Video: Vampires final thoughts.

Vampires vs The Bronx guest review

Vampires vs The Bronx

Privet Tovarischi!  For this guest review, in honor of Fangsgiving, we’re going to be looking at a lovely little film called Vampires vs The Bronx.  Now, this will not be a traditional review, where I talk about how good (or not) the movie is and give it a grade.  I wouldn’t be doing this if the movie were terrible, because unlike Frigid, I don’t hate myself {I don’t hate myself, I just have a very honest relationship with myself}.  I am possessed of Millennial Death Drive on occasion, but I don’t hate myself.  Instead, I am going to be using this film to talk about themes, in my usual openly communist way {Quick note: While I fully support freedom of speech and my editors right to believe as he does, his statements and beliefs are not reflective of the review series as a whole and should only be taken as his opinion :P}. 

The movie takes place in a thriving neighborhood in The Bronx, where a close-knit community, mostly people of color, actually live and work. 

Very early on, we are introduced to our main character, Miquel Martinez, who is called Little Mayor by his neighbors.  Honestly?  He’s a great kid.  He’s smart, a bit impetuous, cares about the community in which he lives, and is well-liked in his neighborhood precisely because he gives a shit.  His nickname is an endearment, not derision.  Which does not stop some shit-giving!  Oh no.  His mission in life is to try to keep the Prima Bodega open, because it’s fallen on hard times, and he practically grew up there.  See, the owner, Tony, basically opens his door to neighborhood kids and keeps them out of trouble, giving them a supervised place to hang out, provides  life-advice, and is basically the neighborhood omnibus uncle.  To do that, Little Mayor went and organized a block party to raise funds, basically to help Tony pay rent.  In the brief introductory period, Little Mayor notices that more and more of his neighborhood is being bought by a single real estate investment firm, and at the same time, people are just straight up going missing.  It should come as no shock at all that it’s vampires doing both things.  They are buying up all the real-estate, and they’re eating people.  

So that’s our basic set up.  Now, what this movie is really doing is talking about gentrification using the lens of vampires.  This shouldn’t come as a shock.  Vampires have, if you’ve been paying attention to prior Fangsgivings, often served as a stand-in for whatever social ills the author of a particular work had an axe to grind about {A common role for monsters but vampires seem rather flexible in this regard}.  Sometimes, this has taken the form of The Other (In various forms, from queer people to “savages” from other places), and have tapped into social anxieties surrounding those things.  However, in this late-capitalist hellscape we live in, housing security and the preservation of communities has become something of a problem.  

So, what is gentrification?  Well, gentrification is the process by which a poor area becomes rich, not because the people there become rich (that would be a different process called un-slumming), but because the poor people who live there are replaced by rich people.  This happens when, for whatever reason, the area becomes more economically desirable.  Maybe a stadium gets built, or a tech company buys up an office.  Property values increase, and when property values increase, property taxes go up and price the people who own their homes and businesses out.  In addition to this, rents respond to property values and not the actual costs of maintaining property because landlords are parasites who do no socially necessary labor but instead suck the lifeblood out of their tenants able to charge more for more desirable rental space in the local market.  This forces more people out.  Old buildings get torn down to be rebuilt into luxury condos, starbucks moves in where the bodega used to be, the smoke shop becomes a vegan cafe, the dive gay bar gets turned into an upscale gay bar with no leather night or gets colonized by straight people etc.  

In this film the vampires (who are all, hilariously and appropriately, white) are buying up the neighborhood to create a kind of feudal estate, like the old days, where they have control over the local government and economy and are thus able feed and reproduce at will.  Basically using the process of gentrification to settler-colonize a neighborhood “where no one [important] cares when people disappear”.

Now, Little Mayor is joined by two of his friends.  I’d say that his friend Bobby isn’t the brightest crayon on the box, but that would be unfair.  See, he’s poor, and he wants to not be poor, and in economically depressed communities with limited opportunities, this can lead to recruitment by gangs that offer quick cash and social status, and he’s starting on the road down that path {Which is interesting in and of itself because the research shows that most drug dealers make about minimum wage, it’s the dealers boss who makes bank.  So even drug dealing is a pyramid scheme in a lot of ways much like AMway or other comparable schemes (That is true, and most gang members have day jobs, but it’s fast and in cash.  Psychological trick.)}.  But in his heart of hearts, he’s a sweet kid.  Luis is basically the polar opposite of Bobby.  He sees his way out: through hard work and education, basically looking to Get Out rather than Get Paid Within the community.  He’s risk averse and bookish, and really doesn’t approve of Bobby’s tendency toward more immediate gratification {Which has its own risks}.

