Hammer Time

For readers in the UK… The Horror Channel (Sky 319 & 198 Freesat 138 Virgin 149) are starting a series of Hammer Double Features and this Saturday features Dracula Prince of Darkness and Scars of Dracula. An excuse to watch the films again. Thanks to Clark for the heads up.

The Vampire in Slavic Cultures – review

Editor: Thomas J Garza

First published: 2009

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Eight hundred years before Bram Stoker gave us the West's most memorable vampire in Dracula (1897) and long before the exploits of Vlad "the Impaler" Tepes horrified Europe (1431-46), the Russian Primary Chronicles write of a Novgorodian priest as Upyr' Likhij, or Wicked Vampire (1047). The Slavic and Balkan worlds abound in histories, legends, myths and literary portraits of the so-called undead, creatures which draw life out of the living in order to sustain their own. These stories of the vampire simultaneously fascinate and horrify, as they draw the reader closer to an understanding of death and the undead.

This unique volume brings together a wide variety of historical, critical, and literary texts that reveal and explore the origins, growth, and development of the vampire myth from its beginnings to the 21st century. These texts explore the vampire within the region of its origin in Western cultures: the lands of the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Russia. From the earliest recorded tales to the recent offerings of Russian vampires on film, this volume gives the reader a dynamic perspective on one the world's most enduring cultural phenomena, the vampire.

The Review: Normally I try to avoid comment on price when doing a review – content is more important, and I’d expect a higher price for an academic reference book. However I must mention that (at time of review) the new volume price for this book, on Amazon UK, has only just (for the first time) dipped below £100. On Amazon US it is still over $115.

Now, trusting I didn’t spend anywhere near that for my used copy, and despite the fact that it is a large tome, the contents of this would seem to be problematic given the price. Firstly it is made up of extracts from other works (all accredited) as well as having a section of literary offerings. There are extracts ranging from the great – for example Keyworth’s Troublesome Corpses – to the not so great – I still have no love for Konstantinos’ Vampires: the Occult Truth. However extracts from books such as Dundes’ The Vampire a Casebook and just about anything by Perkowski were noticeable by their absence. Perhaps permission to reprint couldn’t be gained, however missing these when including some of the lower quality extracts seemed at best a mistake.

The first section contains several definitions of vampires. Pulling these together from a variety of sources was a great idea. It allows the student to see several variants. However it has absolutely no commentary and this is a problem. So, when we get mention of vampires taking the form of a monstrous bat, Garza does not inform the reader that the primary association of bats and vampires comes from the novel Dracula. Given this is a reference book I would have expected some commentary but the book contains no primary commentary on the extracts, hence suggesting that Garza is an editor rather than author at the head of the review (he does translate a couple of pieces).

Worst still is that the reference for each extract dates the extract to the publication Garza used. Thus, when we read the definition of vampire from Dudley Wright’s Vampires and vampirism it offers the date of 2001 (the date the specific publication it was lifted from was reprinted) but the reader may be unaware that the original publication date is 1914. Looking at the date enables us to track changes in genre/folklore thoughts (to be absolutely fair some of the literature, later in the volume, carries an original publication date at the end).

Worse comes with the referencing and footnotes from the extracts. Some have them intact, some don’t – and we know some should have footnotes because the footnote’s citation number is still in the text but the foot (or end) note is nowhere to be seen. At the best this was lazy and unhelpful.

There are sections on both Vlad Ţepeş and Erzsébet Báthory. In the introduction Garza admits that neither was Slavic but suggests that “the geographic proximity of their dominions to the lands of the Slavs clearly had an effect on the development of the vampire myth in those neighbouring countries,” No evidence is offered for this by Garza, though he does suggest that both figures were given the “moniker of ‘vampire’”. Certainly that never occurred until post-Stoker for Ţepeş. Then again, given the cover of the volume I shouldn’t have been surprised by this content. Anyway, the sections themselves carry little in the way of balanced extracts. Though I personally suspect Báthory was guilty (at least to a degree) of the crimes accused (though they were used by her enemies to their advantage) I would have liked to have seen a “she was innocent and framed” article as a balance. As for Ţepeş an extract from Dracula: Sense and Nonsense or similar was sorely needed to offer a balanced viewpoint.

