Buffy the Vampire Slayer- Amends

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Season 3
Episode: “Amends (A Buffy Christmas)” (December 15 , 1998)

Synopsis by Jason Henderson

Overview
The victims of Angel’s vampiric past return to haunt him—will Angel kill Buffy to relieve his pain? Or will he destroy himself?

Credits:

Buffy: Sarah Michelle Gellar
Cordelia: Charisma Carpenter
Angel: David Boreanaz
Willow: Alyson Hannigan
Xander: Nicholas Brendan
Oz: Seth Green
Giles: Anthony Stewart Head

Synopsis

Dublin, 1838

Angel corners “Daniel,” apparently a friend of his who cheated him at cards, and kills him. Angel awakens from this nightmare in present-day Sunnydale to go out into the hot December streets, where a heat wave is promising a toasty Yule. He meets a shopping Buffy, and while they talk, Angel sees the figure of Daniel over Buffy’s shoulder.

At Sunnydale High, Buffy, Xander and Willow wonder if Angel is losing it. They exchange Christmas plans—Buffy will be with Mom, Jewish Willow will be wishing she were with ex-boyfriend Oz, and Xander will be camping out on his front lawn. Cordelia makes an appearance to reveal Xander does that to escape a houseful of raving alcoholics, and announces she’s off to Aspen to enjoy actual snow. Willow and Xander are still reeling in self-pity and guilt over their mutual wrong against Oz and Cordy, when Oz appears.

Oz and Willow speak alone and Oz goes out on a limb: he wisely isn’t sure that whatever’s between Willow and Xander will ever be over. But he misses Willow, and he’s willing to give their relationship another shot. Willow asks, really rather sweetly, “Do you want us to… hug now?”

Buffy and Mom go tree shopping and buy an ugly little one that makes the rest of the gang mad. No, no. They talk about inviting Slayer #2 Faith over for Christmas. (Faith lives in a hotel.) But not Giles, Mom says. Buffy finds a section of the tree farm where all the trees have died. Below the dead earth, druidic types moan, and at the mansion Angel reawakens from another nightmare.

Buffy comes to Faith’s charming flea trap and invites her to Christmas, but of course Faith has too much pride to say yes and feigns plans.

Giles is visited by Angel, the recently revived demon beast who killed his girlfriend. Angel needs help. Giles holds a crossbow on Angel while Angel complains of nightmares. He wants to know why he’s back on earth and not still suffering in the demon dimension. Giles suggests maybe peace of mind and complacency do not befit Angel, and when Angel sees the ghost of Jenny Calendar (Giles’ lover), he runs.

Another dream. This time in 18th century England, Angel cuts off a vampire’s head and receives the Quickening. No, no. Angel, with hair and a moustache that make him look like the Comte de Saint-Germaine, assaults and kills a poor servant at a Christmas party. Oh, and he’s gonna kill her little son, too. Buffy’s apparition appears and Angel awakens.

Next the ghost of Jenny Calendar comes to Angel. She taunts him with her murder. “I am sorry for what I've done… what else can I say to you?”

Buffy’s worried because she walked into Angel’s dream, and Giles agrees to help figure out why Angel has returned. Xander joins in the search for a solution, and soon Willow does, too.

Angel’s being tortured with tales of his own torturing—Angel was a true sadist even before becoming a monster. The demon represented by Jenny Calendar suggests that she has no intention of hurting him, but cruelty is Angel’s only talent: it’s his destiny.

At the library, while Giles toils, Buffy and Angel share a sexy interlude dream that ends in Angel biting Buffy. Jenny Calendar taunts him again—all he need do is take Buffy, and his true self will be unleashed. “This is why we brought you back,” the demon Jenny says. “Take her, and then you’ll be ready to kill her.”

Giles, meanwhile, has dug up a reference to “The First Power,” a demonic entity serviced by the Bringers, cult of original evil, who are good at conjuring dreams and apparitions. Buffy and Xander go to their bartender informant, who says the Bringers are underground somewhere, and their presence has scared off a lot of minor underworlders.

Oz brings videos to Willow’s place and is beset by Willow in a red cocktail dress and Barry White on the stereo. Oz is touched by the suggestion that Willow wants to regain his trust at the not-inconsiderable expense of her virginity. (“And you got the… Barry working for you.”) But Oz earns his place in smarmy fanfic by declining until the time is truly right. (Let’s hear it: sigh.)

At the Summers home, Faith shows up for Christmas! And so does Angel, in Buffy’s room, acting hopped up and frightening. Angel runs and Buffy leaves Faith to run to Giles. “He’s slipping,” she says. “If he truly becomes a danger,” Giles concludes, “you may have to kill him… again.”

Jenny pressures Angel to kill Buffy. He was born for it, she says. Angel vows to kill himself and walks out to await the sun.

Buffy works out that the dead spot at the tree farm marks the hiding place of the Bringers and goes there, to face the First Power itself. The First Power insists that it is truly, deeply evil in an unbelievably primordial evil way. Really, really evil. But the power tells Buffy Angel’s going to die at dawn, and Buffy runs.

She finds Angel waiting for sunrise (at the same hill people keep threatening to throw themselves off of on 90210, I think.) Buffy pleads with Angel, but Angel says he’s weak and unable to fight the evil in his soul. Buffy says he has the power “to do real good, to make amends… but if you die now then all you ever were was a monster.” Let me be strong, he says. Strong is fighting, Buffy counters.

And then, a miracle. It snows, preventing the sunshine for at least a day. Buffy and Angel walk the streets, early on a white Christmas, as each member of the cast encounters the falling snow.

Notes

This was a splendid Christmas piece that fit the Buffy universe perfectly—after all, this is a universe where it fits that God himself might give Angel a “reprieve” by sending a cold front. The miracle allows Angel to walk in daytime, in fact, while California gets a white Christmas.

The whole snow scene at the end is a treasure granted after a series of selfless acts. Xander and Giles reach beyond their hatred to help Angel, Oz shows compassion not once, but twice, and Willow prepares to make her own sacrifice. Buffy reaches out to Faith, Faith reaches out for companionship, and Angel decides he would rather die than be corrupted.

The agony of Angel is an interesting character study. We learn here that Angel possessed a knack for sadism borne of himself, not his vampirism, and it’s that darkness that the First Power wants to unleash. There’s also a hint that Angel is a counterpart to Buffy, put on this earth to destroy her. Buffy may be right that destroying himself is a cheap way out, but Angel has to wonder if the goodness and guilt that he feels is in fact going to last. It’s nice that rather than wrapping the story up, the end merely puts the solution off until Christmas is over, like one of those tales of battlefield truces during the First World War.

