Too Much TV: THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (2018)

As a warning to those who haven't watched any or all of the series yet, this review contains spoilers.

  
To turn most novels into ten-part TV shows, liberties must be taken. Extraordinary liberties have been taken to turn Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House into Mike Flanagan's Netflix series, but the results for the most part worked on their own terms, though one of the greatest strengths of Flanagan's adaptation proved ultimately a weakness. People who binged their way through it quicker than I did have already noted its structural resemblance to This Is Us, a critically-acclaimed multigenerational non-linear family drama. Hill House travels back and forth in time from the present to 1992, reimagining the paranormal investigators of Jackson's novel as a family unit, and the house itself as a fixer-upper that the parents (Carla Gugino and Henry Thomas, with Timothy Hutton taking over for the present-day scenes) hope to renovate for a huge profit. We see each of the five damaged children as a troubled adult, and we see how the ordeal of Hill House contributed to their individual and collective dysfunctions. Steven Crain (Michiel Huisman) turned his experience into a dubious best-seller, earning the ire of most of his siblings. Despite making himself a specialist in haunted-house tales, he doesn't really believe in the supernatural. Blaming the family tragedy on hereditary madness, he had a vasectomy to keep from having insane kids, compromising his marriage in the process by keeping that detail secret from his wife. Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) is an obsessive-compulsive mortician who especially resents Steven's book and sees any family who took the royalties he offered as a traitor. Theo (Kate Siegel), the show's obligatory lesbian, is a child psychologist whose tactile sensitivity to the paranormal leaves her abrasively reluctant to maintain emotional connections with people. The fraternal twins Nelly (Victoria Pedretti) and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) are the youngest and most traumatized by the Hill House experience, Luke becoming a heroin addict, while further tragedies in her life drive Nelly to kill herself at the old house. Her death reunites the family and opens old wounds as the legacy of Hill House threatens to draw them all back so the house can finish what it started long ago.

Hill House enhances the non-linear formula by adding a layer of premonition that ties present and past even closer together. In the most horrific instance, Nelly has been haunted since her time at Hill House by visions of  "the bent-neck lady." When she hangs herself, more driven by the house to do so than willing her own demise, she realizes in her final moments of life that she was the bent-neck lady. At Hill House, the mother, Olivia, is terrified by premonitions of the terrible fates awaiting her youngest children, though it takes her a little bit to recognize the actors we know as grown-up Luke and Nelly as her babies. The moment when Nelly, done up mortuary style for her wake in the present, tears the stitches from her mouth and cries out, "Mommy!' is probably the next most horrific moment. Overall, the show is more horrific than scary, though there are plenty of jumpy moments for scare fans. The family drama underscores the long-term horror of Hill House, and the effort given to flesh out the Crain family pays off thanks to terrific ensemble acting. At the end, however, the series becomes too much about family for its own good.

In Flanagan's imagining, Hill House seems less evil than monstrously overprotective. It wants to keep the people it acquires and seduces the most overprotective member of the family, the mother, with a promise to protect her children, the twins especially, by "waking" them from the "nightmare" that will be their adult lives. To wake them, Olivia tries to kill the twins by feeding them tea laced with rat poison, and ends up actually murdering the caretakers' daughter who just happened to tag along. Conveniently, the caretakers were homeschoolers who had hidden their girl from the outside world. Traumatized by the tragedy but consoled by the appearance of their little girl as a ghost, they agree to cover up Olivia's murder of the girl as long as her husband backs off from his plan to burn the house down. The show ultimately goes too far in portraying the house as an actual comfort, albeit one most people should reject. Olivia and then Nelly seem not to be extensions of the house but autonomous spirits that can feud with earlier generations of spirits or fight off its attempts to claim the rest of the family. Finally, present-day Hugh makes a deal with Olivia and/or the house, sacrificing himself while the rest of the children go free. In an unconvincing epilogue, this final ordeal appears to have cured the surviving Crains of their hang-ups. Steven reconciles with his wife, Shirley with her husband, whom she'd accused of an affair with Theo; Theo commits to a steady girlfriend and Luke is clean for two years and counting at the very end. This seems like a betrayal of the tragic complexity of the lives shown us earlier, unless you really believe, as Flanagan seems to, that all of it was Hill House's fault. Family ends up being not just the real subject of Hill House but its feel-good rallying point, yet any horror project that seeks to make audiences feel good at the end, for the sake of "family" or any reason, is suspect. I'm not saying I wanted Hill House to wipe out the Crain family, but I'd like to think that any viewer will find its conclusion too neat in a way that undermines a project that until then was working fine as both a spook show and a psychological horror. I'll still recommend it, since at it's best it's nearly great, but unless "family" gives you the unconditional "feels" you may share my disappointment at something so good failing to stick the landing.

