MY FRIEND DAHMER. (2017) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

MY FRIEND DAHMER. (2017) DIRECTED BY MARC MEYERS. SCREENPLAY BY MARC MEYERS.

BASED ON THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, MY FRIEND DAHMER, BY JOHN ‘DERF’ BACKDERF.

STARRING ROSS LYNCH, ANNE HECHE, DALLAS ROBERTS AND ALEX WOLFF.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This film is on Netflix at the moment and I loved watching it. It’s loosely the story of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s high school years, which one of his actual schoolmates, John Backderf, nicknamed ‘Derf,’ used as the basis of a graphic novel he made after hearing about the murders Dahmer committed in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. He based his comic book on his ‘friendship’ with Dahmer in high school and on drawings he had made of Dahmer during this time.

The film doesn’t deal directly with the murders, just on Jeffrey’s mid-to-late teenage years, though his first murder, that of hitch-hiker Steven Hicks, is heavily implied in the last scene, then some text appears on-screen to tell us of that young man’s fate.

Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1960, murdered seventeen young men. He dismembered, kept and sometimes even ate and sexually violated their remains, but the film, as I mentioned, doesn’t include these activities, as they happened after Dahmer and Derf had gone their separate ways.

Poor Jeffrey! He had a shitty childhood. I don’t for one minute condone what he did, but if ever a boy was bred for this type of thing, ie, killing, it was poor Jeffrey Dahmer.

His mother Joyce was a high maintenance drama queen who was always fighting and arguing with Jeffrey’s dad, an analytical chemist. Dad Lionel was usually too busy shouting back at his wife to pay much attention to Jeffrey.

Jeffrey, meanwhile, was a desperately lonely teenager. He was rather unnaturally interested in roadkill, or, more specifically, the bones and things that made up their insides.

His chemist father unwittingly taught him how to safely bleach and preserve the animal bones he was keeping in the shed. He had no idea, however, of the dreadful use to which his son would later put this gruesome knowledge…

Meanwhile, Jeffrey, who was also secretly gay and, by now, very sexually frustrated as well, was not getting on particularly well in school either.

He was virtually friendless and drinking hard alcohol to help him cope with his mother’s deteriorating mental health and the negative effect this was having on his parents’ marriage.

Enter John ‘Derf’ Backderf, a talented artist and schoolmate of Jeffrey’s. He had noticed that Jeffrey had a distinct gift for clowning around, acting the fool in class and on the street to get attention and alleviate his boredom.

Derf formed an unofficial ‘Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club’ with a handful of his mates. This mainly involved encouraging Jeffrey to ‘spazz out’ or ‘do a Dahmer’ for the amusement of Derf and his chums.

This doesn’t seem like the basis of a genuine friendship to me, which is why I apostrophized the word in the first paragraph. Derf and his pals are only using Jeffrey, although you could make the argument that, were it not for these lads who egged him on, the unfortunate teenager might not have ever known the joy of belonging somewhere, the joy of belonging in a gang or group of his peers. So, ‘tis as long as it’s broad, as we Irish might say.

Derf did pretty well out of Jeffrey Dahmer overall, in that he got a book and a movie out of him and he’ll always be known as Dahmer’s only friend.

Things didn’t work out quite so well for Wisconsin’s second-best-known serial killer (don’t forget Ed Gein…!), however. He was beaten to death in prison in 1994 while serving his sentence for the murders he’d committed.

Some of the blame for Jeffrey’s story has got to go to his parents, who neglected him terribly, whether intentionally or otherwise. He committed his first murder just a few weeks after graduating from school, during a period when both his parents had moved out of the family home and Jeffrey was living alone because each parent assumed he was staying with the other. He had nothing to do for weeks but drink alcohol and brood on his sexual frustration. No wonder his mind went funny.

Anyway, MY FRIEND DAHMER is well acted and scripted and is well worth an hour or two of your time, especially if you’re a fan of serial killer movies.

Ross Lynch is excellent as the titular Dahmer, and newcomers to the Jeffrey Dahmer story will find themselves expertly segue-wayed (is that how you spell that word???) into wanting to know about the killer’s post-high school career… in killing. In which case, I would refer them to the superb Netflix series, MONSTER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY (2022).

All the best now and happy reading!

THE HUNGER (2018) BY ALMA KATSU. A BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE HUNGER (2018): A NOVEL BY ALMA KATSU.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

PUBLISHED BY BANTAM PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Turn back or you will all die….’

There have been famines throughout history, some more famous- or infamous- than others. The Great Famine in Ireland, from 1845 to 1852, caused the deaths of one million people and the emigration of a further one million. People were turned away from the workhouses because there simply wasn’t enough room to house them or the food with which to feed them. Imagine being turned away from the workhouse! Lean times indeed.

Thousands of prisoners died horribly from starvation in the Nazi concentration camps from 1939 to 1945. The camps, scattered across Germany and Poland, were so nightmarish that the American, English and Russian troops that liberated them never forgot the horrors they saw there, and that, of course, goes double or even treble for the survivors who actually lived through them.

