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Ooh. Getting "all cosy" could mean all sorts of things. On a purely carnal level, I wouldn't kick Oliver Reed (Curse of the Werewolf) or Sandor Eles (Evil of Frankenstein) out of bed. But Hammer's males were never quite as dishy as the females, in my opinion. For those that prefer the gentler sex, that is.
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I don't think lopping off her head is the only option. My preferred method of dispatching with Barbara Shelley is symbolic rape by a gang of monks with a wooden stake.
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Would have to be in my partner's arms. He has rehearsed the zombie apocalypse scenario all his life.
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That's a hard one. If you mean fiction, I tend not to read fiction more than once, so I don't really have a novel that I revisit time and again as such. Probably my most memorable reading experience was The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. I read it while I was laid up in a hospital in BC for a week, almost exactly nine years ago. It was certainly one of those occasions when I felt really immersed in the world of the story.
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Thankfully, he's not too fanboyish, but there is evidence of his obsession around the apartment. His bookshelf is populated with zombie comics and books, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead hang in the hallway, and Fly Boy from Dawn of the Dead sits (still in the packaging) on top of his video game rack (of which several items are zombie games). Oh and there's a rather cool zombie silhouette-maker on the mantelpiece that I bought him for his birthday. He doesn't generally do the conventions and such, but I have seen pictures of him zombied up for a zombie walk. A religious pilgrimage to him would be a visit to the mall where Dawn of the Dead was filmed. Oh, and he boasts constantly about how prepared he is for the zombie apocalypse. I've changed my mind, he is a fanboy. :D
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My other half is not a Hammer fan (he's the sort that if he's ever seen one, he wouldn't remember which one). He's fond of the occasional old Vincent Price picture, but it's the zombie genre from Romero onwards that truly obsesses him.
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Yes, that's me. This is just a fat-suit I'm wearing. For porn shoots, I take it off to reveal my smooth, 18-year-old flesh.
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Since love has almost always meant making compromises I never thought I would make, I'm not sure I can answer that. Love makes you do silly - or sometimes just unexpected - things.
<too much information>For example, I thought I would *never* wear nappies or engage in poop play, and then last night... Oh, never mind.</too much information> -
Damn you. My first Formspring question for weeks, and it's spam!
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Most watched Hammer film: Probably a toss-up between Dracula and Dracula Prince of Darkness.
Least watched: To the Devil a Daughter. Never made it past the first half hour until yesterday!
I used to watch my favourite films once or twice a year. Some of my favourites I haven't watched in two or three years, however - I rather regret overwatching them to the point where familiarity has bred a contempt of sorts. -
I freak out around spiders.
I get quite wobbly at heights, too. My legs turn to jelly and I get an awful feeling someone's going to jump up on me, grab my legs and tip me over the edge.
On a more serious note, I suffer from social anxiety, which ironically makes me at various times both agoraphobic and claustrophobic - afraid to go out and meet people, and then extremely wary of being "trapped" in a social situation. When choosing where to sit, for example, I'll pick whichever place allows the easiest escape route.
Doubly ironically for someone who has a reputation for being "larger than life," being the "centre of attention" and doing all kinds of public things, eg singing, acting, speaking, I fear exposure, and can panic if the attention is suddenly on me. -
Nothing, actually, unless you count DVDs as "collecting."
As a child I used to collect dog ornaments, as I was never allowed a real one (sob, sob). Of my once-extensive collection, I probably have two or three cherished ones remaining.
At another time I collected cigarette cards, mainly just of old Hollywood actors and other subjects that interested me.
I also sued to collect theatre memorabilia, especially handbills and programmes. I still have quite a few of the programmes, as well as a handful of souvenir brochures from movies and such, but I think the handbills got thrown out long ago. -
Wil Wheaton turns 38 this year. Still looks so young and handsome!
I'm good, thanks, but looking forward to a bit of warmer weather. There are many things I like about the winter, but I hardly get out of the apartment. It will be nice to start getting out for walks again and such. Work is going much better since I moved here, although the CAD-GBP exchange rate is the bane of my life. Hope you are keeping well. Best to you, Lucy and Bertie. xox -
America has its good and bad, like every nation. The thing I most dislike - in fact, it drives me mad - is the pathetic quality of public debate in the US. Everything's so polarized. An intelligent, informed, reasoned debate in the public square appears impossible.
