Weird times, man. I've been laying low surfing around Amazon Prime like a deranged 'American Picker' of psychotronic oddities to collect and lay at your feet like so many dead mice. It's become even wilder and weirder out there then ever- all sorts of groovy stuff can be found under the plainest of rocks, while classics are unwatchable thanks to terrible transfer/uploads. Llike with psychedelics or that 'other' Amazon, the one in South America's swingin' rain forest, you need the right guide.
I'm that guide, man. Quick! Turn left!
AVOID Synergy Archive (silver/gold trim); Cinema Classics (pale blue w/palm tree background); Moving Picture Archive (blue velvet curtain backdrop); 'Digitally Remastered' (dark yellow letters on black) These three labels denote 2nd or 3rd generation dupes-sometimes even wrongly formatted image, often edited and mangled and otherwise dispiriting --far worse than not seeing the film at all. Also, unless you're really crazy, AVOID anything recent - no matter how good the poster looks. Anyone can get their film uploaded to Prime these days and while I'm sure they're all special in their way (especially if you made it or star in it), if they're on video, HD or no, it's just not the same as film. When it comes to crap like this, my brothers, film is all.
Now you know the secrets of successful slumming, so I'm giving you Dracula's living dead secret vault of international vampire titles, twelve in all, chosen just as much for the streaming image quality as for content- in no particular order. Keep your hands away from the actors' mouths and kick back your shoes into the fire.
PS - I'm not shilling for Prime or actually giving you a password. But especially as Netflix only seems to care about their original material these days and Hulu has terrible organization skills, for the weirdness hunter Prime is, dare I say it, the new Kim's Video.
All Images below are Screenshots from Prime Itself to give you quality assurance.
BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE
(1969) Dir. Al Adamson (USA)
** 1/2 (Image quality - B-)
Somewhere between the hick carny hustle of Steckler, the macabre jouissance of Wood, the amateur competence of Mikels, and the laissez faire shrug of William Beaudine, Al Adamson waits for thee. More often than not his stuff is terribly preserved and even when it looks good it still seems like you're watching a home movie by a kid who's been following a film crew around and stealing shots for his super 8mm opus while the real cast is at lunch. His set-ups are lazy; his sound mixing done by Charles Haltrey and the Deaf Eggs, but sometimes I'd swear there's something magical about it all when it clicks into place, as it does here, if you're in the right mood for accidental Brecht totemism and sick with fever and lack of sleep and love all the same movies and TV shows as every kid did in the early 70s, i.e. Satan movies in the theater we were too young to see, Universal horrors on local TV Saturday afternoons, and Addams Family reruns weekdays after school** 1/2 (Image quality - B-)
2. VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA
(1960) Dir. Renato Polselli
(1960) Dir. Renato Polselli
*** (Image quality: B+)
(In Italian w/ English subtitles)
Luisa (Hélène Rémy), the gorgeous platinum blond heroine in this atmospheric Italian horror film looks a lot like a hippier, less conventionally svelte Eva Marie Saint or Gunnel Lindblom, which for some reason is enough in and of itself for me to love this film. The busload of showgirls breaking down near an old creepy castle wasn't old hat when this came out (1960) so it's exciting to watch the ladies improv vampire dance routines and the naturalistic way the plot coheres around seemingly random exchanges. Equally compelling is the natural rapport between Luisa and her equally platinum-blonde Nordic-ish roommate Francesca (Tina Gloriani) conjuring weird parallels with Persona and Stage Door. And when Francesca gets punked out by the vampires, she tries to lure Luisa into the fold via weird quasi-lesbian bed sharing and head games. Great kinky stuff. As with Rome's neo-realist 'found value' approach to its countries post-war ruins, fine atmosphere is hewn from the living rock of a bombed-out castle and its winding catacombs, so once sealed crypts are accessible by Third Man-style stumbles down piles of rocky rubble, and the transfer on Prime has got that pencil sketch black and white photographic richness one sees in Italian neorealism of the same period.(In Italian w/ English subtitles)
The vamping is divided between the mysterious Countess Alda (Maria Luisa Rolando) and her bullying male consort --she acts all endangered by him, who wears a goofy mask with ping pong eyeballs but becomes younger and 'handsome' after drinking blood, an unusual smart touch that taps into the insecure amped-up macho vanity at the dark heart of Italian manhood. He drinks from the ladies once they've drunk from the men--cuz he's not gay or anything. And as soon as his lovely young victims come back to life he stakes them, shouting "I'm master of my domain!" and kicking their coffins shut. Meanwhile he's really supposed to be the consort of the vampire princess, if in sooth he's more like her captor, or is he just pretending he is to soothe his vanity? Irregardless, the Amazon Prime print is pretty pleasing and the Italian language being spoken over subtitles helps it keep that arty, neorealist edge to go along with a jazzy score, the theremin-goosed passages of the vamp moments that contrast with the diverting muzak-style filler when the composer (or library cue DJ) can't discern the emotional tenor of a particular scene. Ciao bene!
