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274/365: Roadworks, Bewdley
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Rather annoyingly, I've got a small paper cut on my right index fingertip, about the most irritating place I could have it. While it'll heal shortly, it's awkward to type at the moment so I'll keep tonight's post short. Here is a reasonably colourful but rather disorganised-looking roadworks site in Park Lane, Bewdley. That's about it!

Current Mood: sleepy

loganberrybunny

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Halloween (1978)

I mean, it had to be, didn't it? I'd never seen this film, so when it came to a choice of a movie to see on 31st October... yeah. Here we have a 1970s low-budget horror flick made without traumatising or recklessly endangering its actors.¹ Isn't that nice? It's dated surprisingly well, too, with the exception of a single line that wouldn't get anywhere near being approved today.² The lack of smartphones is a plus. The boring neighbourhood is a plus. The old telly is a plus. The minimalist piano score is a plus, especially the key shifting I didn't expect. The relative lack of gore is a plus. Donald Pleasence is an expected plus. And, of course, Jamie Lee Curtis is a plus – amazing to think she was then almost unknown and bought her own clothes for the movie at a high street store! The film is 18-rated to this day, though it's not an especially strong 18 by 2025 standards, I think. Overall? I'd call this a solid four. Glad I saw it. ★★★★
¹ I expect they'd need some extra stuff in 2025. But by 1978 standards? Pretty darn good.
² Not malicious, just a believable-for-the-character-in-context jokey line that lands badly now.

Current Mood: satisfied

loganberrybunny

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273/365: The Billiard Hall, West Bromwich
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I had a bit of a slog into West Bromwich today for boring reasons. It's not difficult to get there, it just needs three buses each way. Since it was the last weekday of half-term, it was also extremely busy absolutely everywhere in the shopping part of the town centre. It rained quite a bit, too. To cap it all off, Costa had stopped doing their afternoon coffee-and-muffin deal without making it obvious, so I had to pay £6.90 when I'd been expecting £5.49; grumble. :P Here's a pub I used to go to very occasionally, though I didn't much like it as the single big room was noisy. The Billiard Hall started out as exactly what its name implies, and though the interior is dull that name over the door is very nicely done. Note the cues and balls to either side!

Current Mood: tired

loganberrybunny

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271/365: Horsefair horse, Kidderminster
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272/365: Market Hall, Worcester
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The friends being me and

nightlightsuk who I've known for more than twenty years now, and who was kind enough to join me in Worcester for a few hours. Most of which was spent eating, yattering, or both. This was a very agreeable way to spend a day, to say the least, so a big thank you and *hugs* for that! The lower photo today is of the top floor of the rather odd Market Hall in Worcester. No market, just a mixture of empty units and offbeat shops. Up here: comics and annuals shop on the left, vegan sushi café at the end, record shop far right, film (as in camera film) shop near right. It's all very strange.

I failed to upload yesterday's 365 picture on time – as it happens that wasn't a deliberate omission after my much more serious earlier post; it was just forgetfulness! So you're getting it now. That's the upper photo today: the life-size horse sculpture here is in the Horsefair, a formerly (and still to an extent) run-down area of Kidderminster. It's made of over 500 actual horseshoes, and was made by Tom Hill in 2011.

Current Mood: happy

frith

Tomorrow is going to be my last day at work... for-ever! That's four evers, a really long time. I'm not retiring, I'm quitting. I've had quite enough of dealing with fantasy diets that seem to change on whim from the nutritionist, constantly increasing bureaucracy, ignored feedback and lip-service to decades of experience honed on observation and tweaks. After seven pleasant months of picketing (easy work!) I was considering jumping ship around last July but I held on for a while longer to see if anything was going to change. Not much of anything changed, except the season. I'm not keen about starting my day before sunrise and going home in the dark and cold, so several weeks ago I set my cut-off point at the end of October. And here we are!

