Dracula's Godchild

Halloween Horror Fest!!! If I Can Find Anything Good...

2011-09-28T07:58:00.000-05:00

I'm back! And I'm beginning to wonder if I am getting jaded. In an attempt to get the Dracula's Godchild party started, I've so far watched 3.5 horror films, and not one, in my opinion, deserves its own standalone review.

Let me repeat something I've said throughout the horror-movie portions of this blog: I am a high-strung person who loves fiction. I am, in theory, the ideal audience for all but the most tepid of tepid spook-shows. I can suspend disbelief so high it can barely be seen with the naked eye. My surprise, therefore, is less that there are non-great horror movies out there as that they are so non-great that even I noticed.

So here we go...

--Knife Edge: A stockbroker with ESP quits the fast track and moves with her husband and son into a haunted house. Soon, she is seeing visions of a terrible murder from the past and is drawn to a particularly sinister tree on the estate.

Unfortunately, that's as far as I got. It may be that reading Barbara Erskine's House of Echoes a few months ago used up some vital attention span for British haunted-house/domestic dramas. I'm not willing to blame the movie for this, though, and I may yet return to it.

--The Haunted Forest: Nice name, isn't it? It also has nice scenery as a bunch of attractive young people get lost in the woods on a quest for a(nother) sinister tree. Imagine someone using a "Native American Legend" as an excuse to make a J-horror movie in what looks like a forest in Oregon.

Got it? I've just saved you about 90 minutes. You're welcome.

--The Marsh: This was probably my favorite so far: Gabrielle Anwar stars as a children's-book writer who sees visions of a house in he country. Until the movie started, she's been using this to fuel her work, which is shown as adorably creepy picture books I wouldn't mind getting for my godchildren in real life. When she tracks down the real house and rents it for a sabbatical, creepy things start to happen... as, unfortunately, does the unnecessary insertion of Forest Whitaker as a psychic investigator. Pretty good and spooky, though.

--Walled In: If I had a time machine, I might just go back and put Walled In on the list I made, at the dawn of this site, of movies that infuriate me due to unfulfilled potential. Mischa Barton (who is quite good here) stars as a demolition expert doing the initial inspection on an apartment building where people were buried alive in the walls—a plot point that only serves to remind me that I know a lot of morbid little bits of lore that other people don't. As she navigates the building and its strange few remaining tenants, she begins to have eerie experiences....

Which makes it all the more disappointing that the end of the film is a sort of torture-porn lite. The set pieces were so good, the atmosphere was so good, and it all ends with someone trapped in what amounts to a cellar by a still-living doofus. Phooey.

Next up: Book of Blood, if I can stand it.

Just Briefly...

2011-05-31T07:53:00.000-05:00

For the record, I was raised on crime shows: Baretta, Starsky & Hutch, Magnum, the Law & Order franchise (and also a ton of British mystery, though I don't think that's relevant here) and a host of others. My mother can identify the plot of a Magnum, PI episode in its first thirty seconds, but can't remember what she had for dinner two days ago.

You get the idea.

And yet I don't think of myself as having a lot of particular insight into these shows: I don't want to solve the crime, because if I can figure out "whodunit" early, the writers haven't fully succeeded. Which is why I say, quite sincerely: Was the season finale of Castle really a shock to people?

I keep seeing it presented that way. Thanks to a lack of TV reception and a bad habit of forgetting about network schedules/the existence of Hulu, I see about four episodes of Castle a year. And every single time I did catch one, the chief acted funny whenever the subject of Kate's mother came up. Can someone (politely!) explain this to me? If you have more continuity from regular viewing, does the guy's concern come off as something else? I'm not used to being a detective-show savant, so I assume some other force is at work.

Random Observation...

2010-11-04T10:47:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to sense a trend as I watch these:

Arang starts with schoolgirls fearing ghosts and perverts, and eventually the story involves both.

In The Ghost, aka Dead Friend (with any luck, tomorrow's review), the action begins with a teenage séance and a sentence that explains much of the movie (er, spoiler?).

Both Ringu and its American remake kick off with the legend of the videotape as told by kids.

In other words, I think I've finally found the explanation for the title cards at the start of The Heirloom: no matter how steeped in local lore you are, it's hard to have people naturally expositing about fetus ghosts.

A Salty Tale: Arang

2010-11-03T14:42:00.000-05:00

Think Law & Order: Very Special Victims Unit.

In this Korean horror film, a detective just recovered from a sexual assault is paired with the proverbial green rookie (in the opening sequence after the titles, he is trying to photograph a crime scene with no film in the camera). Together, they investigate a series of deaths: some force is killing off a group of young men of the same age. Could it have something to do with a missing girl and a crime committed in a salt-storage shed long ago? Could long-haired ladies, technological manipulation by supernatural forces, and black goo be involved?

Is there a Korean idiom for "Duh!"?

I realize I'm giving a false impression that I didn't like Arang, but in fact I liked it for the same reason I like Law & Order*: there's a point in each when stylized conventions transcend cliché to become classical. I enjoyed the police-procedural aspect of this revenge drama and its little twists—the oaf with the camera plays a much bigger role than first assumed—and the salthouse is a nicely eerie set-piece around which to base your haunt. The movie is very basic in its conventions, however, and talking about it without dwelling on what viewers would already expect (dead girls, photographic shenanigans) is very difficult. If you like these things, definitely give it a try.

*No, Sam Waterston is the other reason.

Belated Halloween Coming!

2010-11-02T20:27:00.000-05:00

Just to let you know that I'll be reviewing some nice foreign horror flicks, assuming I can ever stop watching DVDs of that curiously gentle police show, Pie In The Sky. Thanks for your patience!

Egad....

2010-11-01T09:23:00.000-05:00

I'm going to try to do the NaBloPoMo thing again this year; generally, this is something I remember around the second of every month. Movie reviews will be forthcoming!

Halloween Wish List

2010-10-13T10:09:00.000-05:00

Alas, streaming Netflix has the worst copy of 100 Years of Horror in the world, or there would already be reviews up. In the meantime, how cool is this broom?

Brief Update

2010-09-08T07:02:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to let any readers (all both of them) know that I am, in no particular order:

Still alive;
Revamping (see what I did there?) my online presence a bit in the near future;
Watching far too many David Attenborough nature specials, and am unwilling to bore the blogosphere by describing them here.

However, spook movie season is right around the corner, so who knows?

* squirm *

2010-05-19T11:57:00.008-05:00

I'm finally doing it— reading Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Dance of Death and its immediate sequel.

(WARNING: spoilers about the Pendergast series up to this point will be bandied about freely as necessary. If you've ever said to yourself "I wonder if The Relic or its sister novels are any good?," the answer is "Mostly!" and you should perhaps read my silly movie reviews instead while you plan to get them from your local library.)

I have a somewhat...unique relationship with these Preston/Child books. They're kind of pulpy fun*, full of interesting ideas, and like most bookish heterosexual women who've ever picked these up, I have a mad passion for Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. I would read Agent Pendergast Watches Paint Dry.

I wish I were. Because they are fairly graphic thriller novels and I am squeamish as blazes. While I can admire, from an artistic standpoint, the authorial duo's willingness to off recurring characters and take risks—they borrowed Collins's Count Fosco as a villain once—I do have to force myself along when people are getting their glands ripped out (The Relic), being cut up by a mad scientist (The Cabinet of Curiosities), or dying horribly from an infernal device I correctly identified on the first try (Brimstone). But I do, even when my response to these is less "Wow! What next??" than "Lord! What now??"

After Brimstone came out, it was announced that it would, with the next two books, form a trilogy that might very well kill off Agent Pendergast. So I did what any sensible long-range planner would do, namely look longingly at the paperbacks and wait for a Pendergast novel to come out after them.

Yes, it probably is neurotic to wait four years to read a book. It could be worse. I could be at the building-infernal-devices stage. :-)

What I've at last decided to do is a sort of live-blog of the books as I read them. Unfortunately, this is an idea I've only had now, about a quarter into the trilogy's third book. So here's a quick recap of my reading experience with Dance of Death:

Not 20 pages in, a guy rips his own face off. I can't imagine why I put off reading these for so long!
For some reason, people being framed for things they didn't do makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Alas, this appears to be the main plot of both books.
Too much teasing with the exposition. We're supposed to be learning about the evil brother, but keep getting cut off whenever anything promising surfaces. There's a fine line between building actual suspense and repeating the errors of The Ring 2 movie.
Hey! No fair killing off regulars I like!
It's entirely my own fault for reading ahead in the series (someone gave me a copy of Wheel of Darkness), but knowing something bad is going to happen to one particular character is causing me to drag my feet.
Hey! No fair killing off new characters I like! (Although this person may have been the bad guy in disguise all along. If not, the real Dr. _____ is quietly liquefying in a closet somewhere.)
Book ended more happily than I'd have expected, for a value of happy where most of the people are injured, sad or incarcerated.

On to Book of the Dead:

Great. They managed to make the framed-for-murders-he-didn't-commit-thing even worse.
A new museum exhibit! So far this book seems to be returning to some of the tried-and-true bits of The Relic. I also like the ancient Egyptian angle.
I do not, do NOT, like what's going on with Diogenes and Constance. If anything happens to that little mouse, I swear to god I'm going to stop reading, even as I know with a sinking heart I'll just start again (See the whole Agent Pendergast Watches Paint Dry bit).
I'm starting to realize these books are a fast read for me in part because there are large, well-telegraphed sections of them I can't bear to read: my memory for described gore is quite good, so I avoid it strenuously.

I'll update this post as I go, so that maybe I actually will go...

UPDATE, 5/20:

Oh, no. I think I see where this is going. What is this, Thomas Hardy's Agent Pendergast?
I expected to hate the entire prison sequence, but it was great.
Starting to think the bad guy has a thing for Margo, the heroine from The Relic. He keeps not quite killing her.
Oooh! Much better scheme of evil than I has anticipated!
Oh, authors. You [Deadwood words] couldn't leave that mouse alone, could you?
And finally: it is impossible to hold a grudge against a book which ends with hors d'oeuvres shortly after a fight on a volcano.

*In no way am I trying to downplay this, since in general I hate explained Gothic, and beneath the pulp-fiction-scientific surface, that's what a lot of these are.

Random, With A Less Happy Bat

2009-10-01T13:43:00.001-05:00

I've just discovered Bitstrips.com, a make-it-yourself webcomics site. Behold:

That is all.

Scarred For Life...Er, Fall

2009-09-25T06:52:00.007-05:00

Ah, that autumn crispness in the air--the one that meant evil carnivals to Ray Bradbury and means ogling pumpkins and Hammer films for me!

And so I rented Scars of Dracula, one of the earlier and gorier movies in the Dracula series that features (speaking of ogling) Christopher Lee. The plot is fairly simple: after yet another defeat has turned him into powder, Dracula is revived by an infusion of blood from--

Happybat!

--Beg pardon?

It's me! Batley!

And I'm here to tell you that the bouncing bat who vomits blood on Dracula and revives him is the real star of the show!

--I can well believe it. But... "Happybat"?

You don't bounce like that unless you're happy!

--Point taken, I suppose. The fake...er, possibly merely joyous bats are the movie's special-effects weak point, to be sure, which is a shame since this particular fledermaus plays a large role in the film.

At any rate...Dracula is revived and resumes evil deeds in his castle--which, from the melange of characters and setting, appears to exist in a forest in the little-remarked Anglo-Hungarian Empire circa 1886. The little village nearest the castle suffers a massacre and are wise to the ways of the Drac, but thoughtlessly forget to notify any near neighbors. This leaves three young people (innocent, beautiful Sarah; her stolid fiancé Simon; his short, chronic-wencher brother Paul) out of the information loop at the worst of times. While on the run from an irate father, Paul stumbles upon the castle, macks on a recently turned Anglo-Transylvanian concubine--despite being a vampire, she is soon killed with a dagger, possibly because there are no hawthorn bushes around--and meets a bad end attempting to escape the vampire, the vampire's henchman, and the vampire's henchman's terrible eyebrows of doom.

Naturally, Simon and Sarah go after him. Naturally, Dracula wants Sarah. Most of the remaining villagers are no help, and when the priest (stage 1 of the Peter Cushing Cloning Initiative) attempts to shelter Sarah, he is torn to pieces by--

Happybat! All hail Happybat! Eighty percent of the scars in this movie are, in fact, SCARS OF HAPPYBAT!!

--er, my friend's species-ist outburst is largely correct. If the wounds are anything to go by, he even perpetrated the initial village slaughter.

Simon and Sarah eventually prevail, of course, but only after Sarah gets her cleavage attacked by someone's favorite bouncy flying mammal and a convenient lightning bolt sets Dracula on fire. That'll teach him. . . for about two days, if previous films are anything to go by.

Mein Gott!...and Pop-Cultural Stuff

2009-09-23T07:04:00.003-05:00

It has been almost a year since I unleashed my venom/sense of absurdity/ability to watch Hammer films on these pages, and with any luck, a review of Scars of Dracula will be shortly forthcoming. But for now, Heroes premiere haikus:

Annoyance recedes,
characters more like real guys:
Danko dead. Danke.

Peter saves some folks,
has bromance with EMT...
"Petrellicest" fades.

Drug rings stalk the streets!
Still, Matt saves superpower
for deliv'ry guy.

Hiro: dying man?
Maybe brain would benefit
from relaxing face.

Tracy's back, if damp:
Weren't they triplets, I recall?
One blonde in reserve.

Superdickery...No, Sadly Not The Awesome Website Of That Name

2008-11-14T07:50:00.004-05:00

[I have started watching Smallville again. Please send condolence cards to...]

New theories:

1) The writers work in a room made entirely of meth. They arrive bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and five minutes later they're making the same mistakes over and over again and finding it really fascinating.
2) The writers have taken out an insurance policy on me because they know if Chloe really marries Jimmy Olsen, I'm likely to have an apoplectic fit right there in my friend's living room, on the comfy loveseat I've been pounding in frustration for three weeks now.

I guess by now it's no secret that I am what's known as a "Chlark" shipper (for the purposes of the show: in my heart, I long for Chloe and Lex to take over Metropolis from a really nice apartment, maybe something they built above the former Club Zero, because the reward for being a smart person should be getting another smart person who loves you). Every time Tom Welling and Allison Mack appear in a scene together, it feels as if Chloe and Clark are about to leap into each other's arms. You would think this is the kind of chemistry casting directors dream of on a show where Clark Kent falling for a reporter is an easy reach, yes?

But oho! The poststructuralists who run this particular take on the Superman legend are so far having none of it. Yesterday's episode featured a flashback to Chloe and Clark's first kiss as pre-adolescents, and was the first sweet moment I've seen on Smallville in ages...and which was immediately cheapened by having Clark erase Chloe's memory of his superpowers.

Because when thousands of people write fan letters saying they want Clark and Chloe back the way they used to be, naturally they were pining for all the times Chloe heard a superspeed whoosh and wondered where the hell Clark had got to.

It's not too late for them to fix this, but I refuse to put my faith in the people who brought us Doomsday the EMT.

The Motherlode?

2008-10-31T08:16:00.008-05:00

The ever-distant Ninth Gate review/possible podcast has suddenly become slightly more distant, for I am wondering what it is I managed to obtain for $5 at Wal-Mart last night.

It's a 1985 movie about grave robbery called The Doctor and the Devils, which through some malign operation of fate I've never heard of until now. Grave robbing holds only the tiniest of morbid fascinations for me, but the cast of this movie is so full of actors I adore that I can only conclude (with my native pessimism) that I have stumbled on the Love Actually of horror cinema.

Check it out:

Tim Curry. I trust I don't have to explain to anyone why I love Frank N. Furter/Dr. Poole/Long John Silver/that Satanesque guy in Legend, do I?

Jonathan Pryce. Governor, schmovernor: to me he will always be the thrillingly sinister Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Julian Sands. Note that this would be right around the time he was flashing his willy as George Emerson in A Room With a View.

Stephen Rea. Almost certainly my favorite part of Ready To Wear. "...I think she means...'negotiations'."

Patrick Stewart. I'm not even going to bother elaborating on this one.

Philip Davis AND Philip Jackson. Two actors from the Robin of Sherwood series I adored as a child (Jackson was Abbot Hugo, brother of the Sheriff of Nottingham; Davis played a wonderfully mean and sleazy King John). To this day I delight in spotting cast in other roles, and to find a twofer like this is quite a prize.

Also: screenplay based on a work by Dylan Thomas.

This can't possibly be any good, can it? Review to come.

