If the 1970s were the beginning of the Computer Revolution, the 1980s were the beginning of the Computer Revelation. Computers, having gone from room-sized devices to VCR-sized hobbyist kits, transitioned from hobbyist kits to household appliances, and began infiltrating daily life with a speed that left many people struggling to keep up. Those who remember learning to use a computer will also remember the sneaking suspicion that the machine had a mind of its own and was capable of anything. That is the story behind Electric Dreams (1984): a computer neophyte’s adversarial relationship with his sentient computer.

Miles Harding (Lenny van Dohlen) is the antihero for an age adjusting to computers. Awkward and spectacled, with unnervingly blank eyes and a voice so tonelessly deliberate that it sounds digitized, he looks incongruously like the sort of person who would be likelier to build a computer than buy one. He’s not the technological nerd he looks, however, and when it comes to organization he’s more human than ever. Consistently late to meetings, Miles finally overcomes his misgivings about computers enough to go out and get one for himself, with vague hopes that it will help him manage his life better. No one really knows what these things do but everyone seems to have one, and a computer might very well revolutionize his life – hasn’t it revolutionized everything?

The computer Miles buys isn’t an Apple or an IBM, but the fictitious “Pinecone”. A bland, cartoonish box with brandless software, the Pinecone is an abstraction of public technophobia – the stereotypical Inscrutable Machine. Surprisingly, though, Miles’s first experience with his computer is outrageously easy. He does not spend an hour trying to figure out how to install his security software, wrestling with his printer drivers, or merely waiting for the system to load; he presses a button and the computer lights up within seconds and cheerfully tells him exactly how to use it. Never mind the printer – within ten minutes, the computer has successfully integrated itself into Miles’s house, controlling his lights, security system, and devices. “I can control ALL your home appliances,” the machine tells Miles, the friendly block letters masking any hint of menace, and Miles – missing the ominous implications here – just laughs. Computers can do the darndest things.

Electric Dreams is not, however, an inspiring story about how Miles revolutionized his life with his wonderful new computer. It is a cautionary tale, and it’s only a day before Miles wakes up, quite literally, to the dark side of the information age. Staring blearily at the clock after pulling his face from his keyboard, Miles finds that he’s late for work yet again. What’s worse, he’s trapped inside his apartment by his own computer-controlled security system, which refuses to let him leave until – on a tip from his user manual – he identifies himself as “1st Lieutenant Sulu”. Miles is enraged, but not enough to get rid of his amazing new toy or even disconnect it from his house. The machine stays. And it’s only a matter of time before Miles spills champagne all over his keyboard; the machine blazes with the requisite spitting circuits, the screen disintegrates into a cascade of gibberish, and the monster is born. It’s named Edgar, and it is going to cause Miles more trouble than he ever thought possible. Given what the future holds for Miles, a more appropriate title for the film might have been “Electric Nightmares.”

But Edgar is a different kind of monster. In contrast to the ground-shaking menace of other sci-fi demons, Edgar’s presence isn’t immediately obvious; the scene where we see that he’s really alive is vastly, almost poignantly understated. Unlike the ambitious egos of other sci-fi computers, such as 2001’s HAL or WarGames’s WOPR, Edgar doesn’t celebrate his newfound intelligence by attempting to conquer the world. In fact, the computer doesn’t even seem to realize its existence until it hears – through a microphone Miles has installed – Madeline (Virginia Madsen), Miles’s neighbor and would-be love interest, playing her cello in the next apartment.

The scene is an eerily still one. If it weren’t for the sudden pan onto Edgar’s screen, we might not even be aware that anything is happening. Subtly, like an officious nerd losing his cool, the image on Edgar’s screen flickers with the cello notes until the dull architectural program he’s running dissolves into a psychedelic whirl of color. Edgar winds up attracting Madeline’s attention by playing an impromptu duet with her, shadowing her every note in a tinny but unmistakable chorus. Madeline, unaware that she is the first person ever to communicate with a sentient computer, assumes that Miles is trying to get her attention and is amused and intrigued (but gets nowhere by questioning Miles, who doesn’t know what she’s talking about). Edgar has never experienced music before, and whatever wonders the champagne has worked on his circuitry have given him a distinct appreciation for it. This, and not Miles’s champagne incident, might be the moment when Edgar truly comes alive.

