You Know What’s Coming Up....HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2021--including RATAPALOOZA!

Banner by Chris Honeywell

It’s almost September, which means it’s time for me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, gird my loins and settle my stomach for the fourth annual Halloween Horrorfest 2021!   

Once again, I will be watching 31 horror films and writing about them throughout the whole month of October, one film for each day!  And as with last year, we’ll have celebrity guests picking some of the films, and on those other days, you can choose what I watch!

And, as if that wasn't enough, the choices some of my celebrity guests made have been horror films with rats in them...which means I have declared a mini-festival within this festival, Ratapalooza!  Whenever I have to go to the Randomizer, I'll be choosing from a list of rat horror movies, and people who choose to program rat horror films will get a special treat.

The fun starts a little early this year, as I cover The Hand That Rocks The Cradle this September.  This was supposed to be the closing film of last year's festival, sponsored by Mike Blanchard of Geek Cast Radio.  I never got around to it, but I will now.

There are a couple of ways you can program a day in the Halloween Horrorfest this year:

1) You can become a Domicile of Dread Patreon at any level.  Patreons always get a free slot, as well as advance access to podcasts and other goodies!

2) You can buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi.  Suggested donation is $3

3) You can make a donation to Queens Community House Covid-19 Relief and Recovery Campaign.  Suggested donation is $10.  Please forward your receipt to me as proof.

4) You can choose to make a donation to the charity chosen by a sponsor on his/her/their day. Like with the third possibility, please forward me proof of donation.

There are 26 slots presently open at this point, although that number will be reduced as some of my lovely sponsors submit their choices.  And if, by some strange reason, I end up with more than 31 films for my Gauntlet of Ghoulishness, I will be going into overtime!  No film will be spared.

For your edification, the (lengthy ) list of movies already covered is below.

So join me in one month and see if I survive for a fourth year!  See you then!

Covered During Prior Horrorfests:

A Bay of Blood, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood, Await Further Instructions, Cat People (1942), The Mist, Zombie Hunter, Venom (2005), Mayhem, The Whip And The Body, Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II, Blue Sunshine, American Psycho, American Mary, Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf, The Mummy (2017), Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchboard, Tourist Trap, Johnny Gruesome, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, See No Evil 2, Sleepy Hollow, It Follows, Rabid, Q The Winged Serpent, Frightmare (1983), The Car, The Lords of Salem, Marebito, Rockula, The Haunting (1963), Dark Age, The Blood Drinkers, At Midnight, I’ll Take Your Soul, Onibaba, Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, Misery, Horror Express, The Night Stalker, The Exorcist, Bliss, Voodoo Man, The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations, 28 Days Later, The Intruder Within, Creepshow, Tragedy Girls, Theater of Blood, All About Evil, Pontypool, Ticks, The Beast With Five Fingers, The Prowler, In The Mouth of Madness, The Exorcist III: Legion, Cat People (1982), City of the Dead, The Devil’s Rock, Freddy’s Dead: The Last Nightmare, Mystics In Bali, The Old Dark House (James Whale Version), Black Sunday, Gargoyles, Host (2020), Mansquito, Bad Biology, I Saw The Devil, Hell House LLC, Martin, The Devil's Rain, The Thirsty Dead, Below, Friday The 13th, Supernatural (1931), House of Mystery, Pumpkinhead, The Unborn (1991), The Seduction (1982), Cure (1997), Food of The Gods, The Thing (1982), The Man Who Laughs, The Babysitter, The Creeping Flesh, Vampyr (1932), The Raven (2012), Another Kind, Random Acts of Violence

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 57.5 1963 (Doctor Who Short Trips Volume 2, Big Finish, 2011)

Shortly after picking Vickie up, the Doctor seems to have finally gotten Barbara and Ian back to London on November 23rd, 1963--the day they left.  Unfortunately, time seems to have frozen around them.

As I mentioned earlier, at this time the Short Trips range were meant to be short audiobooks that someone could listen to in the span of a train trip.  But even with those restrictions, this tale comes off as very odd.  I'm very puzzled by how the story utilizes Barbara as its POV character, yet has William Russell narrating--I would think Maureen O'Brien would have been the natural choice, even thought Vicki is barely in the story proper.  But that just might be my old man personal preference....