A few minor points:

*Angel goes to visit Giles to ask for help. I’m trying to imagine Angel calling first. “I thought maybe I could come over…” It’s stunning that Giles agrees to help, later, and only shows what a deeply good man Rupert Giles is.

*Buffy suggests to Willow that one of Oz’s problems with Willow and Xander is that “Xander has a piece of you that Oz just can’t touch.” Tough issue, because it’s true. Like Angel jumping to the notion of killing himself, Willow tries to make up for the gulf between Oz and Xander by sacrificing her virginity. Oz, like Buffy, recognizes the essential good intentions of the sacrifice, but knows that there are better ways of dealing with the problem. More moves like this, and Oz will end up taking whatever firmly entrenched part of Willow’s heart Xander has.

*As a Texan, I loved the throughline involving the hot Christmas. Buffy’s mom lights a fire and turns on an air conditioner—we Americans feel, at heart, that Christmas should be as cold as the Potomac.

*I wonder if the First Power decides its okay to allow Angel to kill himself because he’ll be re-incarnated…

*Faith just pours on the toughness, doesn’t she? I like the touch of the string of lights she hangs in her flea-bitten motel room, defiantly summoning the Christmas spirit. We know she’s going to accept Buffy’s invitation in the end, but true to form she declines at first. Lonely girl. Incidentally, Xander, who we last see isolated and camped out on his front lawn with a snow-driven pizza, is available.

*Any theories on why Mom doesn’t want to invite Mr. Giles over for Christmas?

Memorable Quotes

On bad people:
“For they are the harbingers of death and nothing shall grow above or below them… (sighs) they’re rebels and they’ll never ever be any good.”

- - Giles, reading yet another droning text on evil

On getting back together:
“It’s good. Its perfect, in an awkward, uncomfortable sort of way.”
- - Willow, wondering how to ease back into her relationship wit Oz


On pettiness:

“It must be that whole Angel killed his girlfriend and tortured him thing. Yeah, Giles is pretty petty when it comes to stuff like that.”

- - Xander, pointing out that Giles’ hatred of Angel is not merely “twitchy,” as Buffy callously labels it.

On equal time:
“Hello, still Jewish. Hanukah Spirit, I believe that was?”
- - Willow, showing some Holiday Chutzpah

RIP Paul Naschy, Wolf of Spain

Paul Naschy died yesterday, and I will miss him.

Naschy-- born Jacinto Molina in Madrid, was a weightlifter and trained architect who suddenly in the late 60s began directing and starring in horror films-- usually about the melancholy, aristocratic werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. Personally I consider these movies the pinnacle of 60s and 70s euro-horror, without irony, often dreamy and lusty. In the US we see these movies in washed-out, often heavily oxygen-damaged prints, and the dubbing is absurd, and all of this contributes to the sense of other-worldliness Naschy's work projected.

None of this is high art, and yet movies like Werewolf Versus Vampire Woman are full of vigor and occasionally marked by amazing images.



I admired Paul Naschy for his body of work and his tenacity. He did what the heck he wanted. Viva El Hombre Lobo.

Polidori's Vampyre and Byron's Augustus Darvell

Over the past few days I was on vacation and read John Polidori's The Vampyre alongside Lord Byron's Augustus Darvell (AKA "A Fragment"), which are both reprinted in a recent Oxford collection. This turned out to be a fascinating little assignment for any vampire fan.

The importance of Polidori's Vampyre has been documented well enough; the story, first published in 1819, was an outgrowth of the 1816 Villa Diodati party at which Byron, inspired by the German horror anthology Fantasmagoriana, challenged his guests to each write a scary story.

Technically only two complete tales resulted from the challenge: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, and Polidori's 1819 Vampyre. Polidori's story was the first modern vampire tale, taking the folkloric concept of the ghoulish, decrepit peasant wraith and transforming the vampire into a satire of upper-class devilishness. The villain, Lord Ruthven, is a thinly veiled parody of Lord Byron, Polidori's former employer and friend. But when Vampyre first appeared, it was credited to Byron, a fact that appalled both Byron and the actual author.

Polidori felt robbed of his due credit and Byron-- the single most famous author in England at the time-- felt besmirched, not by the portrait of him in the story, but by any writing he didn't perform. Further, Byron hinted at plagiarism: apparently Byron had told a story at the party that had come out very similarly to Polidori's Vampyre. This idea-- that Polidori had in fact stolen the story-- moved Polidori to write in a note in his 1819 novel Ernestus Berchtold that in fact Vampyre was suggested by a kernel of an idea from Byron:

The tale which lately appeared, and to which his lordship's name was wrongfully attached, was founded upon the ground- work upon which this fragment was to have been continued. Two friends were to travel from England into Greece; while there, one of them should die, but before his death, should obtain from his friend an oath of secrecy with regard to his decease. Some short time after, the remaining traveller, returning to his native country, should be startled at perceiving his former companion moving about in society, and should be horrified at finding that he made love to his former friend's sister. Upon this foundation I built the Vampyre, at the request of a lady, who denied the possibility of such ground- work forming the outline of a tale which should bear the slightest appearance of probability. In the course of three mornings I produced that tale, and left it with her.

Byron, meanwhile, insisted that his publisher release The Fragment that appeared at the end of Mazeppa. That story, though unfinished, hews closely to Byron's kernel.

Here is what I can report on reading them both together:

They are very different stories. Though Polidori clearly took Byron's idea as inspiration, the Polidori story is essentially a satire of Byron overall, and has a wry, cynical, almost modern voice.
[Aubrey] hinted to his guardians, that it was time for him to perform the tour, which for many generations has been thought necessary to enable the young to take some rapid steps in the career of vice towards putting themselves upon an equality with the aged, and not allowing them to appear as if fallen from the skies, whenever scandalous intrigues are mentioned as the subjects of pleasantry or of praise, according to the degree of skill shewn in carrying them on.

His description of Ruthven/Byron is withering: Ruthven is handsome, rakish, and demonically cruel, giving drink to drunks and money to gamblers, but hastening the destitution of the desperate and despoiling the pure. He is capable of great kindness, and nurses Aubrey back to health, before turning cruel again. And it turns out he's a literal vampire. The dramatic moment of the character's death in Greece-- shot by bandits in an action scene-- is only used to set up the vampire's return.