UPDATE, AN AWFUL LOT LATER: Well... it sucked. Not because a temporary blindness led me to confuse Dalton with Curry on the Tim front (that makes more sense: Tim Curry and Stephen Rea are physically similar enough to cause confusion in a movie among the five people who don't know about Rocky Horror). I'm hard-pressed to explain why, though. The set pieces were good, and Phyllis "Lady Jane from Lovejoy" Logan looked gorgeous through the whole production. The plot wasn't bad, if you can imagine melding a thinly disguised tale of Burke and Hare with the sinister-doings-back-here, ingenue-love-plot-over-there structure of Sweeney Todd. As drunken murderers out to steal bodies or make them, Rea and Pryce are genuinely terrifying, particularly in a scene where they torment and kill an old lady fresh off the boat from Ireland.

The Doctor and the Devils is almost startlingly less than the sum of its parts, and unfortunately, I can't even be that nice about my podcasting skills. It's going to take practice before I'm ready to unleash my voice on an unwary world, so no audio reviews for the foreseeable future.

Return of the Spy Bug

2008-10-23T06:55:00.005-05:00

Commercial breaks during the new season of Heroes introduced me to the previews for My Own Worst Enemy, the show that now follows it. I wasn't impressed, for a number of reasons:

I kind of hate Christian Slater. He wasn't even a very good Adso of Melk.
I'm one of the few people who still liked the song used in the previews, and now it's indelibly associated with Christian Slater.
Notwithstanding my first two points, I feel sorry that the camerawork in the previews made the poor guy look so short. I suspect Slater is no strapping Adonis, but there's no need to make it look like his character is a double agent of the Lollipop Guild.
My Own Worst Enemy is taking over the slot occupied last season by the tepid abortion known as Journeyman. I still can't entirely explain my hatred for that show: the idea that when someone develops weird powers their loved ones actually NOTICE was refreshing, and though it did begin to fall apart after a few episodes, the fact is I despised it on sight yet continued to watch through Heroes-induced inertia.

Sadly for the integrity of my dislikes, Christian Slater is so far actually effective in this show about a spy with a lab-engineered split personality, portraying both superspy Edward and schlubby Henry as the divide between them starts to crumble. This week's episode introduced James Cromwell as Henry's boss, and I look forward to Cromwell scaring the hell out of me as he did in L.A. Confidential.*

I don't think My Own Worst Enemy is art, but thankfully it's no Journeyman either.

*I think it's the contrast between the farmer in Babe and a scary power-mad killer that does it... :-)

Horror Reviews, Part III

2008-10-17T13:21:00.006-05:00

I don't ordinarily like apocalypse scenarios: seven years of a parochial education will take all the fun out of the end of the world.

I do, however, based on the couple of short stories I've read, have a weakness for the late Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr., aka Raccoona Sheldon. "Beyond the Dead Reef," my first encounter with her work, was a classic story of the planet getting revenge on polluters; "The Screwfly Solution" explores some of the same themes, but less as cause-and-effect and more as a matter of karma; this is the story that the Masters of Horror series chose to adapt.

The basic plot outline of story and film are much the same: a plague of misogyny is spreading across the world, with men killing women in droves and forming a new religion around their homicidal urge. Scientist Alan, his wife Anne and their daughter Amy are all affected by the epidemic, but only Anne will eventually discover its source.

"The Screwfly Solution" is horror at is most basic, I think, less about the cliches of fright than about the real, aweing possibility that a small change could wipe out everything we know. The film suffers, not from having Jason Priestley as Alan (I definitely had my doubts), but from the problems of adapting a chiefly epistolary story into an active linear screenplay: one must of necessity add new characters and scenes, or tweak perfectly fine existing characters and scenes, to make a movie that, well, moves.

I was most impressed by the film's attention to the ways everyday sexism seems to lead to misogyny, considering that this was really subtext in the story: though the rash of femicide is definitely driven by an outside force which I won't spoil for once, the MoH adaptation is careful to show that the difference between this and the catcalls and strip clubs of the "normal" world might be one of degree. Certainly more substance than I expected to see from this, and it really builds nicely, but I still like the short story better.

Horror Reviews, Part II

2008-10-14T10:42:00.007-05:00

The second part of my Masters of Horror odyssey was adapted from a Clive Barker short story. In general, I find Clive Barker interesting: movies based on his work (with the possible exception of Rawhead Rex) are consistently smart, gory and frightening, and yet he tends to be engagingly fun in interviews. One gets the impression that you should never go to a slumber party at Clive Barker's house, but if invited you might think about it for a second.

This is why, despite some lukewarm reviews, I had high hopes for Valerie on the Stairs and its promising haunted-house setup: struggling writer Rob Hanisey moves into a boarding-house for unpublished authors and begins to be dogged by visions of a beautiful young woman being held captive by a demon (Tony "Candyman" Todd). When he asks his fellow authors for information, they're strangely cagey for people who want to share their words with the world, and then the demon begins to kill them with an ungodly degree of mess. The end is a twist, but not much of one, and is simultaneously an exploration of authors' relationship to their work and a massive disappointment.

Spoilers ahead...

It turns out, of course, that Rob is himself a fictional character made flesh in a grand collaboration among three of the house's authors, as are Valerie and her demon captor. The episode ends with Rob literally (...sigh) turning into paper and blowing away in the cleansing winds of reality.

...Look. The writer-writing-a-writer-character trope is by now a staple of the horror genre, and you'd think either Barker or director Mick Gariss could do something innovative with it: instead the ending, while visually pretty, is for want of a better word masturbatory. I've been tempted to see when the original story was written, on the theory that it's one of Barker's early works; that's the only explanation I can conceive for why the man who gave the world Cenobites (and occasionally vice versa, heh heh) couldn't see that the plot of "Valerie on the Stairs" was a neat idea probably doomed to poor execution. It's a romantic notion, not a story, and no amount of ripping people's spines out through their throats and sensuous nude females can make it a story.

The Spy Bug, So To Speak

2008-10-09T12:40:00.004-05:00

I wrote about my own flare-up of secret agent obsession not long ago, and it appears that the fever has passed to the pets:

Thoughts On Last Night's Heroes Episode

2008-10-07T12:41:00.002-05:00

What do you call one dead Peter Petrelli? A good start. (That sound you heard was the snickering of lawyers everywhere.)
It's nice to see Hiro getting back to his roots as a cute guy with half a brain instead of a would-be samurai/superspy.
Going on the hair-color theory of consanguinity this show seems to espouse (except for Niki and Micah, of course), Little Noah's mother would have to be...Claire, Meredith, Mrs. Bennet, or Mr. Muggles?
Does anyone actually believe in Daphne and Parkman as a couple?
Why do we have to kill Nathan once a season without fail?

BunnyPenny & Poe

2008-10-02T08:45:00.003-05:00

(There will be a Ninth Gate review soon, I swear. I've recently acquired a headset microphone and am considering doing the occasional podcast, so there's a little uncertainty about format.)

Yelling fruitlessly into a robot rabbit's navel doesn't sound like a very good strategy for coping with grief, but the Nabaztag/tag has provided a lot of welcome distraction, even when it occasionally doesn't hear my voice commands. I gave her a bat tattoo to match mine, and now she's ready to fight crimes against punctuation with Edgar Allan Poe. Or play internet radio, whichever.

Horror Reviews, Part I

2008-09-29T08:56:00.016-05:00

A somber note before we get started: I tried to keep most of this out of my personal blog output while there was still any hope, but about ten days ago someone I loved passed away. It wasn't entirely unexpected, but it was someone with whom I'd hoped to spend a lot of my future. The place where we both worked was nice enough to let me have a week off on their tab, and I am just now getting back to work. Which reminds me of him, but then so does everything, down to air molecules. The week I'd hoped would allow me to develop coping strategies mostly allowed me to spend time with others who mourn him as much as I did, and basically to sleep whenever I got too upset: not a good strategy for the workplace.

I also decided to go on with the horror movies, however, as I need the distraction and as this is really not a bad time for me to watch those. Even the guy getting his spine ripped out in Valerie on the Stairs (spoiler!) is watchable when your empathy levels have reached negative 9000. And so...

Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns/Dreams in the Witch House
I'd kept hearing about all the nice extras on the Showtime Masters of Horror DVDs on various review sites, and it's a pity that none of those vague bastards mentioned that there are two varieties. The twofers, like my video store's copy of Cigarette Burns/Dreams..., are unencumbered by special features.

Cigarette Burns is the story of a down-on-his-luck cinephile who is hired by an eccentric collector to find the only existing print of a film that drives people to homicidal madness.* In the world we know, eccentric collectors might have a stash of Marilyn Monroe's underwear: this guy has a mutilated angel, a creature bound to the film in question, whom he keeps on a rotating platform and pelts with ice cubes. Because...yeah. No idea. The cinephile takes the job, though: he needs the money to pay off his dead junkie girlfriend's father, who lent him the money to buy an indie movie house. Those indie movie-house guys, always with the smack and the...yeah. No idea there, either.

The job takes our antihero down a long road of rumors and perils as he confronts a frustrated film critic, a homicidal disciple of the movie's director, and finally the director's wife, who narrowly survived her husband's attempted murder/suicide. He then delivers the goods to the collector, with terrifying results for people who don't like to see intestines in film projectors.

Despite my ragging on it, Cigarette Burns is visually striking, has an interesting plot and makes some interesting points about the nature of art and its power over us. For some reason I'd expected the film-within-a-film to be a silent-movie artifact (damn you, Shadow of the Vampire!), which threw me a bit, but it was a solid if surreal piece of horror. And I say this in spite of the eyeball violence.

The companion piece on the DVD is an adaptation of a Lovecraft story I never particularly liked, The Dreams In The Witch-House. I'd love to give a complete review, but unfortunately I fell asleep halfway through, not entirely due to being in a fragile mental state. The plot follows Lovecraft tolerably well: impoverished student moves into ancient Boston boarding-house and falls victim to visions of a witch and her human-faced-rat familiar, who discovered the secret of manipulating time through geometry. The sex scene was not in the original, but then, neither was the "Miskatonic University" T-shirt on the student, which was the high point for me; human-faced rats just aren't very sinister.

*Except the film critic character, which could either be a statement about how critics don't Fully Grasp The Significance Of Art, or could be the practical need to keep the exposition guy somewhat sane.

Spook Movies (and a Poll)

2008-09-16T09:17:00.002-05:00

I'm not much in the Halloween spirit this year, what with one thing or another, but if all goes well I do want to spend October on the couch with some spooky cinema. However, I can't decide which direction to take with it--I was contemplating some of the Showtime Masters of Horror DVDs, but I'm a little wary of them-- so if I have any readers, help me out:

I Spy...I Wish

2008-09-15T08:13:00.005-05:00

Note: the first season of Burn Notice expires at the end of tomorrow on hulu.com. Further note: watching 75% of the first season of Burn Notice in one day will give you dreams that you are in trouble with both organized crime and the FBI. But I wouldn't let that stop you.

It had been a long time since this particular obsession reared its covert head: the first time I saw a Bond movie, when I was eight or nine, I suddenly wanted to be a spy more than anything in the world. (It narrowly edged out detective, and indeed, there was a surveillance section in my copy of–I kid you not– The Hardy Boys' Detective Handbook.) But I lacked the mathematical nimbleness to do complicated codes, I'm a terrible liar, and...let's just say if I'd attempted to be a school shooter, the affair would have been known to history as the Southside Tidewater Foot Massacre. Not good signs for a would-be spook.

And so the impulse went latent until this summer, when I saw the Get Smart remake.

I didn't review the film here, partly because it wasn't a scary movie (the realization that Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson isn't really a bad actor is more unsettling than scary) and partly because it wasn't very good. It tried to be an "action-comedy" and only succeeded in being "action, then comedy, then action..." And yet I was obsessed with it: partly because of some interesting questions it brought up, as both main characters love their jobs so much they submit to drastic physical alteration in order to keep working, and where should the line be drawn on that even if you are a spy?–and partly because my Spy Thing had suddenly risen from the depths of my unconscious and wanted me to learn to climb walls and outwit villains.

That would be about when everybody and his brother started telling me how wonderful Burn Notice was; maybe the secret-agent lust showed somehow.

I'm possibly the last person in America not to have noticed the show by now, but just in case: spy and master of improvised solutions Michael Westen is summarily and mysteriously booted from the service. Stranded in Miami with his family, ex-girlfriend, and contact/sidekick Sam (played by Bruce Campbell: his character is supposed to have gone to seed, but I'd still rather look at him than Michael, who resembles those cheekboney guys who show up in superhero movies to have their girlfriends stolen by the protagonist), Michael tries to figure out what happened and make it right while also doing side projects and repairing sabotaged weapons with paper clips. It's very good, and I highly recommend it. But it still won't get you a double-O number.

Er...If You Haven't Seen Eureka This Week, You May Want To Click Your Back Button

2008-08-21T11:42:00.006-05:00

(Also if you dislike mild profanity and, since I'm writing this to take my mind off some real-life bad news, possibly writing that does not make sense.)

J. H. Christ, people, I don't care if the actor DID want to leave the show. You killed off Nathan Stark?!? No, no, no!

I will admit, I came to the realization a few weeks ago that the whole Carter/Allison/Stark triangle was a little off, really: when the Stark character first appeared on the show, he was presented as a smug SOB who gets anything he wants. Seeing his wistful, lingering affection for Allison made the character more likable...with the problem, however, that if they got back together, he would again have been the smug SOB who gets anything he wants.

Still, they could have saved the character, even if the producers couldn't woo Ed Quinn back with a fleet of trucks carrying cash, puppies and cupcakes*. This is Eureka, for pete's sake! Someone getting in a science-lab accident and looking like a completely different person might not even make the gossip rounds at the Café Diem! It would, however, probably have given Allison some pause, so she and Carter could work out their issues, and given Stark a reason to evaluate his life and undergo some character development, so that the viewers' liking him doesn't perversely depend on the character being lovelorn.

A blaze of glory isn't everything...

*Maybe they should have tried that?

Hell Yes!

2008-07-18T08:41:00.003-05:00

As a young kid, I had a poster of Ron Perlman on my closet. Admittedly, it was as Vincent from Beauty and the Beast, the tall, smart, romantic, secret-underground-land-dwelling cat/man who could have appealed more to a pubescent girl only by riding a horse and dispensing chocolate. But this early exposure gave me a fondness for the man's work, from the polyglot hunchback in The Name of the Rose to his scariest role of all in The Last Supper: a Rush Limbaugh clone.

And so it was that seeing Hellboy II gave me the chance to do two things I'd been wanting to do: catch up on Ron Perlman's oeuvre and see the faerieland of Guillermo del Toro's imagination without having to rent Pan's Labyrinth and sob like an infant. And it was good.

The first Hellboy took us in the Judeo-Christian direction you'd expect for a movie with the devil's kid in it; the sequel takes us in a decidedly more pagan direction, as an elf prince* seeks to restart a war between the faerie people and the humans. Fortunately for the humans, the BPRD's motley collection of characters--Hellboy, the amphibious Abe Sapien (imagine the spawn of C3PO and a mermaid), and fire controller Liz among them--are out to stop him. Into this plot del Toro manages to weave a lot of messages about love, destiny versus free will, and the loss of wonder in the world.

Which leads me to say that in my opinion, the latter message fell a bit flat. It's an interesting point that, with the fay folk dying out, the BPRD is aiding in the extinction of enchanted things from the past: however, we are reminded of this by the elf villain, Nuada, who keeps killing his own kind when it suits him and generally putting in harm's way the very things he's chiding Hellboy for destroying. And no one calls him on it, in a movie where very few characters are the soul of diplomacy. This is a minor irritant in a movie I otherwise loved, however, and fans of the first installment will be gratified to watch as our hero gets to fight more than one kind of monster. Still no dispensing chocolate, though.

*Elves. I don't know what Tolkien saw in them. But I digress.

I'm Very Annoyed That This Is My 150th Post

2008-07-02T11:24:00.001-05:00

I can't even type the words. If I do, my face will melt like a Nazi in an Indiana Jones movie.

Horror Review Orgy

2008-06-09T15:27:00.004-05:00

I have some very odd coping mechanisms. Apparently, in times of stress, I watch a lot of comedy; when I'm subjected to additional stress, it seems I go for horror-movie review sites. A few observations here:

--Horrorwatch.com , which I'd really liked, is apparently no more. Or else you have to solve a cryptic puzzle-box to get to the reviews, and I'm fresh out. :-)

--There's an apparent correlation between writing horror reviews and being likely to have bad grammar. Which seems odd, though I recall the last horror novel I read, Wither, had similar problems.

--An awful lot of people have seen the same seven or eight movies and are very anxious to share this information.

-Is it too much to ask that a review contain some sort of plot synopsis? Even an amateur review? During my three-plus hours of review-reading yesterday I kept coming across reviews like "I expected this movie to suck but it really defied my expectations. The pacing was good and the effects were realistic. Definitely worth a rental." This is fine if the movie is called something specific like The Hillbilly Hand-Drill Massacre; less so when the film has a name like Evil.

It's A Small, Small...ville?

