strange_complex | Entries tagged with gender

I have been wanting to explore more of Bram Stoker's fiction in order to get a sense of the wider context for Dracula, and chose this book to start with because it is set in Cruden Bay, where I went with the Dracula Society in Bram's footsteps in summer 2018 (LJ / DW). While we were there, local Stoker researcher Mike Shepherd showed us the places where he had stayed or which had inspired his fiction, with The Mystery of the Sea featuring fairly heavily because of its local setting. I read Mike's book, When Brave Men Shudder: the Scottish origins of Dracula about six months later (LJ / DW), which revealed that for Mike, The Mystery of the Sea was important not only for its engagement with the Cruden Bay region, but also for its insights into Stoker's spiritual outlook. So that intensified my desire to read it, and here we are.

( Similarities to and differences from Dracula )

( Authorial self-insertion )

( Bram's spirituality )

( Gender roles )

( Blatant racism )

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/658818.html

lady_lugosi1313 and I booked our tickets for the Northern Ballet's Dracula some six months before the actual performance, because we had both enjoyed it so much when they last did it in 2014 (LJ / DW).

( Ballet as a medium for Dracula )

( Eroticism and Dracula as a liberator )

( Similarities and differences compared to last time )

( The ending )

Now that I have seen this version of Dracula for a second time, it's confirmed the provisional opinion I had of it beforehand - that it is the second best adaptation of Dracula I've ever seen, with only Hammer's cycle of Dracula films above it. As regular readers will realise, I have seen a lot of Dracula adaptations, and Hammer's will always remain the ultimate interpretations to me - so that's the highest praise I can possibly give. This time, the performance we saw was filmed and transmitted live to various cinemas around the country, and I am really hope that also means it might be made available on DVD at some point, as I would love so much to be able to watch it again. And, since the casts changed from performance to performance during its run, I will record here that ours was as follows:

Dracula: Javier Torres
Old Dracula: Riku Ito
Mina: Abigail Prudames
Lucy: Antoinette Brooks-Daw
Jonathan: Lorenzo Trossello
Renfield: Kevin Poeung
Dr Van Helsing: Ashley Dixon
Dr Seward: Joseph Taylor
Arthur: Matthew Koon
The Brides: Rachael Gillespie, Sarah Chun and Minju Kang

Well done and thank you so much to all of them!

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/649699.html

This novel was written by two sisters, of whom the elder, Emily Gerard, was a Polish cavalry officer's wife and spent time living in the Transylvanian Romanian towns of Sibiu and Brașov where he was stationed. It's well known in Dracula circles that she used that time to research an article and book on Transylvania which were used in turn by Bram Stoker in the course of his research for Dracula:

1885: 'Transylvanian Superstitions' in The Nineteenth Century 8: p. 128-144.
1888: The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania, New York: Harper.

But her experiences also clearly informed this novel, which itself also relates closely to Dracula. The connection is flagged up explicitly in the one and only newspaper interview which Bram ever gave about his best-selling novel, conducted by one Jane Stoddard, which begins like this:

One of the most interesting and exciting of recent novels is Mr. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” It deals with the ancient mediaeval vampire legend, and in no English work of fiction has this legend been so brilliantly treated. The scene is laid partly in Transylvania and partly in England. The first fifty-four pages, which give the journal of Jonathan Harker after leaving Vienna until he makes up his mind to escape from Castle Dracula, are in their weird power altogether unrivalled in recent fiction. The only book which to my knowledge at all compares with them is “The Waters of Hercules,” by E.D. Gerard, which also treats of a wild and little known portion of Eastern Europe. Without revealing the plot of the story, I may say that Jonathan Harker, whose diary first introduces the vampire Count, is a young solicitor sent by his employer to Castle Dracula to arrange for the purchase of a house and estate in England.

It's important to notice here that Stoddard isn't saying that Bram's novel wholly resembles the Gerards' - only that theirs is the only other novel she can think of which, like the first 54 pages of his, is set in Eastern Europe. But, recognising the surname from the publications on Transylvania, that was enough to make me look out the novel, and see just what Stoddard meant about its resemblance to the opening chapters of Dracula. None of the libraries I have easy access to had a print copy, and it seems long ago to have gone out of print so that there wasn't a cheap second-hand paperback or Kindle copy available either, but it is on the Internet Archive, and after a bit of experimentation I discovered that downloading the pdf version to my tablet resulted in a readable text which I could take to bed with me. So away I went.

It's a Victorian novel written by women for women, so it isn't a great surprise that the main subject-matter of the book is the question of who our main character, Gretchen, will marry. There are multiple contenders in the field - the sensible, middle-aged, middle-income lawyer Dr. Komers, the wealthy, aristocratic and childishly selfish Baron Tolnay, and (very much lagging behind the field and utterly repulsive to Gretchen) the obsessive Dr. Kokovics. A lot of time is spent establishing their (and multiple other) characters, at first in Gretchen's German home-town and then in the valley of the Waters of Hercules, to which the action shifts from the 7th of the novel's 53 chapters. Gretchen herself is bright, perceptive, and (as we are repeatedly told) sensible, but she begins the novel rather obsessed with the idea of marrying into wealth. Needless to say, she will learn over the course of it that there are other things more important, and that the lawyer has hidden depths which weren't initially apparent on his sensible-to-the-point-of-dullness surface. The style was pleasantly easy to read. The Gerards like to play with our expectations, setting up a scene from one point of view and then switching to another which reveals something different. They are good at establishing settings and moods, and occasionally quite happy to devote a whole chapter to what might seem like a mere comic distraction (such as the various fishing methods espoused by different visitors to the Hercules Valley), but which of course reveals a great deal about character in the process.

The titular and main setting for the story is a very real valley and spa town in what is now part of western Romania, but belonged to Hungary at the time when the novel is set. It contains healing baths and a statue of Hercules, who is supposed to have stopped in the valley to bathe and rest. But much of the action and drama of the novel is in fact driven by another (as far as I can tell) fictional location in the mountains somewhere above the valley: Gaura Dracului, a yawning and apparently bottomless chasm with many a legend attached to it, which wanderers through the forest come upon almost before they have realised it is there, and sometimes stumble and fall into as a result. Obviously, the name of this geological feature is yet another of the likely pointers which nudged Bram Stoker towards settling on the name 'Dracula' for his aristocratic vampire, and indeed it may also lie somewhere behind references to 'deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither' of which Van Helsing speaks in Dracula's Transylvania. In this novel, the name of the chasm has nothing to do with the Dracula family, and simply means ‘The Devil’s Hole’ - actually a very common name for deep caves and pools all over the world (see here for just a few largely English-language versions). But that is quite enough to underpin a number of Gothic horror tropes which run throughout the novel alongside its main romance story.

As the action shifts into the Hercules Valley, the Gerards work hard to establish the right kind of atmosphere of lingering paganism and local superstition for the legends of Gaura Dracului to work on their characters and within their plot - just, of course, as Stoker does on Jonathan Harker's journey into Transylvania. Indeed, Gretchen and her family's journey to the valley adheres to the same basic Gothic model of the journey into a strange and dangerous land as Harker's. Once they get to the valley, we hear a lot about how paganism has survived there, overseen by the statue of Hercules whom the locals treat as though he were still a literal god, and we are treated to some ripe stereotypes of the superstitious Romanian peasant that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has read Dracula. Indeed, when Gretchen asks some local goatherds where she can find Gaura Dracului, they react with terror and cross themselves. Gradually, we learn that the god of the valley has sworn that the hole must have human blood once a century, which to me rang bells of Polidori's The Vampyre, in which Lord Ruthven must have it once a year. Indeed, a prologue set in the time of Trajan establishes that this has been happening since the Roman period. That was particularly interesting to me in light of the paper I gave on Dracula and Classical antiquity at the Brașov conference, because it means the Gerards were here doing one of the very same things I had argued Stoker was doing in Dracula - rooting his menace in the ancient, pagan past as a way of emphasising how long and deeply-established it is, and of capitalising on the blurry line between pagan gods and demons in the western Christian tradition. Meanwhile, we also hear that Gaura Dracului contains secret hidden hoards of Turkish, Russian and many other coins, just like the dusty corners of Dracula's castle, and all sorts of Gothic vocabulary is used to describe it. It is an open grave, haunted and full of ghosts; it has fanged jaws like a monster; Gretchen feels when lost in the forest around it as though the bats and moths flitting about her are phantoms; and a climactic fire-storm which rages through that same forest in the final chapters of the book contains descriptions of trees writhing in agony and an army of fire-demons rampaging through them.

So, yes, it definitely has more than a touch of the Gothic to it, and does resemble Dracula in more than the purely geographical matter of being set in Eastern Europe. I don't think we have any proof that Stoker read it, while since we do have proof that he read the article and book on Transylvania by Emily Gerard which I've mentioned above, it's quite possible that a lot of what appear to be connections between this novel and Dracula were actually ideas he took from those. But, having read it, I could definitely believe that he had done so too. I think one of my little projects for the next year might be to read up a bit more on the Gerards, including reading Emily's work on Transylvania and learning a bit more about their biography, so that I can understand their influence on Dracula more fully. It might well make a decent paper for another Dracula conference at some stage.

Meanwhile, there were other themes in the novel I found interesting in their own right, regardless of any connection to Dracula. One, inevitably, was its assumptions about and attitudes to gender. It's no surprise that Gretchen's main concern is marriage, or that this is couched primarily in terms of how she can best marry her way to a comfortable lifestyle, but I found it interesting that one of the plans she hatches over the course of the novel is to find the treasures supposedly hidden in Gaura Dracului, on the grounds that if she finds her own fortune she can marry whoever she likes. This is hardly a feminist parable, of course, since she still clearly doesn't have the option to lead a genuinely self-sufficient working life, but the very idea is still one of the ways in which Gretchen is cast as a radical, modern thinker, and she feels she needs to hide it like a guilty secret from her more traditionally-feminine Italian friend, Belita. I was also struck by two separate scenes in which Gretchen is cornered very horribly by entitled suitors, and which read very much like the sort of horror stories women have to relate all too often on Facebook and Twitter about their experiences with creepy men today. In one, she is trapped in a gorge with a sheer drop at the end of it by Dr. Kokovics as dusk is falling, and her terror as he approaches, coupled with his dismissal of her terror, together made it very clear (without ever spelling it out) that her basic fear was of being sexually assaulted. In the other, Baron Tolnay gets her alone in dark forest, demands her love on the basis that he has proved his to her by committing a terrible crime, and tells her that him doing so was all her fault for leading him on - which she internalises and believes. Between the two they very much demonstrated how much the novel acted in the Victorian period as a forum for women to share such experiences under the cloak of fiction.

