My Bloody Valentine

To be honest, I’ve never been into the slasher film as a concept; I think I’d been kind of put off by the idea by Ric Meyers and his book For One Week Only, in which he calls them “murder movies” and did not actually consider them horror films as such. I have possibly been prejudiced against slashers (which I’ve been known to also call “let’s kill teenagers” movies) unfairly ever since, been and indeed I don’t think I’d actually seen any before Scream came out. I was, as I’ve observed before, a relative latecomer to the horror genre, so Scream was an educational experience in that respect; I got all the lore and theory of slashers without any real direct experience of them. I was at least familiar with this title, though, and knew it was considered a particularly noxious example of the form (reportedly even the film’s director threw up at the sight of one of the corpse effects). Finally I’ve actually seen the damn thing, and, well, it did pretty much nothing to dispel those decades-old feelings I’ve had about slashers…

My Bloody Valentine is set in a Nova Scotia mining town, where there was an appalling accident 20 years earlier, and it appears a long-incarcerated survivor of the accident has returned to exact revenge or something. It’s very “slasher film”, if you know what I mean, to the point of formula or stereotype; indeed, the whole scene where the bartender relates the “legend” felt borderline parodic, if anything. I watched the “unrated” version with the long-lost violence cut back in, and, well… I didn’t really get the fuss? I mean, there’s a lot of violence (two and a half more minutes of it than there used to be, in fact), but I’m not sure there hadn’t been far more violent films before MBV came out in February 1981 (particularly from Italy), I’m not sure why this was necessarily worse… Anyway, MBV gets two stars for effective locations, especially the mine, and for some adorable Canadian accents. Otherwise I hadn’t exactly been missing a classic all this time…

New low 5,475,139

Yeah, the guy who did a mass shooting I’d completely forgotten about is finally meeting his maker… on livestream.

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed.
In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad will carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.
“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.
Hasan opened fire at a medical processing center on the Texas base on 5 November 2009, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013, and he has been held at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas ever since. He exhausted his appeals last year, which cleared the way for Donald Trump to approve the sentence this week on a recommendation from Hegseth.

Now, I’m not surprised they’re getting rid of this fellow; they obviously weren’t going to let him live even if it took him years to exhaust his options. No, it’s the bit about livestreaming him being, you know, judicially murdered. Making a public spectacle of someone’s death. Which, as others have noted, is something only a handful of countries do, including Iran. You know, that country may or may not be at war with at any given time. I’m fairly sure the US has been critical of Iran in the past on this subject. I can only assume it’s another one of those things that are OK When We Do Them. If they could find a way to make every American watch it, not just make it possible to do so, I’ve no doubt they would.

So why are they doing it now, though? I mean, I know why they’re doing it: the whole grotesque spectacle is obviously meant as a show of force and intimidation, but to America’s citizens more than to international terrorists. Being born in the US will not save you, if it ever did. But why now specifically (as opposed to why has it taken them so long?

Oh.

Pete Hegseth is very insistent that his soldiers be godlike beings chock full of testosterone (especially the women, if he allows them to serve) and he will tolerate no slackers in that department. Except himself, apparently. There’s been other videos of him looking like a champion fuckwit trying to compete with the rest of the joint force as his own joints give way, but some particularly damning new footage has emerged in the last day or so looking, you know, far below the level at which he insists the US military perform. Looking weak.

Do I actually think Hegseth wants this man’s death livestreamed to make himself feel big again after being made to look foolish? Well… probably not, I suspect it’s ordinary fascist cruelty at work. Would I be surprised if that actually were the reason? Well… probably not, cos these people are just… Like That. I wonder if this will finally make the US the pariah nation it must be…

That’s not how it works, Alvin

I am childfree, largely because frankly no one has ever offered to be the mother of my offspring anyway, but also because I don’t want to pass on my ho-hum genetics and, to be honest, because I’m a selfish prick who doesn’t want to be bothered unnecessarily, which children would do to me. I am not prepared to take the risk that I might not pass on said ho-hum genetics, nor that I would suddenly love my putative kids more than my own life or anything like that; it’d be unfair on me, on their mother, and on them.

That said…

…I think I still wouldn’t be THIS bad. I mean, I’m sure this was probably meant as a joke, but with AI techbros (of which Alvin is one) you can never quite tell. Lest we forget this banger. Sam Altmas meant that seriously and I wouldn’t be surprised if Alvin wasn’t entirely joking either…

And RIP Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon, dies at 90

The computer scientist behind groundbreaking research that helped land Nasa’s astronauts on the Moon, has died aged 90.
Margaret Hamilton was a trailblazer in her field, leading the team who developed the software for Nasa’s Apollo missions, which coined the term “software engineering”.
Hamilton’s former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed her death, adding she died on 30 September.
“To say Hamilton was a pioneer – to say she was ahead of her time – would be a dramatic understatement,” MIT said in its statement, before acknowledging that she was a software engineer before it was mainstream.
Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and managed the Software Engineering Division.
It was in this division that she led a team of engineers writing and testing all onboard in-flight software for Nasa’s Apollo 11 project that guided US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the Moon.
“I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before. I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired,” she told the Guardian in 2019.

