BunzelGram February 14, 2022 Issue #77 This Week's Thoughts On Mysteries, Thrillers, and All Things Crime |
|
|
“What if a guy in a Cupid mask started killing co-eds on Valentine’s Day?” That’s the premise behind the 2001 slasher flick (unimaginatively) titled Valentine, one of many bloody films that either deal with Hallmark’s favorite holiday, or was released on this date in the past. With that in mind—and to wish you all the love and romance that today is meant to bring—here’s a bonus list of horror movies to watch when you’re horrified by Valentine’s Day. —Reed Bunzel |
|
|
Alan Ritchson’s Reacher Is A Gigantic, Unstoppable Force In case you haven’t noticed, Jack Reacher is burning up social media. The eight-part first season (yes, Amazon Prime has already re-upped for at least one more) debuted February 4, and millions of people have already binge-watched the thing once, if not twice. The reasons for this instant popularity are many, one of them being that half the planet has read all the books penned by Lee Child (the last two written with his brother, Andrew Child). Also, at six-five, he’s large. And strong. And built. And (I suspect this is a big one), he doesn’t talk much. He simply moves through the story like a bulldozer oozing stoicism, the four virtues of which form the basis of many of our greatest stories: Odysseus as he endured numerous trials on his journey home, or Gary Cooper in High Noon, staring down an outlaw gang even after the whole town has abandoned him. As Corbin Smith says in an article in The Daily Beast, “Reacher wages a one-man war…and takes stoicism to wild new heights, mashing Mickey Spillane’s two-fisted detectives with a Kerouacian mystic drifter. This heady mixture is a tribute to the virtues of masculine self-control that is so extreme you stand in awe of its excess.” Bottom line, according to Corbin: “If the idea of a one-man bloodbath doing the dirty work of pure justice sounds cool to you, give Reacher a try. It’s dumb, sure, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t overflowing with joie de vivre.” | | |
|
|
Super Bowl Disaster Movies: The Most Specific Genre of All There haven’t been many thriller movies set at the Super Bowl. Just two, in fact, and both were released in the 1970s before the NFL became the litigious behemoth into which it has evolved today. No billion-dollar megalith wants its patrons to worry that there might be someone hiding in the nosebleed seats with a SAKO TRG 42 bolt-action sniper rifle aimed at the field, or to fear getting trampled to death in a mass stampede to the exits. But in the mid-‘70s, Hollywood gave us two back-to-back films that, while neither were masterpieces nor box-office smashes, played out during the annual “Big Game.” As Jim Knipfel writes for Den Of Geek, "Universal took the opening kickoff in the Disaster Bowl with a colorful all-star cast in 1976’s Two Minute Warning, with a plot that can be summed up in seven words: 'There’s a sniper at the Super Bowl!'" One year later, "Paramount’s Black Sunday, based on the novel by Thomas Harris [pre-Hannibal Lecter] was inspired by the Black September assassination of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics." | | |
|
|
Dixie Mafia Behind Brutal Slaying Of NC Family 50 Years Ago In my first two Jack Connor novels, Palmetto Blood and Carolina Heat, I based a bunch of bad guys on true-life characters in the infamous Dixie Mafia. That’s why I was particularly drawn to a recent story about a fifty-year-old triple-murder in North Carolina that authorities now believe was tied directly to four DM lowlifes from Georgia. The mysterious slayings of Virginia Durham, 44, her husband, Bryce Durham, 51, and their 18-year-old son, Bobby Durham, on Feb. 3, 1972, went unsolved for decades. Bryce owned a Buick dealership, where Virginia Durham kept the books, while Bobby was in his first year of college at nearby Appalachian State University. When worried family members were unable to reach them, they drove to the house, where they discovered a grisly scene: “The house had been ransacked,” The Charlotte Observer reported. “The telephone cord was ripped from the wall. Blood spattered the den. The television was on, but its sound was muffled by the steady swoosh of running water. The two men followed the noise to a bathroom where they found three bodies, their heads dangling in an overflowing bathtub.” A tip from the sheriff’s office in Georgia led authorities to identify the four suspects—only one of whom is still alive and serving a life sentence for yet another murder, at the Augusta State Medical Prison. | | |
