A friend of mine had a wonderful idea about how to make me draw more: jar drawings. I have two jars, in one of them are topics for what to draw, and other one has different styles. Then, each day I randomly pick one piece of paper from each jar and boom! There’s my drawing for the day.
I’ve been doing this almost two weeks and had the opportunity to draw two Arcana related drawings. After some pondering I decided to share them with you - enjoy. 😄
1) A two-headed creature with foot (Two-headed leech from Julian’s route)
2) A duo with the style of Batman the Animated Series (disaster doctor & Hande)
EVERY suggestion from my trc tracked tag today has been from aftg instead. not even crossovers, just aftg. I wonder why it NEVER happens with any other fandom. you guys are sooo annoying
Today I’ll be working on a tv movie that should have lived in infamy. It’s a film that should be a lot more renowned than it is, because it is a lot of Grade-A ridiculous in a Grade-D form. It’s a movie about horrible creatures that suck the very life out of college students. I’m not talking about graduate programs – I’m talking about the movie ‘Leeches!’. The exclamation mark isn’t a typo. Which right there tells you a lot of what you need to know about this film.
This movie answers a few questions that some fans of bad films may have always asked. The first, and most obvious, is asking what would happen if the amount of skin shown was equal between men and women. The basic plot of leeches involves a swim team, drug abuse, and leeches – so at least a third of this movie is drawn-out shots of men in swimsuits getting out of water, or being in the shower, or being devoured. The first four minutes of the film are ridiculously overdone slow-motion swimming, that’s what we’re talking about. It really feels like the director was going to get their money’s worth from whatever low salary these actors got paid.
This movie likes to get its cast wet, and apparently doesn’t like spending money to do this – which is why you’ll get a lot of shots of the same shower, from the same angle, no matter how much time has passed. I’m not entirely sure why you can only see the shower from that particular angle. Maybe that’s all the shower space they actually rented out. It is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Get used to this shot. You’re gonna see a lot of it.
This film also in many ways is the most emblematic film of its era you’ll ever see. Like what the Breakfast Club did for 80s films, if the Breakfast Club was devoid of charm, talent, or narrative common sense. I’ve been searching for a way to try and explain how the film looks and feels, and I think I can about sum it up after much thought. You remember how Buffy the Vampire Slayer was very late 90s, early 2000’s? Furthermore, do you remember that one weird Buffy episode where Joss Whedon dove into supernatural beer drinking to get some of that sweet, sweet PSA money?
This is doing that, but even clunkier.
This may be the least 2000s screencap I can get. I’m not going back in a third time to prove myself wrong, either.
The basic facts are these. There’s this college swim team, consisting of early 2000s haircuts and attitudes. I shall hereafter refer to them collectively as the Proto-Bros, because even after going through a second time for screenshots, I still can’t remember any of their names. In fact, I can’t remember the names of any of the characters, because I was distracted, both times, by the Leeches! (I think I have to use the exclamation each time. Yeah, I’m going to use the exclamation mark each time.)
The best part? Nobody notices this until - you guessed it - they get across campus to our old friend That Shower Shot We Could Afford.
But the Proto-Bros want to swim faster, so they’re taking steroids. There’s also Leeches! in the area waters, and when the Proto-Bros get in the water, our water-borne nippers get a taste for pharmaceutically enhanced Bro Blood and start to grow rapidly. This is not helped when the use of steroids is discovered, and the team coach (naturally a scumbag to his core) orders them to hide the evidence. I’ll give you one guess where the steroids get dumped. Go on, guess.
Putting more steroids down the shower drain only causes them to start growing more, and soon it is time for the Leeches! to take their blood sucking to the next level. This is where the movie gets hilariously ridiculous. For a start, when a Leech! prop gets dragged across the floor, it is very obviously a piece of rubber on a string. That’d be funny enough. But the actual attacks are where the glory really is. The Leeches! always go for the face, are clearly held on by the actors - but then, well, it gets even more hilarious. I won’t spoil it by showing you, but I will use a phrase my fiancée termed for it that is the most appropriate possible title for these moments: Attack of the Oven Mitts.
As the collection of early 2000s stereotypes and their girlfriends begins to dwindle, hidden currents of conflict, murder and the worst possible end to a kinky night all begin to intertwine. The best part is watching people repeatedly get into situations where “slowly being climbed on by Leeches!” is a valid potential outcome. Sometimes, the movie doesn’t even bother explaining how the Leeches! manage it. They just do. These are the little bloodsuckers that could, and they do it mostly by slow meandering. These truly are the laziest horror movie monsters ever, and the best part is? It works for them. They’re on a strangely monochromatic campus with Proto-Bros. The world is filled with easy prey for them – these are not people with survival instincts.
