Black Gate

Hollywood rediscovering an old story and reimagining it for a modern audience is always a reason to get excited, at least at first. Not all of these ventures turn out well, but I especially like when the source material hasn’t been explored previously in film. Such is the case with a play written by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.

Barrie penned Mary Rose between August 1919 and April 1920, and it was performed at the Haymarket Theater in London, opening on April 22, 1920. A year later Mary Rose was included in London’s “Best Plays” list. It then moved on to Broadway where it has since been revived several times, as well as in London, and always to rave reviews. A New York Times reviewer called the 2007 revival of Mary Rose an “elegantly plotted ghost story,” which is why I’m exceptionally excited to learn that Hollywood is finally taking up the tale.

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It’s as if Hollywood, or at least director Ti West, finally granted Black Gate photog Chris Z’s greatest wish.

Though his suggestions for movies I need to review have never it past the Big Cheese John O (“We do NOT work blue at Black Gate”), Chris Z takes enormous pleasure in creating fake email accounts and sending in suggestions like, “Please have Goth Chick review Zombeavers!” or “I’d love to read Goth Chick’s take on Zombies vs. Strippers!” Never mind that even if I had an inclination to accommodate Chris Z’s suggestions with more than an eyeroll, getting my hands on these movies requires using my credit card number in places it definitely shouldn’t be left on its own.

So, color me shocked when I learned about the movie X and the fact I could actually pull up into my local AMC Theater and see it, which I fully intend to do ASAP.

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Color me old fashioned, but there is something intriguing about a vampire story which comes straight from the region around the Carpathian Mountains. Granted, Serbia isn’t the original Transylvania. But due to the many regional conflicts dating back to the Middle Ages and their eventual land-locked status, Serbia shares quite a lot of folklore and traditions with its neighbors Hungary, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, and of course Romania.

Maybe because unlike Seattle, Serbia looks like a place where vampires would hang out; or maybe it’s the accent. But when I had the pleasure of visiting Hungary and Croatia, it seemed supremely likely that every local cemetery had a resident undead. It’s therefore no surprise that a new independent film from Serbia did so well at the Sitges International Film Festival, followed by Trieste Science+Fiction, and Raindance that it got snagged by Alarm Pictures for distribution in the US and UK.

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Sometime in the mid-90’s I was headed into one of my favorite shops for contraband Cuban cigars, located on the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, when who holds the door for me but Nicolas Cage. I had literally loved him in everything he had done up to that point including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Cotton Club and Racing with the Moon. This wasn’t too long after Cage had appeared in Wild at Heart which was intensely sexy in the weird David Lynch kind of way. And though I desperately wanted to stop Cage (was he single at that time? I don’t remember), if you don’t want to look like an obnoxious tourist in NOLA, you let people go about their business. So, I said “thanks” while looking at him as long as I dared, and went on in the shop.

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The Cursed (LD Entertainment, February 18, 2022)

Trust the Brits to create nightmares from nursery rhymes. You’re probably familiar with “Ring Around the Rosie” and its reference to the Black Death of the mid-seventeenth century. When children on the playground fall down laughing at the end of this rhyme, they are reenacting the plague in which a quarter of London’s population dropped dead. The “ring-a-rosie” referred to the circular rash appearing on the infected, and the pocket full of posies were the floral sachets people carried with them to mask the ever-present smell of death.

Charming.

However, I recently became acquainted with one I children’s rhyme I hadn’t heard previously. “One for Sorrow” is a well-known, traditional children’s nursery rhyme that relates to magpies. It describes a superstition regarding the number of birds seen at a single time and whether that number means good or ill.

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