Movie #895: Blood Simple

Blood Simple is a neo-noir drama starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh, and Samm-Art Williams. It's the film debut of McDormand, but also the directorial debut of the Coen brothers. 

Abby (McDormand) is leaving her husband Marty (Hedaya) with the help of Ray (Getz), a bartender working at Marty's bar. Initially the arrangement just seems to be that he's helping her get out of town, but then they stop at a hotel and become lovers. Marty is, shall we say, not the sort of guy to take this well, and hires a sleazy private eye (Walsh) to follow them, and he delivers evidence that they're involved.

Marty then offers said private eye ten grand to kill them. The private eye fakes a photo of the lovers dead, and shoots Marty. Ray finds Marty apparently dead and, figuring that Abby did it (the private eye stole and used her gun), tries to hide his body, but winds up burying him alive in a shallow grave. 

What follows is the clearest inspiration for Fiasco I've ever seen on film. Ray knows Marty is dead, but assumes Abby did it (and Abby says something to Ray that Marty told Ray she'd say, which makes him think she's lying to him about it). Abby doesn't know what the hell Ray is on about, and is afraid Marty (whom she doesn't know is dead) is going to kill him. The private eye has a bit more information than anyone else, but realizes that Marty had retained evidence that points to him so tries to get it back. 

At the end of all this, the private eye kills Ray and attempts to kill Abby, but she manages to shoot him without ever seeing him, assuming that he's Marty. 

The movie is tightly focused on four characters (we also get Williams as Meurice, the other bartender, but he's not directly tied up in the chaos), but the story is messy in the best way. Everyone makes terrible mistakes that are, from their perspective, completely understandable, and the result is that Marty's buried alive, Ray's shot in the chest, the private eye gets his hand stabbed and a bullet in his chest, and Abby is almost certainly going to get arrested for shooting someone. It's a tragic comedy of errors, if that makes sense, and it's definitely an amazing debut for the Coens and McDormand.

My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Bride & Prejudice  

Chill: Mouthful o' Bugs

With that cheery image in mind, here's the conclusion of our current case.

Last time, Mercy Williams had just been rushed to the hospital following a strange, painful attack of some kind as she'd been tending to Jean Cameron's (self-inflicted) wounds. Jumping ahead to that evening, Jean has been stabilized and put up in psych ward. Mercy has likewise been treated, and they've run tests, and found exactly nothing out of the ordinary in her EEG. She's in a room for the night for observation, and the other three envoys join her to talk this through a bit (they're still waiting on a callback from Alison Ware, their new contact in SAVE).

Amelia Rostov goes upstairs to the psych ward and visits with Jean. They don't remember much - they were just cutting up a tray of fudge and then looking at the knife and suddenly cutting their wrists just made sense. Jean agonizes over explaining this to their wife; Amelia says of course she'll try and help if she can. She also listens for the Unknown (she experiences it as a ringing in her ears) and hears the faint ringing she's had before. This Unknown presence, whatever it is, has its hooks in both her and Jean, but it's not doing anything at present.

Amelia goes back to the room and reports to them on Jean's status (both mundane and supernatural). Amelia tries to text the group chat to check in with the others, but suddenly she doesn't have signal...no one does. Mercy watches the door to try and flag someone down, but no one walks past. Amelia tries to leave the room, but can't. When she steps close to the open door, she feels far away again. "Damn." 

Fortunately, they know how to get around this, at least momentarily. Amelia has Nicholas Failor stand near the doorway and uses Disrupt on him, allowing him to get through the door before the effect reasserts itself. The envoys in the room see Nicholas vanish (likewise, to Nicholas the room looks empty). He grabs a pad of paper from the nurse's station and write "I'm fine, what do you want me to do?" and slides it into the room.

Britt Lepus goes to pick it up, but the pad flies into the air and papers scatter everywhere. The envoys talk this through a little and figure that if Amelia wards the room, it might cancel the effect - she does, and it does. Nicholas comes back in, Amelia's text goes through, Dustin, Danika, and Rochelle all send variations on "wtf is going on with Jean".

The envoys put their heads together. They know that each of them seems to have a specific effect that follows them. For Amelia it's the barrier, for Britt it's objects flying around, Mercy gets physically attacked, and Nicholas seems to call extreme weather. Over in the other friend group, Dustin cause a woman to vomit bugs (rather, he didn't cause it, but it happened around him), Jean gets these self-destructive impulses, Rochelle sleepwalks, and Danika...we're not sure, maybe the dog attacking her? Whatever happened to her, it doesn't seem to be as dramatic. 

