October Horrors # 7: Hammer House of Horror: The Two Faces of Evil (Alan Gibson, TV, 1980)

The 12th, and penultimate, episode of the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ may not necessarily be the best, or most entertaining, of the series - but it is almost certainly the most unsettling, rivalled only by The Silent Scream (also directed by dark horse Alan Gibson, who arguably offered better proof of his talents here than in the theatrical features he made for Hammer during the early ‘70s).

Ranald Graham’s story begins in what by this point has become conventional HHoH fashion, with a well-to-do family (mother, father and one young child) driving through rural Surrey on their way to a holiday cottage. (Location freaks and aficionados of provisional British oddness will delight in the prominence afforded to a battered signpost specifying the distances to Aylesbury, Stoke Manderville and High Wycombe.)

In the midst of a rainstorm however, whilst traversing what looks very much like the same dark stretch of woodland road previously seen in the Children of the Full Moon episode, they pick up a tall hitchhiker, his face obscured by an over-sized yellow rain mac. Alarmingly, the stranger immediately attacks the father, throttling him and and stabbing him with a sharpened fingernail, causing the car to crash and overturn in the process.

Awakening in a suspiciously clean and idyllic country hospital, the mother of the family (Janet, played by Anna Calder-Marshall) learns that her son has survived unharmed, but that her husband (Gary Raymond) has sustained a number of injuries, and is recuperating following an emergency operation to remove fragments of glass from his throat. The evil hitchhiker, seemingly, is dead, following what the police tell Janet appears to have been an extended struggle with her husband following the accident.

Immediately, the ostensibly quiet and orderly world into which Janet has reawakened is painted by Gibson’s direction as treacherous and threatening. In a Polanski-like manner, perfectly innocent supporting characters (nurses, doctors, policemen) appear sinister and untrustworthy.

Seemingly innocuous dialogue (eg, several unrelated characters making reference to “foxes and badgers”) begins to imply a conspiratorial undertone, whilst a sense of Janet’s post-traumatic shock is very effectively conveyed, as she is assailed by momentary flashbacks to the accident and the violence which followed. This culminates in a harrowing sequence in which - dragging her son behind her - she insists on laboriously collecting the ruined remains of the family’s possessions into overstuffed plastic bags, dragging them back to the holiday cottage and burning them, as if to erase the memory of the accident and the inexplicable assault which caused it.

Subsequently, Nightmare Logic takes hold, as the identity of Janet’s “husband” becomes confused with that of the deceased “hitchhiker”, whose facial features, in defiance of all reason, appear to be identical. Other distinguishing features seem split unevenly between the two bodies, with neither quite matching the characteristics of the husband, and, when the surviving man - bandaged and still unable to speak - is discharged back into her care, Janet notices his sharpened fingernail…

Eventually taking a full on supernatural turn (although gratuitous ‘explanations’ are wisely avoided, allowing the sense of irrational nightmarishness to remain undiminished), ‘The Two Faces of Evil’ is a visceral and uncompromising update on the theme of the doppelganger. Evidently inspired to some extent by ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, it proceeds to add a more psychotic/barbaric edge to the material, anticipating Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ by four decades as it disturbingly fuses the disintegration of personal identity with an imminent threat of bloody violence.

Brief, minimally staged and seemingly made with a somewhat lower budget than many of the other episodes in the series, it nonetheless makes for memorable and uncomfortable viewing.

Hammer House of Horror: The Silent Scream (Alan Gibson, 1980)

Continuing last October’s trawl through the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ archives where we left off, here we go with episode # 7, originally broadcast on ITV on 25th October 1980. 

Probably the most unsettling and seriously intentioned instalment of the series thus far, this one tells the tale of a feckless safebreaker (Chuck, played by Brian Cox), who, having just completed a debilitating prison sentence, grudgingly accepts a part-time job offered by sinister pet shop owner Martin Blueck, played by your friend and mine, Mr Peter Cushing.

Beginning with the unfortunate death-by-electrocution of a caged tiger, followed by Chuck’s return to the isolated roadside cottage he shares with his wife Annie (Elaine Donnelly), the first half of Francis Essex’s script is almost comically over-loaded with themes and imagery related to imprisonment and confinement.