I was mystified as to why an essay on The Golem was included – again commentary would have explained Garza’s thinking, perhaps he expected readers would only be people with his lesson plan? I was also mystified as to why an extract from Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled was included, only to be followed by a Montague Summers’ extract that contained the very same extract!

I was rather excited about the literature section. Though I have read the Night Watch (there is an extract from this), Viy and the Family of the Vourdalak there were others included that I had been unaware of and wanted to read. Positively I discovered Jan Neruda’s The Vampire and Iván Turgénieff’s Phantoms (even if I had to find the date of publication from other sources).

I was bemused at the inclusion of the extract from Dracula and the full text of the Vampyre: A Tale. Let us look at the title of the book again – In Slavic Cultures – as important as these two works are, they are not from Slavic culture (though some of the lore used by Stoker is). Other inclusions that were actually from Slavic culture (primarily Russian, it has to be said) bemused me just as much. Karamzin’s the Island of Bornholm is certainly gothic but may not even have a troublesome corpse, never mind a vampire (and is deliberate in its obfuscation). There were four Pushkin poems included – ish. I say ish because The Bridegroom was included twice. A commentary explaining why the different translations were included would have been useful. More useful would have been an explanation why The Bridegroom (x2) and Evil Spirits were included as neither contains any hint of vampirism. At least Pushkin’s the Drowned Man has a troublesome corpse in it, though whether it was a vampire in the strictest sense of the word is highly debatable.

Pelevin’s A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia is fantastic – but has no vampire aspect (so why not an extract from his (currently untranslated) vampire novel Empire V?) Indeed why not two extracts (the vampire parts obviously) from the Probratim: A Slav Novel by Prof. P Jones (1895)? (If you are interested, my reference book, The Media Vampire, covers this work pp136-144!) Indeed why not an extract or the full text of Milovan Glišić’s Posle Devedeset Godina or 90 Years Later – unfortunately not available yet in English but based on pure Slavic vampire lore and the legend of Sava Savanović. The volume’s final section contained vampire lyrics in Russian popular music, which is fair enough if you want that sort of thing.

To be fair, the interesting sections were interesting, but the book has one more sin that needs to be recounted. It doesn’t have an index, so its academic use becomes further limited. In total honesty the book confounded my expectations as I expected a fresh reference work that explored the Slavic vampire rather than a regurgitation of other books, many of which I had. If you see it cheap you might want it, if you are in Garza’s classes then it expect it becomes much more useful but at full price it comes with a health warning. 5 out of 10.

Honourable mentions: The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

I was not really aware of the Mortal Instruments series of young adult books, they had simply passed me by with barely a flicker on the radar. The same went with this 2013 film directed by Harald Zwart. Then a friend told me it had vampires in it and it was straight onto the radar.

The story follows Clary (Lily Collins, Priest) a young girl who starts subconsciously drawing a rune and seeing things that others cannot see, including what looks like the murder of a man in a club by a young man she later discovers is called Jayce (Jamie Campbell Bower, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 1 & part 2).

the rune

Her drawing of the rune is a sign that a magical block her mother, Jocelyn (Lena Headey, The Cave & the Brothers Grimm), has had warlock Magnus Bane (Godfrey Gao) put on her memories and powers is weakening. You see Jocelyn was a Shadowhunter, a band of warriors who have drunk the blood of the Angel Raziel and are known as Nephilim (half angel) or are born of a shadowhunter (like Clary). Jocelyn had stolen the Mortal Cup (the grail that the blood of the angel is consumed from) from her lover and rogue shadowhunter Valentine (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and hid both it and their daughter (Clary) from him – this latest blossoming of Clary's powers has revealed them and Valentine’s men manage to get hold of Jocelyn, who induces a magical coma on herself.

fangs on show

The Shadowhunters fight demons, using runes etched into their bodies to give them powers, and have an accord with other creatures such as werewolves (Being Human’s Aidan Turner makes a transition from playing vampire to playing werewolf) and vampires. However, when visiting Magnus, Clary’s mundane (ie human) friend Simon (Robert Sheehan) is kidnaped by vampires (who put something that remains unexplained in a drink, this chokes him and they run off with him). Thereafter Jayce, Clary and the brother and sister shadowhunters Alec (Kevin Zegers, Vampire (2011)) and Isabelle (Jemima West) go to rescue him from an abandoned hotel that is the vampire’s hideout. They get to him ok, battered and hanging above a lift shaft but he reveals it is a trap to capture Clary and a major fight ensues with lots of vampires.

vampire gun

Eventually interference from the werewolves, storming the hotel and attacking the vampires, allows them to escape the building and the rising sun, which burns vampires, enables their getaway. Simon finds out, when he eventually comes around, that he no longer needs glasses and Clary notices he has been bitten. This is not followed up in the film but – if the films follow the books – he will be turned in the next film. That might mean there is enough vampiric activity in the next film to warrant a review, but for this film the single section was a side-line rather than a main plot point. The only other vampire related thing to mention is the vampire gun that pneumatically pushes a stake from the barrel and has rotating barbs at the end – designed to pierce and destroy the heart.

