Trivia time!

Now that it behooves us all to stay inside and avoid physical contact, I thought I'd talk movies. Okay, to be fair I talk a lot about movies, since movies are awesome. At least some are awesome. Many many films are the opposite of awesome...

So it's trivia time!

An iconic scene in the awesome Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) is when the Terminator is riding his big bike, twirling his shotgun around one handed, to re-cock and shoots gates open.

This scene is so well done. Smooth and badass to the bone. But, anyone crazy enough to do that would end up badly hurt.

The gun in question is a Winchester 1887 lever action shotgun with the stock and trigger guard cut off. Even though it's technically possible to spin it around like that, it won't end well. The gun you see Arnold spin around was a prop gun, and one time when Arnold accidentally picked up a real one and tried to do the move, he almost broke three fingers. Keep in mind that as a champion bodybuilder, Arnold has to have pretty strong hands, and the torque still nearly broke his hand.

Further, the novel states that it is a 10-gauge shotgun, so unless you really are a Terminator, don't try shooting it with one hand, okay? Don't try this at home!

So that was a lot to digest at once. Quickfire trivia time!

Every time John Travolta's character Vincent goes to the bathroom in Pulp Fiction, something bad happens.

The original raw footage of Apocalypse Now is 1.250.000 feet long, or 381 kilometers. The distance from London to Paris is 350 kilometers as the crow flies.

The warthog Pumbaa in Lion King is the first Disney character to fart on screen.

In that vein, Psycho (1960) was the first film to show a flushing toilet.

Staying with Psycho, it was filmed in black and white to save money. Hitchcock had to pony up most of the money himself and was keen to cut costs.

In Batman and Robin (1997) Batman pulls out a bat-themed credit card that reads Good until: Forever. Imagine trying to use that card to buy anything on the internet. How many shops have Forever as an option?

The original Die Hard is one of the finest action movies of all time and it made Bruce Willis a household name. But he was the seventh (technically eight) actor considered for the role. In line ahead of Bruce was: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Richard Gere, Harrison Ford, and Mel Gibson.

The reason for the technical eight was that due to contract reasons, they had to offer the role to an aging Frank Sinatra...

The raunchy Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles was shot on the same set as Westworld

The passport James Bond shows in Skyfall was actually issued by the British Home Office. Besides being made out to a fictional character, it's absolutely genuine.

That's that. Until next time, stay safe, wash your hands and have a great week!

How accurate is it?

The Mummy (1999) with Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah and many more is an amazing adventure movie. It is in fact one of my favorite action-adventure movies.

It's exciting and funny. The jokes are good, the action is great and most importantly it doesn't take itself too seriously. Sure, the CG is a bit dated now, but some of it is still okay, mostly because no one has a reference point as to how a sandstorm with a face in it really should look.

But how correct is it in regard to the Egyptology? Both completely inaccurate and surprisingly correct.

In the following video, Rachel Maksy sits down with actual Egyptologist Dr. Colleen Darnell to find out.

Join me again next week for more Eccentric Spheres, and until then have a great and curse free week!

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjFFrYEZsAQ

Don't kiss vampires

I've been on a horror binge lately, both watching and enjoying many of the excellent podcasts that are out there.

It's no secret to anyone who's been here a while that I'm a fan of Hammer Horror, and to my delight I found a couple that I had never seen before.

So today we're talking about The Kiss of the Vampire (1963). Mild spoilers – sort of.

I say sort of because, well, this movie is mostly predictable to a fault.

Gerald and Marianne Harcourt, a couple of newly weds on their honeymoon run out of gas in their awesome 1903 De Dion Bouton model Q. They stay the night at a local hotel who’s only guest is the brusque and heavy drinking Professor Zimmer.

The same night they are invited to the local castle for dinner by Dr. Ravna and his children. The following day they are invited to a sumptuous ball at the castle where Gerald is drugged and Marianne is turned into a vampire, sort of.