Upon his return home, Chuck tells Elaine that she can’t possibly understand the misery he has experienced as a result of being incarcerated, causing her in turn to point to the virtual imprisonment she has faced while he was inside, as a result of poverty, isolation and societal disapproval. (To hammer home the point, her introductory shots are even framed through the bar-like partitions on the kitchen window.)

When Chuck visits Blueck’s shop, initially to thank him for visiting him in prison and gifting him with some money as part of a charitable programme, he scarcely finds much reassurance. Backed by the budgerigars and puppies he keeps caged in the shabby, public facing front room of his shop, Blueck quietly acknowledges his history as a concentration camp survivor, before inviting Chuck into the secret back room where his real work is done.

Therein, we find an appalling mockery of a zoo, in which a variety of flagrantly illegal animals (a panther, a leopard, assorted other big cats, a few apes and even a wallaby) subsist in cramped, bare cages, trained via the application of massive electric shocks to remain within their allotted spaces until a bell is sounded to let them know the circuits have been disengaged, at which point the sorry creatures can poke out their heads and gobble up the raw meat which comprises their chow.

For any animal lovers in the audience, the footage of these obviously unhappy beasts prowling around their tiny cages will prove immediately upsetting, whilst the idea that a veteran of the holocaust has become obsessed with imprisoning and controlling his fellow creatures - like a victim of familial abuse growing up to perpetrate the same cycle over again - is horribly perverse and disturbing.

As you’d imagine, it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic for us to realise that Blueck is set upon expanding his unsavoury “research” to human subjects, and that his motives in offering a questionable job to a hapless ex-con - and placing a very tempting safe in plain view when he leaves Chuck to look after the joint - are less than wholly philanthropic.

In fact, Blueck makes this fairly plain from the outset, expounding upon his Orwellian dream of creating “prisons without bars”, in which the terror-stricken inmates are ostensibly free, but paralysed by mind-destroying Pavlovian conditioning - a concept which pushes the story into the realm of the truly nightmarish. (Again, note the insane perversity of a man who finds the physical paraphernalia of imprisonment so repugnant, he is fixated on removing it, even as he craves the power of control over others which it represents.)

Perhaps inevitably given that we’re watching a mainstream TV production here, Essex’s script rather sidesteps the darker psychological implications of this tale, downplaying the whole concentration camp angle just, just as Cushing likewise rather downplays his characterisation of Blueck. Providing something of a call back to his always fascinating portrayals of Baron Frankenstein in previous decades, he keeps the character soft-spoken, slow and pointedly non-emphatic in his gestures, allowing his evil and mental instability to reveal themselves more in his actions than through any displays of cackling villainy, but still managing to radiate a certain, implacable coldness.

As his fans will be aware, accents could sometimes prove Cushing’s Achilles’ heel as an actor, but he handles this one very well, betraying just a hint of Blueck’s Eastern European origins, gradually eroded over decades spent settled in a particularly seedy corner of England, allowing him to add just the right amount of unholy relish to his dialogue.

(There’s scarcely a bigger chill in the whole episode meanwhile than the lazy, off-hand cruelty Cushing manages to inject into his character’s tired attempts to fob off an investigating police officer visiting his shop with “..a hamster for the boy, perhaps?”)

Relatively few of the big-hitters from Hammer’s feature film era deigned to lend their talents to Roy Skeggs’ venture into TV, so it is of course wonderful to see the ever-loyal Cushing stepping up for what I believe was his penultimate horror role (followed up only by his touching farewell to the genre in Pete Walker’s ‘House of Long Shadows’ two years later). Needless to say, the producers of the series could scarcely have found a better, more challenging role for him to get his teeth into.

Cox and Donnelly are both excellent too (the former doing a fine thick-yet-sympathetic turn, the latter convincing as the brains of their marital operation), allowing ‘The Silent Scream’ to develop into a strongly played three-hander drama, lending these characters a sense of realism which transcends the excesses of the increasingly far-fetched premise.

Perhaps mercifully, the second half of the episode becomes slightly less distressing, as the script concentrates more on the nuts-and-bolts survival horror of Chuck and Annie’s attempt to contend with the fiendish travails Blueck has devised for them, temporarily turning ‘The Silent Scream’ into what feels perhaps like an early prototype for the ‘Cube’-style “puzzle box” horror film.

