Amazonian Reviews

I gave some brief coverage to my presence on Amazon in "A Note on Amateurs" after  TFO (still hiding behind a variety of usernames) "outed" me.

So, I thought I'd share the reviews I've written for that site. Yes, even the ones that make use of "tnuocalucard".

Let's start with books (non-fiction):

• "Not all it's cracked up to be..." (June 3, 2002) for Leonard R. N. Ashley's The Complete Book of Vampires (1998).
  
• "Great Book!" (July 5, 2002) for the Kim Newman-edited The BFI Companion to Horror (1996).
  
• "An okay read, but could have been better..." (July 10, 2002) for J. Gordon Melton's Vampire Gallery: A Who's Who of the Undead (1998).
  
• "One of the few vampire books written by an actual believer" (October 11, 2002) for Montague Summers' The Vampire in Europe (1929).
  
• "A Wannabe Lestat?" (September 9, 2005) for Katherine Ramsland's The Science of Vampires (2002).
  
• "The First Non-Fiction Book on Vampire Hunters" (November 29, 2006) for Bruce A. McClelland's Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead (2006).
  
• "Highly Recommended" (6 Oct 2007) for Elizabeth Miller's Dracula: Sense & Nonsense (2000).
  

And now, the fictional variety:

• "sitting on the fence for this one..." (July 5, 2002) for Brian Lumley's Necroscope (1984).
  
• "good stories, but expected more" (July 5, 2002) for the Joe R. Lansdale and Pat Lobrutto-edited Razored Saddles (1989).
  
• "An ok read...I guess" (July 7, 2002) for Peter Tremayne's Dracula Unborn (1977).
  
• "Similar in VEIN to Tremayne's "Dracula Unborn"" (July 28, 2002) for Peter Tremayne's The Revenge of Dracula (1978).
  
• "They're baaaacckk!" (December 23, 2005) for F. Paul Wilson's Midnight Mass (2004).
  
• "Zombie in the Old West" (January 3, 2006) for Joe R. Lansdale's Dead in the West (2005).
  

Lastly, let's look at movies:

• "A "pop/corn" vampire flick" (July 7, 2002) for Count Yorga, Vampire (1970).
  
• "Even Von Goosewing is Better" (October 5, 2005) for Van Helsing (2004).

So much for TFO's "detective work"! I had to pretty much stalk myself.

Mortensen's Vampire Gets Covered

I previously discussed William Mortensen's illustration, "The Vampire", in "Staked Vampire Picture Source Revealed".

Here are a couple of books that use the iconic image on their front covers:

Raymond H. Miller's Vampires (KidHaven Press, 2004)

Wayne Bartlett & Flavia Idriceanu's Legends of Blood: The Vampire in History and Myth (Sutton Publishing, 2005)

Rzączynski Gains Fame Through Quotation

Magia Posthuma's most recent post, "De cruentationibus cadaverum", deals with Gabrielis [Gabriel] Rzączynski's 1721 work, Historia naturalis curiosa Regni Poloniae. It is often cited as an early text on vampires.

However, Jan L. Perkowski notes the following in The Darkling: A Slavic Treatise on Vampirism (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 113:

Father Gabriel Rzączynski (1664/5-1737) was a Polish Jesuit priest who wrote the first national history of Poland, Historia Naturalis Curiosa Regni Poloniae, (Sandomir, 1721). The text, which is in Latin, is on page 365, Section II of the Historia, but it is a quotation from the manuscript of another Jesuit, Father Gengell's Eversio Atheismi.

For the record, Georgio Gengell's work, Eversio Atheismi seu pro Deo contra Atheos libri duo, was published in 1716.

Make Them Stop!

Man, am I sick and tired of remakes.

The sheer amount they seem to be producing these days, is quite frankly disgusting.

I know I've written about it before, but it really gets my goat to read about them being churned out at the rate they are. Can't they let sleeping dogs lie? Is the modern movie-going audience seriously that fickle, that they can't bear to watch a movie older than, say, 20 years old?

Check out Upcoming Horror Films' list of remakes in progress. See how many of your favourites you can spot, dug up from their "graves", dusted off and regurgitated by Hollywood hacks.

To keep in tune with this blog's subject matter, here's a brief sample of vampire movies currently undergoing the remake treatment:

• Isle of the Dead (1945)
  
• The Monster Squad (1987)
  
• Near Dark (1987)
• Låt den rätte komma in [Let the Right One In] (2008)
  

I don't have a nostalgic view of cinematic history. Remakes are nothing new. I'm well aware of that. But, seriously, I feel like we're being bombarded with them at every turn.

I'd love to know if anyone has actually studied their output against those of previous generations. Surely we're making history here - of a more artistically-dubious kind.