Also striking was the carefully-ranked hierarchy of national stereotypes into which all of the characters are slotted, and which belong very much to the fundamentally racist thinking of the day. Strong east-west and north-south fault-lines are in evidence, so that the Romanians are swarthy, Oriental, lazy, stupid, natural liars and superstitious, the Hungarians are more competent but ultimately not to be trusted, and the Germans (our point-of-view characters) are blond, noble, intelligent and morally sound. Gretchen's Italian friend is warm and effusive but thinks of little other than fashion and status; the novel's one English character, Mr. Howard, is reserved and hidebound by social etiquette, but does warm up and come round to Gretchen and her family over the course of the story; and a reference to hook-nosed Jews pops up in the context of a discussion about debts. All of this, too, can be found in Stoker's Dracula, of course, though there's no need to believe he got it from here. It is the widely-accepted thinking of the day, occurring unsurprisingly in both novels. That's Victorian literature for you. If you can read round it, though, and like the sound of pagan superstitions, yawning chasms and a German girl's marriage prospects, I would on the whole very much recommend this one.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/627322.html

This book was my response to the 'Doesn't belong to me' prompt when I did the book a day meme back in June. I hadn't actually read it yet at that point, but had spotted it on my Dad's bookshelves, and felt it deserved to be read in this year of all years. The cover looks like this, and was at once promising and off-putting:

I mean, on the one hand that's a great example of a hand-painted pulp SF cover; but on the other in my experience novels with that sort of cover tend in practice towards jet-packs and misogyny. Thankfully, now that I've read it, I can confirm that the latter expectation was entirely unfair. This is actually ( a very thoughtful vision of what the future might look like from the standpoint of 1957 ) All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by this book, not to mention somehow comforted to find that as badly as we seem to be fucking things up here in the early 21st century, someone in the 1950s imagined nothing very different and possibly something worse. Glad not to have disappointed too badly...

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/624186.html

I saw this at the Cottage Road cinema last week with the lovely

lady_lugosi1313. As it is only 66 minutes long, and the Cottage Road crew like to make a proper night out of their classic screenings, it was preceded by the 45-minute comedy short A Home of Your Own (1964), dir. Jay Lewis, which is about the various happenings and antics on a building site as a new housing development is being built. It doesn't have any dialogue as such, although characters do sigh, mutter, tut, etc., so the focus is all on slap-stick and visual gags such as somebody walking straight across a bed of concrete which another guy has just finished smoothing out, but it was lots of fun and we enjoyed seeing it. Also very good for spotting lots of people you recognise from more famous contexts, like Ronnie Barker, Richard Briers, Peter Butterworth (of Carry On fame) and Bernard Cribbins.

After a short intermission complete with ice-cream tray, it was time for the main feature: one of Mae West's earliest screen roles, adapted from a Broadway play which she had written herself. Obviously Mae West is amazing, and nothing much I say could do justice to that, or cast any additional light on her awesomeness, so we will take it as read. But an evening of her wicked drawl, sassy lines and slinky frocks is certainly a delight. Indeed, in addition to her own no-nonsense, sexually-liberated, self-directed central character, Lou, the story features multiple well-defined women and offers up plenty of scenes of just them speaking to one another, which definitely makes it stand out from amongst the standard fare of the day. One of them is a black woman, who although in a typically-subservient role as Lou's maid does get plenty of her own dialogue and actively contributes to Lou's various schemes and machinations. Wikipedia tells me that this character was specifically and deliberately brought on board by West as a way of seeking to combat racism in the entertainment industry, which reflects well on her.

It's a gritty dog-eat-dog world that Lou inhabits, with at least one absolutely psychotic former lover in jail and dodgy deals going on all around her, and she is certainly no angel. One plot-line sees her colluding in having a girl who came into the bar where she works as a singer to attempt suicide shipped off into what we're presumably supposed to understand is prostitution on the Barbary Coast. But the overall thrust of the piece is that men constantly do women wrong, like this girl who has been strung along by a man whom she didn't know was married, and that it is about damn time women got their own back. There is so much double-dealing and so many personal rivalries that I found the plot a bit confusing at the end because I couldn't remember what everyone's agenda was. But anyway, it all ends up happily for Lou, who gets the one man who might make an honest woman out of her, and indeed for the girl who had attempted suicide, as she has the whole ring of traffickers busted and arrested. A fantastic evening and I hope not the last of Mae West's films I'll get the chance to see on the big screen.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/610201.html

Starburst magazine ran a film festival in late August 2016, which I went to with friends and wrote up on my 'starburstff' tag (LJ / DW). It was badly advertised and organised, but actually the films, the guests and the friends I went with were all great, so we had a brilliant time - something I particularly needed back then, as it was still less than two months after my Mum had died. They attempted to put another one on about a year later, but I guess got even lower take-up than the previous year, so that it ended up being cancelled. This time, though, they hit upon the cunning ruse of giving away the tickets for free, which of course meant people snapped them up and it went ahead this time. (Clearly their business model does not really depend on box-office takings.) Andrew,

Extinction65mya,

lady_lugosi1313,

planet_andy and I went along and enjoyed a mixture of brand new and vintage films and the delights of the local food outlets, while periodically boggling out of the windows at the snow swirling upwards between the towers which make up most of Manchester's Media City area, and wondering nervously how we were going to get home. Thankfully, all trams and trains were running smoothly today in spite of the weather, which is more than I can say for Friday when I travelled over. So I'm now safe and warm on the sofa, and able to write up what I saw:

6. The Gatehouse (2016), dir. Martin Gooch

This is basically the story of a ten-year-old girl called Eternity who likes digging in the woods. Eternity is the kind of girl who, when she digs up what looks like an eighteenth-century lady's pistol buried in a tin box, steals a book on guns from the library by stuffing it under her coat (but does give the girl on the desk a cheese sandwich on the way out), finds out what she needs to restore it to working order, talks her Dad into taking her to the hardware store and tells the man working there that it's none of his business when he queries what on earth she wants all this stuff for anyway. And not only is she the central character, but the motifs and logic of the story are those of an imaginative, strong-minded ten-year-old girl too, involving magical stones, a horned god roving the woods turning people into trees, a secret chamber under her house, people who appear to have been shot dead turning out to be fine after all (possibly the blood that looked like jam really was jam?), and her playing a central role in helping the horned god to sort everything out. In fact, it’s a lot like the sort of story my six-year-old niece Eloise tells me when we play with her story-cubes. And while a film matching that description could be dreadful, this one really wasn’t, because all of the characters were so believably written and played (very much including Scarlett Rayner as Eternity, in what I see was her first film role), the horned god was shot just on the right side of obliquely enough to keep him mysterious and stop him looking too much like a guy in a suit, and actually the whole thing was very impressively framed and edited and shot, making very good use of some nice British countryside.

The trailer is a bit misleading, because both Eternity and her Dad are troubled by post-traumatic bad dreams following the death of her mother (in a highly-implausible boating accident which also comes across like the kind of story dreamt up by a ten-year-old), and a lot of the soft shocks which the trailer chooses to foreground are actually those dreams rather than the ‘real’ (insofar as it tries to be anything of the sort) main story. Meanwhile, it entirely misses delights like local teenagers Poppy and Daisy’s drunken walk home from the pub, Poppy's folk-Gothic Lithuanian-accented tarot-reading friend, or Eternity’s Dad teaching her to call up (imaginary) Roman legionaries to help see off the school bullies. Actually the Romans were bumping about quite a lot in this story, not only as Eternity’s personal bodyguard but also as the people who supposedly first built a structure on the site of the gatehouse which she and her Dad now live in. For a moment at the end, Eternity called up her imaginary legionaries to protect her against the horned god, and it looked like we might actually get a stand-off between the might of ancient Rome and the spirits of the British woodlands, which I would have been very interested in. It was not to be, but a great film nevertheless, and in my view the best of the new productions I saw during the festival.

7. Black Site (2018), dir. Tom Paton

The festival schedule had a different film by the same director lined up in this slot, but as the editing on this one had just been completed this week, he decided to treat us to a test screening of the new piece instead. I was a little bit sad about this, as the scheduled film (Redwood) was about vampires in the woods, but then again this one was very solid and it's always exciting to see something absolutely brand new which hasn't reached the general public yet - so I didn't mind too much in the end.

Black Site draws on Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, but the format of the film is 'trapped in an enclosed space with something bad', as per (for example) The Thing or (as

Extinction65mya pointed out) Die Hard. The enclosed space in question is the Artemis complex, an underground military facility used to deport Elder Gods who have returned in weakened form to our universe (I think - I'm not sure I fully followed that bit). Once they have been tracked down by field agents and ‘bound’ into human bodies, they are brought to the Artemis complex for deportation back to hell - a complex process which requires a deportation agent to recite a text which he has memorised. Most of the time, though, it’s a quiet place run on a skeleton staff, which only comes into action when a deportation candidate is brought in. As as result, it's not as secure or well-maintained as it should be, so between that and the complexity of the deportation process, there is plenty of scope for things to go wrong.

Our main character is Ren Reid, who saw her parents killed by the Elder God Erebus as a child, and is now working at the Artemis complex, desperately trying to qualify as a field agent and get out of there, but constantly failing her psych test because of ongoing trauma from her childhood experience. Then one day Erebus himself is brought in for deportation, along with the deportation agent (a rather clueless public-school type) and closely pursued by a group of cultists who want Erebus back so that they can carry on drinking the blood of the succession of human vessels they had been trapping him in before the field agents bust in and took him from them. Chaos ensures, and most of the film then consists of Ren fighting her way through the cultists while protecting the clueless deportation agent, so that she can get him to Erebus at the centre of the complex and complete the deportation.

It was a well-paced, well-crafted story making excellent use of a well-chosen location. I particularly enjoyed the confrontation with Erebus at the end, which proved not to be fighty at all (as he was held safely captive behind an Electronic Light Field - ELF, geddit?), but instead focused on dialogue in which he told the humans just how insignificant they appeared from his out-of-time perspective, and eventually revealed that he had set the whole thing up from the beginning because he wanted to be deported anyway in order to be reunited with his love, Nyx, deported 20 years earlier. (So it was only the cultists getting in the way of the Artemis complex's normal procedures after all.) I am a real sucker for supernatural beings whose power is such that they are simultaneously dangerous to humans and yet also possessed of insight and perspective we can only dream of (it's a lot of what I also like about vampires), so this ticked my boxes in a big way - and all the more so for tagging it onto real-world ancient Greek mythology.

It was also good on female representation. Besides Ren, it also features two other well-defined female characters who are far from constrained by gender roles - her savvy, hard-headed boss and the samurai-trained leader of the cultists. A conversation between Ren and the boss about her career prospects secures a Bechel pass, while we all enjoyed a trope-aware scene at the end in which the deportation agent tried to suggest to Ren that as the 'hero' of the hour, he should get the girl, and she snorted and told him it was never going to happen. It didn't do so well on race, though. It gave Ren a black friend / mentor, but of the four main good human characters (along with Ren, her boss and the deportation agent), he was the only one not to survive the film, and the way this played out was definitely tropey - heroically trying to protect others and then entirely focused on motivating Ren to carry on as he dies. We were also under-whelmed by the American accents which the actually mainly British cast had been asked to adopt. On the whole, though, jolly good and a worthy follow-up to The Gatehouse.

8. The House of Screaming Death (2017), dir. Alex Bourne, Troy Dennison, Rebecca Harris-Smith, David Hastings and Kaushy Patel

This, by contrast, was just terrible! It was meant to be an homage to the great British horror films of the 1950s-'70s, and had adopted in particular the Amicus speciality of the portmanteau format. The framing narrative consisted of Ian McNeice, sitting down to tell an audience whom at first we couldn't see some stories from the bloody history of 'Bray Manor'. You'd think you couldn't go too far wrong with something that had Ian McNeice in it, and the trailer had conveyed a generally promising impression. It's also worth saying that the films of Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and the like were all low-budget and contain much which is rough around the edges. What they do offer, though, is decent acting, characters, stories, period settings, direction and dialogue - which this did not.