Byron's tale is not a complete story, but in general it is clearly a poetic work of heavy symbolism and high language. The central focus is still two men, one a Byronic character-- rich, dangerous-- but where Polidori's version is only begrudgingly sympathetic, Byron's is rather self-impressed:

I heard much both of his past and present life; and, although in these accounts there were many and irreconcilable contradictions, I could still gather from the whole that he was a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he might take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable.

The death of the remarkable Augutus is more like a piece of folklore-- he makes the trip to Greece specifically in order to die and begin a year-long rebirth, and he presses the narrator to complete this revival by throwing a ring into a river.

So: Byron's is a lovely enough-- but abandoned-- story; prose never held his interest. Polidori's story is funny if melodramatic, and very modern, especially in that it gave us the modern, Byronic vampire. One thing's for sure: without Polidori and Byron we would have no Byronic (wan, sad, sexy) vampire at all, no Dracula, no Carmilla.

Would love to hear anyone's comments!

Halloween Treat Links: The Best and Worst Movies for Halloween at Slate

For some time, I've been enjoying Mark Jordan Legan's ongoing video mini-magazine at Slate, The Worst Cinematic Crap That's Ever Been Made." This has been a treasure trove of cinematic mishaps-- K. Gordon Murray's dubbed Mexican children's movies, lost lesser Asian monster movies, the very best of the worst (or at least, what we call the worst, which is not to say unwatchable; I'll take Samson Versus the Vampire Women over Pay it Forward any day.)

This week, Legan gives us two tours, with a twist: a tour of the best little-known horror movies, or at least a handful of them, and then a tour of the worst.

Here's Legan's All-Time Scariest Movies:


For the record, the movies Legan talks about are (with their Amazon Links):
The Haunting

Pulse

The Vanishing - Criterion Collection

Black Sabbath

Trilogy of Terror

and The Nanny, for which I don't have an Amazon link.

Meanwhile, here's his entry on the Worst:



Those movies?
Black Roses, about a Satanic rock band, which I also don't have a link for
Gallery of Horrors, a terrible grade-z anthology
Troll/Troll 2, "one of the greatest cinematic train wrecks ever"
Invasion of the Blood Farmers

Enjoy-- and thanks Mark!

Halloween Treat Links: The Terror (1963)

Can someone please explain The Terror to me?

I have watched The Terror about a hundred times, and I tell you, I have never once been able to follow the story. Maybe too much happens, maybe not enough. But it looks great.



I hear you talking: you're saying, "What's to understand? Jack Nicholson is a young soldier, and he meets a ghost while he walks on the beach, and he goes to a creepy castle and the ghost is a bird and there's a floodgate and the old baron" and then the words just start sounding like wah wah wah.

And yet it's gorgeous. Creepy castles. Endless walks around said castle. Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. It's like a meditation-- how much does something that looks like a movie have to make sense to actually be a movie? In a way, The Terror is a horror slide show. And a great one. Grab some popcorn.

Watch The Terror online at Youtube.

Halloween Treat Links: House of Usher

Usher
Man!

Today's Halloween film is Roger Corman's HOUSE OF USHER -- God, what a delightful film. Isn't it funny to think of the timing-- CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in '57, HORROR of DRACULA in '58, then USHER in '60?



Vincent Price is dangerous and lithe, an insane white-haired man of handsome looks and deep voice, convinced of the imminent failure of his body, soul and beloved, despised and crumbling house. "We are like figures of fine glass," he says pitiably, "the slightest touch and we may shatter."

And it's better-- better than Curse of Frankenstein, more mature of mood than any Hammer. And just sumptuous. HOUSE OF USHER is gorgeous in every frame, bursting with ominous reds and blues in every scene.

I mean, I've seen it before, but what a thrill to see it again.



Here's a book plug: These films deserve analysis. There are many books on gothic horror, but I have a place to start: I first loved Gothic horror as a child but never began to truly appreciate it until a few years ago on reading Bruce Wright's survey of the genre, Nightwalkers. Since then I have longed to spend spare moments sinking into the "deep and dank tarn" of color and nightmare that is the Gothic period of film.

Halloween Treat Links: Watch Black Sunday Free Online!

Black Sunday -- creepy, mysterious, melodramatic-- is a vampire movie so grand that it once determined where I wanted to live.

It's true. Back when I got out of law school, my wife and I drove across the country to Austin, Texas, to spend the Summer and study for the Bar Exam. It so happened that for years I had been reading about Black Sunday, from Mario Bava. "Not the Blimp Movie," I had to tell people, because there was a movie called Black Sunday about terrorists with a blimp, or something, and I knew this because I was always looking for this movie, at every video store, in every city, from New York to DC to-- well, to Austin. No one had Bava's Black Sunday.

So in Austin I wandered-- the first evening we were there-- into Vulcan Video. "Do you have Black Sunday?" I asked, adding, "Not the blimp movie."

The guy at the counter said: Do you want the American or the European cut?

We stayed in Austin for ten years.

That whole story? Antiquated, because now you can watch it free, online.


Here's the trailer:



You can watch it online at Hulu.

Halloween Treat Links: A 1970 Tour of the Haunted Mansion

Halloween's finest dark ride is open all year around, and launched first back in 1969: Disney's Haunted Mansion, here visited by Kurt Russel and, yes, the Osmonds, on an episode of Wonderful World of Disney.

Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity is an independent horror film so good that, as these things go, soon critics will be beating one over the head in a race to see who doesn't like it. That always happens. A small film comes along, becomes all the rage, and there's always a segment of the population that will sneer.

Bah. This is a scary film. It's a small, intimate, often hand-held movie with no more than four characters and one set. Sound familiar? Go ahead: comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are inevitable. That was a scary little film that used the conceit of characters with handicams to tell a story on digital video, and here is another one.

But it is scary. The story, of a young couple who have started videorecording their lives because the girl is hearing strange noises at night, starts out light and gradually gets more tense and dark. I've never seen such effective use of the date and time stamp on a video image, nor such perfect use of understated special effects. I don't want to spoil anything. Go see it and then spend your next evening listening for footsteps in the hallway.

Mummy and Creature

I put up a children's story called Mummy and Creature, about Mummy, Creature, and their cat and dog.

Check it out!