Officially, I'm "retiring", not quitting. Human Resources were clear that they prefer "retiring". Sure, OK, whatever, I'm still leaving, so no difference, except I get an embarrassing dinner and money for groceries (it was either that or money for some store selling junk I don't need; at least I can eat groceries). I'm also going to get a gift for 35 years of service. I was shown a list of travel/home improvement/kitchen junk I don't need so I found some cheap things online I'd like. I was told they were too inexpensive. 9_9 So buy any two of the things I looked up, I _really_ don't care that they're cheap, in fact, when it comes to gifts, I _prefer_ cheap. Cheap and useful pwns expensive and useless, every day of the week.

On my lunch breaks I've been reading Words of Power by Starscribe, who also wrote Fine Print (trickster Discord rents a room to a computer tech worker in a house which exists both in California and ponyville) and Homebrew (set in the Optimalverse sandbox, a benevolent AI apocalypse where the goal is to absorb all of humanity into a My Little Pony simulation). Both those prior books were good, so I expected this book to be well written as well. In Words of Power a factory worker ends up with an injured My Little Pony pegasus guard with a magical book in his house. He opens the book and gets changed into a female kirin (a maned dragon unicorn) and unintentionally changes his computer geek housemate into a griffin. Eventually he learns the skill to open a "worldgate" and all three cross over to Equestria to bring the book back to wherever it is that it can be safely stored.

Words of Power is not exactly well written, in fact it is in dire need of editing. There are continuity errors everywhere, sometimes in the same sentence, plus repetition. Then there's the nonsense. The main protagonist was raised on a farm but can't stand the sight of animal genitalia or the thought that either animal sharing his house will see his labia. 9_9 Since the clothes that he and his computer geek housemate own don't fit, genitalia are on display 24/7. After a week and change, kirin not-guy is smooching the pegasus guard pony and a few days later they're breeding. How can that work? Have you ever seen a horse? It's not exactly subtle, like the kirin wouldn't notice. So, thus far we've gone from body-horror (understandable), body dysphoria, prudish modesty (while wearing a fantasy creature body) to 'oh well, even though absolutely every creature knows I'm being bred by a horse, please don't tell anyone', with a horse who is doing the whole 'stay away from my mare, she's mine' thing.

So the gender transition acceptance thing is ham-fisted and the rushed, the jumbled story structure is off-putting, as was the holier-than-thou put-down of Princess Twilight over a need-to-know stratagem. But buried deep under this mess is a compelling narrative. I've read worse so I kept going and I've almost finished reading the whole thing, gritting my teeth all the while. Cost me $85 Can. and anyway, "It's My book and I'M GOING TO READ IT!" I'm going to think twice about getting any other books by this author.

There were "time capsules" in the news recently. These time capsules are like 25 years old. The people that put stuff in them are still kicking and remember what it was they contributed. It's ridiculous. If some box put away for a few decades counts as a time capsule, then my house is full of time capsules. I have boxes I haven't unpacked since I've moved, like 35 years ago, pictures on Kodachrome and old High School yearbooks. In that vein, my Bambi, Spirit and Pony collections are all time capsules too. There should be criteria for time capsules, like at least a 100 year minimum intentional burial.

DVD's are getting scarce at goodwill. I asked why the other day and I was told it's because DVD's are not getting donated. So it's harder to find anything I'd want to watch but some weeks ago I found a few I hadn't seen, including Entangled and Ralf Wrecks the Internet.

Ralf Wrecks the Internet was OK, predictable with a sneaky controlling boyfriend vibe, but still better than the horrors that the directors had planned, but ultimately cut from the finished film. I finally got to see the Disney Princess clique, discovering t-shirts and declaring that singing to water is The One True Princess Thing. Could be true.

Entangled (Disney Rapunzel) was an exercise in choosing the wrong Fairy Tale to flesh out in a movie. In this movie version, Disney changed the sorceress into an old woman, Rapunzel into a princess with magic hair, the wandering prince into a thief on the run, and the whole trading unborn Rapunzel for stolen salad thing into a kidnapping the baby with magic hair scenario. But that did not change the aspect of the story that made it unpleasant to watch; the sand in the Vaseline was the constant verbal abuse employed by the old woman to ensure that, for 18 years straight, Rapunzel never left the tower. There was no way around that. Nothing magical was keeping Rapunzel from rappelling down the tower and cutting off her hair to escape, just the lies and guilt-tripping. Well, I wanted to see this movie to see the horse protagonist and the horse delivered, but not enough to watch the movie twice.

