Zombie Nightmare (1986)

 

Director: Jack Bravman and John Fasano

Screenplay: John Fasano and David Wellington

Cast: Adam West as Capt. Tom Churchman; Jon Mikl Thor as Tony Washington; Tia Carrere as Amy; Manuska Rigaud as Molly Mokembe; Frank Dietz as Frank Sorrell; Linda Singer as Maggie

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Frank, let's not have any more high school kids turn up dead.

Zombie Nightmare does not have a great reputation. From the land of Canada, they have also produced some truly bizarre films, from the Things (1989) of the world to Science Crazed (1991), and in mind to Zombie Nightmare's reputation being so bad, it was chosen for a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode and everyone on the cast hated sitting through it, Zombie Nightmare is just conventional for me. It says a lot of me that I have seen more that I can consider far worse in horror films, and I came to this instead just being reminded that the eighties actually existed. I missed this era being born in 1989, and I can now look at it in films like this with curiousness, a time where Jon Mikl Thor can look resplendent as he does in the first act, but would be a dress sense viewed only in irony in the modern day.

Playing the son of a brave man killed protecting a young voodoo priest, Jon Mikl Thor, the cult Canadian heavy metal singer who used to bend bars in a muscle man stage act, can wander around with luxurious long hair, wearing mascara and almost looking feminine, things which have aged incredibly well in the modern day and would suit a look of people of any gender. He however also contrasts it with a muscle shirt that could not hide anyone's boobs, men's or otherwise, and would be mocked in the modern day by cynical film fans; in the era this film was made, only then would no one bat an eye on the choice of practical day wear to go to a convenience store in. Considering the hair on display even on psychopathic young male hoodlums, who realise killing Thor in an accidental hit and run is almost ecstasy, and are sex pests with knives, and you cannot help to see how each decade is rewarding to see in films, even ones with wavering quality, just to see that once everyone's hairstyle exploded in elaborate mountains of hairspray filled manes.

In mind that the main director later made Night of the Dribbler (1990), which is a poor horror comedy I struggled with, which makes Zombie Nightmare at least passable for trying at something more engaging. The music alone is of the era and also really interesting as a heavy metal fan to take in, where starting your opening credits with Motorhead's Ace of Spades, playing over the credit of cult actor Adam West's name on a green fingerprint, is memorable to say the least. When Thor dies, the young woman who his father rescued, a voodoo priestess whose actress does eat invisibly scenery when she can, resurrects him on his mother's behalf is just to get revenge on everyone in the car that ran him over. The interpretation of voodoo as less an actual religion, but a Western narrative's occult trope, is always problematic, something I accept more in a forties film like Voodoo Man (1944) as of the time, and just to see a cult actor like George Zucco playing bongos onscreen, but by the late eighties it is startling to see how far we did not progress with depicting the religion. Wes Craven, even in context of a horror film with a white outsider as the protagonist, is one of the only people in this genre with The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) to have made a horror film which tackles actual voodoo beliefs, with few other prominent film afterwards made, and that is startling and looks terrible to even consider. Even here too, if the treatment of voodoo as a plot trope is just campy, you are stuck with the problem that eventually, decaying more and more, Thor is effectively replaced by a hulking actor who could have been anyone, in zombie makeup, shambling around with a baseball bat. He can twist a man's neck with his undead hands easily, but a beefy undead Jon Mikl Thor, who you could pick out just from that hairstyle at the start of the film, would have been a huge advantage for the film if just for camp purposes. The film's flaws, as a person with a tolerance for cinema which few might defend, is entirely for being conventional, where the aesthetic of being soaked in late eighties excess becomes the tonic.

You cannot help, least I do, still find a cheesy horror film like this fascinating when it is still about grief, the loss of love ones and revenge from the grave, still trying for high stakes drama, alongside the fact that most of the hit-and-ran culprits are scared young adults, one a young Tia Carrere, scared out of their minds and sympathetic, only to be picked off, whilst it is just the main member of the group whose psychopathic tendencies feels like a fifties juvenile delinquent character for a scuzzier age. The time stamp is compelling, especially because this is part of a wave of heavy metal horror films from the time. A lot of the music will be obscure for many, with bands like Fist I have never heard of, but with some curious choices, such as Girlschool, an all-female British band who collaborated with Motorhead, whose admiration for the band through Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister's helped the band in recognition as much as create a bond between both groups. My biggest disappointment in musical choices is that the Pantera in this film is one of the many Thor himself is involved with who contribute to the soundtrack. This is disappointing on a morbid level because, contrary to belief, the legendary Texas band were recording albums since 1983 and no one wants to admit everything before Cowboys from Hell (1990) exists. It would have been beautiful, even in a sick way, to hear when they were the comically cheesy glam metal band no one wants to admit once existed. Considering as well the film will be sold on Pantera, and not the right one, will make this even more disappointing.

