Well, it looks like, due to circumstances beyond my control, I’ve dropped the ball on the last installment of my Vincent Price Halloween countdown. If I’m able to run John Langan’s piece in the next couple of days, I’ll definitely put it up and let everyone know. In the meantime, I hope everybody enjoyed the Vincent Price Halloween festivities, and my sincere thanks to all the great creators who participated.  In case you missed any installments, here they all are, in link form:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia on The Tingler
Richard Gavin on The Tomb of Ligeia
Gemma Files on Dr. Phibes
Jesse Bullington on Witchfinder General
S.J. Chambers on The Last Man on Earth
Drazen Kozjan on The Pit and the Pendulum 

When I started all this, there was one thing I didn’t take into consideration: What a tough act I was setting myself up to follow. So, what’s my call for a Vincent Price movie suggestion for Halloween? It’s a tough choice, as you can see by the wide variety of films covered here already. I could list a ton, many of which have already been talked about at length by my other contributors, and it’s pretty safe to say that any movie with Price in it is a pretty safe bet. But if I had to pick just one movie from Price’s oeuvre to suggest for Halloween, it’d be Comedy of Terrors.

For me, Halloween is about more than just scariness. We do that all year round. There’s a certain fun to Halloween, too. A certain mixture of scariness and silliness. And while most of Price’s films might well be considered to fit that bill, Comedy of Terrors is one of a comparatively few overtly comedic outings.

It’s got quite a pedigree, both behind the camera and before it. Screenplay by Richard Matheson (showing he knows comedy as well as horror). Directed by Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Night of the Demon, etc). A cast including Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone. It works nicely as a companion piece with similar comedic outings (with pretty much the same casts) The Raven and the comedic “Black Cat” segment of Tales of Terror. For my money, though, Comedy of Terrors is the sharpest of them. Not beholden to any Poe story, though shot through with many elements native to Price’s many Poe adaptations for American International Pictures, it is freed up to tell the delightfully dark story of a murderous undertaker (Price) who kills his clients in their own homes in order to keep himself in business.

All the actors are joys to watch, and Tourneur and Matheson bring enough wit, adroitness, and enough Gothic trappings to make for a truly spectacular Halloween foray.

So, barring a late-falling installment, this’ll be it for the Vincent Price Halloween. You can expect to hear more from me about my weekend’s festivities and the like very soon, and you can expect to see some changes made around this website come November. For now, though, I’m off to return to seasonal celebrations, and I hope everyone out there has a great day on this spookiest time of the year.

Drazen Kozjan is an illustrator living in Toronto. His next picture book Working Mummies by Joan Horton will be released in 2012, but I first got to know his work from his brilliant webcomic The Happy Undertaker, which you can also follow on Facebook. He went above and beyond the call of duty for our Vincent Price Halloween countdown, providing not only our longest writeup so far but also a special illustration, which I’ll include at the conclusion of the post, all for The Pit and the Pendulum:

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The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), the second in in Roger Corman’s series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptions following the success of The Fall of the House of Usher, holds a special place in my heart for a number of reasons. Like the stories of Poe, which were the doorway to lifelong enthusiasm for macabre literature, watching this film on television as a youngster in the seventies was one of the first horror cinema experiences that impacted me. The films title and startling end set piece of a human being tied down in a bleary, blue drenched dungeon while a massive hatcheted pendulum swung inexorably down upon him impressed itself on my brain, ushering countless hours of horror movie viewing and a life long appreciation of Vincent Price, the mentally shattered, maniacal, wielder of this towering instrument of death and star of this movie.

The film also introduced me to one of my favourite “scream queens”, Barbara Steele, whose majority of movies I wouldn’t see till years later, and writer Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man and Twilight Zone episodes) as well as director Roger Corman. All to become future staples of a horror diet.

I re-watched The Pit and the Pendulum and by no means a writer of reviews, I did my best to briefly convey my thoughts on why the movie jarred me then and why it impresses me still. I guess there are spoilers if you haven’t seen it, if such things matter to you .

Poe’s terror stories never went beyond the short form, believing them the best vehicle for his theory of “unity of effect”. A reader, in a single reading, would be enveloped in a relentless mood of dread, despair, decay, and an escalating horror in the fevered mind and words of the narrator of of one of his tales.

