#Jamie and Williams interactions kill me every time though I NEED him to find out he's Jamie's son

[the-halfling-prince]

Most recent episode of Outlander I watched was low key so funny at the end

Fuckin Marseli was like "listen, so... doctors take an oath to do no harm. Good thing I'm not actually a doctor" and killed that bitch. Jamie walks in to her freaking out because she killed someone and just goes "damn that sucks. But shit happens."

[johnnymundano]

Prom Night (2008)

Directed by Nelson McCormick Screenplay by J.S. Cardone Music by Paul Haslinger Country: Canada, United States Running time: 88 minutes CAST Brittany Snow as Donna Keppel Scott Porter as Bobby Jessica Stroup as Claire Davis Dana Davis as Lisa Hines Collins Pennie as Ronnie Heflin Kelly Blatz as Michael Allen James Ransone as Detective Nash Brianne Davis as Crissy Lynn Kellan Lutz as Rick Leland Mary Mara as Mrs. Waters Ming-Na Wen as Dr. Elisha Crowe Johnathon Schaech as Richard Fenton Idris Elba as Detective Winn Jessalyn Gilsig as Aunt Karen Linden Ashby as Uncle Jack

Theft Alert: All images from IMDB

Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow; working hard here, bless) is the only survivor of a family massacre perpetrated by Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech; looking very Sean William Scott), a creepy teacher with a boner for her. Tonight Donna’s Prom Night is being held at a swanky hotel,  but tonight is also the night Richard escapes from The Home For Creepy Teachers With Wayward Boners. Everything you expect to happen happens, just a lot less interestingly than you would expect for a slasher movie, certainly for one that cost $20 million. Prom Night (2008) is like an experiment see if it possible to make a slasher flick so inoffensive and dumb it could be screened at tea time on The Disney®©™ Channel. It turns out it is in fact possible to make such a thing, but unfortunately no one would want to watch it. It actually makes you hanker for Prom Night (1980), as low-budget and timeworn as that disco slasher may well be.  

For starters, Prom Night (2008) is not a remake of Prom Night (1980) despite what anyone says. Fuck that noise, someone obviously just wanted to use the title. End. Of. They are both slasher movies which take place on Prom Night, but that’s it. I know this because I watched Prom Night (1980) recently for the first time, and last night I watched Prom Night (2008) for the last time. Prom Night (1980) has a mystery surrounding the identity of the killer, which keeps you awake and which also has a surprisingly strong emotional pay off, whereas in Prom Night (2008) we know who the killer is from the off, which is boring and has no pay off at all. Essentially then, this is the difference between the two, one is a bit amateurish but very entertaining, while the other is slick as snot on a door handle and as dull as ditch water. 

Ultimately only one Prom Night successfully evokes the youthful exuberance of the night in question, which is important as I am 50 and English, so I have no personal experience whatsoever of a Prom Night. Also: get off my lawn! Prom Night (1980) makes it look like a fantastically enjoyable event at which hormonally crazed kids dance enthusiastically to fantastically simplistic disco. Apparently the movie was shot with the cast dancing to real, popular disco hits until the makers realised you have to actually pay to use other people’s music (?!who knew!?). Being a bit strapped for cash they had the soundtrack composer Carl Zittrer cook up some home-made disco beats at roughly the same tempo so the visuals and sound would still gel. Carl Zitterer did an excellent job.  A bit too excellent in fact, since the similarity was still so pronounced a $10 million lawsuit was brought against the movie (and settled for $50,000 – phew!). A small price to pay for one of the most cheerful and fun dance sequences I’ve ever seen, particularly as I didn’t pay it. Prom Night (1980) is a decent slasher flick but the dance floor sequence is just pure joy.  Prom Night (2008) makes Prom Night look like a shit night club where nobody knows anyone else there; seriously, the interaction of the core group with everyone else, who they apparently have known for years, is ridiculously minimal. And the songs are the kind of heatedly sexual nursery rhymes I am generationally disposed to dislike. I just don’t get it, basically. You crazy kids! “Who’s your daddy? And is he rich like me?” isn’t so much a song lyric to me as a reason to call the sex police. And while technically the dancing in Prom Night (2008) is smoother, the dancing in Prom Night (1980) is more realistically ramshackle and energetic. 