The Story of Mummy and Creature

Mummy and Creature ~a story of two monsters~
Mummy and Creature got tired of their lives as they had been living them, and because they had been friends for a long time, they decided they would live together.
Because they lived in a rather small town not far from a large city, the two of them were able to find a nice house with two stories and enough room for both of them.
Mummy had a cat named Swanson. Creature had a Collie dog named Gil.
They had their disagreements.
Mummy needed to keep the house very dry, which also suited Swanson. This was a problem for Creature, who loved baths and often fogged up the house with extremely hot water.
Mummy only liked to watch educational programming, while Creature preferred to keep the TV tuned to anything with a lot of explosions.
Sometimes the stress of dealing with a houseful of monsters and dogs and cats got the better of them.
Sometimes when there wasn't much to do, Creature would clown around. Mummy never really cared for Creature's humor.
In the evenings, they would relax on the balcony and review the events of the day.
There was always a lot to talk about.
Mummy and Creature and Swanson and Gil remained in the house for a long, long time.

"Whiteout"-- a killer mystery with a fantastic lead (graphic novel review)

NOTE: In light of the release of the movie WHITEOUT, I wanted to share my review of the graphic novel, which I love and was inspired by when I started creating Sword of Dracula's Van Helsing Family, especially Ronnie.

Whiteout (1999)
$10.99 from Oni Press

Credits:
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artist: Steve Lieber

The cold, US Marshal Carrie Stetko knows, does things to you. It makes your blood pump slower, slurs your speech, numbs your hands. On Antarctica, the bottom of the world, the cold can drop to 89 degrees below zero. Outside, your lungs can freeze. Outside at night, in a storm called a Whiteout, men die a foot from safety because they can’t see the door.

This is the world of Whiteout, a masterful detective novel in graphic novel format by Greg Rucka. The frozen wasteland is the milieu Rucka masterfully uses to frame his story of murder and cover-up. His heroine is Carrie Stetko, a Marshal in virtual exile after a problem she had four years earlier. The cold has changed Carrie as it changes everybody; she’s become cold and cynical in a place of Naval grunts, scientists, and sulking roughnecks, where the ratio of men to women is roughly 200 to one in the heavy season, 400 to one in the winter.

Whiteout works like the best-selling Kay Scarpetta novels Patricia Cornwell writes. The trick is to make the reader feel privileged to learn things few men get to see, and have the outsider become the victor, after many grueling tests. Writer Rucka plunges us into a world he knows inside and out, giving us details of how men talk and work in exotic places, and gives us a character both at home and alien to the landscape. Carrie Stetko is working hard to escape her past and find peace, a peace that is shattered, as these things go, by a murder on the ice.

The man whose face has been blown off lies in the snow in a place where a team of geologists was supposed to have a camp. Around him, deep holes have been drilled into the ground. The other geologists are nowhere to be found, and Carrie must search four bases on a 1600-mile continent to identify both killer and victim. Suddenly she finds that someone out there doesn’t want her to learn the truth, and anyone witness she locates seems to get killed before she can talk to them.

Enter Lily Sharpe, British Intelligence agent. Lily is keeping an eye on Carrie, and may know more than she lets on. Of course the two become allies, and soon it’s the both of them being beaten, frozen, threatened and grievously injured. Rucka lays it all out at a fast, authentic-feeling clip that keeps you guessing, and the Steve Lieber’s art is so cold and ominous you can almost se your breath freeze. The team is willing to put their characters through hell, and in Carrie’s case, it’s a Hell that may heal.

Take a note: this is how mysteries are supposed to work: a dangerous setting. An inscrutable murder. A sympathetic, wounded character. It’s a recipe for the best the genre can offer, and Rucka has made a fine, fine shot at the target.

Awesome Vampire Flashbacks: Samson Versus the Vampire Women

This is wonderful-- a ten-minute montage of the best gags from the MST3K version of Samson Versus the Vampire Women.

For the uninitiated:

• Samson was the American name for El Santo, the Mexican Superhero/Wrestler of comics, books and movies
• Samson Versus the Vampire Women is a movie I have in both English and Spanish-- I still have a fondness for the awful American dubs of these movies, which were all produced by American shlockmeister K. Gordon Murray. These Murray dubs used to show up a lot on basic cable midnight movie shows. Hey, I feel a debt towards Murray-- without him I never would have discovered foreign horror in the first place.
  

Enjoy!

Alex Van Helsing #1 Final Rounds

This is what it looks like when you near the end: Harper and I are now at the point of rapidly shooting edits back and forth to one another as we close on the September deadline to have all edits on Alex Van Helsing #1 completed. What you're looking at is a snapshot of pages 107-148. Note the vast seas of red ink and comments. Now we're down to fairly minor edits. I love this process!

Awesome Vampire Flashbacks: Samson Versus the Vampire Women

This is wonderful-- a ten-minute montage of the best gags from the MST3K version of Samson Versus the Vampire Women.

For the uninitiated:

• Samson was the American name for El Santo, the Mexican Superhero/Wrestler of comics, books and movies
• Samson Versus the Vampire Women is a movie I have in both English and Spanish-- I still have a fondness for the awful American dubs of these movies, which were all produced by American shlockmeister K. Gordon Murray. These Murray dubs used to show up a lot on basic cable midnight movie shows. Hey, I feel a debt towards Murray-- without him I never would have discovered foreign horror in the first place.
  

Enjoy!

Midnight Movie: Terror in the Wax Museum

This movie scared the bejesus out of me when I saw it on TV as a kid. All I remember now is the nightmare sequence. Brrr!

From the Deep Vault: Phantom of the Opry

When I was about twelve, the first Creature Feature of the old hosted, pun-ridden style was this: basic cable's Phantom of the Opry, filmed at the Grand Old Opry House in Nashville. Saturday mornings, Sir Cecil Creape played a lot of imported ba...dness, especially poorly dubbed Italian and Mexican horror. You may not remember this, but if you do, give it a watch.

New from Jason: The Incredible Hulk: Broken Worlds

Just out, Marvel has now released the Hulk: Broken Worlds miniseries in a trade paperback, featuring my short story of the Hulk in one my all-time favorite storylines, the Days of Future Past first seen in classic X-Men comics, where all the mutants and mutant-like heroes have been thrown in concentration camps. This was very exciting for me because I haven't written a Marvel comic in a while-- in fact not at all, except in a single issue of Strange Magic, about Sofia Strange, a series and character Greg Scott and I created for Marvel and then saw published in the ill-fated Epic Anthology.

Welcome to Alex Van Helsing!

This is the first posting at the Alex Van Helsing blog, which I'm setting up as a place for fans and information about the new YA series from HarperCollins, Alex Van Helsing!

The FIRST posting. Meaning I've never posted here before. Heck, the blog didn't exist until just now.So I'm going to post some general information and I can come and post more later-- because no one knows this blog is here yet.