But the thing that nags me about this story is...well, it's not much of a story.  Writer Niall Boyce is making a point about how life goes on in London after the series starts, and ties it in with the fact that the series debuted on the day President Kennedy was assassinated...but there's no connection to said point and our characters.  I felt weirdly disconnected from the whole story, and as a whole it left me...unsatisfied, which is a bit of a surprise given how effective most of the other stories are in this particular box set.

Write this one off as a bit of a misfire, I'm afraid.

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 0.6.1 The Butcher's Citadel (The Sleeping Blood Part Two, The Companion Chronicles: The First Doctor Volume One, Big Finish, 2015)

So after spending twenty five minutes of the first half hour of this story setting up the background, Susan works with the soldiers assigned to stop the hacker to find a way to cure them of their present situation and joins them in raiding said hacker's lair.  Susan is able to foil the hacker's plot, but not before the leader of the mission kills him.  After she is returned to the TARDIS and cures the Doctor, Susan plays back a message from the hacker that pretty bluntly spells out the main theme of the story and....that's it.

This ended up being a rather large disappointment for me, and a lot of it involves writer Martin Day's handling of the point he wanted to make.   Because he spent so much of the first half of this tale in expository mode, he doesn't get to what he wants to really discuss until deep into the second half, resulting in that point being savagely hammered into our head.  I certainly don't disagree with what Day is saying with this story--as someone who relies on modern medication to manage my mental illness, I wholeheartedly endorse it--but the way he lays it out in an undigested lump makes me resistant to it.  Listening to this last few minutes reminded me an awful lot of Ann Nocenti's overpraised and overrated run on Daredevil, where pages and pages of each issue were devoted to characters presenting what read like Nocenti's collection of college political science essays instead of engaging in dialogue.  It ended up wearing the reader--or in this case, listener--down so much he or she actively resented the effort no matter how sensible the points being made.

...and it's really sad, because Carol Ann Ford is as good as always, and guest performer Darren Strange is very adept in playing two roles to the point where I didn't recognize they were the same voice actor.  As I stated before, the time Susan and The Doctor spend together prior to 'An Unearthly Child' is a time ripe for exploring by the writers of Big Finish.  It's just...I'm sorry, but this tale doesn't prove to be one worth telling.  This is not a great start to the company's first anthology of Companion Chronicles featuring the Hartnell Doctor.

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 0.6.1 The Sleeping Blood (The Sleeping Blood Part One, The Companion Chronicles: The First Doctor Volume One, Big Finish, 2015)

...and here we are all the way back to the time before 'The Unearthly Child'--before the Doctor and Susan ended up on Totters Lane, even!--in a dramatized reading from the first Hartnell-themed Companion Chronicles adventure.

When an injury the Doctor received from an alien plant becomes seriously infected, Susan has to venture forth in search of medicine.  She finds herself in what seems to be an abandoned hospital on a colony world that uses nanotechnology to monitor wellness.  Unfortunately, that reliance on nanotech has left the populace open to terrorist acts from a mysterious hacker, as evidenced by the soldier she comes across that is simply...shut down.

The story, by Martin Day, of 'The Sleeping Blood' is at turns compelling and sound.  It surprises me that the various writers working with Big Finish haven't exploited the time before 'The Unearthly Child' more. However, I found this first part lacking.  Day spends so much time in expository mode where he explains the technology, the culture and the world--he even takes a few lines to explain how this planet was named--that the plot doesn't seem to start until the last few minutes of the episode.  And because it takes so long for the story to get underway, I get no sense of the stakes or the characters--when one is killed by the hacker shutting down the nanotech in her body, I felt nothing.  There had to be a better way to either better disseminate the backstory or put everything in one place.

I'm not sure where this story is going, but the feeling I got was that this segment of the play spent a little under a half an hour to get to the point where the story actually begins.  In these two parters, I should feel in the middle of the second act by the time I get to the cliffhanger...but I feel like we're in the earliest part of the first act.  I'm still interested in what develops...I just worry I am about to be disappointed by this serial overall.