They chart out all the manifestations they've seen and try to find a pattern. It's not cyclical, the timing seems random. It's not when groups of them are together because it's happened when they're alone just as much as not. It's not just when they just the Art or sense the Unknown, though they do notice that with the meditation group, it seems to happen when they zone out or let their minds wander, which considering this started happening because of meditation and lucid dreaming makes sense. Maybe Danika is just more present in the moment, and that's why it hasn't hit her? But that still doesn't get them any closer to beating it.

They decide to get back to the community center and gather the others, and have every stay there tonight in a warded room (except Jean and Mercy, obviously). Mercy gets her hospital food ("yay"), Amelia buys burgers on the way, and when they get there, Dustin and Danika are waiting. Dustin says Rochelle is on the way.

Meanwhile, Mercy, with not much else to do, tries to do a little research into Stan Walton, the SAVE envoy who murdered Desiree Cummings while possessed and then turned up dead a few months later. Mercy discovers that his ex-wife, son, and brother all died between May and December of 2000, all in "accidents." 

At the community center, the others are about to go in, and then Britt feels something in her teeth...and then feels it move. She coughs up a mouthful of flies, but manages to keep herself from freaking out too badly. The envoys push everyone inside and Amelia wards the room. Dustin looks out the door and sees Rochelle pull up. "Yo, Rochelle! Come in! Wait, where you going?"

Dustin runs out after her, but slips on the gravel. Amelia tries to get to her, but she's not fast. Nicholas, however, is, and sprints across the parking lot, grabbing Rochelle just as she is about to step into the road. "Huh? What's happening?" 

"We need to get inside," says Nicholas. They start moving, and the wind starts to kick up. Debris flies around and smacks both him and Amelia, but doesn't do more than give them cuts or bruises. They all manage to get inside, into the ward, and calm down a bit.

They set the non-envoys up with a DVD and get on a video call with Mercy. She tells them what she's found, and they figure that if the entity possessing Stan is that aggressive, it should be possible to track it. Amelia points out that, according to Alison, SAVE was under attack in 2000, but that doesn't explain Stan's family. Mercy tries to track down similar patterns of death (clusters of accidents within a family or a group), but it's too broad to get very far tonight. She decides to get some sleep.

Britt's phone rings - Alison. She puts her on speaker, and Alison explains that she hasn't been able to find anything that specifically fits this creature's MO. It's not as simple as "oh it's a dream demon, you need to put robin feathers on it" (Britt: "Is...that a thing? Should we get some robin feathers?" Alison: "Never seen anything that reacts to those, but a lot of creatures of the Unknown do respond to shit that weirdly specific"). The thing she finds interesting, though, is the creature's apparent ability to use disciplines of the Evil Way through others. She likens it to having tied elastic around people and being able to twang the strands when it wants. 

Amelia asks if having everything sleep in a warded room would break that, and Alison says it might - if the creature can't find the people it's connected to, it might get lost. That's going to be difficult, though, because Mercy and Jean are in hospital. The envoys had been thinking that they were as safe as they could be, but if they could get in and ward their rooms...

At this point Mercy calls them and tells them that she had a dream. In the dream, she was in the community center, alone, when someone knocks on the door. She answers it, and there's a man standing there that she doesn't recognize, but who is smiling far too broadly. He says he's been looking forward to meeting her, and steps forward, at which point she wakes up, heart pounding. 

Alison hears this, and gets quiet. "I'll look into it," she says. "Let me get back to you. If you do see that kind of person, don't let them in."

Alison hangs up, and the envoys talk about the possibility of getting everyone under a ward. Getting Jean and Mercy out of the hospital at this time of night is unlikely, but getting a ward to them seems doable. 

They decide to try it. Amelia and Britt leave to head to the hospital; Nicholas stays behind with the other folks, both because they figure someone should and because they don't want a hurricane happening. They drive to the hospital and visit Mercy's room. Amelia wards the room, and then she and Britt head upstairs to psych ward. The find a machine that dispenses clean scrubs and Britt uses her Skeleton Key discipline to activate it. They walk up to the woman in the office and Britt uses the discipline again, and explains to her, using perfectly accurate medical technology, why she needs to get in. The woman lets them in, and Britt kind of blinks and asks Amelia what happened. "You were just a Viking," she says. "Yeah, weird," says Britt. "Kind of like being possessed, but in a good way!"