Pictured: a rubbery argument against Darwin.
We also get to see the gloriously ridiculous attempt to build tension by waiting for Leeches! to slowly come to a pool. At the end, there might be a twist. I say might have been, because after re-watching the relevant scenes again, I’m not sure. The dialogue and delivery gets kind of confusing. I get the one part of the twist, but am not entirely sure of the other. Your mileage may vary on that. I’ll honestly say it could’ve been a good twist, not exactly original, but not bad. Unfortunately, it is delivered with all the aplomb one might get a gas station corn dog.
Thing is, were this better acted or scripted, this might have worked. That being said, I’m pretty adamant that Leeches! are not the Grade-A horror monster that the people behind this movie thought they were. There’s a truly terrible 50s horror movie about Giant Leeches, where the leeches are clearly people in suits – and even with arms they’re still fairly useless attackers of anything faster than, say, Internet Explorer. Even the Triffids made more sense as attackers of humans.
The funny part to me is that this movie will be one of those films that, in decades to come, you could identify the time period it was made without any trouble whatsoever. It oozes its time period. It reminds us of the very questionable choices we made in that era, from hair to clothing to…well, name a thing.
This movie had some good ideas, but in the end it’s more a slightly strange anti-drug PSA than a genuinely great creature feature. The characters are too bland and generic to really pick up any “I want them to live!” or “ohhhh I hope they get it!” vibes like you do from some movies. Really, every scene without the Leeches! could be any Buffy episode ever, but without any deliberate sense of humour.
Leeches! is certainly not the worst creature feature out there – not by a long shot – and some of the scenes are a great unintentional laugh. But it’s not the best choice for that sort of watching either. It’s sort of middle of the road, and for that reason, it gets a middle of the road score.
I don’t usually put a review out on an album based solely on a single, but here I make an exception for the debut LP from American Leeches, the supergroup from southeast Wisconsin. Anastasia (bass/vox) from The Curious Case of Benjamin Butthole, Bea (drums) from The Fibonacci Sequins, and Chad (guitar/vox) from The Rad, Chad, Tad Band stew up some delicious, straight-up American rock in their first single “Leeches!” I’ve heard them live a couple times in Milwaukee/Kenosha and my ears orgasmed, so I can guarantee this album’s gonna be sick. Comes out September 2nd. Pre-order NOW.
The concern that youth follow the lead of peasants was very much in keeping with Mao’s own statements and with the dominant policy thrust of the late 1960s and 1970s. Thus such stories almost invariably emphasized at least their cooperation with, and usually their reliance on, or even subservience to, peasants. For example, a group of sent-down youth in Hebei Province set up an experiment station with the support of the local Party branch. Instead of allowing themselves to be guided by the “old peasants,” however, they pursued impractical ideas in an attempt to “startle” people with their innovation, such as hybridizing cotton and paulownia to create a perennial “cotton tree.” And so the story continued, with local Party officials becoming aware of the problem and educating the youth about the importance of uniting with the masses, then the youth reportedly becoming very successful in designing new forms of pest control and fertilizer.
In many cases, references to youth being led by the masses appeared merely ritualistic, with little evidence as to the relevance of the education they were supposedly receiving. But some accounts were more specific in this regard. In one story, a rural youth graduated from secondary school, returned to the countryside, and was assigned to a weather station where poor and lower-middle class peasants observed leech behavior to forecast the weather. At first he reportedly had a negative attitude and did not realize how much he could learn from the peasants. Then came a day when the youth carelessly lost his leeches. He found a new leech, but his next forecast failed. A peasant explained that there are three kinds of leeches and that he had collected the wrong kind. The youth then realized that old peasants had a wealth of experience watching weather patterns. He visited more than eighty old peasants to collect their knowledge of observing animals to predict weather. Such stories underscored the Maoist class-based philosophy of science, in which “old peasants”—by virtue of their class status—possessed knowledge of critical importance to the pursuit of agricultural science.
-- Schmalzer, Sigrid. “Youth and the “Great Revolutionary Movement” of Scientific Experiment in 1960s–1970s Rural China.” Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism
Giving a dragon alcoholic beverages might be a bad choice on the bartender, but the result is this:
HHAVE YOU EVER EATEN A LEEEECH BEFRO? I HAVE. VREY SLIIIMY. VERY…GROSH. *He licks his snout* THAT WASS BACK W-HEN I HAD ALL THEM LEECHES! …GAVE MOHST AWAY…. HAD TO DO SOMETHING WITH THE LEFT-OVERS… DON’T JUDGE ME! I WAS JUSS’ CURIOUS..
