Kicking a peach pit till I worry it's blue

[sovay]

Generally I appreciate axial tilt, but not always the resemblance between walking out for groceries at four-thirty in the afternoon of a hard-raining November and an all-night convenience store run. The brightest thing that wasn't the headlights was the scarlet maple in the war memorial.

It is incredible to me that I have been laid off for a month and gotten so little done with my theoretically free time. Mostly I seem to spend it the same kind of exhausted and seeing more doctors than anyone else. I keep reminding myself that I was supposed to be on medical leave, not vacation. It does not improve the sensation of a decaying orbit.

Immediately on concluding Lust for a Vampire (1971), spatch and I dubbed it Tits for Dracula for its plenitude of full-frontal yet curiously unsexy cleavage, as if it were enough just to have the buxom playmates of its Styrian girls' school breasting boobily all over with their tops occasionally falling down even as any of its exploitation potential as a Carmilla retelling is neutralized by the heterosexuality of its titular affair. Major props to Ralph Bates for turning himself into a horrible little gremlin of an occult-obsessed tutor who in one of the film's only original points tries to offer himself to its resurrected Mircalla Karnstein as her Renfield and is pathetically rejected, drained just enough to kill but not even to enthrall him. Major demerits for the post-dubbing of a modern pop ballad over the aforementioned central het scene from which neither of us ever recovered even a push-up of disbelief. Rob swears it was not in revenge that he introduced me to the googly-eyed marionette monster of The Giant Claw (1957).

This obituary of James Watson was like witnessing a murder from beyond the grave and he had it coming.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Begley's obit is gorgeous, yes.

[minoanmiss]

Oh Watson finally died? I expect to feel quite vindicated reading that obituary.

[thisbluespirit]

*hugs*

And, oh, dear, it did cross my mind that maybe I should warn you about Lust For a Vampire, but, ha, oh well. You survived! I, weirdly, get a lot of enjoyment out of it, more than most Hammers, if absolutely in a "this is so terrible! I need to watch it again!" way. I feel bad about this, because while it probably could be more tacky if it tried, it really doesn't need to, and I'd say the off-screen implications don't bear thinking about except I watched a Hammer doc earlier this year & I'm pretty sure the scenario was unfortunately exactly as bad as you would fear. And yet, somehow, I still have the thing on my DVR and talking about it now makes me go, oooh, you know what? I should watch it again! /o\

(I think it's a combination of factors - Hammer's Drac series is good but for the most part frustratingly non-iddy/dull for me personally re. the vampires themselves compared to all the other Dracs I watched, with honourable exceptions so far of Kiss of the Vampire (in a genuinely good way!) and Taste the Blood, which you know is maybe not 100% successful, but is genuinely doing something really interesting - and then Lust, which I think, somewhere under the truly remarkable unsexy sexiness has got something iddy going on for me. I like a lot of the others and very much more than LfaV, but I had been led to believe by all the other Dracula adaptations that there would be interesting takes and personal iddyness and Hammer are just so resolutely: nope, not for you anyway, dear. Have Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in compensation, and here we are. They are good compensation. :-)

I mean, I did also enjoy for stupid coincidental old telly watching reasons seeing Michael Johnson get made into a complete vgampire-bait idiot, but neither that nor Ralph Bates being good value, nor a sensible schoolteacher who almost got things to do, are enough to justify that. Oh, Hammer. She could have rescued him at the end herself, but as they still have never worked out what the words "female" and "agency" could possibly mean in relation to each other or which order one should put them in, some rando darts up to dive in and rescue the guy he spoke to once in a tavern. I suppose he is pretty, there is that).

I can't say anything as to RB's other Hammers, because Lust is the only one I've watched. Twice. lol.

[gwynnega]

Now I wish it had been titled Tits for Dracula.

That giant bird may be the most ridiculous movie monster I have ever seen.