The film tries as well to clearly not "look" and "sound" Canadian either, with the sense its biggest get Adam West is the older bankable American star to sell the film on. It is forty four minute in when West actually appears, but alongside how the film gets some additional drama with his back-story, anyone expecting (as I did) additional camp from the former Batman may be taken aback by what he does instead. Rocking a moustache, he plays a cynical cop with complete seriousness, which actually adds to the film for the better. Even for a film which has impalement with a steel baseball bat, its seriousness actually helps for the movie, with the unintentional cheesiness still able to have some meat to it because of an attempted sincerity. Again, my taste in films and knowledge means that I have seen so much worse that Zombie Nightmare is passingly entertaining and even charming. Truthfully, it was one of many horror films from this era, including from Canada, and this one just got the rotten luck of notoriety.

Crime Wave (1985)

 

Director: John Paizs

Screenplay: John Paizs

Cast: Eva Kovacs as Kim Brown; John Paizs as Steven Penny; Darrell Baran as Ronnie Boyles; Jeffrey Owen Madden as Skip Holliday; Tea Andrea Tanner as Dawn Holliday; Mark Yuill as Stanley Falco; Neil Lawrie as Dr. C. Jolly (as Neal Lawrie); Bob Cloutier as Mr. Brown; Donna Fullingham as Mrs. Brown

An Abstract List Candidate

 

I'd say the guitar stays behind until you're unbroke.

Not to be confused with Crime Wave (1985), Sam Raimi's follow-up to The Evil Dead (1981), written with the Coen Brothers, the Crime Wave I am talking about is an obscure Canadian film and a curious one at that, shot in "Total Colour" and produced with "Select-O-Sound", one which went out of its way to replicate a time that never existed by even having a score, by Randolph Peters, evoking old educational films.

In this world, a family has let out a room upstairs to Stephen Penny (director-producer-writer John Paizs in a mostly mute role), an aspiring writer who wishes to create the greatest "colour crime film", and working at night by street light when he types. Living over the garage, the young daughter Kim Brown (Eva Kovacs) develops a bond with him, wishing to help Stephen overcome his writer's block. She even gets (as we the viewers do) a demonstration of optical illusions all within a story, which she narrates, of Stephen being unable to overcome his ability to create a script and the frustrations surrounding this.

A significant section of the narrative, with Stephen able to write beginning and ending but struggling with the middles of narratives, is the story of Crime Wave, Stephen's goal of a tale, in its various forms. Of vying tribute musicians - Buddy Holly, Hank Williams and Sid Vicious - with an Elvis impersonator named Ronny Boyles getting involved, one of the many stories written and unfinished by Stephen who ends it with the Tribute King dying by crashing face first into a telephone pole in a car wreck, the pole (including the face imprint left) becoming a tourist attraction.  Or the Always Diamond couples and beauty goods distribution wars, with a couple who steals from homes and even murder when need to, leading to a wheelchair bond woman's mouth being blocked with dog biscuits, or a self-help book guru who has a mental breakdown and bashes his head on the kitchen floor to die. All the unfinished scripts we see, pastiches of real crime films, with real old posters on Stephen's walls like Teen-Age Crime Wave (1955) and The Sellout (1952) with Walter Pidgeon, are funny in their weirdness. We even get the fragments, as Stephen cannot write middles and leaves the attempts in the trash for Kim to collect, from an abrupt cancer subplot, hidden bondage roleplay, or the unfortunate death of a child's pet when it went under the lawnmower.