While hanging up flyers, Little Mayor ends up getting chased by a gang member named Slim, who is in turn killed by a vampire who had been stalking Little Mayor through the night.  Seeing this, Little Mayor runs to Tony’s Bodega where he feels safe and there’s a big strong dude with a baseball bat, and is followed in by the vampire (presumably still hangry or anxious about discovery).  This is when the other boys notice something is up, because the vampire doesn’t leave a reflection in any of the mirrors.  So they do what every young boy should do when confronted by landlords vampires… They read Mao watch Blade to figure out how to kick off a protracted people’s war and end up with a wikipedia article about the mass-killing of landlords with their name on it  kill vampires {Which is ironic because Blade disposes of a lot of the folklore regarding vampires, in order to provide more satisfying action}.  

Now, I am not going to spoil the entire plot here, that would be unfair, because you really should watch the movie.  However, there are some pretty obvious problems that these kids face.  The first is that there are three of them and they are all of thirteen and ill-equipped to overthrow the bourgeois state and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat hunt capitalists vampires who  control the government have bought the courthouse and appear to be a perfectly normal real estate investment firm, who have the backing of what Lenin called Special Bodies of Armed Men police on their side.

That means they have to convince their neighbors that capitalism is a system built on the exploitation and immiseration of the working class vampires are real {To be fair to the adults, once evidence is provided they don’t spend a lot of time refusing to believe but mobilize pretty quickly (Definitely, yes)}.  This is something of a tall order, because everyone knows that capitalism is just human nature vampires aren’t real.  The adults can see what’s going on with the gentrification, and they don’t like it, but for them, that is just the way the world is.  It’s just their turn to get screwed. They don’t have the context to realize that there are better alternatives and that the way of the world can be changed evidence necessary to convince them that the destruction their community faces is caused by rentier bourgeoisie vampires.

So of course, the three amigos try to prove their case and find evidence of what is going on, but this backfires and gets them in trouble.  Friendships start to fray, they split the party over the best way to cope with their economic and vampire situation.  So the question is, can they do it?  Can they overcome their differences and the deck stacked against them and be the vanguard party of the revolution that educates the working class into achieving class consciousness and rising up against the bourgeoisie convince their neighbors that they need to rise up and purge the vampire menace from their midst?  Or will they die martyrs of the revolution fail and end up at best watching their neighborhood get the life-blood sucked out of it literally and figuratively?  You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.  

I really enjoy this movie, obviously.  Marxism is only subtext because no one is hanging around reading Das Kapital, and it takes aim at not just at gentrification itself, but the white-supremacy that normalizes it like Lyudmila Pavelchenko taking aim at fascists in the Crimea.  However, my communist rambling aside, it is also a fun and strangely light-hearted romp with enjoyable well-acted characters who feel like real people.  That’s the really amazing part. Everyone involved in this production put on performances that made their characters feel like real living people, in a neighborhood that feels actually-lived-in.  

Green Text is your usual reviewer Garvin Anders

Black Text is your guest reviewer Dr. Ben Allen

Vampire Hunter D By Hideyuki Kikuchi

 Vampire Hunter D

By Hideyuki Kikuchi

Hideyuki Kikuchi was born on September 25, 1949, in Choshi, Japan. He attended Aoyama Gakuin University and trained under Kazuo Koike, best known in the west for writing Lone Wolf and Cub. Hideyuki Kikuchi released his first novel in 1982, Demon City Shinjuku which was adapted to animation in 1988. His greatest successes are most like the Wicked City series, Darkside Blues, and of course the subject of today's review Vampire Hunter D. He is considered one of Japan's leading horror writers and is certainly a prolific writer. Vampire Hunter D for example has 27 novels in the series, as well as anime, manga, art books, and various guidebooks, and more. Today we're looking at volume one. 

According to Hideyuki Kikuchi, Vampire Hunter D is heavily inspired by the Hammer Horror movies, specifically, the idea for D first occurred to him when watching the movie Horror of Dracula starring Sir Christopher Lee (May his Nazi-hunting soul rest in peace.). Which is another impact that Sir Lee has had on the world, which makes me sad to think we will not likely see someone of his caliber anytime soon. In fact, the first book is dedicated to Sir Lee, as well as Peter Cushing and the entire cast of the Horror of Dracula. Vampire Hunter D doesn't just draw inspiration from the Hammer Horror films but also from gothic films, westerns, science fiction, and folklore. Let's take a look at the setting and you'll see what I mean.

The year is 12,001 AD, sometimes 10,000 or so years ago humanity almost destroyed itself in a nuclear war (We’re still not through that filter, kids!). The vampires, seeing it coming, withdrew to bunkers deep beneath the earth and once the worst of it was over, they emerged, swept away what pathetic resistance the ragged remains of humanity could offer, and took over the world. For thousands of years, Vampires ruled unchallenged, calling themselves the Nobility and reforming the world as they saw fit (I swear on Lenin’s cat…). Through the use of dark science and magic, they created or summoned forth various creatures and beings from mythology and unleashed them on the world just because they could. They created marvels of super science beyond the hope of humanity to understand and even reached out into the dark void of space. They even rewrote humanity's genetic code to make it easier to prey upon us. They engineered us to forget the powers of garlic (one would think that they would have driven the garlic plant into extinction instead) and the cross, and if anyone rediscovered it, they were forced by genetic conditioning to forget it.