KOMMISSAR X: THREE GOLDEN CATS (1966)

At the height of the Sixties spy-film craze the Germans made a series of seven films based on the pulp fiction character Kommissar X, who despite the name is neither a Communist nor even a spy but a globetrotting American private eye. Three Golden Cats (also known in the U.S. as Death is Nimble, Death is Quick) is the second film of the series. As they did throughout, Tony Kendall plays Joe "Kommissar X" Walker -- the nickname isn't used here -- and Brad Harris plays his sort of friend/sort of rival, policeman Tom Rowland. Co-directed by Rudolf Zehetgruber and Gianfranco Parolini, the latter later best known for the Sabata spaghetti westerns, the film benefits greatly from its Sri Lanka locations and the colorful cinematography of Klaus von Rautenfeld. Our heroes end up in the erstwhile Ceylon to protect an American heiress (Ann Smyrner) -- who seems resourceful enough not to need their help much -- from the kidnappers of the Golden Cats, a former anti-imperialist guerrilla group that turned into gangsters-for-hire after independence.

Behind the Golden Cats, we learn toward the end, is a mad scientist who wanted ransom money to finance the biological warfare projects that got him thrown out of the U.S. This Bondish sort of villain exists mostly to put some of the protagonists in a death trap and is completely eclipsed,  by the Cats' head karate killer, King (former Hercules Dan Vadis). This may be Vadis's finest hour on film. Bald and mustachioed and coolly glowering, making a fetish of donning a headband before a kill, King has an indisputable menacing charisma that upstages the ostensible stars on every occasion. Vadis and Harris staged their own fight scenes -- Rowland is also a karate expert -- and did many of their own stunts in this action-packed picture. They make it look more like a precocious martial-arts movie than a Eurospy film -- the training sequence involving scantily clad Sri Lankan policewomen definitely doesn't defuse that impression -- and their final showdown in the Cats' temple is a bravura blend of camp theatrics and succinct brutality from two plausible looking bruisers.

You also get an acid attack in a shower, an assistant assassin who specializes in nitro capsules, a cool boat chase with our heroes pursued by a futuristic vehicle through an exploding swamp and a climactic collision between a speeding car and an airplane on the tarmac. You also get ladies' man Walker getting kissed by an elephant and getting dumped at the end by the heiress, an equally capable Sri Lankan heroine (Michele Mahaut) and the elephant at the same time.

Kendall's horndog antics date the picture to its time, but Harris and Vadis's commitment to pure action make Three Golden Cats feel more like a contemporary action film than may of its actual contemporaries. Judged by the standard of any time period, it's an enjoyable piece of unrepentant pop trash that inspires confidence in the rest of the series.

ERREMENTARI (2017)