2008-04-25T09:37:00.004-05:00

I know the show would never be taken for Shakespeare, but I really hate reading the TWoP recaplets of Smallville this season and feeling, every time, as though I've dodged a bullet by not turning on my TV.

I had the advantage (if that's the word) of watching the first five seasons of this show in about three months' time, which tends to give one a definite perspective on how Smallville has declined in quality. This season, they've introduced an Illuminati-esque secret society. Here's my conspiracy theory:

A few years ago, a number of writers, network executives and producers decided to test the idea that all you really need for a show is ideas, not development. To get people hooked at first, of course, they made it about something recognizable: Superman. They wrote a few decent episodes to give it a nice fan base, and when they had enough test subjects in place, the experiment began:

--Endless embryonic attempts to develop Lana's character. As a word-nerd myself, I was always going to identify more strongly with Chloe, but I can think of many, many times they started to tell us something interesting about Lana and...just stopped. Take her sudden martial arts skills in season 2: laughable that after one session with Lex she can defeat an assailant, but they could have kept that up. They could have shown her taking a more active role (when not possessed) in that whole witch thing back in season 4. They could have, for the love of god, spent more than 5 minutes indicating what she wants to do with her life, since she hardly touches a pencil onscreen before deciding to major in art in college.

--Constantly going around on the whole man vs. (S)superman thing with Clark. We get it; he's afraid of becoming a Kryptonian overlord on earth. But I'm pretty sure that would have made season 1 Clark more determined to use his powers in his own way, while current Clark is just hanging around on the farm till trouble knocks on his door (Wait, what am I saying? NO ONE on this show knocks on doors!).

--Lex not really being evil. Onscreen, we see him being incompetent occasionally, or misguided (he was making those supersoldiers because he was afraid of an alien invasion, a fear not really all that unfounded since, you know, he saw aliens invade). But until recently, very little true evil has come out of Lex. The show has managed the interesting feat of making BAD THINGS LEX EFFING LUTHOR DOES seem vaguely out of character. Yeesh.

I could go on; many people do, more eloquently, on various forums. But the fact that I feel a little guilty about not watching is proof enough that the vast conspiracy has worked; that you can feed people a string of neat ideas in place of a plot and still keep them tuning in.

A Shining Example

2008-04-11T07:41:00.004-05:00

So I finally saw The Shining, and it was pretty good. But rather than a review as such, I thought I'd bring you this quiz:

"People In This Movie Are Not Like You and Me" Quiz

1. You are a man who is stranded in an abandoned hotel with your family. You think you might be going nuts. You...

a) Radio for help and get the heck out of there.
b) Put more structure into your day so your duties take your mind off things.
c) Go for another drink at that nice bar full of evil spirits. After all, you have a tab...

2. You are a woman with a psychotic husband and a possessed child. How do you spend your evening?

a) Night classes. What, are you kidding? The minute my kid started to refer to himself in the third person, I made the cops take us away in a helicopter. I've been rebuilding my life for three weeks now.
b) Practicing self-defense in the kitchen of the hotel where I'm trapped. That guy tries one more thing, I'm going to go all Buffy the Jackass Slayer on him.
c) Taking a nice nap. The possessed kid won't mess with that knife I laid down beside me--he can't even work out that R_E_D_R_U_M is "murder" spelled backwards!

3. You are a nice chef who's a little worried about that family trapped in the snow across country. What do you do?

a) Call the cops a few times, maybe make enough of a stink to get someone to check.
b) Offer my friend back in Colorado $500 to hop in his snow vehicle and make sure the family is okay.
c) Stay in my room full of naked-lady prints and drink. A lot.
d) Spend countless hours and dollars to get back west, because even though I'm receiving psychic messages and know for sure there are evil spirits there, hey! what could go wrong?

4. You are a horrifically decayed ghost who can pose as a beautiful young woman. You...

a) Work on getting the heck out of room 237 so you can become the world's first supermodel!
b) Enjoy the fact that you may be disembodied, but still get to take a nice, long bath.
c) Mack on a guy who looks like Jack Nicholson.
d) Go tell everybody in the bar full of evil spirits how you used your power to scare the piss out of that asshat caretaker who looks like Jack Nicholson.

Good Questions All!

2008-02-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

Check out today's Get Fuzzy strip.

Apparently, It's Better to Be British

2008-02-25T09:19:00.003-05:00

Case studies:

Tilda Swinton:
--Ethereally beautiful

--Best thing in several movies (that sound you hear is the nodding of everyone who saw Constantine in the theater)

--JUST WON AN OSCAR, for Pete's sake

--appears to have one of those unorthodox living arrangements that puts me in mind of old British mysteries in which, after the murder, you find out the cast have all been quietly doing "scandalous" things for decades

--got paid to roll around naked with Clancy Brown in Female Perversions

Helena Bonham Carter:
--Also ethereally beautiful

--Got paid to see Julian Sands in the buff when quite a young girl in Room With a View

--Canoodled with Kenneth Branagh when that meant a lot more than it might today

--Married, for the love of god, TIM BURTON, who is made of awesome (and possibly spiders)

--Can apparently have a baby and turn up looking fantastic mere weeks later

--Is supposed to have received four pairs of clunky black boots as a present from her awesome husband after having said miraculous baby, which has to be the cherry on top of the She's Living My Dream sundae.

I think the results speak for themselves.

Wulfbane, In Listy Form

2007-12-07T20:27:00.000-05:00

See if this sounds right...

THE CAST OF BEOWULF/CHARACTER LOOKS LIKE...

Robin Wright Penn/Robin Wright Penn
Angelina Jolie/Angelina Jolie, with a tentacle
Anthony Hopkins/Anthony Hopkins, chubbier
John Malkovich/John Malkovich, brunette
Ray Winstone (Beowulf)/Sean Bean with exciting scars and stubble

Think there's a problem here.

It's one of a few for Beowulf, but since my expectations were low, I went in looking for a movie in which:

• People talked some Anglo-Saxon. (Check. I actually do find that exciting. I am such a nerd.)

• Ray Winstone got angry enough to sound like Will Scarlet in Robin of Sherwood again. (Check.)

•There would be a kick-ass dragon. (Check.)

• And, perhaps most importantly, all eyeball violence would be sufficiently telegraphed for my viewing avoidance. (Nearly check--there's a sea-monster sequence that would do a Bugs Bunny cartoon proud, since that's the only other time I've seen people get eaten and then turn up behind a monster's eyeball.)

The movie was a lot of fun, without sacrificing the things I personally like best about Anglo-Saxon poetry, namely the pervading sense of cold and doom and the desperate grasp for immortality through fame. The thought that such people, scrounging for their very survival in the grip of a landscape they didn't fully understand and the compounding factor of a miniature ice age, set such great value on story that we now have Beowulf to screw around with in the first place fills me with admiration. That this is somehow turned into a story about karma whose moral is, basically, "everyone wants to sleep with Angelina Jolie whether or not they know she is a demon" does shallow it up a bit, but I left the theater a lot less indignant than I thought I'd be.

This Explains The Lack of Vampires...

2007-12-06T12:38:00.000-05:00

I saw a link to this test on a friend's Livejournal, and now kind of wish I hadn't:

Your Score: Garlic

You scored 25% intoxication, 75% hotness, 75% complexity, and 50% craziness!

You are Garlic!

No offence, but you stink. Pretty much everyone loves you, though. You're smart and pretty hot and you fit in with about any culture. You're a total cut-up; in fact, the more cut-up you get, the hotter you become. But be careful, when you get embarrassed, you turn really sweet.

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Come on, Now.

2007-12-04T08:07:00.002-05:00

At least MY predictions below didn't involve a Popeye-based sight gag. And something nice did happen to Hiro; he turned out to be even cooler when he's a sadistic bastard!

Cynical Heroes Predictions

2007-11-28T17:52:00.000-05:00

I'm not mad, exactly, and yes, I have heard of the dreaded "Sophomore Slump," having been through the one that helped kill off Carnivàle ("Now don't forget, you DID have that summer when you went insane and raped a Gypsy! That we've never so much as hinted at. Until now. Because that builds suspense!" But I digress. The topic is network TV bitterness). I am, however, giving up on this show becoming really good this season, and offer the following ideas:

• Sylar, after more road tripping with Maya, realizes the thrill of pointless personal drama beats anything he ever felt while eating(?) brains. He dumps her and gets his own talk show. When he receives word of any particularly talented yet little-known prospective guests, however, he still eats their brains.

• Maya finally reaches the vaunted Dr. Suresh, only to find that it's not the one who actually understood anything, but Mohinder. Mo's innate dullness proves an effective damper for Maya's eyes of evil, and they fall in love and have an adorably cute mutant child. Potential spinoff: wacky comedy where Mohinder and Family travel from place to place, allowing hijinks to ensue before the kid gets upset and kills her preschool class. call it "Honey, I Slew the Kids."

• After coming back from the dead, Bennet decides he actually enjoyed the moment of impact. Till he can reunite with his family, he steals a store of serum derived from Claire's blood and becomes a vigilante who fights crime by diverting evildoers into shooting him in the eye. Win-win, baby!

• Elle realizes that her name is a bad pun (I mean, electric Elle? Really?) She kills a lot of people, then finds God and becomes a novice at an order called Sisters of Perpetual Light.

• Niki manifests a well-balanced personality that wants to go back to school. She and Micah end up in graduate school at the same time, i.e. about three years from now.

• Parkman influences enough dreams to be inexplicably voted People's Sexiest Man Alive, despite the fact that he's not a celebrity. He seamlessly transitions from real police work to cop movies. The directors say it's like he can read their minds or something.

• Something nice happens to Hiro that isn't a doomed relationship or checking back in with Ando. He gets a puppy. Saves the dodo from extinction. Has a non-doomed relationship with a proofreader who makes cynical blog predictions. Whatever!

Out of My Skull

2007-10-30T13:06:00.000-05:00

The funniest comics thing I've seen for Halloween so far, here and here.

Horror By The Book

2007-10-29T11:45:00.000-05:00

While I try to figure out whether this is the Halloween I stop being the only person on earth who hasn't seen The Shining, I now share with you a few of my reading choices for the season:

The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James: I was debating putting E.F. Benson on the list instead, but for creepiness James just edges out Benson (exception: if you find giant bloodsucking elemental slugs the scariest thing ever, disregard this advice and go straight for the E.F.) James's antiquarians are forever finding eerie mysteries in the mundane activities of life-- buying books, traveling, doing a spot of research, visiting friends, or just finding stuff lying on the ground. And his writing eloquently evokes an atmosphere of dark-paneled old houses that makes these stories perfect for autumn evenings.

Museum of Terror, Volume 3 by Junji Ito: I've talked about this gentleman before in my review of Tomie, and the first two Museum of Terror anthologies collect the Tomie stories. This third book, however, is a collection of random spook stories from a superior imagination, and the last one in particular, set during World War II, gave me the sort of shivers Twilight Zone used to when I was a kid.

Waking the Moon and Black Light
by Elizabeth Hand: This pair of novels defies categorization -- horror, religious fiction, high urban fantasy -- and tells the story of the Goddess and her consort manifesting in the world we know. In both cases a young heroine must cope withe the manifestation and decide whether to align herself with the deity(ies) or with the old boys' network of scholar-sorcerers known as the Benandanti.
Hand's prose is stunning, and the books are filled with that rare commodity: a long descriptive passage that doesn't derail the action. Black Light falters at the end, but both are worth checking out for an exploration of the space where the divine and the monstrous commingle.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to Be Read With the Lights On: Out of print, obviously, this anthology is available at Half.com. I first read this book when I was about eight years old, and even remember somehow conning my teacher into letting my bring it to my hardcore Baptist school as a small child. It's as disturbing now as it was then: a couple find an arm on a lonely Mexican road. A voodoo doll carries a monkey's-paw-like curse. An explorer finds out the faerie folk are real...with a twist. Great stuff.

Spooky Tales: I own the only copy I've ever seen, but this anthology of ghost stories for children has a lot going for it, including stories that run the gamut from scary to funny, tales from some classic authors of the genre, and neat little illustrations, one of which has freaked me out since I was 12.

Happy Reading!

Phthulhu!

2007-09-06T09:30:00.000-05:00

The Season of Culturally Approved Bat Décor approaches, and truth be told, I am falling a little behind. Not wanting to get my decorations shredded by an inquisitive kitten, I am now six days late in setting up the Halloween stuff at my house.

More alarming is that I seem to be tiring of Lovecraft. I didn't even know that could happen: I figured one either loved him or hated him at first sight. And from the moment I read "The Festival" in an anthology at 16, I was hooked, even if the man never met an adjective he didn't like.

Admittedly, my relationship with Lovecraft is like my relationship with The X-Files: I don't give a damn about space aliens. Evil cannibalistic families? All good. Unspeakable beings from beyond the stars? No, thanks, I gave at the office.

And perhaps this is why I failed to get into The Dark Goodbye, which seemed like such a sure thing: film noir and Elder Gods were so much fun together in a movie like Cast A Deadly Spell-- why not in manga?

Sadly, the manga failed to move me. And after going over all the possible reasons -- not wild about the art, plot devolves into a bunch of objectionable characters scrabbling for a power object, scenes loosely tied together at best -- I still think maybe I've lost patience with Cthulhu and his merry band. I kind of hope not. That would be unspeakable. Ineffable. Possibly even "foetid."

Only the News Part Is Scary

2007-08-16T09:37:00.000-05:00

Today I stumbled across this celebrity-news story:

Ben Kingsley and Mary-Kate Olsen will kiss in an upcoming movie.

Immediately I wanted to yell, "Watson? Make a note of that!" Not, as you might think, because the very idea had sent me barking mad, but because it gives me a chance to talk about one of my favorite comedic movies, Without A Clue.

Without A Clue presents a twist on one of my favorite literary subjects, Sherlock Holmes. In this version, Watson (played by Kingsley) is a straitlaced doctor whose deductive faculties make him a consummate crime-solver. In fear of notoriety, however, he attributes his success to a fictional Sherlock Holmes, and is forced to hire a drunken actor (Michael Caine) to portray him when Holmes's fame spreads. When an apparently routine robbery leads to a plot of national importance, it's Watson versus Moriarty, with "Holmes" as the public face of the thing: hence "Watson? Make a note of that!" among many, many other wonderful lines.

Sure, it's the buddy formula, but a version which toys gleefully with Sherlockian convention as Caine's character swills, flirts, and generally proves to be as dumb as a stump. The casting is quite good, too, with not only Kingsley and Caine but supporting actors Jeffrey Jones, Peter Cook, and Lysette Anthony. One of those rare comedies that remains funny all the way through, Without A Clue, like its Watson, deserved far more fame than it has.

Not Exactly Shocking...

2007-08-10T13:26:00.000-05:00

Take the Quiz here!

Dracula's Godchild Watches Dracula's Child

2007-07-19T10:03:00.000-05:00

I finally finished watching Dracula 2000. I started last year at the urging of one of my favorite people, who still speaks to me despite the following transcript of my initial 20 minutes of viewing:

"Huh. Interesting..."

"Is that Christopher Plummer?"

"Oh, dear. They're going to regret that."

"A LEECH! ON AN EYE!! GOD-D#@! IT! AN EYE! WITH A LEECH ON IT!! JESUS $#@!!* CHRIST!!! AAAAH! UUUUUUGH!!"

"*whimper* *squeak*"

"...is it... gone now?"

I assume I missed this movie until now because I naturally assumed its existence. Of COURSE they made a movie where Dracula turns up in New Orleans (...and has a kid...through involuntary blood transfusion...and eats Jeri Ryan... Fine. Not that last part). And notwithstanding Gerard Butler's ironclad pulchritude, the movie has a lot of flaws. It does, however, have just enough wit to be interesting. Favorite moments include:

• The opening heist, before the "leech! on an EYE!" part;
• The big reveal of Dracula's true identity, goofy as it was;
• The wide-eyed innocent at the heart of the whole story working at Virgin Records, because if you're making a goofy vampire movie, why leave any pun unturned?
• A sex scene during which the laws of gravity are actually suspended;
• Van Helsing injecting Dracula's blood to stay vital; shades of Victorian monkey-gland therapy!

Highly entertaining, once you pry your hands off your EYES!!! (I mean, eyes).

Quick Note

2007-07-05T06:46:00.001-05:00

Usually when I pass a movie theater sign especially crowded with titles, I read them as meant and move on. But two movies on one line this morning got me wondering what kind of movie Knocked Up Pirates 3 would be:

Jack {staggering]: 'M pregnant. Tha's interesting.

Mr. Cotton's Parrot: Awk! I hate morning sickness!

Davy Jones: Me tentacles are bloated, and I have a cravin' for Kraken calamari!

Will Turner: Elizabeth? What the devil did you do to me?!

...while Barbossa and Monkey Jack just laugh and laugh.

Monk'd!