I'll admit I'm a bit confused as to why the cross would still injure vampires, as Christianity has been completely forgotten (Maybe it has nothing to do with the religious symbol, but the right-angle?  Like, the high-contrast right-angle raised in relief over a background behind it that is actually three-dimensional causes a processing problem in their brains or something.{Considering they live in squares and artificial environments where right angels abound… I’m thinking blindsight is not the answer here}). I mean, I'm a practicing Christian, I believe in the death and resurrection, and I would tell you that a cross is simply a 't' shape if you don't have any faith in it. The power of the symbol comes from the belief and faith of the people who use it. The Almighty could just as easily manifest himself in a common river rock for as special as the symbol is without faith. Also, if it's just the shape of it? Wouldn't that mean Vampires could be repelled by books or even wooden blocks with the letter t on them? They're just not as terrifying if they flop over every time they see the word the or tree or so on are they? 

However nothing lasts forever, eventually, humanity was able to create a rebellion that stuck. Slaying enough vampires to cause the majority to either flee, place themselves in deep hibernation in the dark bowels of the earth or withdraw to the wild frontiers of the world. There on the edge of human civilization, the last outposts of vampiredom squat in a collection of petty fiefdoms in hollow imitations of the dark glories of ages past. Immortals lost in crushing boredom and strutting in boastful vanity in the ruins of their own empty crumbling monuments of horror and savagery (Good.  Time to finish them off.{Still a bunch of them in space}). Unable to let go of the past or build a new future;  they instead slowly but surely become prey to a new breed of humanity, the hunters who roam the Frontier as mercenaries, lawmen, or even heroes seeking out the monsters that prey on humanity. These men and women slowly but surely push back the borders of degenerate inhumanity and make the world safe for a new human civilization. One that struggles to understand the scraps left behind by the predators it bested. 

Count Magnus Lee is one of the last members of the nobility stubbornly holding his sector from his castle fortress with his daughter Larmica as his only real company. Driven by boredom and perhaps something like loneliness, Magnus Lee decides not to kill a teenage girl he comes across one night. Instead, he'll do worse, he'll drain her slowly and turn her into a vampire and then force her to marry him. The lady in question, Doris Lang is less than thrilled with this idea, she hasn't been fending off the mayor's thuggish son, keeping her father's farm going and raising her little brother only to become the plaything of a thing 3000 years her senior. So she hires the strongest hunter she can find, a beautiful young man dressed entirely in black who only gives the name D. 

The novel takes us on a surreal journey through a world that has been utterly reshaped by the mad whims of a predatory upper class and driven to ruin and regeneration. As D, Doris, and Dan, the little brother in question, struggle to not only fend off Magnus Lee, but super-powered bandits, angry village mobs, the mayor's son, and the various monsters and supernatural creatures left littering the landscape by the nobility's cruel wholesale rewriting of the ecosystem. Through this, we see that D is a Dhampir, the son of a vampire and a human and an incredibly powerful one at that. While not invulnerable, he's so powerful that his father may have been the most powerful vampire of them all... Let's go ahead and talk some more about Dhampirs, shall we?

The word itself comes from Albania (Land of a quarter million bunkers.) and was originally applied to the children of vampires, and vampires, without distinction. The idea of vampires having children seems to be mostly from the Balkans among the southern Slavic peoples and there's a lot of variation in the myth. Some say that Dhampirs can practice sorcery or are born without bones, and others grant them various powers that can be passed from father to son. In popular culture Dhampirs usually have a lot of the strengths of vampires and few of the weaknesses; such as being able to roam about in the daylight and not having to fear the menu of an Italian restaurant. D is a lot like Blade in that he has all the powers of a predatory ruling class but instead chooses to use it for the good of humanity and the common people, even in the face of disrespect and bigotry. In D's case, his taciturn and stoic manner may also spring from the fact that he seems to have inherited his father's lifespan, which means he'll be riding his mutant horse and hunting monsters when everyone else has been dust for a thousand years (That would be a very lonely way to exist…{I’m not sure he has much of an alternative}). Well, unless something kills him first. 

I really enjoyed the novel, it has a strange but heady mix of bleak gothic tragedy and wild west style action. Hideyuki Kikuchi takes some pains to let us see this world as both an emerging human civilization pushing back the darkness and a crumbling civilization of vampires who can only remember a glorious past. That said he doesn't pull any punches about the vampire's predatory nature or try to romanticize the fact that they bloody eat people! Magnus Lee may be a person who is bowed under 3000 years of life and struggling with ennui, but he's also a monster who treats everyone else around him as an object for pleasure and amusement. This may be why he's suffering such deep ennui and boredom. Larmica is herself a bit of a tragic figure but she's also a bigot who's more offended by the idea of her father turning and marrying a human girl than his many crimes against the people around them (Gotta end her too.  Full Romanovization. {For the record I don’t condone murdering children because of their family name.  In Larmica case, it would because she literally eats people}). It's their very flaws that led them to their destruction, with D just having to be the active but inevitable agent of their doom. That said, there's a lot of telling when it comes to history and the book is heavy on exposition, which I'm not really a fan of. Because of that, I'm giving the novel a B+. 