The Spanish affinity for traditional gothic horror extends to the Basque country, which gives us Paul Urkijo Alijo's grim fairy tale of a film. Based on a European legend that also influenced the "Howling Man" episode of The Twilight Zone, Errementari is set at the time of the First Carlist War in 19th century Spain. A deserter from that war is Patxi the blacksmith (Kandido Uranga), who made a pact with the minor demon Sartael (Eneko Sagardoy) in order to be reunited with his wife, only to find that she, presuming him dead, had shacked up with another man and had a daughter, Usue (Uma Bracaglia). The tragedy results in  the other man killed, the wife a suicide, Usue a despised outcast raised by foster parents taunted with tales of her mother suffering in Hell, and Patxi the keeper of a terrible secret. The arrival of a government official with stories of a hidden stash of gold at Patxi's forge hastens the revelation of the secret, but it's Usue, hoping that the smith can repair her headless doll, who makes the discovery. Believing the smith a fresh murderer (in fact, a trespasser has died by accident), Usue discovers evidence that Patxi is keeping a child in a cage. Naturally, not having watched The Twilight Zone, Usue frees the pathetic victim, who promptly reveals himself as Sartael in all his folkloric if not cartoonish splendor: red skin, horns, presumably cloven hooves, etc. The demon tries to avenge himself on Patxi, but the blacksmith could not have held a demon captive in the first place without being knowledgeable and resourceful. In folklore, demons are very vulnerable. Far from invulnerable to physical attack, they're also hypersensitive to the ringing of bells and, like some vampires, they're compelled to count chickpeas cast on the ground. Worse, mess with the pile and the poor creatures have to start counting over again. It soon becomes clear that for all his frightful appearance and taunting, Sartael's actually a pretty pathetic excuse for a demon, a laughingstock among his peers, and especially his superiors, for getting himself trapped and detained so easily by a mortal. When another hellish emissary arrives, planning not only to claim Patxi's soul at last but also to demote Sartael to a fate worse than death in the infernal hierarchy, old enemies will join forces, each seeking redemption of a sort through kindness to Usue and the memory of her much-wronged mother.  Boasting lavish art-direction, lurid cinematography and a satiric attitude toward Carlist conservatism (their side supported absolute monarchy) that echoes in Europe and elsewhere today, Errementari feels like a crossbreed merging Spanish historical gothic and a more Burtonesque sensibility in its sympathy for a devil who never entirely becomes a good guy. Available for streaming on Netflix in its native language and an English dub, it may be the most charming new horror film you'll see this Halloween season.

FUTURE WORLD (2018)

My guess is that James Franco saw The Bad Batch one day last year and said, "Psssh! I can do better than that." For all I know, he'd seen Mad Max:Fury Road some time before and had the same reaction. If you really want to speculate on his influences, you might find Future World reminiscent of the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Cyborg. On the DVD, Franco drily explains that he wanted to experiment with the postapocalypse genre, as if it were his ambition -- it might well be -- to direct in every genre known to man. He shares the directorial credit here with his frequent cinematographer Bruce Thierry Cheung, and while Cheung is also one of the credited writers Franco makes it clear on the disc that he was involved in putting the story together. Not that that took much effort, as Future World is more a collection of tropes and an exercise in style than anything else. There's been an apocalypse, and while bullets have become extremely rare there's fuel enough to keep motorcycling marauders on the road, massacring most everyone they find and partying at Big Daddy Love Lord's (Snoop Dogg) poontang oasis. There's a real oasis somewhere nearby that the marauders, led by a horned-helmeted Franco, somehow have never stumbled upon, but it's benevolent ruler (a supine Lucy Liu) is ill with the dreaded Red Fever, the cure for which reportedly can be had at the legendary Paradise Beach. It's there that Prince -- it seems to be both his title and his name (Jeffrey Wahlberg) -- is bound with a precious handful of bullets that are promptly taken from him by Franco's gang after the naive hero makes the mistake of stopping at the big whorehouse. A more impressive acquisition of Franco's is the android Ash (Suki Waterhouse, late of The Bad Batch), a killing machine of the bad old days who apparently shut herself down in an act of protest against mankind's wars. Unfortunately for her -- and she's not only very female but also, as a matter of cliche by now, lesbian -- once she's awakened Franco can control her by yelling into a little control box. Collaborating with Big Daddy, he sends Ash to roll the hapless Prince. The poor youth is allowed to live only because Franco needs someone to lead him to the oasis, but in the course of an escape attempt Ash ends up out of range of the remote control gizmo and becomes Prince's staunch ally.