(1966) Dir. Curtis Harrington
*** (image quality: A-)
For the longest time this film, the tale of crashes, deaths, and rescues involved with escorting a vampire alien ambassador from a Martian moon to Earth, was available only in faded ugly pan and scan TV prints/transfers, but now thanks to small miracles its even in Blu-ray in a gorgeous full color restoration, so it glows much like its compatriot in ALIEN-inspiring, 1965's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (see: Growing up Alien) and man it looks great. Coming from the Corman/AIP school of using Soviet bloc sci fi film effects footage with newly shot story and American actors, Curtis Harrington used footage from a Russian film Corman had acquired, 1965's MESTRE NASTRESHU, a film almost Bava-esque in its deep reds and eerie gel lighting. Those colors are now on Prime's print perfectly popping. They not seem quite 'right' but they're better than right.
Acting as a fine mirror to issues of gender as well as Soviet-American relations of the era, the footage is matched brilliantly to its respective sides - the Dionysian and ornate deep red Russian footage for the female vampire Martian ship and the red planets - while the Earth scenes and space ship interiors are in nice powder blues and cafeteria grays on threadbare Apollonian sets with John Saxon and Dennis Hopper amongst the astronauts, Basil Rathbone and Judi Meredith on the ground by the monitors. The result is a perfect metaphor for the repulsion/attraction between the US and Russia... Together it's like an unholy union written in the stars and read by lovers holding hands across the Berlin wall. When the astronauts of both planets get together for the flight home, the hypnosis starts and the blood drinking and the orders from on high not to harm the specimen, no matter how many human astronauts perish like so many sailors on Dracula's London-bound schooner. This time however, everyone but John Saxon agrees: save the queen! If she wants to drink Dennis Hopper's blood just warn her first: the thorazine is long gone!
4. CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD
(1964) Dir. Ákos Ráthonyi
**1/2 (image quality: B-)
Dubbed in English
Eurosleaze mainstay Adrian Hoven is a possible vampire aristocrat squaring off with a square visiting detective over a hottie blonde (Erika Remberg) in this cool black and white German variation on the mid-60s neorealist Eurosleaze horror film. The real stars are the cobblestones, Remberg's lingerie, the crazy tunnels and some nice expressionistic shadows/ At night the villagers are offed by a weird silhouette of jazz hands at the window leading the visiting detective towards his aristocratic quarry. Not quite as lurid as a Franco film or as procedural as a krimi, it manages to have one foot in the aftershave and sideburns of its era and another in the timeless past. As for the story, the vampire aspects are cleverly folded into a class study and there's hints of the dream poeticism we find in later films like Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The print/transfer on Amazon is okay, could be worse--kind of sepia-tinged but whatever. Find the old Image DVD which has enough of better upgrade to make it worth it, if you like it. (To me, it's not quite as robust as Vampire and the Ballerina, but if you're feeling the groove after seeing that one, go for this. Remberg will make up the difference) Gordon Murray dubbed it and released it in the States on a double bill with Tomb of Torture, also on Prime, but in worse shape.**1/2 (image quality: B-)
Dubbed in English
(1971) Dir. Jean Rollin
*** (image quality - A)
in French with English subtitles
in French with English subtitles
Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille Dargent are a pair of cute young outlaw clown girls on the lam who wind up trapped in a crumbling vampire chateau with mausoleum, graveyard, castle, grounds with paths all winding back into itself in prime dream logic style. A kind of Ghost World for the Bataille set, but with vampirism taking the place of adult responsibility as eventually one of the wedge between the two plucky heroines-- one of the girls keeps her virginity and dutifully lures a wandering horny Frenchman to his death, Don't Deliver Us from Evil-style; the other falls for her quarry, losing her virginity to him (which she intentionally invites to save herself from vamp initiation) even enduring a flogging by her once-bosom pal to find where he is, to no avail (only to have the man shove her out of the way and run off later!) There's no doubt really that Rollin is rooting against him, despite his charismatic charm, and that's why it rules and why Rollin is no misogynist despite all the groping/raping of the brute underlings.
