You all may have noticed (or not if you’ve never read my work, and shame on you) that most of my stories include sex or at least the mention of sex. Weird, romantic, disturbing, funny, confusing; I like to write all the sex.
The best sex writing, though, is the kind erotic horror inspires me to write. I didn’t realize I might actually be good at it until recently, when I was invited to submit something for DarkFuse’s Erotikos series. (which is going to be AWESOME, by the way) You can read the teaser story, GOOD VIBRATIONS, written by yours truly, for free. Here’s a look at the trailer.
To say I was excited to be involved in this series would be an understatement. I wasn’t sure what Erotikos editor, Dave Thomas expected, because a lot of people, publishers included, have different ideas of what the genre is…
I’ve had quite the love-hate relationship with this film. The first time I saw it, I hated it, much to the disgust of the friend and massive Gary Oldman fan with whom I was watching it. (‘But he’s Sirius Black!” she kept saying. ‘Sirius Blaaack…!’) Sirius Black from HARRY POTTER or not, it made no odds to me. I just didn’t get his whole deal.
The thing about me is that I like a nice sexy Dracula. Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, even Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu in Werner Herzog’s beautiful, dreamy film; these are all my boys.
I’ll also accept a terrifyingly scary head vampire in lieu of a sexy one. For example, Max Schreck as Nosferatu in Murnau’s ground-breaking 1922 masterpiece, or the wonderful Reggie Nalder as Kurt Barlow in the 1979 TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s SALEM’S LOT.
I guess I just don’t like Gary Oldman as Dracula, and I didn’t dig him either as Old Dracula, with his ridiculous ‘two loaves of bread’ hairstyle; as Young Dracula with those dreadful dark blue eye-glasses he sports; or even as ‘Bye-dear-I’m-off-to-war-Dracula, in which persona his suit of armour and long unkempt hair/facial hair makes him look like a cross between an armadillo and the Cowardly Lion from THE WIZARD OF OZ.
The second time I saw the film, about a year later, I totally got it and had a whale of a time. I still don’t like Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Dracula, a fictional character very close to my heart, but I guess sometimes you have to give something a little distance before you realise that you love it…
So, what is the actual deal here? Well, this is a rather superior re-telling of Bram Stoker’s supernatural- and super!- literary classic, DRACULA. Gary Oldman, as if you didn’t know, lol, plays the aristocratic vampire Count from Transylvania who has waited centuries to be reunited with the love of his life, Elisabeta, who took her own life due to the cruel lies of others.
The poor tormented Dracula, who really is a most sympathetic character, finds his Elisabeta again in nineteenth-century England. In a nineteenth-century Englishwoman and prim, proper little schoolmarm, to be precise.
While in his alternate guise of a young(ish) nobleman, he quickly gets under the skin of Winona Ryder’s Mina, the reincarnation of Elisabeta, and wins her unswerving allegiance. Not too surprising, considering Mina’s romantic alternative is lowly estate agent’s clerk Jonathan Harker, woodenly played by the hilariously uncharismatic Keanu Reeves.
Winona Ryder, an actress I don’t normally like, is actually quite acceptable as Wilhelmina Murray, who wants to be faithful to her beloved Jonathan, but just can’t help falling for the lonely charms of Dracula, even while the dopey Jonathan is still trapped in Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, being sexed up nightly by Dracula’s three hot, sex-starved wives.And complaining his scrawny arse off about it too, if you can believe that!
Dracula, of course, is simultaneously leeching the life out of Mina’s bezzie mate, the slutty Lucy Westenra, played by Sadie Frost. The scenes of seduction between Lucy and Dracula in the guise of a hideous wild animal manage to be both sexy and mind-blowingly wild. Red-haired Lucy also has a loyal little band of male followers surrounding her who gladly provide her with their blood when Dracula takes hers.
Cary Elwes plays Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur Holmwood. Richard E. Grant, another actor for whom I’ve never much cared, plays suitor Dr. Jack Seward, whose insane asylum needs to be brought seriously up to code, as it still uses the power-hose as a means of subduing hysterical inmates. Billy Campbell plays the third suitor, the rich AmericanQuincey P. Morris.