Expanding one of Poe’s nightmare jewels into feature script is already a difficult (and probably losing) proposition but director Roger Corman and screenwriter Richard Matheson do an admirable job that does justice to his bleak vision and tortured internal landscapes and creates a portrait of obsession and decay that I find hypnotic.

Opening with a suitably sixties psychedelic liquid gel title sequence and haunting, almost abstract music by Les Baxter, the movie already gives a hint that we are on shaky mental ground and headed for a colour soaked mind trip. A brief carriage ride by Francis Barnard (John Kerr) and a walk through a nondescript, eerily dreamy forest up to the door of the looming, gothic castle of Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) on the edge of ceaselessly turbulent sea are the only signs of the outside world that we will see during the course of the film .

By setting the story entirely within the confines of the castle, Corman makes a great decision. The castle, its memories and ghosts, shadows and corridors, opulent furnishings and netherworldly dungeons become a reflection of Price’s anguished mind and the tumultuous relationships, past and present, of the story.

Francis is here to find out more about the mysterious death of his sister, Elizabeth, who was Nicholas’ wife. Greeted at the door by Catherina Medina (Luana Anders) , Nicholas’ sister,
he is being led to her tomb when the castle erupts in monstrous groanings and creaks from somewhere behind the stone walls and heavy doors. Investigating, Francis is greeted by an obviously high-strung Price, whose startled face leaps from behind a door anticipating Francis’ entry. I love Price’s delivery of a line here as he explains away the mysterious sounds as “It’s an apparatus that must be kept in constant repair.” … what kind of apparatus makes noises like these, we wonder.

From his first appearance Price’s performance is a spectacular one. Moving effortlessly between romantic reminiscence of his dead wife to frayed nerve despair, he plays the character to the hilt but never so much that the tragedy of his character is not evident or taking one out of the story (at least not me).

Elizabeth Medina (Barbara Steele) first appears in blue tinted flashbacks over Price’s narration, relating the story of the initial joy of their union to the gradual disintegration of Elizabeth as she becomes tortured by the oppressive history of the castle and the memory of Price’s father, a infamous inquisitor who tortured innumerable people in the castle dungeon. She eventually becomes sickly, not eating and dies after a illness succumbing to the horrors of her mind.

Elizabeth’s brother, skeptical, is told Price’s story in a flashback by his sister attempting to justify his questionable behaviour. She tells of how Nicolas as a boy, was witness to the murder of his mother and his Uncle by his father Sebastian (also Price) in the dungeon after confronting them with their adultery. After pummelling the uncle with a hot poker, Price tortures his wife and puts her in a iron maiden. Thus Price is consumed with guilt, he watched the death of his mother, as well as being helpless to stop the death of his own wife.

Price’s friend, Doctor Leone (Antony Carbone) who has arrived and stays to comfort Nicolas, attempts to alleviate the brother’s suspicions but to no avail.

The brother continues to be skeptical as the memory of Elizabeth seems to take on supernatural, material existence , her voice is heard through the castle, her room upheaved and her painting torn, all bringing Price closer and closer to collapse, fearing Elizabeth is coming to avenge her death on him, as we then learn, because she has been possibly buried alive. Upon opening her crypt, this in fact appears to be the case. Price is terrific through all this, at first denying he has anything to do with Elizabeth’s apparent haunting, as Francis accuses him, to then wondering if he is in fact doing this destruction and is so far gone he doesn’t realize it.

Price’s exuberant performance is wonderfully enhanced by Roger Corman’s direction, Floyd Crosby’s cinematography, and Daniel Haller’s art direction. Corman composes beautiful Panavision shots, drenched in colour or submerged in shadows. There is a feeling of hugeness, vast rooms and endless hallways juxtaposed by a claustrophobia within that same space, like it’s all closing in no matter how big the castle,or luxurious the furnishings, and mirroring the character’s psychic upheaval and decline. All the while outside the storm rages and builds.