They find Jean's room and, through the window, see Jean start to thrash in his sleep. Britt quickly uses the discipline one more time, and Amelia goes in and wards the room. The thrashing stops, Jean flips their pillow to the cool side and goes back to sleep. 

Amelia and Britt head downstairs to Mercy's room and just crash out there. Everyone sleeps well (Amelia and Britt wake up a little stiff from sleeping in hospital chairs, but otherwise they're fine). Everyone (except Jean) gets together for brunch, and a few attempts to sense the Unknown confirm that, whatever it was, it's not in them anymore. 

Dustin leans over and asks Britt if there's an application or something for SAVE. Britt just says "you're hired!" Rochelle, however, basically tells them she's done with this nonsense; she is going to have to have a long, boring conversation with her mother as it is. Danika is unsure, but leans toward helping out. The weirdness isn't going to go away if she doesn't, after all, and now she knows about it.

The Seward HQ seems to be growing!  

Character Creation: Era: Kaiju

I thought, I'll just do a quick character this morning so I have something between movie posts. Oh, hey, I've still got a few of those Era games, those are quick? No, they're short. 

I initially was going to do a character for something called Era: Bloodlines, but after poking at the PDF for a while, realized that it's a "prototype" and doesn't actually include full chargen rules, making it ineligible for this project. Good, I thought, I don't actually love these games much, that means I just have two (Kaiju and Friction) left. In looking around about the game and trying to figure out what "prototype" meant (it was included from a Kickstarter, but it's been a while and I back a lot of Kickstarters), though, I saw on the company's page that there are a whoooole bunch of these games. Oy, I thought, glad I didn't back all these, I'd be doing these games forever.

And then I opened my "Era: Kaiju" folder in ye olde documents folder and discovered that, no, I actually have like four more of these games than I thought, so while I'm going to take two games off the list today (Kaiju because I'm doing this character and Bloodlines because I don't actually have the rules for it), I'm adding four more. At least one of them has a fillable character sheet. 

The Game: Era: Kaiju
The Publisher: Shades of Vengeance
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one 

As I've mentioned before, there are a bunch of these Era games, they all seem to work on a system very similar to early Storyteller. Some of them kinda leave me cold, but I have to admit, this one looks kinda cool.

The idea is that there are Alpha Kaiju (the big boys) and Beta Kaiju (only about half the size of an Alpha, but like, half a Godzilla is still pretty big). Betas will band together into groups and will repel an Alpha if it encroaches on their territory, so humans have figured out that if they leave Betas alone, they can get rid of Alpha for them, which is good because humans don't otherwise have a way to do that.

Right, nifty. Let's make a monster!

Step 1: Background. This isn't elaborate, just basically how I came to the notice of the world. Hmm. You know, there don't seem to be too many mammalian Kaiju, so I'm gonna make one that's kind of bear-like. Let's say he was hibernating in the Sleeping Bear Sands Dunes (going back to that well, Matt? YES) until some other Beta came up out of Lake Michigan and woke him ("Dammit, Frank, I was having such a good dream"). Anyway, the press named his Ursus because they have no fucking imagination, but the people on the Internet have nicknamed him "Snuffles" because he has a habit of sniffing at everything before he eats it. 

And, um, he will eat it. That's what you do when you wake up from hibernation, you replace the fat you've lost. 

Step 2: Quirk. Well, I think we've established Snuffles' Quirk; he's hungry. All the time. He's learned that if he eats people, he gets weapons aimed at him, so he's limiting himself to not-humans. Most of the time. Basically if it's organic, he can eat it.

Step 3: Form & Environment. My form is obviously Mammalian, but the listed bonus is to Speed, and I don't see Snuffles as especially quick. The Mollusc form raises your Kill Threshold because of its armor, so I think I'll just yoink that bonus because Snuffles is lorge and has thick hide. His Environment is Forest, obviously (sure, he was sleeping in sand dunes, but there's lots of forest around). 

Step 4: Attributes. There's six of these (Might, Reaction, Willpower, Luck, Health, Power). I get one at 5, one at 4, one at 3, and the others at 2.

Well, Reaction can be 2, and I guess I'll put Luck at the other one. Power can get the 3, Willpower gets the 4, and Might obviously gets the 5. Oh, wait, forgot Health. I'll give Power 2 so Health can have 3, I guess.

