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As this Hammer horror melodrama from 1972 opens, schoolteacher Albert Mueller (Laurence Payne) catches his wife (Domini Blythe) and one of the young village girls making their way through the countryside in what's apparently a quite unwholesome direction. He follows, but is unable to prevent their entry to the castle of Count Mitterhaus, a notoriously sexy vampire who holds the whole village under his sway. As the cuckold tries to marshal the shiftless men of the village for a rescue mission -- experience with the Count seems to have whipped everybody here into a sense of meek helplessness -- his wife offers up the young blond virgin to the vampire, who rips the girl's throat out. The woman tears her own clothes off and Mitterhaus makes love to her. When the villagers are finally coerced to make their way to the castle with torches and grim looks, they carry away the dead girl and do battle with Mitterhaus himself, who ends up impaled through the chest on a pointed wooden stick while cursing the village in a stage whisper. Albert's wife is brought outside and whipped as punishment for her betrayal, but finally runs back into the castle, which is set afire and burns into ruins. And then the opening credits roll.

I can only hope that reports of Mike D'Angelo's death are, once again, greatly exaggerated. Even if they come from Mike D'Angelo himself.

Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I'd think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives -- known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project -- has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.




Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.

Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What's especially interesting is, at low resolution, it's sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.

Not long ago, a friend emailed me to say she had recently NetFlix'd a "little B movie." She said she enjoyed it, but her tone suggested that she was reluctant to go too far with an endorsement of such a lowbrow film. Had I seen it, she asked?

The name of the movie was Exotica. Why did that blow my mind?