Prime used to have dozens (though he really only ever made the same film, over and over) of Jean Rollin's lyrical dream-like art school neurotica but--as befits the title and somber mood of the film--this is the only one left. (Not counting Zombie Lake); the quality is lovely if not quite magnificent, and should allow for pleasant napping. Stretches do seem to run by where you can feel Rollin not sure what to do next- maybe wishing he had a script. (the girls' initiation evening involves one sitting next to beta vamp lady playing piano for ten minutes, while the other goes into a red lit mausoleum and then comes out. The piano tune is pretty annoying by then but the red and blue gel lighting is nice and the somber mood inescapable. The scene last four hours it seems, going nowhere, ending in one of those "party's over" speeches that seems to denote an auteur ready to declare the subject matter of his trilogy exhausted. As Acidemic contributor Ethan Spigland writes:"Despite the gratuitous nudity and requisite sex associated with the genre (and often demanded by producers), Rollins films never come across as misogynistic. In Requiem for a Vampire, the men tend to be either brutish, foolishly gullible, or impotent. The last vampire accepts his fate with quiet dignity, but possesses no sexual magnetism. His female vampires, by contrast, convey an erotic power. Though women are associated with the chthonic, we never sense the fear of the castrating phallic mother that one encounters in such films as Lars Von Triers Antichrist . Rollin seems to be in thrall to their ecstatic jouissance. "(more)
6. FEMALE VAMPIRE
(1973) Dir. Jess Franco
*** (image: B-)
In French with English subtitles
In French with English subtitles
The period of 1971-1973 was the peak for vampire lesbian movies coming out of Europe and based loosely on Le Fanu's "Camilla". 1971 alone had about 300 versions all with the surname of the lead vamp being named either Karnstein or Bathory. This Jess Franco masterpiece, also known as The Bare-Breasted Countess,Erotikill, and Loves of Irina exists in a myriad of versions, each tailored to the needs of each country's censors vs. distributors. In some place lurid gushing violence was cut out and pornographic close-ups inserted; in other places vice versa; and in the version on Prime- not in HD but still looking pretty spiffy - both sex and violence is cut out. Yet the movie's still 100 minutes and has plenty of innocuous softcore gyrating (it's hypnotic in a second chakra aligning miasma, rather than either erotic or flat-out boring), misty morning standing around with Lina Romay--excellent as the mute Irina, the usually naked and certainly last countess in the Karnstein lineage determined to be the last of her race, living in self-imposed exile on the strange island of Madeira (where the film was shot - a beautiful place off the coast of Portugal with mountains that seem straight of some Alpine Herzog existential wandering), slowly decimating the population thereon of all its libertines male and female. She kills by biting the enflamed sexual orifices of her victims and feeding on their hormonal essence, or something. Jess Franco plays a Van Helsing come to kill her, and running ineffectually up against her hulking manservant
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But the real magic comes from Jack Taylor, the Franco go-to for steely-eyed leading man, "for the auteur who wants a John Phillip Law all to himself. " He's a doomed poet ever at his writing machine, pining for death and in love with her even before they meet --Baudelaire approves from beyond the grave--and with the whispering wind and trees and glowing white sky, the weird love between them manages to be eloquently conveyed with barely a word... mostly by embracing and then running from each other--each saddened by the inevitable damage that their love will bring upon themselves, but only as far as it will cut that love short. Taylor's piercing blue eyes seem legitimately haunted over that blonde mustache and straggly hair- this is no longer his masculine puffery from a few years earlier in Franco films like Succubus, this is real genuine existential dread, the kind alcoholism or drug addiction brings when you use your own warped perceptions and poor health as a tool to strip away the layers between you and the harrowing void... you know... for your poetry.
