The Nightmare in a Styrofoam Cup

If ever a movie succeeds entirely because of its creature and makeup effects, it's 1985's Fright Night. The story is dumb, the protagonists are annoying, the villains aren't nearly as effective as you want them to be, and Roddy McDowall delivers the kind of misguided performance only an actor confident in his abilities can deliver.

Yet I was rooting for McDowall more than anyone else in the film. Playing a character named Peter Vincent, he's supposedly an homage to Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, but there's a lot more Cushing than Price in the veteran horror actor known for playing a vampire killer. Wikipedia says the filmmakers failed to interest Price in the role which makes me wonder why they didn't try Cushing. Cushing playing this guy straight would've been so much funnier, and scarier, than McDowall's gratingly broad bug eyes and double takes as he discovers vampires are really real.

His schlocky grandstanding when he adopts the vampire hunter persona is even worse. I hate when actors play actors with false notes in their voice even when they're supposed to be playing good actors.

Somehow the fact that he had a shred of Peter Cushing in him, though, made me like him more than anyone else. Certainly more than the main protagonist, William Ragsdale as the teenage boy Charley whom we're introduced to whining to his girlfriend, Amy (Amanda Bearse), because she won't have sex with him and then ignoring her when she takes her top off because he sees the neighbours bringing a coffin into their house. The fact that Amy doesn't care that the neighbours are bringing a coffin into their house makes her equally annoying and I kind of felt these two deserved each other.

The neighbour ends up being a vampire named Jerry Dandrige, played by Chris Sarandon, an actor I recognised only as Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride, though apparently he was also the speaking voice for Jack Skellington. Without the Dread Pirate Roberts of Inigo Montoya around, all the charisma was with Humperdink, so I wanted him to gruesomely kill the kids until he passed up one opportunity to do so after another and I lost patience with him, too.

I was about to write the whole movie off until the climax which suddenly treated me to some of the most amazing practical makeup and creature effects I've seen. By Richard Edlund and his team, I was particularly impressed by this wolf to human transformation:

Topped maybe only by this sudden ultra fangy reveal:

The Old Horse

Drawing takes too long, especially when it's hot. To-day I pencilled page seventeen of my comic, wanting to have finished page twenty four yesterday. Or something. Not that I'm comparing myself to Alfred Hitchcock but I'm reminded of hearing about him being on set of his films of the late fifties and later being bored out of his mind because he basically considered a movie finished once the script was done, the actual filming being a sort of formality. This makes sense of the fact that he's said to have hardly given any direction to his actors, like the famous story of Cary Grant walking through the hotel in North by Northwest and it being the actual hotel Grant was staying at so Hitchcock had simply said, he knows how to walk through this hotel, let him do it.

I wish my drawings would just act out my scripts on their own. I should just have to draw a character once and then let her do the rest. Maybe I should watch Cool World to-night, I've never seen it.

I've done so much work on this comic and still only a few people have seen it. What's weird is I'm a little reluctant to submit it to publishers, even though I think it may be the best looking art I've ever produced, because I can't shake the feeling that it would be read by less than half the audience in print form than it would be published online. Maybe this is an illusion created by the fact that I spend more time online than at comic book shops. But I envy people who get to perform in front of an audience, getting some feeling of rapport with an audience must be nice instead of spending months with your material in a bottle before you feel it's ready to be shown, and only then knowing how people will take something that you came up with six months or a year ago, nevermind the stuff you thought of last week.

I was tempted to post some concept art at least to-day but the time still doesn't feel right. Here are some doodles I did at university orientation last week:

I really need to review how to draw horses. I do find them a lot easier than most other animals for some reason.

I signed up for a pretty full roster of classes for fall--I'll be at school all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and most of the day on Mondays and Wednesdays. I'm hoping I'll still be able to make three pages of comic a week so if I do make this a web comic I'll probably release at a pace of eight pages every three weeks instead of my usual two weeks. At least the classes sound fun--I'm taking a class devoted to John Milton, a class devoted to Shakespeare, and another devoted to African Literature. That's for Tuesdays and Thursdays. Monday and Wednesday I'm studying pre-colonial Latin America and Star Trek. Yes, Star Trek. I needed an elective and all the more useful sounding ones were already taken. Anyway, I'm hoping I'll have more spare time since most of the classes I'm taking are things I already know a lot about.

Oh, you may ask, just how much do you know about John Milton? Well, maybe not as much as some but I have, over this past year, read all his prominent political pamphlets, his History of Britain, two biographies of him, several of his letters, and all of his poetry. So I guess I'll go ahead and tell you one thing about my comic--John Milton's in it. Here's some concept art.

