Well once again the magic tupperware told me to embrace the double edged sword of the classics with Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde! The problem with the classics as always is everyone’s done them every way you can think of. Besides that It’s hard to think of good ways to show the two of them together. So I went with the mirror schtick. It works most of the time. Besides having the scene in the Bathroom is a good place for the doctor to drink his “medicine”.
After, yet again, not spending quite enough time deciding what this weeks theme would be and I fell back on an old favorite and went with watching a few more H.P.Lovecraft adaptations. The one’s I ended up going with were obscure and quirky but not at all bad. Another point of interest is these are two of Lovecraft’s works that don’t appear to fit in the Mythos setting.
The first on my list was the nearly direct to video film, The Resurrected. A modern day adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, It tells the story of a detective hired by a client to investigate the strange behavior of her husband, Charles Dexter Ward. It turns out that Mr. Ward’s behavior is very strange indeed, Involving wild animals, strange smells, copious demand for fresh meat and the resurrection of dead ancestors.
This is an interesting film that mostly does a good job of updating the material as best they can. I confess I like it because of it’s portrait of the backroads of Rhode Island in fall. (What can I say, I’m a sucker for films that open up with establishing shots of my home town.) And there were pretty good performances from everybody, especially Chris Sarandon as Charles Dexter Ward and his ancestor. The film had pretty good creature effects.
In the end what dragged the film down for me was how it was dependent on people being idiots (possibly a side effect of avoiding correcting for period) I mean, not getting into the question of why didn’t they investigate the catacombs bellow Ward’s house after the police raided, but when they finally did would it kill them to make sure the batteries in their flashlight (yes they only had the one and a lantern that was easily extinguished for the near dark monster scene) was fresh and have backups?
An adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, it’s the story of a writer, played by Moore (unnamed in the story but for the movie is made into one of Lovecraft’s regular protagonists, Randolph Carter) who after moving into a boarding house meets and befriends the mysterious Doctor Muñoz played by Jack Donner who’s health is dependent on a strange refrigeration unit. It inevitably breaks down and the Muñoz melts to death and that’s mostly it…. Okay, that was bit curt it’s actually a nice little character piece and parable of human will, that could easily be done as a play. Donner’s Performance as the doctor is excellent. My biggest problem with it was my tendency to get distracted by how dependent on being a period piece a film is. If this story took place today there would be nothing magical about a good air conditioning or refrigeration units or for that matter it’s easy to get large quantities of ice on short notice… In fact you’d think that the doctor would have some suppliers on speed dial in case of such emergencies, and we know that because in a modern setting the doctor would have a phone!
I’ve learned more since then, but most of it is still motivated by the media interpretation (by creators who only saw that page as well) But I’ll try to make due and have an image of two of them in their native habitat. Haunting a ruined castle in the highlands of Scotland.
The day started so nicely. I had had my breakfast doing one of my “mock commutes” to Starbucks and back and had done my day’s Inktober challenge while I was there. Other than getting a little slowed down by my computer’s personality I thought things were beginning to go okay.
And then I heard A loud thud. When I looked up there was a large hole in my window surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks. I wasted a couple of being in shock wondering if someone had it in for me. Finally I went downstairs to see if there was any evidence I could asses. I was too late to see anyone running away and while there are plenty of rocks lying around there didn’t seem to be enough with the right heft to do hat kind of damage.
I called my building manager who said he’d get somebody to tape it up and to call the cops for paperwork’s sake. Because this was definitely not an emergency I was on hold for nine minutes. (being told if it wasn’t an emergency I could hang up and try again every thirty seconds) I finally got contact with a real person who took my information and said I had the option of getting a cop to look at it if I believed the damage was more than five hundred dollars. I said that it was but I wasn’t completely sure if I was telling the truth or not.
About an hour later the building manager showed up, and with one look assured me that I wasn’t lying about the more than five hundred thing. He contacted the handyman since it wasn’t just the hole in the wall that was the problem but that the way the window was cracked that it could hypothetically collapse with shards fall on people bellow.
About a half hour later I finally got a call from the police to tell me that they were running late and I should keep waiting.
Soon after handyman showed up to put plastic over the window. And then the Police finally showed up to have a look at it and give me an incident number freeing me from my wait. The frustrating thing is even with the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed I’m still going to have to waste more time with this tommorow when the contractors show up to replace the glass.
On top of this I don’t think there’s any evidence that dismisses my “a bird had an accident” hypothesis.
For my own personal reasons, Zombies/Revenants fall into the category of things I refuse to take seriously anymore. Literally everything has done with the “modern zombie” to the point for me the only way to go is parody (a fanfic with Reg Shoe showing up in Walking Dead is an idea I’m trying very hard to scrub from my mind)
While I’d like to go back to some of the traditional folklore but I don’t know enough about the European traditions regarding revenants for one of these challenges, and as for “real” zombies… Well not getting into an argument about political correctness, there’s really no way to explain how a picture of sleepwalking blacks doing menial chores isn’t what it looks like.
to maintain some variety in my diet I’m trying to do more recipes. I’ve also been wanting to do a good meat pie for a while and I’d been shopping around for a descent recipe. Most of the suggestions I’d bee getting came from my favorite cooking blogs, Inn at the Crossroads which reverse engineers meals mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire along with it’s accompanying cookbook, A Feast of Ice and Fire.Most of the more medieval recipes were sweeter than I was looking for but I finally found one I liked very loosely based on the pork piesLord Manderly serves to the Boltons and the Freys in revenge against the Red Wedding. It is heavily implied in the book (and later confirmed by George R.R. Martin) That the main ingredient was three murdered members of house Frey.
The blog’s version of the recipe substitutes Frey with Pork.
Beyond prep taking longer than I predicted, and a comedy of errors with some spilled gravy making a lot of smoke so I spent an hour trying not to break my apartment’s fire alarm, I think it came out pretty well. (though I might have rushed the roux a little too much so the gravy wasn’t quite as thick as it should have been.
Well once again the magic tupperware told me to embrace the double edged sword of the classics with Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde! The problem with the classics as always is everyone’s done them every way you can think of. Besides that It’s hard to think of good ways to show the two of them together. So I went with the mirror schtick. It works most of the time. Besides having the scene in the Bathroom is a good place for the doctor to drink his “medicine”.
