Blackmoor Vituperative

Last night’s interstitial Cult Movie Night SPECIAL EDITION was Silent Night, Deadly Night (a Christmas tradition!) and Brick. It was going to be Silent Night, Deadly Night and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but I was overruled.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a much better movie than you might think, if you’ve never seen it. It spends a good portion of the movie introducing you to the main character, Billy, and gives you insight into why he later snaps and start killing people dressed as Santa Claus. It also includes a lot more nudity than you see in slasher movies nowadays (something I miss). But it’s not torture porn, like Saw and Hostel — there aren’t long, lingering scenes of people tortured and in pain. The violence is over the top and fun, not sadistic and disturbing. That being said, there are some genuinely creepy and scary parts, primarily in the early part of the film where we see Billy being traumatized by his early experiences.

Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is completely different. Brick is a film noir mystery set in and around a high school. That might sound camp, but Brick works because everyone in the movie takes it deadly seriously. It works because in high school, every ridiculous little thing is deadly serious. There’s very little violence, some mild language, and no nudity. An episode of CSI has more violence in first fifteen minutes than Brick has in the whole movie. Yet the movie is rated R for “Violent and Drug Content”, showing you what a load of crap the MPAA ratings are.

What a day. I tracked down a very devious bug of my own design and fixed it, so hopefully that project I am two days behind on will be finished before I am four days behind on it.

Then I cleaned the hot tub thoroughly with a mop and a bucket of bleach-water, in the dark. Thank goodness for security lights and cotton string mops! There’s nothing quite like a cotton string mop for a job like that. Then I filled the tub and started it up. The pump is running and the tub doesn’t appear to be leaking, but there’s a lot of water splashed all over the place so I can’t be absolutely certain about the lack of leaking. The current water temperature is 58 degrees — let’s hope the temperature rises!

And now I get to spend the next couple of hours before bedtime working on the Character Sheet Helper for Bulletproof Blues. I have renamed it from “Character Builder” in the hope that the new name will better convey the notion that this spreadsheet isn’t required to play the game: its main purpose is to help make attractive, easy-to-share character sheets.

While visiting my mom, one of my sisters, and my sister’s family a few weeks ago, I took a few minutes to change my Champions Online password because I received an email that made me suspect my account might have been hacked. I logged in just long enough to do that and then logged out again: a minute, perhaps, at most.

I did not realize that my 6-year-old nephew Malakai was looking over my shoulder while I did so (children are sneaky). Later that day, he presented me with the drawing on the left, which he had done entirely from memory. Note the things he noticed and remembered: not just Grimknight in the foreground, but the waving police officer and the insectoid spaceship behind him! I was, and am, amazed.

I love Christmas. It vexes me when this or that group wants to claim it as “theirs” and declare that no one else can have it. It vexes me when someone dismisses it as no more than an excuse for crass commercialism. Christmas isn’t about some guy being tortured to death, and it’s not about feral crowds and shopping. It’s not about this or that religious festival which coincidentally happens to be held at the same time. Christmas is about love, hope, good will, generosity, friends, and family. It’s about reaching out to people that you’d normally ignore, at best. Frankly I wish we — and by we I mean everyone: atheist, Jew, Buddhist, Christian, Pagan — would take Christmas back from the Scrooges that want to poison it.

Christmas is no more a “Christian” holiday than Tuesday is a “Norse” day of the week. It’s just a name: the actual holiday is much bigger than that. Christmas is a human holiday. Christmas is about love, hope, good will, generosity, friends, and family.

We saw The Dark Knight Rises last night. I’m not bothering with a spoiler warning, because it’s unnecessary: the movie is just that predictable. I started looking at my watch after about 70 minutes. That’s not a good sign.

The first half of the movie is a strung-together series of Long. Serious. Monologues. After a while it picks up, and turns into a dull, predictable remake of Batman Begins (a fantastic movie).

I liked Anne Hathaway, but she wasn’t onscreen enough to salvage the movie around her. Dull and predictable sums it up.

Oh, and if you think the ending needs further explanation (why anyone would need the ending explained is a mystery to me, but apparently some people go looking for ambiguity), this toy can explain the ending to you.