So John Milton's one of the people I've been stuck inside with. I was vaguely planning on driving across country in August but I decided I'd be better off saving my money and staying in and getting some drawing done. Oh, but the outside . . .

Twitter Sonnet #779

Cable hair keeps the forest mind in town.
Jigsaw wedges complete the puzzle legs.
A steamer trunk full of acorns was brown.
Moving stacks of smoke fry the flying eggs.
Ribbon stilts'll buckle below the belt.
Accessory weight dampens the murder.
To touch the pen or hat is two ways felt.
There's protein in ev'ry Frank-N-Furter.
The yam finger says I am a starch thing.
A brain hits hard enough to enter skulls.
Quiet colludes like garnish to the bang.
Barnacle pin-ups glimmered on the hulls.
A chip has too much salt for the old block.
An incredible feat broke the tube sock.

We All Have Our Coffins

Is vampirism a lifestyle choice or a reflection of a fundamental difference of biochemistry? 1936's Dracula's Daughter presents us with this question, reminiscent of debates about whether or not homosexuality is genetically determined, perhaps appropriate since the film is deemed by many to feature lesbianism in thinly disguised metaphor. A nicely shot film, at its centre is a beautiful, tortured anti-heroine.

Gloria Holden plays Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula's daughter, with cool, querulous elegance, seemingly lost in the world after the recent demise of her father, she is repulsed by her own desire to drink blood. In an effort to control herself, she begins talking to a psychiatrist named Garth (Otto Kruger) who, without being told too many of the particulars of Marya's problem, recommends confronting her addiction head on by intentionally placing herself in situations where she might be tempted.

So she has her henchman, Sandor (Irving Pichel, looking eerily like Paul Muni), hire a pretty young girl off the street to pose for her as an artist's model. It's this one scene where it would seem a woman is trying to seduce another woman.

Marya drinks men's blood, too, so maybe the movie's more a metaphor for bisexuality? One might also ask, since Dracula drinks from men and women, why is Dracula's Daughter more of a metaphor for same sex relationships? Well, it's more about social context than whether someone is literally ravishing someone of the same sex. Marya is tormented just for being what she can't at the end of the day help being. Murder as metaphor for non-heterosexual orientations may seem too harsh but one has to consider that normal and Christian culture regards homosexuality with similar moral contempt, if not more.

Comparing this movie to 1970's The Vampire Lovers, I find I prefer the newer film as far as vampirism for unsanctioned sexual orientation goes. Based on the novella Carmilla from 1871, the 1970 film is told more from the vampire's perspective than the original story, it more strongly implies vampirism is a metaphor for homosexuality, but unlike Dracula's Daughter, Ingrid Pitt's character isn't ashamed of what she is, just sort of heartbroken that the people around her don't seem to want to accept her.

Dracula's Daughter does have the incredible, 1930s Universal horror film atmosphere, though. It's intended to be a direct sequel to the Dracula starring Bela Lugosi but the only returning cast member is Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing, continuing in the mysterious, decades long trend in films to avoid using the first name, Abraham, established for Van Helsing in the book. Marguerite Churchill is in the film as the sometimes annoying, sometimes charming Lois Lane-ish assistant to Garth.

Truth in the Bottle

I'm glad the second season of True Detective went out like the noir it'd been all along. That is, rather grimly. There'll be spoilers in this post, I hardly think it's worth talking about a final episode of something without spoilers.

Bezzerides and Velcoro at the beginning swapping stories about the roots of their self hatred was nice. Though I still think their sins are a little too innocent. I'd like to see next season maybe Pizzolatto giving us a protagonist who's done something unambiguously perverse. In fact, it would be kind of great if one of the villains of this season were the protagonist of next season, Burris, for example.

I was never especially interested Velcoro's story about his kid. Maybe if I had a kid myself I'd feel different. As it was it was hard for me to sympathise with him stopping to see his son one last time, though I didn't find it implausible. I just found myself saying to the screen while he was deciding, "Don't do it, don't do it, Velcoro, don't do it." The moment he got onto the off-ramp I thought, "Well, I guess he's going to die." But this adds that damning ingredient of free will to the sense of doom that hovered so well over the previous episode. As little as I was interested in his paternity story, I still liked it better than Woody Harrelson's plot in the first season.

Frank's plot was for me the best part of the episode, his and his wife Jordan's. I love the feeling of his identity disintegrating as he crossed the desert, moments that defined his persona manifesting as ghosts around him for his mind to cling to before finally losing his grip and falling away. This works especially well with a character like Frank who has such tight self control, has the steely principles of an idealised gangster. Of course he wouldn't give up his suit, presenting himself properly is that important to him, and it's another important element of free will added to the doom.