The film itself wasn’t too bad, essentially a young adult adventure story with a supernatural focus, if you like that sort of thing. The imdb page is here.

Interesting Shorts: Phantoms

This story by Iván Turgénieff dates from 1863 and the accompanying illustration was taken from the 1904 edition of “the Novels and Stories of Ivan Turgenieff: Phantoms and Other Stories”, which was translated by Isabell F Hapgood.

Written in the first person, the narrator explains in the first instance how the phantom of a woman started coming to him. His first description of her, which he assumes is a dream, is interesting as he seems to be describing sleep paralysis. The apparition keeps asking him to meet her at the corner of a nearby forest by an old, lightning blasted oak. Eventually he does go there.

When he meets her she asks him to give himself to her, she seems reluctant to act without permission and – more as an experiment than anything – he eventually says “Take me”. She embraces him and flies into the sky with him. At first his concern is the flight itself but I found the descriptions of her semi-corporeality interesting. She is more phantom than physical and yet is able to interact. She can take him, in this manner, to anywhere he wishes to go – almost in the blink of an eye. But when, at one point, he suggests America she admits she cannot as it is day time there.

On their first flight there is a telling line, “Again she fell upon my neck, again my feet left the earth”, of course that is a telling line from a modern viewpoint. Perhaps more explicit was the later sentence “I felt on my lips a strange sensation, like the touch of a soft, delicate sting… Leeches which are not vicious take hold in that way.” The phantom will not tell him anything in detail about herself. She gives the name Ellis, but denies English heritage. She displays jealousy but often seems cold and far off. We do see her in the first light of dawn. She seems to become more corporeal and then melts like vapour.

There is one particular night where she seems able to show him wonderments – but his own fear prevents it. It is clear that he is becoming more and more ill with their interactions. His housekeeper comments that he seems to have no blood in his face and he does wonder whether she is drinking his blood. We discover that she is able to be detained by something, that there is another entity that Ellis describes as death and refers to in the feminine. We discover that Ellis is trying to acquire life. The narrator is told he has anᴂmia by a doctor.

However we are never told exactly what she is. The narrator doesn’t really know and muses, “What was Ellis, as a matter of fact? A vision, a wandering soul, an evil spirit, a sylph, a vampire?” However, to me, she was clearly a vampiric ghost, all the more interesting because she had the peculiar semi-corporeality I mentioned and she needed permission to interact with (and prey upon) her victim – an invitation, in fact. He seemed obsessed with her and there was a sensuality that she tried to display – though she often lapsed into indifference – and a claim of love for her chosen victim that was more a jealous possessiveness than love. Given the year of publication I find the story to be very exciting, giving us another insight into the development of the genre.

You can download an e-version of “the Novels and Stories of Ivan Turgenieff: Phantoms and Other Stories” from the Internet Archive.

Vampyros Lesbos – review

Director: Jess Franco

Release date: 1971

Contains spoilers

As I write this we are only a couple of months away from the blog’s 8th birthday. During that time I have reviewed a whole array of vampire movies from around the world. Many of those films I had on DVD (and sometime vhs) before I ever contemplated writing Taliesin Meets the Vampires. Most of those I had before have now been reviewed. There are a couple of notable exceptions.

burlesque interpretative performance

So, very recently I received an email from a blog reader asking about a missing review; specifically, wondering where the Vampyros Lesbos review had got to. It wasn’t missing however - I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet! This is, of course, unforgivable on my part as it is arguably Jess Franco’s best known vampire film (it’s either this or Female Vampire). Now I have to admit a love/hate relationship with Franco. I find myself drawn to his films and then being disappointed. My expectations and anticipation, more often than not, utterly overwhelm his execution. Vampyros Lesbos is no different really except that it is from the golden age of Franco films.