If you're only a casual viewer of the 60s-70s Eurosleaze genre it can be hard to understand why anyone would give Jess Franco a red cent to make his godawful films--so let me take this unruly space aside to say a few words. One--hey, they're on film, and aesthetically always interesting --they capture a mood --Franco has a good eye for framing and composition and using what's around to fit his theme rather than the reverse (has he ever actually built a set?). It took me seven tries to get even fifteen minutes into Female Vampire back in 00. I figured I was looking at inept student art film pornography. But the eighth try I was sick with a cold, strung out on cough medicine and half-asleep and the magic took ahold of me like a pair of velvet claws soggy with vaginal seas and zees. I 'got' it, realizing Franco's style is to inverse Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, i.e. an adventure not of mind but of sight and sound. With touches of Herzog and Malick swirled in its trans-national naturalism, vintage 60s cocktail boots and post-giallo lounge lizard loucheness--all sorts of nouvelle vague tricks to mask mismatched dubbing in a dozen languages by an international cast (with as small amount of dialogue as possible, to save studio time in post). No wonder Orson Welles was such a close colleague (in his Euro expat food gorging, budget-grubbing latter days). Franco and Welles have a lot in common - though for every one film Welles "finished" there'd be thirty Francos, their cumulative overall effect is pretty much the same.
A lot of this hard-to-peg existential ennui, I've deduced, is bred from language barriers in everyday life that globe-trotting filmmakers encounter, way more numerous that the average American is used to--but when they do I'd betcha Franco movies, and Antonioni, too -- even Harmony Korine-- start to finally make sense. In our modern era too it can be hard to imagine the appeal of such films as this and Rollin's Requiem; but remember that this was the era before hardcore pornography was street legal. These kinds of films were risque but still respectable. Sure this is an incoherent jazzy mess, but so is seduction, sex, love - no matter how airbrushed Maxim wants to make it. This is sex with a bush, baby, and there's nothing coy here. Franco isn't trying to woo you into some kind of Mulveyan eye possession but to devour you from the outside in via a vagina dentata clockwork zipper.
As far as music, though he's not Ennio, Daniel White is always a sublime collaborator for Franco. He lathers on the swirly cacophony, the silken lounge lizard eyes-across-the-casino seduction, the breathy swooning hotel room breathing, and through it all a layer of constantly chattering birds, bats, peacocks... it's hypnotic, so when they suddenly stop we're left to wonder if its intentional or Franco just got bored and forgot, or they ran out of noise. It doesn't matter; if you're nodding off in your easy chair, the blood beyond your eyes drained from either arousal or too many cigarettes, then you can nod off for minutes and not miss a thing. The idea with slowness in movies of course is to, as the saying goes, 'slow your roll' in the same way meditation works when it works, which is never.
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In that sense, Female Vampire isn't a movie at all really, but an X-rated writhing melancholy jazz riff on one - the way Coltrane doesn't play "My Favorite Things" except in the beginning and end of his long-form improvisation, instead be-bopping some ghostly counterpoint echo/antecedent of it, a kind of negative space reverse fill in. In that way, a Franco vampire bat is not a flapping piece of rubber on a string but a bat-shaped hood ornament. If you can dig that, you're ready to watch the six hour opus by the late great Paine Dreying.
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| Change the name to 'Kuersten' and she could be talking about me! |
A lot of this hard-to-peg existential ennui, I've deduced, is bred from language barriers in everyday life that globe-trotting filmmakers encounter, way more numerous that the average American is used to--but when they do I'd betcha Franco movies, and Antonioni, too -- even Harmony Korine-- start to finally make sense. In our modern era too it can be hard to imagine the appeal of such films as this and Rollin's Requiem; but remember that this was the era before hardcore pornography was street legal. These kinds of films were risque but still respectable. Sure this is an incoherent jazzy mess, but so is seduction, sex, love - no matter how airbrushed Maxim wants to make it. This is sex with a bush, baby, and there's nothing coy here. Franco isn't trying to woo you into some kind of Mulveyan eye possession but to devour you from the outside in via a vagina dentata clockwork zipper.
