Emperor

It is the iconic and often chaotic Birmingham pub that inspired a subgenre.

The Mermaid in Sparkhill helped launch Napalm Death, one of the the most influential metal bands of all time.

It also sparked the creation of Grindcore - a fusion of heavy metal and hardcore punk that emerged against a 1980s backdrop of miners' strikes and the Cold War

The venue's cultural significance is now being examined as part of a project funded by Historic England and run by Home of Metal, a Midlands-based music heritage project.

What’s such a great surprise, and such a great pleasure, is just how talky Heretic is, the first half akin to watching a juicy stage play, reminiscent of Deathtrap or Sleuth, a sneaky game of psychological cat-and-mouse that’s far more tense because of how withheld the more in-your-face horror is. Grant’s speechifying, crafted by A Quiet Place duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, is smug, sure, but also delicious in its provocations, striking at hypocrisies and inconsistencies within religion, like an anti-preacher delivering a hateful sermon. It’s then rather thrilling to see the missionaries gain the strength to strike back, a captivating game of high-stakes tennis that’s far more satisfying than any action sequence I’ve seen this year. Grant tears into it with such ebullient vigour that it feels as if he’s been waiting for something like this for decades, a performance of total freedom and what seems like genuinely giddy pleasure. He gives us flashes of the same disarming charm we associate him with, but here it’s used as part of his weaponry as he tries to cajole his opponents into playing his sadistic game. Disappointingly, the ultimate nature of the game isn’t quite as well-figured out and as the film enters full genre territory, as commanding words get sidelined by unconvincing actions, Heretic stretches our belief.

Family members of Krishna Kumar said they took him to Ganpati Hospital in Saran after he vomited several times. "We admitted him and the vomiting stopped soon after. But the doctor Ajit Kumar Puri said he needs to be operated upon. He conducted the operation by watching videos on YouTube. My son died later," Chandan Shaw.

The family members said they do not know if the 'doctor' had proper qualifications. "We think he was self-styled and fake," they said.

The teenager's grandfather said the boy was feeling better after the vomiting stopped. "But the doctor sent the father away on an errand and started operating on the boy without the family's consent. The boy was in pain. When we asked the doctor why he was in pain, he snapped at us and asked if we were doctors. Later in the evening, the boy stopped breathing. He was revived (with CPR) and then rushed to Patna. He died on the way. They left the boy's body on the stairs of the hospital and fled," said Krishna Kumar's grandfather Prahlad Prasad Shaw.

More discs are on the way this week as well, so be sure to watch for them.

It’s a slow morning for release news, but we do have a couple things for you.

First, Paramount has set ZAZ: The Collection! for release on 4K Ultra HD on 11/19. That’s Zucker, Abrahams & Zucker to you! The collection will include Airplane! (1980), Top Secret! (1984), and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988). The first two are new to the format.

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Here’s something exciting: Decal and Neon are going to be releasing Pablo Berger’s animated Robot Dreams (2023) on Blu-ray on 10/8! I haven’t seen this yet, but a few friends have and they have great things to say about it.

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And in other news, Synapse Films will release Mike Mendez’s The Convent (2000) in 4K on 10/8.

A24 and Lionsgate will release Ty West’s MaXXXine on Blu-ray and 4K UHD on 10/8.

And Well Go USA will release Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma (2024) on 4K and Blu-ray on 10/8 as well.

Medical clowns are known to have a positive therapeutic impact on kids in hospitals for a range of health issues, and now it’s been shown they can reduce the length of stay and antibiotic use for children with pneumonia.

A study, done on 51 children, found that those visited by medical clowns on average left hospital more than a day earlier than those who weren’t.

“Medical clowns undergo specific training to work in hospitals,” says Dr Karin Yaacoby-Bianu, a researcher at the Carmel Medical Centre and Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.

“They have been shown to reduce pain and alleviate stress and anxiety in children and their families during medical treatment, and have been gradually integrated into many aspects of hospital care

“But their impact on children being treated for pneumonia has not been investigated.”