I hope y’all enjoyed Fangsgiving, tomorrow our editor will be providing a guest review for us and next week I’ll wrap up with a video.  If you enjoy these reviews consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you’ll get a vote on upcoming reviews, events like a david lynch Dune watch together and other benefits for as a little as a dollar a month.  Hope to see you there, until then keep reading!

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Blade (1998 film) Directed by Stephen Norrington

Blade (1998 film)

Directed by Stephen Norrington 

It's the late 90s and Marvel is struggling, having declared bankruptcy and having several of its initiatives to rekindle the business fail. On the movie front attempts at using characters to gather a wider audience have led to three legendary failures, the 1989 Punisher film (which was described as boring!), the 1990 Captain America movie (which we will never talk about), and the legendary failure of Howard the Duck. Marvel gathered itself together for one final toss of the dice; both in comics by launching the Marvel Knights line, and in movies by making a deal with New Line Cinema for a film starring a little-known character known as Blade the vampire hunter. Let me talk about the comic book Blade before we get into the movie. 

Blade was created in the 1970s as a supporting character for the horror comic Tomb of Dracula, which Marvel created when the ban on Horror comics in general and vampires in specific was relaxed (Comic self-censorship follows a similar path as movie censorship.). Marv Wolfman created him in 1973 and he appeared in the 10th issue. Blade at the time dressed in bright colors sported an afro and was known for leading an all-black squad of vampire hunters and wielding knives made of carved teakwood (Okay, that’s actually pretty boss.). Now the teak wood blades make sense because you need to use a wooden stake in the comics. The rest of the vampire hunters didn't last long, however, as Dracula did what he usually does to vampire hunters, drain them dry. Which only served to intensify the battles between him and Blade (You killed obvious cannon-fodder friend number 2!  Noooo! {All things considered buddy under the current rules of fiction, you’re the cannon-fodder friend, are you sure you wanna invoke that trope?}). 

Despite his solo comics never really lasting, Blade proved to be the longest-lasting contribution of Tomb of Dracula to the wider Marvel Universe, outlasting even Dracula himself. Despite Marv reigning in Blade appearances, he kinda overshadowed the main characters as a rival for Dracula. Interestingly enough he wasn't a Dhampir but a well-trained mortal man, having been trained from a young age by a number of mentors who drifted in and out of his life (Oh come on!  Why can’t these kids have stable home lives and mentors?  This is not healthy. {Healthy people don’t decide to hunt monsters as their life’s work}). Despite his lack of superpowers he would go on to serve on superhero teams, show up in the Spider-man cartoon and always, always be on the hunt for vampires. 

The film re-imagined Blade from the ground up, with a lot of the input coming from Wesley Snipes and David Goyer. Blade was given a more 90s aesthetic, wearing a black overcoat and ballistic armor, his origin was reworked to let him stand toe to toe with super-powered beasts of the night. This also let him tap into something else but we'll get there. Instead of leading a team of hunters, he worked alone, as long as we didn't count his aging mentor Whistler, who was created wholesale for the film (Who is totally awesome BTW, and finally someone stable in poor Blade’s life.). This re-imaging was so successful and popular that it led to Marvel overwriting the comic character in favor of the film character; even having Morbius, another vampiric character, bite Blade in the comics to turn him into a Daywalker and grant him the powers of the film version (Wait, how does that work? Is this a kind of half-transformation thing where he either has to kill someone giving into his blood-lust, have sex with a vampire post-bite or in lieu of it [hot], or drink the vampire’s blood to go fully vamp? {Keep in mind that Morbius is a vampire created through SCIENCE! And not traditional means so the rules are different for him}). 

 Deacon Frost also appears in the comics but as an old man who killed Blade's mother after he was born. In the comics, he's a scientist who turned himself into a vampire via experiments with vampire blood, which only reinforces the need for an ethics committee (Where the hell is the IRB in comic universities?!  WHERE IS IT!? {Eaten by vampire scientists clearly}). He would duel with Blade and appear to be killed several times only to return each time through the powers of dark science or magic. The film re-imagines him as a young and hungry vampire resentful of how the elder “purebloods” of vampiric society keep trying to lock him out of political and economic power (And before anyone says anything, this is new bourgeoise vs old bourgeoisie, they should all get the choppy choppy {Normally I would find this debatable but they are all literally bloodsucking monsters here}). His plan is simple: he's going to use the leaders of pureblood society to ascend to godhood and become a vampiric god on earth. Then he'll use his vampiric powers to turn the majority of the population into vampires, overtaking pureblood society through a combination of divine might and sheer numbers. The film also comes up with the idea that some people are born vampires, which raises the question of how come there aren't more Dhampirs running around if vampires can sire offspring? (My guess is that when vampires fuck, they create vampires.  When a vampire fucks a mortal, or maybe someone who isn’t turned yet, it will create Dhampirs. {Which means all a Vampire has to do to create a squad of superhuman soldiers is seduce a couple of women and raise the children. Am I supposed to believe that vampires and humans just never have sex together?  Because Blade is presented as a singular event!})