2007-06-28T11:44:00.000-05:00

One of my odder fetishes as a longtime lover of books and reading is tiny books: few things make me happier than finding affordable purse-size hardcovers, even though I never carry a purse and thus tote tiny books just like their compatriots of normal size. Discovering a row of little blue Konemann Classics editions of English novels fills me with quiet joy, which is more than I can say for some of their selections (Charles Dickens, I'd be looking at you, but a) you are deceased and b) if you weren't, you'd write an entire chapter about me looking at you).

On my last big binge at a bookstore, along with two obscure horror mangas and a humor book called Haiku U, I bought both a Konemann Classics edition of Dracula and a small, sensationally covered and blurbed Oxford edition of Matthew Lewis's The Monk, the 1796 Gothic novel I didn't get to read in college because we were assigned Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Udolpho, while longer and plagued by a heroine who went unconscious more often than Nancy Drew, assisted me in putting into words a literary position I'd actually held my entire life:

I hate Explained Gothic.

Sure, it's a more realistic subgenre of creepy fiction. But the writer of Explained Gothic, now or then, is no better than a magician who pulls a rabbit from a hat and then shows people the hidden bunny-cage. Saying "Oh, but it was really the nephew all along, merely PRETENDING to be Aunt Sally's ghost in order to drive down property values and snag the manor for himself" is all very well for the novelist, who gets both the benefit of hooking his/her audience on spooks and the smug superiority that comes with shining the light of knowledge into dark places at the end of the story. Readers, on the other hand, feel only faint disappointment. In short, if you put Explained Gothic in front of me, there'd better be someone saying "Jinkies, Scoob!" in due time.

I am pleased to report that, true to its advertising, The Monk is gloriously unexplained, not infrequently wallowy Gothic. In a welter of incest, murder, intrigue, convent goings-on, mistaken identities, hauntings, pacts with the Devil and potions that simulate death, the only thing Lewis seems to have left out is the nun-raping. The plot in its simplest possible terms is this: Lorenzo and Raymond are friends. Raymond loves Lorenzo's sister, Agnes, but she has disappeared into a nunnery after a series of mixups, and soon disappears altogether. Lorenzo loves newcomer Antonia; unfortunately, so does the titular monk, Ambrosio, who after being seduced by a sorceress is in the kind of slippery-slope moral decline much beloved by writers of After-School Specials, but with more cassocks and corpses. From all this springs a situation so bizarre that our heroes, who otherwise spout a kind of proto-Jonathan-Harkerish rationalism, end up relying on the Spanish Inquisition to sort things out-- possibly the last time in history the Inquisition was portrayed as a righter of actual wrongs.

This last is actually where my objection to the book lies: the tension between characters who feel themselves to be rational creatures and a world where a few blocks away the devil is handing someone a pen and a contract has been so well explored in later works (like, well, Dracula) that it comes as something of a shock to see Lewis abandon it for more grottoes and human suffering. The book does seem to focus on mood over substance, but the mood is effective, even two hundred-odd years later.

Sacrificial Lamb Sushi

2007-06-14T12:58:00.000-05:00

With iMDB and a host of review sites online to assist me, it's rare that I rent a movie without first doing research. It was only after grabbing Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, however, that I looked at the review on Snowblood Apple and wondered whether it was possible for a straight woman to be seduced by a picture of two cute schoolgirls standing in a pentagram.

I'd picked up a slasher film? (Admittedly, a supernatural one, but still.) Moi? The Mid-Atlantic Eye-Covering Champion?

I needn't have worried. Though the protagonist doesn't get to kick quite as much ass as the DVD's cover suggests, Eko Eko Azarak is a very enjoyable movie about black magic. Oddly, it's black magic Western-Style, with robes and black candles and pentagrams: a Satan worshipper takes possession of a school with thirteen people still inside, ready to use the hapless students as sacrifices that will raise Lucifer and grant infinite power. Lucky for those of us who are anti-Satan, schoolgirl witch Misa Kuroi is on the case, trying to track down the evil force before her schoolmates go the way of all flesh--in this case, flying, bloody and painful.

Asian countries seem to do an excellent job exploring the horror that is secondary school, and this is what lifts the movie above the level of your standard and-then-there-were-none scary movie. The characters are by no means all sympathetic, but they are well-developed: one girl wonders, as the students are trapped in the building, how she'll ever get home to make dinner for her father (hint: not by getting decapitated like that), another wants to know if the school's sports team is winning their match, and the dialogue is otherwise full of rivalries, love interests and classroom politics that beautifully convey the idea that these are real teenagers. An aura of doom hangs over Misa Kuroi, who like Junji Ito's Tomie appears to be a supernatural entity AND a perennial student, but the action nicely balances the existential sadness. The Snowblood Apple site compares this movie to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, and the two do have a lot of virtues in common.

If you're less squeamish than I am (and you probably are), give Eko Eko Azarak a try. It's my new favorite slasher movie.

Getting Some Heir

2007-06-13T09:49:00.000-05:00

The Heirloom is an odd little horror movie from Taiwan, and one that has taken me a while to write about as I try to explore my relationship to spooky movies in general. I have this problem, you see, with taking a movie to task for predictability when the very reason I rented it was that I saw the cover and immediately knew someone, maybe more than one someone, would be wiped out by a vengeful spirit probably emanating from a house or large article of furniture.

And it was so. So what the heck do I have to complain about?

The plot is simple, its broad outline familiar even if the details are not:

Tragedy takes place in a creaky old house.
In this case, an entire family is found hanging, all the same distance above the ground.

Unknowing young person inherits and uses creaky house as the jumping-off point for a new life.
That would be James and his dancer fiancee, Yo. The twist here, if any, is that it's she who has the fear of commitment. Since James turns out to be the kind of guy who ignores a MURDERING SPIRIT in favor of working on his architectural blueprints, who can blame her?

Soon, spooky manifestations begin.
These are, I believe, one of the movie's weak points, as people who visit the house become ensnared by it, suffering blackouts after which they find themselves transported back to its eerie precincts. This makes for the movie's goriest scene, as a policeman manacles himself to his bed in order to escape the phenomenon. He really shouldn't have done that.

An explanation is discovered.
This is usually my favorite part of the movie. Alas, The Heirloom loses much of its power in this respect by featuring a title-card prologue explaining about fetus ghosts. (You heard me.) In case you somehow missed that part, Yo does finally track down an elderly relative of James's who turns out to be The Old Lady Who Knows All About The Family's Secret. Except the fetus ghosts are not that secret. Because we read about them before the action started. Oh, well.

A surviving character, quite often a woman, attempts to stop the vile manifestations.
Nothing surprising here except a sort of Buddhist exorcism angle. Anyone who misses Carnivåle's Fetus In A Jar will, like me, get a small kick out of this part.

The remaining characters will believe this worked....UNTIL--!
Remember the good old days when you could actually get rid of a supernatural force that wasn't named Freddy or Jason? Those days aren't back in The Heirloom, either.

I won't spoil the rest of the ending, and the movie does have a lot of virtues: good performances, a fascinating if poorly deployed back story, gorgeous set pieces and at least one very disturbing death scene. Ironically, however, the movie that starts with a family hanging doesn't hang together well itself.

Movie Weekend Part 1: Shrek to the Max

2007-05-21T09:03:00.000-05:00

"But Gloomie!" you (maybe even both of you) are saying, "Shrek the Third isn't a spooky horror film the likes of which fills you with satisfaction and/or a need to avoid mirrors for a while, just in case!"

If this is indeed what you're saying, you've never been a mild claustrophobic in a dark, crowded room with lots of children-- a circumstance which ties into one of the film's main plots, as the titular ogre is dragged reluctantly into fatherhood. Along the way he'll take on succession crises, a search for king-to-be Arthur to prevent said crises, and another attack from the image-obsessed Prince Charming, now reduced to performing in dinner theatre.

Alas, Shrek the Third is the second "part III" film this season to lack the power of its predecessors. (The third Pirates installment will presumably complete the set.) While the story is pleasant enough and it's always nice to see my favorite fairy-tale character get screen time, by now the hero and his antisocial ways are well-known to audiences, and even the villain recurs from Shrek 2. Some examples of the entertaining inversions of various stories do appear in Shrek the Third-- Snow White using tiny woodland creatures to kick butt, Merlin the Wizard as a burnt-out former teacher who appears to wear Birkenstocks-- but the franchise is gently tiring out, its subversions as expected as Bugs Bunny's cross-dressing.

In sum, cute? Absolutely. Puss-in-Boots? Not enough. Worth braving the mobs of opening weekend? Phooey.

My Spidey Sense Is Tingling, And I'm Going To Hell For It

2007-05-08T11:35:00.000-05:00

The disclaimer first: despite fears that it would be too frenetic (and it was, a bit), I quite enjoyed Spider-Man 3: it had laughs, realistic relationship difficulties, Bryce Dallas Howard looking quite lovely, amazing effects, and genuine conflicts both internal and external. It lacked the emotional resonance of the second movie or the fan familiarity of the first, but it made a respectable showing.

Except for two little things (well, more than two, but we'll leave out the selectively maiming goblin grenades and yet another trip down "Surely Spidey Cannot Do Two Things At Once!" Lane):

1. Is there any way to arrest the Osborn familly butler as an accessory?

With his remark about seeing all kinds of things in "this house," Harry's manservant (heh) opens new and unwholesome avenues for speculation. What exactly has he been keeping quiet about for two-and-a-half films? People drinking too much? Trying on masks? Talking to oil paintings? Carrying big boxes marked "Acme Goblin Grenades"? Isn't this what Law & Order calls "depraved indifference to human life"?

Worse, the only way to explain his sudden willingness to spill the beans on Harry's father is a secret crush on MJ, since not until she's in trouble does he go into the pep talk business.

2. The Moral Spider

Look. I'm familiar with the broad conventions of comic book writing, particularly old-school comics, as regards being a good guy: Good guys should be good. All the time. No matter what. No one wants to see Superman heat-vision a puppy because he didn't get laid last night, etc. These characters, Spidey included, are frequently held to A Higher Standard. (You might even say Spidey especially, since three seconds of teenage assholishness contributed to the death of Uncle Ben.)

But c'mon, the karmic burden was surely running a little high this time? Peter Parker, emboldened by the black suit, exposes Eddie Brock for a fraud. He didn't do it nicely, but he didn't, oh, SUE him the way most people would in a clear case of copyright infringement. Yet he makes a deadly enemy, and we have Mary Jane literally dangling in the breeze once more.

The world of Spider-Man is a world where somehow it is more respectful to lash someone to a flagpole with your arm secretions than to tell him to f*** off, an After-School Special kind of place where people who sneak a wine cooler end up as pregnant runaway meth addicts.

Surely there's a better definition of "great responsibility" than "be nice or else"?

Because Snow in April in the South is WRONG...

2007-04-16T09:20:00.001-05:00

In Defense of Malls

2007-04-13T10:16:00.000-05:00

I've been contemplating a shopping road trip this weekend, even going so far as to compare driving directions on Google to figure out where I can find the most Stuff We Don't Have Here in the quickest time. With Villa Grammatica in the throes of spring cleaning and my good self in ned of a small makeover (fewer black shirts? Blashemy!), I've been thinking a lot about shopping malls and why people like them.

There are the obvious reasons, of course: one-stop shopping, convenient setups, shiny colors, and that hunt-for-the-holy-grail feeling that around this corner, you will find a store full of things that DON'T have fatal flaws. The chance to run errands in a controlled climate can also be a powerful influence, particularly in the kind of weather the Southeast has suffered recently. But it took a recent trip to the comic book store for me to realize that a greater psychological factor may be at work here.

Malls are non-threatening.

Admittedly comic stores tend to be extreme examples of this phenomenon, but the fact is, a stand-alone store commands a different social dynamic. There will be regulars. There is little room to hide, if you're not a people person. There is little chance that you can pass yourself off as exactly "just looking," next to no chance that you wandered in by accident, and therefore an uncomfortable feeling of accountability when you leave without buying anything. Should you later become a regular, of course, all these things can turn into positives: personal service, a feeling of belonging to an exclusive society, etc.

So what malls do, and rarely get positive credit for, is function much the way a table of hors d'oeuvres or a wine tasting does: they give people a chance to look at, touch, and try new things without feeling too out of place. If you find that expensive clothing store daunting, you can take a quick turnaround and leave with a "Thanks," pretending all the while you were headed for Old Navy. The courage it takes to stop at a hole-in-the-wall store and pretend you don't stick out like the New Lawman In Town on an old western just isn't necessary, and in many ways that can be a relief.

The Shopping Mall Paradox: Malls are awful because they're impersonal. Malls are fantastic because they're just impersonal enough.

A Non-Gilded Cage

2007-03-28T11:18:00.000-05:00

I finally saw Ghost Rider last weekend, after spending the last four weekends having the following internal dialogue:

Me: This looks lame.

Optimist Me: But Ghost Rider! Comic book movie! Flaming skull! DEMONS!!

Me: Ahem. Nicolas Cage.

Optimist Me, more quietly: Oh. Yeah.

And I realized, before I'd even reached the theater's parking lot, that a self-aggrandizing parody would be a lot more fun than a review, so I present the following script in extended-trailer form:

Ghost 'Reader

Kate Booker was a promising young proofreader for a printing company.
[We show a random suit going by Kate's desk with a client, saying "She's one of the best." Kate, in slightly gothic attire, smiles and gets a pat on the shoulder from her mentor, Rose.]

But when her mentor is in trouble...
[Kate reads letter pulled from trash: "Rose has glaucoma? And they spelled it wrong!"]

...she makes a deal she'll regret.
[Kate, at a foggy crossroads, looks over a contract with Satan. Naturally, she's checking it for grammar. Later, at the office, someone tells Kate that Rose suffered an eye injury during rough sex; her mentor's proofreading career is over, and Kate is promised to the devil. Drat.]

Bound to the forces of darkness, she must now ride the night.
[Cut to a glimpse of Satan--played by Gabriel Byrne, whose Prince of Darkness was the one bright spot in that Schwarzenegger movie.

Satan: With your...assistance, there will be less bad spellers.
Kate: You mean FEWER bad spellers.
Satan: Get in the frickin' car already.

Kate whistles, and from the shadows comes a Scion xA to stand at her side. It makes cute puppylike noises. Because it really would.]

Soon, she will face her greatest enemy...
Cue the entrance of Babel, a demon bent on causing chaos in language. He is played by Cillian Murphy, who creeped me out to no end in Batman Begins. Naturally, he is all black-duster-coated swaggering badness.]

...in a battle she can't afford to lose. For all that stands between chaos and the world we know is--
[Now, the big action montage: The xA zooms about in a car chase: Kate, in thigh-high boots, kicks some butt using a dictionary on the end of a leather strap: books fly from their shelves in a great library. Satan smirks! Babel sneers! Kate leaps across some trestle tables! The sky turns black from eeeeeeevil!!!]

--the Ghost "Reader.
[Kate, from the beginning of the movie, gives a sunny smile and says, "My red pen is all-powerful." AND go to black!]

Finally, I Forgive Him For Igby Goes Down

2007-03-15T21:59:00.000-05:00

Attention citizens!

You may want to check an ocean near you to see whether it's turned to blood: Jeff Goldblum has a new TV show, and it doesn't stink.

I really thought Raines would be an exercise in pain. Surely the dark marriage of Goldblum's somewhat hyper mannerisms and yet another "eccentric detective" premise would yield nothing but pure, unsifted organic fertilizer. Instead Goldblum plays his detective, who hallucinates dead people in order to help him solve crimes, with just the right amount of quirk.

There's been a prevailing trend lately in shows that focus on the thught processes of the detectives as much as the whodunit plot, from Law & Order: Criminal Intent to the psychologically damaged Adrian Monk to John Laroquette's McBride, who visualizes himself as a bystander in flashbacks when interviewing witnesses. The conceit of Raines is more interactive: as the character learns more about the murder victim he's investigating, the victims themselves change. It's a development that works in the show's favor, getting the audience into Raines's head in a hurry and showing that he has layers, not just tics, as well as raising the material above the "brilliant cop with a sad past" setup.

Whether I'd add a Raines action figure to my Ian Malcolm and David Levinson collection remains to be seen.

Regeneration X

2007-02-19T20:09:00.000-05:00

It's illustrative of the East-West cultural divide. Take the following elements and mix freely: a predatory antagonist, regenerative powers, pursuit of a very skinny victim.

In the US, you get a Roadrunner cartoon: in Japan, Junji Ito's Tomie.

Tsukiko, a student and budding photographer, has a shaky family situation, an annoying boyfriend, and a case of mild amnesia: she's seeing a hypnotherapist to deal with what she's been told is an auto accident in her past. Really, however, her family has pulled a V.C. Andrews move, trying to alter Tsukiko's memory so that she'll forget the horrific murder that took place in her bedroom.

