I opened the door to my Beanie Baby storehouse. I reached out for the string that when yanked would give me 60 soft-glowing watts. The illuminated room revealed no Beanie Babies.

Half a lifetime of investment down the drain. I was supposed to retire on those!

I screamed and with that, a pencil-necked geek came out with his hands up from behind one of the shelves. 

“Please. Please,” he said while twisting his sweaty palms. “Don’t hurt me.”

— To be continued.

Tonight’s movie is 1975’s Shivers from director David Cronenberg. His movies always make me uncomfortable. (Did you know they offered him Top Gun? How would that have gone? Maverick would have been crashing jets on purpose for psycho-sexual gratification. Nobody wants to see that. Were the brass at the studio even aware of Cronenberg’s body-horror of work?) In Shivers we have a horror movie about parasites that turn humans into sex fiends.

The movie begins with an advertisement for a spectacular new apartment complex on an island near Montreal, Canada called Starliner Towers. This apartment complex is more like a luxury cruise line with all the amenities you could wish for like all the modern appliances, a cable TV, convenience store, restaurant, golf course, tennis court, dental office, doctor’s office, and bingo night every third Tuesday. What could possibly go wrong? How about a deadly parasite that gets spread around driving the residents slowly insane.

A murder-suicide happens at the beginning of the film. Dr. Emil Hobbes murders a young woman named Annabelle by choking her to death. Then, naturally, he pours acid in her stomach. Then he slits his throat.

Yeah, skip this one for family movie night.

Dr. Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton), the doctor of Starliner Towers, discovers the two corpses and calls the police. A man named Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver) was a partner of Dr. Hobbes and he had been busy working on a new type of bio-medicine. Let’s say you have a failing kidney. Well, Dr. Linsky figures we can just insert a parasite into you that will adopt the kidney function. Unfortunately, Dr. Hobbes thought we could use parasites to eliminate pesky human inhibitions.

Perhaps Dr. Hobbes didn’t intend to transform the residents of Starliner Towers into sex maniacs who spread these disgusting parasites to everyone they encounter.

And yes, the parasites are disgusting sluglike things that crawl up the drain hole in your bathtub and slip through your mailbox. One resident, a man named Nick (Allan Kolman), keeps throwing up these parasites at regular intervals. One of them even bounces off an old lady’s umbrella before scurrying into the bushes.

As Dr. St Luc investigates, he discovers more erratic behavior from the residents. At this time in the movie, we wonder if anyone’s going to make it out of this thing alive. Why do medical doctors think that creating parasites to solve the world’s problems is going to do anything but create a hive of sadists bent on destroying the world?

Seriously.

How many times will we try this?

 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, episode 599, and episode 642) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.