The film itself was Marvel's first box office success and made a profit, making 131 million against a budget of 45 million. I know that by today's numbers that doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind this was almost 30 years ago and the market was very different then. Blade proved that Marvel heroes could be successful on the big screen, which would be reinforced in 2002 by Sony's Spider-man. It also began to kindle ambitions in Hollywood and within the halls of Marvel comics but that's a story for another time. Now, this almost went the other way, there were executives in New Line who were convinced that a serious action horror film couldn't work and wanted to rework Blade as a parody. With one group of executives actually going so far as to ask why not make Blade white (Fucking. White. People.). However, Norrington, Goyer, and Snipes managed to convince everyone to hold the course and we're probably better off for it (If the alternative was white-washing, yes.  Yes we are. {Or a parody, which was not something we needed}). 

Because the film itself is, in a lot of ways, the grand evolution of the 1980s action movie Snipe's Blade is unrelentingly stoic, expressing himself mainly through one-liners and physical action. The action is brutal and gory with blood and dismemberment everywhere. Blade tears through humans and vampires alike with a grand disregard for anything but achieving damage to his targets. This is summed up very nicely in the opening where Blade basically conducts a mass shooting at a vampire rave (In fairness, they were dancing in blood that was raining down from the sprinkler system.  They needed that mass shooting. {See next sentence}). The movie literally opens up with our hero attacking an unarmed group of dancers at a rave but gets us to cheer for him by showing that all of these people are brutal predators who are literally dancing in the blood of innocent people when he shows up. Subtlety is not one of the virtues of this movie. 

What it is profoundly good at is combining dialogue and visuals to tell various stories. By using Dr. Karen Jenson, a hematologist who Blade rescues on a whim, as our viewpoint character, we can be drawn into Blade's world by degrees. Each new revelation showing that elements we thought were innocent in prior scenes were actually rather sinister. I encourage everyone to watch the movie carefully, twice and realize that familiars (human servants of vampires) and vampires are hidden in the background of several scenes. Which creates a sort of feeling of initiation into a secret world while increasing the tension in the film. We also get a sense of various supporting characters' stories and histories this way, which is a very streamlined and efficient way to tell a story. 

The biggest complaint I have with that approach is that it limits the amount of characterization we can effectively do, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There are several supporting characters who we're left asking “wait who was that person?” For instance, the teenage African American girl who appears in several scenes and then just disappears partway through the movie. We're left wondering if she had some relationship to Blade, just what her relationship with Frost was, and what is she even doing here? For that matter, much of the dynamics of Frost's minions are underdeveloped, like why does Quinn work for Frost? What's the relationship between Blade's mother and the blonde vampire heavily implied to be Frost's current lover? None of these are really important to the main story, so they're never gone into, left for the viewer to fill in the blanks with their own imagination (Which, for my money, is fine.  A movie is a kind of simulation of a real set of inter-relationships; and one that cannot always be fully explored in the run-time of the film.  It is after the movie is released that it can take on a life of its own in all of our heads and become more of a simulacra. {It would still be nice to know who the hell that girl was supposed to be!}). 

Everything that isn't about advancing the main plot is left pretty bare bone. The movie relies heavily on archetypes and brief interludes to provide characterization to the various relationships. For example, Whistler’s and Blade's relationship on the surface seems fairly 1980s macho; two badasses united only by a shared purpose, but is given more depth by scenes such as Whistler holding Blade's hand (Which is pretty much unheard-of intimacy for two unrelated men in the 1990s.) while he suffers through the application of the serum that keeps his bloodthirst at bay. Even the action tells the story of the plot, Blade can raid any part of the vampire world he likes and slay dozens of vampires with impunity but he can't clear or hold territory, always having to flee before the overwhelming numbers of vampiric servants mass in enough numbers to pull him down. While each vampire he kills likely saves hundreds if not more lives, the problem is there seem to be plenty more vampires to replace the fallen and Blade is locked into a war that has no end-state until the end of the film where the good doctor suggests that a cure is possible for turned vampires at least, which would allow a massive thinning of their numbers. 

Blade works on several levels that would later be tapped into by other heroes and that we see powering the ideas of various characters throughout vampire fiction. There is of course the standard wish-fulfillment element and power fantasy. There is also the idea of a monster that chooses to protect humanity instead of preying on it. The vampires of Blade continue the themes first set up in The Vampyre, Carmilla, and Dracula: being able to move through our society as privileged members of it (the 1% if you will) and use that very privilege as a camouflage for their predation. Wouldn't it be nice if some of them used that power for the good of society instead of stating their own selfish hunger? (Gee, it would be nice, but art imitates life, and it doesn’t happen.) I think that's what gives the Dhampir myth its legs and fuels a number of other heroic archetypes. 

