- Hey Chiller, sorry to be so late
- to the party, but I hadn't seen this post in my little favorites ticker and didn't even know it existed. Thanks for the plug to my blog! Hey did you happen to read that post on big momma Salon about the 10 best vampire movies that were better than Twilight? I've been going through that list and have found some very good stuff. You should check out "Let the right on in" , if you haven't already. It is the best vampire film I've seen in a very long while. Also, there's a campy 70's film...something like, "Dracula 1974". I will look up the exact title, but it was the first vamp flick I'd seen from the 70's, and pretty good.The other one I've seen is a Japanese film called, "Marebito." It was interesting in an avant garde sort of way, a little hard to follow though. You have to be in the right mood for this one, but I would still recommend it.
I know I'm soon going to run out of titles for my True Blood posts, but thankfully, Lafayette is there to give them to me!
And as always, OSers Julie Walters and bluestocking babe are here to give us their peerless recaps and commentaries on the show. I'm only here to spill my disjointed obsessive thoughts.
The clever title Lafayette provided me, plus the focus of my fellow OSers post on "9 Crimes", the latest episode of True Blood, converge neatly but not in a pleasant way. I am referring specifically to the "stripper meal", as bluestocking babe calls it.
Vampire Bill, in his ever-increasing descent into the dark side - (all "good" vampires seem to struggle with this - I wonder if it happened to Bunnicula?) - is charged by Lorena and the King of Mississippi with finding "something exotic" and “smokey and not too fatty.” He does indeed do his job of "procuring," and in typical fashion the victim is a stripper/sex worker. Bill performs a hypnosis audit and determines she's the best choice for a meal. Ostensibly, he's looking for someone that won't be missed by relatives, but was he was also looking for someone who already felt dead inside, to salve his conscience? As bluestocking babe noted, it's a rather disturbing and dismissive view of women in the sex industry. It's also a disturbing death sentence for depressed people, as though it's a condition you couldn't recover from.
If you've seen as many vampire films as I have, you become sort of numb to the fact that the vampire attack in modern times looks like unpleasant snuff. Long gone are the slow, sensous, languid boudoir vampire attacks of Lugosi and Lee, which automatically ended in vampirism (it was, to my knowledge, Anne Rice who popularized vampire attacks as ending in death unless the victim drank the vampire's blood). The cruel 3-way feeding at episode's end reminded me of that fact.
Who knows why Vampire Bill is wantonly indulging his dark night of the soul, but the werewolf community will not be outdone by the vamps in outre sex and hellfire club kinks! We're witness to a wolfy branding and blood ritual at Lou Pine's, for the iniation of Alcide's ex Debbie Pelt into the V-head werewolf gang. Debbie Pelt sports a Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett biker chick look. Said ritual was officiated by the King of Mississippi, who I guess we can assume was an ex-Nazi werewolf?
I do hope the branding ritual doesn't go the way it was implied that it would. Not every episode needs to end in ridiculous envelope-pushing sex. Besides, we already have The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf for that!
Thanks Bluestocking! I did see the Salon piece on vampire films, and I agreed with a lot of it. I was glad to see "Near Dark" there because I opened this blog commenting on it. The film you mention may be Hammer's "Dracula AD 1972" which is awesome - it's full of Swingin' London grooviness, and it stars the great Christopher Lee and Stephanie Beacham.
I'm always glad to read your stuff--especially when I find sentences like these: "Who knows why Vampire Bill is wantonly indulging his dark night of the soul, but the werewolf community will not be outdone by the vamps in outre sex and hellfire club kinks."
Caroline, you just made my day!
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