My favourite section of the movie is the resurrection of Elizabeth. A real tour de force. The camera follows the haunted Price as he is pulled by Elizabeth’s ethereal call of his name, he moves anguished, through cobwebbed , mazelike corridors , her voice eventually leading him to her tomb. Here, as her bloodied hand appears from her stone casket, Steele gets an amazing entrance. Rising, she is kept in shadow as she stalks the fracturing Price through the halls . Only when he collapses on the dungeon floor, his mind broken, do we see her appear from the shadows. A beautiful “corpse” hovering demonically over her shattered husband . As the the doctor enters revealing the adulterous affair between them Steele is a joy to watch as she revels in torturing Nicolas, who stares vacantly, and talks of how she waited “a eternity for this” invoking the spirit of Nicolas’s dead mother and perhaps other victims of the dungeon as well.

Nicholas’ mind now gone, in turn becomes inhabited by the spirit of his father Sebastian who sees not Elizabeth but Price’s mother, and begins to exact his revenge on the adulterous couple!

The music of Les Baxter during this whole sequence is remarkable as well. Baxter doesn’t’ go heavy on anticipating or heightening moments, playing the viewer easily, but instead the music seems to hover underneath reinforcing the dread, eventually breaking apart as well, in stabs, bursts and echoes, musical bats flying out of the darkness.

From here on Price is at his deliriously sinister best, the last vestiges of tender hearted romantic, Nicholas obliterated he is fully possessed by the apocalyptic spirit of Sebastian, and wearing his inquisitor garb, he lets loose the hell at his disposal, taking the movie to the delirious pendulum climax. At one point in sadistic glee speaking the lines, “… the razor’s edge of death, the pit and the pendulum, thus the condition of man, bound on an island from which he can never hope to escape, surrounded by the waiting pit of hell , subject to the inexorable pendulum of fate, which must destroy him finally.”

Hell yeah!

S.J. Chambers is another of my very best friends, a talented author, a Poe scholar, co-author of The Steampunk Bible, and articles editor at Strange Horizons. Surprisingly, when I asked her to contribute something to the Vincent Price Halloween countdown, she didn’t pick one of the many Corman/Price Poe films, but gravitated instantly to the great Richard Matheson adaptation The Last Man on Earth, which by chance I also talked about in my latest column for Innsmouth Free Press:

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Solitude.  Time for one to collect their thoughts. To sort out one’s memories. It always sounds idyllic—probably in a cabin in the woods, or a hammock on the beach, and impossible in a living and thriving world where people are everywhere.  If only they would disappear, just for a few minutes, one could clear one’s head.  But, then of course, the people do disappear, or begin to lay undead in the streets, and the Solitude, the anticipated respite, the quiet becomes your worst enemy.

The Last Man on Earth is my favorite Price film of all time, because for its first twenty minutes, Price, as Dr. Robert Morgan, take us on a tour through true solitude. I can’t think of any other film that simulates the complexity of loneliness like LMOE.  Because there is no one to talk too, it is silent with the exception of  Price’s ruminative voiceover uttering thoughts like:

“Another day,”
“…empty silent world”
“I’ll settle for coffee and orange juice this morning”
“Now it bores me”
“I can’t live a heartbeat away from hell. Forget it.”

Thought fragments that help imbue the story which is further developed by the juxtaposition of his routine and the objects that crowd his house.

Performed by any other actor, this fragmented form of visual storytelling could easily fall flat, but transformed through Price’s poise, the sanity, the composure the character tries to keep, waivers every second on his face.  As he walks aimlessly through his home, contemplating all the relics from his old life, his face waxes and wanes under the memories and associations, only to return to a disgusted, yet Zen-like expression that is, well…Priceless.

What is also lovely about this first 20 minutes is it keeps conjuring up emotional questions in the viewer that keeps them following Dr. Morgan, who has nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to love and be loved by, yet he carries on.  Why? He has been liberated from the world—no job, no family, yet, he creates tasks for himself to keep himself sane.  What does he need the sanity for?  To wait it all out? For the lonely plague to dissipate? Because he believes he isn’t the last man on Earth?  Well, yes.  While we all long for solitude, no one wants to be the last person on earth.