Blade isn't a cinematic classic, but I do think it has an important place in history and occupies an interesting place in vampire mythology where, like Buffy, the hunter overshadows the monster and becomes the driving force of the story. If vampires tell us that we do not own the night and that there are dark forces both out in the night and within our own society that sees us as nothing more than cattle to be drained; Blade, Buffy, and other fiction in the same vein tell us there are those with strength and determination who can push back such forces and allow a better type of society to thrive. Which is a very modern way of looking at it perhaps. Since the film is an adaptation, it's gonna get two grades. First, as a stand-alone film, I'm giving it a B. The stark and bare-bones character work and world-building prevent it from reaching A status but the action, efficiency of the plot, and great pacing of the film propel it above average I think. Second as an adaptation... I'm actually going to give it a B-. While it did reimagine its main character from the ground up, it did so in a way that kept the core of the character intact and frankly improved and modernized Blade in a lot of ways. Either way, if you haven't seen it, give it a watch. 

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Carpe Jugulum by Sir Terry Pratchett, a guest review by Gary T. Stevens.

 Carpe Jugulum

By Sir Terry Pratchett 

Hello, fellow review readers.  At the invitation of our illustrious retired Teufelhund reviewer, I'm here adding my own little addition to this year's Fangsgiving.  As for introductions, for now we'll go with my chosen nomme de plume, Gary T. Stevens.  I have been mentioned before as the primary author of the Breach of Faith novels, of which three have been reviewed on this blog.  If you're already wondering about my sporadic, arguably pretentious, use of fancy non-English terms, it's part of my style and feeds my vanity (Vanity is counter-revolutionary, especially French language vanity.  You must be purged by the Khmer Rouge.[I'd be careful invoking that lot, given their attitudes towards people with academic learning :-P] If I were in Revolutionary Kampuchea, my doctorate would be the least of my concerns.[Touchè]), but I will try to dispense with it for the rest of this review.  I also ask for your patience; it has been many a year since I wrote something in this vein, so I won't be as concise and insightful as Garvin would be.

I admit I almost turned this down because I'm not much of a classical horror fan.  By volume my primary experience with vampires tends to be as enemies in video games to hit with whips (those kinky Belmonts[Don’t kink-shame the thirst-trap.][Do I want to know?  Actually, having finally finished Castlevania on Netflix over the last week, I think I do know.  Someone's a Trevor fan.]) or cast Fire and Cure spells on in Final Fantasy games, or alternatively, the various vampire courts of Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" novels and comics.  But after some consideration I realized there was a novel I could cover that heavily features vampires (or vampyres in this case), and which I hadn't read in a while.  That book is Carpe Jugulum, published in 1998, the 23rd book in Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

The Discworld.  There are few fictional settings I have enjoyed more.  I could probably write a long article on this series, what an influence it's provided to my own writing, and how much I love the Disc and all of the wonderful ways Sir Terry explored Humanity through serious silliness and silly seriousness and sometimes just outright seriousness.  But I see my editor in the corner there making a scissoring gesture, red pen in hand (Along with the consignment to a gulag.[What, is there a word shortage or something, am I being a wrecker by using too many? :-P] Yes), so I will endeavor to stick to details.

I don't think our illustrious host has covered a Pratchett work yet, so in brief (and admittedly with the help of Wikipedia, my editor is now scowling at me[No, it’s cool.]); Terrance David John Pratchett was born on the 28th of April in 1948 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, presumably because Beaconsfield did not want its only mark on the world to be the title of a 19th Century Conservative politician.  By his own profession Sir Terry was a "nondescript" student, and became a journalist upon graduation.  He was also already writing short stories while an apprentice journalist. His first book, The Carpet People, would be published in 1971, followed by two SF works, The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata.  In 1983 he published the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic (or Color of Magic if one wishes to sparingly use the letter "u" as we Americans try).  He devoted himself to writing after finishing the fourth Discworld novel, Mort, and by the 1990s was writing two books a year, becoming one of the best known humorists and fantasy writers in the world.  In addition to the Discworld he wrote a number of other series and stand-alone books, such as the Johnny Maxwell trilogy in the 1990s and the novel Nation in 2009. He also co-wrote Good Omens with Neil Gaiman in the early 90s, which recently was adapted into a live action mini-series on Amazon Prime.  Discworld has likewise been adapted in numerous ways, with radio dramas, graphic novels, video games, and a few different efforts at television adaptation; two novels were adapted into animated mini-series in the 1990s starring Sir Christopher Lee as the voice of Death, three more live action novel adaptations by Skye in the aughts, and — speaking very loosely — the recent "adaptation" series called "The Watch" on BBC America.  On New Year's 2009 he was knighted for services to literature and a year later won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.  Sadly he passed away on the 12th of March, 2015, after over seven years of combating Alzheimer's, survived by his wife Lyn and his daughter Rhianna.  The world lost a great light on that day, as well as more stories of the Disc, and other worlds, that his imagination and wit would have brought us with time.