But I'm able to distinguish between the public face of America and Americans themselves. I doubt most Americans have much in common with some of the inane personalities who represent them on the world stage. The Americans I know personally are just fine people. -
Ha. I have no idea. There's something distinguished and gentlemanly about him as he's aged. The old Spitting Image sketch with Norma and the peas failed to do justice to his sexual charisma.
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Hmm, by "guilty," I assume you mean unusual crushes I would be embarrassed about?
I had it bad for Keith Carradine as Special Agent Lundy in Dexter. He's in his sixties now, and funny thing is, I always figured he looked kinda strange when he was younger.
Diane Keaton - at any age. See, eg, Annie Hall and Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Anjelica Huston - as she is now (or fairly recently). See her appearances in Wes Anderson's films, eg The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
I have this thing for older women. (I know, I'm gay, it's fucked up.)
Like Holger (not one of my celebrity crushes), I have a bit of a thing for Caroline Munro. Granted, she was a beauty in her Hammer days, but it was when I met her at a Hammer convention in 2008 I was really taken with her. She was such a sweet lady and still looks so beautiful.
When I was a lad, I used to get painful crushes on actors. I guess during adolescence, crushes always are painful. I had it bad for Wil Wheaton after I saw Stand by Me. (If you've seen him recently, he is still incredibly youthful-looking, though he's almost 40.)
Anyway, yeah. Strange celeb crushes. Saying nothing of John Major. (Yeah, I kid you not.) -
Both films still had continuity with Squigglyboo; more so with One Million Years BC, since it not only shared key personnel, eg Michael Carreras, but was broadly within the monster/fantasy.
But yes, I'm trying (remember I'm really thinking on my feet here, expressing some jumbled thoughts for the first time!) to draw a distinction between Hammer and Squigglyboo. So On the Buses isn't quite Squigglyboo, but it is Hammer.
In my experience, the more I get into Hammer, the broader my scope of interest becomes, however. There was a time when it was purely the Gothics from the 1950s and '60s I was interested in. Didn't care for the 1970s stuff. Then I broadened to take in the 1970s stuff. Then I began taking in the non-horror Hammer films from the same era. Then I went outside the Gothic era altogether and started watching the earlier noirs and such. In most cases, the fact it's Hammer invariably leads me to love it, no matter how good or bad.
But with Beyond the Rave etc, it's still that broken thread that prevents my enthusiasm. -
Is it bad that most people "don't really care about the non-horror stuff"? I mean, people like what they like.
The bad part, I guess, is that they confuse the part for the whole. So recognizing that what we're really talking about is Squigglyboo, rather than Hammer, per se, is key.
Still, even 1935 to 1976 had a continuity about it, right? It might not have been the same at the beginning as at the end, but there was still an unbroken thread. Still seems to me the thread essentially broke for a long time, and a new thread began. So the situation with the "new" Hammer is unique. -
Hmm, I figured my explanation ran the risk of dismissing the rest of the Hammer canon, which is why I posted a bit of a disclaimer to Facebook.
I guess a better way to think about the difference between Hammer then and Hammer now is to give Hammer then a totally different name. Because for someone for whom "Hammer" is "Hammer's Gothic horrors 1957-1976," an early Hammer film like, say, The Public Life of Henry the Ninth, is also "Hammer in name only."
So let's just call "Hammer horror" (the main films 1957-1976) by the name "Squigglyboo."
Then let's ask whether Beyond the Rave is Squigglyboo.
The answer (to me) is no, Beyond the Rave is not Squigglyboo. And since my major interest is Squigglyboo, Beyond the Rave doesn't excite me much.
I am pretty interested in the Exclusive era, as a kind of extension of my interest in the Hammer horror era. And because there was that continuity between Exclusive and Hammer horror - it didn't cut off and then start again new, but its various phases overlapped.
Does that make more sense?
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David Rattigan’s Bio
British-Canadian writer