Ultimately though, even the clever ministrations of Anthony Hopkins’s wonderfully dramatic and over-the-top Professor Van Helsing (actually, lads, is he drunk?) fail to save Lucy. She succumbs to Dracula’s blood-sucking ways, as we know from reading the book (so don’t be saying I’m dealing out spoilers here, it’s a one-hundred-and-twenty-three-year-old book!), then comes back as a vampire and is put to death appropriately in some brilliant scenes in a gloomy crypt by Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood.
Good old Gary Oldman as Dracula then swaps haemoglobin with the not unwilling Mina in some surprisingly sexy and even tender scenes. Meanwhile, Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood and the rest of Mina’s suitors, Jack Seward and Quincy P. Morris, are running around like headless chickens trying to destroy and/or render useless the boxes of earth from his native Transylvania without which Dracula is unable to travel. They eventually burst in on the loved-up couple, but are they in time or is it much, much too late to save Mina from a fate worse than death…?
The scenery, costumes and special effects are excellent. Lavish and visually stunning, as we might expect from director Francis Ford Coppola. I have no beef with these. This is not a low-budget affair.
The Vampire Chicks are absolute knock-outs, but even they can’t coax a life-like performance out of Keanu Reeves. Is it because they’re un-Dead, or is he just a bit crap…? I’ll leave you guys to make up your own minds.
I guess the reason I sometimes feel less than tender myself towards this film is that its cast is not the cast I would have personally chosen. But don’t worry, folks, the film’s done quite spectacularly well over the years even without my personal seal of approval, lol, and I’m sure it’ll continue to do so. Over and out.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
Creative Writing and Memoir Classes March 24, 2021 This first part of our class notes today is to all of you! You are writers. Do you behave that way? Do you plan your day for writing? I am suggesting that you set an appointment with yourself and your writing space three to five days a […]
Earlier this week we acknowledged the year anniversary of the covid-19 lockdown. It has been quite an emotional week – while the last year was a lengthy period of reflection and practising gratitude, the realisation of the enormity of the situation affected me more than I expected. I’ve already spoken about this in previous posts, […]
If you would like to have your work published in The Poetry Bar send your poem, a few words about yourself and the link to your blog and Instagram account to the e-mail poetrybar1@gmail.com Source: The last of you – Pen to paper
‘Well, out here is the court of Ted! Here, what I say is law!’
I saw this film on video- yes, that’s right, video, lol!- back in 2002, and it scared the living daylights out of me. Since then, I’ve toughened up a lot and I’ve read a lot of the books about American serial killer Ted Bundy, so I’m well able for it nowadays. It’s still a very gruesome watch, mind you.
What I like about this version is that it doesn’t really glamorise Ted and his awful crimes. The more recent film, starring Zac Efron as the man himself, was a drastically sanitised re-telling of Ted’s story– EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (2019)– and portrayed the brutal woman-killer and rapist as a heart-throb beloved of women everywhere.
This film really shows the ugly side of Ted. Okay, sure, he’s good-looking and well-dressed, although I personally think those daft dicky-bows and checked jackets make him look a bit dorky. All he’s really got to commend him to women is a pretty enough face and the gift of the gab, and that’s all you need with some women.
But here, even in the opening scenes, set in the early 1970s, we see him as the kleptomaniac Peeping Tom and disgusting chronic masturbator that he really was, making those ugly weird gurning faces when he ejaculates or when he looks at himself in the mirror. Was he a narcissist as well? Probably!
His modus operandi is well known by now. We see him chatting up attractive young brunette women smoothly and slickly, often wearing a cast on a ‘busted’ arm so that women will help him to his car with his books or whatever else.
When they’re not looking, he hits them viciously over the head with a tire iron and shoves them in the car. Then he takes them to a deserted place, where he rapes, tortures and murders them. Nice guy, huh? He returns, often several times, to the body ‘dump sites’ to have sex with the rotting corpses, until such time as they’ve become too decomposed for his enjoyment.
We see him putting make-up on a woman’s severed head which he’s brought home and is keeping in his house. Disturbingly, he carries the wrapped body of an unconscious or dead woman out of her house and into his car in front of a passing group of four people and a dog, who apparently don’t see anything strange at all in what he’s doing.
