vovat | Hotter Than Hellraiser

Last weekend was the Monster-Mania Convention in Cherry Hill, and we went on Saturday. I'm sure I've already written about how there aren't as many question-and-answer panels as there used to be, and I don't know whether this is because the convention organizers don't want to do them or the guests don't. The first two panels this time were with Craig Sheffer and William Fichtner, neither of whom we really knew, although they were both in some movies we've seen. The latter was a guy the Joker killed near the beginning of The Dark Knight.

The third was Heather Langenkamp, who talked among other things about how it was kind of weird to show her son A Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, although she doesn't have a problem with kids watching horror movies.

For the longer panels, the first had Melissa Barrera, Tony Revolori, and Marley Shelton, who were in some of the later Scream movies.

The final session was a Hellraiser reunion with Doug Bradley, Ashley Laurence, Simon Bamford, Barbie Wilde, and Nicholas Vince.

Clive Barker was at the convention, but couldn't attend the panel for health reasons. There was some discussion of the Hulu remake, and a few of them mentioned that they liked the aesthetic, but not how much it differed from the original story, and downplayed the original BDSM themes. I'd heard something before about how the first movie was really more about Julia, but people liked Pinhead so much that he basically took over the franchise, even though he's usually a supporting character. Bradley also talked a bit about Barker's screenplay for Hellraiser III, which ended up not being made for weird legal reasons. It would have had Pinhead being resurrected in a vat in a church, and the Great Pyramid turning out to be a Lament Configuration housing the first Cenobite. Instead, we got CD-Head.

The air conditioning in my car hasn't been working. Actually, what happens is that it works at first, but soon cuts out after I start driving. I took it to the dealer, and they said it would cost upwards of $3000 to get it fixed, and it didn't seem worth it. It's definitely made for some uncomfortable rides, however. It hasn't just been incredibly hot in this area recently, but the air just feels gross and oppressive even when it isn't that hot. It makes me want to leave the apartment even less than usual. At the convention, it was warm even inside the hotel for the first few panels, then too cold in the bigger room for the last two.

While down in South Jersey, we went to a Spirit Halloween, and I took my usual pictures of costumes with weird generic names. And it isn't even just rip-offs of copyrighted characters that get these names. They're not even particularly funny, just odd.