Gerald wakes up and is told by everyone that he has no wife and that he came alone, drank too much and made a scene. The police won't help him and he despairs until Zimmer tells him the truth; Ravna is the master of a cult of vampires.

Together they rescue Marianne and then enact an occult ritual that destroys the vampires and Marianne is released from the vampires influence. The end.

The Kiss of the Vampire is a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, the idea of using occult powers to defeat the vampires instead of the old stake to the heart is a welcome change and the ritual is well filmed. The movie is over all well made and the atmosphere is fine. The part where everyone insists that Gerald isn't married was really good.

On the other hand, these are the weakest, most ineffective and lame vampires ever. They really don't do anything. When Gerald and Zimmer rescue Marianne from the castle, they are pursued by the vampires hulking servant, and once he is killed, they can seal the castle by drawing crosses with distilled garlic on the doors and the vampires are trapped. All they do is sit around and complain.

This bunch is far removed from Dracula and the Karnsteins, who are actual predators and thus are actually scary.

This brings me to the vampire “cult”. They like to gather in a room vaguely decorated in an Asian style and they wear white robes and sit in a square on the floor. It looked so much like the martial arts movies of the 60's that I half expected Bruce Lee to kick in the door and beat them up.

And what is the deal with having a vampire cult? Creating more vampires that still has to drink blood creates a greater demand for victims, which increases the likelihood that they will be discovered exponentially.Very silly.

All in all TkotV is a very mixed bag. I didn't hate it, but I can't really recommend it either. It's certainly not one of the great Hammer vampire movies, but from a completionist point of view, it's worth watching. Decide for yourself.

That's that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

One church you don't want to visit

Last week I talked about Stagefright by Michele Soavi, and today we're talking about The Church also by Michele Soavi.

The Church (1989) is a beautiful mess of a film. The plot in a nutshell is this:

Back in medieval days, a force of Teutonic Knights are called to cleanse a village of evil. They do this by indiscriminately slaughtering every living thing around and burying all the corpses in a pit which is sealed with a big stone cross. A priest instructs them to erect a great church on the site to trap the evil in the pit forever. Cut to 1989. The evil is released and everything goes pear-shaped.

The actors aren't bad, some like Hugh Quarshie (Father Gus) went on to play the Captain of the Guard for Queen Amidala in Star Wars Phantom Menace. The bishop is played by Feodor Chaliapin Jr. who essentially reprises his role from The Name of the Rose. Young Lotte is played by Asia Argento.

To be perfectly honest, this movie is a great example of style over substance. The shots are great and the sound and music are topnotch.

The biggest problems are the script and the cutting. Several smaller scenes make no sense and the dialogue is almost pointless. The pacing is also a bit odd, but not so much as to really make a difference. It feels like as if a group of people sat around and pitched cool scenes with the script built around those scenes as an excuse to make a film. In most cases this would be catastrophic, but Soavi pulls it off nicely. The movie is mostly like a dream with soft shots and muted lighting that never goes too dark to be watchable. Many modern directors could take note here. After all, what's the point of watching a movie if it's too dark to see what's happening?

Most of the special effects are good and still hold up quite well. Whether you like the rubber demons that pop up here and there is up to you, but the final monster, that is built of squirming human bodies is still quite impressive.

Interestingly, they wanted to shoot the movie in and around the Nuremberg cathedral but the city decided they didn't want a horror movie filmed there. The church is actually The Matthias Church in Budapest, or the The Church of the Assumption of the Buda Castle (Hungarian: Nagyboldogasszony-templom) to use it's full name.

Although the real church is not a cathedral, the one in the movie is. My question is; how did they build a great cathedral, which requires a substantial foundation to be dug out, without unearthing the pit of evil underneath?

A silly little nitpick to be sure, and considering that this rather cool horror movie is all about style over substance, it doesn't matter.

At the end of the day, The Church is a movie I would recommend to horror fans but not really to casual horror watchers. It's not a masterpiece but it is a fun curiosity.

