A Brief Break and Blog News

I’m taking number 1 son out to Spain tomorrow, so that he can summer in the sun with Grandparents. I’ll be returning Friday but doubt I’ll be blogging again until Sunday – given that I’m off to the Rebellion Punk Festival on the Saturday to fill me boots with some UK Decay and Peter Murphy. So toodle pip for a few days, but when I return…

You may recall, those who have been with me for some time, that for many a year I ensured there were daily posts from the blog. I slowed that down primarily so I could get my backside into gear and work on the second novel. That failed, spectacularly, mainly due to the fact that I traded any spare time into doing a Foundation Degree (which is going swimmingly, by the way).

What has also happened is that I’ve managed to build a back-log of blog articles – over 60 of the blighters. That means, presuming blogging daily, two months of material (and it will replenish itself). Blogging every other day… its four months and the article mountain shall only grow. So, for a little while at least I’ll be going back to a fairly daily blog rate.

Before I go I should mention the Immortal Edition of Martin that is out on UK DVD. Now I reviewed the actual film quite a while ago and had the actual DVD much longer. However when I saw this set I couldn’t resist another copy in my collection! It is slip cased, and the actual DVD cover is reversible, offering 4 different movie poster covers – the one pictured is my favourite. There are 6 art cards with movie poster reproductions and a reversible poster with two of the designs. There is a booklet with an introduction to the film written by Romero back in 1977 (and unfortunately buying into the McNally/Florescu Dracula theory, though to be fair it was all the rage back then). There are a couple of documentaries and radio/TV spots. Of course there is the movie in both 4:3 and 16:9 presentations.

For the completist there is also the Italian cut of the movie (with English subs). Called Wampyr it is a different edit, with dubbing into Italian and a score by Goblin. The Goblin score is funky but perhaps misplaced and it is also a poor cut of the movie itself. Some of the scenes are blooming awful transfer wise, the entire train scene from the beginning happens later in the film destroying the context, indeed the story seems to jerk forward and backwards in a wholly unsatisfying way. Martin feeds on the woman in the house invasion (which doesn’t happen in the English edit), using rehashed scenes from the train attack to create the scene, and the entire radio show aspect has vanished – with just some desperate phone calls to a newspaper to wallow in guilt. A poor relation, but fascinating none the less.