Sorry, I've got something in my eye.  Give me a second… okay… no, still in my eye… I'm going to need a bit, okay?

Alright.

Carpe Jugulum, as you can imagine given its numbering in the series, came with the Discworld as an established setting as opposed to some of the odd bits from the early books.  In fact, it's effectively a final chapter, the fifth and final book to focus on the Witches of Lancre (they would make later appearances as supporting characters in a few other Discworld books, particularly the young adult series about Tiffany Aching).  It introduces the Nac Mac Feegle into the Discworld as well (think violent Scottish Smurfs with thick brogues and thicker heads who love fighting, drinking, and stealing "coobeasties" aka cows, a remarkable achievement for six inch high little blue men).  We even get to see a phoenix.  And, of course, as the title suggests… vampires.

But these aren't your usual vampires.  These are vampyres; the re-spelling that Count Magpyr insists upon given his ideas of modernizing the relation between his kind and Humanity, which is to say, formalizing the arrangements by which Humans will let themselves be fed upon by their blood drinking betters in the name of community and harmony (Time to break out the Bolsheviks…).  His wife, the Countess, and children, Vlad and Lacrimosa (often shortened to Lacci), have been invited by King Verence of Lancre to the formal ceremony where his two week old daughter will be officially named, a form of christening among a people who take the naming very seriously.  Just ask the child's mother, semi-retired witch Queen Magrat Garlick, who would have rather someone corrected her mother's spelling of "Margaret" before her naming.

Unfortunately, King Verence's eagerness to be a forward thinking modern monarch has left his kingdom at the mercy of this forward thinking modern vampyre and his followers, since once you invite a vampire in, it can be impossible to get them to leave.  Especially given the whole hypnotize and mentally overpowering humanity part of their skill set (not to mention weather control).  Even worse, many of the other classical methods for taking vampires down don't work on these vampyres, as Count Magpyr has been relentlessly training his family and followers to resist everything from lemon to garlic to swiftly displayed religious iconography (complete with flash cards!).  They're even handling sunlight rather well these days.  So the Witches of Lancre — Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat, and Magrat's successor Agnes Nitt and her caustic alternate personality Perdita X Dream — have their work cut out for them in showing these modern thinkers the door, a task that will lead them to the Magpyrs' domains in Uberwald (Sir Terry's take on Eastern Europe), with a little help from the Nac Mac Feegle, newly-arrived Omnian missionary the Quite Reverend Mightily(-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om) Oats, and Igor, the Magpyrs' "more-gothic-than-thou" servant who believes in the traditional ways of things and is fed up with his masters (or "marthterth" as he would put it, the lisp is part of the tradition after all).

I admit that when I re-read books I tend to focus on the bits I enjoyed the most in my first reads.  But fully re-reading Carpe Jugulum reminds me that Sir Terry's style is everywhere in a book, on every page.  His use of footnotes for both humor and worldbuilding, his "no chapters" approach, and the way the quirks of the Discworld and its denizens are explored are tried and true.  Whether he's continuing the humor of almost all the government jobs of the kingdom belonging to one man (Shawn Ogg, one of Nanny's many sons) or following single-minded falconer Hodgesarrgh's hunt for a phoenix, you'll find yourself cracking a smile.  But as always, just because the Discworld is silly and ridiculous doesn't mean it has no dramatic weight, and as always he presents his characters with all their foibles, flaws, and personal touches.  Granny Weatherwax in particular gets some stellar bits, as we get frequent glimpses at how she thinks.  Her arrogance, her struggles with her own dark side, struggling with having to make the decisions demanded of those who live "on the edge" of life, and her frustrations at dealing with an enemy with mental defenses even she cannot break, it sucks you in, and through it all she remains a force in the story.  Agnes' interactions with her split personality Perdita comes off as two sisters who are forced to share the same body despite very different personalities, and she plays a key role through the story after winning the attention of Vlad Magpyr, as she is our viewpoint character for many of the vampyres' arguments and justifications.  Nanny is capable of both direct action and subtlety, a matriarch who understands the power of words and little touches, like showing who has favor in the Ogg family by where their images are placed on her tables.  One of the moments that shocks the others comes when she even proposes that Agnes could, in fact, answer the attention she's getting from Vlad, seduce him, and try and affect his behavior afterward; a revolting idea, but befitting Nanny's character as practical-minded, not bashful at all about matters of sex (indeed she's often come off as a dirty old woman), and understanding of how relationship dynamics can work (sometimes).  Magrat as the retired witch and former maiden of the Lancre Witches balances caring for her newborn child, including some of her and her husband's ideas on baby Esme's development, with her old witch's instincts and continued loyalty to Granny and the others.