Alas, since the days of postcards Paradise Beach has become Drug Town, presided over by a coked-up Milla Jovovich, and while she does have a cure for the Red Fever, it has a high price. First, she intends to take custody of Ash, intending her either as a sex toy or an object of worship, or both. Then, she insists that Prince shoot up some heavy drugs and battle her champion in a gladiatorial combat which our questionably experienced hero, malnourished, injured and drug-addled, somehow wins when Ash tosses him a machete. That spoils Jovovich's fun a little, but what really ticks her off is that her captive techie Lei (Margarita Levieva) scores with Ash before she gets a chance. Worse yet, the Franco gang, having little sense of direction, mistakes Drug Town for the oasis and attacks. There's a great goofy moment here when Jovovich shoots herself up with two syringes of something to inspire a  battle frenzy befitting the impending clash of titans, but however you rate the relative prowess of action movie stars, Franco puts himself over in the fateful encounter. In the end, though, Ash rebels against his control when he orders her to execute Prince and Lei and, as women everywhere presumably cheer, she puts the fiend down once and for all. After delivering the chaste Prince back home in time to save his mom, Ash and Lei ride off, theoretically in search of other androids and further adventures, as if this were a pilot for some series. Given its ghost of a release and its atrocious score on Rotten Tomatoes, it's safe to say we won't see more of these heroines. But while I concede every failing of this project, especially its absolute lack of originality, I couldn't help liking it for its earnestness, its impressive outdoor cinematography by Werner Herzog's latter-day cameraman, Pieter Zeitlinger, and the very throwback spirit that most likely provoked others' contempt. I still enjoy a bit of postapocalyptic cheese every so often, and if you can't have a Mad Max every couple of years a James Franco pastiche will do for a little while.

Pre-Code Parade: FAST LIFE (1932)

William Haines had his career killed by scandal, but my impression is that he was one of the big silent stars whose personae simply didn't translate well into either the cadences of sound cinema or the sensibilities of Depression cinema. Haines was the archetypal brash young man who comes on too strong and pushes too hard, alienating and injuring people before learning the excess of his ways and disciplining himself into a responsible hero. Like Harold Lloyd, his was a Twenties type that seemed to become almost offensively obsolete in very short order. Accordingly, before Haines got into legal trouble, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tried, as they did with John Gilbert, to remake Haines for a changed audience. One result was Harry Pollard's Fast Life, which sometimes feels more like a slapstick comedy, as if it might at one point have been intended for yet another of Metro's troubled male stars, Buster Keaton. As Keaton was chained to Jimmy Durante in his later M-G-M pictures, so Haines here was teamed with an erstwhile Keaton sidekick, Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards, though Edwards comes across as less of a sidekick than a stooge to Haines's Ted Healy. They're common sailors turned starving civilians after Haines tinkers clandestinely with the carburetor of an admiral's motorboat, convinced that his innovations can give boats prizewinning speed. After a near disaster the two sailors have to live by their (really Haines') wits, and our hero tries to exploit an accidental encounter with an heiress (Madge Evans) into opportunity, but can't help bragging about how he tricked her. Thrown out of her resort, she demands the return of even his swimming trunks, and in an implicitly Pre-Code moment we see the trunks fly back at her as Haines presumably flaunts his defiant nudity. Thinking fast back on land, he promptly hijacks some excursion boats by selling tickets to an impromptu race. With the inexorable logic of farce, one of his excited passengers is the heiress's father, the head of a speedboat manufacturing company (Arthur Byron) who's impressed  by our hero's brashness.

One touch I like about this picture is that this character never loses faith in the hero, even after the first test run of a new boat with Haines's souped-up carburetor ends in another near-disaster. This earns Haines fresh hate from the heiress and her stuck-up boyfriend (Conrad Nagel), but the old man, a veteran entrepreneur, understands that trial and error are part of progress and doesn't hold his injury against our hero. Ultimately, Haines redeems himself, not just by boatmanship but by exposing Nagel, who's trying to take over the company, as the ally of bootleggers. Through much of this Edwards seems utterly superfluous, included mainly for those in the audience who fail to find Haines amusing. For all that, contemporary reviews, especially from exhibitors, indicate that Edwards practically stole the picture from its star. He does have one nice gag where he meets a girl at an amusement pier. With no apparent provocation, she slaps him in the face. Then we see her stalk off until she reaches her destination, the tent where she works as a mind reader.It's not much, but it's more amusement than Jimmy Durante provides in many of his efforts at that time. As a sound actor, Haines has a more distinctive, brassy voice than Gilbert did, but his personality unfortunately comes across as more obnoxious than was probably intended, particularly in his treatment of his presumed buddy, Edwards. Now, a certain aggressiveness characterized the new stars of the day, but Haines doesn't come across as the sort of "caveman" Depression women apparently found desirable. Whether his stardom was salvageable before Haines himself gave it up, supposedly by rejecting a "lavender" marriage to hide his sexuality, is hard to say. Speaking for myself, his obnoxious ruthlessness here is taken to such a comic extent that  Fast Life ended up one of the more entertaining Haines films I've seen. And at the very least, unlike some of his peers, he does not seem alien to the Pre-Code era.