A less high profile veteran of Hammer’s feature film era, Alan Gibson directs efficiently, with a certain amount of style, as befits the voluminous CV of TV work he’d racked up since helming the last two Christopher Lee Dracula movies in the early ’70s. Rather ironically in view of the episode’s subject matter, there is also some very nice location work to enjoy here; both Chuck and Annie’s remote rural cottage, lonely and isolated just off the motorway, and the thoroughly seedy row of commuter-belt businesses which houses Cushing’s shop (perhaps just a few doors down from Denholm Elliot’s estate agents from Rude Awakening), are very well chosen.

In view of my above observations on Cushing’s character however, I can't help but feel that Essex fumbles the ball rather dreadfully in the final act, when he drops what is clearly intended to be the blood-and-thunder revelation that Blueck was not actually a prisoner within the concentration camp, but a captor.

As well as stealing the punch-line to my all-time favourite bad taste gag, this misfiring twist actually succeeds in making the story far less disturbing than would otherwise have been the case. (After all, a mad Nazi on the loose is a far easier threat to deal with than that of a traumatised victim becoming secretly obsessed with exercising control over others.)

Sadly, this casual revelation also robs Cushing of the opportunity to give Blueck a touch of that sublime, sympathy-for-the-devil pathos he always did so well in his villainous roles - or indeed to invest the character with any of the knotty complexity we may have hoped for. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that the scene in which this twist is revealed is also that in which Blueck finally bursts out in a fit of ol’ fashioned villainous cackling.)

An unfortunate misstep, this can’t help but make the episode’s conclusion feel a little flat in dramatic terms, but regardless - on the surface of it, we still get a satisfyingly nasty and hopeless denouement, worthy of any grimy ‘70s British horror shocker, cementing ‘The Silent Scream’s place as easily the best episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ I’ve watched thus far.

Be sure to tune in this time next week, and we’ll learn whether episode # 8 proves a contender to the throne…

October Shorts: A Pre-Halloween Horror Round-up.

Every year, when October rolls around, I survey the movie bloggers and film forums undertaking “31 films in 31 days” pre-Halloween countdowns and so forth, and feel a profound sense of envy as I consider those lucky enough to enjoy a lifestyle that allows them the time to view, let alone write about, a feature film every single day - that being a circumstance which usually feels beyond the reach of my wildest dreams at this time of year, sad to say.

Nonetheless though, this year I’ve been doing my best – aggressively ring-fencing movie-watching time, squeezing in double-bills wherever possible, prioritising horror above all other genres and trying to find a few minutes to scribble down some thoughts afterwards. Thus far I’ve only clocked up a mere six films in seventeen days, but believe me – under the circumstances, I count that a success.

Hopefully I’ll be able to rack up enough to compile a “Part # 2” to this post later in the month, but for now, let’s crack on. Needless to say, all the write-ups that follow are “first thought / best thought” type efforts banged out with a minimum of forethought or proof reading, so make of them what you will.

The Wasp Woman 
(Roger Corman, 1959)

Well, this was… quite alright I suppose. It’s snappily paced, smartly scripted (by b-Western ‘heavy’ actor Leo Gordon, no less), has an agreeably loopy premise and is full of likeable characters portrayed by a crew of familiar AIP/Corman faces. Unlike Corman’s best black & white era films however, ‘The Wasp Woman’ never really manages to transcend its status as a five-day-wonder double bill timewaster, failing to offer up anything that is liable to live long in our memories the way that ‘A Bucket of Blood’ or ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ did, or to challenge an audience’s pre-existing expectations of a movie named “The Wasp Woman”. There are any number of interesting directions that the Countess Bathory-esque ‘aging-woman-will-go-to-any-lengths-to-preserve-beauty’ storyline could have been taken in, but instead Corman and Gordon just serve it straight, avoiding of any social commentary/satirical twist despite the film’s self-aware, cosmopolitan atmosphere and Madison Avenue setting.

Still, it’s a thoroughly diverting seventy-something minutes that remains approximately 126 times as entertaining as what might have resulted had any other director active in 1959 made a film about a woman turning into a giant wasp with a budget roughly equivalent to Charlton Heston’s dry-cleaning bill.