Would you, for example, enter the pub in a village where you are staying, and, on the back of having been (rather improbably) told earlier by the local priest that several local people had disappeared about a year ago, announce at the top of your voice to the entire assembled company, without any preludes or introductions, that you wished to express your sympathies for their recent losses? No? Well, a character in this film did. He also turned up in the village without a hat, stood at the bar in shirt-sleeves with no cuff-links, said 'OK' and ran past visibly-modern radiators, even though it was all supposed to be set in 1888. Meanwhile, another story featured a character explaining how she had once murdered someone using a stake from a fence in the process of construction while we saw a flash-back of the action, except that in the flash-back she was very clearly wielding a garden fork, not a fence-stake. Plus all of them relied heavily on scenes of people standing still and delivering exposition to one another, while we had got a good twenty minutes into the film before a single woman spoke.

At the very end the framing story offered the chance to excuse the utterly inept period detailing at least, since it turned out that all of the main characters from the stories were gathered together in one time and place as the audience listening to Ian McNeice's narration, after which he proceeded to murder them all. So maybe they had never 'really' inhabited the various time-periods when their stories were supposed to be set at all, and were actually just the modern victims of a modern serial-killer. But that is to cut the film a lot of generosity for something which it gave no convincing sign of having thought through in advance, and I personally didn't have any such generosity left to give after everything we'd sat through for the previous two hours. Not actually the worst film I've ever seen, but very, very disappointing.

9. Tremors (1990), dir. Ron Underwood

Our final two films were oldies, so I won't bother with plot précis. I've only seen Tremors the once before, on TV when baby-sitting around the age of 15 or so. I wasn't expecting much from it, but I remember getting sucked into its silly fun at the time, and can very much see why now. For what is essentially a wild west film (but with worms instead of armed bandits), it's not bad for diversity either. Finn Carter as the geologist, Rhonda, has a purpose and agency of her own, isn’t overtly sexualised, contributes plenty of good ideas throughout and indeed is seen by the two main male cowboy characters as an authoritative source of information. Sure, Kevin Bacon's character does ‘win’ her at the end (in exactly the trope parodied in Black Site), but there's a knowingness about it even here in the way he doesn't do it in self-assured alpha-male fashion, but is clearly pretty nervous and has to be chivvied along by his friend. In the racial diversity stakes, we have a Chinese store owner who dies, but a Mexican character survives, and like everyone else in the cast gets to make his own contribution to the rescue effort by having the idea to set a tractor running to distract the worms, and the bravery and physical skills to do it. All in all, it's one of those films which actually just ends up reminding you how little progress we've generally made on diversity in film almost thirty years later (for all that the past few years have served up some stand-out exceptions). Probably my favourite moment of this viewing was sitting next to

Extinction65mya, who is a palaeontologist, when Rhonda observed that there are no fossils of anything like the worms threatening the town, and that therefore they must 'pre-date the fossil record'. She head-desked. I also kept thinking Kevin Bacon would end up riding one of the worms, but I guess I was getting that mixed up with Dune. His cliff-face grand finale defeat was great anyway.

10. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), dir. Ed Wood

Another very special genre classic, which I last saw a little more recently that Tremors, but only by about three or four years. As

Extinction65mya observed, you've had one hell of a film-watching day when (thanks to The House of Screaming Death), this is definitively not the worst film you've seen. But of course the reason everyone loves it is the surreal charm of its particular form of ineptness, underpinned by a sort of cheerful exuberance which somehow carries you along for the ride. We howled with laughter throughout, in a fond and appreciative way. My only real disappointment is how little Vampira really gets to do in it, and I'm now keen to watch some of the other films which Maila Nurmi played in her Vampira persona, so that I can enjoy more of her obvious excellence.

With that, we called it a day, and

lady_lugosi1313,

planet_andy headed off for a terrifying white-out drive along the M62, while Andrew,

Extinction65mya and I merely walked across the square for dinner at Prezzo. Here's hoping we're all back in Manchester before long for more from the Starburst crew - but ideally without the snow!

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Last October, Andrew Hickey wrote an excellent blog post to mark the 25th anniversary of the broadcast of Ghostwatch (1992), a BBC production with a rather special place in cult TV history. I have always wanted to watch it, and his post forcefully reminded me why, as well as revealing that it is now available on a DVD two-set along with The Stone Tape (1972), which I have also always wanted to watch. I therefore put them on my Christmas wish-list, and Santa (acting through the medium of my sister) kindly obliged. Arguably, neither is really a 'film' - they are both one-and-a-half hour long scripted BBC TV dramas, which I guess have been packaged together as they both involve people investigating paranormal phenomena. But now that I no longer have a back-log of some twenty actual films to write up, I can expand the limits of what belongs on this tag a little. And besides, I want to write about them anyway.

1. The Stone Tape (1972), dir. Peter Sasdy

I should have loved this. After all, it was made in the early seventies, directed by a man who regularly worked for Hammer (e.g. he directed Taste the Blood of Dracula), and concerns the supernatural with what turns out to be a significantly folk-horrorish vibe. If I'd watched it at the right time in my life, I probably would have loved it. The fact that I didn't I think stems partly from the very fact that it has been elevated to such cult-classic status over the year, and partly from the fact that I now live in a world that allows me to be alert to gender disparities - but many of the people who have raved about it either didn't, or do and don't care. This effect is very neatly captured in the 'Cultural significance' section of its Wikipedia page, where the final paragraph quotes six people in a row saying how wonderful it is... but all six of them are men.

The result was that I already knew the core story-line before I watched it - in essence, that what appear to be ghosts haunting a cellar turn out to be memories written into its stones, and extending far back before the construction of the cellar to the prehistoric stone-beds they were quarried from. Knowing this meant I didn't have the capacity to be wowed by that revelation. It was already a given for me. But I certainly did have the capacity to notice that there is only really one significant female character in the story - Jill Greeley, played by Jane Asher - and that her basic role in the story is to be sensitive to and scared by the ghosts. She is part of a team of scientists who have been sent to an old country house to conduct intensive research into potential new sound recording methods, and in fact her framing within that team is an artefact of the historical period during which men did the 'proper science' and women programmed the computers. She is literally introduced at one point as "Jill who programs our computer". But the men around her repeatedly dismiss her concerns, block her investigations and eventually drive her into a situation where she ends up dying, horribly, alone in the haunted cellar.

The script doesn't entirely celebrate this behaviour - we're clearly invited to think that at least some of the men are assholes, and we're also given enough material to see that Jill is actually very bright and generally correct in her insights, so that if the men had listened to her earlier things might have turned out a lot better. But still, the positioning of her as the 'sensitive one' alone is enough to make the story cringeworthy and alienating for a twenty-first century female viewer, and the notion of memories being recorded into stone is nothing like enough to compensate for that. I just can't see myself feeling tempted to watch it again.

[I watched another film in between these two which I will return to, but am skipping it for now for the sake of reviewing both parts of the DVD set as it is now packaged.]

3. Ghostwatch (1992), dir. Lesley Manning

Thankfully, I liked Ghostwatch a lot better. The Wikipedia page describes it as a 'reality–horror/mockumentary television film' and provides lots of useful production context, while Andrew's excellent review also explains the concept, gives some good examples of how it works, and points out the crucial importance (way beyond the entertainment value of a Halloween ghost spoof) of the fact that it set out to encourage people to critically evaluate what they see on TV.

I watched it with

lady_lugosi1313, and we found ourselves fascinated by the way the premise had been worked through, as well as for the insights it gave into early '90s culture. It was noticeable that the family at the centre of the hauntings consists of a single mother and her two children, and that this appears to have been done specifically because it would be easy for the audience to believe that the occupants of such a 'broken home' might be more than usually sensitive to, or even a target for, supernatural horrors. So something a little bit like the hypersensitive Jill Greeley in The Stone Tape was still going on here - but to nothing like the same cringeworthy extent, and with much more to compensate for it. There was even a female academic being interviewed 'live' in the studio!

Though Andrew is right that the whole production is incredibly cleverly put together, it did give itself away at a very early stage when what was labelled as 'university footage' from a bedroom in the haunted house panned and zoomed towards the action as soon as something started happening. A fixed CCTV camera wouldn't do that, and a fixed CCTV camera is what you would use if you were trying to get an objective record of what was happening in the room without a) introducing human bias or b) requiring 24-hour human monitoring. So that broke our suspension of disbelief by revealing the hand of a director striving to deliver a dramatic experience. Other revealing flaws included talking to somebody 'live in New York' from the studio with absolutely no delay on the line, and the fact that all of the supposedly 'ordinary' people in it, including various children, people gathered in the street to watch the 'documentary' being filmed and callers phoning into the studio, spoke clearly, articulately and concisely rather than being shy, mumbling, or going on about trivial details for ages - as real people actually do when they find themselves on TV.

Other than that, though, there was very little to give it away as anything other than an absolutely genuine chunk of early '90s reality television, complete with all the presenters you would expect to see fronting it. I was just sorry that in practice, we were watching it a little over 25 years later, and thus couldn't fully see how it would have looked alongside the regular TV productions of the day. The lighting, camera techniques, and reporting techniques looked different from what we see on comparable news and reality programmes now, but I'm no longer quite able to say how well they matched those of 1992 - though my guess is 'very well indeed'.

As for the story, it is a fairly simple 'horrible thing happened here once and hasn't been laid to rest' ghost story, but that is absolutely right for what is purporting to be a documentary about a real haunting case. The story itself should be quite tropish and formulaic, precisely to underpin the sense of realism, while the clever stuff lies instead (as Andrew has shown) in the presentation and the way it makes you think about what you are seeing. We did think it got a bit silly at the end, as the 'ghost' escaped from the ordinary suburban house where it had first manifested and began making lights blow out and cameras roll across the floor in the studio from which Michael Parkinson had been charismatically interviewing guests throughout. I thought a much better line to follow here would have been to capitalise on the psychology of Mike Smith, stuck in the studio, seeing his wife Sarah Greene apparently in grave danger in the house. This opportunity isn't completely missed - we do see Smith getting a bit distracted from his designated task of monitoring the studio phone-lines towards the end of the show. But if the events he's seeing from the house are real, he should be absolutely flipping his lid, shouting at the studio team, demanding people at the filming location go in after his wife, and generally going utterly to pieces out of a combination of fear and impotence. That could have been a lot more psychologically compelling, and indeed convincing, than the OTT 'everything going crazy' we actually got at the end.

Still, though, a very impressive piece which I felt deserved its place in cult TV history. I only wish I'd felt the same about The Stone Tape.

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A little over two years ago, I went to a staged reading of an unproduced Hammer script held at De Montfort University's Cinema And Television History (CATH) Research Centre entitled The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula (LJ / DW), as part of the Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham. This was essentially the same deal – a line-up of actors giving a live reading of a script based on unproduced material from the Hammer archives as part of the 2017 festival. In this case, though, there had never been a fully-developed original script. Instead, what the archive had to offer was a 13-page story treatment put together in 1970 by David Allen, but never taken any further.