The murder itself proves a bit of a moot point, however, since the victim, a preternaturally beautiful demon named Tomie, is being regrown from her severed head by an eyepatched devotee. This itself is an interesting progression, as Tomie goes from "living" in a trash bag, to a basket, to having a childlike body, to finally being mature enough to take revenge on those who beheaded her--former "best friend" Tsukiko included.

Tomie is the first movie in a big franchise; the ultimate seductress has appeared in as many horror flicks as Michael Myers. Yet she's a strangely passive demon, relying on the men who inevitably fall in love with her to do her dirty work. At the same time, however, she is killed over and over (the detective on the case, who provides the male eye candy in the film, tells us that Tomie has been listed as a murder victim in cases dating back over 130 years) and always returns, always eighteen and beautiful and deadly.

I expected the more science-fictiony elements of the movie to give me pause, but found I quite enjoyed Tomie. The DVD special features were also interesting, including a "making of" documentary and trailers for sveral of the Tomie movies.

I Am(Done With!)Charlotte Simmons

2007-02-15T09:50:00.000-05:00

The first Tom Wolfe book I ever read was Bonfire of the Vanities when I was about sixteen. The excerpt in one of my aunt's fashion magazines made it seem glitzy and soap-operatic, but there was something about the book that made me hate it (something besides Wolfe recasting every sentence a Southern character spoke into phonetic dialect right after its written SAE counterpart, a device that affected me like fingernails down a windowpane). It went directly into the garbage the instant I finished it.

You may wonder how, after this, I got talked into reading I Am Charlotte Simmons. Me too. However, years of literary analysis have at least led me to some understanding of why I still don't like Tom Wolfe's books.

The book was recommended to me as being a fairly truthful depiction of college life, but it wasn't depicting anything like my college life, in which it was relatively easy to find, even at a private college, other scholarship kids from similar backgrounds to spend time with. Apart from a few of the more political subplots, I Am Charlotte Simmons too often reads like the traditional warning to high-school girls from those just returned from college about the evils of drinking, sex, and fraternity parties. The middle of the book strongly resembles Tess of the D'Urbervilles, if Tess and Alec had both been at the same school and Angel Clare had been consumed by ambition instead of purity.

However, it's the characters who distance me from Wolfe's books: it's statistically improbable that so many people with so little sense of humor about themselves could gather in one place. When the author is more of a narrator and less an observer, this gap can be overcome: Patrick Hamilton's The Charmer is the best example, a mean and hilarious study of nasty and self-important characters. But there's no one, in the book or the narration, to offer the idea that any of these characters has the sense of the ridiculous about themselves that most people have in some small measure. They simmer with anger, bubble with scheming, burn with lust and ache with humiliation, but never seem to really laugh. Wolfe is incisive and vivid in his prose, but Charlotte Simmons and those around her have the quality of socially overconscious androids.

I Held Out As Long As I Could...

2007-01-26T11:26:00.000-05:00

...but finally broke down and saw the Underworld sequel. This after swearing I'd only see it if it were titled Underworld: Kraven Reads Poetry For Two Hours In The Nude, an innovation that would have greatly improved things.

For those of you who have forgotten (involuntarily or through dint of concentrated acts of mental blockage), the first Underworld movie took us to a monochromatic world in which werewolves and vampires were engaged in a longterm war against one another: the movie was carefully stuctured around shoot-'em-up action sequences and scientific warfare in order to remove the supernatual elements (or in layman's terms, the "fun") from the idea of night denizens. This it did, but the movie also delivered in terms of themes of family loyalty, slick visuals, loud music, and pale people in tight black pants.

The sequel, sadly, does less well in all of these areas, as batwinged vampire Marcus Corvinus--the wings being my favorite part of the film, though watching his enemies get impaled on them got old fast--searches for his long-lost Lycan brother William. Yes, you read that right: William the Werewolf. The key to finding him lies, literally and figuratively, with Beckinsale's character, former Death Dealer Selene, who finally consummates her relationship with the last of the Corvinus line, hybrid were-pire Michael. (And a good thing, too, since one can only assume the hybrid vampire gets more miles to the pint. But I digress.)

On their way to kill everybody else, this intrepid duo meet up with the father of it all, Alexander Corvinus (Derek Jacobi! I know!), an immortal man who is neither a night creature nor likely to say "There can be only one!" and is thus of less interest than you might imagine.

The feminist in me would love to endorse Underworld: Evolution, if only for the fact that Beckinsale kicks all kinds of butt while her character's love interest mostly runs around shirtless, but I just can't. Without the uniform slick spectacle of its predecessor, this movie suffers. So, for that matter, does the definition of the word "evolution."

Winter Holiday Report: by Batley

2006-12-22T20:03:00.000-05:00

Greetings! Once again I was swept away for a road trip with Her Majestic....er, Majesty, Gloom Raider. She says this'll be my first Christmas and I ought to enjoy it...at least, she says that when she's not muttering about the Scion xA. (Can anyone tell me what a "little red hatchback" is? Is it like a little brown bat?)

So now we're visiting Gloomie's parents, after a stop at Crate & Barrel: I've always wanted to hang upside down in a barrel--preferably of nice red wine--but apparently we were just there for wrapping paper and stuff. The family farm is a fun place, though, even if they have already put me to work:

Feliz Navidad!,
Batley

Where Are The Gratuitous Nun-Raping Flashbacks of Yesteryear?

2006-12-18T13:42:00.000-05:00

It's been an odd holiday at Villa Grammatica. Family matters that are usually little more than exasperating have for some reason taken on a grandiose Ibsen-esque aura of gloom. My present-buying skills, usually limited only by my budget, this year suck like a fleet of Dysons. And I've been going car-shopping, which is nice because I can have a new car, and awful because that means going to car dealerships and handing someone who does not have my best interest at heart a large wad of money. The test-drive is tomorrow.

So when WolfSpider turned to me this weekend and said in speculative tones, "I see you have this movie called Lair of the White Worm?..." It was as if a momentary light of joy illuminated the whole godforsaken holiday season. There's nothing like a really wretched Ken Russell concoction to take your mind off your troubles!

Based ever-so-very loosely on a story by Bram Stoker, with a dash of folklore in the form of the Lambton Worm, the 1988 Lair is the story of a snake-god and his acolyte (Amanda Donohoe wearing not much) pitted against the forces of good, represented--I was going to say "Don't laugh"--by Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, and snake-charming music. As plot clearly isn't the film's strong suit, allow me to give the highlights in a sensational fashion I hope Mr. Russell would appreciate.

--Sexy archaeologists in wire-rimmed glasses! (Who apparently know both where to rent a mongoose in Northern England AND have the foresight to bring full Highland regalia and a set of bagpipes with him on a poorly-funded dig. Still, since he is played by Peter Capaldi, I forgive him.)

--Big skulls!

--Hallucinogenic venom! That induces...

--Nun-raping flashbacks!!

--A Boy Scout receiving a poisonous bite on the willy from a woman! (That he totally deserves, the little horndog!)

--Hugh Grant acting like he has deductive abilities!

--A dream sequence that would make Sigmund Freud put his own eyes out, Oedipus-like, with one of those cigars which is just a cigar!

--Virgins! Being tested with one of the 50 billion dildoes that seem to show up in this film!

--Actual "dun!" music every time the camera pans in on a vaguely snake-like object!...and there are A LOT of them. Even more than dildoes.

--Peter Capaldi producing the aforementioned mongoose from either 1)thin air or 2)the inside of his kilt! Youchie!

Which is, perversely, my attempt to point out that words cannot do the sheer bizarre, Freud-coated cheese factory that is Lair of the White Worm any justice. A classic, of its kind.

Oh, and "!".

Dork Break!

2006-12-08T11:23:00.000-05:00

Checking in briefly to point out this news story about the death of Jeane Kirkpatrick, an important figure in the politics of the 1980s who is nonetheless better known to me as Bill the Cat's ex-girlfriend.

I bet I am not alone in this, either.

So Underrated, It's Scary

2006-11-16T09:34:00.000-05:00

While I've recently taken a break from the movie-viewing couch (save for falling asleep on it, anyway), over Halloween I revisited an old favorite: Fright Night. The 1985 vampire flick with Chris Sarandon and Roddy McDowall not only holds up well, but makes one wonder why an excellent example of not one but two genres should be more or less forgotten--particularly since its horror-show-host-takes-on-real-monsters plot predates the trend in "meta" horror films.

The plot of the film is simple: sexually frustrated teenager Charlie (played by William Ragsdale) has a new neighbor. At first he enjoys peering across the alley with his binoculars, but the peeping turns deadly when it transpires that neighbor Jerry Dandridge (Sarandon) literally regards his hookers as midnight snacks. Charlie turns to the host of the local "Elvira"-type program ("Fright Night," of course) for help, and once aging actor Peter Vincent is made to really believe in vampires, the battle is on.

The movie is a near-perfect mating of the teenage comedies of the 80's (clueless parents, horny teenagers, goofy sidekicks and cafeteria hijinks) with the classic trappings of a vampire movie. All the staples of the classics are there: the creaky old house, the half-human henchman, the painting of a long-lost love who mysteriously looks just like Charlie's girlfriend. Dandridge himself is a vampire of the old school who casts no reflection, can turn into a wolf or bat, and even swoops down on one character with a modified trench-coat version of the billowing Dracula cape. Yet all of this is presented in a fairly low-key way, with none of the "See what I did there?" smugness you might expect.

And yes, Chris Sarandon is quite the dentally endowed hottie. Yet that's only one reason to check out a movie that should get credit for more than spawning a crappy sequel.

"Turkey" Is Right

2006-11-16T08:33:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long delay, my five or so readers: I've actually not been watching many movies, so posting material has been thin.

It still is.

However, with the approaching holiday week (that I just found out was approaching next week instead of the week after), and the totally miserable weather, it's time for another list of Good Stuff In A Crappy World:

Voltaire--every album I hear just gets better. Except Almost Human, and that was pretty good too.

Japanese food

Heroes, at least so far.

Finally buying a TV antenna (see above)

Morningstar Farms meatless buffalo wings

The fact that Books-A-Million's discount card is a lot cheaper than Barnes & Noble's

Half.com

Kawaii Not

Elizabeth Peters's Vicky Bliss Books

The Critic on DVD

The MacBook, especially the built-in webcam.

Tomato juice, particularly with vampire novels, because sometimes I am a walking cliché

The Perils of Anti-Liberal Arts Bias At All-Hallow's Time

2006-10-26T10:11:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite sites, Livescience, posted this story in which a physics professor purports to debunk the idea of vampires. Here's the argument:

"[Professor Costas] Efthimiou's debunking logic: On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on. "

I hope other connoisseurs of the supernatural are also hopping up and down with indignation right now over these points, among others.

1. The definition of vampire is kind of, well, liquid. At various times and to various people, the words can signify either your general undead fanged guy preying on humans; his more conscientious counterpart who haunts blook banks or butcher shops; psychic vampires who live on the metaphysical essence of their victims; or living people possessed or infected by an evil spirit, who may or may not take up the sanguinary lifestyle until death.

2. Not everyone bitten by a vampire becomes one. That's right: not in Eastern European folklore, not in Dracula, not in Anne Rice novels, not in the new wave of vamp romances. The method of transmission varies, as does how hard it is to contract vampirism (even willingly), but this point holds--in the fictional accounts, often FOR THE SAME REASONS Prof. Efthimiou offers. Which leads us to our last point...

3. Research: it's not just for science! The article is cute, but Efthimiou's claim that he wants to combat superstition would carry a lot more weight with me if he'd done any sort of research on what that superstition entails. How hard is it to find a folklore book at this time of year?

Quoth the Raven: "That Was Jack Nicholson?!?"

2006-10-13T08:02:00.000-05:00

My spook-movie enabler (let's call him "WolfSpider," shall we?) recently fulfilled the quest Batley was bitching about last week and tracked down Roger Corman's parody of, well, Roger Corman movies, The Raven. I expected silliness, but...wow.

Vincent Price plays Erasmus Craven, quite possibly one of the best character names ever: a retiring sort of sorcerer, Carven lives in his musty old manse with his daughter and mourns his dead second wife, Lenore. When a raven flaps through the window and Craven playfully addresses it, the bird begins, startlingly, to swear and ask for a drink. Soon Craven is turning the raven back into fellow sorcerer Bedlo (Peter Lorre!), and the two plan to descend on the castle of evil Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff), where Lorre swears he's seen Lenore. Craven's daughter and Bedlo's son (Jack Nicholson, though I sat through the entire film without noticing that) join them on this fool's errand, and the battle is on.

The battle is also wonderfully goofy, with Price and Karloff smugly mugging in their gothic finery in a way that would have done credit to a Fantasy Island sequence, and I mean that in a good way. While it raises disturbing questions about how much of the "unintentional" comedy in Corman's Poe adaptations really was unintentional, The Raven is a piece of charming nonsense that shows a director unafraid to poke fun at his own conventions.

(It also shows Vincent Price in tights, for which I am appropriately grateful.)

Zzzzzz...

2006-10-07T21:56:00.000-05:00

'Tis all over: Gloom Raider looked lovely:

And now I'm going to go hang on the ceiling for a bit. Goodnight, all!

Long Weekend Wedding Report: by Batley

2006-10-05T08:53:00.000-05:00

She was going to write a review of The Cell, but since she's busy maid-of-honoring, Gloom Raider asked if I could take over for a bit. I'm not sure why, since I just met her two days ago when she bought me and promptly stuffed me in her train luggage: perhaps she recognized a natural blogger in my personable smile and beady little eyes.

Anyhow, on with the show, or at least a few potpourri-like bits:

1) Nobody has Roger Corman's The Raven anywhere, and between us we've now looked in several states. Why? We're looking at combining this with the inability to get an MP3 of The Jazz Butcher's "Peter Lorre" anywhere as evidence of a global conspiracy, but I'm told we don't have time right now.

2) GR's twin, Evilena (aka The Bride-to-be), gave us an excellent book about movie monsters, which Gloom Raider says we'll review later. Pictures! Essays! Film history! Vampires! Did I mention the vampires? There's even a tangential mention of Gloom Raider's favorite, that guy from Extreme Prejudice who played the Frankenstein monster back in the 80s.

3) Amtrak rocks! Even from the inside of a backpack! Our train reached its destination an hour early. And we thought Deadwood getting canceled was a sign of the End Times.

More later--we have a "Dracula vs. Capone" comic book we're saving for the return trip!

Fang you very much,
Batley

Twitburger Jr.

2006-09-27T08:14:00.000-05:00

Time for a little political blogging again (sorry about that, guys) as I follow the George Allen "Macaca" saga that is putting Virginia in the news: I guess Pat Robertson is taking the season off.

The major problem, as I see it, is not that Allen might be a racist, although for all I know that may be true, and I suspect many of the people who fought under the Confederate flag that keeps getting dragged into this discussion would have found Allen's remark rude, at the very least. And there is the real nub of the problem.

I can hardly expect an older male Republican politician to share my social views, but what I can expect is that he be a good politician, and in this instance Allen failed horribly.

I, for one, already know I would make a terrible politician, and not merely because the contracts Satan draws up are so darned hard to read. I lack the ability to blithely ignore ridiculous contradictions that such people have to reconcile in a sound bite, and even if I trained my mouth to say "I believe the gentleman is confused," I have the kind of poorly-controlled face that would clearly betray the "What a $%#!! moron!" lurking beneath the spoken words. I have my talents and my job and I try to employ them the best I can.

Senator Allen's job involves, among other things, not alienating potential voters (whoops), presenting the appearance of paying attention to potential voters (double whoops), and also, not making fun of someone's name (a "whoops" I believe I was being corrected on in kindergarten, even though we were all pretty sure I'd never have constituents)--particularly, if you have to pick and choose, those of potential voters.

It is certainly important to ascertain Allen's views on race: he represents me, at least in theory. But it seems to me at least as important to make sure people in politics can serve the peculiar function by which they earn a living.

...Anagram of Blood for the Road, Please

2006-09-21T10:41:00.000-05:00

The chill in the air this weekend was helped for me by a couple of good old British horror films. I got to see The Wicker Man again--you know, the real one--though only in the chopped-down version. Someday, someday, that $50 box set with all the footage they could salvage WILL be mine! Bwahahahahahaha!!!!!

I also saw The Vampire Lovers, a more-faithful-than-you'd-expect Hammer adaptation of le Fanu's "Carmilla." Unfortunately, this fidelity to the subject matter leads to low-tech attempts to recreate the dream sequences of Carmilla's victims, but they likely did the best they could. Peter Cushing gets to stake some more undeads without being saddled with the van Helsing moniker, Madeline Smith frolics around in not much and gets involved in some girl-on-girl action, and Ingrid Pitt...well, probably does the best she can, too, as a rather stone-faced and (for the part) elderly Carmilla. The film also showcased a couple of phenomena common to older vampire movies:

1) The fang-take--surely it wasn't actually NECESSARY for a vampire to hiss dramatically before moving in for the kill? I realize it's for cinematic effect, but the smolder-pull back-hiss-scare bejeezus out of incipient meal-bite routine gets old after a while, not to mention being inefficient.