That's that an all that. Join me again next time and have yourself a great week!

Bloody Italian mayhem

I've been happily reading about old school horror movies on Wikipedia and IMDb. Yeah, that's the subject of the week.

So, whilst reading, it is fun to try to remember if I've seen a particular film or not. In this vein I ran across Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) and vaguely remembered watching I ages ago. The synopsis seemed okay and I found it on Youtube so why not? I'll tell you why not. The script and pacing is awful. And the acting is sadly subpar.

I can deal with the dubbing and the lack of lip sync, but it was atrocious enough for me to turn the movie off, and instead watch a vastly superior movie:

Stagefright (1987).

I had seen this ages ago during my late teens or early 20's. I remembered it vaguely, but boy, was I pleasantly surprised.

Stagefright is directed by Michele Soavi and was in fact his first full length film, and what a home-run! He cut his teeth under Italian Giallo master Dario Argento, and this debut shows he was paying attention.

In a nutshell, the story is this: A group of dancers are rehearsing for a show that's supposed to open in a week. One of the dancers (Alicia) has injured her ankle sneaks off with the wardrobe mistress during a break to see a doctor. The closest hospital happens to be a psychiatric facility, where a murderous madman, Irving Wallace sees Alicia. Unbeknownst to them he escapes and hides in their car. In no time at all, the wardrobe mistress is killed and the police is called. The director, Peter, colludes with the financier Ferrari (not the car) to retool the show to be about Wallace instead of a generic killer in an owl mask. In order to get the changes made, Peter arranges for most of the cast to be locked in the theater to rehearse the new script, and they are all trapped inside with the killer. Bloody mayhem ensues.

What we have here is a very intelligent horror movie. Everything that happens is setup right, nothing is left to chance. Plot devices that become important later are properly shown earlier. The actors do a credible job, even with the above mentioned dubbing. The music is aggressively 80's synth, which in my opinion works nicely, but hasn't aged terribly well.

For being an “80's slasher” Stagefright avoids most cliches or at least subverts them. There is no nudity just for the sake of it. One short flash in a scene where a dancer changes her costume is it, and it makes sense within the narrative. The killer kills because he wants to and that's it. No pointless moralizing. Soavi even plays with slasher tropes a bit just for fun but not so that it gets in the way.

In the way of nitpicks, a couple of the corpses are breathing if you look carefully, and I have no idea where he gets the pickaxe for the first murder from, but the biggest flaw is when,

SPOILER WARNING

a dancer is pulled through the floor. Her boyfriend and the director are both pulling on her arms for all they're worth while the killer somehow holds her down and manages to cut her in half. A chainsaw sound effect was accidentally left out, but still it's an impossible feat. Wallace is big but the two guys should have pulled him up with the girl.

SPOILER ENDS

Bottom line, Stagefright is a really good slasher style horror movie. If these films are your cup of tea, and you haven't seen it, you need to. It's as simple as that!

That's that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

The Butcher of Lyons

So, it has been a while since I did a book review, but today it's time.

Last week I finished; Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons by Tom Bower.

Klaus Barbie (1913 – 1991) was a Hauptsturmführer (captain) in the SD, subsection IV, better know as the Gestapo. This probably tells you quite a lot already.

After a short intro, the book sketches out his childhood and how he came to join the SS. This is followed by his early service culminating in Barbie being posted to Lyons. This section is a hard read as the details of the interrogation techniques he used are pretty stomach churning. But it would have been a mistake to gloss over it too much, as it's important to be aware of what these people did.

This section also details the French Resistance groups and Barbie's intelligence work to find and break them.

As the war ends, the book goes through Barbie's struggles to evade the Allies and how he in 1946-47 starts to work for the US CIC, or Counter Intelligence Corps. As relations between the Soviet Union and the rest of the Allies rapidly fell apart, and paranoia over Stalin's plans for Europe explodes, Barbie found himself invaluable to the American effort to spy on and suppress German communist parties.

