The Curator of Schlock $324 by Jeff Shuster

Bloody Birthday

Bad Seed times three. 

Indigo didn’t show up for our Thursday night checkers game. My housemate was nowhere to be found. I started searching the property and found his dead body tucked behind the tool shed. Too puncture marks were on his neck and I can’t help, but think that it must have been some kind of animal attack. Maybe one of those Florida panthers got him. Jervis said he’d contact the authorities and they’d take care of the body. Creepy business. Maybe I should make plans to leave, but Jervis is making Sloppy Joes this weekend. I love me some Sloppy Joes.

But what I don’t like is children. Yeah, I didn’t like children when I was a child and I certainly don’t like them now that I’m a man of distinction. Children are the main focus of tonight’s feature film, 1981’s Bloody Birthday from director Ed Hunt. The movie begins with three children being delivered at a hospital during a solar eclipse, two boys and a girl. And I guess if your born right at the point of an eclipse, you’re a bad seed.

Fast forward ten years and we have a trio of miserable ten-year-olds whose idea of fun is murdering people and getting away with it. These are Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy), a blonde girl, Steven (Andy Freeman), a blond boy, and Curtis (Billy Jayne), a four-eyed little shit that I want to smack every time I see him on screen. They’re all little shits and I can only think that getting killed by them would be one of the humiliating experiences imaginable. If I have to go, let me die by that hands of a Cropsy or a Michael Myers, not this trio of despicable brats!

Their first victims are a couple of horny teenagers who thought it was a good idea to make out in an open grave. The adolescent girl gets strangled with a jump rope and the adolescent boy gets his head bashed in with a shovel. Then the children throw dirt over the grave. This doesn’t stop the town Sheriff from uncovering the bodies and determining that a killer is on the loose. And wouldn’t you know it, Sheriff Brody is Debbie’s dad.

This doesn’t stop our little Debbie from orchestrating the demise of her own father. She leaves a skateboard on the back steps to her house, but her dad just steps over it. That’s okay since Steven is at the ready to bash his brains in with a baseball bat. Curtis also gets in on the murder game by using the Sheriff’s revolver on his super strict grammar school teacher, Ms. Davis (Susan Strasberg). You see, young Curtis had a replica of a revolver that he switched out for the real thing.

The heroine of this movie is Joyce Russell (Lori Lethin), a high school senior with aspirations of becoming an investigative reporter. I think she first becomes suspicious of the bad seeds when Curtis and Stephen lock her younger brother, Timmy (K. C. Martel), in an old refrigerator at the junkyard. A night of babysitting gone to hell removes all shadow of a doubt that these kids are killers, but Joyce doesn’t kill them. She manages to subdue them in time for cops to arrive. What a disappointment. I was hoping to see Curtis get decapitated or set on fire. I wonder if there was a sequel.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #323 by Jeff Shuster

Hotel

I am so confused.

Okay. Things have gotten a bit strange around this old manor house somewhere in the state of Florida.

Celestial went missing for a couple of days and then shows up in the middle of the night, pale as can be. Now she sleeps all day and only comes out at dusk. Her eating habits are peculiar too. Celestial keeps drinking some kind special V-8 toast Jervis procures from a health store. Oh, well. Jervis is making shrimp scampi tonight. It will be in a lemon-butter sauce. He said the grocers were all out of garlic.

Tonight’s movie is 2001’s Hotel from director Mike Figgis. What’s Hotel about? I don’t know that it’s about anything. The movie begins at a hotel in Venice, Italy. The actor John Malcovich enters the hotel and registers under the name Omar Johnson, but we all know it’s John Malcovich. He partakes in a shared meal with creepy hotel staff and the hotel tour guide played by creepy Julian Sands. The tour guide asks John Malcovich, “What’s the difference between a duck?” A plate of fresh meat is shared between them and from the cured legs and hands hanging in the kitchen, I can only come to the realization that it’s human meat. I don’t know if the hotel staff are vampires or cannibals or some other creature of the night. I don’t know that it matters much as the movie isn’t really focused on this.

Hotel is centered around a crew of filmmakers shooting an adaptation of John Webster’s The Duchess ofMalfi, dogme 95 style. Apparently, this was a revolutionary style of movie making championed by Lars von Trier back in 1995. It involves handheld camera work, no sets, no lighting, etc. So the director of this Duchess of Malfi adaption, an intense Welsh man named Trent Stoken (Rhys Ifans), insists on shooting the Duchess of Malfi in modern day Venice with all the tourists and pigeons flying about while the cast delivers Elizabethan English in period clothing. And it’s all shot on digital video which has not stood the test of time and looks ghastly on any modern television. But maybe that’s the whole point. The entire production reeks of Pretention, by Dior.