2) Those Buffy writers sometimes know their stuff--Carmilla is the last of a vampire clan exterminated long ago at their home, Castle Karnstein. The last-minute assault on the castle by people in the neighborhood shows it wasn't too far away...yet nobody connected it with a phenomenon of dying young girls? This is a little less ridiculous than the BTVS episode where Dracula's castle appears in Sunnydale, but not by a lot. Don't any of these people gossip, for Pete's sake?

August Goeth Before a Fall

2006-09-13T10:41:00.000-05:00

It's approaching, people: harvest time. The spooky part of the year. The time when impending fall gilds (or after three days of rain this week, mildews) the land. PUMPKIN SEASON!!!

Ahem. Sorry about that. It's just that around this time of year, when pumpkins start appearing in grocery stores and farmer's markets, they also begin piling up in my home and office like Tribbles. Which is but one reason I present:

Gloom Raider's Guide To A Seasonable Autumn

Decorate, decorate, decorate--My finds this year include this skeletal fellow, made locally:

As for mass-produced goodies, below is by far the best thing I''ve found so far, the Halloween item beside which all others pale: not only is it cute, it spins around on its branch while singing along to Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me" in a Peter Lorre voice. There's no way I could make that up, but I'm so grateful somebody did.

Craft projects--Now is a great time to find eerie stickers, foam bats, and fall silk flowers. Not to mention skull jingle bells!

Media--Get out your Voltaire CDs for an enjoyable wallow in the gloom, or just find some folk music to accompany the turning of the leaves (Gloom Raider recommends lots of Robin Williamson and early Bert Jansch).
Movie-wise, try Something Wicked This Way Comes: it's one of the darkest "family" movies ever and as specifically tied to the season as a film is likely to get. And in the realm of books, what fall would be complete without reading along to Roger Zelazny's A Night In The Lonesome October? Not mine, and I hope not yours either.

I'm sure I'll be posting more about my favorite time of year later, in between feeding the pumpkins, so get started on your happy haunting!

The Incubus, One Year And a Bit Later

2006-09-07T21:22:00.000-05:00

Growing up big and pretty makes you soooo sleepy.

It's Not As If I Even Like This Kind of Movie...

2006-08-27T17:25:00.000-05:00

Most recent action movies and I have a tenuous relationship: call it the Tarantino Factor.

Put shortly, I'm not one of those people for whom a "Tarantinoesque" blurb is going to make a movie jump from the video store shelf into my hands. I've seen a fair number of the guy's movies and a few documentaries about him, and think that I manage to have an appreciation of the Tarantino's peculiarly schlocky talents even if he personally annoys me every time I see him onscreen. (A lot. A whole lot.) I have even, in the past, appreciated him as a pioneer without whom the good movies in the "El Mariachi" saga would not have been widely seen.

It is with as little malice as possible, then, that I sit here hoping Quentin Tarantino wakes up in a cold sweat every night remembering that his movies are to The Boondock Saints what Thomas Edison's gramophone was to the Bose Wave stereo: a necessary precondition for the formulation of a vastly superior product. I didn't expect to like this film; I'm still not really sure I dolike it, really, as it's a little bloodstained for my taste, but it is so good I am nonetheless racing to the Godchild to tell as many people about it as I can. The film has incredible depth, moments of humor, violence you sometimes wish was mind-numbing, and Willem Dafoe in a performance so good he should be able to pave his driveway with Oscars. Not to mention Billy Conolly.

If you have more of a stomach for movie violence than I do (and that is nearly everyone)...no, even if you don't, go rent this.

Love For The Advice-Lorn

2006-08-24T07:27:00.000-05:00

I believe I've mentioned somewhere in this compendium of oddities my addiction to advice columns: on an average day you'll find me reading anywhere between three and six of them, reveling for the most part in the same travails of work and family rudeness that were in all the previous columns. Call it morbid curiosity (or more benignly, people-watching at one remove), but it never gets old.

I therefore consider myself something of a connoisseur and offer the following guide to any others so afflicted:

The Classics-- Dear Abby and Annie's Mailbox are still pretty good, if a little hidebound in their advice; the Dear Abby column in which she suggests a child be psychologically evaluated due to clumsiness still rankles, for example. And since these are more or less the institutions of the genre, their space is more frequently taken up with holiday remembrances, public service announcements, and reprints of terrible poems about the consequences of doing anything fun. They do provide a daily dose of advice, though, while some of the following don't.
Rating: 5/10

Which Is The Snarking Fork?-- I have long loved Miss Manners, whose column deals with some of the most hifalutin issues of etiquette with a wit that's always a joy to read. At least as enjoyable (though far more erratic) is The Lady of the Manners at Gothic Charm School, whom you can read by clicking on the link to your right.
Rating: 8/10

Advice Columns:TNG--A new crop of columnists seems to be emerging in recent years, with more practical advice for those in sticky social situations and more biting sarcasm to back it up: Amy Dickinson and Carolyn Hax are two that leap to mind. "Dear Margo" is written by Ann Landers's daughter and manages to combine some of her mother's rectitude with a Miss-Manners-esque knack for the gentle zinger. Relatively new to the game is the new writer for Slate's "Dear Prudence," who shows some promise.
Rating: 6/10

Best of the Best--By far the best of the advice columns is written by Television Without Pity cofounder Sarah "Sars" Bunting, whose Tomato Nation website has a column called The Vine. It's not only vastly more profane and entertaining than most of the above offerings, it's the only one I think actually helped me with an issue. ( Just by reading the archives!) If you're temporarily in need of a stern older sister, or just like to read the woes of people who are, check this one out.
Rating: 10/10

Honorable Mentions--Randy Cohen's ethics column; the new Vicious Whisper cartoons at Heart Shaped Skull, the site of my favorite goth comics artist.

Silent Huh?

2006-08-21T18:16:00.000-05:00

Oh, frabjous day, I finally found someone with whom to watch horror movies! No more wistfully gazing at that crappy-looking recent vampire movie at Hollywood Video because evisceration was never my thing; no more sitting on my couch in the minutes after, say, Candyman ends and realizing that 1) I'm suddenly terrified of mirrors and 2) I will quite soon have to pass one on my way to the bathroom. I don't know how long this happy state will last, but I intend to enjoy it as long as I can.

Which brings us to Silent Hill, a movie I was not ABOUT to watch alone. Based on a creepy-looking video game where I suspect most of this story's actual plot can be found--I didn't see much of that about onscreen--the film tells the story of Rose, whose adopted daughter Sharon sleepwalks while muttering about a place called Silent Hill. (The characters' names point gently in the Biblical direction, which will be kind of important later.)

Rather than doing what the rest of us would do, i.e. getting misled by Google and ending up in perfectly innocent Silent Hill, Nebraska or some such, Rose manages to take her child to the spooky ghost town of Silent Hill, WV, where demons walk, giant evil cockroaches frolic, and the acting talents of the handsome Sean Bean are pretty much wasted. Once there, she loses Sharon and must brave the aforementioned dangers to find both her daughter and the five minutes of exposition near the end of the film that explain what the-hee--devil is going on. There's an interesting story about intolerance in here, and some fine spooky monsters, but really not enough of either.

What I Did With My Long Weekend

2006-08-21T05:41:00.000-05:00

Here I am with Mom Raider during one of the few moments we weren't shopping, sightseeing, or watching Remington Steele reruns

An Unusually Serious Turn

2006-08-12T23:21:00.000-05:00

Sorry about doing this in a blog more or less devoted to aspects of vaguely Gothy pop culture, but a combination of personal strife and a recent re-exposure to online discussion forums has guided my hand until here I am, making a statement of faith in front of...er, realistically, maybe ten people on a good day.

My faith, largely Christian in origin, stems from the one Bible verse I'm willing to interpret literally: the one that says man and woman were made in the image of God.

Clearly, however, we aren't gods too, even if some of us like pretending. Therefore we are also made up of other stuff: physical matter, bad ideas, talents, what have you. The meaning of life, then, would seem to be working at the separation of the crud from the good stuff in our own natures.

My own conclusion on the matter is that being godlike is perforce harder than acting merely human.

And this, despite people who might tell you that Christianity and liberalism are mutually exclusive, is why I espouse a lot of "liberal" principles. Because telling other people they should have children they can't afford because the idea of abortion makes you uncomfortable is EASY. Denying people legal rights because two guys holding hands makes you feel funny is EASY. Deciding that if you can't understand this "evolution" thing, so your god couldn't have either? Compared to reading biology, compared to taking the leap that maybe, just maybe, God uses science too, that's EASY. It's the same reaction as a child who doesn't want broccoli to be part of the world, and almost as mature and reasoned.

{Actually, the entire abortion debate turns on an aspect of this principle that people seem curiously unwilling to acknowledge: liking babies is easy, too. You look at a baby and see cuteness, innocence, all that potential: you look at a pregnant woman and see the twit who cut you off in traffic last Friday. It's easier to side with an embryo than with the asshole who has Parkinson's, especially when adopted embryos have a cute name like "Snowflakes.")

The whole "love your neighbor" idea, by contrast, is enormously hard.* I work at it every day and would still willingly deck anyone who runs their SUV down the wrong way of a one-way parking lot lane. Not writing people off as worthless? Hard. Not interfering "for someone's own good" in how they should live their lives? Very, very hard, for there is a little Mrs. Kravitz in all of us.

All of which is to say that when I see someone on a forum, most likely even someone who cheerfully admits they want to start a fight, saying that one group or the other is godless, I have to turn away. Because they are talking about me. And they are lying. Don't tell me it's not personal, because that is what religion at is best is. Bring groups into it and you have denominational spats and holy wars, but the best churches provide a community that nonetheless allows people to go about the vital work of chipping from their individual souls everything which is not divine.

I promise something more readable next time.

*Of course, that was love your neighbor as yourself, and at the moment I have quite the store of self-loathing, so perhaps it will all work out...

In Which I Try Like Heck To Avoid The Obvious Devo Reference

2006-08-10T08:08:00.000-05:00

As autumn approaches, I get back on the horror train with another one-dollar acquisition, Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body. The story has echoes--hee--of "Fall of the House of Usher" and similar Gothic fantasies: evil oldest son Kurt (Christopher Lee, on which more later) returns to the family manor, allegedly to seek forgiveness after a long abstinence from debauching women and/or driving them to suicide. His father and brother fear him, the maid despises him for causing her daughter's death, and his ex-fiancée, now the brother's wife, both hates Kurt and loves their sadomasochistic relationship. Yes, this would be where the whip comes in.

In short order Kurt is found stabbed with the same dagger that dispatched the maid's daughter, and while the family tries to figure out whodunit, Christopher Lee again gets paid to spend some time in a coffin. This does not last, however, as Kurt's old lover begins to see him everywhere, family members begin dying, and we begin to wonder if the bad seed was buried alive.

Like my favorite Korean horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters, this is a semi-explained Gothic story that allows the viewer to embrace either a psychological or supernatural interpretation of events. The movie is visually beautiful and appropriately tense on all the right levels: family hatred, jealousy, terror of death and the unknown all blend together into a wonderfully toxic stew. The real treasure, however, besides the steamiest scenes of erotic pain I've ever seen, is Christopher Lee's performance. As a disinherited eldest son and dissolute aristocrat he has ample opportunity for the sneering and smoldering that make Lee such an iconic Dracula, but there is also a sense of longing: who knew anyone could outbrood David Boreanaz? Lee's virtuosity even manages to offset the fact that his voice was overdubbed (for reasons I can't fathom, since the movie is in English; on the other hand, had all this been accompanied by his own deep baritone, I would have screamed and fainted like a Beatles fan within the first ten minutes).

The real mystery, in my opinion, is what this was doing sitting around a dollar store.

Rod The God

2006-08-04T08:31:00.000-05:00

My relationship with DVD box sets is a lot like my history of relationships with guys: I start out shy, seeing something across a room that looks interesting. Still, my instinct (or in this case, the price tag) tells me that we Live In Separate Worlds. Some I give up on, abandoning a rosy vision for cold reality and a wallet that doesn't weep like a banshee when I open it. Others, I try to earn.

Yesterday afternoon, after months of flirting, I finally gave in to passion and bought the Night Gallery Season One box set. Only iron self-control kept me from watching it all last night. The pilot movie for the series was a staple around our house while I was growing up, but I had only seen a handful of actual episodes on the Sci-Fi channel.

Like its older brother The Twilight Zone, the show focused on stories of the supernatural and macabre, but Night Gallery's emphasis is less on the sci-fi/postapocalyptic side, preferring to stay more firmly in ghost-story territory. The stories, some of them mere sketches, are entertaining, the future-star-spotting factor immense (Sally Field, Diane Keaton, Dean Stockwell--on the other hand, Bert Convy), and my undying love for Rod Serling ever more firmly cemented.

Not only did he perfect a style of narration without which Night Gallery and Twlight Zone would be lost, his writing is fantastic. He has, particularly in episodes like "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar," a depth of feeling for life's losers peculiar in a man whose face and voice are so recognizable decades after his own death. He's the dark Frank Capra, and he should get more credit for this. If the words "Submitted for your approval" ever caused a tingle of joy to go up your spine, check out this series too.

Is This Why They Say "Aaaarrrrgh"?

2006-07-11T16:01:00.000-05:00

In spite of its bizarre wavering between slapstick and inner demons, not to mention its occasional moments of illogic, I quite liked Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

Especially the end, unfortunately, which is why I can't talk about it.

Rag Doll

2006-07-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

My latest ill-advised craft project is finished!

A cute little devil, sewn in what have to be the two hardest materials to cut this side of real silk. Cute, though.

I Don't Even Know His Real Name!

2006-07-06T08:24:00.000-05:00

I could tell you I enjoyed it, or that the special effects were amazing, or that Kate Bosworth really doesn't make a bad Lois Lane. But that's what all the other movie reviewers are for.

So it's come to this in my quest for a fresh angle on reviewing Superman Returns:

THE MAN OF STEEL vs REMINGTON STEELE

Powers of Disguise
Remington Steele manages to keep his identity secret for several seasons of the TV show, and does have the edge on Superman by being in disguise even when fighting crime. But he can't put on a pair of glasses and convince people he's an entire other person.
Advantage: Superman

Looks
Slightly roguish black-haired man versus more buff slightly roguish black-haired man.
Advantage: Draw

Quality of Love Interest
Lois Lane may be hard-boiled, but she's no match for the tough talk, stunning clothes, and adventurous enthusiasm of Laura Holt. When was the last time you saw Lois in a fedora, anyway?
Advantage: Steele

Smarts
Advanced alien race or no, let's face it: Superman would never think to use wind-up fuzzy monsters as a distraction during an art theft, and not just because he would never commit art theft, either. (That Steele scene remains one of my favorites in all of television.)
Advantage: Steele

Quality of Enemies
Between people who want their money/artwork/dignity back and someone who schemes to submerge the continent, there's really no contest--and no, it does NOT depend on which part of the continent!
Advantage: Superman

So, as you can see, it's a push. The ability to heave land masses about like gym weights is undoubtedly useful, but generally not as a matter of daily operations.

"...It Can Be Combative."

2006-06-27T09:16:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it's not that my life has been quite that dull, but that I have. In the past few weeks I've had very little to write sensibly about--no trips to the video store worth mentioning, no good books that I've read yet (though I just got a few from my evil twin!). One reason for this? Deadwood's third season has started on HBO. How do I love it? Let me count the ways:

Actor Heaven/Eye Candy Galore: I've been a fan of Ian McShane since the first run of Lovejoy on A&E, and watching him be ultimate evil guy Al Swearengen (now the penultimate evil guy, since George Hearst's arrival in Deadwood) is great fun. The cast is full of excellent actors, particularly McShane, Paula Malcolmson as Al's lieutenant/possibly-ex-whore/the future mayor's squeeze Trixie, and Robin Weigert's brilliantly played Calamity Jane. John Hawkes and Titus Welliver add pulchritude to the mix as well.

A Western For People Who Aren't Wild About Westerns: Deadwood is not about cowboys, Indians, or riding the range: it is about gambling, whoring and saloons, but only as a sidebar to business, politics, love, death, tragedy, the march of progress, race relations, the rights of wo/man, and the coming of civilization itself to the lawless camp of Deadwood.

#@!!: Yes, it is the swearin'est show on HBO. Yes, I remember when a certain word starting with C and ending with R was the strongest insult I could offer anyone and not a standard greeting on Television Without Pity's Deadwood forum. But with dialogue often compared to that of Shakespeare, they're not exactly using profanity as a crutch as much as using it as a seasoning. And if you can't sully your mouth with what I've come to call Deadwood words, the show has also given us the term "hooplehead" at no extra charge.