Also, in Prom Night (1980) the killer, whoever they are, is refreshingly human (they slip on the slippery floor at one point, etc) but in Prom Night (2008) the killer is a tediously efficient killer; which is odd because he’s just a school teacher with a creepy boner for one of his female students, which explains none of his killing efficacy. By rights he should just be crying while wanking over the school yearbook, as I imagine most creepy schoolteachers with boners for their female students do. Maybe creepy schoolteachers with boners for their female students find that reductive and a little offensive of me, and that’s a real crying shame there, because the last thing I want to do is offend creepy teachers with boners for their female students. Every school has that one teacher who dates his female students “secretly”, and as the female student ages out of school he replaces her with a new female student. Maybe you are that guy. In which case you need to hear this: Dude, you are creepy. No one is impressed; they are creeped out. Preying on children is not cool. And if they are in school they are children, I don’t care how developed their chest is. A light prison sentence or some intensive therapy are what you need, creepy teacher dude, not high fives and Budweiser with the bros. (I do apologise for the fact I went to school in the 1970s leading to my not acknowledging that creepy schoolteachers can also be female, and the students being creeped on can be both female and male; with any combination of gender being creeper and creeped upon. I guess everyone sex creeping on everyone else, well, that’s progress? Well done, everyone. Personally I would have tried to phase out the whole creepy-schoolteacher-with-a-boner-for-their-student thing but I guess expanding it across the gender spectrum is certainly one way to go.)

In terms of cast Prom Night (1980) only really has Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen as “names” but everyone is okay, and the characters are all quite quirky and sympathetic. Prom Night (2008) might not have many “names” but it has a far more professional level of acting, which is a win for it. But, alas, while there are real actors in Prom Night (2008) and they all try hard with what they are given, what they are given is so lacklustre and generic it is dismaying how much effort they probably had to put in just to make the characters seem as bland as they do. There’s the black couple; he’s good at sports, she’s a bit sassy. There’s the co-dependant bickering couple; he’s controlling and drinks too much, she’s whiny and, well, she’s just whiny. The gym teacher is sparky and enthusiastic like absolutely no gym teacher I’ve ever met in my half a decade existence, but very like every gym teacher in American high school set shows on Nickleodeon. The most interesting character is Detective Nash, and that’s only because James Ransone appears amusingly miscast; unless a cop who resembles Christian Bale if he was a candleblogger is your idea of a movie cop.  Obviously that’s nobody’s idea of a movie cop, luckily though Idris Elba knows what everyone expects from a Movie Cop and delivers it with lightly self-parodic gusto. Of course   Idris Elba is unarguably a charismatic screen presence; I know that because most of the things I’ve seen him in are godawful but he is always a pleasure. Maybe it’s just unfortunate choices on my part and I’m actually missing a string of entertainment pearls starring Idris Elba, even so Prom Night (2008) would come in on the poopy side of the mark sheet. But, again, even in something as poopy as Prom Night (2008) Idris Elba is fun. Here he’s The Big City Cop so he walks like he’s prolapsed and rasps his dialogue like he regularly gargles lava-hot cawfee. The enthusiasm Elba invests in playing this poorly written part makes up a bit for the utter idiocy of the character. Ultimately though nothing could distract from Detective Winn’s stupidity, so colossally boneheaded are his actions in the movie.

Prom Night (2008) seems to take place in an alternate universe where every authority figure is a moron. In a better slasher flick this might be a genuine attempt at a point, but here it’s just bad writing. Sure, you might think that everyone in authority in the universe we actually inhabit is a moron, and at this point in history you would have a strong case, counsellor. Exhibit one being our current lying coward of a Prime Minister (I write this in the year 2020). But the authority figures in Prom Night (2008) are actually more excessive in their cretinous obliviousness than even that lying shyster. Having (eventually) realised that the killer is loose Idris Elba visits Donna’s guardians, who decide not to bring her home immediately or have her placed in police custody for her own protection, because it might “embarrass her” in front of her friends and put a big downer on this magical night of awful dresses, terrible music and light fingerbanging. Idris Elba, a policeman remember, goes along with this, which is kind of epically dumb, but then he raises the dumbness stakes by going to the Hotel Swank to keep an eye on Donna. Literally. He actually stands by a bit of silver scaffold in the dance hall for hours, and stares at the back of her head, occasionally rubbing the top of his own head and pursing his lips. Incredibly this does nothing to locate and apprehend the killer, who is merrily killing staff and guest alike at his own convenience. Idris Elba even asks at the desk if they have seen the killer, even showing them a picture (which is some amazing police work for Prom Night (2008)). But when asked by the desk clerk if he should be concerned Idris Elba says ”no”. Later when the fact that the killer is in the hotel killing people can’t even be avoided by Idris Elba he pulls the fire alarm and the entire hotel decants chaotically onto the street. Because there’s absolutely no way the killer could get out unnoticed during that, right? Absolutely no way at all. Nu-uh! Essentially most of the people in Prom Night (2008) who die do so because Idris Elba’s character has all the brains of a shoe.