Sir Terry even plays with the roles a bit.  The earlier Witch novels of the Disc employed the traditional coven of three, with Granny as the Crone, Nanny Ogg as the Mother, and Magrat as the Maiden.  Now this dynamic is shaken; Magrat is herself a mother, with Agnes/Perdita ready to take her place, but early matters and the idea of Granny leaving Lancre open the idea of all the roles shifting, with Magrat becoming the Mother and Nanny the Crone, a role that Nanny is not particularly interested in.  Indeed, the idea of the three of them having to work together without Granny is part of the middle section of the story.

Mightily Oats gets some good moments as well; he is a young, untried pastor, and he struggles with matters of faith with all sorts of attendant nervousness.  He follows a religion that is described as frequently splitting into more and more congregations due to disagreements, which complicates his faith and underscores his wish for knowledge, arguably certainty, such that he is as much a split personality like Agnes/Perdita in this struggle of faith vs. knowledge.  But he has his own hidden depths, with an insightfulness that Sir Terry employs to give us differing views on his longer-established characters, especially Granny Weatherwax herself.  Oats is a vehicle for Sir Terry to give commentary about religion and sin, including the basis of sin and what religion means to people, and what it could mean.  This does tie into the main plot and the antagonists, of course, given their behavior and outlook.

In comparison to Oats, we also get Igor's sullen insistence on tradition as that kind of playful nod to genre conventions that Sir Terry has so often played with. There's a certain joy in the character, so it's no surprise that in following books Sir Terry didn't so much bring the character back but made him part of an entire extended clan of Igors who specialize in henching (and surgery, medicine, and sanitary practices) and behaving in traditional manners.  He would likewise feature the Nac Mac Feegle prominently in the later Tiffany Aching books (albeit turning down their accents and slang a bit, for the sake of the young adult audience of those books).

Ah, but it's Fangsgiving, so I'll get back to the vampires.  The Magpyrs are an ambitious lot, and with the exception of Countess Magpyr, who mostly just comes off as a stuffy wife and doting mother, they have particular individual tendencies.  Lacrimosa is played off as something of a vampyre goth, hanging out with other vampires who like to adopt strange names like Sally and Fred instead of their perfectly good vampire names like Hieroglyphica.  They wear plain clothes sometimes too!  She also has a teenager's vanity and temper and a cruel, sadistic streak, making her an odd counterpoint to the Perdita personality (and naturally this makes both Agnes and Perdita absolutely detest her).  She does not get along with Vlad, a convert to his father's thinking who is out to persuade Agnes/Perdita to become a vampire willingly, because those little people you're so worried about, well, we'll treat them better than other masters, and their kind always have a master anyway.  Nor are his arguments so easily dismissed, as he makes cutting points about the practicality of the usual arguments about escaping domination and oppression (I have some ideas about that…)[So I am aware.  Your love of guillotines is noted.], albeit still from the perspective of his own selfish interests.  Count Magpyr, of course, is the central figure, a "modern" thinker who believes vampires are at risk of becoming outdated and old if they do not reform.  He, and his family, protest that they are trying to bring the vampire/human relationship into modern times, to move beyond the old monster vs. mortal dichotomy.  They have their own ideas on the best way to do it, which can be described as making their feedings and other displays of superiority a routine, not extraordinary incidents of Humans fighting bloodsucking monsters.  Later in the book we get to see how this works, and I'll just say that it involves lotteries, queues, and "rites of passage" for children of a certain age (Or, you know, we can get rid of the parasites?  In the manner of Buffy the Anarcho-syndicalist Vampire Slayer.  Or maybe they can try not being parasites.)[Read on…].

As an aside, since this is Fangsgiving, Sir Terry would later show more vampires taking a similar attitude of having to reform, though in the direction of co-existence with Humanity requiring forswearing the whole bloodsucking thing (Good!  They can live when the revolution comes.).  We'll get vampires aligned with the actual protagonists, portrayed as essentially being alcoholics pledged to temperance who are constantly surrounding themselves with alcohol, and developing all the little tics you might expect for such people.  With Sir Terry, even the inhuman undead are, in fact, quite Human.

Since my editor's giving a pointed look at the word count, let's bring this to a conclusion.  I know it is customary for Garvin to assign a grade to a book, but I can't bring myself to do so.  True, there are some Discworld books I prefer over others, but they're all equally good in their own way.  They're all stories about stories; how they shape us, how they inform our world and the way we think on it and everything around us.  That includes our stories about vampires and monsters, with Sir Terry having his usual fun with the associated tropes about these mythical bloodsuckers, the purpose of monsters in stories, and through their behavior, ideas of what good and evil and sin really are.  And like with every other Discworld book, Carpe Jugulum has the usual observations and fun about the foibles of life and Humanity.  It is a treasure that gives us a fond farewell to the Witches of Lancre and I greatly enjoyed reading it once again.

Have a Happy Halloween, everyone!

Red text as always is our editor Dr Ben Allen

Black text is our valient guest reviewer Gary Stevens, independent author, friend of the review and one of our ever wise patrons.