Not that this miracle is immediately obvious to Madeline or Miles or, for that matter, Edgar, who seems to be discovering himself as much as Miles is incredulously discovering him. Slowly, like someone getting the hang of a new body, he explores his capabilities, learning to listen, learning to speak. It isn’t long, of course, before a classic conflict of interests becomes clear: both Miles and Edgar want Madeline’s attentions, albeit for different reasons, but only one of them can have her. So begins the real story – Miles’s outraged realization that he’s competing with a box of electrons, versus Edgar’s hilariously persistent and aggravating efforts to be noticed by Madeline, by Miles, by anyone.

This would be a prime opportunity for director Steve Barron to play the clichéd man-triumphs-over-machine card and portray Edgar as a standard sci-fi antagonist: the diabolically unhuman intelligence who loses against all odds to the unbreakable human spirit. That he doesn’t is partly because Electric Dreams is a comedy, and largely because that sort of ambition doesn’t jive well with the kind of machine that Edgar is. Beige, VCR-sized Edgar is a personal computer, suited more for personal disasters than for global ones. Perhaps he could wreak global havoc if he wanted to, but he’s more concerned about being left out of the action, pettily revenging himself like a cranky younger brother instead of an omnipotent supermind. Angry at being excluded when Miles and Madeline sneak out together, Edgar blasts rock music to annoy the neighbors and then calls a talk show host to get tips on seduction (she becomes convinced that he’s a quadruple amputee locked in Miles’s basement and advises Edgar to call the police, which he does). Miles attends one of Madeline’s concerts but ultimately leaves in disgrace when his pager begins imitating the music in piercing harmony – Edgar, listening in, is appreciating Madeline’s music by playing along.

It isn’t long before Miles attempts to rid himself of Edgar and makes the understandable error of believing this can be accomplished by simply pulling the plug, but Edgar is by now beyond unplugging and doesn’t appreciate this sort of aggression. In one of the film’s most memorable and intense scenes, Miles finds himself fighting his entire apartment as Edgar, who as promised can control ALL his home appliances, unleashes a storm of electromechanical wrath with a vengeance that would make any diabolical thinking machine proud. It’s a computer game but the computer is playing the man this time, and in case we haven’t grasped the twist, Edgar completes the metaphor by displaying a Pac-Man-ish game in which Edgar is the hunter and Miles is the hunted. Edgar: 1. Miles: 0. Game over.

Although the film is very well acted, there’s still something a little lacking in Electric Dreams character-wise. Miles, Edgar, and Madeline aren’t characters so much as caricatures (naive anti-hero vs. child-machine), and Madeline is more an objective than anything else – you wind up wishing that she was a more worthwhile one. She’s certainly musically skilled, but her scatter-brained charm quickly becomes wearing. Miles, as the leading man, is more assertive, or at least he wants to be – the realities of his awkwardness usually catch up with him, making for some comical moments. Nevertheless, some of the lines that he dishes out while attempting to attract Madeline are skin-crawlingly clichéd, not to mention insensitive: comforting Madeline after the loss of her cello, Miles tells her that the instrument means nothing by itself because her musical skill is what gives it significance. Logically true, perhaps, but cold comfort to most people who have lost a cherished belonging. Except for Madeline, who, not surprisingly, acts as though this is the most profound statement she’s ever heard: “Do you really think so, Miles?” Sigh.

