Taking a break from stressing about the problems of the world to focus on a much cheerier topic: the problems at Marvel Comics thecommasplice.com/marvel-comic...
09.03.2026 17:59
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Taking a break from stressing about the problems of the world to focus on a much cheerier topic: the problems at Marvel Comics thecommasplice.com/marvel-comic...
It's a wonder either of them went over with the safety barrier there.
Yes, I’m religious. I believe in the Holy Trinity.
Elmer Fudd posting to Reddit after the Opera Incident
Listening to the latest @theiainmartin.bsky.social podcast when without warning or explanation I hear the phrase "Is that a penis?". Blink twice if you need me to call someone, Iain.
Stephen Thorne's reading of The Myth Makers really is a thing of beauty.
Richard Belzer: John Munch in Homicide: Life on the Street, and Tom Bombadil in scenes deleted from Fellowship of the Ring.
Post your favourite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.
Post your favourite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.
Time to polish your stories - or write one if you don't have something ready!
Most accurate portrait of modern culture currently available
It's a good collection of jump scares in a well-realised and genuinely new location for a collection of jump-scares to happen. But it won't crawl into the back of your mind like really good horror can. It won't live beyond the closing credits. It won't actually do anything.
I think ultimately it doesn't work because it's a film too impressed by its own premise. At some point, someone used the words "and the rest writes itself" about this, and they truly believed it would. That the premise was so good it didn't need to be supporting anything else.
Here there isn't really any of that, or any point to the story beyond letting Dracula out of his box. Having a Chinese christian on board is interesting, but you suspect only happened to allow a bit of diversity amongst those holding crosses to ward off vampires.
Alien worked because of the dynamic between the crew, which you had to sit with for a lot more of the film than people remember. There were social and para-social structures at work, personal and political conflicts. All to make a point about corporate manslaughter.
But setting it on a boat also means that the characters are all a little samey. You can have a captain, a stowaway, a boy one and then our mysterious hero with a backstory, but the rest are essentially cannon-fodder in a vaguely sailor shape.
It's a base under siege episode with no van Helsing to save anyone, and nowhere to go even if he could. It is - basically - just a vampire movie, a chunk of the original vampire movie, hoping that the same tweak they made for Speed 2 will be enough to make it different.
It's a bit of the book that exists purely to beef up the bad guy, make him seem like even more of a threat. Dracalien doesn't really have that, because to have him properly vampiring - the whole point of the film - is essentially shooting fish in a barrel.
It's tempting to say it doesn't work because it's a misreading of the book: Stoker's rules for vampires mean that Dracula could not leave his packing case while at sea, and that chapter is all about how he's so evil just being near his imprisoned body is enough to destroy men's minds.
Alien isn't that film, though: on a first watch with no foreknowledge (impossible now, I know) it's a film where the unexpected character turns out to have all the kills everyone needed to survive and nobody listened to her. Dracalien doesn't have that: we need the captain to get Dracula to the UK.
I don't think it's particularly because its an adaptation of a known story - a *chapter* of a known story no less - and so we already know how it ends. Dracula wins, only the captain survives, spoilers for the first horror story etc etc. Films where everyone is doomed can work.
Watched #TheLastVoyageOfTheDemeter, which is a film that really should work: it was pitched as Alien But Dracula and that's a mash-up that instantly fires the imagination. But it doesn't, almost in any way. So obviously I find *why* it doesn't work infinitely fascinating.
Which part was Miriam Margolyes offered in #DoctorWho - Season 21? Find out in this Thursday's episode of this podcast!
"Could I BE any more suicidal?"
Things look grim in the markets right now, but at least the U.S. economy wasn’t already being propped up by a massive speculative AI bubble that is highly sensitive to rising energy costs.
This is a depressing thought that just never occurred to me. Why do we assume that the people who don't vote would - if made to do so - do it in different proportions to those that do?
I have been released! My short story Baby Boom is on the latest episode of @thenosleeppodcast.bsky.social and available at www.thenosleeppodcast.com/episodes/s24... (Story starts around 01:24:00). Enjoy! #horror #podcasts
We’re currently seeing a major revision of history by right-wing politicians who are attempting to blame Labour and net zero for the results of policies they championed: privatisation, closing the Rough gas storage plant, remaining dependent on oil and gas imports.
This reminds me of the fact that Henrik Ibsen always used to say he wrote comedies.