There was also the terrible incident in 1972, in which a rugby team and some of their families and friends crashed while flying over the Andes Mountains. Several crew members and passengers died straightaway, and the remaining survivors spent two months alone on that bitterly cold mountain from October to December. They battled adverse winter weather, an avalanche that killed off more of their already depleted numbers, and, worst of all, starvation that led to the cannibalising of the dead…

In the present day, Yemen is experiencing food shortages that have been on-going since the start of their Civil War in late 2014. Even in the so-called First World, people in countries like Ireland and England are in the kind of dire financial situations where they have to choose between ‘heating or eating,’ as it’s dubbed in the media. Few countries are total strangers to food poverty.

The food poverty situation that is really attracting me to it at the moment is the subject of Alma Katsu’s fantastic book, THE HUNGER. It’s the fascinatingly gruesome story of the Donner Party, pioneers of the Old American West, who fell into unimaginably dire straits as they attempted to travel to California from Springfield, Illinois, in 1847.

The wealthy Donner and Reed families departed Independence, Missouri in the spring of 1846, in a wagon train consisting of five hundred covered wagons. Their destination was California, thousands of miles away, where they hoped to settle for the final time.

Resettlement to California was the name of the game in the 1840s, with many Americans wanting to avail themselves of the blossoming economic opportunities in the West. Also, the belief that white Americans should settle on that part of North America, often at the expense of the Indians who already lived there, was prevalent at the time.

The ninety or so men, women and children that comprised the Donner-Reed Party might have been fine if they’d stayed with the herd, so to speak. But brothers George and Jacob Donner were very taken by an adventurer called Lansford Hastings, who was then advocating a supposedly shorter, more direct route to California, across the Great Basin rather than through Idaho’s Snake River Plain. The Party opted for the Hasting’s Cut-Off…

That was the rock they perished on. The entire party got stuck at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains for the whole of the winter of 1846-7. They’d tried to outrun the winter snows but Mother Nature pipped them to the post, covering the mountains with the thickest snows and rendering them impassable till spring. Their food ran out, of course, and they very reluctantly had to resort to… you guessed it, cannibalism.

I’m over-simplifying things greatly, of course. A myriad of other horrible, painful and uncomfortable things happened to the intrepid pioneers before they even reached the Sierra Nevada mountains. Many people died en route from different ailments and conditions like consumption, before starvation was ever a real issue.

While I feel desperately sorry for the people who were so hungry that they had to cut up and eat the bodies of their dead friends, I didn’t like the way that the Donner-Reed wagon train left some old, sick people literally by the side of the road to die alone because they’d become liabilities. No good karma could ever come out of treating your fellow man like that…

Alma Katsu’s book adds a supernatural element to an already gruesome story. She has children disappearing along the route, as fiendish, skeletally-thin humanoid figures stalk the wagon train through the trees in order to pick off the weakest and most vulnerable members when no-one is looking.

The children’s bodies turn up, but with every ounce of edible flesh skinned off them. Grim, huh? I felt that the demons were a metaphor for the encroaching hunger that intends to sweep all before it before long, but the demons sure are terrifying whether you believe they’re real or not.  

The book also sexes up the plot by turning George Donner’s hot younger wife Tamsen Donner into a sexy sorceress, who bewitches men with her looks and witchy herbal trickery. She seduces the handsome Charles Stanton, who has no problem at all with being seduced.

He is tormented by the ghost of a lost love, however, and Tamsen may have some competition in the healing-poor-dear-Charles’s-broken-heart stakes. Mary Graves, daughter of Franklin, is patiently waiting in the wings to nurse him to her fragrant bosom. Do they have a happy ending, Charles and Mary? Sadly, I cannae tell ye, readers. It’s against the Reviewers’ Code, lol.

The book kind of turns German immigrant Lewis Keseberg into a sex offender. He takes the little girls into the woods and tells them that, if they don’t submit to his sexual advances, he’ll choose them as the human sacrifice required to feed the starving wagon train.

I don’t suppose too many people will shed tears over the portrayal of Lewis Keseberg as a bit of a scumbag. He was one of the survivors of the Donner Party disaster, and he was generally reviled as a man-eater and ghoul, as he openly talked about nom-nom-nomming on human flesh. The funny thing is that he opened a restaurant in later life, but I couldn’t comment as to the provenance of the beef, heh-heh-heh…

Anyway, do read this book if you have any interest in the grisly side of history, which I have in spades. YouTube is jam-packed with excellent films and documentaries on the subject of the Donner-Reed party, which I’ve been watching avidly all week.

The prologue to the book, just two-and-a-bit little pages, scared me almost out of my wits. Do you want to be scared too, reader? Do you want to be so scared you can’t trust yourself to go to sleep until the first rays of dawn lighten the gloom in your bed-chamber because you don’t know what might be lurking in the shadows…? Just pick up this book…

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CARRIE. (1976) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

CARRIE. (1976) DIRECTED BY BRIAN DE PALMA.