And a lot of people do die in Prom Night (2008), but don’t get too excited slasher flick fans, because it doesn’t really feel like it because the kills are largely inoffensive stuff; which in a slasher movie is kind of offensive in itself. Prom Night (2008)  tries to distract from the lack of splatter with sudden bursts of convulsive editing which just makes it look like the killer is over amorously cuddling people to the floor, or re-enacting his favourite Super Bowl tackles. The only clue that his victims are dead comes later when we get to see the body with some dainty little red marks on their clothes. So averse is Prom Night (2008) to actually getting bloody that one character has their throat slashed and so little claret splashes it’s preposterous. If you were asleep next to somebody with their throat cut you’d wake up sodden in the red stuff, you wouldn’t have to turn them over to discover they were dead. Maybe Prom Night (2008) should have invested some of that $20 million in a medical professional acting as a consultant to tell them that throat wounds tend to, you know, bleed profusely since it’s all the blood inside you coming out of that new hole that kills you. Okay, sometimes it’s the shock of blood loss that offs you but, whatever, there’s a lot of blood involved. There is, I admit, one artfully shot kill where an arc of blood spatters a sheet of plastic but mostly the effects in Prom Night (2008) are less Tom Savini and more Tom and Jerry.

Sadly then, when it comes to this particular Prom Night (2008) you’re better off staying at home and washing your hair.

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

hunger - chapter 8

Hunger master post

Stiles blinks his eyes open and finds himself gazing up at a series of beige ceiling panels. He feels his usual burst of fear at being in an unfamiliar place, and tries to move. Metal clinks, and his arm catches. Stiles turns his head to discover that he’s handcuffed to a bed.

He blinks again.

He’s in a hospital room. The air is cold and smells of antiseptic. There are sticky tabs stuck to his chest, and one of those clip things on the end of his finger. The heart monitor next to the bed starts to blip excitedly as Stiles’s fear rises.

He’s still wearing his jeans and his socks, but where are his shirt and his hoodie? His shoes? And his knife? And—

And his dog.

Stiles claps his free hand over his mouth to muffle the sob that tries to escape him. He twists as the door to the room opens, and the cuff rattles along the rail of the bed.

It’s Scott’s mom.

She shows him a small smile as she crosses toward his bed, and that’s enough to end him. His sobs grow louder, and he tries to roll onto his side and pull his knees up. To preserve what little dignity he’s got left, or something.

Mrs. McCall is having none of that. She leans over him and puts her arms around him. “It’s okay, Stiles. You had a panic attack and you were pretty out of it there for a while, but you’re safe here, and it’s going to be okay.”

She smells a little of the hospital, but mostly of warmth and safety, and the body wash Stiles used in the McCalls’ shower. Stiles returns the hug with his one free arm and cries into her shoulder.

“She killed my dog!”

Mrs. McCall flinches, and Stiles remembers that her interaction with the dog hadn’t been exactly positive. She’s too nice to mention that though. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“He protected me,” Stiles cries. “He saved me. When I was sick he brought me food.”

“Oh.” She tightens her hold on him. “Oh, Stiles.”

Behind her, the door opens again.

Mrs. McCall straightens up, her expression hardening as she turns on the man entering the room. “You’d better be here to take this child’s handcuffs off, Jordan.”

Her sudden fierce protectiveness amplifies the ache inside Stiles’s chest. It’s like an echo inside an otherwise empty cavern, all that space carved out where the people he loved used to be. His mom. His dad. The dog.