For the purposes of the festival, Steven Shiel and the Mayhem team had worked that story treatment up into a full script, consciously aiming as they did so for something in keeping with the kind of film Hammer would have produced at that time, if they had developed this one for release. As for the Dracula reading I went to, they had also put together a nice set of opening credits, various evocative stills to project onto a cinema screen behind the actors during the reading, and some sound effects. The actors themselves had also broadly dressed correctly for their parts, without looking too much like something out of a fancy-dress shop, and occasionally did some body language or actions to match what was going on in the script – for example, removing braces or undoing shirt buttons when hot.

Again, as for Unquenchable Thirst, I came equipped with a notepad and basically wrote continuously throughout the production to capture an outline of what was going on, because I knew the production was a one-off and that there was no guarantee I would be able to experience the story again. I'll provide a ( brief plot outline )

Once again, as for Unquenchable Thirst it was a real thrill to experience this story fresh on its first telling, with no idea at all what would come next. Hammer films generally are so thoroughly discussed nowadays that if you are at all interested in them, and thus read relevant books and discussion forums, it is more or less impossible to go into any of their films without a bunch of preconceptions and expectations. So one of the biggest gifts the Mayhem team are giving us is the ability to escape that, and experience (would-be) Hammer films raw for the first time. They and the acting cast certainly all did a great job of bringing this one to life for us, and I know I was captivated throughout. It's nice and pacy, and has also sorts of lovely little character moments and comic sequences to offer (which I've largely omitted from the outline above for the sake of brevity, but which were very enjoyable at the time). Certainly,

lady_lugosi1313 and I had a grand old time on the front row roaring our heads off at what is basically an adventure-comedy story, albeit with SF elements.

It belongs to a specific genre, neatly encapsulated by the two Wikipedia pages on Lost World films, and Lost World novels, which isn't as close to my heart as gothic horror. So while I can certainly see how it relates to some of the other Lost World stories I have half-watched, I can't set it very precisely within its genre. I could, though, see how, like most such stories, it is inherently colonialist – as for example emerges in the motif of Fulmer, the British explorer, staying behind at the end to 'develop' the Dallick civilisation (i.e. make it more like his). Probably that's part of why I am not all that into Lost World stories generally – well, that and because they essentially boil down to Men, Men, Manly Men having Manly Adventures and either winning women as trophies or telling them to stay in the kitchen.

On that particular front, Zeppelin v Pterodactyl isn't actually too bad – at least as scripted and performed at Mayhem. In fact it sort of works through the issue in the person of Ruth Imrie, a newspaper photographer. The Captain of the Helios initially grumbles about how the ship / expedition is 'no place for a woman', but in fact she proves nothing but an asset throughout, and is certainly very unafraid and self-determined. There is a nice scene where she is dressing rope-burns on her hands caused by a harpoon rope which she had fired at a pterodactyl during an attack on the zeppelin. She is saddened because men from the crew still died despite her best harpooning efforts, but at this point the Captain remarks that she did what she could, constituting a recognition of her value and resolving his earlier misogyny. Ruth herself them explains how she dressed the wounds of soldiers at Mons in the war, and saw good men die – but, for the same reason, she also knows that there can be miracles. So we have a quite rounded picture there of a woman who has become experienced and independent as a direct result of exactly the circumstances which did have that very effect for many women in the First Word War and its aftermath. How much of that is actually present in the original 1970 Hammer story treatment, and how much creative embroidery by the Mayhem team is difficult to say. But my guess is that there was an outline of a 'strong woman' already there, which Steven Shiel worked up to its best effect, where potentially that might not have happened in a real 1970s production.

I'm not sure either whether some of the gorier moments in the script are original or were the Mayhem production team's attempts to recreate what Hammer were doing in the early '70s accurately. I certainly know that I enjoyed hearing about two pterodactyls pulling apart a zeppelin crew-member between them, before one of them is shot and the other drops his bloodied corpse down into the valley below, though! I also liked the use of Classical motifs for the name of the zeppelin (Helios) and for the arena games which characterise the decadent society of the Sithar. And I was reminded of the Doctor Who story The Daleks both by the name of the villagers (Dallicks) and by the broader set-up of simple villagers living outside an advanced city inhabited by hostile mutants, including scenes of people going through caves to infiltrate it. The resemblance puzzled me initially because influence tended to flow from film to TV in the '60s and '70s, not the other way round. But then I remembered that that particular Doctor Who story had also been made into an Amicus film starring Peter Cushing – so of course anyone writing a story treatment for Hammer in the late '70s would have been aware of it, and liable to rework elements from it.

Anyway, a great evening all round, and I will certainly be continuing to keep a close eye on the Mayhem film festival and any further Hammer manqué productions.

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So! Film festival, day two. Here is the overall schedule for the day:

And here's what I did:

( 21. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), dir. Gordon Hessler / interview with Caroline Munro / Ray Harryhausen's Lost Treasures )

( Interview with Katy Manning (aka Jo Grant from Doctor Who) )

( Met Caroline Munro and got her autograph )

( Doctor Who season 22 show-makers' interview )

Afterwards, I joined

newandrewhickey,

minnesattva and

innerbrat for the first 45 minutes or so of The Rocketeer (1991), a sort of larger-than-life SF comedy about a US stunt pilot in the 1940s who finds a jet-pack, with Jennifer Connelly as his under-impressed girlfriend. I could see it was good and would have stayed to watch the whole thing if there weren't competing features on the schedule, but there were: two live commentaries from the Tenth Doctor era, marking the fact that his first full season screened ten years ago now. Ten is much more my thing than Six, so off I slipped...

( Live commentary on New Who 2.3 School Reunion )

( Live commentary on New Who 2.13 Doomsday )

All this time, Galaxy Quest had been playing in another room, which is a pity, because once the Doctor Who stuff was over and I went to join

innerbrat,

minnesattva and

newandrewhickey in the screening, I realised what bloody good fun it was to watch at an actual con. But then again I have seen it multiple times before, and those live Doctor Who commentaries really were great, so I think I made the right choice.

After the film had finished, we went for food at a seriously good pizza / pasta place just down the road. It was nominally just a take-away / sit-in at fixed tables place, but the quality of the food was way better than you'd normally expect for a place like that, and along with the cute student room I was staying in and the well-appointed Co-op just below it, this was one of a number of things that really made me fall for the area where we were staying. Like, on one level, it was just edge-of-city-centre ring-roadish urban redevelopment, with a lot of medium-rise new-builds, but on another it did actually feel somehow quite modern and dynamic and nice to be in. In fact, hell, let's have a picture of it which fails to do justice to the intensity of the sunset on the Friday evening:

( 22. Blood of the Tribades (2016), dir. Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein )

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This is a British SF comedy, which a neighbour of mine lent to me when I had shingles, on the grounds that he knew I liked Doctor Who and guessed I might need things to watch from my sick-bed. Which was very sweet of him, although in practice it took me until this weekend to get round to watching it. (I'm an academic, so the main thing I actually did on my sick-bed was read a PhD thesis and write up comments on how it could be turned into a successful monograph.)

The main character is Neil (played by Simon Pegg), a school-teacher who is randomly selected by a council of aliens to be granted absolute power for a period of ten days. All he has to do is wave his hand, vocalise his wish (e.g. 'Let me be holding a bunch of flowers') and bingo! The thing happens. Except that the aliens don't tell him they've done this, so that he only figures it out slowly over a couple of days, and they also don't tell him that it's all a big test of humanity, with them sitting in judgement over him the whole time to see whether he uses his powers for good or ill. And if it's ill, they are going to destroy the entire human race.

So it's fine, and sometimes quite funny, with plenty of situational social comedy and lots of stuff about Neil phrasing his wishes poorly and them being interpreted utterly literally. E.g. one of the ways he discovers his powers is that when he wishes for his entire class of delinquent kids to be wiped out by aliens, it actually happens. The reality of this is obviously awful and traumatic, so he tries to undo it by wishing for everyone who was dead to come back to life, but this is interpreted as meaning absolutely everyone, not just his class. Cue some nice scenes of zombies rising from the dead. Also, Eddie Izzard is very good in it as the headmaster in Neil's school, who is normally an utter dragon, but turns into a gushing, fawning sycophant as the result of one of Neil's wishes.

But is is also Terry Jonesish. He co-wrote this film as well as directing it, and my response was distinctly similar to how I felt about his writing when I read Starship Titanic a couple of years ago. This film was similarly not as funny or clever as it seemed to think it was, with a lot of cheap, predictable gags and some pretty two-dimensional women. In fairness, you could feel this film trying harder than Starship Titanic to portray its women as real human beings and grapple with the realities of modern life. There are four meaningful female characters in it, three of whom have conversations with each other, and Kate Beckinsale's character is shown struggling with unwanted and entitled advances from two different male characters in a reasonably sympathetic manner. But ultimately it is still all about Neil and male wish-fulfilment, with the women primarily on screen to serve that agenda.

I thought for a moment that it passed the Bechdel test, because of a conversation between Kate Beckinsale's character and her boss (Joanna Lumley) about their work, until I realised that they were discussing strategies for interviewing a male author. Otherwise, all conversations are of course about the women's various exes, boyfriends or love-interests. And guess what happens in a film where a male character is granted absolute power? Yes, there is self-awareness in the script about the rapiness of using magical powers to make someone fall in love with you - for example, Simon Pegg's character thinks he has done this to Kate Beckinsale's character for a while, but the script carefully dodges the full implications by showing that the alien technology providing his powers breaks down at the crucial moment, so that in fact she 'really' decided she was into him at that exact same moment. But he doesn't know that and isn't troubled by it. Meanwhile, he makes a whole bunch of women worship his friend Ray as a god, but all we see of the consequences of this are his friend Ray finding it annoying - nothing at all about the trespass on their free will.

So, yeah - sort of OK, but fundamentally not funny, uplifting or interesting enough to be worth sitting through the cis, het, white, middle-class blokeishness of it all. (It's just as bad on the rest of those, too, though at least trying a bit on race.) Oh well, at least it's a useful reminder of why I don't normally watch 'zany' modern comedies, and that even aliens and magical powers are unlikely to save them.

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As if a genuine Smell-O-Vision film and an unfilmed Hammer Dracula script hadn't been enough, last weekend's journey of cinematic wonders ended on the Sunday evening in Bradford with 2001: A Space Odyssey, seen as it was originally intended to be seen - that is, in the full glory of Cinerama. I watched, rapt, alongside

minnesattva,

magister and Andrew Hickey, as the wonders of space opened up before us, and pondered idly what it must have been like to live in those heady days of the late '60s White Hot Technological Revolution, when the world of normalised space travel which it depicted might really have seemed like a plausible likelihood for the far-distant future of 2001.

I have seen the film before, of course, but believe me when I say that seeing it in Cinerama is an entirely different experience. Kubrick designed it specifically to be seen on a curved screen, and once you see it that way it becomes so painfully, searingly obvious that he did that you realise you simply haven't experienced the film he thought he was making until that moment. This was perfectly clear to me already in the first half, when I realised exactly why the location chosen for the ape-creatures drinking from their water-hole was a rounded geographical bowl, and why so many scenes of the lunar landscape are designed the same way - because, of course, in Cinerama they would appear to be actually curving out towards the audience, as though we were sitting ourselves on the far side of that very bowl. In Cinerama, when the idea occurs to one of the ape-creatures for the very first time to pick up a large thigh-bone, and use it to smash up the smaller bones of the animal skeleton lying in front of him, the pieces which fly up into the air appear as though they are coming right out of the screen at you. And as for the space stations and planets which cartwheel by to the music of the Blue Danube - watching them is like looking out from the bridge of your own vessel, as vast bodies thousands of miles away float balletically across your field of vision.