Linda and Omar

Spurred on by the email I sat down to dip into the world of Franco and revisit Vampyros Lesbos. After opening shots of the Countess Carody (Soledad Miranda, Count Dracula), boats and the minarets of Istanbul we shift into a night club and see the Countess (not revealed as such until later) offering a burlesque interpretative performance. The music has to be mentioned as Vampyros Lesbos has a wonderfully surreal acid jazz soundtrack that is perfectly evocative of the time it was shot. In the crowd are the lovers Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) and Omar (Andrés Monales) – Omar has a thin moustache and eyes that dart like an “eagle eyes action man”.

telepathically calling Linda

We see Linda dreaming, and get images as the Countess calls out telepathically to her, such as blood drops on a window, a moth and a scorpion. Franco places these key symbols – and a kite – through the film. We cut to her on a psychiatrist’s couch and she admits having recurring dreams about the woman and an island beach house, neither of which she knows, and was shocked when she saw the performer as it was the woman from her dreams. She admits that the dreams both scare and arouse her. The psychiatrist simply doodles and then puts it all down to sexual frustration and tells her to get a better lover.

victim of a serial killer

Linda works in the Istanbul office of the law firm Simpson & Simpson and has to go to visit Countess Carody about an inheritance. She gets so far on her journey but misses a boat and has to stay in a hotel where a creepy man called Memmet (Jess Franco) warns her away from the island as it is a place of madness and death. He asks her to meet him in the wine cellar and she goes there to see a bleeding, tied woman – later we discover that Memmet is a serial killer. This, however, does not seem to trouble the lawyer who gets the next boat to the island without raising the find with the authorities!

Seconds before passing out

At the beach house – which is all too familiar – she finally meets the Countess, who is sunbathing. This is one of the interesting things about Vampyros Lesbos, Franco overturns the gothic for beaches and beach houses, darkness and moonlight for sand and sunbathing. Rather than get straight down to business the two women go skinny dipping and sunbathing (observed secretly by the Countess’ servant Morpho (José Martínez Blanco, also from Count Dracula)). At dinner they talk about the complex inheritance left to the Countess by Count Dracula – he was a Hungarian, the Countess correctly confides. Some wine (maybe drugged, maybe blood) and Linda suggests she has a headache and then passes out.

José Martínez Blanco as Morpho

She is carried to her bedroom by Morpho and then seduced by the Countess. In the morning she awakens and finds the Countess’ body floating in the swimming pool, passes out and wakes in a private hospital run by Dr Seward (Dennis Price, Son of Dracula (1974), The Horror of it All, The Magic Christian, Dracula Prisoner of Frankenstein & Twins of Evil). She has amnesia but a newspaper advert leads Omar to her. Also in the hospital is Agra (Heidrun Kussin) – Agra is interesting as she is kind of a female Renfield, she had been to the island and is psychically linked (and obsessed) with the Countess. She was Memmet’s wife and so it seems that her obsession was that which caused him to become a serial killer.

wine or blood?

Franco playing with the genre was fun. Seward is the vampire hunter but he is more interested in becoming a vampire than hunting them. There is very little in the way of religious aspect but he manages to hurt the Countess (who, of course, was not dead in the pool) with a Latin chant. He also tells us that a vampire must be killed by giving the brain a deadly blow – suggesting a hatchet or iron bar. We have the drinking of wine that is really blood (later in the film, though it may have also happened on the first meeting too). We discover that the Countess was a mortal in Istanbul and was attacked and raped by soldiers and rescued by Dracula. It is the rape that made her hate men and become a lesbian.

embarrassing tussle

The film is languid but that adds to its dreamlike quality and it is perhaps the dreamlike quality that enables us to forgive some of the plot contrivances. It doesn’t descend into silliness like a lot of Franco films (except, perhaps, during a brief fight between Seward and Morpho). There is a fair bit of nudity but nothing particularly hardcore and some of it is actually tastefully done. Certainly it is unlikely that Soledad Miranda ever looked more beautiful than in some of the shots in the film.

Soledad Miranda is at her finest

The frustration is that Franco made some incredibly intelligent plays in the film – such as his handling of the move from Gothic to beach – but these moments become lost in some of the contrivances (as much as the dreamy quality allows those). If I say that this deserves 4 out of 10 then I am probably being very fair but I do have to say that it is worth more than the sum of its score.

