A group of punks dragged the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orland, into my exhibit of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. One encphlitic punk whipped the limp body of the Revenging Manta with a chain. Another guy in a ski mask mocked my display of the ungodly warlock Schweick. I had a sign warning customers not to touch Schweick and that a curse would be upon anyone who did. 

“What a bunch of mumbo combo voodoo horseshit!” the ski masked punk said. He struck a match across the face of Schweick to light a joint. I thought it was imagination, but I thought I heard the corpse grunt.

— To be continued. 

Tonight’s movie is 1992’s The Vagrant from director Chris Wales. I got serious House vibes from this movie, though it doesn’t involve any of the writers, producers, or directors of that series. I did catch Mel Books as a producer so that’s interesting. While this isn’t a movie about a house haunted by spirits, Vagrant is a movie about a house haunted by a disgusting vagrant.

Bill Paxton plays Graham Krakowski, a sales analyst hoping against hope to be a proud homeowner. While sitting in a soul-sucking cubicle, he glances at houses in his price range. After the real estate lady tries to force herself on him, Graham agrees to buy a fixer-upper he felt iffy about. As he enters the house, now a proud homeowner, he discovers a creepy, unhoused gentleman using his sink. Graham and his friend secure the house with a new deadbolt, but the vagrant sneaks into his bedroom in the middle of the night and taunts him. Or is this scenario all in Graham’s head?

Graham calls the cops and gets the vagrant arrested for urinating in the bushes in a vacant lot across the street. Later that evening, while Graham is making a pasta dinner, he sees the vagrant cooking on an open fire across the street. As he’s on the phone with the police department again, the vagrant taunts him through his front window. Graham takes out a second mortgage on his house to have a gated, hardwood fence installed around his house along with some floodlights.

Graham’s paranoia skyrockets when an elderly neighbor is murdered and his visiting girlfriend invites the vagrant into his house for a sandwich. Graham becomes convinced that the vagrant murdered the old woman, but Lt. Ralf Barfuss (Michael Ironside, naturally) now suspects that Graham has something to hide. While investigating a smell coming from his basement, Graham finds the old lady’s fingers in a heart shaped box. The vagrant is in the basement too, taunting him as he escapes from a secret exit. Or is it Graham’s paranoid delusions getting the better of him.

What else? We get heads in refrigerators, a SWAT raid, a trailer park slaughter, and a murder by chair.

This is one weird movie.

I love it!

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.