The Curator of Schlock #329 by Jeff Shuster

Vampyres

Sometimes characters deserve to die due to their own stupidity. 

You know, I noticed a huge portrait above the entrance to this stately mansion I’ve been residing at for these past few months. The painting is of a southern aristocrat with wispy raven hair, a pasty complexion, and a stern countenance. A black cape adorns his broad shoulders and he grips a cane adorned with a silver skull at the head. I asked Jervis about that man and he told me his name was Wallace Jameson Volkasin III, the master of this estate some two hundred years ago. I’m sure none of this information will be of any importance to events I will describe on next week’s blog.

Tonight’s movie is 1974’s Vampyres from director José Ramón Larraz. Did any of you see Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Remember that scene where Keanu gets seduced and sucked dry by Dracula’s beautiful brides? Now imagine they made a movie out of that scene and presto, you’ve got Vampyres. If I learned anything from this movie, it’s that regular people are really stupid when it comes to dealing with vampires.

We begin with two women, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka), getting shot to death in bed after an explicit lesbian love scene. Not long after, we’re introduced to a young British couple, John (Brian Deacon) and Harriet (Sally Faulkner), driving down down an isolated highway with a camper in tow. John and Harriet notice two young women in long flowing coats hiding in trees on the side of the road. Wouldn’t you know it? It’s those two young women that were shot to death at the beginning of the movie. How can they still be running around?

John and Harriet decide to drive down an unkempt road and park nearby an abandoned gothic mansion. I’m not really sure why they do this as this mansion is creepy as all get out. Next, we’re introduced to Ted (Murray Brown), a proper English gentleman that’s traveling on business or some other unspecified reason. He picks up Fran, one of the aforementioned strange women in the woods, and drives her to the abandoned gothic mansion. She offers him some fine wine and it’s not long before their clothes are on the floor and the two of them are having a torrid affair.

Ted wakes up the next morning to find a huge bloody gash on his arm and some broken glass with his blood on it. He visits Harriet and John, who give him some first aid and a fresh cup of coffee. You’d think Ted would get the hell out of dodge, but he turns the car around and heads right back to mansion. Sure, it’s likely that Fran sliced his arm open with some broken glass in order to suck on his blood, but the sex was just that good.

Still, the Darwin Award goes to Harriet and John. It’s one thing to camp outside a vampire infested mansion for an evening, but to stay there day after day? They should have driven a hundred miles away from there at the first sign of anything unusual. Like when Harriet decides go inside the mansion to do some exploring just to find those strange women holed up in the basement, sleeping in contorted positions in the middle of the day. Or when Harriet wakes up in the middle of the night due to one of Fran and Miriam’s victims banging on the camper window only to disappear a moment later. John, of course, dismisses Harriet’s alarm, saying she just imagined it. The two of them are going to die horribly, but they had plenty of opportunity to escape. Vampyres is another creepy one, worth checking out.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, & episode 442) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #326 by Jeff Shuster

Count Yorga, Vampire

Dracula moves to the suburbs. 

Celestial is a vampire! My hippie housemate is a vampire! She came home one night with some biker dude she picked up at a bar. Now, I wasn’t peeping or anything, but I happened to peek through the crack in her bedroom door while they were supposed to be, well, you know. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because Celestial was sinking her fangs into this guy’s neck and blood was trickling all over the place. Now, I’m starting to think Indigo wasn’t attacked by a panther after all. I bet Jervis is in on all of this.

I have to do some research on the Hominus Nocturna so October will be Vampire Month for your humble blogger. Tonight’s movie is 1970’s Count Yorga, Vampire from director Bob Kelljan. The movie begins with a narrator giving all sorts of useful tidbits about vampires. We learn that vampires are malignant spirits who suck blood from the throats of the living. They only come out at night as they are susceptible to sunlight. They can also be killed by a wooden stake to the heart. Good to know.

The movie begins with a seance at a house in the California suburbs. The seance is being led by a Count Yorga (Robert Quarry), an immigrant to the United States from Bulgaria. A woman named Donna (Donna Anders) is trying to contact her deceased mother. Donna goes a little crazy during this forbidden ritual and Count Yorga uses hypnosis to calm her down (and make Donna his servant). You know, it’s so annoying when Bulgarian vampires come into this country to steal our women. I’m sure Count Yorga also played the Powerball his first day in America and won the 50 million jackpot.

One of the couples, Erica (Judy Lang) and Paul (Michael Murphy), give Yorga a ride back to his place in their boss van. The Count invites them in for a nightcap, but they decline. The van gets stuck in the mud. Paul convinces Erica to enjoy some sweet lovemaking in the back of the van. Afterwords, they go to sleep, only for Erica to be woken up by a fang-baring Count Yorga. The vampire knocks Paul unconscious and attacks Erica. Paul notices two bite marks on her neck and he takes Erica to get examined by a Dr. James Hayes (Roger Perry). The good doctor notices some blood deficiencies and recommends a high protein diet. Erica’s idea of a high protein diet is eating the family cat.

Dr. Hayes begins to suspect that vampirism is the root cause for Erica’s affliction. Erica is missing. Paul goes to Yorga’s mansion to find her only to get his bones crushed by Brudah, the Count’s henchmen. Dr. Hayes visits the mansion with Donna’s husband, Michael (Michael Macready), in an effort to keep the Count Yorga up until dawn with small talk. He asks Yorga if he believes in werewolves and vampires and Count Yorga says yes, but insists they leave before he becomes ill-mannered. Dr. Hayes calls the cops a few times, trying to explain the threat of the vampire, but they call him a prankster. Dr. Hayes and Michael are on their own. They carve stakes and put together makeshift crosses to take care of the Count. Too bad they didn’t realize there is more than one vampire residing in that mansion.

I don’t imagine a nice ending for them.

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 $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.