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Strange, how this guy keeps popping up in various things the past week:
That character wasn't even one of them; but first, ol' Cool (Severed) Hand Luke showed up in a uniform that I know well and never associated with him:
He and the Herd showed up in a 1993 film titled Body Bags. It's a compilation of three short horror films, two of them directed by scare legend John Carpenter (who also narrates between the segments). The baseball one is titled "Eye," and in addition to the on-field and locker room scenes in Buffalo Bisons gear, they show televised segments clearly shot at what was originally christened as our downtown Pilot Field. He plays a minor leaguer looking for his chance; he loses an eye in a horrific car accident, and fortunately obtains a transplant, but it UNfortuately turns out that the donor was a serial killer and, well, you can probably take it from there. The segment is directed by B-horror-movie mainstay Tobe Hooper, and the cast also features Twiggy as the player's wife and schlock producer-director Roger Corman as one of the doctors.
That film came a good decade after Hamill's final Jedi turn in the original trilogy, when he was having some typecasting issues. His Cockknocker cameo for Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was almost a decade later, and was also his first film reunion with Carrie Fisher until the final trilogy almost 20 years later, since it took until the twenty-teens for the final three appearances of his signature character to return to the Star Wars universe.
And now, we just saw him as Jimmy the Vampire:
That's from the current F/X series being streamed on Hulu called What We Do In the Shadows, a vampire comedy based on a 2014 film of the same name and premise. It's been following three traditional vamps and a housemate "energy vampire" (who can go out in the sunshine and sucks energy rather than blood from his victims), who inhabit a Munster-like home on Staten Island with a human familiar. The show's gotten quite a few other guest appearances from fans of the show or film, including Discovery's Doug Jones, the multitalented Kristen Schaal, stoner film regular Craig Robinson, and Doc Martin's Lucy Punch. Hamill shows up as an out-of-town vampire trying to collect on an old debt, and winds up coaching a girls' volleyball team in rural Pennsylvania. Because it sounded like Transylvania, you see....
----
Then there's real life. Ours has been quiet since events last week; "the box" is still on my office floor, and "the brain" is still in decent shape, but after finishing the binge of Inventing Anna, I came upon what I predict will be the next Netflix-style "true crime except the parts they make up" tale:
The paralegal from hell.
Meet Ashley. She worked as a paralegal for a Texas lawyer, and if you believe what you read in an Austin appellate court decision, over the course of a number of months, she raided his bank accounts, diverted his email communications so he wouldn't learn of his financial losses or of the resulting petition to disbar him (they did, but reinstated him after the facts came out), stole from other lawyers in the building, poisoned her boss with antifreeze and locked his family out of his office by breaking keys into all the locks- and then, the piece de chutzpah, tried to get his civil lawsuit against her dismissed (and then appealed the denial of the dismissal) under a Texas SLAPP suit provision. "The appeals court ruled that the law doesn’t protect Szymonek because her alleged lies didn’t implicate matters of public concern."
She may have bigger problems than that, though, because the day after the appeals court decision, she was arrested on theft charges. No word on when or if it will go to trial- no doubt all those abortion-snitching cases are clogging up the dockets- but given the reaction to the Anna business, I expect the streaming services will be falling over themselves to buy the rights to her story (Netflix ponied up $300,000 to Anna for hers). I'm picturing Rosamund Pike, doing a perfect Texas accent, in the leading role.
And maybe Mark Hamill as the ill-treated lawyer.
That character wasn't even one of them; but first, ol' Cool (Severed) Hand Luke showed up in a uniform that I know well and never associated with him:
He and the Herd showed up in a 1993 film titled Body Bags. It's a compilation of three short horror films, two of them directed by scare legend John Carpenter (who also narrates between the segments). The baseball one is titled "Eye," and in addition to the on-field and locker room scenes in Buffalo Bisons gear, they show televised segments clearly shot at what was originally christened as our downtown Pilot Field. He plays a minor leaguer looking for his chance; he loses an eye in a horrific car accident, and fortunately obtains a transplant, but it UNfortuately turns out that the donor was a serial killer and, well, you can probably take it from there. The segment is directed by B-horror-movie mainstay Tobe Hooper, and the cast also features Twiggy as the player's wife and schlock producer-director Roger Corman as one of the doctors.
That film came a good decade after Hamill's final Jedi turn in the original trilogy, when he was having some typecasting issues. His Cockknocker cameo for Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was almost a decade later, and was also his first film reunion with Carrie Fisher until the final trilogy almost 20 years later, since it took until the twenty-teens for the final three appearances of his signature character to return to the Star Wars universe.
And now, we just saw him as Jimmy the Vampire:
That's from the current F/X series being streamed on Hulu called What We Do In the Shadows, a vampire comedy based on a 2014 film of the same name and premise. It's been following three traditional vamps and a housemate "energy vampire" (who can go out in the sunshine and sucks energy rather than blood from his victims), who inhabit a Munster-like home on Staten Island with a human familiar. The show's gotten quite a few other guest appearances from fans of the show or film, including Discovery's Doug Jones, the multitalented Kristen Schaal, stoner film regular Craig Robinson, and Doc Martin's Lucy Punch. Hamill shows up as an out-of-town vampire trying to collect on an old debt, and winds up coaching a girls' volleyball team in rural Pennsylvania. Because it sounded like Transylvania, you see....
----
Then there's real life. Ours has been quiet since events last week; "the box" is still on my office floor, and "the brain" is still in decent shape, but after finishing the binge of Inventing Anna, I came upon what I predict will be the next Netflix-style "true crime except the parts they make up" tale:
The paralegal from hell.
Meet Ashley. She worked as a paralegal for a Texas lawyer, and if you believe what you read in an Austin appellate court decision, over the course of a number of months, she raided his bank accounts, diverted his email communications so he wouldn't learn of his financial losses or of the resulting petition to disbar him (they did, but reinstated him after the facts came out), stole from other lawyers in the building, poisoned her boss with antifreeze and locked his family out of his office by breaking keys into all the locks- and then, the piece de chutzpah, tried to get his civil lawsuit against her dismissed (and then appealed the denial of the dismissal) under a Texas SLAPP suit provision. "The appeals court ruled that the law doesn’t protect Szymonek because her alleged lies didn’t implicate matters of public concern."
She may have bigger problems than that, though, because the day after the appeals court decision, she was arrested on theft charges. No word on when or if it will go to trial- no doubt all those abortion-snitching cases are clogging up the dockets- but given the reaction to the Anna business, I expect the streaming services will be falling over themselves to buy the rights to her story (Netflix ponied up $300,000 to Anna for hers). I'm picturing Rosamund Pike, doing a perfect Texas accent, in the leading role.
And maybe Mark Hamill as the ill-treated lawyer.