Then in the intermission, Andrew too commented that he had never realised before just how much of a Cinerama film 2001 was. Fresh from having seen The Best of Cinerama that morning, he meant something more than my simple observation of curves, space and quasi-3D. Rather, as he pointed out, Cinerama travelogues of the type he had seen that morning regularly introduced their viewers to a rather surreal combination of the wonders of nature, followed by the wonders of technology - exactly like the early ape-creatures followed by the pirouetting space stations we had just seen. What's more, although 2001 was not shot using the three-strip camera technique which The Best of Cinerama used (and which I have experienced myself for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)), he had noticed that some of the shots were composed as though they were going to be - that is, with strong verticals positioned 1/3 and 2/3 of the way across the screen, exactly where the joins between the strips would have been visible. I settled down for the second half with his comment in mind, and he was absolutely right - for example, Kubrick had shot the room on the Discovery One containing the three EVA pods exactly and precisely with its two far corners at the 1/3 and 2/3 positions, just as I remember noticing for every scene which ever featured a room in it during The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. I wasn't particularly surprised later on, when checking the Wikipedia page for the film, to learn that it was indeed originally planned to be shot in three-strip Cinerama, exactly in line with what Andrew had noticed.

Truly, truly spectacular, then. A film with an almost boundlessly-ambitious vision, making the fullest possible use of the technology available in its day, stretching it to create a cinematic experience which would actually do justice to the nature of the story. In fact, we were lucky enough to enjoy not only the film, but (part of) an after-show chat from Douglas Trumbull, who did the special effects for the film, and who articulated exactly the vision Kubrick was trying to create. He explained that Kubrick wanted to create a film which was less concerned than usual with the characters on screen, or the experiences and dramas they are having. In fact, this was deliberately minimised by pointing the cameras relatively little at the actors, and having only fairly limited and largely banal dialogue. Rather, he wanted to put the audience and their experiences at the forefront. This is particularly clear at the climax of the film when the last surviving crewman of the Discovery One, David Bowman, comes face to face with the monolith in orbit around Jupiter, and falls into the strange and psychedelic star-gate which it opens up. During this whole sequence there is actually very little screen-time devoted to David's reactions, and as Trumbull put it, this was because Kubrick didn't want this sequence to be about David experiencing the star-gate - he wanted it to be about the audience, in the star-gate. And in Cinerama, boy, is it!

Even without the Cinerama, though, the care, detail and ambition put into the model-work and the special effects is so impressive that even now, almost 50 years after its release, the only thing which really gives the film away as not having been made this year are some of the fashions worn by the female members of the cast. I'd love to say the treatment of gender was a give-away too, given that women appeared almost (though not entirely) exclusively in subservient roles (daughter, mother, air-hostess, receptionist), and that by the time you get to the elite crew of the Discovery One, they have (of course!) vanished altogether. But the sad truth is that there are more films which still do exactly that today than don't. Only two years ago, Geena Davis (Thelma of Thelma and Louise fame) suggested that modern Hollywood films consistently depict women to men in supposedly mixed groups at a ratio of 1 to 5 or 17%, and that what's more men perceive this as a 50:50 balance, and anything more as female-dominated. Here, too, I noticed that in the board-room scene where Heywood Floyd explains to the Clavius base personnel why it is so important to maintain secrecy around the monolith found on the moon, there were two women and ten men: exactly the 1 to 5 or 17% (to be precise, 16.67%) ratio which Geena Davis pointed out. So, in other, words, the gender balance of 2001 may be heavily patriarchal, but it certainly isn't dated! We're still doing it, just the same. :-/

That is on us, though. While we're working on it, a late 1960s film which makes you feel as though you are actually floating in space remains very much worth watching, and I am once again awed by the power of Cinerama.

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This was not actually a film in the conventional sense - rather a staged reading of an unproduced film script - but I'm including it in my 'films watched 2015' tag nonetheless, because it was very close, and I know that's where I'll look for this review in the future. The script in question was written by Anthony Hinds, joint architect (along with Michael Carreras) of Hammer's horror heyday, and it was originally intended as the seventh entry in their Dracula franchise, to follow after Scars of Dracula (1970). There's a good blog post here which explains the production context and what happened - basically, Hammer's distributors, Warner Bros., had some assets locked up in rupees in India, and this was intended to be shot on location as a way of unlocking them. In the end, it never came to pass, and the script instead lay forgotten in Hammer's script archive, until the collection was passed to the Cinema And Television History (CATH) Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, and examined properly by some experts. The obvious interest of this one was quickly recognised, and arrangements put in place for its first ever public airing in Nottingham last Saturday evening as part of the Mayhem Film Festival.

The event was billed on the Mayhem website as "Jonathan Rigby to narrate long-lost Dracula script from Hammer archive", with the further information that he would be "accompanied by a group of actors" - and quite honestly, that was more than enough for me and I went on that basis. But in practice it really undersold how much effort they had gone to to bring this script to life. What actually happened was that Rigby read all the scene descriptions and directions from the original script, while a cast of seven voice actors did the dialogue, sound effects were provided by a two-man crew with laptops and a mixer, a live sitar player did his thing at the appropriate moments, and occasional visual effects were projected onto a screen in the middle. These included opening and closing credits, as well as a close-up of Christopher Lee's eyes in full Dracula mode whenever his signature character was required to stare piercingly at a variety of young ladies during the story - which happened quite a lot. I took a few photos myself, but this one, which Jonathan Rigby posted on Facebook after the event, best captures it:

Full view of cast and eye by Ashley Bird.jpg

You can also see thirty more from an enthusiastic audience member here, including perhaps the most touching moment of all - the words ‘In memory of Sir Christopher Lee, 1922-2015’ displayed as part of the closing credits, to great cheers and applause from everyone present.

In short, then, it was a lot like watching a live recording of a radio play, except for the occasional use of the screen. And this was absolutely excellent for me, because I went there knowing that this might be the only time I ever had the chance to hear the contents of this script, but that I was also going to want very badly to be able to revisit and reconsider the story. So I took a note-book, and was able to sit in the second row, right behind the sound crew in the seats of the first row, looking up occasionally but mainly just listening intently and scribbling and scribbling madly across the page, until I had filled up 33 A5 pages in two hours with basically everything that happened in the entire script, including some verbatim dialogue. Meanwhile, as I wrote and listened, an entire film played out, as if by magic, in the inside of my head. I have read a few Hammer scripts before, and their descriptive text usually goes quite well beyond the purely practical. This one was no exception, describing a decaying Maharajah's palace as a ‘gaunt edifice’ whose corridors are lined with faded brocade and crumbling trophies, or speaking of the 'cold light' of the early dawn and someone being 'ground to bone-meal', for instance. So it was very easy to visualise the right sorts of settings from Rigby's narration, while the sound effects gave them the appropriate texture and the voices of the various actors populated them with living characters. Indeed, I am well enough steeped in Hammer's visual style to mean that often I could see in my mind's eye exactly the sorts of sets and costumes they would have used, the camera angles they would have chosen, and the composition of the shots.

All of which was incredible and amazing and breath-taking, because Hammer's Dracula franchise is my favourite film sequence bar none, and yet its last entry appeared in 1974, and I was born in 1976, so I never had the opportunity to see any of its films fresh on first release at the cinema. Indeed, it's some 25 years since I saw a Hammer Dracula film for the first time at all in any context, so I find it difficult now to remember or imagine what devouring one I haven't seen before is actually like. The raw experience of an entirely new Hammer Dracula story, with absolutely no idea what might happen next at any point, was something I never expected to have again - and this performance was the closest I have or will ever come to experiencing that not only on my own at home in front of a video, but live and completely fresh in the cinema with a whole audience around me doing the same. Walking up the cinema aisle at the end of the performance, I found myself overwhelmed almost to the point of tears at the sheer magnitude of what I had just witnessed, coupled of course with the sad knowledge that I may never have such an experience again... Well, that is, unless the same team get themselves together and do a performance of Lord Dracula - the other unmade Hammer Dracula film lying in the CATH archive, which is an 'origins' story linking the Hammer Dracula with the historical Vlad III Dracula. I don't think I have to explain to regular readers of this blog how and why that is basically the story I consider myself to have been put upon this earth to hear.

So, having talked about the performance at the Mayhem Film Festival, I'm now going to review this story qua story, in the way that I have every other Hammer Dracula story on this blog. The obvious difference of course is that you, dear reader, are almost infinitesimally unlikely to have 'seen' it. That means we need to start with a brief plot summary. ( It is utterly spoilerific, as is everything I say from this point onwards in the review. But given that as far as we know at the moment, this story will never be released in any other format, you may as well read on and at least find out what happens in it. )

Right, I'm ready to write about Doctor Who now. So, basically I liked this episode. I liked ( all these things ) Fundamentally, I feel we've now had four strong episodes in a row - which hasn't happened for a long time.

But!

But.

There is a trope in SF and horror stories which has annoyed me for a long time, which involves a woman being told to stay somewhere safe by the male characters, her refusing to follow their advice and going off on her own into danger anyway, and then her getting into danger and / or compromising the success of whatever mission they are all involved in as a result. I've complained about it multiple times in reviews of such stories, for example here in relation to Isobel in the Second Doctor story, The Invasion (1968) or here in relation to Jessica Van Helsing in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), and it's now occurred to me to check whether or not it has an entry in TV Tropes. Sure enough, it seems to be a sub-type of Stay In The Kitchen, which in its simplest sense just involves men telling women to stay in the (metaphorical) kitchen, but here is extended to 'prove' that such advice should be heeded in the first place by acting out the negative consequences of women ignoring such advice.

The TV Tropes article claims that "Nowadays, when this trope is invoked, this character [i.e. the man telling the woman to Stay In The Kitchen] is unlikely to be treated sympathetically for his opinion." But there seems to be no 'nowadays' about it in Doctor Who. What we saw in this episode was ( exactly in line with the examples I've mentioned above )

Meanwhile, ( there were two other crappy discriminatory tropes in play here, despite the obvious current efforts of the production team to acknowledge and represent diversity through their casting ) What's going on, Doctor Who? And when can it stop?

So I feel like this is hardly a 'review' of the story at all, and just a massive rant about diversity and -isms in TV shows instead. Let me go back to the beginning - the story, as a story, was good. I liked it - I really did. Its narrative arc, its characterisation and its ideas were all good. But having tropish fails at work in the same story throws me off what would otherwise have been a very enjoyable experience, and ends up making all the actually-good drama fade away into the background. I'd really like to not have to keep being distracted from a show and character I otherwise love by all this.

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So! A new season of Doctor Who, then! I missed the first episode because I was in Bournemouth for Lib Dem Conference, and although I did catch up with it last Saturday (effectively watching both as a two-parter that evening), I haven't had time to write about them until now because I wanted to get conference written up first, and have then had a busy week.

