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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Overall, Blacula isn’t a bad time. It’s too long and too slow but it’s interesting to see how Dracula and Dorian Gray get kinda mashed together for one of the first times. Blacula will strike again, despite his untimely end, later this Horror Watch. See you then muah haha

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

He comes to Dracula’s castle to try to stop the slave trade and ends the movie voluntarily walking into daylight when he fails again to keep his beloved wife alive. It’s so gothic, you wonder why it wasn’t in the book. Also, did Francis Ford Coppola steal that for his Dracula movie??

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Again, not sure this is actually the first, but this is the first movie in the Halloween Horror Watch where Dracula is specifically a love interest and not just stalking a lady for what she can offer (money, land, blood). Blacula is actually a tragic figure!

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Ultimately, things play out very solidly like you would expect for a horror movie. I expected WAY more camp given the title. Camp, as a concept, is even name-checked by the gay couple at the start of the movie. But this is pretty straightforward. It even has the first tragic love story for Dracula.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Because it’s the 1970s, there’s a cop subplot with a savvy Black doctor who figures out vampires are the problem but cannot put together than Mamuwalde is the source for far too long. He’s paired with a white cop who is shown to be notably less good at his job or caring until a vamp almost gets him.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Mamuwalde is involved with Luva’s reincarnation, and he has the honor of being the first Dracula to actually bang the lady he stalks through the movie. We are so in the 1970s blaxploitation folks. I dunno if Dracula got any before this movie but he didn’t in the ones I watched.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Blacula is rather dashing, though his vamping out is done à la Jekyll and Hyde to disfigure him when he’s a monster. It’s funny how a very 70s dude accuses Blacula of having no drip when he blends surprisingly well, even with a cape. The movie is not camp for something that should be so camp.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Blacula is the first movie to make hay of the geometric spread of vampirism. In the Lee/Lugosi movies, there were always other vamps, but their numbers were few. In Blacula, everyone bit is adding to the infestation. A cop is attacked by the horde and immediately abandoned as lost.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Unfortunately, Blacula takes out his centuries of blood edge play on a couple of queer characters who buy Draculas estate, including Mamuwalde’s coffin. I know the movie is just “of its time,” but the F-slur is thrown around a lot. Not mentioned: the pair of gay art dealers are a mixed racial couple

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Luva, the wife, actually gets a brutal death of being walled in alive with her newly vamped husband who is chained in his coffin to suffer her death and his own hunger. When Mamuwalde, now Blacula, rises, he kinda has a right to be pissed.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Beginning with Blacula! We open on the most “is this stucco convincing?”-ly silly looking castle. It looks like a Ren Faire set so naturally we are at Castle Dracula and two members of African royalty are his dinner…guests. Mamuwalde will unsurvive when Dracula turns him. His wife doesn’t.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

Not including the Hammer Dracula films I watched last year there are at least FOURTEEN Dracula films in the 1970s to get through. And this is with me pruning out any tv shows or ensemble monster movies! I might have another year of Halloween Horror Watches for just non-1970s Dracula!

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 3h

There were so many Dracula movies I didn’t get to last year, I’m bringing back DRACULA as the theme again this year for my Halloween Horror Movie watch. Now that I’ve hit the two sort of pinnacle classic Draculas, Lugosi and Lee, I am going chronologically on into the 1970s. Now playing: Blacula!

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

And Sparky, an African Grey, aged 44 years.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

Dornoch, a faithful friend, shares a stone with Gargoyle (no epithet). Sphynx, Spock, and Sambo. Two different dogs named Eva, each with birthday balloons by their markers. Dandy, who passed in 1922, set alongside Bubbles who passed exactly 100 years later. Haymarket Dora. Sam the Siamese.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

I like the headstones for the one dog that was well loved and for the families of cats one person memorialized each time one left. The stones with pictures and reliefs carved into them and the metal plaque on a stone that just says “Ditsie.” Chubby Butterscotch and her austere sister Heidi.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

Some more I love and have to mention: —Gemini, the beautiful cat model —Sweet Baby Choo Choo —A Maltese named Dillon, his picture of him wearing a fedora —A Yorkie named Viking —Quillie, whose name is carved into a relief shaped like a sheet of parchment —Jessie, from da Bronx

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

For Major, for Anisette, for a cat named Beer, for dogs dead 100 years and their people who have likewise passed on, I am just gonna sit and sniffle my heart out.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

People have really been loving on their stinky angel babies forever and that is beautiful.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

Well I picked a terrible day to walk by a pet cemetery. I am sobbing sitting on a bench looking at people who have, for over 130 years, loved small animals so much they wanted others to know about it. Whenever I think humanity is a waste, I will have to remember this place.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

That’s my Drake! He was a COVID kitten along with his brother, Carrot.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 9h

I have never liked kids nor been a fan of being around them. It means I’m often around others like me but who HATE children. It is supremely uncomfortable. Kids deserve to exist! Without being harassed for just existing!

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 10h

This is a day she will think of for the rest of her life with joy. You are a wonderful parent.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 10h

Losing this dog broke me, not gonna lie. My grief in losing him was followed one and two years later by the loss of his cat brothers. I cannot think of any of them without getting teary and they have all been gone for years. Love on your fur children everyone.