I have other blogs, and it may even happen that I post the same thing at Facebook and elsewhere and here. If this happens and you read the same thing twice-- sorry?

So. What IS Alex Van Helsing?

Alex Van Helsing is the story of Alex, a 14-year-old boy who finds himself thrust into a world of superspies and world vampire organizations. This is not the world of romantic vampires-- our vampires are the bad guys.

Alex doesn't know vampires even exist, see. He's always heard that vampires are just legends, the stuff people make movies about and tease him about his name about.

But in Lake Geneva, Alex meets up with the Polidorium, an enormous, UN-backed secret organization that uses high-tech weaponry to track vampire terrorists the world over.

Hey, wait a minute, you might, and I stress might, be saying. This sounds a lot like a comic book, Sword of Dracula. Ah. Right you are. Alex Van Helsing, the novel series, takes place in the same world as the comic Sword of Dracula, although you don't need to have read any of the comics to get Alex. (In fact, AlexVH takes place many years before the comic series Sword of Dracula and the graphic novel still coming, DRACULA WAR.

More to come. I won't spoil plot here, not much. Not yet. Heck, we have til next summer. I'll post about once a week. Feel free to ask questions

Rifftrax Plan 9 and Twilight

Gentlemen, I have discovered Rifftrax. What is Rifftrax?

Well, if you're a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000-- it's essentially the same thing without the robots. If you're a BIG fan of MST3K, this is like manna.

Between writing sessions I just watched Rifftrax "Plan 9 from Outer Space"-- a few scenes free below-- and then added every one of these to my Netflix queue.



Incidentally, here are some of the best bits from Rifftrax Twilight:

Martha Stewart's Halloween

I note with interest that Martha Stewart is now in the Halloween business-- and I can't imagine a better fit for the vaguely BDSM undercurrent present in all things Martha. Pictured above is the Martha Stewart choker:

Don't simply accessorize — really make a statement by adding the visual drama of our Martha Stewart Crystal Choker Necklace. This is a basic choker taken to beautiful extremes, so it's guaranteed to get noticed.

Rowing with the Wind

"Why can I never learn to swim?"
"Because you do not want to. You have only to throw yourself into the water and float, then learn to move your arms."

For years I've been fascinated by the Villa Diodati party of 1816-- that famous gathering of Byron, Shelley, Mary soon-to-be-Shelley, her sister Claire, and John Polidori. The party figures in a novel I'm working on, so recently everything I consume seems likely to be drenched in Romanticism. (Literally, my evenings are spent moving from reading THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK or whatever might be requested, to editing and listening to Rob Zombie, to reading Byron and Shelley.)

Curiously, the events of the Diodati Part-- which are told very well in the recent book The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein-- have been made into several movies, all of which came out in the mid-80s. Catch them if you can. The greatest and weirdest is Ken Russell's Gothic, which attempts to capture the fever-dream weirdness of the Haunted Summer. There is one I haven't seen-- Haunted Summer, starring Eric Stolz and Alice Krige, a film now so obscure it's apparently not even being bootlegged anywhere.

But up til last week I was completely unaware of Rowing with the Wind, a strange Spanish-produced (but English-language) version from 1988, starring Hugh Grant as Lord Byron and Valentine Pelka as Shelley.

Unlike Gothic, Rowing with the Wind is not a work of grand vision. (Russell's film is something I need to post about separately.) Rather it's more of a magical realist picture where fantastic and horrible things happen but we understand them to be visions. There is one persistent vision in the film: Mary Shelley's creature, which haunts her. Rowing with the Wind is actually pretty funny-- Hugh Grant was never my idea of Lord Byron but plays the part with deft ironic abandon. He's always either making a cruel comment or screaming to the heavens, and seems to be half-joking the whole time.




(I should note that "Byron's" hair is also quite strange, beginning with a sort of up do that would have made sense in a Thompson Twins video, and finishing the film with some luxurious rock star locks.)

Still, it's a haunting film in parts-- the idea of the movie is that the tragedy of Mary Shelley's life-- an awful parade of drownings, suicides and infant death-- are a curse, a cosmic punishment that follows her for reasons unknown. On this point I can agree; her life was full of most horrendous pain.

Does the movie work, as a movie? Not as well as it should; it drags from episode to episode, sometimes having the feel of a TV biopic. Several of the events are out of context or compressed, a side-effect of any biopic.

On the other hand, the conceit of the creature-- here seen as a disturbing ghoul fairly similar to his description in Shelley's book-- actually following these characters around and cursing them is an interesting one. For one thing, it lets the filmmakers quote liberally from scenes from Frankenstein, especially around the death of William, Mary's son, and the fictional William, Victor Frankenstein's young brother.

I liked seeing the Romantics presented at roughly the correct age -- in 1816, Byron was 28, Shelley was 24, Polidori was 21, and Claire and Mary were 18. Here, only Polidori, played by a late-forties Spaniard, is miscast. (By contrast, in Gothic-- which again is a way more interesting film-- the ages of the actors are completely wrong.) The record will show that after the Summer which birthed The Vampire, Childe Harold Canto IV, and Frankenstein, Polidori would be dead in five years, Shelley a year later, and Byron two years after that. Within eight years, all but Mary and her sister Claire were dead. In between were tragedies no parent should ever endure, and they endured them again and again. The darkness of these things don't play as well against the humor of Byron and Shelley, and it's possible this is on purpose.

See this one back to back with Gothic.

I'm going to post the trailers for each film, with a caveat. The only trailer I can find for Rowing with the Wind is in Spanish. The DVD isn't, but the trailer is. (The movie was made in Spain.) The trailer for Gothic, from the same period, is not in Spanish, though I guess it would have been fun to find a Spanish language version of that one, too.

A peek at the First Draft Process

Friday roundup of projects I'm working on:

ALEX VAN HELSING #1-- this book is due on July 20. I wrote the first draft over a couple of months, using a schedule that required steady work but no more than two or three hours of a writing night, and only a few nights a week. The trick is to schedule it and get it done. I tend to use a writing strategy I call "Astronaut," after the old adage than an astronaut solves problems by taking the time he or she has and parceling it out in a plan. I shorten "Astronaut" into the adage: if you're out of time, schedule it.

So I scheduled the first draft of Alex Van Helsing carefully-- first in a bulleted outline, then an Excel Document outline. Excel outlines are useful because you can set up a column showing whether you've completed the chapter or section. I also set up a reverse counter indicating how long the manuscript was in draft form.