More than the first season, season two really felt like a complex machine with many small parts calculated to assemble a whole, very much like a single eight and a half hour movie. I suspect it might have been improved by a single director for every episode but the fact that season two feels more solid might prove again that television is at this time more of a writer's medium.

Love or Something at First Sight

Why would someone pretend to love someone else? Lots of reasons--convenience, to please family, or tradition. Maybe the most common reason is money, or maybe it's better to say that the freedom and power that come with financial security are attractive enough to override any misgivings about being stuck with someone one doesn't feel exactly crazy about forever. It's with something like this in mind that a young woman named Abby pretends to love a dying rich man in Terrence Malick's 1978 film Days of Heaven. A film with gorgeous cinematography, it has a plot that's more odd than complex, an intriguing riff on a biblical story that doesn't quite hold together but works well enough for the fantastic imagery.

Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are a married couple in early twentieth century Chicago who become farm hands after Bill accidentally kills his boss at a mill. For some reason, Bill decides they ought to make their coworkers believe he and Abby are siblings rather than a married couple. His reasons aren't clear but I was reminded of a recurring story in the Torah (and Bible) about men deciding to pretend their wives are their sisters. Abraham does it because he's afraid men will kill him to be with his beautiful wife, Sarah, but this plan backfires a little when the Pharoah decides to court Sarah. However, Abraham and Sarah become rich because of it before God sends a plague to punish Pharaoh.

Similarly, the terminally ill young man, credited as "The Farmer" (Sam Shepard), who owns the farm and fields where Bill and Abby happen to be working, falls for Abby and on Bill's encouragement she marries him. Bill and Abby, along with Abby's little sister, Linda (Linda Manz), move into the big house and upgrade their wardrobe.

The Farmer (even kind of sounds like Pharaoh) starts to intuit the truth somehow but he doesn't become positive until there's a plague of locusts.

Really adorable locusts. I think we're supposed to be freaked out but I couldn't hate these little guys.

It all doesn't make quite as much sense as the biblical story. Bill's actually in more danger of being killed by pretending Abby's his sister, risking the Farmer's jealous rage, and the plague shows up long after Abby and the Farmer have been married.

I don't want to be too judgemental, life is hard and I can understand why people might want to go into marriages of convenience. Throughout history, marriage has really not been about love. But I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the Farmer who married Abby when he barely knew her and then becomes enraged when he finds out she might not love him. I'd say that's what you get for being shallow, man. I'd personally rather have a harder, lonelier life than accept a woman who's only pretending to love me. I watched Vertigo again for the ten millionth time yesterday and the scene where Scottie and Madeleine are at the beach and the waves crash and the music crescendos and Scottie says he's with her, "All the time," made me think, goodness, how embarrassing. No wonder he's so angry at the end. Of course, he's not exactly perfect himself but this is no time to be leaping into another Vertigo analysis--you can read some of my many, many thoughts about Vertigo here.

Days of Heaven is narrated by Abby's little sister, Linda, who otherwise is not directly involved in much of the story. Having her narrate was a good choice, actress Linda Manz's androgynous voice with a thick Chicago accent and slightly odd but pretty features give her a weird credibility. The movie also features a lovely score by Ennio Morricone.

Twitter Sonnet #778

A clean bitter internet burns wrong leaves.
Ginger ale bullets scrape like finger nails.
Boiling silence contrives reasons and cleaves
Voices like steam o'er black steel on the rails.
Red Vines wait for unsaved sideways drivers.
Bags unpacked mutely speckle the highway.
Pressure pushed ignored by iron divers.
The sand too thin for warmth obscures clear day.
Indigo Christmas lights show scrambled eggs.
Thumbprint shadows flit outside the diner.
Blistered murals brush over passing legs.
Register tape holds the rubbish liner.
Foil crumpled in velvet is the moon.
Pencil bicycles grant a mental boon.

The Isle Evacuates

Very sleepy to-day. I only had four hours sleep, I woke up at 5am and couldn't get back to sleep. I seem to recall a dream of something in the sky exploding into hundreds of giggling Irish college students. Probably this is related to my obnoxious neighbours from Dublin. I've learned that for some reason college aged young people from Ireland and Brazil come to San Diego every summer to party 24/7, they get two room apartments and have twenty people per apartment. Which explains why every time I see the door open someone I've never seen before comes out and it explains why young Irish men and women seem to just roam about the apartment complex all day and night. As hot as it is in here with just me I can only imagine it with twenty people.

This is not Innisfree. This will not make me hate the Irish. I'm pretty sure Yeats would be angry at not being able to sleep, too. I've complained and sometimes they try to be quieter which is the main reason I don't call the cops. They don't seem like they're trying to be rude, they just seem like inconsiderate children. I feel like I'm babysitting.