Parrish steps forward, fumbling for his keys. “I had to use the bathroom, Melissa, and I didn’t want him giving me the slip.”

“Am I under arrest?” Stiles asks.

Parrish hesitates, then stands beside Melissa and unlocks the cuff from Stiles’s wrist. “Yeah.”

Melissa juts her chin out. “What for?”

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” Parrish says.

“But I didn’t—” Stiles thinks of his knife, but of course that’s not what Parrish means. “I didn’t tell the dog to attack.”

“That’s not what Deputy Argent says,” Parrish tells him.

Of course it’s not, because Kate Argent is a fucking liar.

Parrish takes the cuffs back and puts them back on his belt. He sighs. “Look, I’m pretty sure she’ll be happy not to file the charges if you help us out some.”

“She shot my dog,” Stiles says. “Why the fuck should I help her out?”

“You want to ride that attitude all the way to juvie?” Parrish asks. His expression is more concerned than angry. “And it would be juvie, right? You are a minor. So why not start with telling me your name, so we can get you back home where you belong?”

“Jamie Williams,” Stiles says. It’s a common name. It’s as common as John Smith probably, but not so obviously a lie. Stiles bets there are a shit ton of teenagers called James Williams in the system, and he’s willing to let the cops wade through every single one.

He catches Mrs. McCall’s gaze. Her mouth is a thin line, but she doesn’t speak up.

“Where are you from, Jamie?” Parrish asks.

Stiles just shrugs.

Parrish has that same patient look his dad always did when he was dealing with what he called difficult customers. Dad always said one of the signs of a good cop was them not taking it personally when someone was yanking their chain. Parrish seems like that sort of cop. Fair-minded, and slow to anger.

“Any reason you don’t want to answer that question?” he asks. His gaze is shrewd. “Trouble at home?”

“Nope,” Stiles says.

Parrish nods slowly. “Because if there was, then I could put you in touch with people who could help you out.”

Yeah no. Child Protective Services has been helping Stiles out for four years, thanks. He’s never going to be one of their success stories. And he knows that there are good foster families out there. Of course there are. Just that Stiles has always had shit luck, hasn’t he? He’s nobody’s shiny new son. Not with all the baggage he’s dragging along behind him like a crippled limb.

“No,” he says.

“Okay,” Parrish says. “Then I guess we’re going to talk about this at the station.”

“I guess we are,” Stiles says.

“Jordan,” Mrs. McCall says. “He’s clearly dehydrated and malnourished. The doctor wants to keep him here for observation until morning at least. I don’t care if you get a chair and sit outside, but I’m going to need you to leave him alone to sleep, okay?”

Parrish sighs again.

“Go,” Mrs. McCall tells him. “Outside. Sit.”

He retreats, and the door closes behind him.

“You bully cops a lot?” Stiles asks her softly.

“Only when they deserve it.” She wrinkles her brow. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t tell him your name, Stiles.”

“If they send me back to care, they’ll just lie to me again,” he says. The machine by the bed beeps faster as his heart rate rises. “They’ll put my back in some shitty placement where some shitty guy stands in my bedroom door and stares at me while he jerks off.” He drops his gaze so he doesn’t have to see the horror and disgust on her face. “You know what the real kicker is though? I wouldn’t have cared what happened as long as they let me visit my dad.”

Mrs. McCall curls her fingers through his.

“I would have been the best behaved kid in the world if they’d let me see my dad,” he says. It’s the truth. He would have let his foster mother’s boyfriend do whatever the hell he wanted if the right payoff had been on offer. “But either they’re punishing me or they’re punishing him, but they always came up with some reason I couldn’t go.” He swallows around the lump in his throat. “I made it as far as Fresno once before they told me the visit got canceled.”

He sees the realization flash through Mrs. McCall’s eyes even before she asks the question. “Stiles, where is your dad?”

“Mendota.” Stiles swallows again. “Doing thirty-eight to forty-three years.”

“Oh my god,” Mrs. McCall says, and a hand flies to her mouth. No, it wasn’t realization. It was recognition. “Oh my god. Your real name isn’t Stiles, is it? You’re Claudia Stilinski’s little boy! You’re her Mischief!”