Finally when pressure from the French became too much, and the CIC could no longer convincingly lie to cover for Barbie, they spirited him away to South America through Italy.

Barbie sets himself up as a businessman and intelligence officer/adviser for right wing governments in South America, particularly Bolivia. Since Bolivia's founding in 1825 they have had 190 changes of government, ususally through coups, so Barbie had no shortage of work.
Finally, thanks to the untiring efforts of the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Barbie was extradited to France to stand trial for all the people he tortured and sent to their deaths.

This is where the book ends, as it was published in 1984 before his sentencing to life in prison in 1987. The kindle version I read is a reissue, and it would have been nice to have an addendum of post '84 events, but that is why we have Wikipedia.

As history books go, this one was a very easy read. It never got bogged down but it never loses the important details. It also manages to keep a good sense of a neutral perspective, reporting but never editorializing. This is of course not an entirely easy thing to do with this subject matter.

Finally this book gives an interesting insight in the unwillingness the Allies had in actually running down and punishing Nazi criminals. A speech by Roosevelt and later Churchill made it an unavoidable issue, but officials on both sides of the Atlantic really didn't want to meddle in that. Sure, the big-wigs had to go, but beyond that, many were content with leaving things as they were. This attitude coupled with the communist fueled paranoia really explains why and how the US came to protect a man like Barbie.

If the subject matter interests you, I absolutely recommend this book, both for the quality of research but also for being well written.

That's that. Join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres, and have yourself a great week!

Has Blizzard completely lost its mind?

Well, Activision-Blizzard has gone and done it again. You'd think they would, after all the trouble they had last year, try to stay calm and keep quiet...

Back in 2018, during the ill-received Blizzcon where they announced Diablo Immortal on mobile, which by the way still hasn't been released, Blizzard also announced a remaster of one of their all time best selling and beloved games: Warcraft III.

With all the scorn heaped upon them for their misguided way of announcing Diablo Immortal and their flippant comments of “don't you guys have phones”, this remaster announcement went a bit under the radar.

Until this last week when Warcraft III: Reforged released. The shock and outrage was immense as stunned players saw what they had received. The previews and teasers had been good, with new fully animated cut-scenes and updated graphics and UI, but what they ultimately got was not good.

Apparently, in several cases, the graphics look worse, and the beautifully rendered cut-scenes are now in game models just standing there with animated portraits talking in the corner of the screen. The UI is apparently just the old one.

Old and beloved custom maps and mods no longer function in Reforged, and the new EULA is rewritten to allow Blizzard to claim ownership of any and all mods and maps created for it. To make it even more ludicrous, a map maker tried to make a battle map based on the goblin run pirate town of Booty Bay only to be informed by Battlenet that the word booty is not allowed as it is considered dirty. Keep in mind that Blizzard themselves have created Booty Bay...

Angry gamers immediately tried to refund the game only to be met with considerable difficulties. Most have been denied refunds altogether, with Blizzard even lying to keep the money. One player reports that he hadn't even started the game when he heard how bad it was, only to be told by Blizzard Customer Service that he was ineligible for refund because he had played too long.

And all of this isn't even the worst part. The most ridiculous part is that Blizzard has nuked the old version of Warcraft III! So if you owned the old version, with no interest in Reforged , they have auto-updated it so that Reforged is the only one that works.

As if that wasn't enough, strong rumors are swirling around that players who are too vocal about refunds or helping others to get one, are being banned from the official forums. Yes, this is a rumor, but several news outlets have picked up the banning story so it may well be true.

As of writing this, Warcraft III: Reforged has a Metacritic score of 63 for official critics (incredibly bad for a Blizzard game) and 0.5 for Fans with 18353 players leaving feedback. This makes it the lowest rated game in Metacritic's history. It's no wonder the Internet has redubbed the game Warcraft III: Refunded.

That's that. Until next time, have a really good week!