Another Goodwill find was the 2021 Ghostbusters film, the one where Egon is dead, his daughter and grandkids inherit his farmhouse off in the badlands and the grandkids and their friends take up ghost-capturing. It was an OK movie, but the more I dwell on it, the more crass it feels. The teacher has only disdain for his students, wastes their class time by showing them horror movies while he goes off to putter around in his lab and geek/fan boy over seismology and the now defunct Ghostbusters. The kids make snide comments time and again, which they seem to get from their penniless mother. They're all pretty actors and do a good job... at being crass. I guess that's the Ghostbusters vibe, crass humor. Crass with sexual and misogynist innuendo. I saw the movie that followed this one at the cinema last year or so, when it came out. It had much the same cast and was mostly forgettable. As in, I've mostly forgotten it.

loganberrybunny

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Content warning on this one for threats of sexual violence. I've deliberately put some of my own wording before the (text-only) screenshot, so you can stop reading now if you want to.

This is it. As I say, the smoking gun. If you've been following my posts about Sandra Peabody (originally credited as Sandra Cassell) and the abuse she suffered on the set of Wes Craven's early horror film, The Last House on the Left, then you'll know that one thing that's repeatedly frustrated me is how difficult the evidence is to find. It's not hidden exactly, but a lot of it's in un-Googled places like DVD commentary tracks, obscure video clips, or a making-of book that's been out of print for two decades. But now, finally, I've found something different.

This is from an actual mainstream publication: Vanity Fair. Specifically, from this article from March 2008. It's paywalled, and normally free users can't read very far down – as you may well find if you click that link – but very recently I was able to get legitimate access on some kind of very short-term mobile free trial offer. The article is called Killer Instincts, it's bylined Jason Zinoman, and it starts on p304 of the print edition. It's a long article – over 5,000 words – and the relevant part here is almost 2,000 words in, far beyond the usual paywall line. That's why I'm only reproducing the small section that's directly relevant:

It's pretty sickening stuff. If you've spent the time I have in researching what happened on this set, it's sadly not surprising that David Hess would say that. Nevertheless, it's extremely rare, possibly even unique given how difficult it was for me to find this, for him to be quoted saying something so directly repulsive in a mainstream publication. Hess is no longer around; he died in 2011. I would say "good", except that it means he'll never be held accountable.

Vanity Fair failed on that, too. After the extract I've included, without any further editorial comment, we get many paragraphs of rambly recollections from Wes Craven, the director of Last House on the Left. We get to learn all kinds of things about him, from his Baptist upbringing to the time he encountered Quentin Tarantino. What we don't get, anywhere, is Mr Zinoman actually asking Craven why he allowed behaviour like Hess's on his film set, and whether he regretted failing to protect a young and vulnerable actress.

Craven too is dead now, so that question too can never be asked. He left a more worthwhile legacy than Hess, and in his later career he does seem to have shown proper concern for his actors. But he didn't here, and as far as I'm aware he never once apologised for that. He got as far as a "She wasn't always acting" or a "We put her through hell", usually accompanied by that rueful chuckle of his, but actually saying sorry to the woman his actor terrorised was apparently a step too far.

I have serious issues with the way parts of the horror fandom still seem to idolise David Hess as "the Mad Hessian". He threatened a young woman with rape on set in autumn 1971, then spoke with no remorse about it 37 years later, and if that doesn't disqualify him then your moral radar is broken. I also have issues, more widely, with the whitewashing of Wes Craven's career. He did a lot of good things in his time, but the way he ran the Last House set wasn't one of them, and that needs to be said much more.

Sandra deserved so much better than this.

Current Mood: sick

loganberrybunny

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270/365: Piccolos, Bewdley
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Another fairly unexciting day, which is naturally par for the course for me! The most interesting thing I can remember seeing is a hole in the road on Park Lane where National Grid were replacing something or other. Yes, this is the level of thrills we get in Bewdley life. Today's photo is even more amazing, as it's a coffee shop I almost never go into! Piccolos is fine as far as service goes, but it's really cramped inside and so it doesn't feel comfortable lingering. What's the point of a coffee shop where you can't linger, eh?