Sympathy For The Devil(s): There are no good guys in Deadwood, but you'll love them anyway--a point brought home to me when last week's preview showed two characters squaring off and I yelled "KILL 'IM, DAN!!" at the top of my voice.

In short, Deadwood: the best hooplehead c***s****rs you could hope to spend an hour with on Sunday nights.

Bookstore Orgy

2006-06-07T08:57:00.000-05:00

I was just going into Barnes & Noble to use the ladies' room and browse around.

How was I to know that when the websites said Bizenghast Vol. 2 and the paperback version of Undead and Unreturnable would be out "in June," that meant by June 2nd?

Bought 'em Friday night: read 'em Friday night.

M. Alice LeGrow's Bizenghast is a very gothic manga series, in which a girl named Dinah and her sidekick (whoops! "friend") Vincent accidentally enter into a pact to cleanse a lost mausoleum of its nest of unquiet spirits, one ghost at a time. The first book, published last year, introduced the characters, sent a lot of perturbed souls to heaven, and ended with Dinah and Vincent meeting a new addition to their team, the cat-thing Edaniel. This latest installment shows us not all ghosts go to Paradise, goes more deeply into Dinah's relationship with her (haunted) home and family, and reveals Edaniel's humanoid form. The art is exquisite, and the story is good if initially confusing, but I'm still annoyed about Edaniel. Go figure.

Undead and Unreturnable is also a series book, the fourth of Mary Janice Davidson's novels about reluctant vampire queen Betsy Taylor. While all the books are likeable, this one seems to suffer from a lack of focus: there's a serial-killer plot that goes almost nowhere, as well as one flagrant timeline error that made me hold the book at arm's length, the better to scream at it. And wasn't it Ibsen who said that a Christmas present you hide in the first act must go off by the end? Still, there's some good stuff here, as Betsy confronts a few basic issues about vampire weddings and settles more deeply into her role as queen.

On Saturday, while I was still berating myself for Friday, I snagged the prize of the weekend: a new collected and translated version of Vampire Loves, Little Vampire creator Joann Sfar's graphic novel.

Ferdinand is a lonely soul. Not because he looks like Murnau's Nosferatu, although he does. He's just unlucky in love, and spends a lot of time at his Lithuanian castle, listening to records and reading with his cat, Imhotep. The four stories that make up this collection follow Ferdinand through a series of opposite-sex misadventures in which he pines for his ex Lani, a plant-girl he can't even bite; meets up with red-haired vampire sisters Aspirine and Ritaline; has a tryst with a Japanese tourist at the Louvre; and dances with, and through, a phantom on a cruise ship. I find it hard to think of this story except in the context of Francophone movies, so take the optimism of Amélie and the randomness of plot points in The Triplets of Belleville, and apply that to the story of a guy in a suit--who only bites with one fang so it'll look like a mosquito bite. Really excellent.

I Feel So...Safe!

2006-06-05T07:47:00.000-05:00

I'm selflessly shoving a discourse on my Three Book* Weekend to the side for now to say a few words about our government.

After all, we live in an era of increasing instability not only in the reliably restless Middle East but elsewhere. Iran wants us to believe that plutonium they want will only be owned by a little old lady who might take it out on Sundays. Global warming suddenly went from "disputed science" to "hey, look at them temperature records! Dayum!" New Orleans continues to be in need of massive rebuilding, and several members of Congress have turned out in the past year not only to be more crooked than Quasimodo's chiropracty images, but also to be TOO DUMB TO HIDE IT. Immigration remains an intractable issue.

Good thing, then, that our leaders can see the clear and present danger of boys smooching.

Seriously, am I missing something? Does all that affection generate body heat that's melting the polar ice caps?

"Well, it's against a lot of people's beliefs." So, I foolishly presume, are many things currently allowed by law. Some religious sects don't believe in medical science: it doesn't mean somebody's standing up in the House to ban aspirin lest it threaten the longstanding and perhaps religiously useful (see Saul on the road to Damascus) institution of headaches.

What really threatens the institution of marriage? Call me crazy, but it may boil down to: people not getting married who probably should, for benefits, for the kids, for the fact that they're together for decades anyhow; people who ought not to remain married hanging on and poisoning the whole idea for anyone who watches them fight; and people, some media idols among them, who treat marriage as just another thing to do in Vegas. None of which has anything to do with boys smooching, except possibly to make me wonder why they'd even bother.

So to recap, my national agenda would go something like this.

1. Don't get blown up.

2. Try not to let other countries get blown up either.

3. Fix hideously disaster-torn parts of world.

999, 542. Dear God, were they holding HANDS?? Hands with little gold rings on?!

999, 543. The very real threat of a cootie epidemic if those little boogers mutate beyond the reach of the current "circle, circle, dot, dot" technology.

999, 544. Grant establishing The Foundation For the Preservation of Dryer Lint Shaped Like Historical Figures ("smell the sweet Snuggle-y aroma of Lincoln!")

* Two of them were graphic novels--they sort of count less, quantitatively anyway.

Tilting At Windmills

2006-06-04T14:00:00.000-05:00

Some things are too weird, even for me.
I've sat through David Lynch films that were not Dune. I've watched bad Italian noir (The House of the Yellow Carpet). I bought from half.com Bullshot!, a slapstick parody of the Bulldog Drummond movie, even though I've never seen one of the latter in my life.

I even watched that bizarre TV movie with Anthony Perkins and Mia Sara in which they played vampires with little lamprey-teeth on the ends of their tongues. Beat that.

But I am interrupting my planned posting schedule to tell you, though I am undoubtedly one of the last to know, that Moulin Rouge is one effed-up piece of cinema. I have only been watching twenty minutes and already this film is to pastiche what turquoise-and-orange plaid is to pattern. I cannot believe, in all the articles I've read about how this movie re-invented the musical, that no one mentioned its random citations of the last hundred years of music.

It's a script I could have dreamed up one sleep-deprived night in college: a young swain, a hooker with a heart of gold and lungs of TB, and a mustache-twirling villain...and whenever you run out of original dialogue, just pick a song off your "Bad Love" mix CD and edit as needed. Only somehow the script fell into the hands of someone with an enormous budget for spectacle, so the result is the most highly-decorated tripe I have ever seen.

Worse yet, I kind of like it.

I expected to enjoy the wardrobe, of course, and a stout old man singing "Like A Virgin" is bound to have some entertainment value. But the "plot" has the familiarity of an old fairy tale, and even the strange lapses into modern pop may well be trying to make a good point: that to people of the 19th century, that flashy bohemian underworld must indeed have been like the discos of the 20th. Moulin Rouge is no movie musical: it's a twist on opera, stripped down to its basest, most cliche-ridden elements and with the added thrill of people bursting into The Police's "Roxanne" for no adequate reason.

So: Reinvent the musical? Not quite. A pretty picture? Certainly. One more proof that the awesome Richard Roxburgh is attracted, raven-like, to scripts full of shiny trash? Well, that too: even if he has played Dracula, being the best thing in Van Helsing is like being valedictorian of the Village Idiot Academy.

With Apologies to Dilbert, Nerdvana

2006-05-26T16:40:00.002-05:00

This is what happens when I get off half a day early: one more geekish pursuit today and I get a badge!

Coming soon: I tell you why I love Vincent Price (some more), and inspired by the remake preview I rent and review The Omen. You know. The real one.

Unwholesome Instincts: or, Curses!

2006-05-25T12:27:00.000-05:00

The minute I came across a news story about China banning the sale of voodoo dolls, my very first reaction was:

a) Hey! That's a violation of freedoms!

b) "Feudalism"? How the heck do voodoo dolls encourage feudalism?!

c) Hah! Foolish heathens!

d) [scrolling down] C'mon, where's the picture? You call this news? Can I buy one anywhere?

If you guessed (d), you've read this column before!

I did finally manage to find a photo, too, and it's awfully cute. If the Chinese government really thinks they're harmful, maybe they should passive-aggressively ship their stock over here. Not that I have an ulterior motive...

updated to add: Aha! Here they are, on one of the most unfortunate domain names I've seen for a while.

Bonk!

2006-05-16T11:53:00.000-05:00

Perhaps, like me, you read a lot of mystery series as a kid. I remember obsessively collecting Nancy Drews and picking and choosing from the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Bobbsey Twins, T*A*C*K, and Susan Sand franchises, to name the ones I can remember. [Edited to add: and The Three Investigators, which I am an utter moron for omitting the first time, since they were only MY FAVORITE.] But it was Nancy Drew who captured my imagination, who seemed willing to snoop anywhere, despite any danger.

Specifically, the danger of getting bopped on the head. It seemed to happen in nearly every book, right before Nancy would awake to find herself tied up, dumped in a locked closet, or both.

In real life, however, it turns out concussion has far more serious consequences, as this article from LiveScience's Bad Medicine columnist suggests. Nancy would have been a drooling mass of cognitive deficits before ever coming into contact with The Ghost Of Blackwood Hall. Which seems a shame, but might explain her relationship with the eternally tepid Ned Nickerson:

"Didn't we have a really bad date last week?"

"Uh...no?"

"If only I could remember! Well, how's Friday night for you?"

"Fine--Friday night!"

"What about Friday night?"

Less-Than-Magnificent Obsessions

2006-05-12T09:41:00.000-05:00

What I pay attention to by the light of my blue banker's lamp at Villa Grammatica:

Um...okay. It's Neopets. Though I'm clearly not the target demographic for this little virtual-pet world/shameless marketing opportunity, I find Neopets strangely compelling. Neopia has a stock market, for Pete's sake, and a bank where a dragon-looking thing in a suit is routinely friendlier than my real-world bank staff. The games on the site are pretty good, and your pets get smarter by reading books. (People should try that sometime.) My one complaint is that the spelling on the site leaves something to be desired.

This video clip.

Speaking of strangely compelling... You can find more on this little fellow here.

Bite Club. Good reviews of the subsequent comics miniseries led me to the first graphic novel. Normally I have no time for stories that take the supernatural out of vampirism: if your vampires only have the capacity for evildoing of, say, Hannibal Lecter, why bother making them vampires at all? This story, though, fills the gap left by missing mysticism with a fascinating look at the machinations of a family of fanged mobsters.

Skellramics. The ceramics company has finally united two of my collecting obsessions with this skull teapot.

Various Webcomics. My favorites are Evilkid (check out the archives!) and the deranged but amusing Chopping Block (motto: "Because Serial Killers Are People Too.")

BatBert?

2006-05-04T11:49:00.000-05:00

To make this an unintentional theme week of posts, I borrowed a copy of Batman Returns, the second Batman film featuring Michael Keaton. This particular outing pits Batman against an industrialist (Christopher Walken), the Penguin (Danny DeVito), and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer, giving unexpected verve to the take-off-her-glasses-and-she's-beautiful cinematic conceit). After reading an interesting article about Catwoman on comics webzine Sequential Tart*, I was interested to see the movie's portrayal of the character. Probably best described as "Supervillain Suffragette," Catwoman/Selina Kyle is by turns smart, sexy, angry, and worried. Human, in other words, but with a lot of energy, a lot of rage, and a better wardrobe.

The main theme of the piece, however, seems to be an odd one: good corporate citizenship. Walken's Shreck is the ultimate bad boss, polluting Gotham's sewers and, oh yeah, KILLING PEOPLE. Yet when he begins his tactics to supplant Gotham;'s mayor, the first thing he does is imply that the mayor, by not building a power plant, is effectively being a bad businessman. The Penguin himself, of course, is the ultimate pollutant, dumped by freaked-out parents. He builds quite an interesting organization out of society's discards (recycling!), but then falls into the Max Shreck habit of offing insolent underlings. Bad boss!

All this is contrasted with Bruce Wayne, and a bit unfairly, since Alfred is the only Wayne employee out of presumed hundreds that we ever see. Even now, years later, Michael Keaton seems an odd choice for Batman, but acquits himself wonderfully, particularly in the scenes with Selina/Catwoman. And even after the franchise has taken a new direction with Batman Begins last year, much of this film remains relevant and interesting...and not merely because I am Tim Burton's bitch.

*I was going to provide the link, but I can't find the darn thing. Their site has a search function, though, if some other intrepid soul wants to wade through 150 mentions of Catwoman.

Esprit de Corpse

2006-05-01T09:34:00.000-05:00

As the actual political landscape grows too grim to contemplate, a new list:

Ten Reasons Tim Burton Should Be President

1) All the black, velvet, and lace clothes that have been in fashion for the past year or so will be in style through 2012, helping Americans save money.

2) He appears to have the Headless Horseman on his side.

3) Helena Bonham Carter: the best-looking First Lady in almost a century.

4) A small but definite chance that come spring, the Easter eggs might roll the children!

5) The inevitable Danny Elfman arrangement of "Hail To The Chief" could become a classic.

6) Halloweentown's two-faced Mayor would make an ideal White House spokesman.

7) Vincent Price on the $50 bill.

8) Facing down Congress is no problem to a man who works with monsters for a living.

9) Burton's career in film would introduce all kinds of new concepts to the office, like "creativity," "deadlines," and "budgets."

10) Secretary of State Christopher Lee would spook rogue nations into compliance: would you argue with Dracula/a sadistic dentist/the man who fought Yoda and lived?

Lagniappe Yay!

2006-04-29T23:38:00.000-05:00

I don't usually go on about my shopping experiences here, as I try to filter that, my personal relationship foibles, and cute kitten pictures onto a more personal space. But when my address labels from Label Freak came today with an entire extra sheet, I felt I had to mention my favorite feature of online shopping: the idea of lagniappe, a little something extra.

Goth retailers seem particularly inclined to this: Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab always sends extra samples with its perfumes, Dark Candles sends tealights, and Goth Rosary offers a choice of candy or temporary tattoos to go along with your order. It's a custom that puts them immediately in my good graces (note to all retailers everywhere: so does free shipping. It's like a drug to me. I love you, Sock Dreams!), and helps keep the childlike fun of opening a present alive, even when you've placed an order yourself. Thoroughly splendid.

Sometimes There's A Reason Celluloid Is Flammable

2006-04-26T08:43:00.000-05:00

Today we present Gloom Raider's Worst Movies Ever. This list is harder to compile than it looks. For one thing, "so bad it's good" movies shouldn't count. Nor should movies whose only fault is being conceived before decent special effects were evolved, etc.

What really makes for a bad film, in my opinion, is the ratio between expectation and actuality. That's why you won't find, say, Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of Darth Petulance (or whatever that was called) on the list.

So we begin:

5. Altered States-- This movie sits on the horns of my critical dilemma, since a major reason I dislike it is the horrid special effects. On the other hand, how, after listening to William Hurt's Dr. Jessup prattle eruditely all over the place (and after the high-concept exposition of trying to reach the essential, primitive nature of man through sensory deprivation) are we supposed to react when it turns out that means running around in a bad apeman suit and eating gazelles from the zoo?

4. Dr. T And The Women--I didn't even have high hopes for this Robert Altman movie about a gynecologist, and it managed nonetheless to be a bitter disappointment. The film is slow, pointless, and able to leach all the fun from the idea of Kate Hudson and Liv Tyler getting it on, but the real trouble is Richard Gere's Dr. T., a character so sweet and sensitive that he may well have driven his own wife nuts. After about half an hour, I realized that I'd like to beat him to death myself. Robert Altman's films are famously hit-or-miss, but this trifle is 110% miss. Rent Ready To Wear.

3. Identity--A low point in John Cusack's career, among other people's. One of those "twist ending" movies I hate so much, in which the destinies of a bunch of stranded strangers intersect with that of a Matt Pinfield-alike crazed killer. Blatantly and annoyingly manipulative, the movie is at least good for anyone who wants to see Alfred Molina in a rare non-villainous role.

2. Starship Troopers-- I've seen more than ten of Clancy Brown's movies, of which a few are...not so good. But this, based on a respectable sci-fi novel, took all kinds of cake. Moronic heroines, brain-sucking bugs, a hero I wanted dead the minute he came onscreen, and Neil Patrick Harris dressed like a Nazi. The end.

1. An Awfully Big Adventure--I still sometimes wonder how I could possibly hate this movie, which superficially has so many things I love. Comedy? Check. British period piece? Check. Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant being a dickhead, Young Sherlock Holmes's Alan Cox, and for-God's-sake Lord Peter Wimsey himself, Edward Petherbridge?! Check! And yet this ostensible comedy, which treats among other themes war, incest, homosexuality, thwarted love, suicide, and the despair of growing old as an artist, flops utterly. One funny bit. One. And yet the cover of the video was dotted with blurbs, apparently by people whose idea of "rollicking comedy" is anything more cheerful than an autopsy. I ask you.

Spell Me, Would You?

2006-04-20T10:27:00.000-05:00

It was the church sign that made me snap--the one that said "ABOVE ALL ESLE, PUT ON LOVE."