I really liked these two episodes, though. I went into them with fairly low expectations, after a week of reading various comments around the internet to the effect that The Magician's Apprentice was not that great. So it may be that the low expectations in themselves helped me enjoy both episodes more than I might have done otherwise. But certainly, watched together, they seemed pretty strong to me.

The basic set-up and central drama, revisiting the Genesis of the Daleks dilemma by giving the Doctor the power of life and death over a being whom he knows will kill billions but right now is powerless and innocent, is sound enough and professionally handled. OK, you could argue it's a lazy re-hash of Doctor Who's back catalogue, but I liked the structuring principle which meant that we kept getting new takes on how the Doctor had actually responded to that dilemma right up until the end of the two-parter, even while the consequences (and causes) of his actions played out in another time-line.

The real star of this story for me, though, was Missy. Looking back at my reviews for the last two stories of last season, I didn't have terribly much to say about her beyond the gender-switch thing, but this story really let her blossom into a fully-developed character, so that she has officially become loads of fun. In particular, she is far more interesting here than she ever was in the last series for the ambiguity around whether she is temporarily collaborating with the Doctor and Clara purely out of expedience, or out of some kind of respect for her history with the Doctor. This really broadened her out from a fairly one-dimensional villain into a fully-fledged incarnation of the Master, whose relationship with the Doctor always was shot through with the ongoing reverberations of their childhood friendship / rivalry. As others have said, Michelle Gomez's performance very much rose to meet the new opportunities, replete with echoes of Masters past along the way. So I am now really looking forward to seeing more of her (and her gorgeous purple Victorian outfit!) in the future, and fervently hope that she will displace River Bloody Song as Doctor Who's resident mysterious recurring female character. I'm also looking forward to meeting her daughter (or son by this time, of course) - though in grand Whovian tradition, it could literally be decades before we do.

Missy wouldn't have worked anything like as well as she did, though, without Clara to play up against - and torment a bit. I thought Clara's side of the dynamic worked particularly well during their first encounter, when she was able to pin Missy down to business and stop her from randomly killing people because she could by insisting that Missy 'make [her] believe' that there really was something serious going on relating to the Doctor. That is the same self-assured, experienced Clara that she had grown into by the end of last season, and whom I like very much.

Clara's moments trapped within the Dalek shell, unable to communicate her human emotions and even frighteningly unable to convey her identity to the Doctor were excellent too. They were stronger for recalling the life of Oswin Oswald her fellow-inmates in Asylum of the Daleks, but would have been good anyway for giving us a new level of insight into the horror of what Daleks are - not to mention an explanation for why they shout 'exterminate' all the time! Fine achievements after over fifty years of them.

Then there were the scenes between the Doctor and Davros - also good, and for much the same reasons of ambiguity as those involving Missy. Probably Davros is just Evil, and tricked the Doctor into coming to Skaro so that he could harness his regeneration energy. And probably the Doctor, for all his compassion, knew full well that he could turn Davros' plans against him by activating the gloopy dead sewer-Daleks, so was never really in Davros' emotional grasp. But maybe, just maybe, on some level they do actually also like and respect one another. Certainly, it was compelling to see these two ancient enemies recognising each other for the two sides of the same coin they have always been, even if it was only a temporary and somewhat illusory truce.

In general, then, excellent character-led drama, with just enough new twists on the familiar staples of the format to make the story seem new. On the other hand, though, I could really have done without yet another fake companion death, and particularly one used so overtly as a fridging device to push the Doctor into doing (plot-necessary) crazy things in the Dalek city. And while I appreciate the attempt at representing racial diversity by putting black faces in the crowd in AD 1138, still in this story a black character (young Davros' companion in the hand-mine field) was the first person to die on screen yet again. Doesn't anybody explicitly double-check scripts for this, given how a) common and b) fucking racist it is?

Finally, two things in this episode reminded me strongly of The Fires of Pompeii - 1) the hand-mines with eyes in the palms of their hands, much like the Soothsayers of the Sibylline Sisterhood, and 2) the Doctor and Clara standing on a hill-side, watching the destruction of the Dalek city. This is what I mean on the latter point - the composition of the shots is never quite the same, but the general feeling is very, very similar:

So Caecilius in Fires of Pompeii and the Doctor in The Witch's Familiar have now stood in similar settings, watching cities being destroyed, while wearing the same face. And since the Doctor said himself at the beginning of last season that he must have been trying to tell himself something by choosing it, I feel like we should pay attention to that.

A few smaller, random thoughts to finish us off:

Missy's static planes reminded me really strongly of the various examples of planes caught mid-flight by Google mapping satellites.
Davros being referred to as a Dark Lord and being served by an intelligent snake all seemed very Harry Potter.
But there was also something very Darth Vader-ish about Davros having once been a round-faced little boy on a desert planet, becoming dependent on a life-support system later in his life, and wanting to see the Doctor with his own eyes in his final moments.
Davros' supposedly-dying speech rang some strong Augustan bells for me. Compare and contrast: "Did I do right? Tell me, was I right? I need to know before the end - was I a good man?" and "Did I play my part well in this comedy called life?" It is classic Great Man / Strong Leader stuff - the iconic historical agent with power over millions revealing his inner humanity just before the end.
There was a strong set-up for a scene in which the Doctor would have to pull the Dalek wires out of Clara's head, causing her significant pain in the cause of restoring her humanity, but in the end we didn't get it, and skipped straight to her being fine and running along a corridor again. Looks like shoddy editing, I would guess because the story as initially planned turned out to over-run.

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I've known that this exists, and is a 'blaxploitation' film, for a very long time (not least because it is featured in my Horror Bible), but had never tried to track it down until very recently. Without actually having researched what blaxploitation entails, I had assumed it would be all white-perspective exoticising stereotypes about black Americans - especially stuff to do with funk, afros, tight spandex pants, etc. As it turns out, while there are a few scenes set in a disco bar, and that bar has its fair share of customers with afros and tight clothing, actually both this film and blaxploitation as a genre are very different from what I had expected. The genre term 'blaxploitation' as a whole is less about exploiting stereotypes for economic gain (as I'd assumed), and more about exploiting the economic spending power of black audiences by appealing directly to their interests - including, of course, their interest in being portrayed as three-dimensional human beings with agency of their own on screen. In the context of this particular film, that translates into a black director, a cast full of meaningful, positively-drawn black characters, and a script which engages directly with race issues in its plot and dialogue. As such, it's distinctly better in its handling of race issues than most mainstream screen productions manage to be today, including those produced by companies like the BBC which are honestly trying to be diverse and inclusive (see e.g. the Black Dude Dies First trope being rife in Doctor Who).

This particular story kicks off in 1780, when an African prince named Mamuwalde goes to ask the help of a powerful white European aristocrat in suppressing the slave trade and freeing his people. Unfortunately, the particular European aristocrat he picks is Dracula, who is pretty keen on the slave trade, and furthermore conceives a liking for Mamuwalde's (also black African) wife and starts saying incredibly racist / sexist things when Mamuwalde objects about how he should be flattered that a white man thinks his wife attractive. To punish Mamuwalde for his insubordination and his wife for rejecting his advances, Dracula then turns Mamuwalde into a vampire, locks him in a coffin so that he will be tormented by blood-lust forever but unable to get out to slake it, and locks his wife up in the same room so that she will die hearing his cries of thirst from within the coffin. So we have white European treatment of black Africans literally presented as vampirism, and our sympathies are entirely directed towards the black victims.

Fast forward (almost) two centuries, and the box containing Mamuwalde is transported to 1970s Los Angeles, with predictable results. Here,

ms_siobhan was absolutely right to point out that Mamuwalde adapts rather too easily to his vampire nature. The whole point at the beginning was that vampirism was meted out to him as a cruel punishment, but that isn't really followed through in the main story. It's not that he becomes completely evil - he remains a sympathetic character, still basically searching for his long-lost wife. But there could have been a lot more pathos and self-loathing about his actual vampirism in the portrayal - as, for example, was done so well in Dracula's Daughter. After all, he is basically condemned to a life where it's now impossible for him not to enslave people himself - and in the light of the opening sequence he should have a bit more emotional conflict about that.

The long-lost wife story also rather stuck in my craw. Inevitably, he very quickly comes across a 20th-century woman who looks exactly like his 18th-century wife, and tells her all the usual sort of stuff about how she is his long-lost wife's reincarnation, they are destined to be together, etc. This is of course a well-worn trope, and I think I have reached the end of my tether with it. It is almost always the female character who is reincarnated, purely so that an immortal male character can still have their designated love interest, so that it reeks of male privilege and women existing only as objects for male attraction. It also completely robs the female character of all agency, as any independent choices which she might have made crumble in the face of her Manifest Destiny. And so it plays out here - and in the process serves up yet another case of characters allegedly falling in love on screen without us as the audience being given any very compelling evidence for why they might have done so, exactly as happens in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) in the context of the same trope.

In spite of those niggles, though, the film as a whole is ace. Partly that's just because I'm always eager for new takes on vampirism, and partly because I'm a sucker for contemporary-set '70s films full of awesome flares and enormous collars. But on a more universal level, William Marshall in the title role is genuinely compelling, with lots of power and gravitas to his performance, and he is surrounded by loads of really well-developed secondary characters too. Interestingly, these included a gay male couple, and several independently-minded female characters with jobs of their own who were not defined in relation to any man - e.g. a photographer and a taxi cab driver. It would be an exaggeration to claim these characters as paradigms for equality - the gay male couple in particular live up to camp stereotypes in that they are interior designers; their penchant for the aesthetic is to 'blame' for Mamuwalde's resurrection because they buy up his coffin and bring it to LA; and naturally they are punished for this by becoming his first victims. Similarly, both the photographer and the taxi cab driver meet sticky ends. But all four of them are presented as having real agency and meaningful lives of their own in a way that pretty rarely applies to the same sorts of characters in other films of this era - so I think there may be a case for saying that in casting aside mainstream stereotypical treatments of black characters, blaxploitation films also to some extent opened the door to better portrayals of other under-privileged groups at the same time.

In short, I'm glad I watched this, and

ms_siobhan and I have already devoured the sequel as well. Review of that to follow.

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Believe it or not, I am still catching up with back-logged film reviews from things I saw before I went to Romania. There's just one more to come after this one, but I am not sure I will finish both this evening, so I'm posting this now in order to get at least half the job completed.

Having recently re-watched and enjoyed The Awakening (1984), I sought out this film as Hammer's take on the same source material - Bram Stoker's novel, The Jewel of the Seven Stars. I didn't have hugely high expectations, because even the most ardent Hammer fan will generally admit that they started to go off the boil from about 1970 onwards. Also, it was clear from all the still images I'd seen that it was going to really objectify its star, Valerie Leon. But then again, this particular film does seem to be spoken of quite highly by fans amongst Hammer's later output. So I figured I'd give it a shot.