It seems a crass thing to say, but this is a very Canadian film, at least in the sense Canadian films, when they are eccentric and allowed to be weird, are their own unique type of weird cinema, an eccentricity with quaintness where trivial things are magnified in their oddness, like a character having car counting at night as a professional part time job. This is however contrasted by a perversity; the calm and politeness of Canadian culture they are stereotyped is subverted in the likes of Guy Maddin's films as they are here, with moments of abrupt gore, and very explicit referrals to sexuality. Sex is just nearby, be it nudity or secret kinks, and even with the daughter at one point, a young teenager leading to raised eyebrows, offering Stephen to overhear her parents having sex at night to pass the time.

A lot exists on the fringes of Crime Wave, its gee-whiz mentality contrasted by so much, set in a timeless yet contemporary, which belies a more sinister edge. Of fringe groups of a more positive light too, but still ostracised, such as a group of men hanging outside in the day in the streets who are possibly gay cruisers, only to be target of homophobic half-ton truck drivers, or overtly bleak such as the fact that the final act is caused due to the town of Sails, Kansa being closed and abandoned due to a radiation accident or some "secret stuff" that means any left pets have to be shot immediately. Some of the jokes may be too dark for some viewers - in one case, an imaginary film called "The Last White Man in South Africa", an action story only seen in a poster and one scene of a Rambo figure, has not aged at all unless you call it a really bleak joke in mind to where Apartheid was at this period - but the tone in itself, strangely humble in spite of what is not hidden at all, helps considerably for impact.

The twisted nature (and weirdness) of Crime Wave comes to a head when, to help Stephen, Kim sends a letter to Dr. Jolly the screenwriting expert. Unfortunately Dr. Jolly (Neil Lawrie), who looks like a gaunt Joe Bob Briggs, the cult film and exploitation movie expert known for his Southern redneck persona, has also gone mad, trussing men up on beds and riding them in a cowboy hat, hiding the bodies after death in the boot of his car to dispose of. Crime Wave itself, to pastiche old genre films, is structured as one only in a very bizarre form, where Stephen's inspiration (by way of a street lamp over the head) is to turn on himself, and the genre tropes when they do appear are subverted, when a conflict is resolved by a car driven (or hurtled along) by a dog behind the steering wheel abruptly. With its incredible and distinct colour palette, looking of even the forties, and a whimsical tone based on old idiosyncratic influences, by way of Canadian educational films, this was a pleasant surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Perverse/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Non-Abstract Spectrum: Darknet (2013-4)

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Series Directors: Vincenzo Natali, Rodrigo Gudiño, Jeremy Ball, Anthony Scott Burns, Steven Hoban, Brett Sullivan

Screenplay: Randall Cole, James Kee, Sarah Larsen, Vincenzo Natali, Doug Taylor, Pascal Trottier

Based on the Japanese series Tori Hada

Synopsis: Set in Toronto, Darknet follows various individuals connected in different gruesome tales by Darknet.net, a sinister website on the hidden side of the web which offers real death videos and forums for questions such as how to dispose of a body.

In 2010, a Japanese show called Tori Hada came to be and went on to have multiple spin-off films and additionals, Japanese horror notable in grasping on the fears new technology from the web to mobile phones would produce since the nineties. Enter Vincenzo Natali, the Canadian maverick behind films like Cube (1997) and Splice (2009) who decided to work on adapting Tori Hada to the West as this Canadian production. Unfortunately, whilst it's been made available for streaming online, the resulting show Darknet only last for six episodes before being canned.

There are sign, clear, why this was the case, but especially with the structure and style, it would've been an innovative horror anthology even if it had a few more episodes. Initially, it combines various stories in a non-linear fashion in the same world of Toronto (usually after dark). Characters in one tale appear others or are connected to each other; neither is it, as mentioned, linear in chronology, played t, with the exception of the middle of the series where it sags, in interlinking the stories in unique ways. Its mood is based on the idea of urban legends especially in connection to how technology influences them, the title based on the fears of the "dark net", the idea that once accessed, there's a subterranean world to the net is a place of the worst in humanity. The real life version is called deep web, and the fears of what transpires on it, whether true or not, including it being a place where child pornography can be accessed or even worst could be located. In the last few years, to take this review in a sad real perspective, that mass murders can be streamed on Facebook off a profile has made the deep net as a bogeyman unnecessary as the ordinary net can be abused in real tragedy. It dates Darknet in a tragic truth, but Darknet as a series still touches upon this fear with a lot of interest.