Anyway. I still think Doctor Who should go to Ireland one day. I only listened to one audio play this past week, the Eighth Doctor 2005 story Terror Firma, the first Eighth Doctor audio to be released after the première of the new television series. In other words, it was the first time Paul McGann played the Doctor knowing he wasn't the latest Doctor anymore. It could be my imagination but I thought I sensed a touch less enthusiasm from all involved, especially when the Doctor asks Davros, "How does one address an Emperor?" as though the Doctor wouldn't know, a particularly odd thing for him to say considering the Fifth Doctor met the Roman Emperor Constantine just two stories earlier.

And yet, Terror Firma isn't bad. Another story where the Doctor and his companions Charley and C'rizz are made to doubt their senses, this kind of story seems to work in audio format rather well. If nothing else, it gives characters more excuses to describe what they're seeing or think they're seeing. The story is pretty effectively creepy and sort of panicky as a lot of it concerns Davros losing his identity to another in his mind and the Doctor sympathising with him while C'rizz is meanwhile struggling not to give in to his murderous instincts. You find yourself caught up in examining the actors' voices for hints of motives.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
by W.B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

"Don't Forget the Songs that Made You Smile"

This seems to be a day for bidding farewell to great comedic talent with the death of George Cole two days ago and last night's final episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

The first movie I saw George Cole in was 1970's The Vampire Lovers where I completely failed to notice him. But he played a very minor role in that film which featured Ingrid Pitt, Jon Finch, and Peter Cushing in the leading roles. It was a rather misleadingly innocuous tip of a brilliantly funny iceberg--I next saw Cole in 1956's The Green Man which I saw for Cole's mentor Alastair Sim but it was Sim whose role was minor in that film and an unheralded Cole who thoroughly stole the show, pulling a trick only a few comedic actors manage. He could play an utterly unselfconscious fool, his face and voice conveying sincerity even as every beat had the perfect timing of a watch.

I saw several more of his films over the past couple years. I talked about Cole with my friend Martin Johnson last year who said Cole was an actor who could always play a different character yet somehow always remain himself. Whether he was the ringleader crook in Too Many Crooks or the innocent clerk in Laughter in Paradise, he was earnest, dedicated, but always just slightly "off" in that perfect way like Thelonious Monk hitting notes off the beat, knowing where to put them even when you can't hear that beat. So natural was Cole that he began as a remarkable child actor, a streetwise orphan with dishevelled black hair and a face that already conveyed an inner world seemingly without effort. That was Cottage to Let, a 1941 World War II comedy where Cole essentially played the lead at sixteen even though he was among many established comedic talents--including Alastair Sim. I have a hard time imagining not loving this film, particularly Cole in it who's so weird, vulnerable, and clever, unlike any other child performer I've seen.

It seems he was best known, though, as Flash Harry in the entertaining Saint Trinian's films and for a television series called Minder that began airing in the late 70s which I've never seen. I've seen so much George Cole and I have admired him and I still haven't seen him in one of his best known roles. I certainly look forward to it. You can read my reviews for George Cole films by clicking here.

Jon Stewart, meanwhile, is not dead, I should say, merely "taking a pause" in his conversation with the audience, as he put it last night. I started watching The Daily Show in high school when it was hosted by Craig Kilborn. I watched every episode but at that time it wasn't much more than an imitation of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, or rather an imitation of the sort of newsroom spoof Weekend Update used to be rather than the imitation of The Daily Show it is now. This reversal in comedic influence is attributable entirely to Jon Stewart who took over as host of The Daily Show more than sixteen years ago. At the time, I thought he was wrong for the job, and in a way I was right, and that's what made him work so well. The job, which as adequately filled by Kilborn, really wasn't as good as the one Stewart created in the same seat, a bastard child of calculated satirical comedy and a genuine, heartfelt conversation. He brought the legacy of Lenny Bruce into a different arena, he took unprecedented advantage of the obvious lies people are too petrified to acknowledge.

Like so many people, I first became interested in politics watching Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. Stewart has always been a little gentler than Maher which has at times allowed him to score more complete victories over his targets. Maher could never have gone onto Crossfire and gotten the show cancelled just by saying the show was hurting America. It may have been true the type of meaningless false equivalence indulged in by twenty four hour news networks was harmful regardless of who observed it but Stewart had earned a particular place of trust with everyone.

It's easy to push the churning clouds of cynicism out of your mind as you feel completely disconnected from the workings of powerful people and institutions but Stewart could shine a light sometimes that gave you the feeling that meaningful things could still be said and done. That it was okay to say the Emperor had no clothes. It's going to be a little harder to feel that way without those sad, plaintive, yet angry and restless eyes looking at us from the screen.