In between the abductions, rapes and brutal murders, he studies law (sporadically), works as a volunteer in a telephone crisis centre (that’s a bit like the Samaritans over here) and checks in with his girlfriend, single parent andstudent Lee and her young daughter, for a dose of much-need family life. After one murder in particular, he’s starving with the hunger and Lee obligingly cooks a meal for him!
This film doesn’t make Lee (based on Elizabeth Kloepfer) look too good either. In fact, here, she’s a whingy, whiny nightmare who wants to keep tabs on Ted round the clock, but Ted has the wanderlust (he cruises for women constantly in his little VolkswagenBug) and he just doesn’t operate that way.
She whines at his habit of seeing other women but doesn’t take any decisive action, she asks him what he’s thinking when he’s quiet (a big no-no), she pesters him about meeting his parents when it’s clear there’s some mystery there that he doesn’t want discussed, and she doesn’t question it when she finds a pair of handcuffs in Ted’s car that he says he’s never seen before in his life.
She’s not comfortable about being tied up and asked to play dead when they’re in bed together, but she doesn’t stand up to him because she’s weak and afraid of being on her own. I’m not judging her for that. I’ve done the same thing myself in the not-so-distant past. It’s a very ‘woman’ thing to do, shure.
Anyway, most of Ted’s ‘big moments’ are in here, but with the womens’ names mostly changed. There’s his spectacular abductions of, not one, but two, women from Lake Sammamish State Park on the one day in sunny July, his two escapes from prison, and his horrific attack on the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, during the second of these escapes.
We see his attempted kidnap of Carol da Ronch (1974) from the Fashion Place Mall, Utah, by the phoney ‘Officer Roseland,’ and one of Ted’s most shameful accomplishments, the abduction and murder of twelve-year-old schoolgirl, Kimberley Leach. Not that the other murders weren’t shameful too, but you know what I mean. A child, a twelve-year-old little girl…
The justice system threw the book at Ted after that. Retribution for his heinous crimes eventually caught up with him on January the twenty-fourth, 1989, when he was executed in the electric chair.
He manages to have sex in prison (bribing the guards was a common practice) and even conceives a child while inside, a daughter, with his new girlfriend and champion, Carol Ann Boone. Although we see the sex, there’s no mention of a child here.
We see the big bold brave Ted bawling like a baby when he has to have his head shaved and his rectum packed with cotton wool prior to talking that last walk to ‘Old Sparky.’ It’s as plain as day that all his pity is for himself, though, and not for the beautiful young women with families and talents and potential whose lives he stole.
What happened to ‘the court of Ted,’ Ted…?A big man around women, he shrinks and shrivels inside himself when he’s dealing with big tough men who are not going to stand any bullshit from him.
Like I said, this film doesn’t glamorise Ted, but instead makes him look like the cowardly weasel he really is. EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE introduced Ted to another generation of young female groupies, but it’s not really the most accurate picture of the man and his crimes. This film from 2002 comes pretty close, I think. Check it out, but be aware that it’ll give you the willies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.
Before I get to my post today, I wanted to share some wonderful news. Her Dear & Loving Husband is now officially an award-winning novel. James and Sarah have won the Coffee Pot Book Club Book Award for highly recommended novels. Cool, right? And now, on to the show. I love it when a story…
We hear TONS of writing advice, but the only true writing advice is “do what works for you.” But, that doesn’t mean some of that advice doesn’t have its place — if you use it the right way.
In part 1 of this to-be-randomly-appearing series, I talk about the top 3 writing advice bits I hear:
– Write what you know
– Write every day
– Show, don’t tell.
They all have their place… if you don’t take them to the extremes.
on Helping Writers become Authors: Last night, after I finishing a book, I found myself curious about the author. So I googled for images and found several pix. In the old days, this would be unthinkable. How many of Charles Dickens’s or Jane Austen’s readers knew what they looked like? But nowadays, an author photo […]
BARE BEHIND BARS. (1980) DIRECTED AND WRITTEN B Y OSWALDO DE OLIVEIRA. STARRING MARIA STELLA SPLENDORE, MARTA ANDERSON, DANIELLE FERRITE AND NEIDE RIBERO.