 ***

 There was a time when Stiles’s face was known by most of the nurses at Beacon Hills Memorial. He was eight then. Mischief by name, they used to say, and Mischief by nature.

Memory is a funny thing.

It takes dribs and drabs and shakes them up and stitches them together and looks for the patterns they make.

At one time, Mieczyslaw Stilinski must have done something to stick in Melissa McCall’s memory. He was a fixture around the hospital for a few months, and then he must have been a footnote—that poor boy. First losing his mother, and now his father—but enough to snag in her mind.

And now the pieces have fallen back into place.

“My dad didn’t do it,” Stiles says, his voice quiet. “He didn’t. I came back here to prove it. Please don’t tell them who I am. Please.”

 ***

 Mrs. McCall is silent for a long while. She keeps a firm grip on Stiles’s hand, and rubs her thumb over and over his knuckles. Stiles has no idea what she’s thinking. He has no idea what she’s going to tell Parrish.

She leans in close, an errant curl of her dark hair brushing Stiles’s cheek. “In twenty minutes there’s going to be a disturbance on another ward. I’ll get Parrish to go and help. Go out the back entrance.”

She leans back again, and Stiles stares at her blankly.

“Did you get that?” she asks. She reaches down and picks up a bag from the floor. “Your clothes and your shoes. Stiles, do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Y-yeah,” he said, even though it seems too impossible to be real. “I understand.”

She squeezes his hand. “Don’t make me regret this, Mischief.”

Stiles nods, and uses his spare hand to wipe his eyes. “I won’t.”

 ***

 “I can’t believe my mom did that,” Scott says an hour later. He’s been saying it ever since he picked Stiles up from the hospital parking lot, in varying tones of disbelief tinged with admiration.

He lugs a pillow and a comforter down the basement stairs.

The McCalls’ basement is kind of a mess, but there’s an old pullout couch amid the stacks of boxes and assorted detritus, and it looks a hell of a lot more comfortable than anything Stiles has slept on for months.

“I’m really sorry about your dog,” he says.

Stiles hasn’t told him much about what happened, except that he had a run in with the police and the dog was shot. He doesn’t feel capable of saying much, actually. He’s still in shock, and he knows if he thinks for a second about everything the dog meant to him—

He pushes the thought away. He doesn’t want to cry in front of Scott.

He’s been at the house long enough to shower and change into warm clothes. His own clothes are in the washing machine. He watches as Scott makes up a bed on the foldout couch.

Stiles has put his shoes back on. He can feel the hard wedge of the folded paper under the arch of his foot. Luckily whoever took his shoes off him at the hospital didn’t check them. It must’ve been a nurse, not Parrish.

His knife, of course, is gone.

He hopes Scott hasn’t noticed he’s still wearing his shoes.

Because, fuck, he wants to stay here. It’s warm and it’s comfortable, and he’s pretty fucking sure that neither of the McCalls will turn him in now they’ve both made themselves accessories. But also…

But also the police aren’t stupid. It won’t take them long to figure out exactly who was behind Stiles’s disappearance from the hospital. Stiles is expecting a knock on the door any second now.

“Do you want to watch a movie or something?” Scott asks, his expression hopeful. “We can make popcorn.”

Stiles follows him back up the stairs. “Sure,” he says. “Popcorn sounds great.”

“So,” Scott throws over his shoulder, “Allison said she was checking her history on her laptop, and she wants to know why you were Googling her aunt?”

Stiles almost misses a step. “What?”

“Her aunt,” Scott says. “Kate Argent.”

Stiles’s blood turns to ice.

“Do you want plain butter popcorn, or caramel?”

“Um, plain butter?” Stiles isn’t sure he can hear his own voice over the roar of blood in his skull.

“Cool.” Scott heads for the kitchen. “So, Allison’s aunt?”

Stiles runs for the front door.

“Stiles? Stiles!”

 ***

 There’s a park on Jefferson Street. It’s quiet. Stiles isn’t stupid enough to sleep on one of the benches. Instead, he crawls behind the hedge of manzanitas that look like they were planted in an effort to beautify the maintenance shed, and curls up in the dirt to sleep.

It’s cold, and Stiles feels smaller and more alone than he has in a long time.