The Ghost of a Future Self

Now for a simple story of possession by time travellers, talking cats who watch porn, and orange juice. New anime series that are actually good are so rare these days, I'm intensely pleased whenever I find one that's halfway decent. I just finished the twelve episode series Punchline (ぱんちライン), an impressive pile of adorable yet sincere weirdness. The layering of concepts in just the first episode is a little dizzying--two masked assailants attempt to hijack a bus but they're thwarted by a superheroine named Strange Juice who wields a giant bendy straw as a weapon.

But she loses the struggle and the day is saved by a random boy in the bus named Yuta--Yuta is the spirit of a boy living in a girl's body making this the most unexpectedly trans-friendly anime I've seen. Unfortunately, Yuta is killed in the process.

His ghost, guided by the aforementioned cat, haunts Korai House where his four female friends live--Strange Juice's alter-ego, Mikatan, an MMORPG player named Ito, a medium named Rabura, and an android named Meika. There's an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and it's Yuta's mission to somehow warn the living and formulate a plan for stopping the asteroid all while avoiding the sight of panties, the excitement provoked by this unleashing energy that might destroy the world. So there's your metaphor for adolescence.

The show's stimulating series of surprise conceptual introductions keep going but don't stand in the way of real relationships between the characters. These become, as is so often the case in anime, a little too sentimental towards the end but this show is still more than worth watching. It's like a more popular version of Natsu no Arashi.

This morning I read "DRY BONES", the new story in Sirenia Digest, a very nice shapeshifter tale, maybe the most classical of the many shapeshifter stories Caitlin R. Kiernan, the author, has produced. It very nicely captures the frustration of a human mind caught in a bestial form, a bestial form caught in a human contrivance, also paired with the irony of a beast being exploited and punished for a lack of passion. Early in the story, there's mention of how the shapeshifter, Alma, stays with a human woman, Flannery, out of both necessity and love and I was reminded of a Smiths lyric, "Loud, loutish lover, treat her kindly though she needs you more than she loves you." It occurred to me that in Caitlin's work I can't remember two people pretending to love each other which made it interesting that the story goes on to be one about someone being punished for not pretending to love. I wonder if Caitlin despises the pretended love so much that she can't even give that trait to her characters.

Twitter Sonnet #777

Long even rows of seeds make weirder teeth.
Putting Evas in the can was Red Eyes.
Closing lambless roads over dripping heath.
Loops of lupines stumble for seven tries.
Short Dahlias pin the den on the lost.
Angel roads wander dreamless in Glasgow.
Half a pumpkin persists in snow at cost.
Seven put ghosts over the Jordan now.
Crow Valentines mean the month opposite.
November findings divest of the cloth.
Christ canidae consult the composite.
Ophelia satellites ravish sloth.
Bay leaves arranged merge with the paper fan.
Even careful claws cannot avoid Pan.

Who DOESN'T Want to Sleep in Dracula's Castle?

It's amazing how a thousand small steps can lead you to exactly where you didn't want to go. That's why 1966's Dracula: Prince of Darkness works so well, and a lot better than 1958's Dracula though the earlier film was based more closely on Bram Stoker's novel and both films were directed by Terence Fisher and released by Hammer. Prince of Darkness is a much more organic story, building from character development and an atmosphere of apprehension.

Both films also had screenplays by Jimmy Sangster but not having to force Stoker's story to accommodate the sensibilities of the contemporary filmmaking culture seems to have freed up Sangster's creative faculties in Prince of Darkness. Indeed, it's a much leaner tale following four English tourists in the German town of Karlsbad who, despite warnings, end up at one of Dracula's castles after one thing leads to another with subtle inevitability.

I'm reminded of one of my favourite quotes from Edgar Allan Poe, from his story "The Black Cat":

Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong's sake only—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.

It's not so much that the four travellers in Prince of Darkness do anything that is outright wrong but they do manage to talk themselves out of the sense of danger implied by their coachman's dire warnings, the warning from the friar at a local tavern who urges them not to go to Karlsbad despite the fact that he scoffs at the superstitions of the vampire-fearing villagers. Played by Andrew Keir, this clergyman, named Sandor, is the film's version of Van Helsing and is actually more effective than Cushing's take on the character in the 1958 film for seeming more complex, more flawed. Sandor speaks too roughly sometimes and seems to regret it, he overlooks things more easily, coming off as slightly more brutish and clumsy.

Barbara Shelley plays one of the tourists, Helen, whose instincts seem sharper than the other three's, and it's she who has to be convinced every step of the way by the rashest of the group, Charles (Francis Matthews), that it's silly not to go through Karlsbad, that it's ridiculous to stay the night in a shack when there's a perfectly nice castle nearby, or anyway let's take the conveniently appearing carriage to the nearest town.