THE DEVIL AND FATHER AMORTH (2017)

The first thing that's hard to believe about William Friedkin's documentary is that more than forty years passed before the director of The Exorcist was invited to witness an actual exorcism. Once the opportunity arose, Friedkin made it the occasion for a meditation, at times searching and at times utterly credulous, on the potential real-world benefits of exorcism. He was invited to Italy to witness the pre-eminent exorcist of the age, the nonagenarian Fr. Gabriele Amorth, in his ninth session with a woman named Cristina. It looks nothing like Friedkin's visualizations of William Peter Blatty's novel. Cristina is surrounded by an extended family as Amorth, who died before the film was released, does his thing. Blatty is constrained by Amorth's forbidding of a film crew of cinematic lighting, but his digital video long-take approach seems appropriate to the material, though his cinema-verite presentation of the exorcism is marred by his obvious resort to enhanced sound effects whenever Cristina starts ranting. Of course, she's incapable of the contortions or levitations of pop legend, but it is unsettling to see her thrashing about and playing the devil at random moments during the session. She says nothing outrageous -- or nothing outrageous was translated -- unless you're still outraged by people claiming to be the devil, or "legion," or whatever. For all that, it seemed, especially with the family around, more like an exotic therapy session than a struggle with the forces of darkness.

Digressing, Friedkin interviews a number of reputed experts in various related fields, from the author of a scholarly history of the devil to medical specialists who debate whether Amorth's work can have a genuine therapeutic effect. The film is at its best here, steering away from sensationalism to suggest that there may be some worth to exorcism, perhaps on a placebo level, apart from its spiritual pretensions, though it was Amorth's own policy not to exorcise anyone who could be diagnosed with psychological issues. There are reasons, detailed in his Wikipedia listing, to question whether Amorth was the best judge of his own work, though Friedkin tends to take his claims on, well, faith. His film has ultimately limited value as a documentary, compared to an essay film, because it fails to appraise either Amorth or Cristina objectively. I especially missed the lack of background to Cristina or her family that might suggest more mundane reasons for her odd, attention-seeking behavior. Instead, Friedkin goes in an even more sensationalist direction, telling a yarn about an unfilmed encounter with Cristina and her boyfriend in a creepy church in which she went apeshit and the boyfriend threatened the director with physical violence. It's hard not to call bullshit on that bit of business, but Friedkin is probably betting that no one will care enough to try to corroborate the Cristina story. There's an "evil wins" implication here, underscored by the facts of Amorth's final illness, but The Devil and Father Amorth is really too slapdash to make any strong impression. Nevertheless, I found it entertaining on a barnstorming level, a bit of exploitation hucksterism that seems more like something from The Exorcist's own time than the work of the director's old age.

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018)

Many people drew conclusions about the Han Solo prequel once the intended auteurs, Miller and Lord of Lego Movie fame, were seen off by Disney in favor of Ron Howard, who promised nothing visionary, irreverent or even fresh. Public opinion has turned against Disney's Star Wars franchise for a number of reasons, ranging from a reflexive distrust of large corporations to a worrisome revulsion at the studio's commitment to diversity in the official episodes. Many people no doubt went into Solo, or stayed away from it, convinced that it could only be a soulless, mindless piece of hackwork. I stayed away myself, having recently seen and hated The Last Jedi for reasons having nothing to do with the race or gender of its protagonists. Now that I've seen it at home, I can say that at a minimum Solo is better than Episodes 7 and 8. It's nothing great, but it's what it was meant to be: entertaining in an easygoing way. Its weakest part comes early when young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is a low-level thief on Corellia. The vaguely Fagin-esque milieu and Han's efforts at nervous con-man patter make this the most retrograde and corny part of the picture. It picks up once Han is off-planet, an imperial academy washout reduced to foot soldiery in some absurd before he manages to fall in with a band of smugglers who've infiltrated the military. He finds a mentor in the boss smuggler (Woody Harrelson) and an unlikely friend in Chewbacca the Wookie, briefly a fellow prisoner. In this meet-cute bit we finally see that Han can speak the Wookie language, and I found it appropriate that while his efforts in that enigmatic tongue are subtitled, we are never to be privy to the plain meaning of Chewie's own remarks.

