Sacre Blecch!

They look sad because it's only the opening sequence and there are 90 minutes to go.

Jean Rollin"s "Requiem for a Vampire" is a little bit Antonioni, a little bit Hammer, and a whole lot of boring.

See, these two girls bust out of boarding school and naturally all they want to do is dress up like clowns and shoot at the cops.

This does not work out so well for the poor sap they got to drive them but c'est la vie.

So they wander around the countryside until they blunder into a ruined castle that everybody insists on calling a chateau. It's got some pretty lame vampires and three ugly mooks who apparently look after the vampires in between raping the gals they got chained up in the basement.

One of the mooks looks a bit like Ralphus from "Bloodsucking Freaks" if that helps when you are wondering whether to rent this sucker.

So there's a lot of blah blah blah from the main vampire about being the last of the line, and lots of aimless walking around, and mooks attacking the chained up nekkid girls and saying "arrrgh" a lot, and some more shots of the countryside, and of green slime, and the clown suits, and the revolvers that have 56 shots in them, and some mild lesbitation, and what does it all mean?

It means you should check the batteries in the remote, because you're gonna be hitting that fast-forward.

Bah. One grudging coil. (I can't find the coil photos, so you'll have to imagine it.)

An outtake from the upcoming "50 Shades of Grey"? Nope — just the vampire slaves tapping into the fringe bennies on a slow day in the dungeon.

They like this sort of thing in France. In Europe, for that matter.

When hippies breed, part VII — The Boho Vampiress. First she lulls you to sleep singing "Joe Hill." Then she closes in for the kill.

"Shall we go up? Shall we go down? Shall we take our clothes off? Shall we reload?"

"Or shall we roll around nekkid in the vampire master bedroom?"

Dog Days 2012

Now is the time of year when fly-rodders in Northwest Connecticut must either trek to the Farmington or forget about fishing for trout.

August is bass season — smallmouth in the Housatonic, and largemouth in lakes and ponds.

Also bluegill, crappie and perch.

It's not bad, floating around in a pontoon boat chucking gigantic flies at the dumb brutes.

But it only goes so far. I'd gladly sacrifice summer weather for waders, a sweater and trout.

Luckily, the heat wave snapped, and it's getting down in the 50s at night. We're getting there.

Pontoon boat — powered by oars and/or swim fins

Largemouth bass, Lower Lake, Mt. Riga, Conn. This is a typical specimen. They get bigger.

The colorful and silly bluegill (aka sunfish)

A larger largemouth. A largemouth bass is basically a swimming mouth.

The perch. They don't get much bigger around here. They travel in swarms.

The crappie, which looks like the hideous combination of a bass and a bluegill. People out west and in the south like to pronounce it "croppie," but not me.

Yours truly, in delightful LL Bean fishing shirt, with nylon and polyester goodness. The most comfortable one of its kind I've found. Discontinued, of course.

Mercer's straight collar

My introduction to Mercer and Sons shirts was in the form of the introductory offer of 25 percent off. I bought oxford-cloth buttondowns in white and blue — a bold venture, I agree.

I liked them just fine, and started looking at the other fabrics on the site.

After some back and forth with David Mercer, I picked up a couple of spring/summer plaids with the straight collar.

These can be worn as sport shirts, no problem. Or you can put in the stays and wear them with a tie. For some reason they don't look goofy to me, the way a buttondown gingham with a knit tie (as seen in the Lands End catalog) does.

Reminds me of the bailiff on "Night Court." It's the "I'm wearing a tie because I have to" look.

Maybe my affection for these shirts is due to the fact that I have to save for months to afford one. If it costs this much, I damn well better like it.

I've added a couple more over the years. I know people love the Mercer buttondown collar, but BDs are a dime a dozen. (Well, maybe not a dime.)

If I'm going to drop over $100 on a shirt I want something very different than the workhorse shirts I can get by the yard elsewhere.

Caged Fury — So Bad It's Bad

I had high hopes for "Caged Fury," a 1989 bimbos-behind-bars flick, because it stars the immortal Erik Estrada.

Nope. This flick stinks.

They said it didn't exist — the movie so bad even I can't take it.

I have endured "Manos: Hands of Fate." I made it through "Deathstalker IV and V." I even emerged from an extended study of "The Incredibly Strange People Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" able and willing to write amusingly about it.

But "Caged Fury" is just Pure-D Dookie. No coils.

PS: Eighty-eight breasts.