BASED ON THE BOOK BY STEPHEN KING.

MUSIC BY PINO DONAGGIO.

STARRING SISSY SPACEK, PIPER LAURIE, JOHN TRAVOLTA, NANCY ALLEN, WILLIAM KATT, AMY IRVING AND BETTY BUCKLEY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘I can see your dirty pillows…’

Oh boy. This one is a corker. A genuine, bonafide honest-to-goodness corker of a horror movie. A high school that gives new meaning to the phrase ‘first period,’ if I may be flippant for a moment. A lot of peeps consider this to be one of the finest Stephen King book-to-film adaptations, and I definitely agree.

I love the story behind its being King’s first novel, which he decided wasn’t any good and so he threw it in the trash, where it was fortunately rescued by his devoted wife Tabitha. Imagine if she hadn’t found it, if it had really ended up in the back of a garbage disposal truck! The world of horror writing would be a poorer place.

Anyway, Sissy Spacek plays the eponymous Carrie White, the plain, poorly-dressed sixteen-year-old daughter of a religious nutter of a single mom. Piper Laurie plays the mom, and both women were nominated for Academy Awards for their parts in CARRIE; Sissy Spacek for Best Actress and Piper Laurie for Best Supporting Actress. Strangely enough, Piper Laurie died only two weeks ago at the tender age of ninety-one. May she rest in peace.

Carrie’s crazy Momma, Margaret White, thinks that sex and anything to do with the human body is dirty, so when Carrie gets her first period in the showers at school, she not unnaturally thinks she’s dying. She freaks out big-time.

The girls at school have a right old laugh at her expense. So much so that poor Carrie is left terrorised and traumatised and has to be rescued by Miss Collins, the gym teacher. The angry teacher puts the offending girls in detention and even puts a question mark over their upcoming prom, for which the nasty teenage brats naturally blame Carrie.

My adult daughter and I re-watched the film on Halloween Night, 2023, and we are both agreed on the following: teenage girls conscious of their bodies do not wander naked and un-self-consciously around the school changing-rooms, no matter how much men might like to think of them so doing. It’s purely a shared fantasy on the part of the male writers, heh-heh-heh.

Like the way guys think that women have pillow fights in their underwear while on sleepovers with each other. We just don’t do it. Oh no, guys, don’t cry, please don’t cry. I was only messing with ye. Of course we bounce around in our underwear and hit each other with pillows when we have sleepovers. And then we whip off our bras and panties and dance the can-can.   

Anyway, one of the girls, Sue Snell, develops a bit of a conscience about the whole ‘first period/ plug it up’ thing and makes her boyfriend, class heart-throb Tommy Ross, invite Carrie to the prom in her, Sue’s, place. Carrie is flabbergasted but thrilled when Tommy, blessed with a full head of flowing golden curls, issues his invitation.

Momma, however, goes ape-s**t at the news and starts carrying on something terrible, but Carrie sticks to her guns. She tells Momma straight that she’s going to the prom and that’s that, even refusing to let the crazy lady lock her in her darkened ‘prayer-closet’ with only a freaky-ass statue of Jesus for company. You go, girl. Finally, Carrie is standing up to her awful mother, who clearly has experienced sexual trauma in her lifetime that has turned her into the hysterical, repressed woman she is today.

Carrie and Tommy finally make it to the prom, but things are not as they appear. The nastiest of the bitches- there’s no better word for these malicious harpies- in Carrie’s class has planned to ruin Carrie’s night with the help of her lowlife boyfriend, played by a young John Travolta. I won’t tell you how they do it, but let’s just say that their actions push an already strung-out Carrie over the edge…

By the way, did I mention that Carrie has telekinesis, the power to move objects with the force of her mind…? If I didn’t, I should have. It’s kind of the point of the whole film. When her dream prom night turns into a nightmare, Carrie uses this power on a scale on which she’s never used it before. The nasty little prom queens get a whole lot more than they could ever have bargained for. I reckon they’re sorry they ever messed with poor little Carrie White.

Just when you think the film’s over, Carrie goes home to Momma, who by now has become completely deranged. The final scenes are shocking and powerful. Then, when you think the film’s over again, there’s one more little twist to enjoy before the credits finally roll.

I’d like to hope that horror maestro Stephen King, on whose phenomenally successful book the film is based, was happy when he saw this movie adaptation of his work. I know I was, anyway. It’s a film about bullying and about revenging oneself against the bullies.

When the bullies are your school peers, it’s bad enough, but when your biggest bully is your parent, and your only parent at that, things can become very tricky. It takes a lot of courage on Carrie’s part to stand up to her mother, who genuinely believes that Carrie’s magic is sent from the devil. It’s a film we can all learn a few lessons from; that’s if we’re done laughing at Tommy’s crowning glory…