For horror, even the idea of this, to take this review back to covering a fun and creepy cancelled series, becomes as much about horror stories of yore from the perspective of internet media. Where there's a secret website, whose forums allow you to ask how to dispose of a body, and even one's GPS map system isn't safe. Creepy Pastas, urban legends with a known existence as being fictional, are close to what Darknet riffs upon but with the exception that, barring one that gets in Vincenzo Natali's obsession with body horror and the ending scene for the whole series, there's no overt supernatural tale but entirely about the thick evil morass of what people can get up to.

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The structure, when it's focused upon, is inspired, where even clichéd tropes of horror are given new life by wrong footing the viewer with the chronological structure. It also has no concern for getting over the top - the first episode has a businessman finding a key in a subway locker, sent on a wild goose chase with another key and so forth, logic not getting in the way of the creepiness. In terms of the fears the series plays on, many are "realistic" or at least about gristly things, and in one case you even have a story wrong foot you by never having any death at all, just turning into an amateur porn shoot. Even by pure accident, perception of characters as much as the twists provide a lot of great moments, alongside the sense of this being a horror series only possible to make in the 2010s. Again, it's dated a little now that even the regular internet is shown to be a dark and horrible place, but dealing with subject matter like internet trolls and furries, it stands out as having a fresh perspective on this type of storytelling by talking about new cultural ideas.

It makes a blunder with Episode 5, which is one single tale of an isolated young woman who witnesses a strange vanishing figure on her CCTV camera footage at work. It's not as bad as I was prepared for it to be, but its clichéd, bland and obvious. Throughout the series, the stories are to the point, even intercut between each other for an interesting pace, and have no fears of taking risks. Even those that overegg their stories, Episode 4 including a woman being gas lighted using her psychological issues, are contrasted by perfectly executed ones like a single woman toying with a peeping torn across the road, little cliches kept fresh by their invention and short lengths. One episode which is about one story, no others, ends up completely missing the point of why the formula worked and scuppers the pace due to there being only five other episodes for contrast.

Episode six improves and clears up the failures of the fifth, although one has to speculate what caused Darknet to fail and only have these six episodes. I suspect episode five didn't help at all - imagining if I was a TV executive that the whole episode, alongside the plot with the gas lighting in Episode 4 which stumbled into too many twists, there was a sense the production had already drifted away from the tightly constructed work of before, and that fear that it could happen over and over again if the future episodes had to be rushed. Beyond that, there's only speculation, baring the fact that with Episode One directed by Natali himself, Darknet was starting off well but with the potential danger that, in lieu of what feels like perfectly and carefully worked over initial episodes, they could have easily gotten lazy if he or someone likeminded wasn't planning ahead.

Episode 6 does at least return to its point, as even Episode 5 distanced itself completely from its premise about technology, stories varying upon a cartoon mouse as well as the dangers of internet trolling. It does unfortunately end the whole series on a deeply silly, and frankly bad, conclusion; returning characters, abrupt supernatural computer technology without set-up, and the strange (and dumb) idea of an assemble of deviants being pulled together for a Machiavellian group like a superhero team. It thankfully doesn't undermine Darknet too much but does feel like a sour note to finish on. Sadly, only three hours long altogether, a much better outcome should've taken place even if Darknet was still cancelled, just for its idiosyncratic take on horror anthology storytelling. What we got if flawed but was still a fascinating construction.

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Halloween 32 For 31: Things (1989)

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Dir. Andrew Jordan

"You have just experienced Things" is as inspired an end credit text as you could get for any film remotely like Things, an infamous no-budget horror film from Canada. Films like this are still a foreign language to me I've only picked a few words up in, an entire subculture around no-budget genre cinema significantly more pronounced in the United States. A few ended up getting released in the United Kingdom, almost all on cheap DVDs, but the Americans have had a greater history of these maligned films, the result of their own idiosyncratic history of the VHS boom where countless obscurities that were never released in the UK were available because of the need for content to sell in the market. Many a person who has greater knowledge in these sorts of topics could, and have reading and listening to their work, have informed me of how far this sub culture in cult cinema goes. Obscurities like Sledgehammer (1983) and Boardinghouse (1982) that sound like an occult language of their own, worshiped on the alter of the video cassette player, with various regional directors I'm only hearing of within the last year as the preachers. Even now, a film like Things is unlikely to get a UK DVD release, because of the cults and phenomenons we hear afar of in the States not reaching over yet, and that because of how the British retail industry works, especially with the costs of getting films certificated, the money or interest needed for an obscure film infamous for being one of the worst films ever made is going to need a larger British contingent of "Thing-ites" to exist to make it viable to release. Last time I check too, you can't watch Things on YouTube either, only reviews from amateur reviewers and the main theme played over and over again for ten hours. I thank the celluloid God the American DVD was available.