The photo of her standing next to the printout of the Apollo 11 code is a classic, of course; now there’s probably a mobile phone app that can do the exact same thing. I was saying yesterday about what changes Eva Marie Saint must’ve seen in her industry, but they must’ve been even more so in Margaret’s. Alas that she didn’t live to see the next landing, but at least she got to witness this year’s Artemis mission…

RIP Eva Marie

There’s been quite a few notable passings in the last couple of days, not just Jim Bakker (cunt) but also Jeffrey Archer (cunt), Dennis Hastert (cunt), and Richard Morecroft (not a cunt, he was cool), and now one of old Hollywood’s last big figures, Eva Marie Saint, has shuffled off her own mortal coil at the pretty reasonable age of 102. I was amazed that her first TV role was in NINETEEN FORTY SEVEN—an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that, per IMDB, also starred John Carradine as Scrooge and David Carradine (only about eight years old or so) as the young Scrooge—and her last acting role appears to have been a podcast (a scripted comedy/drama series) just five years ago. What industry changes she must’ve seen over all those decades.

Hands of the Ripper

So we need a bit of Hammer if we’re doing horror films for October, and I’m trying to limit myself to first-time viewings this year to whittle the watchlist down some, which meant going with this (one of the few unwatched Hammer horrors I still have on said watchlist). 70s Hammer, of course, was not what it had been just a couple of years earlier, struggling to keep up with changing times, the ascent of Michael Carreras who hated the studio’s traditional gothics, and the deaths of some key production crew like designer Bernard Robinson, as well as suffering the general British film industry slump of the time. Sinclair McKay’s book on Hammer, A Thing of Unspeakable Horror, is pretty harsh on this period, but even he calls Hands of the Ripper one of the studio’s best films, and that’s probably fair. Hammer were trying a few different things by 1971, and this was one of those, a Jack the Ripper film… sort of.

The daughter of Jack the Ripper, in fact, is the subject here; as a small child she witnesses him killing his wife, her mother, and as she grows to young adulthood it appears she may be, well, carrying on her old man’s trade. A well-meaning psychiatrist takes her into his care, but will this just make things worse in the end? No prizes for guessing. I don’t think any of the cast were Hammer regulars, interestingly, and though other Hammer productions of the time ramped up the sexiness and nudity, this one went heavier on the violence; there’s a kind of nastiness to it most other Hammer films don’t really have. Hands of the Ripper is elevated by its two main leads, Eric Porter as the doctor and Angharad Rees as the Ripperette, they’re quite appealing and well-played characters (as are most of the secondary cast). It struggles to reclaim the old Hammer atmosphere, but it’s a valiant effort, and on the whole definitely one of the better examples of late Hammer.

Bakker kikks the bukket

God loved him so much that he made Jim humiliate himself through his later years by having to sell Bakker Buckets. (Why didn’t they call them Bakker Bukkets? Missed opportunity.)

Frankly, a Vic Berger video is a fitting tribute. When you look at his life, it’s impossible to feel sorry for him; maybe that time when Jerry Falwell kicked him out of PTL, but that was ultimately his own fault too. Tammy Faye deserved better.

The Ghost of Yotsuya

Still in Japan but somewhat further back in time, both in terms of story setting (1600s) and production era and style (late 1950s). The story itself is based on an 1825 kabuki play (itself somewhat loosely based on a true story; presumably there was no supernatural vengeance in real life), which has been filmed dozens of times in Japan since 1912; indeed, there was another version of it released by Shintoho just a couple of weeks after this one from Daiei. I gather that different versions of the story do emphasise different aspects of it, and director Kenji Misumi seems to have been mostly interested in the romantic melodrama side of things with a bit of additional swordplay. The crucial difference with this telling of the story, though, appears to have been with the male lead character of Iyemon, who’s not the villain here that he usually is; there’s other changes but that seems to be the biggest one. Iyemon is an impoverished samurai offered a position with the Ito clan, but one of the conditions of the job is marrying the lord’s daughter… and Iyemon is already married to Oiwa, who will have to be dealt with. Usually this is Iyemon’s task in the story, but here he’s actually being conspired against by the kind of shitty people he insists on associating with. Oiwa’s murder doesn’t happen until about 20 minutes before the end; once the supernatural shenanigans finally begin they’re fairly good, it’s just a fairly long haul to that point. I suspect this version may not have been the ideal first viewing of the Yotsuya story for me, but it was the one Radiance included in their Daiei Gothic blu-ray box (logically enough), so it was the one I watched; hunting up the Shintoho version now so I can compare…