October Movie Reviews: Countess Dracula

Stuck in the 70's with another one of the Hammer Films.

This time we are getting into what would be fertile ground for Hammer, beautiful young women killing other beautiful young women.


Countess Dracula (1970/1971)
This one is a bit mis-titled, and a bit of different one for Hammer.  It is the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, but the twist is here the blood she drains and bathes actually does make her young again in the form of Scream Queen Ingrid Pitt.

The story is not a bad one, but not memorable.  Bathory kills girls, dupes dumb men into being her pawns, finally gets caught in the end.  We are missing some of the characters from Bathory's history, but that is fine really.

The one ups the blood and gore (too be expected) and the sex and nudity (also to be expected).
It is not quite as good as Daughters of Darkness that came out a year later. But it has more of supernatural feel to it and more of a Hammer feel to it if that makes any sense.   Ingrid Pitt also stared as another famous vampire, Carmilla, in the Vampire Lovers.  Female vampires became very lucrative for Hammer in the end, but not enough to save them it seems.

I had forgotten I had seen this one till I got into it.  So I watched it with the audio comentary on instead.  Very interesting insights to Hamer in the 70's to be sure.  Makes me want to go back and listen to the audio comentary tracks on the all the other Hammer films I have watched.

15 Games that Inspired Me

Doing that blog-o-sphere thing again.  I am listing the 15 games that had the most influence on me a player, game master and a game designer.

1. AD&D 1st Ed.  (credit where credit is due)
   
2. Moldvay Basic D&D (toss up which one influenced me more, this of AD&D)
   
3. C. J. Carella's WitchCraft (THE modern horror game)
   
4. Ghosts of Albion (fairly obvious I think)
5. D&D 3.0/d20 (a revolution in game design and publishing. Gave birth to the entire OSR)
6. Chill (showed me there was more to RPGS than just killing monsters in dungeons)
   
7. Traveller (opened up new worlds to me)
   
8. Star Frontiers (the Sci-Fi game I played the longest)
   
9. D&D 4 (sacred cows make for tasty burgers)
10. Vampire the Masquerade (sometimes you get to be the monster)
    
11. Call of Cthulhu (despite playing it in the 80's it was not till the 90's that I figured out how good it is)
    
12. Mutants and Masterminds (showed more than any other game that the OGL was working)
13. Shadowrun
    
14. Paranoia (Role-playing should be about fun too)
15. The OSR (I am lumping them all together since they inspired me to go back and look at the games I played ina  new light)

Pakistan Flood Relief

Long time readers might recall the Haiti Flood Relief done by OneBookShelf Inc (Drivethru RPG and RPGNow).  Well they are doing it again for the recent flood in Pakistan.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=84741&affiliate_id=10748

So for a $25 donation you get over $700.00 worth of products.

It is worth checking out and for a good cause.

There are at least four books I saw right away I wanted and that would have cost me 45+ bucks right there.  I am also certain there are more.

Hell, it has Starblazer Adventures included and that is $50  right there.

The Essentials Druid

The new Druid build for Essentials made it's preview today.
You can read about it here, http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ex/20101018.

On first glance I like the changes.  There is no wild shape ability in the first 10 levels that I can see and focus is more on their animal companion.

Points of Light is also talking about them, http://daegames.blogspot.com/2010/10/essentials-druid.html.

I had expressed my displeasure with how 4e had done Druids before (here and here).  So far this new one looks better than what PHB2 gave me.

Will have to wait and see.

October Movie Reviews: To the Devil a Daughter

Back to the 70's with one of the last Hammer Films produced till the present day.

To the Devil a Daughter (1976)

This one has an all star cast, which in a horror flick usually means bad news.
Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Honor Blackman, Denholm Elliott and introducing a young Nastassja Kinski. Really it should not get much better than this.

I mentioned this one in the past. It was less of the Gothic horror tradition and more into the supernatural horror. It was the time in the 70's, movies like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby were big hits.  The Devil had never been more popular.
The story involves an excommunicated priest (Lee) and an occult investigator (Widmark). Lee is secretly a worshiper of Astaroth and hopes to use a young nun (Kinski) as the vessel of his lord.