A spoiler follows

In light of this, it's interesting that Shelley is turned into a vampire by Dracula. She's always set in opposition to the other characters, first as the spirit of wise restraint and then as a figure of diabolical menace. The image of her being held down by a group of men who drive the phallic stake through her heart is hard not to see as reflecting men feeling threatened by independent women.

End spoilers

That Dracula himself is a somewhat vague figure in the story contributes to the feeling of focus on female sexuality. This was Christopher Lee's first return to the role after the 1958 film and he has no lines whatsoever. Wikipedia quotes Lee as saying, "I didn’t speak in that picture. The reason was very simple. I read the script and saw the dialogue! I said to Hammer, if you think I’m going to say any of these lines, you’re very much mistaken." Jimmy Sangster, though, said, "Vampires don't chat. So I didn't write him any dialogue. Chris Lee has claimed that he refused to speak the lines he was given ... So you can take your pick as to why Christopher Lee didn't have any dialogue in the picture. Or you can take my word for it. I didn't write any." I would generally be inclined to believe Lee and yet a silent Dracula makes sense in the context of the movie's themes.

There are two items in the final act of the film that seem like they may have inspired Francis Ford Coppola in his adaptation of Dracula--Thorley Walters plays a lunatic named Ludwig who's kept locked up in Sandor's monastery where we watch him catching and eating flies. He bears a great deal of resemblance to Tom Waits' Renfield, a character from the book who was absent in the 1958 film, unusual considering he appears in nearly all other film adaptations. Prince of Darkness also features one of the most unambiguously sexual depictions of vampirism, Dracula cutting his breast open for a woman to drink from, a moment that was replicated almost exactly in Coppola's film.

The context is very different, though--Dracula is a more fully realised character in the Coppola film while in Prince of Darkness he is a mute, ambiguous figure of dirty sex, more of a manifestation of men's insecurities than of man.

One of the problems with Hammer vampire films is that the vampires seem like they have more weaknesses than strengths, this film relying on a particularly pathetic vampire weakness to running water. Not holy water, just water that's moving. Along with the vampires being completely overcome by anything even slightly resembling a cross, it does diminish the feeling of dread they inspire somewhat, but mostly Dracula: Prince of Darkness is a nice sequence of menace.

I Can be Only One

Hi, I'm the English major at San Diego State University. The one and only. Well, among transfer students for the class of 2017. Still, that's eight thousand students who were in the auditorium for orientation with me starting at 8am this morning and among them only I had decided to major in English.

The damned orientation ran from 8am to 5pm and, just as I suspected, nearly all of it was material that could have been covered on the web site or in the catalogue, particularly the hour that was spent by two spokespeople strongly advising students not to rape anyone.

They also provided advice on what to do "in the very likely scenario that a friend comes to you to report a sexual assault," which seemed a slightly roundabout way of saying, "A substantial number of you will be raped this semester." It's true, the statistics are terrible, the issue obviously needs addressing, but it goes to a new dimension of depressing when handled as part of the series of alternately zombified and teeth-grinding terrified speakers. Speakers whose main thoughts are either, "Let's get through this," or "Oh, God, please don't let me fuck this up," but whose words were mostly reiterations of, "Go Aztecs!" "Remember to always have a positive attitude!" "Don't rape anyone!" and "Don't smoke weed on campus!"

After this, at around noon, everyone filed into one of the big open areas for the barbecue that was included in the cost (just over a hundred dollars) of orientation. Since this fabulous meal consisted of hamburgers (apparently I was also the only vegetarian), I had to spend an extra five dollars in one of the three Starbucks on campus for a "edamame wrap" which wasn't bad but I was starving again two hours later.

We were then split up into sections that incorporated majors, I went with the ninety students who had majors under the "Arts and Letters" heading which included English, linguistics, social sciences, and others. Then the English students and linguistics students were culled and taken outside where the ten of us learned about various registration options and, finally, for a meeting with our academic advisor, my group was distilled to just English and English for Single Subject Teaching. There were just four of us and I was the only one who wasn't doing Single Subject Teaching.

The advisor brought us to a classroom and talked to us about how vitally important English is especially with the erosion of literacy and proper critical thinking by social media. He told us not to worry about the relatives who harangue or make fun of us at Thanksgiving dinner for choosing a major without a lucrative future, adding there were many fields opening where a BA in English was desirable. He said, yes, it's risky but the bottom line is we'll all be okay.