Anyway, for a time we practically have a poor man's Guardians of the Galaxy, with Han in the Star Lord protege role and Harrelson as his Yondu-like mentor, plus a sort of Gamora (Thandie Newton), a sort of Rocket (a talkative multi-armed CGI critter) and Chewie as Groot. The filmmakers (Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan are the credited writers) know better than to let the resemblance sink in, so some of the characters are eliminated before the core group reports to their employer, a vicious space gangster (Paul Bettany) whose moll (Emilia Clarke) is the girl poor Han had to leave behind back on Corellia. To save their lives after a recent failure, our merry band must steal a cargo of raw, volatile superfuel from a mining colony and transport it tout suite (via the legendary Kessel Run) to a refining facility. Along the way Han must match his raw wits with crooked gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), who ends up tagging along, along with his uppity feminist droid, while looking out for the pirates who ruined their previous caper. There are surprises yet to come but there's nothing really novel to the proceedings, compared to the drastic difference in tone you get in Rogue One. Comparing the two standalone "stories" is really unfair, though, since Rogue One was ambitious in a way Solo probably never was meant to be. Whatever the original creative team had in mind, Solo was always going to be cinematic comfort food, and for that sort of thing Ron Howard is a reliable chef. What holds the thing together and makes it tolerable is Alden Ehrenreich's title performance. With admirable quickness he makes you stop comparing him to Harrison Ford and turns young Han into a viable, likable character in his own right, with issues yet to be resolved (though probably never on screen now) before he becomes the man we got to know back in 1977. In retrospect, Solo got a bad rap, but that's probably inevitable when so essentially ordinary (yet satisfactory) an adventure film is packaged as a blockbuster event by corporate imperative. Would it have been better had it been left to the intended auteurs? The fact that we'll never know shouldn't be held against the film we have.

THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI (La Maldicion de la Bestia, 1975)

The turning of the blowing of the leaves again turns my thoughts toward horror and monsters, and so it's time again to visit with Jacinto Molina and his onscreen alter ego, Paul Naschy. "The Curse of the Beast" is his reboot, authored by himself and directed by M. I. Bonns, of the saga of Waldemar Daninsky, who here turns into a wolfman again for the first time. Anthropologist Daninsky travels to the Himalayas with a team of European scientists in response to seeming photographic evidence of the existence of the legendary Abominable Snowman. The yeti, however, proves to be literally the last of Waldemar's worries. Losing track of an injured comrade, our hapless hero ends up in the clutches of a pair of witches who love him up into a werewolf. The territory actually is infested with witches. One, bearing the totemic name (for Naschy) of Wandessa (Silvia Solar) is the power behind the local warlord, Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni). The Khan is plagued with ulcers on his back, but Wandessa eases his agonies with skin grafts flayed from the backs on captive women. Relief never lasts, so the Khan constantly sends his head minion Temujin (Jose Luis Chinchilla) to fetch more captives, including the members of Daninsky's expedition. Whatever his own problems, Waldemar has got to save the day, though there's something of a selfish motive behind his heroism. He's been told by a local mystic, who unsurprisingly gets killed by the bandits, that the leaves of a certain plant, mixed with the blood of a young woman, will cure lycanthropy. Surprise follows surprise as only a small amount of his girlfriend's blood is needed, and the cure works-- but not before the filmmakers square things up with the audience by pitting werewolf Waldemar in perfunctory fashion against a yeti that appears in the worn, much-edited print I saw as little more than a tall blur. To use Naschy's Universal reference points, what we have here is a little bit of Werewolf of London (the Himalayan origin), a little bit of House of Dracula (the happy ending) and a bit of the old studio's Arabian Nights pictures thrown in, with the usual extra bits of sex and sadism thrown in to satisfy Seventies audiences, though not so many for me as in an uncut print. It's far from Naschy's best, but I like the way his imagination ran rampant here in directions I didn't anticipate. And of course this was not the end of Waldemar or his curse, but it's nice to see that in one part of the multiverse things turned out all right for him.