Step 5: Derived Traits: Are you sure? It's not the last step...OK, I'll trust you. Size is 5, Speed is Size + Might + Reaction (11 for me), Initiative is Reaction + Willpower (6), Defense is half Reaction (3), Health is...hang on. Oh, I see. We have an Attribute called "Health" and then our hit points are also called "Health." That's not confusing or anything. 

Anyway, Health is Health + Size (8), Pain is figured the same way. Hang about, "Kill Threshold" isn't anywhere on this sheet! Dammit! NB: That's because it's dependent on what's attacking you, my bad.

That actually is the last step in chargen, but I'm supposed to pick a power so let's go to the next chapter. Obviously an example of chargen is too much to hope for.

Well, one of the powers is Enormous, which makes me bigger, which if I'd known was a thing before I did Derived Traits I might have taken which is WHY DERIVED TRAITS SHOULD BE THE LAST THING YOU DO but whatever I'm not bothered moving on. I think I'll take Burrowing, that seems pretty appropriate for ol' Snuffles. I can hide underground and then burst out and attack! Rar!

Snuffles looks a lot like a brown bear - quadruped, snout, small tail, big gnarly claws and fangs, but also the long tongue and lips for sucking up small prey like moose. He's got brown fur, but it's starting to get light as he's awake longer, who knows what that's about. SNORT SNUFFLE.

Movie #894: The Slumber Party Massacre

The Slumber Party Massacre is - hey! Another schlocky early-80s slasher movie! (Pure coincidence, I just bought a bunch of Shout Factory DVDs at the beginning of October because they had a sale.) It stars Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella, Jennifer Meyers, Debra Deliso, Pamela Roylance, Rigg Kennedy, Gina Mari, Joseph Alan Johnson, and David Milbern. 

Very, very simple premise: A bunch of girls have a slumber party. There's an escaped serial killer named Russ Thorn (Villella) on the loose, who evidently has no better motive that "kill as many people as possible." He starts off with a phone repairwoman (Jean Vargas) and steals the frankly impractically long power drill from her van, and uses that as his primary weapon. He focuses on the girls having a slumber party. Trish (Michaels), the girl hosting the party whilst her folks are away means it to be all girls (like the good old days), but her horny friend Diane (Mari) invites her boyfriend (Jim Reid Boyce) along, and a couple of the girls' classmates, Neil (Johnson) and Jeff (Milbern) show up to tease them.

Meanwhile, Trish had invite the athletic new girl Valerie (Stille), but she didn't really feel welcome so stays home with her little sister Courtney (Meyers). As such, the action in the movie cuts between the two sisters hanging out, talking about going to the party (Courtney is, shall we say, starved for social interaction), and the girls at the party getting nekkid in full view of an open window (you know, as one does) while Neil and Jeff watch and giggle and Russ hides in the bushes waiting to drill someone to death. 

And drill he does! It really is a massacre; Russ racks up a pretty impressive body count, considering the lack of isolation like we have in camp-based slashers. Trish, Val, and Courtney manage to kill Russ and survive, but basically every other character we meet gets drilled.

I knew this movie existed for a long time, but what I knew about it was the cover: The killer standing over three scantily dressed girls with a big ol' power drill hanging pensily down in front of him. And when I finally did see it some years back, yeah, that metaphor is really as overt as you'd think. But then I learned that the movie was written by Rita Mae Brown (the author of Rubyfruit Jungle) and directed by Amy Jones (who was just starting her film career at the time, but would go on to write and direct other films of varying quality - as a side note, she wrote The Relic, which has since become a favorite of mine). The history of the movie is interesting, because she was working with Roger Corman at the time, and so the early scene with the girls showering was basically her getting the nudity out of the way (there's more later, but it's not quite as gratuitous? No, I guess it is). My point is just that if Amy Jones had directed this script without any constraints from Corman, it might have been interesting, but would it be the gloriously schlocky slasher it became? Who can say.

The movie suffers from some of the same issues a lot of slashers do; to wit, the girls are clearly older than their characters are meant to be (with the possible exception of Courtney, who looks about right; I have no idea how old the actress is and this was apparently her only credit, so it's not like she has a wiki page). I actually had trouble telling the girls' basketball coach (Roylance) apart from the girls themselves in the early scenes. In that vein, a little diversity would have gone a long way. The characters are pretty interchangeable and they don't get a lot of detail to differentiate themselves, and they're almost all white and brunette. 