Well, I hope his hedged bet confidence is well founded. In any case, these could be a fun couple years if I can find a way of paying for the second one. Over four grand a semester, these classes! The website estimated it would cost me seven thousand, I wonder what kind of math makes that mean seventeen grand. Hopefully I can get some kind of paying job this fall. I sure wish that could be my comics though of course that's not likely though I have to say I am rather pleased with how my new comic is turning out and I received some very positive feedback to it at Comic Con. I intend to submit it to publishers once I've finished the last nine pages of the first twenty four though even in the off chance I get lucky enough someone is both interested in and able to publish it I'd still probably need to find another source of income. I'm hoping I can manage to work at a pace of three pages a week. Hopefully I won't be as exhausted at the end of every day as I am to-day.

I do love the look of the campus, the Spanish mission thing makes me think I'll be chasing Kim Novak up the bell tower.

The Constant Light

The True Detectives were under siege from the not so true rest of the world in last night's True Detective. I find myself somewhat inclined not to write about it until I see next week's but on the other hand there's a good chance next week's, by virtue of being the finale, won't have quite the air of expectation and impeding doom this one ended with. There may be doom, but it'll be all over with.

Spoilers after the screenshot.

We join Velcoro, Bezzerides, and Woodrugh holed up in a motel following their operation at the sex party. Immediately I was thinking of Twin Peaks again as the soundtrack was doing the eerie, possibly distorted strings thing I've only heard in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me before. But this episode was more Red Harvest than Twin Peaks. I love how a simple thing like getting hold of a few documents suddenly brings the whole world down on their shoulders, suddenly the detectives are fugitive criminals, except for Woodrugh, who's got plenty of his own problems.

I compared him to Percival early in the season but maybe he's more Lancelot, a skilled warrior with a tragic flaw. As one of the men who captures him says rather potently, they never would have caught him if he'd been honest with himself, his inability to acknowledge his homosexuality is his downfall. At times the story of a closeted gay man wasn't especially interesting, but in the context of a knight on a holy quest, it becomes more complex.

"I made a choice," says Velcoro. "A long time ago. I thought everything came from something else. But it came from there." He asks Bezzerides, "You had something like that too once, right?"

"That's not something I talk about," she replies, confirming Velcoro's suspicion and emphasising the importance of the "something" by the fact that she can only refer to it as something she doesn't talk about. Possibly it's related to the kidnapping she had flashbacks to in the previous episode and that she discusses with her father in this one. Maybe a vow that she would fight evil whatever the cost for the rest of her life. The thing that makes Velcoro, Bezzerides, and Woodrugh different, their principles, they can't be bought or led astray.

I was hoping Bezzerides and Velcoro having sex would be a little more wild but it was still satisfying. Again Velcoro, like Rust Cohle before him, affirms he is a bad man, an acknowledgement that he throws away social contracts and cultural guidelines in the pursuit of his moral purity. He beats up the father of the kid who bullied his son, he murders a man he thinks raped his wife. He knows that there's a problem with his tendency to apply solutions based on only his own imperfect perceptions but he's committed to it nonetheless and sometimes a man like him is necessary.

Of course, Bezzerides doesn't think he's a bad man because she's the same way, I loved the murkiness around the woman she "saved".

Twitter Sonnet #776

The church of Piece of Junk does no favours.
Abrams cannot quit the Brokeback Falcon.
Disney's dream does not come in old flavours.
But to Han Greedo's ghost did first beckon.
Sabre heels rebound for soundless breathing.
Indigo gauze catches neon updraught.
Vertical grills contain darkened teething.
Olive hunters will deliver the raft.
Froggy hookahs slurp alien spinach.
The winning clay creates arms for metal.
Inside the moistened fat something ribbits.
A TIE alights on an ast'roid petal.
Trandoshan sugar addicts lick dry lips.
An Imperial agent never tips.

One Man's Hole is Another Man's Edifice (for this title, you're welcome)

One tends to assume the impossible trip through a black hole would be pretty marvellous. Whether it takes one to another dimension populated by minotaurs or the bookshelf of one's daughter's bedroom, black holes in fiction always tend to deliver lucky travellers somewhere, or somewhen, weird, the phenomenon exciting the imaginations of many writers and filmmakers. In 1979's The Black Hole, Maximillian Schell is willing to throw away his career and his conscience for the chance of going through but this is really a movie about two robots voiced by Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens, an actually not atypical live action Disney film about cartoonish non-humans in a human world. Part unsuccessful Star Wars imitation, part kiddie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film has some mild, average Disney charm.

It's kind of fascinating how much this movie feels like Herbie or Pete's Dragon, not just because these movies had different writers and directors but also what would seem to be entirely difference premises. Somehow, the shadowy forces at Disney, throughout decades, ensured almost every single movie they released would in some way be exactly the same.