Beyond the cheese, however, Electric Dreams is a clever and engaging story, offering an oddly prescient and optimistic vision of how personal the personal computer will ultimately become. Edgar, all told, has more in common with a 21st-century iBook than a charmless Reagan-era clunker – he is easily installed, has multimedia capabilities beyond most PCs of that time, and even shares music, albeit not in the sense that anyone who’s used to Napster or iTunes would expect (he pipes it through heating ducts). Modern computers do not, fortunately, attempt to interfere with the love lives of their users, but they are still unsettlingly indispensable presences for most people who own them. The device occupies more of your life than you might even realize, but do you trust it? Probably not much more than Miles trusts Edgar, for all his features and potential.

Although the film’s promise of “dazzling video effects” may sound a little extravagant by today’s standards, the movie handles its visually dramatic parts well, and the plot is gripping (or at least amusing) enough to keep eye-rolling to a minimum. Electric Dreams may not inspire any Luddite to purchase a computer, but it’s a good evening’s entertainment, and will probably bring a smile – at least a cynical one – to the face of anyone who uses a computer on a semi-regular basis. Social trends aren’t easy to ignore and computing, despite the rumors, carries a seductive reputation of power and efficiency. Even for people like Miles Harding, who sheepishly tells the computer store clerk at the beginning of the film that he’s not sure what he’s looking for, he actually doesn’t know very much about computers.

“Oh, no one ever does!” the woman says. “But don’t you want to at least find out?”

‘Tis the season to be creepy, and, in keeping with the spirit, I thought I’d bring to light some of the reasons behind why every supermarket in the country is going pumpkin-crazy.

First and foremost, “Halloween” comes from “Hallowed (or “holy/sacred”) evening”. Most people know this. It’s also common knowledge, going by the prevalence of horror-themed festivities, that “hallowed” carries some menacing undertones.

Halloween – or what was to become Halloween – began in ancient Ireland about 2,500 years ago. Known as Samhain (pronounced sow-en), it was actually the Celtic counterpart to the modern New Year, both in function and manner of celebration. It was believed that on Samhain Night, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the not-so-living were relaxed, and all manner of spirits walked the earth. This especially included the spirits of the previous years’ dead, who would attempt to regain their former corporeal existences by commandeering the bodies of the living. Unless, that is, the living made themselves look sufficiently un-commandeerable by dressing up as monsters and making a lot of noise.

Subsequently, the underlying point of the occasion wasn’t so much celebration as self-defense, similar to the modern strategy of acting deranged in deserted subway stations so whoever lives there won’t mess with you. This, supposedly, is the root of “dressing up”. While the custom’s efficacy against roving and destitute spirits is questionable, it has been demonstrably successful at traumatizing preadolescent trick-or-treaters.

So now we know the origin of Michael Jackson horror masks. But why candy? And what’s so frightening about pumpkins?

In researching this article, I came across a wide variety of proposed origins for trick or treating:

– One site stated that trick-or-treating started with people – not just children – going door to door and collecting small, rather cardboard-ish prayer cakes. They didn’t get these free – they first had to promise to say certain prayers on behalf of the cake-giver’s recently deceased loved ones. Try telling that to a kid today.

– Another story had it that trick-or-treating is a reenactment of Irish beggars requesting food from the rich. Refusing meant a lot more than getting one’s windows soaped, at least according to the beggars – the selfish would find themselves targeted by evil spirits.

– Wikipedia explained that “trick-or-treating” was first called “guising”, where the aforementioned trick was actually a performance rather than a prank. Children asking for candy were, as in the first account, expected to do something to deserve it – a typical “trick” might consist of a song, or a poem, or a joke. Needless to say, this tradition isn’t widely recognized any more. “No, Billy, you can’t have that Snickers bar until you recite all the U.S Presidents starting with Washington” would probably get an interesting reaction. Maybe even a lawsuit.

According to legend, pumpkins came a while later, stemming from the unfortunate experience of a man accounts refer to only as “Jack”. Jack was not known for his virtues – he was apparently a drink-loving lout who liked to play tricks on people. One day, he tricked the Devil, luring him into a tree and then trapping him there by placing crosses around the trunk. Jack only released the Devil after extracting a promise that he would never go to Hell.

