrates some of that rawness present in Ferrara’s first feature film production, it is by far a smoother film, making excellent use of its mostly unknown and untested cast, especially Zoë Lund, the protagonist from which the title, Ms. 45, gets its name.  Of Ferrara’s early films, Ms. 45 is certainly the most compelling, if not because it is a tighter, thematically expedient production, then because of its somewhat brutal (and uncompromising) exposure of the sexist underbelly of NYC — a common theme, it seems, in Ferrara’s work.

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Mad Max: Beyond Patriarchy — On Fury Road’s (2015) Visual Rhetoric and Apocalyptic Social Rebirth

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If you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road (2015; dir. George Miller) yet, I highly recommend it.  Unexpectedly, it turned out to be a film I didn’t know I wanted.  There are a lot of things worth discussing here, but in particular, I want to explore two elements of the film that I think make it a significant work of cinema. Visual Rhetoric and Mad Max (in Brief) In my review of  The City of Lost Children (1995), I argued that Mad Max : Fury Road is primarily interested in storytelling as visual versus a story funneled to us through narrative proper.  The point I want to make about the visual qualities of Mad Max — an idea that also applies to The City of Lost Children, albeit mobilized for different purposes — is that there is so little in this film that is told to us as a narrative (i.e., in exposition, dialogue, or in literal narration) that it compels us to focus not on the narrative (the plot), but on the conveyance of meaning within its visual landscape, both in the straight symbolic sense and in the characters-doing-things sense.

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Retro Nostalgia: The City of Lost Children (1995), Visual Rhetoric, and the Critic’s Confused Apparatus

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May 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children (1995).  It is perhaps the most recognizable example of contemporary surrealist cinema, and it remains one of Caro and Jeunet’s most well-regarded works.*  The surrealist nature of the film is fairly evident from even a casual viewing, as it embodies just about every layer of the film’s plot, characters, visuals, and underlying “myths.”  It’s chaotic, moody, and, at times, bewildering.  The City of Lost Children‘s, in other words, is not simply a fantasy; rather, it is a fantasy which has been divulged of its realistic undercurrents.

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5 Films to Complement Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet

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The movie list game with Ian Sales continues.  I have been challenged to come up with five movies to complement his Apollo Quartet, as the concluding volume of that series, “All That Outer Space Allows,” hit stores in late April.  The following list of 5 is my attempt to come up with a few good films that fit the bill. First, a few “rules”:

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Around the World: The Driller Killer (1979; dir. Abel Ferrara)

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As Abel Ferrara’s first non-porn feature film, The Driller Killer  serves as a signpost of the director’s vision of New York City and its social ills.  Ferrara would hone this vision into a more coherent film three years later (in Ms. 45), but in The Driller Killer, he was, I think, in his rawest form:  vulgar, uncompromising, and noisy.  It’s not surprising, then, that the film was banned in the UK in 1983 given that its UK distribution included a still shot of one of the more gruesome scenes in the entire movie:  a man having a drill bit shoved into his skull.  What is surprising is that, as Mike Bor of the British Board of Film Classification notes, Ferrara’s film was “almost single-handedly responsible for the Video Recordings Act of 1984,” a reactionary piece of legislation that required creative works to be classified to be legally sold; unclassified works, as such, would be banned.

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