[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I tried to do a Russell Brand voice.
Yeah, I don’t think I can make my voice that annoying.
Mickey’s new hiding place. XD
D’awwwww.
“I hereby claim the most comfy spot on the couch in the name of… ME!”
Shiori: Hey Lydia, do you like vampire stories?
Lydia: I am not particularly literate in the vampire genre, except of course for Bram Stoker’s Dracula which I enjoyed thoroughly.
Shiori: But you know about Twilight, right?
Lydia: Oh, yes, although I only read snippets. Horrid.
Shiori:…
Very enjoyable review! I completely agree with all of Lydia’s points. This movie, while not terrible, is barely memorable let alone a masterpiece.
Thaaaaank you! I actually enjoyed it, but I’m not going to pop in to see it again like I did The Avengers…
Grodie is the most craven piece of fuck since Ben. Hell, even BEN (of all people) has more balls and originality than Grodie ever will. Grodie went out of his way to block both Jeff and I from every site he owns because we’re DYING to remind him why he’s dying alone. It’s not obvious enough as it…
Fucking A. This guy can’t deal with rejection which is a part of life.
So Shiori and Lydia review <i>Dark Shadows</i>…
Shiori: Hey Lydia, do you like vampire stories?
Lydia: I am not particularly literate in the vampire genre, except of course for Bram Stoker’s Dracula which I enjoyed thoroughly.
Shiori: But you know about Twilight, right?
Lydia: Oh, yes, although I only read snippets. Horrid.
Shiori: Okay, so I was checking out the previews for Dark Shadows and I thought, finally! A vampire movie you can really sink your teeth into!
[Lydia rolls her eyes and sighs.]
Lydia: Seriously? Vampire puns? You disappoint me, Shiori.
Shiori: Okay, okay. It’s a vampire movie that doesn’t suck.
[Lydia rolls her eyes again.]
Lydia: Well, I had quite different thoughts. I thought: “blimey, another Tim Burton film with Johnny Depp in it! It’s not like I have seen enough of these to know how it will turn out!”
Shiori: It’s about this guy, Barnabas Collins, who comes to America in the 1700s? And he builds this fishing empire there, And he’s in love with this one girl and boning this other girl, but the other girl is a witch, right? And she kills the first girl and curses Barnabas to become a vampire. And they bury him in the ground for 200 years until he’s accidentally dug up again, and has to help his descendants in the 1970s.
Lydia: Except the witch is still alive.
Shiori: Yeah, and she’s basically taken over the whole fishing industry of the town. So Barnabas has to like, fight against his nature and do right by his family, and put an end to the scheming of the witch who wants his love.
Lydia: She desires access to his fortune, much more than his love.
Shiori: Okay, so this is a fairly typical Tim Burton movie? And it has like all the funny points and dark points that his movies usually have. It’s got quirky characters — there’s Barnabas himself, of course, he comes from the 18th century and doesn’t understand stuff from the 20th century, like he thinks a car is Satan coming to get him! I love that. But his modern family — what’s left of it anyway — doesn’t fare much better because they’re like, dysfunctional. The little kid sees dead people —
Lydia: — where have we heard that before? —
Shiori: — his dad’s irresponsible, there’s like a rebellious teenager who’s trying to be cool, a stupid house servant played by Whatshisname, the Rorschach guy…
Lydia: Jackie Earle Haley.
Shiori: Yes, that’s it! Then there’s Victoria, the newly hired governess. She’s like the one normal Munster. Just sort of there for the ride, taking the strange all in. Till Barnabas falls for her.
Lydia: The problem with these characters is that they are not quirky, they are formulaic. Burton has a template somewhere with which he stamps these things out. Oh, we must put Johnny Depp in a lead role, let’s cover him in white make-up and have him move and talk funny. We have to shoehorn Helena Bonham Carter in there somewhere, and while we are at it, let’s cover her in make up as well, since she is certainly not getting any younger. Let’s drape spider webs and skeletons everywhere to make it look like bloody Halloween Town all over again…
Shiori: I didn’t see too many spider webs and skeletons here. Inside the Collins mansion, sure, but outside it was mainly shots of this New England coastal town. Very nice, in fact! I’ve never been to the northeastern United States. I thought it was cold, like, all the time.
Lydia: Actually, if my experiences in the Other Cambridge (the one in Massachusetts) are any indication, it is quite lovely in the summer time. Temperatures can get above thirty centigrade.
Shiori: What is that in like degrees?