Current Mood: awake

loganberrybunny

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269/365: Bromsgrove Hospital
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And I do mean quick: I was in Bromsgrove Hospital for about 15-20 minutes! The annoying thing was that, even with a lift, it took forever to get to and from Bromsgrove thanks to two separate long traffic lights on the road from Kidderminster. Also, I was starving by the time we got back as I'd declined the offer of a bite, which I rather regretted! Small hospital that it is, its restaurant is only open at lunchtime, which is less than ideal if your appointment is at 16:15... anyway, I was there for routine eye screening, and I always like going to Bromsgrove for that as it has the most modern equipment and so the scans are very quick. No need for dilating eye drops these days! The photo above is exactly what you'd expect, but it does show you how small the place is. There's a small two-storey wing just to the right, but that's about all.

Current Mood: tired

loganberrybunny

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And for anyone who's seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as I now have, I want to be clear: my subject line is accurate. I don't mean her character, Sally Hardesty, though she was indeed a proto-Final Girl. I mean the actress herself, Marilyn Burns.

In my recent post, I detailed three particularly nasty examples of her mistreatment while making the film, but these were far from the only ones. Among other things she was semi-accidentally hit on the head with a sledgehammer whose steel shaft hadn't been made safe, was hurt doing a six/seven-foot jump involving sugar glass that had hardened in the humid conditions (her limp near the end is genuine), smashed up both knees to be bleeding pretty badly after 17 takes of the gas station sequence (Tobe Hooper: "It was terrible, but it played very well"), was chased through dark woods with a live chainsaw (chain off, but rubber belt on), and – for just a second – was in a room with a Gunnar Hansen who literally wanted to kill her because the set conditions had driven him deluded and for that moment he thought he was Leatherface.

So, Final Girl? Let's have a look at the scorecard:

1) Moral superiority. Her safety was treated as rather a low priority by Tobe Hooper and his obsession with bloody "raw authenticity", leading to injury after injury. She was upset by neither him nor anyone else on set praising her performances. Yet in later years, while she was honest about what she'd faced, she never sounded vindictive or twisted, and she was willing to remain on good terms with Hooper, Hansen (except for a while after his knife deception was revealed) and the others. She didn't treat anyone else the way Hooper treated her. Box ticked.

2) Resourcefulness. Despite not being an experienced actress, she was able to produce a performance that is still talked about while frequently acting under extreme duress – exhaustion and overheating at best, active abuse and assault at worst. She did most of her own stunts, some of which were significantly more dangerous than those of many other actresses of the era and genre – sometimes even more reminiscent of the silent era. Box ticked.

3) Resilience. Are you kidding me? Let me remind you that she somehow made it through a shoot where, in the space of five weeks, she had been beaten to the point of unconsciousness, dripped with her own blood, assaulted with a knife, run from working chainsaws and done about 900 takes of every angle regardless of fatigue because of Tobe sodding Hooper's cavalier attitude to her safety and obsessive artistic perfectionism. Box ticked.

4) Survival. On this set, that didn't just mean getting through a tedious, tiring shoot. It literally meant what it says: survival. She could have died in several ways out there: if Hansen's delusion had lasted a little longer, if the steel-cored "broom" had caught her an unlucky blow on the temple, if the sledgehammer had been wielded a bit too hard, if she'd succumbed to the extreme heat of the dinner scene, if a chainsaw accident in the dark had severed an artery... Box ticked.

5) Overcoming her monster. The "monster" here is probably a combination of things. Tobe Hooper (yes, again), the generally appallingly unsafe set, and the brutal Texas heat. In post-production, Hooper deliberately drove her to emotional collapse for the eye close-up scene, despite being under nothing like the pressure he had been on set. The set involved genius stunts like one actor putting gunpowder on his hand and lighting a match. All this should have broken her. It didn't. Box ticked.

6) Bearing witness. Burns didn't retreat into a quiet life once TCM had finished filming. She chose to lean into her experience and engage with fans and journalists, guest at conventions, do Q&A sessions and interviews, and more besides. She was straightforward about how hard her experience had been, but she almost never crossed into bitterness or anger. Once she knew the truth about Hansen's lie, she was able to talk about it fully. Box ticked.