The script is actually rather well researched and certainly is a better portrayal of what real occult practices were like.  Widmark even repeats something I have repeated myself many times about how most "satanists" out there are really just perverts looking for some kinky sex.  It it the other ones you have to worry about.  Lee is great in this role, as usual. Widmark seems bored and Blackman utterly underused here.  There are some places in the script that left me scratching my head about why one thing or another was done.  But all in all it was a fun, if not all that great, movie.

Of course the movie is rather infamous for it scenes of full-frontal nudity from a then 15 year old Nastassja Kinski.   The DVD version I have has those scenes intact as well as the Satanic orgy often cut from most American versions of the movie.  They are pretty risqué for our time, so imagine what they were like in 76.

What I liked best about this DVD though were the interviews.  Christopher is always great to watch in interviews. He reads part of the original book that this was based on and left me with wanting to hear him read all of it.  

I guess in the end I just wanted this to be more than it was.

October Movie Reviews: The Lestat Movies

Double Feature weekend!

I watched, for the first time "Queen of the Damned" and rewatched after a long time "Interview with a Vampire". Both based on the first three books of Anne Rice's Vampire series.
I watched them in the same order I originally read the books way back when. I read "The Vampire Lestat" first then "Interview with a Vampire" next. It gave me a very different point of view of Lestat than others reading the same books at the time.
Let's be 100% honest here. If it was not for Anne Rice we would not have had "Vampire the Masquerade" and certainly she gave birth to the latest modern trend in vampires. More so that "Sookie Stackhouse", "Buffy" and even "Twilight". While Rice's vampires are appealing they are also monsters. Sometimes they struggle with that. So we have her to thank (or blame) for the Agnsty Emo Vampire in whole or in part.

Queen of the Damned (2002)

This film combines and shortens the tale found in the books "The Vampire Lestat" and "Queen of the Damned". Lestat (Stuart Townsend this time) comes back after his self imposed exile/sleep to be a rock star (who sounds an awful lot like Korn). Hey in the books it worked. It comes off a bit rushed in the movie though. His songs, especially about the really old vampires wakes Akasha, Queen of the Vampires (played by the late Aaliyah).  Wackieness ensues. Vampires that don't want to be outted try to kill Lestat, Akasha wants to keep him alive.  Marius shows up.  The ancient vampires fight to stop Akasha.

To start out with, this is not an exact sequel to "IwaV", more of a separate interpretation of the same universe.  That being said lets look at the good and the bad.
Good.  The vampires here are very cool.  Their powers have a nice affect on screen and they are still bloodthirsty killers.  The movie itself is better than I had been lead to believe all these years, but if one compares it to the book then it fails.  Lestat does not come off as a spoiled brat in this one as he did in "IwaV" and the books.  More like a vampire that kinda wishes he was still human.  Which of course was NOT Lestat in the books.
Bad. The script is kind of a mess.  They are trying ram two very dense books into a movie footprint and don't do so well.  Granted, Rice's later books needed pruning, but that is the fine skill of an editor, this was the work of a guy with a chainsaw.  Characters have disappeared, entire plots lost and the resolution does not have the same impact in the film as it does in the books.

In the end I enjoyed the movie, but only as a vampire flick, not as something that I know belongs in a larger universe.

Interview with a Vampire (1994)

Everyone had such high hopes for this one.  On the tail of Bram Stoker's Dracula this was supposed to open up a new era of vampire films.  Maybe it did.  But the movie was a disappointment.
Based on the book of the same name, this one has an all star cast.  I mean really.  Brad Pitt as Louis, Tom Cruise as Lestat, Kristen Dunst as Claudia (long before she would kiss Spider-Man), Christian Slater (filling in for the recently late River Phoenix) as Daniel and Antonio Bandaras as Arman.  I mean wow.  Look at that.
Visually the movie is very appealing.  Pretty (and petty) vampires feeding on humans while Louis frets and mourns his lost humanity.  Yeah agnsty emo vamps.
Tom Cruise was great as Lestat, but in some ways not as good as Townsend.  Now, I'll be honest, I don't like Tom Cruise I think he is a nut-job with a lot of issues and belongs to a wacky cult.  But so do a lot of people.  But he certainly made me believe he was Lestat here.  I am going to come back to why in a bit.  Now Brad Pitt I do like, after his bit in "12 Monkeys" and "True Romance" he convinced me he was not some pretty boy actor.  Watching him "Snatch" confirmed that.  But here he is the pretty boy vampire and frankly the best line in the movie was Lestat's "Oh shut up Louis."
I really liked this movie when it came out, but now almost 10 years later I seen the cracks in the veneerer, the flaws.

