I have two updates today!

Firstly, I tried a new thing for dinner: mushrooms fried in butter and soy sauce (with a pinch of wasabi, for good measure). OMG: revelation! Now, I’m a big fan of fried mushrooms, and I’m a big fan of Marmite – and this is basically like both in dinner form. I strongly suspect that this dish will become a staple of my #childfree weekends from now on.

Secondly, we watched the 1958 Hammer remake of Dracula for Horror Friday. While I love many of the Hammer films, including many of the Dracula entries, I’ve never been a huge fan of this one. However, I bought it on bluray a month or so back and have been quite keen to give a fresh evaluation.

… and I’m still not sold. It’s not as dull and stagey as the 1931 version, but it’s still a strangely tempered affair. Christopher Lee displays some of the qualities that would immortalise him in the role, but is distractingly perfunctory at other times. The story is tightened up from the original, but relocating it in its entirety to England (while saving on the budget) robs it of the other-worldliness that provides part of the compelling mystery of Dracula himself.

It’s one of those films that you have to admire for having earned its place in film history. I may yet give it a further viewing, but for now it seems to be one of those movies that hasn’t quite transcended the era in which it was made.