Probably Should Have Seen That One Coming, Ma'am

According to Der Spiegel, a German prisoner murdered a woman during an unsupervised six-hour-long conjugal visit on Sunday, using two knives and a wrench to stab and beat her to death.

The prisoner also slit his own wrists but doctors were (fortunately?) able to save him and continue spending tax dollars to keep him in good health for the next thirty years or so.

Why should this woman have seen it coming? Because the prisoner was serving 19 years for raping a 9-year-old girl and beating her to death.

Probably not the best guy to start a relationship with, definitely not the best guy to break-up with during a conjugal visit, especially if you have knives in your purse, especially if he looks like this:


Not quite Darwin Award material, but it sure is close.

The scariest thing about all this, however, is that the brutal murder could have a silver lining for the victim's now-orphaned child.

Instead of this monster being released next year and moving in with them--which surely would have resulted in this child's rape/death at some point--s/he can now live a long and fruitful life in foster care, in constant pant-wetting fear of the inevitable day this psycho escapes from prison--when the guards send him out to buy them some lottery tickets--and decides to finish the job.

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The Best Movie of 2008

And the best vampire movie ever made*:

Let the Right One In


It's Swedish. It has subtitles. It is already being remade in American, for people who can't read so good, probably with Catherine Hardwicke directing a script rewritten by Kevin Williamson, starring Haley Joel Osment and Abigail Breslin.

The original movie is fantastic. It is what every one of the countless vampire movies/series made recently wishes it could be--good. It is what every horror movie made lately wishes it could be--scary without trying too hard.

Instead of quick cuts, depriving the audience of information, surprising them, jolting them out of their seats, Let the Right One In chooses a creepier path--long, lingering, right-there-out-in-front-of-you shots. The violence speaks for itself, its import is allowed to creep into your brain, the characters get developed, humanized.

Instead of your typical bloodthirsty, vengeful villain, Eli is a vampire who hates what she is, what it makes her do; she feels remorse and shame after each thirst is quenched. She wants desperately to be good, to be normal, but knows it is impossible and that her fate is sealed. A girl's gotta eat!**

My favorite aspect of the movie--spoilers ahead--is that although the little vixen ultimately makes the boy her next mortal slave, and a no-doubt-centuries-long tradition continues, it appears as though the future will be brighter for Eli, that she has grown a sense of purpose, maybe even a social conscience.

She will no longer be alone; she will have a friend. No longer will she hunt the innocent, no longer will she force somebody else to kill for her: she will simply unleash this vulnerable boy--as one might send a blind chicken into a den of hungry foxes--into a world full of bullies and feast on his cruel tormentors.

Which is kind of a beautiful thing, when you think about it. The two ultimately form a symbiotic partnership, each benefiting from the other. Hell--they could travel the world as a team, roaming from here to there at will, attracting the local riff-raff and destroying them. And would that be so bad?

Probably good for the gene pool, right?



* The second-best vampire movie ever made.

** A friend recently told me that a friend told her--did I lose you yet?--that things are a bit different in the book, that Eli is a boy who chopped off his dick because he didn't want sexuality getting in the way of his vampirism. Which gives a different meaning to her "I am not a girl" utterance than I initially gathered and sort-of explains the odd full-frontal-genital shot we get of Eli in the movie, but actually just confuses things a whole helluva lot...

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