Jesse Bullington is one of my best friends, though we’ve only met in person a paltry once. Not only does he sport some fine facial hair, but he’s also the author of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and The Enterprise of Death, as well as a handful of truly excellent short stories. (We’ve even shared a table of contents a time or two.) Like all the contributor’s to this Vincent Price Halloween, he’s a big fan of good old Uncle Vincent, and especially of the film he’s discussing here, Witchfinder General:

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We love Vincent Price. This is not up for discussion. We relish his wanton disregard for restraint, his commitment to entertaining the audience no matter how bland the screenplay, how pedestrian the plot. We cheer as he sinks his teeth into the scenery, as he stalks and schemes and rages, as he kills, as kill he must. Even in mostly humorless films, such as The Last Man on Earth, Price’s flair for the theatrical bleeds through, and the result is an actor who always seems to be having so much fun that we can’t help but be caught up in his charisma, even when’s he wailing for a dead wife or cackling as he tortures an innocent victim. I very much doubt I would be the person I am today without Uncle Vince to tutor me in the delicate art of camp, of mixing horror and humor to fine result, and just thinking about his wracked facial expressions brings a smile to my face.

Yet it’s not The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Theatre of Blood, nor any of the others that stands out as favorite child in a much-loved brood, important though those films were for Young Moi. No, Price was capable of a restraint not often displayed in his horror fare, from his Kentucky gentleman in the noir Laura to his bittersweet final role as the inventor in Edward Scissorhands, and it’s one of these toned-down performances that I count as my very favorite: his portrayal of the infamous 17th century witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins in the English filmWitchfinder General, retitled The Conqueror Worm in the states to cash in on Price’s Poe cachet. As a child, I put in a battered betamax tape fully expecting to root for Uncle Vince as he went about his dastardly way, only to be profoundly disturbed, not just by the overall film, but by Price’s genuinely sinister performance.

Of course, I absolutely loved the experience, but in remarkably different fashion than anything else of his I’d ever seen. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that perhaps part of the cruel gleam in Price’s eye might have resulted from his hatred for the director, Michael Reeves, who had no love for Price, either, but that’s neither here nor there–the point is, Price creeped me right the hell out, and single-handedly inspired what has become a lifelong passion for witch-hunters and well-done historical horror. Much of the witch-hunter sub-genre is awful, such as Christopher Lee’s The Bloody Judge, some of it comes close to greatness only to fumble the stake at some point, such as Blood on Satan’s Claw (which had it’s originally-planned, pitch-black ending completely changed to placate censors), and some of it is every bit as good as Witchfinder General, such as Ken Russel’s The Devils, which features Oliver Reed at his best. One or two witchsniffer flicks may even be better in a lot of ways, such as the recent, quietly brilliant Black Death … but for me, always and forever, Witchfinder General stands firm as the quintessential witch-hunter pic. Few films, before or since, have left me as imprinted with horror as the ending of the US release of the film, which has Price delivering the final lines of the Poe’s ”The Conqueror Worm” to chilling effect. Much as I delight in cheering on Uncle Vince, in sharing in his malicious victories and deserved defeats alike, I’ll always love him best for the role where he made me hate him, and with good reason–he scared the bejesus out of me.

Gemma Files is a celebrated author and film critic whose most recent books are A Book of Tongues and A Rope of Thorns. I met her at World Horror this year, and found her to be not only a wonderful conversationalist, but also one of the few people I’ve ever encountered whose knowledge of film puts my own thoroughly to shame. So when it came time to solicit people for my Vincent Price Halloween countdown, she was one of the first people I thought of. Here, she talks about both The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its successor Dr. Phibes Rises Again:

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My first official encounter with Vincent Price came via The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, a Canadian-made children’s comedy-horror show which used to run very early in the morning on CityTV. Price appeared as the host, intoning little pre-shot rhyming set-ups for the various segments, most of which starred local actor Billy Van under tonnes of unconvincing makeup. I was never entirely sure how to “take” the show overall, let alone Price’s performance; on the one hand, these bits were obviously meant to be funny, or they wouldn’t rhyme (this was my child’s logic), but the way he chose to emphasize various things, the weird rhythm and intonation he brought to every line, the weariness in his eyes, the cruelly faded, fleshy handsomeness of his face…it was a conundrum. It made me uncomfortable, which in turn kept me watching, even though I found myself saddled over and over with Van’s vaudevillian B.S.—a guru pelted with flowers, a gorilla felled by golf-balls, a werewolf deejay and an obese lab assistant dancing to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in front of a psychedelic background—rather than the far creepier, more dreadful truths that Price appeared to hint were coming.

