Control The Blood

Spent some time yesterday watching Joel Schumacher's Blood Creek again, and was once more impressed by what a fine villain Richard Wirth of the Ahnenerbe is. Like a lot of classic Nazi mystics, he has that particular combination of charisma and drive vs. almost ideologically non-specific lust for power--I mean, the War's very securely over by this point, but winning the War hasn't been his aim for some time now, any more than it's Kroenen and Ilsa's aim in Hellboy. He's moved on to a goal that's somewhere between personal revenge on Liese Wollner and her family and just seeing the damn thing through, to see what'll happen. Also, because he's played by Michael Fassbender, we get the additional what-the-fuck-have-you-done-with-yourself spectacle of his degeneration, the ruin of a good-looking intellectual into something utterly inhuman, skin blackened, rucked and gum-purging, which mainly still wears Wirth's leather trench-coat because that's all it can find, down there in the root cellar. Throughout, he remains both consistently smarter than you expect (I love that he can still talk, and plausibly, though it's obviously a bit of a chore) and more animalistic, switching on a dime from thinking strategically to being consumed by parasitic hunger--Pavolv's bell rings, even in the middle of a fight, and he comes running.

Otherwise, the lures stay intact: Viking ancestor worship, FUTHARK crooning, animal zombies, a ritual coat of bones. Dominic Purcell reprising his general role as Toughest Man Alive, under extremely difficult circumstances. I even like the Supernatural pilot tone of the ending. Just wish they'd done more overall with Liese's knowledge of rune-magic, though I guess I can understand that a lot of her stoic fatalism and why-do-anything? depression probably comes out of being a ninety-year-old in a seventeen-year-old's body.

Actually, it's sort of creepy how strong the appeal of Ahenenerbe shenanigans is for me, as a narrative element. I'll watch (and read) a remarkable amount of crap just on the promise of pseudo-scientific archaeology/arcanistry overseen by somebody with S.S. lightning-bolts on their lapel--straight-to-DVD movies, James Rollins books, what-have-you. Man, I wish somebody would pick up and publish "[Anasazi]", already.

All right, I think I'm awake now. Going to try and break another 500 or more today, if possible.