So there we are. A perfect full house. The whole point of the Final Girl is that she's supposed to be fictional, something impossible to recreate in real life. Yet Burns did it – and she did it without the predestined protection of the script that her fictional counterparts have. She faced moments when it was genuinely uncertain whether she would leave that movie set alive. Her treatment was unconscionable, and she should never have had to earn this title. But since she did:

Marilyn Burns. The real Final Girl.

Current Mood: impressed but sad

loganberrybunny

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268/365: A gate and a field
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The clocks have gone back, which means sunset is suddenly well before five and it's dark the whole way through after teatime. It is (briefly) a little bit lighter in the mornings, but I'm not really an early morning person when I can help it. The weather was mostly grey again, albeit with one or two breaks. Today's photo is me really scraping the barrel. Well, no, it's not that. I'm not sure I have a barrel. It's just a gate leading to a field by the interestingly named Snuff Mill Walk. I have absolutely no idea whether said road ever boasted an actual snuff mill; these days it's simply a mildly posh residential cul-de-sac.

Current Mood: relaxed

loganberrybunny

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267/365: Bug Hotel, Worcester
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Another trip to Worcester today to have a nice afternoon with My Little Pony fandom friends, including one who hadn't managed to make it for several months and persevered despite being inconvenienced pretty badly by CrossCountry Trains. (This is not exactly rare.) We had a nice few hours, as we nearly always do, in spite of the lighting in the basement we use gradually failing through the weeks to the point where our side of the big table we sit at now has one working bulb! Today's photo is of the Bug Hotel near Worcester Library – appropriately known as the Hive – which is there to attract insects. Not much going on today that I could see, but then it is almost the end of October. Clocks going back tonight, which definitely heralds the end of the outdoor season for me if the rain hadn't already done it.

Current Mood: pleased

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

loganberrybunny

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266/365: High Street, Bewdley
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Thank Frith it's stopped raining for a bit. It was actually not too bad at all today, albeit rather on the chilly side again. I didn't do anything even remotely interesting, so all you're getting is yet another photo from Bewdley. This is High Street from the eastern end, which is where the town centre is. Those fifteenth-century houses I showed you yesterday are out of shot, around the bend in the distance. The Talbot pub keeps trying to reinvent itself, but it never really works out. I've never so much as been inside myself!

Current Mood: busy

loganberrybunny

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It turns out it was worse than I thought. Worse than I could ever have imagined. Regardless of the grace and humour Marilyn Burns herself showed in engaging with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, its personnel and its fans in later years, and regardless of the fact that she worked with director Tobe Hooper again on Eaten Alive, looked at objectively this particular movie's creation was an ethical catastrophe. Marilyn Burns suffered gross negligence, physical assault and psychological cruelty on that movie. And when you watch the film, the results of all three are right there on the screen. You are literally watching a young actress being abused on a film set. Let me give you the details – and these are nowhere near all the ethical failures that five-week shoot had, just three of the most severe. I'll first give a brief summary of each incident, following up with a longer paragraph including links and citations.

1. Gross negligence – Because a broomstick prop hadn't been checked for safety, Marilyn Burns was beaten so badly with it that she received multiple bruises and a black eye, and briefly fainted after cut was called.
2. Physical assault – When a tube containing prop blood failed, co-star Gunnar Hansen deliberately cut Burns' fingertip for real with a knife, then allowed another actor to suck the blooded finger without knowing the blood was real.
3. Psychological cruelty – In post-production, director Tobe Hooper called Burns to the editing suite under false pretences, then subjected her to hours of distress and discomfort to make her eyes look bad for a shot.

Now for the promised details of each incident:

1. Gross negligence
This one directly contributed to the worst injuries Burns received during production. As director Tobe Hooper notes in this 2015 interview with Flashback Files, for the scene where the Cook (Jim Siedow) attacks Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) with a broomstick, he'd asked for a safer prop "so as not to hurt Marilyn". So far, so good. But what he was given was a rubber stick with a steel rod inside – more dangerous than a real broom. As Siedow himself noted in 2000, the crew and even Burns herself, assuming the stick was a safe prop, encouraged him to hit her harder for realism, something he'd been reluctant to do. He "started having fun doing it and started really slugging her", they got through the takes... and then she "fainted dead away ... beaten up pretty badly". (She has a black eye at times in some of the following scenes. That black eye is not make-up.) So, an actress was beaten into – fortunately brief – unconsciousness because her director failed in his basic duties to a) know exactly what was going onto his set and b) keep his actors safe, and because a brave and committed actress was willing to endure pain beyond what she should ever have needed to.