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Children visited by clowns needed an average of 2 days of IV antibiotic treatment, while the control group required 3. Other medical markers, like heart rate and inflammation, were lower in the clown group.

“While the practice of medical clowning is not a standardised interaction, we believe that it helps to alleviate stress and anxiety, improves psychological adjustment to the hospital environment and allows patients to better participate in treatment plans like adherence to oral antibiotics and fluids,” explains Yaacoby-Bianu.

The Road is perhaps Cormac McCarthy’s most successful work. Released in 2006, the book, which deviates from his usual Western inclinations, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Two years later, it became a Hollywood movie starring Viggo Mortensen and a young Kodi Smit-McPhee. Now, The Road is taking on a new form: the graphic novel.

French cartoonist Manu Larcenet brings McCarthy’s dark epic to life with detailed linework and stark black-and-white imagery. Larcenet’s drawings go beyond anything Hollywood could ever bring to the screen, showing the true sadness and depravity of The Road. The entire project was also approved by McCarthy himself, though the author died in June 2023 before he could see the final product.

“He died and only saw half of the album before we could communicate,” Larcenet tells Inverse. “I was only told that he was both happy and impressed by it, which is both too little and a lot.”

Ahead of his graphic novel’s U.S. release, Inverse interviewed Larcenet via email to find out how he discovered The Road, his thoughts on the story’s ambiguous ending, and the story behind some of his favorite images from the adaptation.

“I think all the Pythons are nuts in some way,” Eric Idle once wrote, “and together we make one completely insane person.” That insane entity, the comedy supergroup Monty Python, convened in 1969, with the BBC sketch show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Its six members—Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Graham Chapman, plus a lone American, Terry Gilliam—became the defining absurdists of postwar Britain, stomping their collective foot on polite society. You know the rest: the ex-parrot, the Comfy Chair, the Ministry of Silly Walks, the Knights Who Say “Ni!” If he had done nothing else, Idle would have given humanity an enduring gift with “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” the ditty that ends “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” sung by a group of unlikely optimists while they’re being crucified. At one point, it was ranked the most played song at British funerals.

But Idle’s work extends beyond Monty Python. His TV film “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash,” from 1978, which chronicles the rise of a not-quite-the-Beatles rock band, was an early specimen of the mockumentary. (A sequel, “The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch,” appeared in 2003.) Based in Los Angeles since 1994, Idle has lent his trademark jolly obnoxiousness to everything from the English National Opera’s production of “The Mikado” to the reality show “The Masked Singer.” With his musical partner, John du Prez, he wrote “Spamalot,” a stage musical “lovingly ripped off” from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Musical and was revived on Broadway last season. Idle and the surviving Pythons—Chapman died in 1989, Jones in 2020—are now beloved octogenarians, the closest thing comedy has to living deities.

And yet there have been signs of disquiet in the Python kingdom. The group’s most recent (and, they insist, final) reunion was a decade ago, at London’s O2 Arena, and was motivated less by fan service than by financial straits. A producer of “Holy Grail” had successfully sued for “Spamalot” royalties, claiming that he’d been the “seventh Python.” (Idle called the idea “laughable.”) This past February, Idle tweeted about the Pythons’ money problems—“I never dreamed that at this age the income streams would tail off so disastrously”—and pointed the finger at their asset manager, Holly Gilliam, Terry’s daughter. Cleese came to Holly’s defense, calling her “very efficient, clear-minded, hard-working, and pleasant.” The two men, who had toured together as recently as 2016, traded barbs on X: Idle revealed that he hadn’t seen Cleese for years; Cleese posted, “We always loathed and despised each other, but it’s only recently that the truth has begun to emerge,” then said that he was joking. Still, fans wondered: Had the Spam soured?

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There’s a line that stood out to me from the diary: “On a positive note, I did realize this morning that the Grail is essentially about the Pythons: each knight’s character is a reflection of our own.” Can you tell me what that means?