Lydia: … Bikini top and shorts weather.
Shiori: Oooooooh!
Lydia: Anyway, the point being, that Tim Burton has nothing left to say. He is sort of stuck in this endless loop; he should take a break from filmmaking. Go on sabbatical, spend some time with Helena and the kids. Someplace colourful, perhaps, like Hawaii. The same goes for Johnny Depp.
Shiori: What do you have against Johnny Depp?
Lydia: Nothing; I like Depp. He is a fine actor. But his success as Jack Sparrow has sort of turned him into a shortcut for creatively destitute Hollywood.— the “quirky one”. According to studio executives, the “quirky one” is someone who does not fall into one of the finite and very small number of bins that have been established for male protagonists — the macho, assertive action hero; the treacly, mawkish romance hero; the sidekick; the nerd; the villain; etc. He has a few behavioural idiosyncrasies which appear cultivated to amuse a particular audience, but is still charming, non-threatening, and not possessed of an outlook that will challenge the audience. Never mind that Cary Elwes, Robert Downey, Jr., Kevin Spacey, John Malkovich, and even Brad Pitt have all portrayed unusual characters well. Does the character not fit in? Is “fish out of water” his strapline and only notable character trait? Get Depp on the line! And hark! the thunderous sound of multitudes of hipster girls squealing for joy.
Shiori: You’re kind of right about that, but… he was awesome in 21 Jump Street!
Lydia: If reprising his 1980s television role is the most original thing he has recently done… well, I suppose he should take a step back and re-evaluate his career choices. Why not cast Depp as a Bond villain? Hell, why not put a dress on him and have him play a Bond girl? That would be a lark!
Shiori: Now that’s a bit too quirky.
Lydia: Oh, poppycock! Have you never seen Ed Wood? It would be a marvellous return to form for Mr. Depp.
Shiori: Aaaaaanyway… one thing I really liked were all the outside shots. If it’s really as nice as you say it is, then one of these summers I have got to check out Maine. The forests and beaches and scenery are so beautiful I wanna just LIVE there! Except for the cold. I can’t STAND cold weather… Another thing I liked was that… okay, Barnabas is a vampire, right? So he… actually goes out and kills people. There’s like a whole mythos there. This is what vampires do. This is what we’ve always been told they do. And that’s respected in Dark Shadows. I mean, Twilight was pretty lame. The books were better than the movies. But even then it’s like… there’s bad vampires, who suck people’s blood, and good vampires, who don’t. It’s like… how do you even reconcile that with them being this supposedly big, scary deal? Isn’t that the whole point? The girl falls in love with the monster, and there’s risk there?
Lydia: Vampires are difficult to cast as heroes, notable exceptions like D and Blade notwithstanding. You have to make the monster somehow sympathetic, despite the implied conflict with the bloodthirst that is their very nature. That should pose a challenge to any writer. A better-than-Twilight, though still unsatisfactory, job of it is done in Dark Shadows. Oh, here are some one-note characters who only appear in this very scene and will never be seen again. You don’t mind, audience, if they suffered a gruesome death at the hands of the protagonist? He’s still sympathetic, isn’t he mates? He’s still a cracking good lad, isn’t he? I have a problem with that. It is a leap in credibility which I am not prepared to make.
Shiori: That’s kinda heavy, isn’t it? This was a fun movie, and it had that whole Tim Burton black humor thing going on. He always does that with death in his movies. Plays it for laughs and a shrug of the shoulders. Plus there’s a love story. Like a real, believable love story. Not like Bella and Edward. I think that was my favorite part. Where Victoria was like “I’m from the light and you’re from the shadows and it was never meant to be.” There’s risk there, vampires are nothing to fuck with, and she realized it — even though she had grown close to him, even though — unlike Bella — she had time invested in him. It took her the whole movie to come to grips with these feelings. That’s what makes it especially tragic. That, and Barnabas was on the verge of losing his second true love in 200 years! I… I had a little tear in my eye right then!
Lydia: What, Barnabas and the little governess girl? The one who escaped from the asylum from Sucker Punch? I think you have only proven my point: these characters are recycled and forgettable.
Shiori: Oh, come on! You’ve gotta admit this movie was fun.
Lydia: Well, maybe a little bit…
Shiori: Okay, what was the most exciting part for you?