I have a first draft of the novel completed and after taking a few days off, for the last few nights I've been slowly going through the draft the old-fashioned way, with an enormous printout and a pen. The basic progress (I wrote this down recently) goes like this-- I really don't look at the first draft much until I have the whole thing done, then I do a lot of reading:

• a quick read-through to catch big mistakes
• another to start adding in missing scenes ("pickup scenes") that establish certain things you may have forgotten to establish
• another to really fix up sentences and sometimes perform major surgery, removing scenes or changing descriptions, or making some major change, like changes of locale or removing/adding subplots. If I decide Alex has a fixation on mermaids (he doesn't) then that must pepper his speech-- a change like that has ripples all through the book.

That's before you actually turn the book in and deal with revision requests from the publisher. So right now we're about in Bullet #1.


WOLFENSTEIN
Meanwhile, I notice MTV has an article up on the new "Nazi Kill Calculator" in Wolfenstein, a game I was a consulting writer on. I did some dialog punch-ups as a deep, deep fan of this series, so naturally I'm very excited.

Nadja on DVD

I watched Nadja over the last couple of days-- if you don't recall it, this is a vampire movie in the same sense that Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is a vampire movie-- which is to say it's an art movie first and a vampire movie someehere about ninth. Look, this should settle it for you: Nadja is in black and white and was produced in 1993 by David Lynch. Sound like something you'd like? I'll bet you already know.

For vampire fans there is indeed some wonderful stuff here. At the heart of the film is Elina Lowensohn as Nadja, a vampire in New York. Lowensohn is completely entrancing as the vampire-- sexy but almost unassuming and even innocent in her delivery. She is a sort of slow-talking manic pixie dream girl they build romantic comedies around, except that eventually she is going to kill you. It's a riveting performance; the movie loses some steam anytime she's not onscreen.

Nadja is, in fact, the daughter of Dracula, whom Nadja senses has died and whose death has sent Nadja into paroxysms of existential angst. This is the kind of movie where existential angst involves a lot of dancing to house music and slowly walking through Manhattan to Portishead. The look of the film is mesmerizing; the beauty of black and white sometimes leads me to wonder if a lot of films wouldn't play better this way-- would THE THING be better if you turned off the color? What about HALLOWEEN? Nadja picks up lovely young bride Lucy and falls in love with her, but unfortunately Lucy is already married, and her husband hangs out with an uncle named Van Helsing.

The rest of the cast is playing bonkers material with expert deadpan. Peter Fonda turns in his kookiest performance ever, playing Van Helsing as a thoroughly mad vampire hunter whose slow delivery and matter-of-fact discussion of vampires and the need to hunt him deflect from his own insanity. Between the hunter and the hunted are the young, troubled couple Jim and Lucy, played by Martin Donovan and Galaxy Craze.

Nadja cannot be watched as straight narrative because it's too much a movie about vampire movies, or about the idea of vampire movies, I think. The dialog is generally ironic and played entirely straight (early on, Nadja tells the mortuary attendant: "We have come for the body of Count Voivoida Armenios Ceauşescu Dracula. I believe there is a wooden stake in the heart. You will take us to him.") In the trailer, these lines sound hilarious, but in the movie the humor is much more muted, daring you to laugh.

Two very interesting ideas in amongst all the angst, which when you get down to it is the same angst every vampire movie references, although here it's much more beautifully done. But besides the angst we get this:
- first, this movie owes a great deal to DRACULA'S DAUGHTER almost to the point of being a remake, both in basic plot and many visuals, especially the garb of Nadja and her languid servant. Here's the trailer for that lovely film

- second, I'm fascinated by the presentation here of Dracula, recently dead, here presented as having been tired, washed up, "like Elvis in the end," sad and confused and so prone to being killed that he must have been suicidal. It's interesting to hear of Dracula dying of ennui.

Haunting and sometimes slow to the point of sleepiness, Nadja is perhaps the best genuine art house vampire movie ever. If that sounds like something you would appreciate-- it's certainly something I appreciate, although it's fun to switch from this to something more traditional like HORROR OF DRACULA-- then I recommend it.

Podcast review of Sword of Dracula at Midnight Podcast

I have no idea how I missed this, but over at Midnight Podcast, at the end of April, host Corey reviewed (extensively) the original Sword of Dracula, and it was a really great review-- since Midnight Podcast is dedicated to zombies, this was a review straight up our alley-- after all, at the end of SOD: Season 1, you have skyscrapers full of zombie, and downtown Dallas turned into Hell on Earth. Check it out, and be sure and give the whole podcast a listen. This is a dedicated, enthusiastic zombie resource, complete with segments on how YOU will survive-- or not-- after the Zombie Holocaust.

Alex Van Helsing in Sword of Dracula: Flashback

Working on finishing the rough draft of Alex Van Helsing #1 this week, but here's a fun flashback-- a reminder of the role Alex played in the original Sword of Dracula series, from Line of Fire, April 2004.

Alex Van Helsing, Ronnie’s brother, has a strange premonition that causes him to call his sister. This phone call causes Ronnie to go about freeing Dracula. His escape from his capsule is very, very cool. It is a squence that you have to see – Belk’s art is really good and it shows in this sequence. Why does Ronnie let the king of the vampires go? Well, we’ll have to wait until the next issue.

In that scene, Alex was an adult, years after the events of Alex Van Helsing #1, which will be out next Summer.

Blood of Dracula

This weekend I came a few thousand words closer to completing a rough draft of Alex Van Helsing #1, so after a decent writing session I kicked back and watched the glorious 1957 "Girls Gone Vampiric" movie Blood of Dracula AKA Blood of the Demon AKA Blood is My Heritage.

Mind you, this is not a Dracula movie and it probably would have done better had it gone out under a name similar to the earlier works of the same crew, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. But who cares? Halfway through this movie, when a Fabian-like "bad" boy interrupts a girls'-school pajama party to croon a mildly rock & roll number ("Puppy Love," but not the one you know) I turned to my wife and said, "this is officially the best 1950s girls' school vampire movie ever."

The plot? Teen Nancy is a girl with some behavioral issues and a nasty dislike for her new step-mom, so in true 1950s movie fashion, Nancy's Dad ships her off to the Sherwood School for girls, led by the well-meaning and long-suffering Mrs. Thorndyke.