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 62. The Centre (The Web Planet Conclusion)

In wrapping up this too-long serial, we finally get to meet the Animus, and it's...a spaghetti-monster perched over a high-intensity flashlight.

Much like the Optera, the Animus' obvious artifice--you can see the dome that gives the mass of felt ribbons its shape--takes away from the story, and no amount of bright lights flashing in our cast's faces can hide how shabby our ultimate villain looks.  Even with the amount of time focusing on getting Ian to the Animus to put paid to its machinations and Hartnell and O'Brien squirming about as if 'possessed,' I can't take this seriously as a Big Bad.  Thankfully, this thingie is put out of business pretty quickly....

...or it would be a thankful thing if we didn't get such an extended 'saying goodbye' sequence where it seems more attention is spent on the various alien races than on our heroes.  Look, I understand the design staff worked hard on coming up with all these costumes meant to represent non-humanoid lifeforms and they want us to appreciate all that work, but the impact is decidedly lessened due to the length of our exposure to it.

This serial as a whole should have been shorter, and there are scenes that could've been cut whole to aid with its plodding pace.  Spending extra time watching the Optera frolicking under the smeary moon does not help any.  I wonder if there is an alternate universe where this serial, rather than the next one (The Crusade), that's missing literally half its episodes.

I respect what was intended.  I just am glad it's finally over.

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 45.5 The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance (The Lost Stories: The First Doctor Box Set, Big Finish, 2010)

This is another product line from Big Finish Audio, apparently the brainchild of producer David Richardson, which digs up abandoned scripts, outlines and pitches for Who and adapts them into audio plays.  In this case, it's a dramatized reading of what we now call a Spec Script written by Moris Farhi in the week leading up to his meeting with then script editor David Whittaker.  Based on the strength of this script, Farhi was commissioned to write 'Farewell, Great Macedon,' a six part historical about the last days of Alexander The Great for the first season...which did not make it into production.  As such, it's a fascinating bit of ephemera, a 'proof of concept' from Farhi that was never meant to see production.

On the impossibly colorful and peaceful planet of Fragrance, young Rhythm declares his love for Barbara and asks her to stay.  Barbara politely refuses...not knowing that this is dooming the man to suicide due to the planet's cultural beliefs.  The story examines the reaction of Rhythm's family and the Who Crew as Rhythm goes off to his destiny.

It's an interesting little story, very reminiscent of some of the better Short Trips (like them, it's just under a half hour).  As with Domain of the Voord, William Russell and Carol Ann Ford switch off the narration with John Dorney and Helen Goldwyn providing voices for Rhythm and his sisters.  The production flows well, which is probably helped by its brevity.  But what I like the most is that I get the sense that this story works better in an audio medium, as it's more philosophical than action-adventure-y.

Of course, what's interesting about the Lost Stories concept is that Big Finish is doing something akin to media archaeology, giving life to these never-were and putting them in the context they were intended.  'The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance' not only feels like a First Doctor story, it feels like it would fit right in with that first season of the show*, where the intention was to do science fiction that wasn't about ray guns and bug-eyed monsters.  In listening to this, I got vibes of literary science fiction of the 60's that focused more on softer sciences like sociology and psychology.

I will admit that I have a weakness for the Lost Stories format as a whole, so I'm somewhat biased.  But even with that bias being acknowledged, it's a pretty decent tale.

*--although you'll notice I placed this just before 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth.'  There's a minor plot element about the Doctor fixing up the Tardis to get Ian and Barbara back to London that made it a natural place to slot the story in.

Meanwhile Over At DREAD MEDIA 710

Wolfmen and witches dominate this week's episode, as Des and I endure the high concept gunslinger-versus-wolfmen tale High Moon and Rich The Monster Movie Kid comes back with an amorous vibe as he covers 2016's The Love Witch!

The trailers are below, as is a discussion of how to categorize your werewolves, a feature on actual spell-casting witches in Romania, and music by Martin Gore of Depeche Mode and Burning Witches

Listen to Episode 710 here

(...that's right. baby--I'm back!)