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Let's call a spade a digging implement in a spade shape. Things is what happens when two ordinary guys from Canada, director Andrew Jordan and co-writer/star/co-producer Barry J. Gillis managed to get the resources together to make a film, clearly obsessed with horror cinema, but unlike The Deadly Spawn (1983), where semblance of technical cohesiveness on a rudimentary level exists, and in great cases like The Deadly Spawn succeed in being a good film in the conventional way, the result of making Things seems to suggest they had no idea how to make a film in the first place either. The thing, if you forgive the unintentional pun, difficult to use "thing" in my habit of using vague descriptive words, with the film is that it's the least technically competent film I've seen, or one of them, and one of the least comprehensible, but that has meant it's still an experience of great worth if you have the right mindset. Two friends, one J. Gillis, recognisable with his moustache and glorious mullet, visit the brother of J. Gillis' character, whose wife is part of an experimental procedure as they are unable to conceive children. Unfortunately the procedure gives birth to the titular things instead, giant insects that are man eating. That is the only cohesive narrative I can give you as the rest of the film has no cinematic sense to it. The transfer for the version I viewed, the best available version I could've viewed on the first viewing, transferred from film to video, is already hazy, but the technical quality of the original footage would raise the eyebrows of those expecting the gloss of what even a modern day straight-to-video film has. Almost all the film is set in a single house. Sound had to be rerecorded and post-synched, with wooden or outlandish vocals for many of the cast, the sound a messy fuzz. Bleeding red and blue lights are used frequently, drowning entire scenes in the retina burning hues. The things are cheesy models that wobble and wiggle along. And the story itself is a scramble of thoughts disconnected to each other in a stream of wavering acting and abrupt events or dialogue exchanges taking place.

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The things of the title and the actual narrative doesn't appear until thirty minutes in. In that time, the thirty minutes consists of actors talking to each other in either the longue or kitchen, drinking beer and a current of garbled content, too much that doesn't make sense one after another to keep up with and rationalise in the cerebrum. The film starts strongly in warning you of this with a dream sequence with a stripping woman in a rubber devil mask, and while nothing supernatural ever takes place, and nothing plot essential happens in the first thirty minutes, it is a sign to inform you of how random Things will get. In the first thirty minutes you get the following - conversations about finding bestiality programming and about how "Some of the stations he doesn't know where they come from!"; the lost Salvador Dali painting Devil's Daughter on a wall and another nearby given to someone by the Queen of England; the characters eating bread sandwiches and adding tap water to their beers; a tape recorder being taken out of a refrigerator and such other things (to forgive the accidental pun again). The result is stupefying and after the plot kicks in, it gets increasingly nonsensical. The result is virtually unwatchable in terms of conventional filmmaking; the virtue I have grown to love within it, instead, being that of the cinematic image separate from narrative is of the most importance, even in a grotty looking, piece of lunacy like this.