But there are some interesting choices, too. The killer doesn't have much motivation, but he's never hidden or masked. He's just...this guy. He's a short, skinny, bug-eyed fucker who likes killing people (and while he mostly kills women, that really just seems to be what's on the menu because he kills any guys he comes across, too). The actor (the late Michael Villella) applied some Strasbergian method acting techniques to developing his motivation and performance, and while I personally never vibed with that method, damn if it doesn't work - Russ Thorn is probably the most distinct character in the movie. 

We're done with slashers for a little while now (just got a bunch of new DVDs from Half-Price Books last night), but I'm finding I'm really enjoying the early-80s stuff, so I might need to hunt down a few more.

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: High

Next up: Blood Simple 

Movie #893: Sleepaway Camp

Sleepaway Camp is an early 80s slasher movie starring Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten, Christopher Colet, Katherine Kamhi, Mike Kellin, Desiree Gould, Karen Fields, and Paul DeAngelo. It's infamous for the twist ending, but we'll get there. Spoilers for a 40-year-old movie, I guess.

We open with a horrific boating accident that kills John Baker (John Tursi) and one of his kids (Frank Sorrentino and Colette Lee Corcoran). Then we fast forward eight years, when the surviving kids, Angela (Rose) is about to go to Sleepaway Camp, accompanied by her cousin Ricky (Tiersten); she's been living with him and his crazy mom (Gould), her aunt. 

The cousins arrive at camp, meet Paul (Colet), Ricky's bud, who immediately develops a crush on Angela. Angela, for her part, doesn't talk for the first week or so, she just stares with these impossibly wide brown eyes and gets under the skin of the popular assholes, because while she's a good bullying target she kinda doesn't react the right way. Ricky does, however, so when popular asshole Judy (Fields) or popular asshole counselor Meg (Kamhi) get on Angela's case, Ricky has her back.

Which is great and all, but then people start dying, starting with the pedophile cook (Owen Huges) who tries to fuck Angela in the kitchen (OK, he doesn't die onscreen, but we're led to believe he's on his way out) and just escalating from there. A boy (John E. Dunn) who made fun of Angela drowns, it's an accident. But then a boy (Loris Sallahian) who threw a water balloon at her gets beehive'd to death, and that's enough deaths for one summer, at least for a lot of the kids. 

(Side note: I appreciate that once two campers have died, most of the parents retrieve their kids from the camp. I think it wouldn't be at all believable if none of them did, and it's more or less believable that not all of them did - you figure some parents are on vacation, some are willing to roll the dice because hey, my kid can swim and isn't allergic to bees, and some parents just suck. Not that "believability" is the greatest goal here anyway.)

Paul romances Angela, and is a little pushy about it, frankly, but he's a 13-year-old boy in 1983, so it's not unrealistic. But he gets his anyway - Angela has him meet her on the beach for a nekkid swim, but then decapitates him and when the others find her, turns out she's really Peter! And she's...got a peter! (The famous shot from this movie is the full-frontal shot of "Angela", and it was done by taking a cast of Felissa Rose's face and putting it on a college student who was approximate the right build. He has evidently never identified himself.)

So...wow. Sleepaway Camp was one of the slashers that came out in the wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th (A Nightmare on Elm Street happened the next year), and is pretty clear about its inspirations. It takes the camp setting and even elements of the plot (child "dies" in boating accident, actual killer is dead child's relative) from Friday. Like a lot of horror movies at the time, gore-wise it's not extreme by today's standards, though bits of it are pretty bloody. The director also made the decision to use actual teens to play teens, rather than the 20-somethings that usually do in horror...except he didn't do it across the board, with the result that the campers here are a mix of young children (the youngest seem to be around 8) and very obviously grown men and women. It's really hard to tell the counselors from the campers in some scenes.

But for all that, it's a good time. The plot and script are campy (no pun intended) as hell, the actors do their level best, the casting doesn't always make sense (why in the fuck is Meg macking on Mel, the camp own, who is quite obviously old enough to be her grandad and has a face like a fish?), but it's a fun, schlocky slasher flick with enough twists and turns to keep it interesting.

My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: High

Next up: The Slumber Party Massacre 

Character Creation: Wine Dark Nights

We never drinks...nights. Er, wine.