The imdb page is here.

Daddy, Santa Claus is Dead – review

Director: Yevgeny Yufit

Release date: 1991

Contains spoilers

Family of the Vourdalak (1843) by Count Alexis Tolstoy is a classic 19th Century vampire tale. Most famously it was made into one of three short films in Mario Bava’s anthology Black Sabbath and was the source for the film Night of the Devils. Both were blooming marvellous films but neither could prepare you for the surreal Papa, umer ded moroz.

That isn’t to say that the film is a bad film, it certainly isn’t. But it is most definitely strange. Tolstoy’s story is recognisable in the film and the vampiric elements are hiding in plain sight. If you dislike arthouse films then you are probably better looking away now. However the film has a way of catching a hold of you and drawing you into its eerie landscape – made all the more sparse for the lack of musical score.

trap

It begins with a man underground – possibly in a sewer or water logged bunker. He trips and falls head first into a wire noose, the trap killing him. A young boy with dead eyes and a one legged man go to him. His watch is stolen, his suitcase emptied of the metalwork contents and filled with the clothes stripped from his body. His naked corpse is wheeled away on a trolley and disposed of in fast flowing waters. The trap, it is clear, was constructed by this pair.

on the train

A biologist is investigating a rodent, a shrew-mouse he says. He plans to stay with his cousin in the countryside whilst working on his paper about the mouse and so takes a train out to the country. As they travel, the passenger next to him peaks around a curtain and announces, “Forest” and then “Lake”. When the biologist disembarks he sees a group of men in black suits, stood in a field, crowded around what is clearly a body. They finish wrapping and leave. The biologist approaches and removes some of the shroud bindings. It is a woman, still alive.

silent reunion

Having helped her he goes to his cousin’s house. A woman (his cousin's wife) lets him in and his cousin, on hearing of their familial bond, hugs him fiercely and then sits with him in silence. The wife returns and also sits in silence. Their young son eventually makes an appearance. The film deliberately sits with them, the silence pregnant, the dialogue sparse throughout the film, and yet somehow you are pulled into this sordid, dirty world with peeling wallpaper and muddy clothes.

vourdalak takes the grandson

A man enters the house, the boy calls him grandfather and we recognise this from Tolstoy. The biologist later sees the old man and the boy outside and, later still, clears grasses away to find the boy left languid and deathlike, softly imploring his grandfather to bestow more kisses. Later we see the father with an axe, sharpening a long trunk of wood into a stake. When the mother deliberately throws it into the river the father is angered and inconsolable – the son, of course, has died and the stake is lost, while the dreamlike quality of the film means that the idea of simply sharpening another stake is not appropriate.

Mother with the stake

With strange rituals from the men in the fields, homosexual lust hidden behind a closed door, an existential dentist who stuffs the mouth with cotton and a child’s suicide; this film guides us along rare paths. The film, to some degree, reminded me of Vampyr in timbre and in that the actors seemed chosen for their faces as much as anything, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they were chosen because the director felt they looked the part. Yet the film achieves an hallucinatory cohesiveness because of this.

carrying the coffin

This works so well because it is a dreamscape (or should that be a nightmare), because it might be purgatory or worse, because it refuses to explain but forces speculation and because it is undoubtedly Tolstoy’s story. The Grandpa is most definitely a vourdalak, his grandson the first victim. Of course, there is also the joy of being able to post about a film called Daddy, Santa Claus is Dead. 7 out of 10, with the health warning that it is arthouse, with all the entails.

The imdb page is here.

Vampire Riderz – review

Director: Dan Garcia

Release date: 2012

Contains spoilers


Now, when a film contains the rapper turned actor Sticky Fingaz (Blade the Series) and also mentions a daywalker in the blurb then it is only natural that certain connections are made. In this case these would not be accurate, this is neither a Blade film nor Blade rip off and the whole Blade franchise can breathe easier for that. Originally called Speed Demons when available to purchase for download, the DVD has changed the title to Vampire Riderz.