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The things appearing doesn't stop the nonsense even if they try their hardest to make a mess of fake blood out of everything. It doesn't stop J. Gillis, after a character's death, talking about the entire narrative of a fictitious science fiction book his character read for no apparent reason. Or, in-between a succession of gory, homemade splatter effects, including a drill and a chainsaw, characters for an entire ten or so minutes sequences walk through a corridor and examining the corners of the bathroom. Or wishing one another were a midget so it'll be easier to carry them. I admit my patience on a second viewing was waning occasionally in the middle half, but Things' apparent unwatchability is compelling and certainly memorable. A truly bad film is merely dull, and I now consider the worst of cinema not to be dictated by technical competence or narrative consistency, but impact and tone, two things (forgive the accidental pun thrice) Things does have. I haven't even mentioned that the creators of the film managed, despite the obscurity of their work, to their credit and tenacity, to get porn star Amber Lynn to star as an omnipresent news reporter, speaking to no one, or maybe us the viewer, or an imaginary one, in a dark room separate from the rest of the film in a mass of eighties styled blonde hair and a sky blue jacket. Reading her lines at points, obviously, as you see her eyes blatantly looking to her right off screen, her musings are as cryptic and strange, anything from asking an unknown audience abruptly to lock their door and stay indoors, to the copyright issues of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). There is a random cutaway, extended sequence, to a mad doctor with a female assistance, early in the film, gruesomely mutilating a man strapped to a chair which is never explained. The actual narrative between all this gets odder to compensate. Countless film references appear obscurely or literally out of the fridge. Someone briefly disappears to through the "3rd, 4th and 5th" dimensions. The reference to Salvador Dali is a perverse and an unexpectedly inspired inclusion because, trying to watch Things, I cannot help but think, to the baffle of some people who may read this, of the automatic writing games of the Surrealists as if done by mistake in a no-budget film.

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The Surrealists admired "bad" cinema for how the mistakes and deficiencies punctured cinematic reality - Things is a catalogue of scenes and moments together that never connect, legitimately surreal even if it was by mistake, with no deliberation but as a mass of uncontrolled thoughts. Things is legitimately weird. I realise on this viewing how bad the film is in context of film studies and film academic structures of how a movie works and is made, but I went to acquire this film on DVD, as many did unless they were the ones who stumbled upon it originally, with this being made clear. Everyone who goes to watch Things has likely went with some knowledge of this, and that wasn't a detraction from it. I knew what to expect after first learning of its existence through Cinema Sewer, which flat out warns you of its tone and content even if the piece about it secretly loved the movie. Nor is this an ironic bad film or lamely terrible...the word "stupefying" is said by me with amazement too. The appreciation I have for anyone who makes a film, having never done so myself, with what resources they could get is always applaudable, many a cult film fan, particularly with no-budget cinema, with the same mindset, a wonderfully humanitarian view of one's fellow man regardless if a film is good or not. I'm closer to a mindset though I've yet to read or hear explicitly about these films, which Things encapsulates, where for it's inanity, amongst aimless scenes, a catchy doom metal riff rock song in the soundtrack, cockroach eating and mind numbing content, where if I was a film maker, I would take as much inspiration from a film like this and it's apparent failures, and do them deliberately in my work to effect a viewer in the same ways. If an existing director was to do this, I'd argue they would create legitimately great cinema. I've yet to hear anyone say that Things pushes the potential for cinema - in form and content - in its skull fucking weirdness and incompetence as much as an avant-garde film can, so I'll say it here myself, knowing what the film actually is, but still able to see the virtue in that.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) - High

Things proves that a lack of knowledge is as powerful for a viewer as a deliberately made film in the same tone is as well. In what was made by people with the passion for films, which I admire, but yet had no idea how to put this film together, it's completely unpredictable in ways filmmakers have failed miserably in trying to replicate on purpose. Things can jump from a pointless joke about paper children to a Amber Lynn musing, with the randomness of a few random scribbles stuck together in any order. Again, I'd argue that if the content in Things was done deliberately, it would've been exceptional in leaving the viewer in a freakish headspace; as it stands, Things is exceptional in messing the collective minds of myself and many others in the same way, stumbling about for its length incoherently.

A Cinema of the Abstract movie?

I admit to being dangerously close to pretentiousness here, if not already there, comparing Things to high art, but as well as being utterly entertaining in its perceived awfulness, I find joy in it in my personal way as, seeing the garbled mess of impassioned z-grade horror onscreen, it as much shows the nature of films, and how you can bend and break it, as you can learn from a "well made" film too. I can see as much of what can be done here with the medium which is as much a reason this schlock is as worthy of covering as the cultural vegetables of experimental cinema. Things will be the flag post for an area of cinema I wish to see more of, poorly recorded beauty that is on the opposite end of the technically proficient films of the same beauty. I can't hate a film either with this level of ridiculous dialogue, pointless amounts of gunge being split and arbitrary things happening that are hysterical in just taking place. It can be mind numbingly slow and patience testing, but never boring.