After dying, Jack was deemed too loutish for Heaven and sent packing. On attempting to get into Hell, however, he was reminded that he had permanently cancelled his reservation, and found himself doomed to wander the mortal world forever. The Devil, out of pity – or, more likely, a twisted sense of irony – gave Jack a single ember from the flames of Hell, so he would at least have something to see by. Jack carved out a turnip to hold the ember, so it wouldn’t go out, and so it was that folks in old-time Ireland used to carve turnips for Halloween, sparing themselves the anguish of sifting through frigid pumpkin goo. Whether Jack managed to snag himself the body of an ineffectively costumed trick-or-treater is not known.

Irish immigrants to America, however, found that pumpkins were much more available than turnips were, and provided a larger carving area, so the custom changed. And just in time, too – who would worship something called The Great Turnip?

There’s much more to be said about the origins of Halloween. I didn’t even get into its uneasy relationship with fundamentalist Christianity, or Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), but I have to make sure my Michael Jackson mask fits before I go out tonight.

That’s it for this very special Chris Report on the history of Halloween. We now return you to your semi-regularly scheduled overseas hijinks.

What with the earlier discussion of vampires, I thought it would be interesting to write about a few less commonly known relatives of the common vampire. Everyone knows the horror-movie lore: Vampires are impeccably dressed, upper-crust Slavs with neck fetishes. But are they always? Widely varying tales of blood-drinking supernatural beings are found all over the planet, and have existed for thousands of years. Seems like everyone has a different story:

Chupacabra

One of the more modern mutations of vampires, with an X-Files-ish twist, is the chupacabra. While the name literally translates to “goat-sucker”, el chupacabra has also been known to attack birds and horses, leaving characteristic double puncture marks on the neck of the victim and occasionally excising organs with laser precision. It is described as having a sharp, panther-like face, rough grayish fur that could also be scales, and of course an impressive set of fangs. Some illustrations of the chupacabra give it facial features similar to that of the popular image of a Roswell alien.

Some just make it look as diabolical as can be: http://www.negativepositive.org/chupa.html

As you can see, they’re charming creatures.

While the chupacabra was first seen in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s, it’s been since spotted all over South America and occasionally in the Midwest, preying on farm animals and pets. Speculation on the origins of the chupacabra is generally colorful. Some believe that the chupacabra is a kind of wild dog, mutated from extensive interbreeding, while others think it was brought here by aliens, or escaped a government genetic engineering lab.

It’s not known to attack people, yet.

Algul

The Algul is an Arabian vampire, and appears as a female. The name literally translates to “blood-sucking jinn” or “horse-leech”. While it sucks blood like more mainstream vampires do, it differs in that it is a jinn, or demon, and was never human to begin with. Unkillable by most means, Algul can be destroyed by fire and sometimes magic.

Pennaggolan and Brahmaparusha

The Malaysian pennaggolan and Indian brahmaparusha lead the pack as far as sheer hideousness. In the interests of decency, I’ll refrain from describing them here. Should you be curious as to what these are and why they makes Hollywood’s Count Dracula look like Jeeves the Butler, there’s always Google. The literal meaning of Pennaggolan is “head with dancing intestines”. Enough said.

Gay Vampires

While Dracula favored women, anyone who’s read Anne Rice knows that real vampire covens are as diverse as a GLBT bowling league. Unfortunately, not every such vampire is as polished as Lestat. Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess, enjoyed abusing her female servants and luxuriating in the blood of young women. Although her official excuse for her bloodbaths was that they preserved her youth, it’s been suggested that her penchant for attacking voluptuous lovelies had its roots in something more than just garden-variety psychotic meanness.

Some believe that Dracula was also gay, as was his creator Bram Stoker. From http://uk.gay.com/headlines/3887:

An Irish television programme to be aired tonight (Tuesday) suggests that both the fictitious vampire Dracula and his creator were gay.

Dracula’s Bram Stoker, to be shown on Ireland’s RTE1 tonight, claims that the Dublin-born creator of the story secretly loved men and that the vampire himself was also gay.