|
|
Death On The Nile Reveals Christie’s Insight Into Psychology And Morality Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile hit theaters last week, to mixed reviews from critics and movie-goers alike. I have not yet seen it, so I’m writing this from the possibly biased perspective of a mystery fan who was deeply disappointed by the last cinematic adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel, the 1978 version starring Peter Ustinov and Mia Farrow. In my opinion, the book is one of her best detective stories; as Julia Sirmons writes in a Crime Reads article last week, “It is one of Christie’s keenest investigations of psychology and morality, with complex characters and particularly fine prose and deft humor–aspects of [her] writing that are often undervalued.” The 2022 movie plot, in a nutshell: Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot's Egyptian vacation aboard a glamorous river steamer turns into a terrifying search for a murderer when a picture-perfect couple's idyllic honeymoon is tragically cut short. As Wendy Ide writes in The Observer (UK), “The camera whirls giddily, dizzy from the sparkle and spectacle, but not quite able to conceal the fact that this is an empty bauble of a movie.” And as Bilge Ebiri says in New York Magazine, “Branagh seems to be having a grand old time, so we might as well, too.” | | |
|
|
The 10 Best Coen Brothers Movies of All Time? Whenever you sit down to watch a Coen brothers movie, you have no idea what you’re going to get. Sure, the characters are going to be multi-dimensional, the plot quirky and unpredictable, the visuals stylized and nuanced. Since Joel Coen’s solo shot The Tragedy of Macbeth hit Apple TV last week, I thought it a good time to take a look at some of the brothers’ best work. Fact is, Joel and Ethan Coen have been directed feature-length movies for nearly four decades, exploring a broad spectrum of genres while maintaining an affinity for strange humor, and a recurring fondness for subverting storytelling conventions. Along the way, they’ve managed to deliver a body of work that has proven unspeakably influential, both in and outside Hollywood. Judged only in terms of quotes film buffs now work into their everyday vernacular, the Coen Brothers have become icons. This list from Collider examines ten of their best films, from Fargo (who can forget Frances McDormand’s line “I think I’m going to barf?”) to The Big Lebowski (“The Dude abides”) and all the absurdist gems in between. Note: Not all Coen films are crime stories, but most of them at least nudge up against the criminal nature of the human species, which is why I’ve included this list in BunzelGram. | | |
|
|
ALSO: Super Bowl 2022: The 25 Best Football Movies Of All Time, Ranked While there have only been two bona fide Super Bowl thriller films over the past LVI years, lots and lots of movies focus on football. While many of them have absolutely nothing to do with mysteries or crime, here’s a list of 25 of the best. [USA Today] Gone, But Not Forgotten: 12 Great Mystery Authors Readers Still Love Thousands of mystery titles are released by major and independent publishers every year, but few of them would be possible without the groundwork laid by the early masters of the genre. [Crime Reads] The Year’s 10 Best Movies That Got Zero Academy Award Nominations Every year, two minutes after the Oscar nominations are announced, movie critics and fans pile on Academy members for overlooking this actor or ignoring that film. Fair nor not, here’s a list of this year’s best films [not all of them mysteries or thrillers] that received absolutely zero nominations. [The Daily Beast] |
|
|
Southern Mafia Plays Major Role In Palmetto Blood, Carolina Heat As noted in one of the main stories above, the first two novels in my Jack Connor series deal extensively with the Southern Mafia, alternatively known as the Dixie Mafia. Relatively quiet for the past decade, the DM was a criminal organization composed mainly of white Southerners and based in Biloxi, Mississippi, that operated primarily throughout the southern U.S. since the early 1970s. Totally unrelated to the Italian Mafia or the Russian Maffia, the group was primarily focused on trafficking stolen merchandise, illegal alcohol, and illegal drugs. And murder. Lots of murder. | | |
|
|
|
|