It does have to be said that I was right about the objectification of Valerie Leon. She plays two characters in the film - the Egyptian queen Tera, and the present-day archaeologist's daughter Margaret Fuchs - and she appears on screen for the first time in her role as Tera, lying dead in her sarcophagus. Unlike most mummies, though, she is perfectly preserved, not wrapped in any bandages, and clad instead in a beaded bikini-top and skimpy skirt. In other words, she is the perfect female body, lying there passive and unconscious. The camera then proceeds to introduce her by panning up her body from her legs to her face, lingering salaciously over every curve and dip - and there are plenty of similar scenes later on in the film. That said, one of the pleasures of vintage horror films is that it is also a standard trope to present women who are both attractive and unusually powerful. For male audiences, this is presumably meant to be a horrifically perverted paradox, but for female viewers it offers entirely different readings - though you do have to reconcile yourself to the fact that these characters always inevitably die. Anyway, as characters both Margaret and Tera are extremely autonomous and self-assured, with Margaret quite explicitly seeing Tera and her ancient powers as her ticket to a world in which she is free to do whatever she likes. Obviously, in the end this is coded as a tragic misjudgement - but it's fun while it lasts.

Meanwhile, the overall storyline, the characterisation, the acting, the set design and the direction are all very impressive - and this is quite an achievement, given that both the film's intended leading man (Peter Cushing) and its director (Seth Holt) were rendered hors de combat (in different ways) during the course of the production. I particularly enjoyed the series of death-scenes visited on those who had dared to open Princess Tera's tomb, all of which were conveyed via tense music and suggestive images, rather than direct on-screen violence. The very best of these was for a character called Berigan, who has already been driven insane and committed to an asylum as a result of his involvement with Princess Tera. Trussed up in a straight-jacket by two malicious hospital orderlies who tell him it'll be no good screaming as no-one will take a blind bit of notice, he is left isolated, terrified and unable to trust the evidence of his own senses, while a snake statuette from Tera's tomb comes to life and kills him. Revolving camera angles, disembodied laughter and close-ups of Berigan's terrified face convey the necessary sense of madness, periodic shots of empty hospital corridors outside his cell remind us of his isolation and helplessness, and extended periods of absolute silence really rack up the tension - all while we remain uncertain how much of what we are seeing is a manifestation of his insanity, and how much the 'real' power of Princess Tera. It really is a tour de force of direction, acting, lighting and sound effects - but also indicative of the quality of the whole film.

If you would like to see this film yourself, it's currently available for free here, and Berigan's death scene starts at exactly 45 minutes in. I can highly recommend it.

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This is a Romanian film about the historical Dracula, which tells the story of his main reign from taking the Wallachian throne in 1456 to his arrest on the orders of Matthias Corvinus in 1462. It isn't legally available to buy in the UK, so I watched it on Youtube (complete with English subtitles), partly to see if it would help me in my current efforts to learn Romanian, and partly of course for its own sake as a portrayal of Dracula.

On the language-learning front, it wasn't a great deal of help, mainly because I just haven't learnt enough yet to be able to pick up new words or constructions from context, but perhaps also partly because the sound-quality on the Youtube video is pretty poor, making everything sound a bit distant and unclear. I'd say I was able to recognise something like about one word in a hundred, which obviously wouldn't get me very far in a real-life situation! But hopefully I will at least have tuned in to the rhythms and structures of Romanian just a little bit while watching it, and maybe if I come back to it shortly before actually going there, I will find by then that I can get more out of it.

On the portrayal-of-Dracula front, though, it was absolutely fascinating. It is, of course, a product of Communist Romania, released right in the middle of Ceaușescu's time in power, and ( needs to be understood in that light )

That's not to say it isn't also ( deadly serious history )

There was one scene which really jarred for me from a political / moral perspective, though, while not needing to be there at all from a historical one. This concerned the story from the pamphlets about ( Dracula and the beggars )

I also noticed that ( there wasn't a single woman in a speaking role throughout the entire 2hr15m film )

Despite such reservations, though, I really liked the film as a piece of drama. The story is dramatically plausible, following a satisfying narrative arc from Dracula's noble aims at the start of the film to his tragic downfall at the end. And its star, Stefan Sileanu in the title role, is absolutely excellent. He really inhabits the part, endowing it with all the intensity, self-belief and sense of purpose which really have to be there for Dracula's actions to come across as convincing, but also showing us the moments of vulnerability and despair which also have to be there for him to appear human. I particularly enjoyed a scene in which some of his enemies fled into an Orthodox church for sanctuary, but Dracula ordered them to be dragged out and punished anyway, leading to a crackling set-piece between him and the priest about the rights and wrongs of what he is doing. Furthermore, he has fantastic eyebrows, wears excellent hats throughout (nicely modelled on the historical portraits), and looks good on a throne or a horse:

That said, if you weren't super-into the history, I suspect the 2hr15m running time and Romanian-language soundtrack would be off-putting. For me right now, though, it was great!

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I saw both of these with

ms_siobhan as a New Year's Eve double-bill at the Hyde Park Picture House yesterday, from our favourite seats on the left-hand side of the balcony.

45. Some Like It Hot (1959), dir. Billy Wilder

First of all, it does have to be acknowledged that this one particular film probably bears about 90% of the responsibility for the transphobic myth that trans women are really just straight dudes who want to infiltrate women-only spaces and ogle cis women. It didn't invent that idea, and nor is it now necessarily the direct cause of most people absorbing it, but it is a major theme of the film, and must surely have given it a very big cultural boost. So I think it's important to say that whenever talking about this film, as a small way of helping to chip away at the real-world potency of that very damaging myth. On a similar note, I also found the scenes in which Tony Curtis' character, in persona as Shell Oil Junior, coerces Sugar into sex by pretending to be sexually unresponsive and in need of 'help' to fix him pretty gross as well. I get that disguise and deceit are ancient staples of romantic comedies, and never more so than in this one, but she was totally into his Shell Oil Junior character anyway. She would very obviously have willingly and enthusiastically have had sex with him without that extra layer of lies and manipulation, so to me they broke through the romantic comedy genre conventions and out into some distinctly rapey territory.

But I am perfectly capable of separating out those things from the rest of the film in my mind, and seeing it for the of-its-time romantic musical comedy it is meant to be. As a star vehicle for Monroe it is magnificent, with her performance of "I Wanna Be Loved By You" capturing her appeal perfectly. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are perfectly paired as the two protagonists, the Chicago gangsters are brilliant, the music is great, the physical farce fantastic and the witty dialogue to die for. Plus, for all my reservations above, I also think that by showing male characters experiencing male treatment of women at first hand, and by including scenes with strong homosexual overtones (both lesbian ones between Sugar and Curtis-as-Josephine and the famous "Well, nobody's perfect" ending between Osgood and Lemmon-as-Jerry), it probably helped to achieve some social steps forwards as well as backwards. So, if the movie isn't perfect either, that doesn't mean it isn't still a great watch.

46. The Apartment (1960), dir. Billy Wilder

Part two of the double-bill was the next year's follow-up movie from the same production team, which brought back Jack Lemmon as the leading man. It's still a comedy, and starts out looking for all the world like a farce, but it has a dark undertone from the beginning, because of the way it portrays sleazy executives laughing it up together as they coldly conduct affairs in Lemmon's character's apartment, and him conniving in it for the sake of material promotion, while at the same time being very obviously strung along and exploited himself. Then, half-way through, the darkness bursts violently to the surface when one executive's to-him-casual (but to her serious) fling attempts suicide in the apartment. The overall arc is actually very moralistic - Lemmon discovers his moral compass and is rewarded with True Love, the chief sleazy executive gets his come-uppance, and the young lady (Miss Kubelik) rediscovers her sense of self-worth. But gosh, you do get put through the wringer along the way.

This made it a good second film for the double-bill, though. It felt a little more 'cerebral' than Some Like It Hot (if that's quite the right word), which worked well for its early evening slot once you'd been warmed up by the comedy first. It was certainly more moving, anyway - I found myself sniffing back tears as the end credits rolled, which you just wouldn't get from Some Like It Hot (unless, of course, Chicago mobsters had killed your grandmother, you insensitive clod). But it has in common with the other film all those classic qualities of slick pacing, seemingly effortless photography and of course a brilliant cast. Though his character isn't very nice, I actually thought Fred MacMurray was absolutely brilliant as Sleazy Executive Mr. Sheldrake, hitting that perfect note between oiliness and plausible charm which seems to be so characteristic of American Presidents (Nixon and Regan particularly spring to mind). It is essential to the whole plot that we should be able to believe Miss Kubelik might attempt suicide over him while simultaneously being able to see that he's a schmuck, so MacMurray had an important job to do there, and did it really well. I'd like to see more stuff with him in now on that basis. I also loved both the characterisation and the performances for the two Jewish neighbours, Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfuss - relatively small roles (especially hers), but ones which felt very human and three-dimensional al the same.

While Some Like It Hot has fun playing up the glamour of the 1920s jazz age, The Apartment is now just as fascinating for being set in its contemporary present day. I particularly enjoyed seeing how large-scale corporate office culture might have operated in 1960s America, complete with lobbies, elevators, desk diaries, rotary card index files, calculating machines and telephone exchanges. And I liked the insights into Lemmon's bachelor life-style as well, which was so close to and yet not quite the same as its equivalent today - frozen meals for heating up in the oven rather than microwave meals, a TV remote-control unit with a dial on it fixed to his table, and of course the time-honoured pokey apartment for one. In less cheery news from the 1960s, though, I was disquieted to realise that Miss Kubelik is obviously at risk of getting into trouble with the law for having attempted suicide, so that the whole thing has to be hushed up. We have moved beyond that, suicide-wise, in both the US and UK since, but that is still exactly where we are with drugs, leaving addicts unable to seek help for fear of punishment (not to mention at risk from unregulated products), and it's about damned time we sorted that out.

Back to The Apartment(!), it also turned out to be a Christmas / New Year film, which I guess was yet another reason (on top of release-date chronology and the tonal move from pure comedy to black comedy) why it needed to be the second half of the double bill. Miss Kubelik makes her suicide attempt on Christmas Eve, spends a few days recovering at Jack Lemmon's apartment, and then finally dumps her Sleazy Executive in favour of him on New Year's Eve. Not quite the Christmas-to-New-Year experience I would wish on anyone in reality, but still in its own way something to get us in the mood for our own NYE celebrations which followed.

( Films watched 2014 round-up )

And now I believe it is time to get started on my films watched in 2015. :-)

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I saw this on Tuesday evening with notorious Dracula-enabler

ms_siobhan, and it was absolutely captivating. I'm not a big ballet-goer - in fact, I think the last live ballet I went to was a performance of The Nutcracker at the Birmingham Hippodrome with my mother during my mid- to late-teens. But when

ms_siobhan pointed out that this was on, recommended it highly based on having seen it previously, and suggested that we go along, I didn't take much persuading. Well, let's be honest, I'll find time for pretty much anything with 'Dracula' in the title right now. But I could see straight away how a ballet version of the story would have the potential to really bring out its fantasy, romance and visual spectacle - and I was not disappointed.