Whenever I ran across Price later on, therefore, in more classic roles—as the titular character’s baffled brother in the original The Fly, for example, or Prince Prospero in Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death—there always seemed to be something a bit “off” about him, as though he was doing a bad imitation of “himself”. Which may, I suppose, be why the two Price movies that work best for me are probably his simultaneously oddest, most eccentric and least dependent on vocal performance: Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr Phibes and Dr Phibes Rises Again, in which Price plays Anton Phibes, “a doctor, scientist, organist and Biblical scholar” whose horribly scarred, probably undead visage is eternally hidden behind a slightly ill-fitting rubber mask cast in his own image, and who (much like DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise, another camp masterpiece whose main character is played for anything but laughs) is unable to speak at all unless he plugs an amplifier cord into the side of his neck.

Blaming the medical professionals who were unable to save his beloved wife from death for her demise, Dr. Phibes has spent years plotting an arcane and complex revenge that requires him to live in an Art Deco underground lair full of musical automata, sleeping next to his wife’s glass coffin and rising to exact ridiculously complex, “punishment fits the crime”-type revenge on every member of that fatal team. Like Saw‘s Jigsaw, he has a strict theme to keep to—in this case, all the murders are based on the Ten Plagues of Egypt, thus allowing him to substitute enbalming while alive for the waters turning to blood and a wind-up frog-mask whose clockwork mechanism slowly vice-grips one doctor’s head until his skull cracks for the plague of frogs. All this culminates with the death of the first-born, in which team leader Joseph Cotton must operate on his own son in order to retrieve the key which will prevent acid from dripping on the boy’s face.

Phibes is aided in his plans by Vulnavia, a mysterious, beautiful mute who appears to be as desperately in love with him as he is with his deceased spouse. As his lair burns at the end of the first film, he and Vulnavia share an open-mouthed (in his case, his mask having been ripped off sometime shortly before, very open-mouthed) kiss that has all the hallmarks of a Technicolor Edgar Allan Poe update, and has haunted my dreams ever since. Recently, on the Space Channel’s Fanboy Confidential‘s “Horror” episode, I watched Rue Morgue cover artist Gary Pullin get this very moment inscribed on his body in glorious grey and white, and envied him. It’s the ultimate “Death & the Maiden” scenario, simultaneously tearjerking and gag-inducing.

While Dr Phibes Rises Again can’t possibly top its predecessor, it’s still extremely strange—artificial, grandiose, big-W Weird. And both films definitely fill a niche no one else has ever (thus far) dared to occupy, effortlessly knitting camp to opera, humor to horror, style to substance; the stakes are high throughout and the payoff unique, to say the least. For a Hallowe’en night double-bill you probably haven’t seen before, therefore, you could certainly do a whole lot worse.

Richard Gavin is one of my favorite contemporary writers of the supernatural, and I’m also lucky enough to consider him a friend. (Whether he feels the same is a mystery.) I also happen to know that he shares my love of a good Vincent Price movie (is there any other kind?) and so when I went looking for contributors to this countdown, he was more than happy to wax poetic on The Tomb of Ligeia:

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I never celebrate Halloween without Vincent Price.  His presence is as requisite in my home as carved gourds and candy.  So when I received the invitation to participate in this list of suggested viewing for All-Hallow’s, my confirmation was instant.  The only difficulty to be overcome was selecting a single title from Price’s long and impressive filmography.

Because he was as diverse an actor as he was a distinguished one, Vincent Price wore many masks over the decades, from the ridiculous to the sublime.  I prefer my Horror straight rather than sly, so my taste has always run toward Price’s more earnest roles, the ones in which he manages to step out of his endearing persona and avoids giving audiences his subtly reassuring wink, reminding them that it was all in good fun.  As my initial choice, Michael Reeves’ unflinching Witchfinder General (1968), is in the capable hands of another contributor, I turned my attention to what I consider the most sterling entry in the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman for American-International Pictures: The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).