Lydia: Well… I have a story to tell. I went to see this movie with a bloke who helps keep the database servers at work ticking over; as it happens, he is named Tim. Jolly chap, gayer than a treeful of parrots, big fan of Johnny Depp, so of course he is giddy as a bird to see this. When we arrive, Tim decides to pop off to the concession stand. (I have a hidden pocket in my coat which I use to smuggle outside victuals into the cinema, typically a spindle of red rope licorice; until millimetre-wave body scanners are deployed in cinemas I will continue to make use of it.) Tim comes back with one of these containers of spaghetti — gigantic bins, really. I had no idea spaghetti was an available concession in cinemas, but there you have it. With the meatballs and all of that. Anyway, there is a bit where Barnabas has just awakened and fed on some construction workers. He prowls about the town of Collinsport, checking out how the scenery has changed in the past two hundred years. His face and mouth are still covered in blood. I look at Tim, and there is red all over his face! I nearly jumped out of my seat at the sight! After the scene I just saw, I thought he had gone nosferatu on me and made a Happy Meal out of the girl seated on the other side of him! Well, of course it turns out that was not the case at all: Tim, you see, is a man of less-than-pristine eating habits, and had been noshing at his spaghetti with his face in the bin like a horse at a feed-bag.
[Shiori giggles and scrunches her little nose in disgust.]
Shiori: So he had fucking marinara sauce all over his face?
Lydia: All over his face! And that was the most exciting part for me, getting a bit of a scare and then realising it was just Tim making quite the little piggy of himself. What was the most exciting part for you?
Shiori: The party with Alice Cooper. And the ending.
Lydia: The climax just defied all logic. The rest of it I could have quite done without. Especially the bits involving Angélique. Let me tell you something: I do not believe in vampires, nor in werewolves, nor in ghosts; but with a witch I have years of direct, personal experience.
Shiori: Julia.
Lydia: Yes. And Angélique is rather accurate. The manipulation, the selfishness, the obsession with vengeance and one-upsmanship. It was all hauntingly familiar. Those are things I would rather not recall.
Shiori: Don’t blame you.
Lydia: The rest of it, from a plotting perspective, was a boring, paint-by-numbers affair that ends way too quickly and illogically. What’s worse, there is a bit of a cliffhanger at the end that hints at a sequel. I hate when movies do that. Do not presume the opportunity to carry on a shite story in another installment!
Shiori: Well, I liked it. I thought it was fun to watch. It had some nice set pieces of small-town New England, Johnny Depp was funny as like a 1700s guy trying to get acclimated to our times, there was comedy and suspense and romance, and the kids were great in it!
Lydia: Burton seems to do his best work with young actors; that was true at least since he directed Winona Ryder as my namesake in Beetlejuice. One of my favourite characters — and performances — in any movie, ever. For obvious reasons, of course, but not just for those reasons.
Shiori: Oh right! There was a Lydia in that movie! … And there was a Julia in this one. Whoa, that’s weird.
Lydia: Regrettably Dark Shadows stands in the long shadow cast by Beetlejuice, which vies with Ed Wood and the 1989 Batman for the title of Burton’s masterpiece. I suppose we should be thankful for the small blessings — the set pieces and that — because in the large, this movie is a bloody mess.
Playing Sonic the Hedgehog 4 lately. Was reminded of why “Tails” is so annoying sometimes.
Just whose side are you on, you orange twat?
Another commission for someone who wishes to remain anonymous! They asked for Dr. Mark Koks to give a blowjob to his boyfriend, Albert Love. I happily obliged. There isn’t enough pieces where Mark and Albert are together, which is something I need to address. It’s also a rare chance (?) to see Mark submit to Albert. So enjoy this! XD I had a blast drawing this. Enjoy!
Ohohohoho, yes, yes… It is nice to see Mark get down on his knees for once. ;x I do admit I enjoy putting him in his place. Teehee…
Not exactly the position I’d expect for Mark. But diversity is good! XD
This is a commission for someone who wishes to remain anonymous! They asked for Percy to captured by one of Dr. Nim Rod’s mechanical tentacle machines and one of the tentacles to have a sword fight in his mouth. XD I happily obliged! It’s always flattering and a pleasure to draw porno commissions of my characters. Anyway, this is a different scenario for Percy. I had a blast doing this and hope you all enjoy!
THIS IS REALLY HOT. I LOVE Percy’s surprised expression and I love how the tentacle is around his cock area, too. ;D Love his shirt too; it looks very fancy. ;D
Thank you so, so much! It means a lot to me! I can tell you like him a lot. ;)
One of your… more interesting Percy pieces XD That expression is gold!