2. Physical assault
When the kidnapped Sally is brought into the Sawyers' farmhouse, she's bound hand and foot on a chair and gagged with a rag secured by a rope. This being low-budget 1970s film-making, those restraints are real, not quick-release props: Burns noted in this Terror Trap interview that at one point she fell over and "I'm sitting there with my hands tied, my feet tied, the filthy gag in my mouth they just picked off the set (who knows where it had been)". Anyway, in this scene Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) cuts her finger with a knife so that Grandpa (John Dugan) can suck her blood. In his memoir Chain Saw Confidential, Hansen writes (pp122–23) that after the blood tube failed multiple times, he "decided to make sure it worked. I turned away from the others and quickly stripped the protective tape off the blade. [...] I would cut her for real. I wanted to be done with this shot, whatever the damage." He cut her fingertip, squeezed to get the blood to ooze, then pushed her finger into Dugan's mouth for him to suck. Dugan assumed it was stage blood, as did everyone but Hansen and Burns herself. Sally (and therefore Marilyn) was gagged and bound, so Burns could not effectively withdraw consent, and her screams – we all know that fingertip cuts hurt – were expected for the scene so were interpreted as acting. Hansen did not admit what he'd done to anyone for decades, so Burns repeatedly defended it as an accident – even some online sources continue to state this. So yes: if you watch that film and are impressed by how real the blood and screaming feel at that point... it's because they are real. You are, quite literally, watching a bound woman being injured with a knife, and having her blood drunk, without her consent or even prior knowledge.

3. Psychological cruelty
Again, the details of this incident come from Chain Saw Confidential (p128 this time), including contributions from Burns herself and from editor Larry Carroll. After principal photography had ended, Hooper asked Burns if she wanted to come to the editing office to "see what's going on", adding "I just want a few shots of your eyes". What actually happened was that she was kept there far longer – in her recollection, "it seemed like four or five hours", with the camera on them the whole time and her having to scream and cry repeatedly. She wasn't able to check her eyes as they got redder and debris built up, and nobody asked her if she was uncomfortable or suggested she "take a moment". Instead, she says, "They thought, 'This is getting better. Give her another couple hours and her eyes will really look crappy.'" When it was finally over, says Carroll, everybody left. Burns was left "devastated [...] there was nothing left." Carroll alone did stay with her, wanting to drive her home because of her condition. He ends by saying, "I think for Tobe, the performance that he wanted, about the only way that he knew how to get it out of her was basically torturing her, and he did. It was horrific." What came of all this were the extreme eye close-ups (not those of Burns' wider face) shown in the dinner party scene. Again, the result of what Hooper did is in the film you can watch today.

Current Mood: horrified

loganberrybunny

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265/365: Fifteenth century houses, Bewdley
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Not a lot for me to say tonight; I think the most interesting thing I did was to buy a small box of Ritz crackers... and then to eat the lot. Ahem. The weather wasn't exactly brilliant, but it's late October and the clocks go back this weekend, so I can't really be surprised that it's getting to be damp and chilly more now. Here's a not very interesting photo of some houses in High Street, Bewdley. These houses look like they're Georgian creations, but in fact only the frontages are. The one with the blue plaque in the centre of the picture has actually been there for about 600 years. The date on the plaque is 1419, but I don't think the exact year is known for sure, so "early fifteenth century" will do!