No sooner does Nancy arrive at Sherwood but she is harassed and then recruited by the girl gang called "The Birds of Paradise," who are monstrous, monstrous girls engaged in such well-known gang activities as flirting, having sleepovers and going on scavenger hunts. Also, the gang leadership demands they clean up after themselves and is a respected teacher's assistant. Somewhere these rebels have missed the concept, but luckily Nancy is a genuine rebel with genuinely anti-social tendencies, so naturally Nancy is soon under the close study of Mrs. Branding, a psychiatrist who has some kind of theory about unleashing our inner demons, or something. Did I mention that Nancy becomes a vampire?

This movie is fantastic. Yes, it's full of leaden performances, a plot that makes no sense, and stupendously stupid dialogue. But I couldn't take my eyes off of it-- it's easy to make fun of movies like this, but it's impossible to make them boring.

(Note-- the images in this entry are all from that amazing source for teenage horror movie information, the American International Pictures TEENAGE HORROR FACTORY. DO check it out.)

Arise, Sir Dracula! Queen knights Christopher Lee

From the Associated Press, we have news that the greatest Dracula of the movies has become a knight of the British Empire. Lee changed the way the character would be regarded forever-- before Lee, horror fans had Lugosi only to contend with. Since then, it's been Lee and Lugosi neck and neck, with no challenger unseating them yet.

Great timing for Lee's followers, as the Prince of Darkness' cape is expected to be auctioned at Bonham's tomorrow.





Arise, Sir Dracula! Queen knights Christopher Lee

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER – 2 days ago

LONDON (AP) — The Lord of the Undead is now a knight of the British Empire.

Christopher Lee, whose sonorous voice and burning black eyes made him a memorable arch-villain in films from "Dracula" to "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith," was given one of Britain's highest honors Saturday by Queen Elizabeth II.

Golfer Nick Faldo, captain of Europe's 2008 Ryder Cup team, was also promoted to "sir." He can add the title to his six major championship wins.

Among the others receiving royal honors: Tony-award winning actor Alan Cumming, for his work in films such as "X2: X-Men United" and his gay rights advocacy; celebrity hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, who lent his name to a worldwide brand of shampoos and salons; and U.S. economist David Blanchflower, who accurately predicted Britain's recession during his tenure on the interest rate-setting committee at the Bank of England.

Celebrity chef Delia Smith, whose recipe books adorn kitchens around the world, was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, or CBE, for her help in teaching the country how to cook.

Poetry also got a boost, with Andrew Motion and Christopher Ricks both awarded knighthoods. Motion was Britain's Poet Laureate for a decade until he was replaced by Carol Ann Duffy earlier this year. Ricks steps down from his post of Oxford Professor of Poetry later this year.

Lee, 87, who made his name in Britain's low-budget Hammer Studios horror films, is one of cinema's consummate bad-guys, appearing as everything from Bond villain Scaramanga in "The Man With the Golden Gun" to the disreputable Russian mystic in "Rasputin, the Mad Monk."

More recent turns include the evil wizard Saruman in "The Lord of the Rings" movies and fallen Jedi Count Dooku in two of George Lucas' "Star Wars" prequels.

Faldo first picked up a golf club at age 14 and has gone on to win more than 40 tournaments. His six major victories include a triumph at the U.S. Masters in 1996 and the Nissan Open in 1997. The 51-year-old has since made a series of entrepreneurial moves — into fairground design and television commentary, among others.

Cumming was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE; Blanchflower and Sassoon were both made CBE.

Lee, Faldo, and the rest are among 984 people honored in Queen Elizabeth II's Birthday Honors list.

In descending order, the main honors are knighthoods, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and Officer of the Order of the British Empire, OBE, and Member of the Order of the British Empire, or MBE.

Knights are addressed as "sir" or "dame," while recipients of CBEs, OBEs and MBEs have no title but can put the letters after their names.

The honors are bestowed twice a year by the monarch, but recipients are selected by committees of civil servants from nominations made by the government and the public.

Although sportsmen, politicians, and artists regularly top the list, more than two-thirds of the honors go to people out of the limelight, especially civil servants and those with long service to their communities.

This year's recipients include a former elementary school janitor from Aberdeenshire in Scotland and an information desk assistant at Belfast International Airport in Northern Ireland.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Dracula's Cape at Auction

WOW.

Christopher Lee's Dracula Cape is to be auctioned off Tuesday at Bonham's in London.

So, what cape are we talking about? We're talking about this one-- seen here in a 1958 trailer for DRACULA.




At article at the Evening Standard has this nice tidbit:
The highest estimate is for the Dracula cape. It was only identified by Lee two years ago after becoming lost in the cavernous Angels warehouse, which has eight miles of clothing rails, in Hendon.

Soon after Dracula was made in 1958 the garment was accidentally mixed up with other capes and hired out, without fanfare, to producers looking to dress extras in medieval or nativity scenes.

Lot details from the auction page:

Lot No: 251†W
Christopher Lee as Dracula from Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula),
1958
A black opera style cape, of wool, being full length, with collar, with silk effect rope tie to neck, together with a letter signed by Christopher Lee, on Angels headed note paper, dated 15 May 2007, stating "To Whom It May Concern, This is to certify that the black cape presented with this letter is an original from the Hammer film Dracula - 1958. Christopher Lee", and a still image of Lee wearing the cape as Dracula


Estimate: £20,000 - 30,000

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View all items in the Sale

Contact the Specialist to discuss this lot or sale
Email: Stephanie Connell
Tel: +44 (0)8700 273 620

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Tel: +44 (0)8700 273 620

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Footnote:
Christopher Lee is regarding by many as the definitive Dracula. This cape featured in the 1958 film, which was Lee's first appearance as the character and is a classic of the Hammer horror genre.

The cape was missing for over 30 years and discovered within the Angels collection in 2007.

Blood Ties cont.-- review

-- I promised to follow up with a review of Blood Ties once I had a chance to watch it, and so here we are.

At the start of Blood Ties, someone-- possibly a vampire-- is killing people in Toronto, and three different investigations are underway: one led by copy Norman Bridewell, slick and blond, one from Vicki Nelson, PI, a former cop whose bad vision caused her to leave both the force and her affair with Norman, and one from Henry Fitzroy, a Jim-Morrison-attractive, dark-haired vampire whose casual life of charm and seduction has been interrupted by a fear that humans will decide to hunt him down over crimes he didn't commit. These three investigations soon meet, and form the cornerstone of the series, which is a nice blend of genres-- a crime show with a unique female lead, and a vampire story that treats its vampirism with a matter-of-factness we might call innocent.