Shock Waves 

(Ken Wiederhorn, 1977)

Similarly, this little number – in which Peter Cushing and John Carradine lead a cast of younger/lesser known performers pitting their wits against undead Nazi super-soldiers in the Florida keys – has all the necessary ingredients in place for an absolutely bad-ass under-the-radar ‘70s horror…. but somehow, it just never manages to get the engine running.

The main boons to the film’s intermittent effectiveness come from it’s incredibly atmospheric shooting locations, which convey a convincing sense of isolated deprivation, and it’s uniquely conceived antagonists, who rise from the water uniformed and be-goggled like some nightmare combination of Golan-Globus ninjas and Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead. The cast are all fairly good too (Brooke Adams, who went to better things in the ’78 ‘Invasion of The Body Snatchers’ particularly stands out), and much of the photography is superb, despite being shot on 16mm.

Quite why such a promising outlay eventually fails to deliver the expected thrills therefore, I’m unsure, but let’s reluctantly grit our teeth and think it through. Firstly, continuity is all over the place (at several points early in the film, the characters seem to be discussing and acting upon terrible events that we have not been privy to), and, cool though it is, the whole Nazi zombie concept is rather undeveloped, as early suggestions that we’re dealing with an occult/supernatural menace are dropped in favour a presumably scientific rationale for their existence, which likewise remains unexplored, as does their obvious thematic status as a potent return-of-the-repressed atavistic terror, ala those aforementioned Blind Dead.

Furthermore, once they’re wandering about on land, the zombies gradually shed their initial menace, moving like ordinary human beings (presumably whilst being shouted at by an Assistant Director) and failing to demonstrate any abilities that would render them significantly more threatening than any other bunch of semi-mindless, unarmed men.

Perhaps most damaging of all though is the production’s decision to avoid any gore or explicit violence, which, though in some sense admirable, also wreaks havoc with the essential build up and release of tension necessary to the success of any chase/stalk/kill-orientated horror movie. When the expected crescendo of bloodshed that would traditionally accompany the demise of each of the zombies’ victims is watered down to an “oh, well… I guess he’s supposed to be dead now?” damp squib, the theoretically remorseless survival horror showdown of the film’s final act is stripped of any real urgency, leaving us instead to simply admire the view and reflect that the poor extras in the nazi/zombie get-up must have had a really rough time shooting this thing.

Carradine and Cushing are both under-used – presumably bacause the production cut corners by only hiring them for a few days each, which I’m cool with – but, whilst the former is as boisterous as ever, this is sadly one those mid-‘70s movies in which poor Peter seems to be at his lowest ebb, looking more cadaverous than ever before. Though professional to a tee, his lack of engagement with the material is clear, as he fails to really put any meat on the bones of his potentially fascinating character, the way he would almost certainly have done a decade earlier.

But, I should step back at this point and stop knocking this movie. I’ve made my point. If nothing else, it’s a fairly unique entry in the canon of ’70s American horror, and if you come to it with your expectations primed for ‘interesting failure’ rather than ‘lost classic’, you’ll likely find it a somewhat worthwhile experience.

Count Dracula’s Great Love 

(Javier Aguirre, 1972)

Ah, now we’re talkin’! Despite a plodding and rather campy opening half much concerned with hunts for lost coach wheels and inconsequential romantic trysts, Paul Naschy’s sole outing as the Count eventually warms up into not only one of his best films, but one of the most exultantly delirious slices of euro-horror nirvana ever to emerge from the sainted ‘70s. The set up that gets us there may be clumsy, but as soon as “Dracula”s voice-over starts delivering ultra-reverbed metaphysical pronouncements and his be-fanged ladies begin their slow motion peregrinations through the cobwebbed corridors, we’re on a different plain entirely, supping an intoxicating brew that leaves our heads spinning happily as love and death commingle, footsteps clang through a brace of effects pedals and Kensington (Madrid?) Gore dribbles ‘pon cleavage.