Current Mood: sleepy

loganberrybunny

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264/365: Civil War mural, Worcester
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I had to be in Worcester today for boring reasons, but I did at least have a little time to myself to go for a walk, so I wandered up past Fort Royal Park (site of part of the Battle of Worcester in 1651) and went as far as the Mount Pleasant pub, since it has this rather nice mural on the back that I don't think has been there all that long. My photo isn't that great, but getting an angle without parked cars in the way was tricky! The text "It is for aught I know a crowning mercy" was written by Oliver Cromwell to William Lenthall (Speaker of the Commons) after his victory in the battle. Worcester was a Royalist city, so it's not often you see Cromwellian wording around here! Still, I seriously doubt the landlord sees this as anything other than a nice bit of historical artwork. :)

Current Mood: busy

loganberrybunny

Publie

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

That was it? The apparently greatest horror film of the 1970s? I can't say I'm too impressed. I don't mean it was bad, because it wasn't. I'd rather say it was... a good film of its type. Maybe it was terribly influential, but so was A Trip to the Moon (1902) and I wouldn't rush out and watch that again, either. Good sense of Texas heat, which was really the case while filming. Sound design is interesting and disconcerting, but it feels less unique than a refinement of things the BBC Radiophonic Workshop had been doing for Doctor Who for a decade by then. Some clever visual touches and the hand-held camera actually works, though regrettably being 70s exploitation they just had to turn that apparently technically brilliant dolly shot into a cringeworthy "let's focus on Pam's butt in shorts all the way to the door" sequence. Was this film actually horrifying? In parts; the meat hook sequence (suggestive more than gory – there's far less explicit gore than you'd think) and of course the climactic, claustrophobic dinner party. But as a Brit, without the "cultural touchstone" angle many American horror fans apparently have? This is good, with some uninteresting stretches early on balanced by some clever and still effective shocks. It's really not incredible. High three, I think. Oh and yeah, it has a chainsaw. ★★★

This review is for the film as a film. This point is really important to emphasise, because its production was an ethical catastrophe far beyond anything I'd imagined going in. From my admittedly incomplete research, it seems even beyond what a lot of horror fans realise. Suffice to say for now that the Wikipedia article on the film reads as heavily sanitised and, in at least one crucial respect, outright wrong. Marilyn Burns in particular was staggeringly endangered and mistreated on that movie, even by low-budget 1970s standards and including directly by director Tobe Hooper. For reasons I'll expand on in my "Thoughts after watching" post(s), which will be in addition to this one, I think there's a case for saying Burns was as close to a real-life Final Girl as an actress realistically could have been.

Current Mood: uncomfortable

loganberrybunny

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263/365: Aldi, Kidderminster town centre
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...we have picture of Aldi. Yes, as in the supermarket. This is one of two branches of the store in Kidderminster, and I was in there briefly just today, though I didn't end up buying anything. As you can see from the damp road, it had been raining, although fortunately I avoided nearly all of that. This particular Aldi is unusual in that it doesn't have its own free car park – you have to use the pay and display council car park instead, but that doesn't seem to put people off. In any case, Morrisons is about three minutes' walk away (behind and to the left) and so plenty will park there and walk over to Aldi in the same visit.

Current Mood: okay

loganberrybunny

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262/365: Fallen autumn leaves
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Another wet day, as you can see in today's photo, which is simply of fallen autumn leaves that are a nice colour, not that that quite comes out in the picture. Some kind of maple, but I couldn't tell you the exact species. I did go into the George for coffee this morning. There's a notice up on the bar now telling folks that the free refills have been restricted to just tea, coffee and milk, with hot chocolate and mocha excluded due to new government regulations on sweet drinks. As I almost never drink either, it didn't bother me. It did however amuse me that the shaker containing chocolate sprinkles (for cappuccino, though I didn't use it) was still freely available on the shelf by the coffee machines!

Current Mood: restless

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

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Песец

Pyesetz: The Life of a Geek

Reading

Not a very interesting 365 photo, but what's new? :P

Film post: Halloween

West Bromwich

Two friends, two photos!

Trick and/or Treat?

The smoking gun in Vanity Fair

Piccolos

Quick hospital visit

Marilyn Burns: Final Girl

And now it's basically winter

Bug hotel

Database maintenance

A much better day's weather

The Texas Chain Saw Masssacre: Thoughts after watching

Ye olde houses...e

Civil War mural on Worcester pub

Film post: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Today, in "Fascinating Photographs of Worcestershire"...

Damp leaves

AWS outage

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August 2025

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