‘In a South American prison, life is cheap but sex is cheaper…’
Not to be confused with the animal exploitation film, BEAR BEHIND BARS (relax, there’s no such thing; I made it up!), this is a sexploitation flick of the ‘women in prison’ genre. It was banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1994, though that’s since been reversed, I do believe.
There’s no excuse for anyone to be watching this film, really, except that it’s chock-a-block with female nudity, lesbianism and simulated sex, both heterosexual and same-sex. No gay men though, only heaps and heaps of lesbians!
The scenes of nudity and sex are threaded together loosely by a thin plot involving a sadistic female prison warden, a prostitution ring and an escape attempt, but don’t worry! I promise you that nothing as tiresome as a plot will get in the way of the bouncing tits and jiggling asses you’ve come prepared to see.
The film is set in a women’s prison in Brazil. Conditions are disgusting and insanitary and the food is slop. The staff are all-female, all good-looking and their blouses are always falling open to reveal braless bosoms. They carry whips, which they’re not shy of using, and they like to watch the inmates showering, doing nude keep-fit in the dreaded exercise yard and getting off with each other.
The inmates are all young and beautiful with perfect, sun-tanned bodies. Nearly all of them sport the white bits round the hips and over the boobs that imply lots of bikini-clad sunbathing. They wear thin shirt-dresses and are forbidden to wear underwear because it makes it easier for them to hide contraband like weapons and drugs.Yes, easier, lol.
They all have thick dark bushes of pubic hair because women still had pubes back then. They weren’t ashamed of them because everyone had them. It’s only the modern era that has taught women that hair anywhere but on your head is a bad thing and must be immediately decimated.
There’s absolutely no privacy for toileting or bathing in the prison; everyone has to muck in together and, if you saw the state of the place, you’d agree with me that ‘muck’ was really the operative word.
The ice-blonde, alcoholic aristocratic female head warden, Sylvia, likes to get down and dirty with the new inmates. She also likes whipping them and inventing sadistic tortures for them, and she sells some of the choicest plums in the prison- by which I mean the girls- to rich millionaires as sex slaves with no future. Inmates are often ‘accidentally’ whipped to death and must be buried, with all records, in the already overcrowded prison cemetery…
The prison nurse, Barbara, is a Marilyn Monroe lookalike and soundalike. ‘I simply adore raspberry pudding,’ she says in a breathy, baby-voice while gorging from what we’re supposed to think looks like a carton of spunk, for crying out loud!
She hasn’t a clue how to take someone’s blood pressure but she knows how to check a pussy or a crack for a knife, a razor-blade or a bag of weed, and also how to take sexual advantage of a nubile young newbie who’s far from home and crying out for a bit of comfort.
There’s male-female sex in the film too, in the form of an hilarious encounter between a prison officer and a dark, hairy, heavily-moustached local man who comes to the prison to deliver a consignment of brooms, of all things.
He grabs the prison officer’s breasts from behind while she’s ticking off figures on a list, and the next thing you know, she’s having wild, uninhibited nudie sex on the prison store-room floor with her exceptionally hirsute, sad-faced middle-aged Romeo.
Together they enact pretty much every position from the Kama Sutra, including the very hairy one known as sixty-nine. When her lugubrious Lothario eventually takes his leave, he wishes the prison officer he’s just royally shafted ‘a Merry Christmas to you,’ and she does the same. Funny isn’t the word…!
There are a lot of scenes showing derelict and dilapidated shanty towns and the most abject Brazilian poverty in the bits where some prisoners manage to escape and see a bit of the countryside around the prison, but I’m not convinced that any real attempt at social commentary is intended here.
I forgot to mention that here, the ‘screws’ or prison guards have sex with the inmates too. There’s one mad scene where a gasping, half-naked ‘screw’ is standing splay-legged and orgasmic outside a locked cell while hands come out of the cell’s food hatch to manhandle her pussy and breasts.
Still, it’s not as mad as the scene where someone’s carved a perfectly acceptable, if oversized, knob, to use as a dildo, out of an actual pineapple! Still, it makes a change from the whole prison having to share the only other dildo all the time, taking turns and then passing it from cell to cell on a string…
They’re all mad in this prison, if you ask me, sex-mad, and, if you’re planning to watch this silly, filthy movie, then you’d damn well better be sex-mad too, that’s all I’m saying…!
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.
sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris 