Interlude
I need to take a breather. It was an eventful night — both that fateful frightful Friday of Fuck, as the Angry Video Game Nerd would so eloquently put it on a good day — and the subsequent weekend where I rewatched Sledgehammer on the Ad-ridden Tubi as Shudder took its considerable time uploading Week Eight onto itself. As frustrating as that was, I can understand. I, too, would procrastinate before having anything to do with these artifacts deep from the bowels of the Iron Man Vaults, where the Necronomicon and the Lament Configuration would fear being held.
Just as I am procrastinating right now, as I’m writing this.
I can’t help but think that — by the standards of what I’ve gleaned from the standards of the old Iron Man Certification (or as I like to call it after going through a similar experience, the Broken Man — I would have been done by now. I would have been more than done. I summarized an entire terrible movie. I paused one movie, increment by increment, to write sometimes one or two lines. It’s amazing how you can spread an hour and twenty seven minutes into an eternity. This isn’t even covering the commentary segments, where I went back — once Shudder did post them — wrote shorthand notes, and tried to polish them into cohesive thoughts. That is the painstaking methodology that has formed, and we will be dealing with hereafter: minus Tubi.
I am inept in a lot of ways. I have never gone to film school, or studied film in an academic or professional setting. There is much terminology I don’t know, and words and descriptions for things and cinematic phenomenon that I can barely — and frustratingly — grasp.
Oh, I know what you’ve said about that before Joe Bob. You’ve called upon filmmakers towards the end of your One Cut of the Dead episode from Season Two, told them that Hollywood isn’t the place to develop your new work anymore, that there is far more accessible technology, and all one needs is the inspiration, and the drive to keep going: to keep learning on the way. Isn’t that part of what this infernal exercise into VHS Appreciation Night is about? To hit that point home? I remember what you said. I remember you said you wanted people to send you their films.
Just as you want people to send you these Iron Mutant Notes.
I know. I’ve had to learn along the way, adapt as much as I can with the resources that I have. I’ve written movie reviews before, in my own way. And in the end … sometimes you have to go to the greatest lows to achieve the most glorious heights. Sometimes you have to pursue damnation before you can achieve enlightenment. Sometimes you need to go into the depths of Hell to find your way to Paradise. And sometimes, the greatest obstacle to achieving what you want is your own procrastination: your own terrible freewill in which you realize that the only thing holding you back is you.
I remember what you said. I also remember what I said, at the beginning of my account, and testament.
I am not an Aspirant.
And I will prove it. Right now.
*
Part II: Things
If Sledgehammer, both narratively and cinematically, had issues with space-time distortions, Things is an exercise in a fragmented dimensional singularity.
A disaster.
Sanity Check: A Casio keyboard soundtrack. Thank you, Joe Bob. I didn’t have the words to begin to describe this bizarre soundtrack. But my question: there was a father looking the same age as his daughter in this film, never mind a father and daughter period? And were those good cheese sandwiches? I’m lactose intolerant. Also, with regards to the reason we watch bad movies, by the analogy Joe Bob uses, I will be a god after not only exercising the muscle that watched these terrible movies, but in writing about them — and this — as well. And on that note …
We get to it. What Joe Bob said about lighting generally being an issue with camcorder-made films comes back to me as Things appear on the screen.
But at first, there is some light. It’s Left Field Productions Presents being ushered in by an extremely appropriate nuclear explosion. It kind of blurred together from the beginning of Sledgehammer, but this is the real atrocity: the one that’s about to begin.
There are already screams, heralding the credits as “An Andrew Jordan, Barry J. Gillis Film.” You know, because it isn’t confusing enough that is shot on video in 1989 and I kept calling Sledgehammer a film interchangeably, but now this fine specimen is mixing its putrid metaphors together too. Right. Let’s get to the point, please.
It’s just as well it started as brightly with thermonuclear fire because after light, there is always darkness. Things shimmers and wavers into view, obscured by fluid shadows. Then, the title is clear with a gunshot to the head, putting me of my mis — No. Now, we are in a dingy basement. There is a woman in a white dress, and a devil mask hanging up laundry, presumably also ironed if we look at the implement behind her. There is tacky, weird synthetic music and reverberating laughter as a man who resembles R.L. Stine comes through a door.
Basically, he tells the woman he wants her to have his baby, because he and his wife can’t. And hell, he will even “Pay for love.” The lines sound like they are just read off a piece of paper with the enthusiasm of a corpse. But then the lady starts to slowly take off her dress, and undergarments as our bespeckled protagonist watches lecherously. That eerie faint giggling echoes through the background as this stripshow continues. She has a gorgeous, lithe beautiful naked body under her moustached devil mask. Hell, she even fits the Drive-In requirement of breasts all too well. Unfortunately, as with the aforementioned New York Nights, neither beautiful naked women, or great titties, or dark bush is going to save this movie: or our souls. I am just getting crude because my brain is melting, and I am already regretting my life.
Anyway, she almost goes into the shower, and the man says she doesn’t have to. The dialogue is … He insists on her having his baby. And it sounds like he’s having a stroke when he says this line. “I want you to have my bab-y.”
She bends down, laughing, and out of the shower takes out a carrier and states that she’s already had his baby. So now the man is going “Coochie coochie coochie …”
Shakespeare. I am going to be saying this a lot, throughout this film. I am afraid you will just have to deal with it. Something in the carrier, pink and indistinct — the lighting problem Joe Bob mentioned possibly — bites his annoying man’s hand. And he screams.
Then, he wakes up from his nightmare, but ours continues. Now, I have to say that this terrible and off-rhythm dubbing exceeds a lot of Kung-Fu and Dub-Fu films I’ve had the experience of watching, and this movie manages to do it in not even a funny way. It even translates to the sound abruptly disappearing as he screams and writhes silently. I am waiting for that Oscar, man.
Discordant music that’s supposed to sound domestic and comforting plays, but it is more of a cacophony than all the annoying teenagers in the world. Don’t worry, I will get tired of these smart remarks as the despair sets in again, but I wouldn’t bet too much on it. He gets off the couch, and presumably takes some crazy pills from the kitchen cabinet while walking to the bedroom. It reminds me of a silent film in muddled colour, and a demented musician or track playing in the background. The lighting keeps changing. Reality is fluid here. It’s like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on technicolour drugs, and surrealism gone unironically wrong. I …
Right. So he gets to his wife in the other room. She is bedridden and in pain, and she tells her husband that “I hope they work. I feel like I’m going to die.”
Me too, lady. Me too.
So she takes them, the door closes for some reason, and she says she feels better already. Then we … see another title screen — THINGS — but this time it’s surrounded by darkness, and on fire.
That sounds about right. And we even see the “Things” theme and music credits displayed which, apparently, is created by STRYK-9. Two title screens, and now credit for a score that seems to have been made by the pipes of the Blind Idiot God Azathoth in pandemonious celebration. And … more credits. I am having a Sledgehammer flashback, but at least they did it at the beginning of the film and not after two scenes. So, there is also Familiar Strangers, and one Jack Procher. Did they all make the music? And we are also told that Andrew Jordan and Barry J. Gillis wrote the script for this movie. And they produced it too. It’s the Shot-On-Video miracle that Joe Bob has been talking about in action.
Now we see a train going by, reminding me of how we watched the van driving down the road in Sledgehammer, but more credits are happening, starring: Barry J. Gillis, Amber Lynn, Doug Bunston, Bruce Roach, Patricia Sadler — and also starring as we go down the road to grainy hell, Jan W. Pachul as Dr. Lucas. And this is all directed by Andrew Jordan. Then, thankfully, the credits are far less lengthier than those of Sledgehammer and we travel with the camcorder down the roads, into the woods where all modern horror seems to originate from Evil Dead, and its short film predecessor Within the Woods: that had a similar grainy quality but a straightforward, if simple story about violating a Native American burial ground and a young Bruce Campbell getting possessed, and killing his friends.
We will not be so fortunate tonight.
It turns out we have been following a car’s perspective, where two men — Wally and Doug — exit, allowing the driver to leave.
And now, a news segment with anchorwoman — and totally not pornstar — Amber Lynn, and also some man named Johnny Scott. They are the hosts of “today’s broadcast.” Amber Lynn is actually staring right at the camera talking about Cold War politics and thermo-global nuclear war. I am going to try to tie in these segments later as we go on with this, to see what the art of it is. There is also an oil truck crash that messed up electricity in an area that will not have power for up to three hours. Will this be where the shenanigans of this movie take place?
Doug and Wally are walking in the blurry darkness, perhaps in this place and a great excuse for terrible lighting, towards a house. What is weird is that they are looking for someone named Doug in this house with a barking dog. They talk about breaking in if he doesn’t answer the door. And then, they open the door like it was already unlocked after calling his name at the door and confusing me because isn’t Doug already with Wally, or was that a scene from before and Doug was the driver who was “the goof.”
Right. So the two men are looking for Doug in his house, who might be wasted out of his mind and if he’s a reality warper it would explain this film, as one of the characters claims that what they need is “a couple of hot women and a few beers.”
I hate to break to you, dude, but like I said: I don’t think that either women, or alcohol will save this movie.
So they raid the fridge and it turns out that one of the men is Doug’s brother. He reaches in and finds a book called Horror of a Thousand Ugly Brutal Cuts. Well, that sounds like a more interesting story. That book cover also looks like something you would find in the Bottom Feeder Section. I also didn’t realize it was a book until they pointed it out. And Don — which is Doug’s brother’s name, who also found the book in the fridge — finds a tape recorder in the freezer with a weird echoing recording stating “Get your hands off me.” Wally, the other man, jokes that he should turn it off as it could be possessed. No, no Evil Dead references please and thank you. That also won’t save this abomination.
But I take back what I said about the book being interesting. After all, did Aleister Crowley actually kill anyone? Historical inaccuracies for the sake of misusing occult references aside, and being told there are “sick diagrams” in the book well, what can I say. As this movie suggests by its very existence “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Anyway, I am really hoping the “weird movie with the weird things” they are talking about, that starts with a Satanic tape recorder isn’t Evil Dead. But it’s hot in Doug’s place so Don decides to put his coat in the fridge, maybe to make it cooler, or because of a lack of space? Or, really just reasons. So finally someone — maybe Wally — takes the tape recorder playing Satan stoned out of his mind and turns it off, claiming that Susan — presumably Doug’s sick wife — is sleeping in the other room. Wait … weren’t they going to break in if Doug wasn’t home or available? How did they know Susan was there? Was that even Wally?
Anyway, it’s just Don and Wally, as Wally is looking for a “delicious cockroach snack” in the cupboards, and can’t see any of the critters. Is this … foreshadowing? In any case, they decide to watch some television: which according to Don has access to underground murder television networks and such. Another plot point, or an attempt to make this scene with the weird disjointed instrumental music more tense? You decide. Apparently, the television gets off the air stations, or they are from places that Doug doesn’t know.
Then we get back to the mainline news, totally undercutting everything these two chuckleheads were just talking about. Now Amber Lynn, looking perpetually to the right, is explaining how Dr. Lucas of Grizzly Flats has learned that the exposure of ultraviolet light to the human brain can double one’s lifespan: feeling like they are paraphrasing and just barely altering the plot of H.P. Lovecraft’s, and Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of, From Beyond.
Meanwhile, we see Dr. Lucas — who was introduced in the credits — torturing the hell out of a rotting skeleton man. We hear an echo of the words “I want you to have my bab-y” as he is doing so, making us think that Doug — and it is Doug at the beginning — and his experience with the devil woman is tied into this devil doctor. Perhaps the devil woman is simply a metaphor for the technique that Dr. Lucas used to artificially inseminate Susan … and, in retrospect, and if we borrow elements From Beyond, it might explain the end results later. Perhaps the Devil is supposed to be Susan or an amalgamation of her corruption and Susan in Doug’s drunken or fever-dreaming mind at the time. I like this explanation. It’s kind of cool, and probably not what they were going for. But it helps me, in a traumatic situation, to create order from chaos where none exists.
But seriously, the sequence with the woman in the Devil mask seems very surreal and dreamlike, and Doug does wake up. Perhaps it is that nightmare logic that gradually infests the entirety of this fragile, barely held together soggy cardboard reality that is this movie.
So there are some gross effects as he removes parts of his medical subject, the rot on his arm, his tongue, his hand, and then his eyeball. It’s kind of cool. The sound effects when he removes the eyeball sound like a deflating ball or water gun, and there is another man trying to hang himself, and there are decapitated heads everywhere. And the mad doctor snickers like a child, going “Nyeheheheeh …” which is as intimidating as a Cheeto. It’s a whole montage of Lucas and his female assistant cutting this man apart, her sawing at his throat, and him taking out his intestines. He even gets two more assistants in past the one that killed himself with a stretcher containing a severed head that he picks up, turns to the screen, and laughs.
Sanity Check: Where do we start indeed? One actor — Dr. Lucas — got arrested for soliciting and recruiting a sex worker for a role the porn actress didn’t want to be nude for because they didn’t pay her enough.
Does that sound about right? A nudity required application could have helped them. And her wearing the mask was to protect her identity or something to that effect. But like I said, no amount of women could save this.
So we get back to the two men. It turns out Wally isn’t the man’s name, but the driver that wisely left as the character I thought was Wally mentions. He does look at what he calls the infamous Salvator Dali’s The Devil’s Daughter painting, but it doesn’t seem to exist outside this film, or I can’t find it. It was “supposedly burned years ago,” and the clearly intellectual Doug somehow got a hold of it. But that leads us back to the imagery with the Devil mask woman and Susan at the beginning of the movie itself and all the dime-store occult hints here. Don tells his friend that Doug simply stole it when he was living in “a house on the left.” The left position is traditionally associated with the Devil. Yes. Yes guys. We get it.
Don’s friend is nosing around for a long time. He is always asking questions. He nearly burns his fingers on matches as he wants more light, and only seconds later turns on a nearby lamp in the living room. Genius. Don explains to him there is one weird painting that Doug apparently got from the Queen of England. Don’s friend gets the TV to work and tells him there is something interesting on. The dog makes her appearance.
Then Don insults the beer he is drinking and says something incredibly racist and xenophobic about how it “must have come out of a well in West Africa,” and then pays the US a backhanded compliment in saying he’s adding some “pure American water” to that. Yikes, dude. Even in the eighties, that’s pretty fucked.
Let me note, as we go on, that this movie so far and at many other points feels like a silent film, or a previous one that got dubbed over with murmured, drunken, almost incoherent commentary from people buzzed or stoned out of their minds. Keep that in mind, as I can’t cover all of that, and I won’t, but I will let you know if some parts in the continuing scenes stand out. Don is just humming now here, and it totally feels fake: like everything else. This is why I felt compelled to say something.
Now, what happens next? Well, the dog is lying down — and then promptly runs away — feeling me with nothing but sympathy. So Don and his friend are watching television and he says — and I fuck you not — “I saw this before. What a bunch of trash.”
Is Things … self-aware? Is there some metafictional winking going on here as they look at the blank hallway on that television screen playing a bad movie within a bad movie? My mind is blown. Look at it. Hell, Don even says “this company puts out the cheapest crap I’ve ever seen.” I mean … I didn’t say anything this time. Honestly. But interestingly enough, it could be a dig at the industry that looks down at DIY filmmakers: how they will generate complete garbage with more resources and it’s never original. It’s always derivative. Is Things saying it is derivative while at the same time making fun of the fact it is, and paying attention to how it uses the camcorder by “reliving old memories” and drawing from the power of nostalgia? That is ahead of its time given what we do with the eighties and its art — especially horror — nowadays. Or, like an augur, I am just trying to find meaning in the guts of dead … things.
So, the movie in the movie plays out with a knife attack and I wonder if this is actual film or something the creators of Things made? Oh, it’s called Groundhog’s Day Massacre (without the apostrophe). Let me see … oh wow. It apparently exists! It was directed by Harold Olminsky in 1986. It was SOV — Shot on Video. And I can’t find anything official about it. But it’s cool that Things used, and maybe homage to another SOV movie.
A lot of this is good to write about as a lot isn’t happening in the movie. But then the two men start watching porn. And I guess Doug was the one that came out earlier to tell them not to bother Susan, as he lives his … very red room, and goes into the kitchen. And I think we are coming to an interesting point. I’m serious.
Doug’s brother and friend — who after going back to the Joe Bob Commentaries I now know as Fred (what am I doing with my life) — didn’t bring any food. So he finds some six month old bread, and sets to work on … a sandwich. His brother Don is surprised that Doug isn’t more pissed off by them not bringing food. But he makes them cheese sandwiches. And after Fred wants more beers — and I imagine everyone did at this point if I didn’t make that clear, or Joe Bob didn’t already — Don gets up to get the drinks and complains about Fred’s laziness, stating that: “The next time you come with me, you’re staying home.”
Yes. This paradox, or koan aside, Fred sees a bug on a suddenly red table and squashes it. Foreshadowing?
Then Doug takes the bug — saying with “he might still be alive” and, “it will be crunchy for his tummy.” Shakespeare, my friends. Doug ends up putting the bug in a sandwich, sits down after some spectacular flatulence, just in time for Don to come back and eat it.
Doug and Fred find this hilarious, but then Don is bitten by a mosquito.” Foreshadowing again? Can I also mention that when Don drinks his beer he makes an obvious fake glugging sound not unlike what my great-uncle used to do to make my dad laugh? Yeah. Pure art. Don then compliments Doug on the sandwiches and Doug goes on about how he used to work at a restaurant.
Now, an interesting thing about sandwiches: both Sledgehammer and Things have sandwiches in common. Both are simple and crude to make and establish a basic function: to feed or be wasted as John in Sledgehammer eats a massive ham one and spits it out on a dare, and the cheese ones in Things are cheaply made: one even getting a bug put in it for gross spectacle? Perhaps it’s not creatures, or tools that are the central symbols of both movies, but working class honest-to-god sandwiches as metaphors for Shot on Video movies and production: on simple and direct messages often lost in messiness. Yes, I know. Order in the chaos. I should really be writing these meditations in my Sanity Check columns, but fuck it: just as reality is melding together in Things, it’s doing so in my mind from pure inspiration, and utter insanity. I hope you enjoy your semiotics, Joe Bob. Maybe put some “the medium is the message” in there too, by Marshall McLuhan while we’re at it, and it all goes back to your thoughts on SOV capturing working class thoughts on, and perhaps fears about, life and DIY folk art.
So Doug remembers he has a wife, and goes to check on Susan. And … oh man. Here we go now.
Susan is bleeding awkwardly in different frames, her screams out of sync with her mouth and reality. As Doug gets Don and Fred, freaking out, a bloody bargain bin xenomorph comes out of Susan’s body, and by the time they get back into the bedroom … She’s dead, Jim.
No. I will not confuse these names further. I apologize. Doug starts screaming, and then muttering like he’s lost his morning paper. And Don asks him: “What are you talking about?” I mean … Doug was talking? All right, so now we get the closest thing to straightforward plot that we will ever have in this disparate movie. Soon. He takes his brother, and presumably Fred aside and says he’s going to tell them … about it. Whatever that is.
The dog meanwhile is running through the hall and going behind a curtain. The place is all red and glowing. The dog whimpers and wails, and then growls and snarls. We see blood spray on the curtains. And even though we see a mutated bug afterwards, I choose to believe the dog went to another dimension after killing one of these creatures, barking the equivalent of “Fuck this shit.”
Sanity Check: Chris Jericho is this night’s guest and considered the show’s expert on bad movies. His high school-made Don’t Go to Uncle Earl’s Cabin For the Weekend with the Bag Man serial killer sounds bad ass for The Last Drive-In. I love how Things was shown in Montreal, and broke down twice. And the no drugs on set, but a lack of a no-alcohol policy says a lot about what happened.
Now back to the lovely Amber Lynn. Speaking of the dead rising, Amber Lynn is talking about George Romero — as the director of Dawn of the Dead and Creepshow, works light-years ahead of this construct, which isn’t so much the radiant of a dead star so much as it’s a blackhole — while explaining that he is taking his copyright claims to the Supreme Court of America: and Night of the Living Dead is getting pirated. I think the film is even playing behind Lynn.
I am trying to put these news segments together in my head. Is the area Doug in suffering from a blackout? Obviously we are going to get the tie-in with Dr. Lucas. But is this reference to Romero the creators of Things criticizing the establishment, and the common citizen, for ripping off independently made and produced movies? I told you my thoughts about meaning would bleed into Things. Literally.
Meta-commentary aside again, we get to the freaking plot. Basically, Doug explains that he and Susan wanted to have a baby, and they couldn’t naturally do it. They didn’t have the money to do it officially, and they couldn’t get money from Don as he was going to college. So they went to this experimental doctor, Lucas, for her to get artificially inseminated. It … didn’t go well. I’m assuming she was enveloped in pain and then these mutated insects came out of her body instead due to ultraviolet light, or some insanity like that. This could have been truly horrific, in a captivating way, as a man’s dream to have a child becomes a nightmare of mutated proportions … but instead, like this movie, like this whole VHS Appreciation Night it becomes a nightmare of unintentionally reality-bending proportions.
Don’s not happy about this. There is supposed to be a dramatic musical moment, and silence but it’s shrill like every sound in this production. And then, somehow, Don starts telling a story — a supposed weird science-fiction story — that is more captivating than this entire movie: all because it sounds like what’s going on in the movie, even though it only tenuously does as some teenagers bully a child named Harold in a small town, and then they kill him releasing some “serpentine bees” or something from his body to kill them and the town. Doug looks puzzled, like we all are, and says “This is really no time for stories.” You know, much like in this whole movie.
And what the hell, Doug? Your wife just died, consumed by your demonic children that might be yours, or not? You’d think you would be a little more distraught, and have no time for your brother’s inane recollections of a science-fiction he probably made up on the spot. Well, Don was only trying to “eeeeeazzzze the tension.” Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like. This sound quality, my friends.
Yeah. Even Joe Bob acknowledged this, that VHS Appreciation Night. It must have been this, or another time that this horrible realization came upon me that they were very serious about this entire thing. I was, for a time, able to just think it was a mass hallucination happening and I would just get past it. But I think this part is what began to make me feel like I could qualify for a Broken Man Certification.
So they talk about what to actually do about this, the three of them. Fred suggests getting the police, but Don tells them they not only can’t let these insects spread, but they are in the wilderness, the phone isn’t working even though none of them have tried it — and if it’s electricity that’s the problem why are the television and the lights functioning? Also, Don has to point out that “This is a real creepy place, you know?” No. No really? So many excuses just to keep this trainwreck happening, and yes I remember the train at the beginning of this whole movie too.
So they plan to go to Grizzly Flats — after Don says he didn’t think he’d ever “have to live with the dead” when Fred asks what to do with Susan’s body, an attempt at a profundity that just doesn’t work — and use Dr. Lucas’ phone to call the cops the next day. You know: the man that made all these monstrosities, this swarm we barely see, possible. Someone mentions that the doctor is evil and should be dead, and I guess it was Don because Doug’s mouth isn’t moving, and it is just confusing. It is all confusing.
Oh but now the lights go off, and everything is red. Our intrepid friends need to find a light source after several excuses about the fuses in the house being messed up, and the gas lamp the other two needed to get to Doug’s house almost being used up. How convenient.
And back to the lovely Amber Lynn. Now it’s weird. It’s apparently been fourteen days since Don Drake and Fred Lewis — presumably two of our protagonists — by Brooklyn residents? What the fuck? Are they trapped in a singularity? Is my tongue in cheek coming true? A woman saw them apparently get killed by bikers though. And then we get the news anchorman Johnny totally going into gossip on Cher’s boyfriend being with ex-pornstar Tracy Lord — and then a woman goes in to sit on Johnny’s lap: not realizing they are still on the air. I guess some people are just plain lucky, because I know this fractured reality is still ongoing.
And speaking of singularities, Fred gets sucked into a mousehole in a cupboard. Just like that. All right then. This leaves Doug, with blood on his shoulder from the ceiling, and Don to face the horrors of this house alone. After the two brothers wish the blood off of Doug’s body, we have a jumpcut to some infernal-looking Kindergartner art on a door that the two have discovered for the first time. They are still trying to find the fuse box. Someone makes a joke, maybe Doug, about how he put up those sinister symbols and whatnot before “we tortured and ate her” and I have no idea what is going on with that.
Right. Okay. They don’t go down there as Doug says “it’s too dangerous now.” Then Don and Doug ruminate about how there is no beer in the house. But Don finds whiskey, and then Doug tells a joke. He asks how do you get paper children? The answer: you fuck a bag lady.
Hey, you two, while you’re telling jokes in this hell house with the cheery music going on, stop me if you’ve heard this one. What happens when you give a bag lady a crown from Burger King?
You get yourself a Paper Bag Princess.
See, I am trying to cut the tension now, and I don’t have the gracious Amber Lynn to help out with that either. They don’t have her either, or the Devil woman, so I guess Doug begins to flipout thinking he hears footsteps — or Don does — and while Don thinks Fred has escaped to get help, we get cuts to Doug in red light cackling and crying about how Fred is dead. Then Don pours whiskey on his head. My unintentional rhyming poetry aside, here we can hear dialogue dubbed over previous dialogue as Don realizes he has to go to the washroom, and is afraid of the bugs. Doug ventures towards the washroom in the dark, for some reason, but it smells bad apparently.
They have to go back to the kitchen to get a flashlight first, and that’s when we see another lazy monster bug motherfucker: this time roaring like the parody of what a child would think an antlion is on the stove. Don kills it with a meat cleaver — or “him” as Doug puts it — “real good” (in several awkward jump cuts between swinging and the bug just sitting there). Damn, Sledgehammer and Things use similar implements if you recall.
Unfortunately, the half-dead creature just so happens to be right on top of the flashlight, which coincidentally is on the stove. Don slowly reaches for it twice, as the thing twitches at one point and gnashes its needle-sharp teeth. Then, he snatches it and washes his hand of all the blood: suddenly having the tremors.
Sanity Check: None of the actors were there at the same time the scenes were filmed. Fred’s actor was not available the day they filmed the scene with the mouse hole, which explains his adventures in space and time. Oh yeah. Scarborough. It really is known as a skid area. As someone who lives in the GTA (The Greater Toronto Area), I have heard the stories. A funny thing: Barry J. Gillis responded to my thread on the Joe Bob Collective about Things, though I love Joe Bob’s take on Things being a filmic version of dementia. I also appreciate how Chris Jericho hopes it was intentionally made bad, and I respect his utter loathing of the … thing. And I agree: Winnipeg as a film production Province would never make something like Things, but it would embrace something like Phantom of the Paradise once again.
The brothers begin searching around the house, and soon get to the bathroom. Then, Don goes in to use it, and forgets he needs the flashlight. Doug has to knock on the door to remind him, and he takes it. Sometimes, and I think Joe Bob said this at one point, it’s like they tried to do a horror comedy sequence — or a series of them — and they just failed miserably. The prime example here is where Doug is clutching his throat and sticking out his tongue like a cartoon character choking as the room turns red, and he’s just joking: trying to prank his brother. Like, dude: your wife just died, your friend is missing, and there are monsters everywhere. What the shit?
So then his brother comes out again and after wandering around more, Don just shoves him ages later. Then they go to the bathroom again, I think, and there is a bug on the toilet. Doug starts wheeze-laughing like he’s a kid imitating a cartoon monster’s voice, and Don is losing patience with him. Maybe Doug is finally going insane. In the end, Doug goes back into the bathroom and … flushes the thing down the toilet? Then he comes out with a manic grin on his face and goes: “Eeeeeee …”
Seriously, this is just obnoxious now. But now everything is going red. There is a brief jump cut of Doug making that sound and it’s gone as someone is checking a drawer. They are looking for items to use as weapons and … oh man. One of them has a tiny sledgehammer! Well, damn.
Finally, they venture into the basement past the hellish mural art that says “Love Tessie,” or some weird shit like that. Now, in the basement and the piano playing a melancholy tune in the background, the creatures are coming down from the ceiling “like spiders in a haunted house,” as Don says. The brothers are trying to get to the fuse box, but apparently the creatures are everywhere as the camera pans around and sees a few scattered plastic insect toys made — and failing — to represent a swarm.
Then as Doug is looking towards the direction of the fuel box, some insectoid legs wrap themselves around his neck. Don smashes the insect with … the sledgehammer, but ends up knocking Doug in the back of the head. He falls on the ground, bleeding out of his mouth, a pool of blood gathering on the floor. He’s dead.
But he’s not dead. Somehow. Don tries to lift Doug, and the latter doesn’t bleed out. He reaches over to stab a bug, and blue ichor flows out. Then he finally finds the fuse box. He’s “not very good at electricity things,” though. The creatures just happen to be sleeping over in the corner, though, and he has time to replace wires and circuits and such. For some reason, Don imitates a “zapping” noise: though whether it’s him, or his attempt to make a legitimate sound effect on the movie’s budget is up in the air. I am not expecting much either way.
Then he bashes another bug with the sledgehammer — or is it a mallet — and takes his brother away up the stairs again. We get an almost Nineties action flick pun from Doug that this is not really how “he wanted to get hammered, man.” There is a cutaway to a man with glasses laughing, unconvincingly, on a television screen. Then, back to Doug, we see that he gets attacked suddenly by another bug that eats his hand as he’s trying to get some alcohol.
So playground Keystone Cops antics aside, Doug is pretty fucked up now. Not when he got smashed in the back of the head with a hammer, mind you. And this is where we see that, in an attempt to cauterize the wound by Don, an amputated stump gets set on fire. Then a brief flash of a television screen. But hey, we get Canadian representation — a shout out to the fact that this is a Canadian film — when Don says that the blood coming out of his brother “is just dripping like maple syrup.”
We stand on guard for thee.
Reality is melting as words from the past echo about what the three men were going to do, and Don’s whole statement about living with the dead are the last words Doug seems to hear as Don doesn’t get the morphine, in the toolbox, in the basement, And he finally dies.