I am completely sincere when I say Batman & Robin was better in damned near every way. If you’d told me a week ago that I would say that, I would have laughed at you.

Edit: Someone saved me the trouble of listing most of the problems I had with the Dark Knight Rises script. They leave out one noteworthy problem: the “these guys are the League of Shadows, no wait, now they’re revolutionaries, no, wait, now they are suicidal goons … who the hell are these guys, anyway?” problem.
(Note: Google erroneously marks this site as malicious.)

I am watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. The kid made a tsunami and then deliberately didn’t destroy the Fire Nation fleet with it. I would have sunk them like stones. I guess I’d make a poor messiah. And… um, while I was typing this, the movie ended abruptly. What the hell?

Other than the abrupt, inconclusive ending, I didn’t think this movie was all that bad. Certainly not as bad the negative things I’d heard. I’d say it is on par with The Neverending Story, and that’s some kind of classic, isn’t it?

I typically have DVDs or something from Netflix streaming in the background while I work. As it happens, today I am running through the Universal Frankenstein movies. The movie currently running is Bride Of Frankenstein, which is actually my favorite of the series.

So I am typing away, adding validation to web forms (not a sexy project, but important nonetheless), and I notice that the sound of howling hounds is really loud. I stop and listen, and then I pause the DVD — the howling continues. The howling is coming from the woods behind Castle Blackmoor, out toward the creek that feeds the moors. Curious, I went outside to look and see what was doing all of this howling.

I got to the edge of the path which leads off down to the outpost, and the howling stopped. Not abruptly, mind you: it just sort of faded away. As I stood there, the woods were eerily silent, somehow made even more eerie by the bright sunny sky above. The sounds of wildlife, birds, churring insects and so on gradually came back, and then a bit later, I heard the howl again, so far away that I could barely hear it.

At which point I realized that I’d come outside without even taking along a pistol, much less a proper rifle, as one might reasonably do when investigating a mysterious howling on the moors. Imagine how foolish I’d have felt if I’d found the source of the howling.

It’s easy to criticize the behaviour of victims in horror movies when they do foolish things: going into dark basements alone, going outside to investigate strange noises, chasing an escaped cat in one’s space-underwear, and so on. It’s much easier to make foolish choices than we’d like to think, particularly when the sun is bright and the sky is clear and we are in a familiar environment where a monster has never attacked us before.

Watching Event Horizon and having Prometheus flashbacks. “We have a top secret, super advanced space ship that mysteriously disappeared seven years ago, and now it’s back. Who should we send? Space Navy Seals? Martian Mounties? The Israel Space Force’s elite 669 Search and Rescue Unit? Nah, screw that. Let’s just send a random civilian space-tow-truck crew too stupid to understand three-syllable words.”

It’s not a case of “It was an emergency, so we sent whomever was closest.” Sam Neill’s character, Dr. Weird, was on Earth at the time, and they sent him. If they could send him, they could have sent a competent rescue team with him.

I am taking a break from the evil and general unpleasantness of the real world for the rest of the day. Susan is napping on the couch, Vixen is napping on my shins, and I am going to call my mom and say hi before settling in with a pitcher of screwdrivers and The Lost Skeleton Returns Again.

The Lost Skeleton Returns Again is a sequel to the famed Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra. I watched that the other day for the fifth or tenth time. Great fun. Last night we had some folks over and watch Godzilla vs. Biollante and Dark And Stormy Night. Dark And Stormy Night is also a Larry Blamire movie. Jennifer Blaire, who plays Animala in the Lost Skeleton movies, plays Billy Tuesday. Billy Tuesday is a real doll, a regular firecracker, see? She’s awesome. I also got a kick out of Brian Howe’s character, Burling Famish, Jr. His monologue next to the fireplace where he describes his uncle Sinas Cavinder is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Anyway, that’s my plan for Saturday. I hope yours is nice. Yes, there are terrible people in world, and awful things happen, but those things happened yesterday, and they’ll happen again tomorrow. Focus on the good things, once in a while. Like today, for example. Today is a marvelous opportunity to focus on good things.

Cinematic Titanic’s new DVD, Rattlers, is now available!