In that sense, Female Vampire isn't a movie at all really, but an X-rated writhing melancholy jazz riff on one - the way Coltrane doesn't play "My Favorite Things" except in the beginning and end of his long-form improvisation, instead be-bopping some ghostly counterpoint echo/antecedent of it, a kind of negative space reverse fill in. In that way, a Franco vampire bat is not a flapping piece of rubber on a string but a bat-shaped hood ornament. If you can dig that, you're ready to watch the six hour opus by the late great Paine Dreying.
7.GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE
(1972) Dir. John Hayes
Movie - **1/2 / image: A
Movie - **1/2 / image: A
There's a lot of small things work well together: the moody avant garde score by Jaime Mendoza-Nava. - the way we see the film's large female cast as adult women, not 'girls' with evolved 70s women's lib attitudes towards sex and careers (maybe stemming from work on soaps), but also we see them through the lens of a vampire sex addict (that of the typical of the delusional misogynist who misreads women's sexual cues and then blames the woman for being a tease) as in the strange inversion of the BIG SLEEP bookstore scene at the local library. I also like the tight angles and cramped vibe making us wonder/presume the film was shot in actual houses and apartments rather than on sets. It works: everyone is pressed up against each other and powerless to escape - which makes the final knock-out, kick-the-railing-in brawl between father and son all the more cathartic. But even then, beware! This is one nightmare that will never end.
8.DOCTOR VAMPIRE
(1991) In Cantonese w/ English subtitles
*** / Image - B+
What better way to follow two slow-moving but aesthetically pretty Eurosleaze vamp pics than with this boisterous fast moving albeit flatly shot Hong Kong horror comedy from 1991? The typically boisterous fast-moving horror comedy action follows a virgin intern as his car breaks down and he winds up crashing a ritzy vampire happening, losing his virginity to a cute young neophyte vamp (a scene that manages to be erotic, scary and touching, all while other guests are being killed downstairs in crosscuts), then returning to work trying to deal with his sudden craving for blood (luckily he works at a hospital and has two loyal fellow intern comrades). Meanwhile the Count (he and his main concubines are all white, allowing for colonialist subtext)--who samples all the collected blood of his various ladies after the end of the evening back at the mansion--goes crazy for our hero's virgin blood (she must have bit him before taking it) and demands she bring him back to the castle so Drac can drink deep. But she's young and maybe in love! The stage is set for a hilarious, chilling showdown. The film leaps along various familiar threads but does so with speed, agility and --if not exactly aesthetic miracles, who cares? There's an awesome brawl at a Tibetan monk demon-repelling ceremony (allowing for everyone to don ceremonial garb) and tons of cool touches like use of a surgical laser, an operating light shaped like a cross, giant syringes full of acid, and a magical Buddha statue the Count makes the mistake of spitting on.
9. THE VAMPIRE'S KISS
(1988) Dir. Robert Bierman
**1/2 / Image - A
A lot of us debauched 90s New Yorkers wistfully thought of this film while being underwhelmed by American Psycho. Nic Cage is way crazier, without trying half as hard, as Christian Bale. He's less rich--more a publishing expect--but is certainly even more of a bully, especially after being seduced and drained of precious bodily fluids Jennifer Beals as a lithe urban vampire who seduces and destroys him --- but is she real? Certainly something is happening to him --either vamping or latent paranoid schizophrenia, Cage at his most over the top--he's young, hungry and hammy-- to push nearly every scene way way off the deep end, torturing his bewildered, hard-working Latina secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso) and his patient, clockwatching lady shrink (Elizabeth Ashley). It can all be a little overly improv-manic, at times scenes drag on just so Cage can get it all out of his system, but as a kind of male version of REPULSION and NYC addiction-alienation, it can't be beat.
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Alas, Bierman also has to crosscut constantly, almost mockingly, to the staid working class foil secretary and her drab proletariat sanity, like riding the subway (giving $$ to beggars) etc. We don't need to have a contrast to know off the rails our Cage is, and every second with her is a second that could be spent fathoming the weird succubus style insanity at the core relationship with Beals. As with Ferrara's ADDICTION because the vamp attack occurs in the anonymity of the big city - and there are no witnesses in the boudoir- we wonder if it really happened at all - and is still happening - or if Jennifer is just an anima projection, a schizophrenic mirage. Be it either way, vampire or hallucination, you'll laugh, cry, and kiss reality goodbye when you dig Nic babbling to the street pole 'near end.' And if you hadn't realized back in '88 that Cage--who'd just come off Raising Arizona (1986) and Moonstruck (1987)--was a staggering wild talent --genuinely edgy as in the edge between genius and hammy terribleness (that adenoidal affectation of a voice in Peggy Sue got Married gave his early fans grave doubts about the former), we knew it now; we were firmly convinced. True manic craziness has seldom reached such heights, before, since, or ever.