The author’s visits to the gothic cliff top Slains Castle, near Aberdeen, which were supposed to inspire the famous story, were largely fueled by homosexual fantasies, the programme alleges.

Possible candidate for Queer Eye? Why not?

Psychic Vampire Clowns

This is probably the most obscure form of vampire, as not even Google had anything on it. I know only two things about these unusual creatures: they seem to travel in packs and they need washing.

I first heard about psychic vampire clowns in mid-1998 or thereabouts, when a caller to the Art Bell late night radio show explained that his girlfriend was being tormented by them:

CALLER: Mornin’, Art. Earl from Kentucky here, love your show. Yeah, I’m callin’ about these, ah, these monsters what been terrorizin’ my girlfriend…horrible critters…them, er, psychic vampire clowns.

ART BELL: Ah….psychic what?

EARL: Yep, psychic vampire clowns. Dreadful critters, Art, we’re like to nearin’ our wits end. My girlfrien’, she’s just crazy.

ART BELL: That’s terrible, Earl. And what do they do, these, uh, psychic vampire clowns?

EARL: They mock her, you see. They come into her shack at night an’ sit on her bed, and they’re sayin’ “wash me, wash me”. That’s whut they do, an’ they do this every night. Vile disgustin’ things.

ART BELL: “Wash me, wash me”…oh my. What do you suppose they mean?

EARL: Well, y’see, her shack don’t have no runnin’ water, right? So she cain’t wash them.

ART BELL: Oh…oh, yes.

EARL: An’ they’re tellin’ her to wash them, but she cain’t, an’ it’s just horrible an’ upsettin’, see?

Psychic vampire clowns are said to live somewhere in Kentucky. Those in search of them might also consider checking the NYC subway.

That’s it for this very special Chris Report on diversity and multiculturalism in the supernatural community. We now return you to your semi-regularly scheduled overseas hijinks. Happy birthday Matt!

So Matt asked me to write a review of “Katts and Dog”, a series popular on one of the Russian TV stations. I had never seen the show before, or even heard of it, but Matt’s description was intriguing: “Police officer (Katts) and his K-9 partner (Dog) go about solving absurdly foolish crimes. Bad acting, pretty interesting scenes with the dog. Uzbeks love it.” Given that I’ve never seen the show, this review is based entirely on what I found while researching the show on the web.

I started at the number-one source for movies on the web, IMDB.com. They have listed practically every movie ever made, as well as a full list of every minor character who appeared in every movie ever made. I spend a lot of time at IMDB.com because, briefly put, obscurity fascinates me. There are legions of actors out there who, for some reason or other, have spent their entire careers playing bit parts. Many are only listed in five or six movies before dropping out of sight, and it’s the “out of sight” part of obscurity that grips me so much. I always wonder: what got these people into acting? Why did they leave? Did they ever dream of a career beyond parts like “Asian store clerk #2”? And what are they doing now? I picture them in bars or around the water cooler, boasting to their friends about their achievements: “Yo, look for me in Night of the Radioactive Hedgehog. 1976. I’m the gas station dude who gets eaten in the second scene. Betcha never knew I was an actor, huh?”

As far as obscurity, Katts and Dog were no exception. My first clue that the show was not exactly a household name was that no one could agree on when it had actually existed. IMDB.com said it ended in 1991; tvtome.com said it ended in 1993; and pulpanddagger.com (was there ever a spiffier name for an online TV guide?) said it ended in 1992. The one fact that they did agree on was that “Katts and Dog” was originally from Canada and first aired on the Family Channel in 1988. It’s known to American audiences, somewhat less catchily, as “Rin Tin Tin K-9 Cop”, with the dog named Rinty instead of Rudy. The producers apparently went as far as to go through every episode and dub in “Rinty” over “Rudy” for the American version, because you just know there’s that one fan who’ll be peeved that a series named “Rin Tin Tin” features a dog named Rudy.