Don is distraught and takes his body and puts it in a closet. He begins sealing doors with a drill or something. He then finds the remains of the dog, who didn’t escape I guess and proceeds to be sick on the floor for far too damn long a sequence. I could have seriously done without that.
He begins drilling the remains of a bug or something, I really can’t see in that light but he goes too far and the extension cord unplugs, and he gets fed up with it. Yeah. Riveting stuff. That pun was unintentional.
Don goes into the other room, where he sees Doug sitting in a chair, and he realizes he is hallucinating. He sees him laughing out of the corner of his eye, but it’s just in his mind. Then he falls onto the couch. This whole time, there is a drinking bird set at the beginning of the film still dipping into a glass of water. Then a closeup of the washroom and a dripping sink.
Sanity Check: The close ups for all the doors and facets struck me too. At least in Sledgehammer, it is all to set up the scene and the atmosphere of the killer’s house, the tension of the stillness accidental or not. I love how Jericho remembers Darcy’s birthday and not only wants to show Sleepaway Camp II, but Halloween III on The Last Drive-In. Joe Bob wants Jericho to be the show’s recurring Canadian and Bad Horror Movie expert. I agree with this idea as his presence would be an excellent complement to the Mangled Dick expert that is Felissa Rose. And on the subject of Andrew Jordan: him not considering Things a horror film, but a “postmodern film about filmmaking” is pretty asinine, but I can see him making this argument from the stereotypical view of post-modernist art as relativistic and without inherent meaning as well. I also appreciate the explanation about the dubbing: Jordan said they had to overdub the background noise of the movie. But to return to someone I don’t mind listening to …
Back to Amber Lynn. She basically states that after being missing for fourteen days — time dilation I suppose — Don Drake and Fred Lewis might still be alive. Is this an attempt at pacing? To show how much time has gone by? How fluid it is? Is the use of different media Jordan’s attempt to deconstruct and destroy sensical cinematic narrative? I feel like I had something profound, but exhaustion is dogging me now. I need to go on. The mission must be completed.
Don is surrounded by bugs. But we hear a chainsaw as Fred comes back from the ether and begins destroying some bug motherfuckers. Maybe he isn’t so useless after all. Don is bashing bugs as well, one even crawling from the ceiling. Fred is screaming with the chainsaw as a bug creeps up on him, No, dude. You are not Leatherface, but you get points for enthusiasm. I can honestly believe that scream of maddened rage. I want to make one like it right now. He does kill the bug though, and after saving Don they flee.
Now Amber Lynn really makes us question the nature of reality and not in the way one might like if you know what I mean, and I think you do. She says that Don and Fred were surprised to find out they were being sought after in a nationwide manhunt. They were apparently in a hotel in Dallas and an off-duty security guard found them. According to Lynn, they were going across the country to visit a relative. So did this happen before the events of Things, as they drove to see Doug, or is this in another timeline? I feel like there is a death of the author involved here as this starts to make so much less sense, and that is impressive given how little sense it already has.
Meanwhile, Don and Fred are in the bedroom and the bugs have eaten their mom Susan. Fred gets Don out as he continues to fight them off. Don finds some bugs still eating Doug’s fingers. But then … the bugs get smart. That’s right. They eat the cord of Fred’s chainsaw.
He’s screwed.
According to Fred, they are eating him and he is begging and threatening Don to help him. The music is just terrible. I can’t even describe it, like glittering instrumentals that have no place in this bootleg cardboard box universe made a reality warping manchild and whose existence only remains now on a VHS recording.
There are two sets of screams dubbed on each other, one actual scream and fake ones. Fred is calling for one “little fucker” to “give me back my eyeball!”
Shakespeare. In the Park.
So Don does come back, but gradually and in an attempt at comedy I guess, we see Fred strewn about like a bloody Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz: just a talking, one-eyed skull. I’m sorry Fred: but no amount of spare artificial parts is helping you come back from being eaten and becoming a bunch of Things.
And back to Amber Lynn. Apparently residents refuse to leave their homes, and there is an atomic explosion.
Back to Don. And guess who’s come to visit the house? Dr. Lucas. We almost forgot about him. He’s come to pay Susan a social visit apparently. Don is not impressed. He leads him through the house to show him the carnage. They find Susan in pulp, and Lucas sniffs the blood he picks up on his hand, and confirms it’s human. He blames Don for the massacre, gaslighting the fuck out of him, while Don says it was because his experiments “fucked up.” But there are no bugs and, awkwardly as the dialogue allows — making me realize just how many brain cells I’ve lost listening to it for over an hour — Dr. Lucas builds a convincing case that Don used a chainsaw, and other implements to kill everyone in the house, despite Don’s rapid “I-I-I-Is.”
The creatures are all gone, supposedly. Don thinks they were either eaten by their fellows, or taken away. Dr. Lucas says “You watch too many horror movies, pal,” being a little too on the nose.
Don is spending entirely too much time attempting to convince the madman that his experiments exist. The doctor mocks him. He says he is going to take Don to an institution, but Don has none of it and shoves him into the washroom: where the creatures happen to be. They consume him.
“Creatures with no soul! They’re devouring me whole!” Man, I thought I was the only one rhyming here tonight.