10. DEATHMASTER
** (image - A)
(from: Manson Poppins): Lensed by the great DP, Bill Butler (JAWS, DEMON SEED) in great countercultural AIP semi-documentary style, part Kovacs elaborate pull focuses, part Gordon Willis darkness and wall paint texture, the film might be a bit shoddy special effects wise but it looks great. Manson Poppins
11. THE VAMPIRE BAT
(1933) Dir. Frank Strayer
**1/2 / Image - B
(1970) Dir. Andy Milligan
**1/2 / Amazon Image: B
If you too are rooster-level fascinated by the white chalk line between low budget high camp art (Warhol, Fassbinder, Waters) and the junk basement DIY drive-in filler (Steckler, Lewis, Mikels) then you know that somewhere between the outsider sub-Sirkian soap smut of Kuchar, the drag grotesquery of Smith, the magickal high butchness of Anger, the punk sneer of Jarman and the pulpy opportunism of Al Adamson, there lurks Andy Milligan, a pioneer of grindhouse local NYC DIY bathhouse gay art smut, back before Stonewall, when gay films were considered easy busts by vice squads with too much time on their hands. Maybe it's that sense that the cops might bust in and grab the works that makes Milligan's films seem so urgent and important. A modern sort of theater group-ish reworking of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, the Body was blown up from 16mm to 35mm for distribution, as was the style and the result is washed-out to the point that all the whites have gone quite turquoise from grief, and blacks turned electric grey--and everything in between either a primary color or the look of stressed finish, which fits well the Gothic austerity of the decaying British abbey where most of the action occurs. The story of a few days/nights in the life of a vampire couple--the "reverend" Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed), wife Susan (Jackie Scarvellis), their hunchback servant Spool (Berwick Kaler), and some thuggish underlings, There's lots of transfusions, betrayals (and in a surprising scene, an apology) and enough talk about needing the right royal blood to waken Illuminati conspiracy theorists from their twitchy slumber as they seek the right descendants to be forced into breeding new vampire heirs to their house (who once imprisoned set about trying to befriend Spool into helping them escape). Meanwhile circumstance is compelling them to move to America as the cops are closing in on their cemetery digs.
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All in all pretty impressive considering Milligan was his own cinematographer, editor, wardrobe mistress (using aliases for each job no doubt to make the film seem more 'professional' - we've all done it). Maybe my expectations were just so low thanks to Weldon's damning praise but I admire it's lurching, strange edits and occasional lapses into a kind of Masterpiece Theater flourish. It works to create a mood where anything can happen, and I like the use of sudden cuts to the three witches/sisters/brides of the vampire (all in different color capes) emerging like a pack of silent hounds whenever a guy or girl is chosen for death (rather than slow draining). If you actually enjoy this film all the way through, maybe it's true what Weldon says, there's no hope for you. But since Amazon Prime also has Guru the Mad Monk, you can just keep rolling unto the dawn.
Or you can turn off the TV and go out in it... maybe there is hope yet. But there's so much more to see down here in the bargain crypt....of Dracula's Prime. And who knows when they'll disappear? By the time you read this they could all be gone... or worse...
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PS. LATE ADDITION (9/29/16):
VAMPYRES
(1974) Dir. Jose Ramon Larraz
*** / (Amazon Image - B+)
By the time Vampyres came out the lesbian vampire cycle was beginning to wane, but it's still one of the best, less lyrical and lulling than Franco or Rollin maybe but more satisfying in total with good pacing and interesting offbeat characters, a moody dark green patina (lovely indoor candle lighting and outdoor twilight gloom) and a scenario any man could related to: being lured to the house of two hot girls after the pub closes (gorgeous blonde innocent Anulka Dziubinska and terrifyingly carnal Marianne Morris) getting drunk with them by the fire and then waking up drained and alone, or worse, dead. In short, an indispensable primer on the dangers of priapism no man (or lesbian) should be without.