You know, John Cleese is Lancelot, and he’s violent and keeps smashing people to bits. Michael Palin has got an eye for the girls, but he mustn’t do that. I’m Sir Robin, a friend of the musicians. Terry Jones is Bedevere: a bit batty, with odd theories. And Gilliam’s a kind of daft Patsy.

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In your “sortabiography,” from 2018, you write that, decades after “Holy Grail,” you were working on a sequel, “The Final Crusade,” and John Cleese didn’t want to do it.

Yes, in the end it was John. Funnily enough, I’ve got a little booklet of it, which I’m taking on tour to sell in the lobby. It’s called “Almost the Final Python Film: The Not Making of The Final Crusade.” I had this idea, and I wrote a little treatment. I go and see John, and we have a pleasant lunch in Montecito. He likes it, so I send it to all the others. We all meet in Cliveden, which is a hotel on the Thames owned by the Astors. And John announces that he doesn’t want to do it. Then Gilliam says, “Could you have mentioned this before we all gathered here?” [Cleese, who has a different memory of these events, says that he never thought the movie was a good idea, and still doesn’t.]

I liked the idea that we would all play the same knights, but twenty years have passed, and we would be much older and grumpier. They want us to take Arthur’s body back to the Holy Land, and Graham could still play Arthur: we could use vocal technology to have him say any lines we wanted from inside the sepulcher. I loved the idea of Graham complaining, “Get on with it!”

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Back in February, there was this exchange between you and John Cleese on X that got a little testy, but maybe tongue-in-cheek. How is your relationship with John?

Well, I would say poor. I’d been unhappy with the business and how it was working. And they aren’t unhappy. It’s odd with John, because things started to go a bit south during lockdown, and I got worried. I haven’t seen him for eight years. I think when you lose touch with people face to face, all sorts of things can happen. It’s a pity. It’s not how we were. Again, I met him in 1963, so that’s an awfully long time. I’ve known many versions of John: times of happiness, times of sadness, times of success, times of less success. You just have to take a long view. We don’t have to force each other to face each other on everything that has to be decided. I try not to get involved if I can, because I feel very lucky that I’ve survived. [Idle was given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2019, but it was treated successfully.] I had a reprieve, and you shouldn’t spend the rest of your time bickering if you’ve had a reprieve.

In March, health technology startup HeHealth debuted Calmara AI, an app proclaiming to be “your intimacy bestie for safer sex.” The app was heavily marketed to women, who were told they could upload a picture of their partner’s penis for Calmara to scan for evidence of a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Users would get an emoji-laden “Clear!” or “Hold!!!” verdict — with a disclaimer saying the penis in question wasn’t necessarily free of all STIs.

The reaction Ella Dawson, sex and culture critic, had when she first saw Calmara AI’s claim to provide “AI-powered scans [that] give you clear, science-backed answers about your partner’s sexual health status” can be easily summed up: “big yikes.” She raised the alarm on social media, voicing her concerns about privacy and accuracy. The attention prompted a deluge of negative press and a Los Angeles Times investigation.

The Federal Trade Commission was also concerned. The agency notified HeHealth, the parent company of Calmara AI, that it was opening an investigation into possibly fraudulent advertising claims and privacy concerns. Within days, HeHealth pulled its apps off the market.

HeHealth CEO Yudara Kularathne emphasized that the FTC found no wrongdoing and said that no penalties were imposed. “The HeHealth consumer app was incurring significant losses, so we decided to close it to focus on profitability as a startup,” he wrote over email, saying that the company is now focused on business-to-business projects with governments and NGOs mostly outside the United States.

More and more AI-powered sexual health apps have been cropping up, and there’s no sign of stopping. Some of the new consumer-focused apps are targeted toward women and queer people, who often have difficulties getting culturally sensitive and gender-informed care. Venture capitalists and funders see opportunities in underserved populations — but can prioritize growth over privacy and security.