Don leaves and goes to the closet to bury his brother properly, and then loses consciousness. Then, the next we know he’s out and running out of the house and into the woods through a ravine. He’s shouting. “Help me!”
A man helps him up on a bridge. He is ranting and raving to the man. The man wants to take him to Dr. Lucas, but Don sets him straight and he just wants to get back to Sacramento and tell the police what happened. He goes off with the man, to safety. They finally get to his car and …
“Are you sure this wasn’t all a dream?”
Only for Don to wake up, and the Dollarama Deadite form of Dr. Lucas — perhaps also a callback to George Romero and the possibility of there being a larger infestation of creatures due to the mad doctor’s other experiments — to come at him. He manages to keep the cackling monster out, tying the door closed from the inside.
He sits in there, rocking back and forth, as a creature is on the shelf behind him, muttering. “I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay.”
Well, I’m glad to know that Don. Because I don’t know if I will ever be. Ever.
And when, the words “You have just experienced Things” comes onto the screen and the credits roll, this second time around, I feel blessed relief. It’s over.
The nightmare is finally over.
And at the end, after the credits and the thanks to all their fans and supporters, we have Amber Lynn being incredibly frank about doing “Fifty-Two Pick-Up” with Vanity. She talks about how she met John Frankenheimer for a show where she and porn star actress friends came as a joke, and he wanted her to be in his movie. I have to say, her having this conversation with the crew of this movie is kind of refreshing. It is the most animated and real recording in this whole production. I’m glad she was there. She was the only bright spot in that movie. And on that note …
Final Sanity Check and Observation: I agree with Joe Bob that everything is advanced — and improved — by the presence of a pornstar.
I could go into Things being the medium and the message of independent creators attempting to show how shallow media is through the ridiculous news segments, the television sets that inundated that time, a nightmarish realization that nothing has inherent meaning, and terrible things happen — and are created — all the time, and sometimes you know you will never be okay again, pornstars or no.
But there’s something in this Last Drive-In segment that I want to talk about: that I want to focus on.
Something happened.
It all started when Joe Bob mentions the complete earnestness and drive — the dream — these moviemakers had to attempt these creations. And how, in an Age of Irony, it’s to forget that. And then, there came on — jump cut through his speech, a remix of the “Tail-Spin” song. And just as it had that Friday night into Saturday morning, it hit me. In the feels. It reminded me of something I can’t completely put into words. It’s sad, and beautiful, and wistful all at once.
And then, I did write something about it. And, because you’ve read this far — or if you have — I am going to share it with you.
*
Epilogue
Here is a picture of me, at 11:40 am, having not slept, finishing my Iron Mutant Certification.
I am exhausted, but I did it. And I hope you can see that.
I wrote this in a series of Tweets after the show ended on Friday. Joe Bob’s words, and the “Tail-Spin” remix stayed in my mind. And then, I gathered them together and shared them on both the Joe Bob Collective and Slasher.
This is what I wrote, and at the end of this nightmare and my engagement of it — as one Iron Mutant to another — this is how I want to end my Certification.
I wrote some thoughts tonight on Twitter after Joe Bob’s words about …. Things, or as I like to call it now, Try Hard:
It’s after the show now. And I was thinking about it. Even before tonight’s entertainment. What was different about this season up until this point?
And I think … it was because of all the good movies we saw, or at least the quality, industrial production. We hadn’t seen, even with Audition, anything weird. Anything Wtf.
The Last Drive-In is about spectacle and enjoying or cringing through aspects of those films, but also understanding their context. Where they come from. What goes into them.
It is also a space to bond around those ridiculous premises. To look at the ridiculousness on a screen that we all watch at the same time every Friday /Sunday, instead of living it around us.
And there is something that Joe Bob said at the end of tonight’s episode, after the spectacle of Things, of the creator that never made anything after this film.
I thought about them, and their crew’s utter dedication to this: to throw it all out there, not knowing what they are doing, to see what will stick, and to … make something.
Yes. It was bad. But that enthusiasm was real. And I think about my friends, and how we tried to make things. Ridiculous things. Many of them lost with time. And you know … the creators of Things … at least they tried.
They Tried Hard.
How many people can say the same thing? How many of us can say the same thing?
I had fun ripping it apart. I won’t deny that. That’s part of the kind of person I am. But at the same time, I think about how they went out there with just the sheer primal impulse to … make something, even a mess. And they did it. And that is their memory. I feel almost ashamed, making fun of that sheer need to make something, to tell a story, even if it doesn’t come out right.
Like a child making that Devil’s Kindergarten art on the mirror in the film. But they did it. They made that.
And I realize I can still dislike, or even cringe, at something badly made, but still deeply respect the creative impulse and need to express it.
And I am crying a bit.
And not for the reasons you might think.
Because, for a few moments, I could almost remember. That spark, in Try Hard — as I call Things now, is beautiful.
That spark in Try Hard — as I call Things now — is beautiful. And I may take apart everything else around it, but I won’t tarnish that.
I can’t.
The point is, the people behind the camcorders of Things, and Sledgehammer never gave up. And there is a lesson in that somewhere.
Perhaps, this time, I will remember it.
The Horror Doctor 