Mind you, I snap like this often. I am a proofreader by profession and an avowed enemy of public stupidity by inclination. People who go about with me in public get used to the fact that, faced with a sign or menu filled with errors, I make a hissing noise between my teeth as if I've touched a hot stove. They get used to having to pull me away and console me. "There, there," they murmur. (What they think probably isn't printable.)

Even given my hypersensitivity, however, it continues to baffle me that people treat spelling and grammar as if they're astrophysics, with a hearty laugh about how they could never get the hang of it. If anyone said this about, say, driving, they'd be greeted with either pity or open contempt; change the subject to THE MEANS BY WHICH HUMAN BEINGS COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER SO SOCIETY ITSELF DOES NOT DISSOLVE, a subject which we're taught in school from kindergarten or earlier!!...and it's fine.

What often gets lost in the struggle, as word-nerds like yours truly head for the fainting couch over a misplaced apostrophe, is that we are not the ones who need the writing around us improved. We'd like it, sure, but the very fact that we spot the error means that we've grasped what the hapless writer was trying to say. It's the so-called common man: the one who, when faced with an unintelligible employee manual, blames himself for not understanding it. This is the reason written language has rules: information is best transmitted in predictable patterns.

So it's surely not too much to ask that, if your position in life requires writing or editing, you at least take time to learn to do these things properly: get yourself a nice basic grammar book (or look for an online guide), make a list of the words you can't spell well ("H-O-R-S D-apostrophe-O-E-U-V-R-E-S, folks, or else they're APPETIZERS."), and don't force people of all levels of education to wonder what the heck you're trying to say.

You know, or esle.

Oh, Crumbs!

2006-04-10T13:18:00.000-05:00

It may be an odd admission from someone who uses this page to publicly admit swooning when, for example, Chris Sarandon puts the bite on Amanda Bearse in Fright Night, but... I've been a little embarrassed to review my recent video acquisitions.

A brief background:

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who'd just got cable at home, and on cable was Nickelodeon. At that time Nickelodeon was a comparatively sedate children's' programming channel comprised mostly of cartoons and Pinwheel for tiny kids, and Canadian and British TV shows for the older ones. And right after You Can't Do That On Television was a show called The Third Eye, a rotating lineup of four spooky British miniseries for kids: "Children of the Stones," "The Haunting of Cassie Palmer," "Into the Labyrinth," and, er, the one with the aliens that she never watched*. And it was good. It was very good. There was Freddie Jones, for one thing.

The one day, Nick pulled the show and replaced it with this...CARTOON. Something about a crimefighting mouse with an eyepatch whose assistant was, and we had to take their word for it, a hamster. No time-travel! (Well, less!) No ghosts! (Ditto.) No stone circles! (Actually, that one Halloween episode...oh, never mind. It just wasn't The Third Eye, okay?) And if that little girl hadn't been absolutely addicted to bad puns, all would have been lost.

Yes, I've been watching Danger Mouse. Two box sets' worth. And it's good. I still giggle when Quark and his robot sidekick Grovel try to take over the world, still adore Count Duckula back when he was a carnivore who didn't have his own show, still do a creditable impression of Baron Greenback's pet caterpillar Nero. The puns are awful, the plots are goofy, and I still haven't decided whether Dangermouse and Penfold are, ahem, special friends. It's the best show that ever displaced Freddie Jones, dammit.

*"Under the Mountain," I'm almost sure.

I Have A Thing About Satan...

2006-03-20T13:45:00.000-05:00

After more false starts than I care to admit, I rented Angel Heart, the movie whose controversial sex scene offended all those who watched far too much Cosby.

Not my usual kind of horror movie, Angel Heart is nonetheless important: I can see traces of its influence in Sin City, Constantine, Identity, to name but a few films. The movie begins with your stereotypical hard-boiled gumshoe Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke, looking good) retained by the mysterious Louis Cyphre (played by de Niro... and even the great D.L. Sayers got her Sir Julian Freke on, so we'll leave the GLARINGLY MEANINGFUL name issue alone) to find a missing singer. Angel's inquiries lead him from New York City to Algiers, Louisiana, leaving blood and detached organs in their wake. Never get interrogated by this guy--and never own a window fan, since they're shown prominently right before various characters get slaughtered. At last, after his fateful encounter with voodoo priestess Epiphany Proudfoot (Bonet, sporting a name that sounds like a leftover Bond girl's), Angel finds the singer, the killer, the Devil and, unfortunately, his soul.

It's not a perfect flick by any means: there are a couple of glaring plot holes, and a postcolonialist would probably go apoplectic over the voodoo depictions. Also, for a story in which many of the supporting characters are musicians, the soundtrack is surprisingly spare. However, as I've mentioned before, I have a big soft spot for movie voodoo. The movie's aesthetics are gorgeously bleak, the story has lots of interesting layers--even if they don't always turn out to fit together--and Mickey Rourke is fantastic. A must-see for fans of mysteries and horror films, but perhaps only once.

It's Official...

2006-03-12T19:29:00.000-05:00

I am in love with Korean horror movies. Not one of the three I've seen has made my flesh crawl like The Ring, nor made me laugh like Sleepy Hollow, nor given me eye candy to beat Vincent Price in a cravat. But A Tale of Two Sisters is wonderful, beautifully filmed, and set in a house that's a weird and stunning combination of William Morris-inspired Victoriana and Asian sliding doors.

Sisters Su-Mi and Su-Yeon return from a stay in the [implied mental] hospital to this idyllic setting and to their father and stepmother. It isn't long before tensions and strained relations 1)set the scene for the horror to follow and 2)make the alert viewer start watching out for the twist ending. And even when this comes, even when the twists echo a couple of movies I despise, the film remains strong, creepy, and sad. Director Kim Jee-Woon, if you think you can reprogram M. Night Shyamalan, I will personally help finance your plane ticket: by about $20, but that is not the point.

But all the Korean movies I've seen recently, from Two Sisters to the first two Whispering Corridors films, have a subtlety to their psychological dimension that their American counterparts often lack. The ghosts in these films come to life through our own small cruelties, the tiny mistakes we make in being human: from the rejection of loved ones, from family tragedies, from the quiet moment where a line is crossed and something fragile dies. That is the beauty of these movies, and why they get such lousy reviews from the zombie-loving reviewers of many horror publications. Without being particularly moralistic in their presentation, these films do present a powerful message about mindfulness of our own conduct--scarier, in the long run, than a single satanic child or lone nut seeking the Necronomicon.

Tastes Like Chicken?

2006-03-09T07:55:00.000-05:00

After a long absence from my usual milieu, I lifted my head from the medium-boiled detective genre long enough to rent the classic Hammer Taste the Blood of Dracula. The last time I saw this, one of Ted Turner's cable stations was having Halloween programming called the Five Film Fang Fest, and I managed to watch all of this and part of Dracula AD 1972 before my father took control of the television. This last re-viewing not only confirmed my suspicion that this is one of my favorite Hammer films, but reminded me how absolutely terrible I was at identifying actors as a kid.

Our story begins when an enterprising yet sleazy chap (played by Roy Kinnear, who was Veruca Salt's dad in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but did I recognize him last time? Nope.) is thrown off a carriage and stumbles across a staked Count in the woods. Like the good rising middle class he is, he seizes upon this as a mercantile opportunity and steals Dracula's clothes and blood.

Next we see a bunch of upstanding Victorian types leaving church; when young Alice and Paul (Anthony Higgins credited under another name--do you know how many times I'd seen Young Sherlock Holmes* in my youth? But did I recognize him? Hah!) flirt too long in the churchyard, Alice's father William gives her such a moralistic harangue that you just know he's going to be visiting a brothel before the movie's out.

My, that was quick.

William and his two decadent friends meet up with a satanic-acting nobleman (Ralph Bates, whom thankfully I had no reason to recognize at age 12), who leads them to Roy Kinnear's shop. They're going to raise Dracula... via a ceremony presumably written just in case someone saves the Count's powdered...blood...in a...tube? At the last moment the three back out, and when their new leader dies, they, er, shove him a little with their shiny black shoes. That's still enough for the resurrected Dracula to vow revenge, which he takes by corrupting and vampirizing the younger generation. Young Paul saves the day, rescuing Alice from the Count's sexual thrall and giving the Dark Prince a fatal overdose of sanctity, an odd method of dispatch until you remember that in the later Satanic Rites of Dracula the poor bloodsucker will be vanquished by a tree.

A few points:

1) It really is a superior Hammer film: excellent acting, great costumes and sets. It also provides a nice but not too heavy-handed take on the generation-gap issues of its time.

2) I might give up my desire for super powers if only I could have the Dracula's-Mesmeric-Gaze Light follow me around at all times.

3) Considering that the decadent old gents all back out of the infernal ceremony, one could make a case for calling this movie "Almost Taste the Blood Of Dracula." Moreover, their paranoia about the dead nobleman seems excessive, since they didn't actually kill him: it's not as if Law & Order's Jack McCoy is going to pop up and start talking about depraved-indifference homicide.

I heartily recommend it.

* A quick tour of IMDb suggests that Higgins may be one of the only people ever to play both Sherlock Holmes and (sort of) Moriarty. What a man!

A Long, Drawn-Out Whiny Noise? That's Just Me.

2006-03-03T09:48:00.000-05:00

Today is not a good day at Villa Grammatica, people. In the space of a few short hours I've questioned the utility of my job, the safety of my car, and the necessity of going home for my annual birthday celebration. And now, reading an interview on Sequential Tart, I discover that Peter S. Beagle plans to rework my favorite book.

Bearing in mind that he is my favorite author, and bearing in mind that I've done a bit of fretting myself over his legal difficulties with The Last Unicorn's royalties, I nonetheless must do an Anakin Skywalker Turned Evil and say "Nooooooo!" I can't stand the idea that The Folk of the Air may in a year or two join the short but exquisitely painful list of works remade and cheapened by their own creators. (I'm thinking primarily of Robin Williamson's revisitation of "Verses at Balwearie Tower," but I can see nobody else is; how about Manilow's disco version of "Could It Be Magic"?)

Yet when I try to make a coherent argument against it, I'm at a loss. Yes, the book isn't perfect. It may be, in some ways, better for a rewrite. I don't care. Shameless sentimentalist attachment? Yes. Because, I suppose, it's one thing to be silly and assume a human being will never change: but what is all this printing and taping and recording for, if not so that an artist's work will be there for the formation of those kinds of attachments?

I'm coming dangerously close to the idea that the purest love is between a woman and her books, so perhaps I'd better stop there. But, please, Mr. Beagle, don't f**k with Farrell!

I Won't Play The Sap For You

2006-02-24T08:04:00.000-05:00

Lest all five of you wonder what I've been up to, here at Villa Grammatica there's been a sudden resurgence, for various reasons, of interest in classic-style detective stories (the American kind. For once.)

So I've been rereading everything in my modest collection of Dashiell Hammett, and I once again have to recommend him as the ultimate writer of private-eye cool. His prose style is succinct, to say the least--skip a phrase and you miss somebody getting decked by Our Hero--but inventive and interesting, in the sense that only after you put down The Maltese Falcon do you realize that Sam Spade is a bit of a twerp.

I've also started watching the first-season DVDs of Remington Steele, which is the main thing that's been occupying the time I usually spend watching "Toenails of Dracula"-type movies for review here on the Godchild. If you had any love at all for the series, even as a dim childhood memory, go out and get this. Most televisions shows from the 1980s age about as well as junior-high class pictures: a rerun of Love Boat these days, for example, quickly demonstrates that what seemed merely frivolous resort wear when we were toddlers now resembles a floating clown academy.

With a few exceptions, Remington Steele seldom suffers such setbacks; the show puts as much emphasis on the classic in the looks of things as it does in Steele's references to old movies. It still retains its wit, style, and an evocative jazz soundtrack that will have visions of trenchcoats dancing in your head. Like Hammett's prose, it's damn near perfect, and I highly recommend both.

I wonder how I'd look in a fedora?

My One Demandment

2006-02-16T11:44:00.000-05:00

An NPR story about lawmakers' frantic attempts to make the Ten Commandments legal to post in a courthouse has again roused my fervor. Clearly trying to explain the whole separation-of-church-and-state thing, even with the loud voice and illustrative gestures generally used to explain computers to elderly relations, isn't working.

Time for a drastic reversal, in my opinion, and we can start with the schools!

Survey the population at the beginning of the school year and post it all. Jewish students? Put up some Torah. Ten Commandments, Five Pillars of Islam, Noble Truths of Buddhism, Wiccan Rede--even a passage on living an ethical life without God for atheists. By all means, put up the principles of the Church of Satan during little Ashtoreth's tenure at GloomRulesNow Middle School. When she's gone, have a PTA meeting about taking it down when it's no longer representative.

Because that's the key word, folks. Representative. If we are to blur the lines of church and state, it behooves us to do this with the kind of attention to fairness last seen (ironically) when Solomon sharpened his Sword of Baby Long Division. Just imagine principals across the nation folding their arms at complaining parents and, with a serene smile, only having to say, "I'm very sorry. But this is, in fact, what you wanted." And finally, maybe, everyone will realize that a lot of life is about tuning out the things you don't believe in, not whining until someone else has to give them up.

Soothing The Savage Breast...Put That Whip Down!

2006-02-14T09:10:00.000-05:00

A Valentine's Day guide for the weird:

Movies:
Amélie--Surreally filmed love story whose heroine would be put on Zoloft for displaying that kind of shyness in the States. From the director of Delicatessen, a little foreign movie about cannibalism. Fabulous soundtrack, too.

Secretary--I've discussed this before (without succumbing to the temptation to use the phrase "a spanking good film," for which I want some credit). A movie whose theme is that being twisted doesn't bar you from true love OUGHT to be a classic.

Nightlife--Made-for-cable vampire love story in which a willowy night thing inexplicably prefers The Equalizer's sidekick to Ben Cross. Yeah, yeah, so one's good and one's evil. Your point?

Corpse Bride--Is out. On DVD. What do you mean, you haven't seen it yet? Go. Go! GO! (And get some Kleenex while you're out there.) Tim Burton's inter-veil-between-the-living-and-the-dead romance has suffered unjustly from comparisons with Nightmare Before Christmas. Not all stop-motion movies are the same. Get over it. Buy this one.

Dangerous Liaisons--A little something for you cynics in the house. No, not Uma Thurman's boobies.

Music:

Suggested songs for the day...

"Ravens Land," Voltaire
"Strange Love," Depeche Mode
"A Strange Kind of Love," Peter Murphy
"The Rest (Will Take Care of Itself)," Webb Wilder
"A Woman Like You," Pentangle version
"(Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For?" Nick Cave
"Weekend in New England," Barry Manilow (and I defy you all to find someone to say Manilow's not scary. Trust the Cheese Whiz on this one)
"Spellbound," The Smithereens
"Cupid's Got A Brand New Gun," Michael Penn (again, for you cynics)
"Nights In White Satin," The Moody Blues (as today's one of the few days poetry is acceptable in daily life, go for the long version with the broody spoken-word stuff at the end)

Literature:

Funny-Romantic: the novels of Jennifer Crusie
Transporting-Romantic: the poetry of John Donne
Broody-Romantic: Poe, and anybody else who ever wrote a poem involving a Lenore
Schadenfreude-Cynical: the novels of Robert Holdstock, where even if you find the girl of your dreams, she's likely to be literally just that
Anglophile-Romantic: Dorothy L. Sayers' novels about Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane

Happy Blood-Red Heart Day, all!

A Price Above Ruby...Glass Beads

2006-02-13T09:26:00.000-05:00

Of late, my time has been taken up with:

Massive job-related anxiety;

Sleeping;

Not watching any horror movies to inflict on you people, though I did re-watch The Grudge to make sure that the Evil Ravening Ghost Noise still freaks me out;

Confirming my immaturity to the world at large by messing about on Neopets.com;

Learning to make rosaries so I'll have something to add to my list of bead projects.

It was on a hunt for beading supplies that I found this:

Pumpkin Carols

I only wish I'd thought of it.

Impending Evil!

2006-02-01T22:20:00.000-05:00

Should you check here in future and find that I've taken to plotting world domination and typing out "Bwahahahaha!", it's all the fault of my coworker's candy.

Yes, I have tasted of the Judas confection! And pretty good it was, too. Anybody want an omelet?

How, precisely, does the recent weather suck?
	Like a vacuum cleaner.
	Like a GOOD vacuum cleaner. A Dyson or something.
	Like a black hole.
	Like the plot twist in an M. Night Shyamalan film.
	Like "M. Night Shyamalan Presents: Running a Dyson In A Black Hole" (Plot twist: it's really a Roomba.)
	I'd answer you, but I fear my fingers just fell off from frostbite and/or, I have drowned.

Free polls from Pollhost.com