Basically I have the EXACT same issue I have with the books.  I can't stand Lestat in "Interview" (book or movie) and I liked him in the Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned.

Anne Rice's vampires are creatures of their times.  Not meaning when they were turned, but when the books and movies were made.  Since then the entire sub-genre of Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy has grown up in the soil she tilled.  Vampires are no longer monsters, they are potential date/S.O. material. To be fair, Rice's vampires are monsters.  They just whine about being monsters.

I am glad though I got to watch them both back to back like this.

The Dragon and the Phoenix: Episode 8

Episode 8: Silent Lucidity

Tara: Wow. Who knew Miss Kitty could quote Shakespeare?
Willow: I am still having trouble getting past “Who knew Ms. Kitty could talk.”
- Willow and Tara: The Dragon and the Phoenix, Episode 8 "Silent Lucidity"

Episode 8: Silent Lucidity by ~WebWarlock on deviantART

March 24, 2003. 
Monday

Dawn’s emergent psychic powers traps the cast in her nightmare.
More than a week later and things have cooled down, a but only a little. At least everyone is agreeing to watch a movie together. It’s a Japanese-monster horror film and Xander has to remind Buffy that it is not a training video. Dawn begins to emerge as a powerful telepath and psychic, but not before she traps the cast and herself in the Dreamlands. The Cast must work through there own subconscious issues before they can escape. Willow and Tara’s issues with each other (loss and power), Buffy and Spike’s issues (trust and obsession) and Anya and Xander’s (fears of commitment and rejection). Dawn is dealing with the issues of constantly worried that she nothing more than Buffy’s shadow or even less. All the while Glory taunts her in her dreams.
Story Arc elements: Dawn focused, but also focused on the interplay of the cast.
Game Design elements: Non-magic psychic powers, rules for play in the Dreamlands, Bast for Cinematic games. Introduce Miss Kitty Fantastico II as a Bast. Have the Vampire Chicas come back to town. While the Cast is “sleeping” Dawn’s friend is killed and Faith dies in the hospital.

Notes and Comments:
Given that I was going to college in the 80’s and 90’s I am allowed to name one adventure ever my entire life after a Queensrÿche song. This is it.  I am also allowed to do one "dream" episode.  This is also it.

Ok. So. I killed Faith here.

Of course I have her appear in Buffy’s dreams and up the bi-sexual attraction she has for her. Mind you YEARS before it ever showed up in any comic. But I was careful not to repeat the cliché of a girl showing interest in another girl and have end her up dead (see “The Celluloid Closet” and the "Evil/Dead Lesbian Cliché"). I have Dawn watching all of this in her dreams, but unable to hear anything. She is taunted in her dream by Glory (really just the manifestation of her own fear) with the fact that she is no more real than Kara was and it is only a matter of time before Willow screws up something and undoes the magic holding her together.
I’ll be honest here, I liked Dawn. I always did. So she gets a chance here to shine (figuratively and literally) in the next few episodes.  We had built up her power slowly over the course of the season and this was the episode we let it cut loose.
This episode was very interpersonal. Very little in the way of combat. Most of the creature in the dream lands were Bast (which you have seen some of those in the past here). For the others I used some creatures that later would go on to be in Ghosts of Albion.  I used my old copy of Call of Cthulhu for ideas, but we never really ran into any mythos creatures other than seeing them in background or "through the veil of other dreams".

For the confrontations in the dreams, the cast were paired of (though I was still having trouble getting and keeping a regular Anya player) to deal with their issues.   For Willow and Tara's case, Willow agreed to basically "re-learn" magic from Tara.  If this had been earlier in the season then I would have dropped her back down to Sorcery/Magic 0 and work back up. But we didn't have that benefit.  Plus the next episode I needed a magically potent, if wounded, Willow.  Tara forgave Willow for her dabbling in "dark magics" and agreed that learning magic together would be the best for them both.

The cast finds out Faith died while they were sleeping.  I have a cut scene at the end where a coroner played by Zach Galifianakis performs Faith’s autopsy while Angel waits. Thought it was appropriate if morbid.

The cover of this does not quite represent the agnst of the episode, but my mandate was Willow and Tara on every cover and this was the one I liked the best.


Next up: The New Marvel Girl