Walter Jones as Terrance

The film starts with a woman in a car (it seems) with a man and he attacks after she encourages sex. This is a flashback scene. Some attack scenes (from later in the film) over the credits and we see a girl hitching (ignore her, she’s vamp bait for later). We also see two guys Terrance (Walter Jones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Tiny (Smalls). Terrance is concerned about finding ‘the one’ (in a romantic sense) and both drink, play pool and bicker.

staked

Actually, however, they are vampire hunters and see a male and female preying on a woman. They confront them (in the bar), attack them, and finally leave the victim with the female vampire (never thinking to go back as far as I can tell) as they chase after the male vampire. He leads them a merry dance until Tiny tosses a stake that brings him down. He isn’t dead though. Terrance stakes him and woosh, he vanishes in a flash of light (later killed vampires do not die as noticeably; perhaps the cgi budget would only stretch so far?)

Sticky Fingaz as Wade

In the meantime we see a woman, Jane (Marina Sirtis), being followed by biker vampire thugs led by Wade (Sticky Fingaz). She ducks off behind a car and the vampires, being crap hunters, lose her. She calls daughter Lala (Angela Sarafyan, also Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and tells her they have to go. They end up at a bus and we see Wade burst into their motel room (how he finds it after failing to spot Jane when stood next to her is beyond me) where he finds a timetable. Hitcher girl gets propositioned by a sleazy driver, somehow gets away (it sounded like she used a taser though the film shows nothing) and ends up on the same bus with a boxer (who is fodder as well), two comic geeks, Chance (Al Santos), a sarcastic salesman and a priest, Father Lemoine (Terry Kiser), who has lost his faith.

Nick Gomez as the Master

Anyway, they are attacked, the bus bursts tires and they end up at a junkyard where a solstice (sic) party celebrating New Year is occurring. We have had punctuated moments through the proceedings with a vampire Master (Nick Gomez) who is dying and who was contracted, it appears, to act very poorly. It seems that every five hundred years the vampires (or just the Master – it doesn’t make too much sense) must sacrifice a daywalker (who happens to be Lala; Jane being the woman at the head of the film, I guess) by burning them and then consume their ashes for a further five hundred years of immortality. Lala doesn’t know who she is.

a bite

Bad plotting and dialogue abound. Positively, Terry Kiser was particularly good but his dialogue was awful – one moment refusing to bless Jane as he has lost his faith, the next leading a round of prayers. The good guys and the hunters hold up in a shed, with half a dozen tyres providing a particularly ineffectual looking barricade. Yet again the hunting-deficient vampires don’t find them and so the humans decide to go out and fight them anyway. The hitcher was built only to die and whilst some characterisation was entered into it didn’t really go anywhere. There won’t be cops out here, warns a hunter, this is vampire land and they avoid it... and yet cops had already been out (and immediately died).

Marina Sirtis as Jane

If you cut out the Master section, tightened the script, re-wrote the dialogue and just made the scenes make a bit more sense, then this might have been a passable movie. They had a fair bit of talent in front of the camera (though Mister Fingaz simply growled a lot). As it is, the film was absolutely rubbish, poor camera work, bad lighting and all in all shoddy. 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Hao! Hao! Kyonshi Girl – season 1 – review

Director: unknown

First aired: 2012

Contains spoilers

Hao! Hao! Kyonshi Girl was a Japanese series that was based around the Chinese hopping vampire the kyonsi (or variant spellings thereof).

This review is tempered with the fact that the DVD set I bought did have English subtitles but they were literal translations and so this made them tough going at times. However the programme was pretty simplistic in format and so I don’t think I missed much - though a couple of gaps are mentioned in the review.

Kawashima Umika

The lead actress is Kawashima Umika, who is an idol and part of the idol pop group 9Nine. She essentially plays herself in the series (and the group is also featured) and at the very beginning we are introduced to her, the fact that she is in the group, at college and an actress in Japanese dramas… oh, and hunts kyonsi. This turn of events started because she was looking in a store room at her parents’ café and accidentally opened an urn with a Taoist seal on it.

Bambam captures a kyonsi

The kyonsi had been trapped inside and were now free but the seal became a young boy named Bambam – how he became the seal did come into the show but, to be honest, it was not very clear via the subtitles (however it doesn’t matter really). A layer of comedy is added through with the fact that when he sneezes he becomes adult and reverts back to child with the next sneeze (although an exhausted Bambam became a geriatric at one point too). It is his job to convince Haihe (as she is known) to hunt the kyonsi – she is classed as a priest and did wear a yin yang pendant prior to the accident.