None of the Corman/Price/Poe films are without merit, even those that play fast and loose with their source material.  But one of the elements that elevates Tomb is its faithfulness to Poe’s original 1838 story (titled simply ‘Ligeia’).  All of the story’s major beats are hit and it is also further fleshed out by excellent dramatic performances.

The Tomb of Ligeia’s plot centres on a recent widower, Verden Fell (Price) who simultaneously mourns for and fears his dear departed wife, Ligeia, whose otherworldly willpower may just enable her to conquer death itself.  When Verden becomes smitten with the aristocratic Rowena Trevanion, Ligeia’s wrath begins to stain the lives of Verden and his new bride.

Price is pitch-perfect as the Byronic lead, exhibiting the classical Poe obsessions of desiring what one fears and fearing what one desires.  His mourning for the Lady Ligeia never really slips into hand-wringing melodrama.  He delivers his lines in a controlled, morose tone and traipses his ruined priory as quietly as a walking corpse.  He is a man who longs for the grave as much as he dreads it.  With his strange aversion to sunlight, his emotional torment, his undertaker’s garb, Price becomes the very embodiment of Poe’s world-weary misfits. (Rowena: “Don’t you ever laugh?”  Verden: “Only at myself.”)

The film roams that thin boarder between private obsession and the supernatural, and thus strongly echoes Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).   (Roger Corman made no secret about the fact that his Poe films drew inspiration from the Master of Suspense.) Both films feature broken men who harbor passion for a deceased woman, both also feature lead actresses assuming the dual role of the departed and the new love who reminds the protagonist of the object of his obsession.  Like Kim Novak in Hitch’s masterpiece, Elizabeth Shepherd is excellent as the vengeful Ligeia and the rather innocent Rowena.

The Tomb of Ligeia is an elegant nightmare.  The bounty of outdoor scenes really give this film a more organic, less “stylized soundstage” feel than the other titles in this series. Kenneth V. Jones also provides a wonderful score.

Like all great horror films, the supernatural elements are ambiguous and archetypal.  Shapeshifting, or rather the possibility thereof, is a recurrent theme.  The dominant suggestion is that Ligeia’s determination to return from the great beyond is so strong she will assume the form of a cat or a fox in order to keep a baleful eye on Verden.

The divinity of the female was one of Edgar Allan Poe’s lifelong obsessions.  Romantic love was both his Muse and the demon that hounded him until his tragic death at the age of forty. Because Poe’s real life romances often ended tragically (several of the women he loved suffered protracted and painful deaths due to consumption), love and death became inextricably bound in his life.  This marriage of seeming opposites is the thread that unifies his most notable work.  He was forever in search of the ideal Woman, one whose spirit was so great it might even enable her to defeat death itself.  The Lady Ligeia is the ultimate expression of this wish.

The ecstasy of love and the insufferable silence of the grave; these were the inevitable forces in Poe’s life, in the life of Verden Fell, and indeed in our own.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia runs Innsmouth Free Press, where she’s co-edited several anthologies including Historical Lovecraft and Candle in the Attic Window, and where she puts up with me on a regular basis. She’s also a very talented writer in her own right, and her story “Flash Frame” was recently reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu. Here, she talks about the great Vincent Price/William Castle joint, The Tingler:

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I remember watching The Tingler on TV with my mom. It’s a black-and-white flick produced and directed by William Castle, and it has the usual Castle ‘gimmick’ you’d expect. But it’s a pretty cool gimmick. Vincent Price is a doctor who discovers a parasite which attaches itself to the human spine and feeds off fear (hence that tingling you feel on your back when you are afraid). Eventually one of the Tinglers escapes, which leads to the famous sequence where Vincent Price rushes into a darkened movie theatre and orders everyone to scream for their lives.

I actually thought the Tingler was rather creepy and the thought of being attacked by a parasite that comes from someone’s spine did give me some pause. It’s pretty fun to watch with friends because you can scream (or maybe drink) when everyone starts screaming on film.

I will also confess this was one of the first movies I bought on DVD when we purchased the DVD player. And I had to import it from the USA. How’s that for affection?