Maybe children are sensitive to subtler distinctions. I remember finding The Black Hole a bit spooky when I was a kid and I can appreciate even now some of its foreboding imagery, like the huge skeletal hull of Schell's ship which seems as though it may have influenced the look of 1997's Event Horizon, another black hole film.

The beginning of the film introduces the crew of an exploration ship called the Palomino, played by Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins, Joseph Bottoms, Ernest Borgnine, and Yvette Mimieux. With them is a helpful robot with big cartoon eyes named Vincent (McDowall). They come across Schell's seemingly abandoned ship and decide to risk taking a look inside where they find the living Dr. Rienhardt (Schell), who'd been given up for dead by Earth authorities, and his army of slick new robots. Also on board is "Old Bob" (Slim Pickens), a robot the same model as Vincent who looks like he's been picked on quite a bit by Reinhardt's creations.

Vincent and Bob prove they're both still better shots than the voiceless machines. The main theme of the film gradually becomes family pride--I guess you could even say racial pride--as Vincent and Bob's competition with the new robots turns into their struggle to keep their human friends alive when the new robots start trying to kill them.

In the end, there ends up being something pathetic about Pickens' robot, at the point of death, urging McDowell's to always remember, "We're the best!" I found myself wondering, what does it mean that these two fictional sentient entities are smarter, more skilled, and more compassionate than these other fictional beings? Divorced of any real life counterpart, Vincent and Bob exhibit in lonely, naked form human pride in belonging to a particular group. I suppose I could mock it, I have no real respect for pride, except it's so sad, probably because it's part of such a narrow perspective. I see Vincent and Bob as being slightly trapped, certainly immature. As the friendly cartoon characters they are there for the children, the principal audience, to identify with.

Action sequences reveal the film's attempt to conform to the Star Wars model, they fail for several reasons, chiefly because we never care very much about the human characters and because composer John Barry's attempt to emulate John Williams thoroughly misfires. As Robert Forster struggles to save Yvette Mimieux from killer robots, Barry's music sounds like an awards ceremony. Obviously the director wanted something like the fanfare in the prison break sequence in A New Hope but Barry crucially failed to match tempo to action and Forster and Mimieux's disconnected, concerned parent demeanour lacks the eager and nervous adrenaline of young Han and Luke.

What about the hole itself? The makers of the film knew they had to take us in but they probably would have been better off avoiding it. It's a montage of strange imagery like the end of 2001 but somewhat crudely combined with relatively conventional imagery of Christian Heaven and Hell, draining the moment of any inspiring mystery.

Shape of the Doctor

Despite Sylvester McCoy's recent statement that he doesn't think the Doctor ought to ever be female he's still one of my favourite Doctors. At least he objects on the grounds of what he sees as an essential element for the Doctor and Companion chemistry rather than saying Time Lords should be incapable of changing sex. For what it's worth. Here's the quote via Dark Horizons:

I'm a feminist and recognize there are still glass ceilings in place for many women, but where would we draw the line? A Mr. Marple instead of Miss Marple? A Tarzanette? I'm sorry, but no – Doctor Who is a male character, just like James Bond. If they changed it to be politically correct then it would ruin the dynamics between the doctor and the assistant, which is a popular part of the show.

Ugh, "draw the line"? Like it's an invasion? Now both he and Peter Davison are on record as being against a female Doctor while Tom Baker has wisely said he doesn't have convictions on the issue. I do hope Radagast changes his mind.

I did hear a good Seventh Doctor audio play this past week, 2005's Unregenerate! but I found the Fifth Doctor audio I listened to this week, The Council of Nicaea, more interesting. It's a shame the television series seems reluctant now to explore historical events. This one, written by Caroline Symcox, clearly came from someone who'd studied the history of Christianity but happily she didn't make Five or his companions Peri or Erimem into Christians. There's a funny moment where the Doctor's trying to impress upon Peri how important the Council is to the history of the religion, saying there's something quoted from it every time she goes to church. When she says she doesn't know what he means he says, "Ah, not an episcopalian?" "Baptist," she replies. "Well, my mother was." Peri's still supposed to be American although Nicola Bryant's American accent has been especially weak in the audios I've heard lately.

Fortunately, the story focuses more on the audio only companion Erimem, who makes an interesting point to the Doctor when he says that they can't change history in this case and she replies that the Council of Nicaea actually takes place in what is for her the future. Which presents an interesting tangle. You can sense the early genesis for the television series' "fixed point" concept.

I wish the audio play writers would stop writing the Fifth Doctor as so whiny. He's better when he's more Errol Flynn-ish, like in The Church and the Crown. A perfect opportunity was lost in The Game where he finds himself caught up in a deadly, futuristic version of football and he runs about ridiculously begging people not to fight. Somehow people have decided Five is a free roaming schoolmaster.