The handsomest gray cat and tuxedo cat are posed next to one another in a patch of ivy.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 10h

Five years ago this week, I said goodbye to the only dog I’ve ever had. I didn’t remember it was this week until my baby sister, who was so kind as to drive me to the appointment where we put him to sleep, told me she was thinking of me. He’s now been gone longer than I had him. RIP my little man.

The world’s sweetest senior Chihuahua is cuddled up to by a tiny gray and white kitten.

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Reposted by Feral Cat Lady

Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 13h

In the span of one week, Tennessee tried and failed to execute Christa Pike, Texas carried out the execution of Jamaal Howard, and Curtis Flowers—a man who spent 22+ years on Mississippi's death row for a wrongful conviction and was finally released in 2019—passed away at 56. This country, man.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 14h

I have been go-go-going more than I usually do. I admit, I am a sloth, so that just means I spent a weekend doing fun stuff but, like, all weekend. So by the time I get to this weekend, I still need to do stuff but I don’t waaaaaanna……

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

In short, if you want to have a bad, unsatisfying time watching some great performances nonetheless, I guess this is for you. I hope Gisondo and Winter are remembered at Oscar time along with Pattinson.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

It might have roped in better the gun-on-the-mantle of his professional jealousy of a colleague doing actual news, too, showing Hansen doing podcasts while the other guy is on TV nightly news. Just a lot of options that would have been more than Primetime was.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

It would have engaged in a topic not seen enough in fiction: how people deal with the aftermath of losing celebrity. By all accounts, Hansen never really recovered or renounced the lane he found for himself. There’s drama there, too, drama that has nothing to do with feeling bad for pedophiles.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

Deflate the self-congratulatory defense of “we were stopping bad people” by showing how many accused people got around their arrests and convictions because of the show’s interference. That would have showed the hypocrisy of trying to run a trial by television.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

Primetime wants to make the case that the TV show was bad, run by callous people interested only in ratings and that’s bad, that’s the parallel to the predators in the show. But they’re not equal. Really, a better movie might have focused on what happened after the show went off the air.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

So the question is do we accept To Catch a Predator that is only “catching” “predators” for ratings? Some might argue yes. We have long since accepted outing people as white supremacists, sexists, etc online, this isn’t any different surely? But of course it is due to the power of a network.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

We have long since accepted reality tv but there is a tacit understanding, even if it can never be really planned for in its entirety, that reality “stars” agree to what is happening to them. That is not an option, obviously, with To Catch a Predator.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

I think this matters to me because I think there’s real “everybody sucks here, even if it is not to the same degree” about To Catch a Predator. It’s tricky to try to make a movie where the pedophiles seem sympathetic sometimes, but chumming out people’s lives for rating is gross, full stop.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

You can argue that abstracting from Dan at the center is done because that narrative is “cliche,” I suppose. Or that Hansen is the star of the show you’re making a commentary on. So what? Predictable but narratively satisfying is better than a movie that is confused about its own message.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

Dan’s eventual sympathy for the movie’s devil is likewise sneered at. If Dan had been the center more than Hansen, it would have been a perfect three-act structure: Dan brought abruptly into a world that at first is shocking, then exhilarating, before finally becoming terrifying and he rebels.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

Instead, Primetime mocks Dan’s discomfort or his self-seriousness about his acting. Dan wants to be an actor, how pathetic. He gets a job where they just want him to look pubescent and he wants to build out his character, what a loser. He wants a mentor, what a BURDEN for our hero to deal with.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

If you wanted to say “this humiliation ritual of admittedly bad people who would have done bad things if the set up hadn’t been staged is still wrong itself,” Dan shouldn’t have been used as comic relief. He should have been the star. A film as minimally biographical as it is could have fudged that.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

Because Primetime is trying to draw the metaphor between the exploitation engaged in by To Catch a Predator and the predators themselves. Harder to do when the lead is the star of the show. However off-putting Pattinson makes him, Hansen isn’t a predator or vulnerable. He’s just a scavenger.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

A movie centered on Decoy Dan, lured in with minimal preparation into a televised sting operation, who has to resolve the conflict between the abusive nature of the TV people, the zealous passion of the volunteer pedophiles hunters, and repulsive pedophiles themselves, would have been haunting.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

The character beats are there, but I think the error was in making Hansen the protagonist when Decoy Dan ought to have been. Hansen is the Svengali, Dan is the man whose soul is at stake. Who has genuine emotions other than striving for striving’s sake.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

It’s really something to make pedophiles come off as more human than the guy supposedly catching them. It’s a choice, and I think it’s deliberate. But it feels hollow. More than that, it feels objectively actionable? Like some of this could be slanderous/libelous?

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

The movie does want to make Chris Hansen seem like an unfeeling shark, but it makes no effective parallel to his career striving by hurting others to the pedophiles he’s allegedly catching. There is no depth to Hansen’s anything. Not his love for family or his affair or relationships with colleagues

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

But if you live in that world, you should appreciate the dogged determination to get “the whale,” a prosecutor attempting to lure a child out for rape. It just cannot feel like a victory over a “powerful” man when opposed to him is a major TV network and cops armed like they’re taking on the Taliban

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 15h

To Catch a Predator was bread and circuses for the modern era, using humiliation and destruction rituals acted upon the last group of people no one (allegedly) has any sympathy for: pedophiles. This case is harder to make in a post-Epstein files world.

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