The Game: Wine Dark Nights
The Publisher: Gallant Knight Games
Degree of Familiarity: None with this game, and yet...
Books Required: Just the one 

So, in Wine Dark Nights, you play vampires, which was a revolutionary and novel concept for an RPG in 1991. I'm not being flippant (yet), it really was. Vampire: The Masquerade may not have been the first game that did it - Nightlife came out around the same time and I doubt those were the only two - but Vampire was absolutely the game that put "you play the monster" on the map. (It had a bunch of other effects, too, but that isn't a deep dive I want to do today. If I want to do any kind of deep dive, I'll keep playing Dredge. It's a really good game, by the way.)

SO ANYWAY. Wine Dark Nights is...a love letter? An homage? A ripoff? A stripped-down version? All of the above? of Vampire. The mechanics and game structure borrow heavily from Burning Wheel and Blades in the Dark, but the vampire powers, the focus on hunger vs. humanity, the notion that if your Rage stat builds too far you "frenzy" (yes, that expression of frenzy really came out of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but why split hairs), that's all Masquerade, baby.

I can't say how it would feel to read this game with no familiarity with the properties on which it's clearly based. I can say that I think it would feel thin but playable. It reminds me in some ways of Undying, and my thought when I read that game was that it felt very much like the presentation of vampires that we saw in the 90s, but with a PbtA system. But looking back over that game now and comparing it to Wine Dark Nights, I have an additional point of criticism: There's no setting. It's just "you're vampires, they're manipulative," there's a lot of mechanical attention to that aspect of unlife (the predatory vampire society, the drinking of the bloods, etc.) but there's no context for it all.

Actually, "setting" isn't the word I want. There's no lore. Vampire, in both its Masquerade and Requiem expressions, had lore aplenty, stories about where vampires came from and how their society evolved through the ages and what the current clans were doing and so forth. Wine Dark Nights has none of that. It's basically the Avongers of vampire RPGs, because we know what they're really going for, but they just can't say words like "Malkavian."

So would I play it? Probably not. I've run a lot of Vampire in almost all its incarnations, White Wolf games are triggering for me anyway, and frankly if I were to run a game where vampires are the PCs I think I'd almost rather do it in Cypher or something and try to think about the presentation of vampires in more modern media rather than how they were portrayed in the 90s (I hear good things about the Interview With The Vampire show, but I haven't watched it).

That's all entirely more setup than we needed, and I wanted to mention that the cover doesn't make any goddamn sense because it's a hawt modern grrl holding a severed head, but if you didn't know she was meant to be a vampire, how would you know that?

And the goddamn PDF isn't bookmarked.  

Well, anyway:

I do not have a concept in my brainmeat, so let's have Mr. Random iTunes pick me an inspiration song.

That's "Last Dance" by Sarah McLachlan, and normally I'd skip it because it doesn't have lyrics (which is where a lot of my inspiration comes from when I do this), but I think for a game about vampires, even one as thin as this, it's a good choice. I picture my character sitting at a piano in what's left of a building. Everything's burned, but the piano somehow still works. 

So, I think my character was a dangerous man in life (hell, let's take some John Wick inspiration, too). His name is Kyrylo Chumak, he's of Ukrainian extraction, and his family was involved in some very illegal shit. Kyrylo was a rising star of the family, and he had one quality a lot of other young men in his position didn't - he was patient. He didn't go out and joyride around and snort coke and bang hookers and so forth. He did his job, he invested his money, he played his piano (he actually considered doing it professionally, but y'know, family first). Folks in the family called him "the Monk" or "Father" because of how he lived, but he actually likes drugs and sex and so forth just as much as any of them. He just didn't want it to make him sloppy (or dead).

And then one night, someone came in, killed everyone in the club (all these families own clubs, watch some movies), burned it, and Kyrylo took a bullet in the belly. He crawled out into the alley and some vampire grabbed and bit him. 

OK, that's enough backstory (I actually really like this setup, may have to hold on to this guy for something). SO! I set one Predator and one Prey skill to 4. Well, for Predator, I think it's gotta be Hunt or Stalk, because those are the subtle ones. Let's go with Stalk. For Prey, obviously Temperance. 

Then one Predator and one Prey to 3. Let's do Hunt and Insight.

Two each get 2s. For Predator, let's say Harm and Deceive, and for Prey, Education and Heal. That leaves Threaten and Empathy at 1. I like the idea that Kyrylo might seem "nicer" than other guys in his line of work because he's patient and soft-spoken, but he's actually just as heartless as any of them. Maybe it's worse, because he's not going to get bothered if someone gets all weepy before he pulls the trigger.