PLOT: In the aftermath of WW2, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survived the holocaust, emigrates to America. While there, he gets a taste of the American dream from a wealthy benefactor (Guy Pearce), although success may carry a price too difficult to bear.

REVIEW: It would be fair to say there hasn’t been a movie like The Brutalist in about forty years. One-time actor Brady Corbet, who emerged as a director following The Childhood of a Leader and the underrated Vox Lux, makes movies in the vein of David Lean, with this telling a deeply personal story on an epic scale the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time. Shooting in 70mm VistaVision, The Brutalist is a three-and-a-half hour masterwork (with an intermission) that will go a long way towards establishing Corbett as one of the great modern directors.

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The Brutalist was the toast of the Venice Film Festival and is already taking TIFF by storm. If it comes out this year and it’s given a proper push, it would be reasonable to expect it to be a major Oscar contender in most categories, with acting nods a no-brainer for Brody, Pearce and Jones. However, it also demands to be seen theatrically, as more than any movie since Oppenheimer, it’s been designed to be enjoyed as a cinematic event – and those belong on the big screen. Hopefully, audiences can see it how intended, as this is pretty close to being a masterpiece.

Lyrics:

I hath dreamed bleak and grim, desolate visions
Of the pre-human serpent volk
And communed with long-dead reptiles
Silently watching through the ages in cold, curious apathy
The unending sorrows and suffering of an abysmal humankind

I dare not again surrender to the deep sleep which ever beckons me
Lest I in dread
Shudder at the nameless things
That may at this very moment
Be crawling and lurking
At the slimy edges of my consciousness
Slithering forth from the bowels of their infernal pits
Worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses
On subterranean obelisks of blood-soaked granite

I await the day when the claws of doom shall rise
To drag down in their reeking talons the weary
And hopeless remnants of a jaded, decayed, war-despairing mankind
Of a day when the earth shall open wide
And the black, bottomless, yawning abyss engulfs the arrogant civilizations of man
Chthonic retribution shall ascend
Amidst universal pandemonium and those who slither and crawl
Shall rise again once more to inherit the earth

Liner notes (Nile is known for how comprehensive they can be):

H.P. Lovecraft was one of the most influential authors or horror stories of the last century. The last few decades have seen Lovecraft’s rise from a forgotten author of phantasmagoric pulp magazine fiction to a subject of serious academic study. (A second major biography has recently appeared.)

Lovecraft’s influence on other writers in the horror genre has been significant. His writing is considered to be seminal, and it still exerts a powerful influence on artists and film makers. A distinctive feature of Lovecraft’s ficton that sets it apart from that of many writers in the genre is his construction, as he wrote, of a “background of consistent and elaborate pseudo-myth”. Thus, his invention of the ultimate grimoire – the Necronomicon – was an important part of his fictional modus operandi.

Lovecraft first referred to the Necronomicon in 1922 in his short story “The Hound”. (“The Hound” was later collected in the volume Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, which was published by Arkham House in 1965.) He would refer to the Necronomicon in several other stories. A circle of writers who were friends and correspondents with Lovecraft also started referring to the Necronomicon in their horror tales, which in turn solidified its “existence”. The fact that they would refer to the Necronomicon along with actual books dealing with witchcraft and demonology helped to sell the illusion. Inspired by Lovecraft’s lead, this literary “circle” also invented arcane and “forbidden” texts: Clark Ashton Smith’s The Book of Eibon, Robert E. Howard’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and Robert Bloch’s Cultes de Goules and De Vermis Mysteriis were all forbidden books invented to add further depth to their spine-tingling tales of horror. The “Lovecraft Circle’s” practice of inventing “forbidden books” is very well documented. Not only did they “invent” such books, they even went to great lengths to create bogus histories, which only added to the illusion of their existence.