Ballet dancers, of course, can move in ways which most human beings cannot, and this is a great boon when playing supernatural characters. You can take for granted incredible feats of strength and agility and suitably animalistic movements on the part of all the vampire characters - Dracula, his three brides, and a transformed Lucy. More deliberately supernatural, and different from the human characters in this ballet or the supernatural ones in other dramatic performances, were two particular feats performed by Dracula himself - gliding side-ways, almost as though floating, and literally crawling out of a window head-first, exactly as described in the book. The latter can briefly be seen in this trailer video (at 0:25), which indeed is worth watching in full (it's only 1m15s long) for a good sense of the general splendour of the performance:

Watch on YouTube

It was perfectly clear how both were done - the former by using the tight scuttling movement that ballet-dancers do (I don't know the technical term) while his feet were hidden below the length of his cloak, and the latter by supporting himself with powerful arm-muscles on two vertical bars running down either side of the 'window', while hooking onto the horizontal dividers of the frame with his feet. But still! I couldn't dream of doing either, and seeing another human being right in front of my eyes deploying what (to me) were effectively supernatural powers was an amazing experience. In these days of CGI special effects, it's easy to become blasé about seeing human beings doing apparently-impossible things, so that it becomes hard to relate to the combined fascination and repulsion which Stoker's characters experience on encounters with vampires. But seeing such physical feats being performed live gave a much more powerful sense of the strangeness of difference than I think any screen-trickery could ever quite manage.

Those weren't the only places where the strengths of ballet as a medium for story-telling were well-deployed, either. Other simple yet clever examples included the scenes where Dracula physically manipulated human characters like marionettes to represent hypnotically bending them to his will, or where Renfield's mental torment was conveyed through powerful contortions - not a case of supernatural movement this time, but another good use of a ballet dancer's exceptional physical capabilities to convey difference. And in a context where all of the characters were flowing and floating around the stage in a rather surreal fashion all the time anyway, and there was no dialogue, it also seemed very natural to convey one character's thoughts about another by having them appear at a slight distance. This was how we first met Mina, for example - as a 'vision' in a white dress dancing lightly across a corner of the stage, prompted by Jonathan's longing for her while he is imprisoned in Dracula's castle.

And oh, how well ballet conveys longing and yearning of all kinds! The absolute high-light of the piece was a love-duet between Dracula and Mina in the second half, which seemed to go on for ever, yet which I still wanted never to stop at all. But the early scenes in Dracula's castle of course offer lots of scope for homoerotic longing, too - "This man belongs to me!" and so on. There was some great business between Dracula and Jonathan Harker, where Jonathan would be sitting at a desk studying legal documents, with Dracula hanging over his shoulder on the brink of succumbing to the urge to bite him - but then Jonathan would notice and Dracula would shift smoothly into pointing out something on the page in front of him. Indeed, they had a proper male-male duet too, with Dracula guiding and steering Jonathan's movements in one of his mind-control sequences. That's something which ballet as a format, with all those finely-toned male bodies, has the potential to do incredibly well, and yet of course isn't common in classical ballet AT ALL because of the prevalent social mores at the time when most of it was developed. And much the same could be said for the vampire brides, where the strength of the dancers was used to show them as casually powerful, in complete command of their own bodies, and enjoying the hell out of playing around with a helpless Jonathan Harker. Sure, OK, so Dracula was always going to turn up at the end and tell them to quit it, but they got an extended scene of potent, jubilant femininity before that - a world away from the fragile characters female ballet-dancers are usually asked to play, and quite the most exuberant vampire brides I think I've ever seen.

As for how this ballet related to other tellings of the Dracula story, it largely follows the contours of the book, although it is inevitably impressionistic given the relatively short running-time (c. 1h 45m of stage time), emphasis on character moments and dramatic confrontations, and absence of dialogue. The perpetual dilemmas about where Lucy, Mina, Seward, Holmwood etc all live in relation to Dracula's castle become largely irrelevant when no-one in the story is speaking words like 'Whitby', 'London', 'Carlstadt' or whatever. Possibly Dracula travels to wherever-it-is by ship - but equally, the lashing wind and water which we hear may just be a storm outside Lucy's drawing-room window. It doesn't really matter. On this impressionistic level, the only identifiable 'departure' from the book was a party held to celebrate Lucy's engagement to Arthur Holmwood (at which she shockingly turns up on Dracula's arm!), but since that allowed for some very nice formal dancing scenes which gave roles to members of the company who otherwise wouldn't have been in the production at all, it seemed like a good inclusion.

The sets were probably closest to the 1931 Universal Dracula, in that they were neither realistic nor entirely abstract, so matched its expressionistic spirit. They were certainly really good, anyway - lots of broken castles and abbeys, but also lavish ballrooms and bedrooms, and an excellent carriage pulled through clouds of dry ice by burning-eyed horses. There are quite a few traceable footprints of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) here too - e.g. in Dracula's shoulder-length hair, the very Elizabethan-looking collar worn by Lucy after her transformation, the fact that Dracula and Mina's story is cast as a romance (though thankfully without any hints at reincarnation), and the portrayal of Seward as morphine addict (

ms_siobhan - I checked that one, and this is indeed where it comes from). But there was a touch of the rattish Nosferatu to Dracula's look as well, and of course the absence of spoken dialogue inevitably recalls the format of the 1922 movie.

Because nothing is perfect, I do have to note here that after the highlight which was Dracula and Mina's love-duet, the dancing did seem to fall into a bit of an anti-climax, especially as the team of vampire hunters dashed around the stage in search of Dracula with no obvious sense of purpose to their movements. And while the costumes were generally amazing (especially a long beaded frock-coat worn by Dracula to Lucy's engagement party), his standard attire of a long high-collared crushed-velvet cloak unfortunately looked very much like it had come from a cheap fancy-dress shop. But all in all, this really was a fantastic performance and a great night out. If you ever get the chance to see it, grab it with both hands.

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(Also known as Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel, The Snake Pit and the Pendulum,The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism and about a zillion other alternative titles. Not to be confused with Castle of the Living Dead, which is completely different. Obviously!)

Another entry here in the series 'Other Gothic Horrors Starring Christopher Lee Which I Haven't Seen, And Which Ideally Feature Him Playing A Character As Similar To Dracula As Possible, And / Or Also Star Peter Cushing And / Or Vincent Price', and this one was a corker! Well, at least, it is a corker by 1960s Euro-horror standards. Here are three reasons why it is worth watching:

1. It is visually splendid. This is mainly thanks to being filmed in Bavaria, and making exceptionally good use of the setting. I was particularly charmed to recognise Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which does a huge amount to create the appropriate fairy-tale atmosphere for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, and is such a perfect gingerbread town that it is a struggle to believe it can possibly be real. But in all fairness, the set, prop, make-up and costume departments are all performing at a very high level too. It isn't exactly an expressionist film in the full-blown sense of German cinema from the inter-war period, but it definitely has many of the same sorts of visual design touches, and these are some of its biggest strengths. See, however, point 3 on my 'downsides' list, below, which alas means that a film which must have looked absolutely bloody fantastic when it first came out is now difficult to discern through all the dust and scratch-lines.

2. It is utterly unashamed to ramp the Gothic horror clichés up to the absolute max. The basic approach is quite similar to Castle of the Living Dead, in that this film is essentially a pastiche made up of scenes and motifs drawn from successful previous horror titles. This time, the two chief source texts that I could recognise are Edgar Allan Poe's 'Pit and the Pendulum' (very obviously mediated through Roger Corman's 1961 film) and Dracula, Prince of Darkness, which had come out only the previous year. Poe / Corman contribute a castle full of dungeons and torture chambers, where a group of travellers experience new and more inventive horrors at every turn, while Prince contributes an evil Count who is supposed to be dead, but gets resurrected by a creepy and incredibly loyal servant. According to Jonathan Rigby, Mario Bava's La maschera del demonio is a big influence too, and while I haven't seen it myself the Wikipedia description certainly backs him up. Rather than merely repeating or mimicking its predecessors, though, the watchword for this film seems to have been to make everything about them MORE - more blood, more dungeons, more dark and scary forests, more unsettling interior décor, more bubbling potions, more mad villains, more distressed damsels. That's not always a good thing in horror films, because often all the subtlety of the earlier takes on the story dies a horrible death in the process, but somehow here it just came across as really joyous and exuberant and fun. It's like they said to themselves, "Let's not muck about! This is a Gothic horror film. We know what our audience wants, and so do they, so let's do it properly!" And they did.

3. It has Christopher Lee in it, playing a character very similar to Dracula. This is of course a subset of point 2, but it is a very important subset! His character is called Count Regula, which clearly (as for Count Drago in Castle of the Living Dead) was the closest name they could think of to Count Dracula without attracting a law-suit. The film opens with a flash-back of him being executed in the town square 35 years before the main story begins for drinking the blood of 12 women in an attempt to secure immortality. He didn't quite manage it, needing 13, but thanks to some hand-waving and some kind of elixir of life, his servant is able to resurrect him for the main story anyway, so that he can chow down on his final victim and seal the deal. He looks a bit grey about the face, wears a floor-length black coat, and suffers from an aversion to crosses, while his first words to the travellers who have been unfortunate enough to end up in his dungeons are "Welcome to my house". All in all then, he is set up as a first-rate Dracula-substitute, and he utterly delivers the goods in his performance, too - lots of good icy aristocratic vengeance-fixated evil, some nice bursts of anger when he is thwarted, and some fine anguish when everything starts going horribly wrong for him at the end. In short, this film is even better than Castle of the Living Dead if you're after a cheap Lee-as-Dracula fix and have run out of actual Dracula films to watch - which is, of course, exactly my position.

On the down side:

1. The dialogue is all dubbed in post-production. Although Christopher Lee definitely speaks his own lines in the English-language version, and I'm pretty sure most of the other actors do too, still actors recording their lines in a studio almost always come across as wooden by comparison with in-context performances recorded on set. Also, I'm not sure all the actors were of a terribly high calibre in the first place anyway - particularly someone called Vladimir Medar, who plays a highwayman-disguised-as-a-priest comic relief character.

2. The gender politics of it are utterly Victorian. The main female character, Baroness Lilian von Brabant, is actually quite well played by Karin Dor, especially in a scene where she has been drugged and convinced that she is someone else, but gradually comes to realise that something isn't quite right and she can't be who she thinks she is. Nonetheless, the character clearly exists purely to function as a victim and / or sexual object. At one point, I thought she might experience a bit of character growth by having to face up to her fears in order to rescue her male companion (much as Willie does in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), but no - she just ended up fainting with terror instead, while he got on and rescued himself. In fact, at the end of the entire experience, she begs him to tell her that it was all just a dream - and he reassures her that it was. Bah! This sort of stuff is, of course, characteristic of both the genre and the period, but it's not inevitable. Compare, for example, Diana in Dracula, Prince of Darkness (one of this film's sources), who is full of the spirit of adventure from the start, and even grabs a gun and has a good old shoot at Dracula at the climax of the film. Strong women could exist in horror, even in the 1960s - but this film does not have any.

3. The visual quality of the DVD transfer is absolutely appalling, especially at the beginning. I don't normally get particularly exercised by this sort of thing, but what you get if you borrow this movie from Lovefilm is basically an utterly unrestored film projection, complete with visual noise, distorted colours and massive streaks running down the screen, all simply transferred to a digital disc. I don't mind any of those features on an actual original film reel which I'm viewing in the cinema, as there it is all part of the experience of engaging with a vintage print. But I kind of expect a DVD print to have undergone at least some very basic clean-up in the process of being transferred to a digital format, and this just really hadn't.

In short, not perfect, but one of the downsides isn't the fault of the original film-makers, and the other two are pretty much par for the course in this genre, so it's not like anyone who likes this sort of film won't be expecting them. Meanwhile, the upsides more than compensate. Don't expect it to change your life, but do expect it to make for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

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