Coil is 6, Humanity is 5, Rage and Hunger are 1, Rank and Age are both 1. Easy enough.

I get one Vampiric Discipline Gift. If I wish to take Weaknesses (up to two) I can take more (up to two). Let's see.

So this is weird. Talking to and controlling animals is a Gift, and to turn into an animal you need that one and Age 2 (which means it's out of reach at chargen), but turning into mist is just one Gift that I could take. Well, whatever. I'll take three Gifts, so I'll have to take two Weaknesses. I want Celerity Unholy Speed, Potence Unholy Strength, and Flight (no Masquerade equivalent). 

Let's take Deep Roots (when I go into torpor Retire for a Time, it takes longer to wake up), Fitful Slumber (I have bad daymares, probably of fire), and Disliked (other vampires know that I'm the scion of a crime family that was supposed to be killed with the rest of them; my unlife is probably a nose-thumb to someone, but I don't know who or why).

And that's actually it, because the other stuff - Allies, Enemies, etc - would come with city creation, which I'm not gonna do. I picture Kyrylo as early 20s, sad blue eyes, clear skin (even paler now), light brown hair, long fingers. 

Movie #892: Pumpkinhead

Pumpkinhead is a horror movie starring Lance Henriksen, Matthew Hurley, Cynthia Bain, John D'Aquino, Jeff East, Kerry Remsen, Kimberly Ross, Tom Woodruff Jr, Joel Hoffman, Florence Schauffler, and oh hey, a very young Mayim Bialik!

In the distant hoary past of 1957, young Eddie Harley (Chance Michael Corbitt) witnesses a man (Dick Warlock) getting killed by the demon called Pumpkinhead (Woodruff Jr). In the present (well, in the movie's present), Ed (Henriksen) has grown up in a hard-working guy running a store and raising his young son Billy (Hurley) on his own. They're poor and the surrounding area seems to be stuck in the Depression to the point that some of the neighbor's kids are literally wearing potato sacks, but they're happy together.

And then some fucking punks come to town to have a "cabin the woods" kind of weekend, and two of them, brothers Joel (D'Aquino) and Steve (Hoffman) go tear-assing around on their motorbikes, Joel accidentally runs Billy down. He dies from his injuries, and Lance goes to find the old witch of the Appalachian swamps (?), Haggis (Schauffler) to raise the demon Pumpkinhead from the grave to take revenge!

It's a weird little movie, but it's entertaining and it's well-written, in my humble opinion. The kids do something terrible and they respond in completely understandable ways. Joel flips out and tries to cover it up, even to the point of locking two of his friends (final girl Tracey (Bain) and her boyfriend Chris (East) in a closet. Not entirely clear what his plan is, but he eventually comes to the realization that this isn't going away and he has to man up. Steve, his brother, is horrified and stays with Billy until his father gets there (he was running an errand). His girlfriend Maggie (Remsen) goes into shock. And so on.

The theme here, I guess, is that "two or more wrongs don't make a right", or perhaps "if you're seeking revenge, be sure and dig two graves." Ed is perfectly justified in his anger, but he learns very quickly that when Pumpkinhead shows up and starts killing these kids, he gets to see it through his own eyes and is understandably horrified by what's happening. He tries to stop it, but Pumpkinhead isn't really a thing you can negotiate with. It's a demon of revenge, and that's all it does. 

Much like early slasher movies, this got made before the trend of making every victim character a completely unlikable douchebag came into vogue. As such, while we definitely know that Joel is a dick, the rest of the kids are trying to deal with this horrific situation as best they can. If they had all been assholes about it, or helped Joel in his attempted coverup, the movie would be very different and, I think, weaker for it. 

The design of Pumpkinhead is awesome, great practical effects - the movie was directed by Stan Winston, so you expect nothing less. While the production design is good, it's a little weird (like I said, there's a kind of random swamp with animal species that you don't find in Appalachia, so it's not entirely clear where this movie is set). The ending, where we see the witch burying Ed as he becomes the new Pumpkinhead, is pretty much perfect in-theme. To wit, there's no good ending, here. A little boy died in a horrible accident. No matter how many people die, that doesn't change, so it won't help.

It's a fun movie with a really bleak story, and I think it deserved more love than it got when it came out, but what are you gonna do.

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: High

Next up: Sleepaway Camp