Robert E. Howard first introduced Nameless Cults through his story “The Children of the Night” (1931). In 1932, Lovecraft came up with a German title for it – Ungenennte Heidenthume. Several of Lovecraft’s correspondents balked at this unwieldy title. August Derleth came up with the title Unaussprechlichen Kulten, which stuck, despite the fact that this more literally means “Unpronounceable Cults”: “Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten” or “Unaussprechliche Kulten” would be more correct. The reason for this debate amongst the circle of authors is clear – the German is technically incorrect. The adjective would end in -e for the indefinite plural, not an -n, to with: Unaussprechliche Kulte… If we wish to accept “Nameless Cults” as being the correct wording for an English translation, we would have to accept “Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten” as being the real German title of the work. The addition of the “Von” also allows us to keep the -n ending (perhaps even more appropriate would have been “Die Namenlosen Kulte”). In any case, although Lovecraft doesn’t mention this forbidden text any more than he does others, but he does give its publication “history” in the story “Out of the Aeons”:

“… a glance at the hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt’s horrible Nameless Cults would have established a linkage of unmistakable significance. At this period, however, the readers of that monstrous blasphemy were exceedingly few; copies having been incredible scarce in the interval between the suppression of the original Düsseldorf edition (1839) and of the Bridewell translation (1845) and the publication of the expurgates reprint by the Golden Goblin Press in 1909.”

According to surviving correspondence from Robert Howard to Lovecraft:

“1839: Unaussprechlichen Kulten was published in Düsseldorf. Written by Friedrich von Junzt [read Necronomicon in Greek translation]. Von Junzt dies six months after returning from trip to Mongolia while working on second book. Less than a dozen copies exist of this edition. Von Junzt relates many stories of the survivals of cults worshipping pre-human entities or prehistoric gods, such as Ghatanothoa, Bran, and others. The principle obscurity of this book is in Von Junzt’s use of the term "keys” – phrase used many times by him, in various relations, such as descriptions of the infamous Black Stone in Hungary and the legendary Temple of the Toad in Honduras."

Now, where all this dusty old literary shenanigans takes a more Nile-relevant turn of events… As I was working on this song “Unaussprechlichen Kulten” and driving myself nuts trying to figure out whether to stick with the original Lovecraft variant of the title or the more correct linguistic one, I got a call from Orion Landau (Relapse’s resident graphics genius).

Orion, at the time was working on the cover for my “Saurian Meditation” side project. He contacted me for a quote that he could use for the CD layout relating to the album’s theme. I was compelled to reply, “Oh, yeah sure” (as if there was some book on my shelf ready-made with authentic quotes concerning reptilian meditative states), but on the other end of the phone sat stark silence. In that pregnant moment of silence, a thunderbolt struck me, as I had, of course, been working on the Nile song gathering as much information that I could find on the much-vaunted “Unaussprechlichen Kulten”. I laughed, and said, “What the heck. Sure, I’ll send a quote over. No problem.” So, with Lovecraftian invention, I fashioned a fictitious quote (from the fictitious Von Junzt) from his fictitious Unaussprechlichen Kulten.

It worked so well that I went ahead and blew it up into a full-blown song. After “Saurian Meditation” came out, I got a rash of e-mails wanting to know where they could obtain a copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten, as they had, of course, been unable to locate any of the supposedly existing copies. Try as I might to convince these insistent folks of the truth, they were steadfast in the conviction that the quotes were indeed authentic. Although I denied owning any such book, in their minds I was merely lying to them. They thought I was keeping the dreaded, “legendary” tome to myself. One of them, an obviously bright and thoroughly versed literary student from East Germany (who I will respectfully name here only as “Torsten”), was adamant on the subject, as he had managed to find an empty catalog reference (with the volume long missing from a library shelf in Prague) to an unrelated work by a German author of the same period (Hamburg, 1837) with a very similar name, Frederick von Juntz. In my mind, this coincidence only underscores the incredible, timeless power of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, and the ingenious way his fantastic stories continue to exert their mysterious, otherworldly power.