King Kyonsi

This leads to a double life for a young woman who already has a rather full plate. There are over a hundred kyonsi loose and each bite creates more, plus they have to be retrieved before an evil moon (that occurs once every hundred years) or the king kyonsi will come to power and destroy the world of man. First of all her reluctance gets in the way, then her career and even her heart but (except for the two part finale) each short episode is self-contained.

child kyonsi and spell scrolls

The kyonsi follow pretty standard rules. They can be pacified by spell scrolls (which can be mass printed from a jpeg) and, in such a state, guided by the priest ringing a bell (one, obsessed with running a marathon he was going to run when still human, has enough will power to ignore the bell). They are destroyed by sunlight (though they also seem to be around in the daytime but the rules are a little loose). Haihe has a coin sword which does them damage, you can hide from them by holding your breath and if one stands on your shadow you can’t move.

thug kyonsi

A bite will kill and turn a person – though if sticky rice is placed on the wound in time it can be healed and a virgin’s urine can either delay or heal the wound (that wasn’t too clear). What was amusing was the fact that they ran around in one episode trying to get a virgin’s urine and one would have assumed Bambam and Haihe to be virgins. I think, with Haihe, using her urine couldn’t even be contemplated due to her idol status.

It is Ed Milliband... isn't it?

It is quite difficult to score this as I may, due to the subtitles, being doing it a disservice but whilst it was nice to see kyonsi and it was mildly amusing, it was a bit of pop-culture fluff. The idol culture hasn’t really transposed to the West so much (our celebratory culture seems far more seedy, at least as far as the participants are concerned… the audience may be a different thing altogether) and so the central tenant is, whilst understandable, a little unusual. That said the kyonsi could be stiffly amusing in their own right (and for a Brit, especially the one I screen-captured that looked remarkably like Ed Milliband) even if the makeup/mask effect for the King Kyonsi was poorly rubber. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The Fourth Bride – review

Author: Carole Gill

First Published: 2013

contains spoilers

The Blurb: After the tragic and sudden death of her groom, Dia, cursed by Dracula as a babe, is taken to his castle. Once there, she is seduced and turned by the count, and she becomes his fourth bride. The other brides are to be her sisters, and they are all to love and feed upon one another. As her master says: "The joy is in the blood...the passion is in the blood...endless life is in the blood...!"

And so she finds it is.

Dia's tale is full of erotic sex and graphic violence. It is a tale of love and lust but mostly of blood, for the blood is everything.

The review: When I read Carole Gill’s The House on Blackstone Moor I was taken with the fact that she wrote a very gothic prose but merged it with a nastiness aimed at her primary character that was reminiscent of Clive Barker.

This is the fourth book of the series, but whilst it uses the characters of Louis and Rose as a jumping off point the book itself concentrates on a new character, Dia, a young woman cursed from birth to be the fourth bride of Dracula. It is a brave move, certainly, tying her series into that of Stoker’s masterpiece and, in many respects, it is a natural fit as Carole Gill has always had Satan as the source of vampirism and has tied in Dracula’s education at the Scholomance with another mainstay character Eco.

If I had a criticism, however, it is this. The author writes a fantastic victim and this worked so very well in the first book – when the primary character was human. With the primary character being a vampire I was less comfortable with the “female victim”. It was ok when she was under the thrall of Dracula (or another powerful vampire) but I was less comfortable with the vampire being the victim of human men too. There was an in-built layer of misogyny and I would like to see the author write a strong female lead, one who isn’t the victim and doesn’t need rescuing by a man (vampire or human). That is, perhaps, for another book.

That criticism aside (and I hope it is taken as constructive) this was more rounded as a book than the third volume and took an interesting route by attaching itself to the Dracula mythos. 7 out of 10. Note the review was based on a complimentary copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

The Black Water Vampire – review

Director: Evan Tramel

Release date: 2014

Contains spoilers

Found footage films are still rather popular but they do tend to be a love them or hate them form of the horror genre. There can be a level of crow-baring the reason for use of the camera within a given film and there is a deal of false exposition that sometimes gets thrust in.

By that introduction you can tell that this is a found footage film and I’ll get to some of the pros and cons of that later in the review. However I’ll say at this conjecture that if you like that genre of films you may well enjoy this and, with an element of suspending belief, I rather enjoyed what I saw.

bite on Millicent

The film begins with police shot footage from early 2003, having found the body of Millicent Barnam (Emma Anderson) who had vanished two weeks before. She was found at Black Water Creek, an area many miles from the nearest town, Fawnskin. Her clothes had mainly been torn away, there were no footprints leading to her, there was a bite pattern in her neck, a symbol carved in her leg and a distinct lack of blood.