Infused (in its stronger ‘export’ cut, at least) with a degree of sexual content that pushes it firmly into the realm of the Erotic Castle Movie, the genius of ‘Count Dracula’s Great Love’ is that, whilst it is undoubtedly delirious, it nonetheless remains emotionally coherent throughout, as the trivial faffing about of the film’s poorly drawn human characters is gradually replaced by that of a love story from another world, played out with aching seriousness, as Naschy – ever the tragic romantic – essays one of strangest and most conflicted Draculas in screen history, anticipating a conclusion that is startling to say the least for devotees of vampire lore.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched this film several times in various stages of degradation, and each time the closing card rears up and the music plays out over blackness, it never fails to hit me with that feeling of having just awakened from some extraordinary dream, the usual whys and wherefores of cinema long forgotten – an instant hit of exactly the phenomena that keeps me coming back to these mind-warping euro-horrors again and again in other words, and to finally see it returned to its full glory via Vinegar Syndrome’s recent blu-ray edition feels like a minor miracle. Really, just an absolute pleasure to experience this one again in such fine form.

Dracula AD 1972 

(Alan Gibson, 1972)

As you will no doubt be aware, this film has attracted its fair share of mockery and critical brick-bats over the years, so now I think is as good as time as any to come out and say it loud and proud: I really like ‘Dracula AD 1972’.

Though it is certainly not one of Hammer’s best, and the damaging effect it’s oft-lamented drawbacks (the five-years-out-of-date Swinging London goofery, the almost total absence of Dracula, the rushed and inconclusive final confrontation, the antics of “Johnny Alucard”) remains substantial, I nonetheless maintain that this one is a lot of fun, and actually has quite a lot going for it beside the potential for ironic sniggering. Though not in the same league as the genuinely great ‘Taste the Blood of..’ (which the script here to some extent reworks), I’d probably place it above most of the other ‘Dracula’ sequels.

For one thing, I love the way that it – as is only appropriate, I suppose - oozes pure essence of “Britain in the early ‘70s”, in spite of the uproariously off-message ‘youth culture’ stuff. From the young Mr Alucard’s straight-from-a-NEL-paperback occult proclamations at his black mass, to the heavy-handed allusions to the Manson murders, to the Scotland Yard detective with a desk covered in ‘executive toys’ who dresses and behaves like a slightly younger and posher dry run for Jack Regan in ‘The Sweeney’ (I particularly love the bit where his partner begs some time off to get “a cup of coffee and a cheese roll” before they head off to bust the kids’ drug party)…. you could just bottle this stuff and I’d buy it by the crate.

It helps too that Alan Gibson largely directs the picture more like a crime drama than a traditional horror, rendering it one of the snappiest films Hammer ever made, with Van Helsing Jr and the cops’ pursuit of the vampire menace taking on a frantic feel akin to an episode of ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ – an approach I very much appreciate.

The ‘deconsecrated church’ set upon which much of the action takes place is genuinely impressive too, and the aforementioned black mass, with reversed tape recorder freakouts and Johnny slitting his wrists all over Caroline Munro, is a real showstopper, probably one of the coolest scenes of its kind in early ‘70s horror.

Meanwhile, Peter Cushing – in stark contrast to his subdued turn in ‘Shock Waves’ - just radiates gravitas here, playing it straight enough to add weight to any amount of patently ridiculous plotting, and momentarily imbuing his final confrontation with Lee with a fateful intensity that successfully recalls their hair-raising showdown in Hammer’s first Dracula all those years ago (until the filmmakers bugger it all up a few moments later, but the less said about that the better).

I even quite like weird, ‘alternate world’ aspect of the script, wherein we’re presented with a 1970s wherein Count Dracula isn’t a pop culture household name, but a dread figure of obscure esoteric lore, mentioned alongside Belphegor and Belial in Johnny Alucard’s run-down of demonic top trumps, whom “legend has it” was buried somewhere in Hyde Park one hundred years prior.

Oh yeah, and if that wasn’t enough to win you over, I’ll put it to you that Stoneground’s ‘Alligator Man’ absolutely rules – a monster jam that sounds like it could have come straight off Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’, perhaps lending credence to the argument that those upright cats at Hammer weren’t as far off the pulse of AD 1972 as is generally supposed.

The Brood 

(David Cronenberg, 1980)

Almost four decades later, and this remains Cronenberg’s most thoroughly disturbing film to date [persuasive counter-arguments welcomed at the usual address]. Almost entirely devoid of the “don’t worry kids, it’s just a horror movie” retreats into genre convention that softened the unsavoury subject matter of his earlier (and indeed, later) efforts, his heavy-handed use of a SF/horror metaphor to unpack the cyclical nature of familial abuse, together with a side order of disdain for the machinations of the psychiatric profession, grinds toward its conclusion with a sense of doom-laden inevitability, leavened only by the creepy feeling of ‘scientific distance’ from human behavior that characterizes so much of the director’s work.