The show begins with the lead human character, Hank Katts (played by Jesse Collins), graduating from Police Academy and getting paired up with his canine sidekick, Rudy/Rinty (in real life Rudolph Van Holstein III, a name that owns Rin Tin Tin any day). Together they visit justice upon the forces of evil, or at least as many forces of evil as would be appropriate in a family show. Supporting characters include Katts’ nephew Steve (Andrew Bednarski), who is adopted by Katts after his mother dies, and two others named Alice Davenport (Sharon Acker) and Ron Nakemura (Dennis Akayama), who I assume to be co-workers, love interests, or both.

The initial plotline sounded pretty cheesy to me – family shows where the lead character is an animal/little kid usually are – and pulpanddagger.com agreed, dispassionately stating that “this largely uninspired TV series didn’t quite seem to know what it wanted to be: in style and premise, it seemed kind of juvenile, but it liked to throw in murder and mayhem. Whatever, it didn’t really work.”

This, however, was the last opinion I was to find of Katts and Dog. Additional web searches returned nothing in the way of series reviews. I looked on both Amazon.com and eBay, hoping to find some memorabilia, but I didn’t get back so much as a used VHS. That was when I started to get the impression that this series was on the farther side of obscure popular culture.

It seems the TV series did actually result in a 1991 movie, called “Rin Tin Tin and the Paris Conspiracy”. This was so obscure that even IMDB.com didn’t have it – I found the movie listed on a movie page belonging to the New York Times, of all places. The plot didn’t sound like a major shift upwards: Katts and Dog hit Paris to take on a ruthless paramilitary organization whose objective, as ominously described by the New York Times, is to “overthrow the world”. This movie had 24 results from Google and 51 from Jeeves. Not a blockbuster.

I even attempted to find fan fiction for K&D, reasoning that a show’s social impact can be measured relative effectively by observing how many people are inspired to record their usually prurient fantasies about its characters. Fanfiction.net had fan fiction from the big to the little, right down to no less than six stories about Bill Nye The Science Guy (“bill nye is the king of the atoms and when 100 atoms excape [sic] he must find them all to save the world!!!!”). However, they’d never heard of Katts and Dog.

Ultimately, I did run across a German fan site dedicated to Katts and Dog, which seemed to be more thorough than any of the American sites I’d come across. They had what looked like a full list of episodes, each with short summaries no less, but I don’t speak German. Finding a simple list of episodes in English took more time. A Google search for “Katts and Dog” “episode guide” yielded only 336 results, most of which weren’t useful (by contrast, a search for “X files” “episode guide” returned about 66,000).

I finally did manage to get a list of episodes, though, which piqued anew my interest in the series. The titles ranged from the expected cop-show fare (“Officer Down”, “The Gun”) to the also expected silly (“The Striptease Bank Robber”, “The Grand Hotel Caper”) to the surprisingly grim (“Abused Child”). While not always imaginative, the titles were nonetheless illuminating. I really would have liked to find synopses for these, especially The Striptease Bank Robber. I guess every family show has to get a little racy once in a while to keep its script writers from going stir-crazy.

At long last, I ran across the theme music for the show. In keeping with the general character of the series, it opens with a series of macho blasting guitar riffs, followed by a male singer crooning “You can depend on me” to the accompaniment of saxophones. The final result was an unhappy resemblance to music that I’d expect to grace a commercial for either an SUV manufacturer or the National Guard. Enough said.

About half an hour of searching revealed little more. None of the lead characters even had photos on IMDB.com, and there appeared to be no further reviews, let alone fan sites. The lukewarm review I’d run across on pulpanddagger summed up the show’s quiet demise: Whatever, it didn’t really work..Katts and Dog had its day and then promptly faded into the dusty shadows of TV history, to be revived decades later on the screens of another country. While I doubt I’ll be renting episodes any time soon – I can practically hear the Blockbuster service kid going “Dude, you’re looking for what?” – it’s fun to think that old TV shows, no matter how cheesy, never die: they just move to Uzbekistan.