My paramour, the oft-mentioned Bettie comes from Sicilian heritage. She doesn't know a damn thing about Sicily, she's never seen any of the Godfather movies in their entirety ("I'm not sure how it ends, but I'm pretty sure someone dies", she chirps from the kitchen), and twice I've had to explain to her what omerta meant. But she can whip together a pretty nice red sauce from scratch, even if it's more Northern Italian than Sicilian. She felt that she didn't let the sauce simmer enough, and she stole some of my Hungarian wine to thin it out, but I think it turned out swell. It was a Saturday night with nothing on the horizon, so after a little pasta I poured cocktails. Bettie had a nice Californian White Zinfandel masquerading as an Old Fashioned, and I had a Mint Julep which was actually (yet again) the nicely dry Egri Bikivar, which literally translates as Blood of the Bull.
And animal blood ties in nicely to the second installation of my recent Lovecraft film-fest. The Resurrected, released in either '92 or '93. Yet again, a film-maker tackles ole' H.P.'s "The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward", this time Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon has directed or written a sizeable chunk of films, some bad, most indifferent, but deserves some small notice in the pantheon of Horror Film for two reasons. 1. He was the principal writer on 1979's Alien (according to post-production history, it was his initial draft, and not the subsequent rewrites by Walter Hill or David Giler which went before camera). 2. More than any other filmmaker it is Dan's fault that we genre junkies and (pop) culturally aware people know that zombies eat brains.
See, in most zombie flicks prior to 1982, zombies shambled around mindlessly, sure. Once George Romero had his way with them, they munched on human flesh. But it was O'Bannon's The Return Of The Living Dead (itself an unofficial spin-off or, at best, feature-length homage, to Romero's NOTLD) that first imprinted the extremely memorable and moaned dialogue of: "..Brains...More...Brains..." in our skulls. Even people who have never seen a zombie film where the offending undead munch on the frontal lobes are aware that they hunger for our cerebral cortexes and surrounding tissue. Hell, even Bettie knows this, and she started to watch NOTLD once and turned it off due to a case of the heebie-jeebies.
side note: it is possible that bettie comes to this knowledge through repeated doses of my playing Monolith's horror (and HP Lovecraft, natch) inspired First-Person-Shooter, Blood on the PC. It's a fun game, complete with references to Kubrick's The Shining, Raimi's Evil Dead 2, elder gods, insane monks, and shambling axe-wielding zombies groaning: brains ad naseum as they rush at you...
But that is neither here nor there.
Our bellies pleasantly stuffed post-pasta, Bettie settled down on the WD, and I in my chair for a comfortable Saturday Night viewing:
O: "Oooh! It starts with a storm..."
B: "All good horror movies do."
O: "Yeah, and a lot of bad ones."