David Schwimmer plays Jonathan Danderfine, one of the producers The Duchess of Malfi (retitled Malfi), who has the creepy hotel staff attempt an assassination on Stoken with a silencer pistol. The assassination attempt puts Stoken in a vegetative coma allowing Danderfine to take over the directing of Malfi and put his artistic spin on it. I also think he has the hots for Saffron Burrows, who plays the titular Duchess of Malfi. Much of this is being seen through the lens of a documentary being shot about the making of Malfi, which is where Salma Hayek enters in the fray.Hayek plays Charlee Boux, an extremely obnoxious MTV-style journalist from Mexico whose catchphrase is “Hello!” because I think she hosts a show in Mexico called Hello. She keeps asking to speak to the writer of Malfi, John Webster, not knowing he’s been dead for over 400 years.

Later, Charlee Boux gets into a nasty fight with Danderfine’s good friend Kawika (Lucy Liu). If you ever wanted to see Salma Hayek and Lucy Liu get into a vicious cat fight, then this in the movie for you. Did I mention that Burt Reynolds makes an appearance?

I probably should have led with that.

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #323 by Jeff Shuster

Antrum

The Deadliest Film Ever Made?

My car broke down on my way back to Orlando from the Florida Everglades. I guess leaving it parked in the middle of the woods and not driving it for a couple of months wasn’t the best idea. Famished, hungry, and lost, I came upon on old Antebellum mansion. I was greeted by a gaunt butler named Jervis who offered me a fine meal and a room for the night. He says the former master of the estate had a rule about always showing kindness to strangers. I did a toast to my charitable host and Jervis informed me that I could stay as long as I wish. The Wi-Fi is great here, but these old portraits of southern ladies and gentlemen creep me out. I feel like their eyes are following me.

Tonight’s movie is 2018’s Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made from directors David Amito and Michael Laicini. Why is it called the deadliest movie ever made? Because everyone who saw Antrum died a horrible death soon after watching it. The documentary passes out some fascinating tidbits about this Bulgarian production from 1979, how when it was screened at a theater in Budapest, the whole place caught fire and the audience was burned alive. Other stories involved a man getting stung by a poisonous fish one day after viewing Antrum and dying on the spot.

Another one involves a rare screening of Antrum in San Francisco that caused the audience to storm the exits only to find them locked. The crowd then begins viciously attacking each other due to the LSD laced popcorn they were given before the start of the movie. That concessions clerk is now serving time on multiple counts of manslaughter. What a sick degenerate! The documentary reveals that Antrum also featured weird audio cues and still shots of vile scenes cut into the movie so your subconscious would register the image. Around this point, I’m kind of glad that movie was lost to the ages, but then the documentary reveals that a print of Antrum in its entirety has been discovered and purchased at an estate auction in Connecticut. The movie will begin in ten-seconds. Yikes! I now get to watch this cursed movie!

Antrum centers on a boy named Nathan (Rowan Smith) and his older sister, Oralee (Nicole Tompkins). We begin with Nathan’s mother, Amber, putting his dog, Maxine, to sleep. That’s an odd name for a dog, but Oralee is an odd name for a human, so whatever. During a car ride, Nathan asks his mother if Maxine is in heaven like other dogs and she tells him, “No, Maxine isn’t in heaven because she was bad.” I would have taken a different approach to this question. I would have told Nathan, “It’s a stupid dog! Woof! Woof! A dog!”

I’m good with kids.

We cut to Nathan and Oralee in a tent at night. They’ve gone camping. Oralee has an elaborate scheme that she got out of some kind of forbidden tome to redeem Maxine’s soul. They travel to the forest where the devil landed after God cast him out of heaven. It is there that they will find the antrum, the gateway to hell. Oralee and Nathan uncover some brambles that cover the place they’re supposed to start digging. Oralee draws a pentagram on the ground and puts the star and crescent, the menorah, a statue of Jesus Christ, a statue of Vishnu, and a blood red statue of Buddha smiling menacingly. I guess that’s covering all the bases. The two begin to chant, “One by one we pray to thee, protect us from all we see. From all we’ll hear and touch and smell. From all the unknown dark in hell.”

Weird stuff starts happening after they dig through the first layer. A apoplectic squirrel appears that Oralee insists is a demon. She tells Nathan to use a magic stick to drive it away. They come across a Japanese man undressing down to his boxers about to commit seppuku, but Nathan screams. The guy mutters in Japanese and walks away, presumedly to another part of the forest where he can get some privacy. Oralee and Nathan continue to dig. Nathan discovers a loaded handgun buried in the pit. Nathan keeps seeing black figures staring at them through the woods.

Before bed, Nathan comments on how Oralee’s feet stink and she orders him to brush his teeth because his breath is rank. Oralee tells him that the Cerberus will get him if he stinks too much. Nathan takes her warning to heart and brushes his teeth by the lake under the full moon. He sees what looks like a ferryman rowing a boat with a naked, deformed person in it. This movie is just plain freaky and I’m not liking it. Plus, I keep getting flash frames of devils, occult symbols, and photos from somebody’s sick torture porn fantasy. I haven’t even gotten to the part with the two Bulgarian rednecks and the fact that one of them is committing what I’ll describe as “animal husbandry” to a dead animal! This is a sick, sick movie, but movies don’t kill people.

I got to go.

Jervis is knocking on my door asking if I’d like a hot water bottle.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.