With the exception of a startlingly effective horror movie ‘kill scene’ early on, no diversions, escape routes or sign-posts toward more conventional “entertainment” are offered to the viewer at any point, as Cronenberg’s determination to rub our faces in the nasty, serious business of his troubled characters’ case histories, and to generally go there each time we kinda wish he’d hold back, make this both, a) a remarkable and shocking film, and b) an extremely poor choice to open a Saturday night horror movie marathon. Cue uneasy silence and sombre discussion as the credits roll.

A couple of observations that occurred to me on this particular repeat viewing:

1. There are some striking (if entirely incidental) crossovers with the narrative of Andrzej Zulawski’s ‘Possession’ going on here. Given that that film was made roughly a year later, could we consider the possibility that a few scenes and ideas might have sunk into Zulawski’s consciousness during a screening of ‘The Brood’ and popped up again during the writing process for his own film..? Somehow I’d imagine no one ever dared put the question to him, but… just a thought.

2. Oliver Reed’s performance in ‘The Brood’ is really good. The character he plays is extremely ambiguous, as scripted –  a cruel arch-manipulator whose Frankensteinian disregard for professional ethics was solely responsible for letting the film’s supernatural menace get out of hand, but who also backs up his ‘tough love’ attitude with a genuine streak of well-meaning heroism - yet Reed embodies these contradictory impulses brilliantly. At this stage in his career, you’d have very much expected him to phone in his turn in a cheap Canadian horror flick from the nearest hotel bar, so it's surprising - and great - to instead find him putting in one of his best ever turns as a ‘serious actor’.

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers 

(Fred Olen Ray, 1988)

And meanwhile, at completely the other end of the horror spectrum... let’s just say that if you knowingly sit down to watch a film named “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers”, you’ll get exactly what you expect and/or deserve from this godawful piece of weirdly charming crap.

Camp as a row of tents and artlessly shot on what seems to be the same grubby, rescued-from-a-bin film stock utilised by John Waters on his early features, this basically seems to chronicle what happens when some people who theoretically work in ‘the film industry’ lower their expectations and instead begin competing with backyard SOV gore flicks made by horny teenagers – and if we think they should know better at their age, well, we’re the ones who paid money to watch the bloody thing, so who’s laughing now?

Telling the tale of a generic hardboiled private eye (yes, there are “private dick” jokes aplenty) who ends up on the trail of a cabal of prostitutes who belong to a quasi-Egyptian “chainsaw cult”(?!) overseen by TCM’s Gunnar Hansen (who, it turns out, has the least appropriate speaking voice imaginable for playing a cult leader), what we’re left with is essentially a non-stop pep rally for the delights of good ol’ LA sleaze, nothing more, nothing less, but if you’re in the right mood, then hey - dive right in.

The ostensible “gore scenes” – in which topless women wave chainsaws at off-screen victims whilst stage-hands throw blood and rubber limbs at them – are a disgrace to all concerned, whilst the relentless one-liners and tongue in cheek misogyny runs the gamut from knee-slapping to groan-inducing depending on your state of mind. Happily on this occasion, I found myself veering more toward the former. (“What do ya do, pray to Black & Decker?” was my favourite).

By the closing act, the whole thing has built up enough of a head of steam to become pleasantly deranged, and when we get to Linnea Quigley’s body painted double chainsaw dance, well… what need I do except repeat the phrase “Linnea Quigley’s body painted double chainsaw dance” and remind you that this film is commercially available on various formats? Actually, she doesn’t appear to be dancing all that effectively with those saws (they must have been quite heavy), but what the hell, it's still great, and Fred Olen Ray wins again!

Seriously though, for all my nose-holding, I had a pretty good time with this one – it’s a heck of a lot more likeable and good-natured than the Troma-type films it was presumably in competition with upon its initial release, and it’s really short too, so as long as you don’t make the rookie error of watching it sober, you’ll be home safe.

----

To be continued (I hope)....