In the universe of crime shows, PIs have authority that they generally don't in real life-- they talk tough and bartenders give up information readily. It's the way these things work-- Vicki is that kind of PI, except that her blurred vision, glasses and neatly drawn-back hair are a charming departure from the norm.

The DVD Set includes the whole first season, but Episodes 1 and 2 form the Pilot, which means the action has to serve the double duty of telling an episodic story (in this case, about a small-time nerd who's discovered how to summon a murderous, slightly bigger-time demon) while also introducing the world and the main characters. This leads to a lot more explaining in the dialog than you will ever have again-- though the story Henry tells of how he became a vampire is earnest and compelling and marks the point at which the characters come into their own-- supernatural naturalism.

I like that Vicki is immune to Henry's mojo, at least the kind he uses for the Jedi-mind-trick style questioning and suggestion he likes to pull on the random people he meets. When Henry he tries to hypnotize her as they first meet, Vicki snaps, "You might want to take that hand off my arm before I snap it off at the wrist."

This is popcorn, pure and simple, but as any fan of SLINGS AND ARROWS who also watched STUDIO 60 will tell you, there's usually a Canadian "version" of your favorite show that's probably better, and that goes for popcorn, too.

Of course vampire stories are evergreen, which is why creators get to use them in so many ways; we have romance vampire stories, terrorist vampire stories, superhero vampire stories. BLOOD TIES is a surprise-- an exciting mesh of crime drama and supernatural romance with a cool heroine at its center.

Blood Ties on DVD

I've just gotten Season 1 of vampire crime-drama Blood Ties on DVD-- just released-- but have yet to review it. I promise to get a review up soon!

In the meantime, here's a cool fan-made trailer for this vampire show, with one of my favorite songs:





The Blood Ties Announcement is below:

Eagle Rock Entertainment To Release

BLOOD TIES

First Season Of The Smash Lifetime Series On 4DVD Set

~June 2, 2009~


New York, NY -Although Eagle Rock Entertainment are best known for releasing outstanding music DVDs, their audio-visual entertainment programming also includes film, television series, comedy specials, and documentaries. This summer will kick off with the release of the acclaimed Lifetime series Blood Ties – Season 1 on June 2 (Retail Sales Price $26.99, Pre-book Order Date May 13).

This impressive 4DVD set features the original 13 episodes of the series. Bonus material includes a behind-the-scenes documentary and trailer. Blood Ties is based on the book series written by Tanya Huff, which is currently in its 17th printing. Touted as “A Crime Series, With Bite,” Blood Ties follows the wild success of other vampire dramas, such as Twilight and True Blood. Blood Ties is not your typical crime drama, and the release of this 4DVD set is the perfect opportunity for the rabid vampire fans to sink their teeth into a captivating and engaging drama.

The story revolves around private investigator Vicki Nelson (played by Christina Cox), who witnesses a violent murder one night in the streets of Toronto. This is no ordinary murder, and as she searches for the truth, more and more evidence suggests demonic involvement. The investigation leads to an encounter with the suave and alluring Henry Fitzroy (played by Kyle Schmid), who just happens to be a 470-year-old vampire with a vested interest in the case. The two collaborate, and their relationship starts to bloom into something much more than the mission at hand, which interferes with Nelson’s current relationship with ex-partner Detective Mike Celluci (played by Dylan Neal). As the season progresses, Nelson and her cohorts are pulled into an unpredictable swirl of romance, action, and supernatural activity.

To view a trailer, please visit http://www.eaglerockent.com/downloads/Penguin/bloodtiestrailer.mov.

Eagle Rock Entertainment is an international media production and distribution company operating across audio visual entertainment programming. Eagle Rock Entertainment works directly alongside talent to produce the highest quality programming output covering film, general entertainment and musical performance. Eagle Rock Entertainment has offices based in London, New York, Germany & France.

The Lost Anime Dracula

-- that is, lost for a reason.

Tonight I was working on Alex Van Helsing #1 and letting the classic '31 Dracula play on DVD (with the excellent Philip Glass score, but more on that another time.) But after a writing session I had to unwind, and sometimes that requires complete trash.

So, thanks to a reminder from Tony Salvaggio (not just the co-creator of Psy-comm but also a brilliant anime columnist for Comicbookresources.com), I decided to pop in the 1980 anime DRACULA: SOVEREIGN OF THE DAMNED, also known as THE TOMB OF DRACULA: LORD OF THE VAMPIRES.

Now, I know some of you are shouting, wha? An anime based on Tomb of Dracula, Marv Wolfman's legendary take on Dracula, that introduced the world to a regal Dracula and a bunch of familiar new characters like Blade and Lilith, Daughter of Dracula?

Yes. And some of you are also shouting, I thought that thing was buried forever with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

That second group is more familiar with this work. Hey, I didn't come by my copy easily; I had to buy it from a bootlegger near a loading dock in Dallas, (and by near, I mean, you know, in the dealer room at Wizard World at the Arlington Convention Center, which has a loading dock.)

This is an astonishingly over-wrought movie that tries to adapt the comic into a feature-length video. It begins with a cosmic overtone, in which a breathless narrator goes on about how life is made up of opposites while showing us cosmic vistas and, I think, the surface of the sun.
"A chaotic clash of opposing forces ... the very elements of nature itself are in constant upheaval! An eternal compbat of opposites, light against darkness, heat against cold! Love and malevolence!"

Moving on to malevolence, the narrator brings us to Castle Dracula, and now it gets arty, as we listen to harpsichord music and pan slowly across the gargoyles. But we don't see the count, apparently we're here for a break after that exciting intro about cosmic opposites. The narrator tells us that, whoops, Dracula isn't here anymore, he's headed West, and into the plot.

The plot involves Dracula horning in on the action of a group of Satanists. ("They met in a church! But their form of worship was an unholy desecration!" says the narrator, who is starting to sound more unhinged than Criswell.) Drac runs off with the woman who is intended to be his sacrifice, and then the movie warps through more plot you would expect from one extraordinarily dull anime: Dracula's love with the woman, an anime version of Janus, Son of Satan, an anime version of Marvel's various vampire-busters. Dracula is a hero. A villain. A lover. A rebel. On and on the movie drones.

I mean, seriously-- Zoltan, Hound of Dracula is silly, but it's one story told in a reasonable amount of time. This movie is nine stories told in a strangely-dubbed jumble. I'd give you more details but-- oh, for Pete's sake. Trust me.

So there: the 1980 anime Dracula. I have seen it so that you don't have to. Next time you see this one at the loading dock, you can skip it in favor of that 1978 Doctor Strange.