After a few weeks spent doing all sorts of work that, if successful, means you will hardly notice it has happened, we’re finally back in the saddle, and man did I pay the price for my absence:

SHAITANI DRACULA
In 1948, French artist Jean Dubuffet coined the term art brut, a term which became “outsider art” when critic Roger Cardinal imported it into the English language in 1972. As Dubuffet himself describes it, art brut can’t be created by anyone who functions as part of regular society, even regular art society, and so this form of fierce and feverish creativity remains the sole purview of madmen and terrifying backwoods hillbillies who make sculpture out of cat skins, metal drums, and human skulls. Or, you know, something like that. One gets the feeling, however, that if a potential creator of outsider art suddenly found himself in possession of a movie camera, some plastic Dracula fangs, and half a dozen cheap novelty wolfman masks, the resultant film that would come from that fertile and lunatic mind would look something like Shaitani Dracula, a creation so far beyond the pale of anything we can recognize as a movie that one can only assume no sane human was involved in the production, and the entire thing somehow simply sprang fully formed out of one of those Victorian era madhouses where the patients all wander around in a big open room, giggling and possessed of various degrees of “crazy” hair.