Danielle Lozeau as Danielle Mason

Ten years on and Danielle Mason (Danielle Lozeau) is leading a documentary crew to look into the murders. It transpires that there had been a similar abduction/murder every ten years since 1972. After the 2002 murder police arrested local man Raymond Banks (Bill Oberst Jr., Death Valley) and, having questioned him for 16 hours straight with no attorney in order to get a confession, he was convicted with no physical evidence and now sits on death row. Danielle believes him innocent.

the crew

Travelling with her are producer Andrea (Andrea Monier), who has worked on a couple of documentaries with Danielle before. On sound is their friend Robin (Robin Steffen), who comes across as quite snarky and not on board with hiking three days to get footage of the creek. They have hired a cameraman Anthony (Anthony Fanelli) who is unknown to the group. Before they go to the creek they head to Fawnskin to interview people connected with the case and also to the prison to interview Banks.

symbol in Millicent's leg

En route we begin to see the weirdness of the town. We have already seen interview footage including a man talking about a “rat man” creature and hunters suggest that there is something in the woods. It is revealed that the main road is known as Bloodsucker highway because legend mentions vampires in the woods – much to Robin’s chagrin. As Anthony is driving at night, towards Fawnskin, he swerves because something (he doesn’t know what) shot out across the road. They burst a tire and can hear strange animal noises they don’t recognise. Having tried to flag a car for help the driver stops a distance from them and then tries to run them down.

old newspaper cutting

They arrive late at the property they have rented and the landlady seems… odd. After we discover that Danielle has made a virginity pledge (is this important – we’ll discuss that soon), we see odd behaviour from the landlady who seems to be standing out in the road staring at the house. Something that struck me, as the crew interview family and friends of the murder victims, is the ease for which they believe a man might be the killer (despite low evidence) and the passion for vengeance (as opposed to justice). The film captures this well.

Bill Oberst Jr as Banks

When they meet Banks we have to suspend belief as I don’t believe that Bill Oberst Jr looked nearly old enough to be the killer of all four women (in reality he’d have been roughly 48 when the film was shot and the story staged the first murder was 40 years before). However that thought is lost with a performance that summoned thoughts of a man suffering paranoid delusions, and yet also had knowledge such as the design of the sign carved on the last victims leg (which he draws in blood from his own bitten fingers).

first view

I don’t want to spoil too much. The sign is painted on his abandoned cabin and on trees, someone even paints it on the crew’s tent during the night (after hiking a day). There is a vampire out there, almost manbat like it seems to be another species preying on people in the woods and we see it first of all at night, hanging in the trees, and also in daylight. What it wants and what relationship the town has to it is largely down to viewer conjecture and this is both a pro and a con of the film. Indeed the lore is limited (and that which we do get is too much of a spoiler to relay here).

a daylight encounter

You see, because it is a found footage film there is little in the way of actual exposition. Let us look at Danielle’s virginity. I assume it to be important – due to it being mentioned – but as no character actually explains whether it is important (or why) it is entirely my own conjecture. The fact that the filmmakers leave much exposition out is quite right as, being found footage, anything else would seem forced so and they leave a trail of breadcrumbs for us and so is much more pro than con.

strange signs

The film is quiet derivative of the Blair Witch Project (the granddaddy of found footage films) – lost in the woods, strange signs, etc but was much more cohesive – thanks in large part to the leads – than the BWP, a film I believe to be overhyped and quiet poor, to be honest. The single-minded pursuit of the story despite the events (by Danielle) was an aspect that I just had to suspend belief with, but did find I was able to. The last scene (which I won’t spoil) did make me wonder how the footage ever “was found” but, again, as the film is silent we have to take it on trust.

night vision attack

I have said before that I am not a huge fan of found footage films and this remains true. However I found myself caught up in the Black Water Vampire and I put this entirely down to the trail of breadcrumbs left by the scriptwriter (Jesse Baget) and the natural feel of the main actors. As a con, the use of camera at times seemed a little forced, but that is always going to be the case with this style of film (even the more magnificent examples such as the Rec series had their clunky moments in this regard). But if a film keeps you truly interested then that is certainly a big plus. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.