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Beach Blanket Zombie. Mark McLaughlin
Читать онлайн.Название Beach Blanket Zombie
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isbn 9781434448637
Автор произведения Mark McLaughlin
Жанр Зарубежные детективы
Издательство Ingram
So saying, His Lordship raked out her eyes with a single swipe of his talons.
Minty Belasco’s Top Ten Most Hideous And/Or Splendid Movies Of All Time
Translated From The Original Croatian
Introductory note from the translator: Last year, while vacationing in Europe, I visited film critic, fashion designer, and international trend-setter Minty Belasco, who was living in an apartment above a Goth nightclub in Munich. Minty is tall, thin, pale, and extensively tattooed. His age is anyone’s guess. He is the author of seventeen books on a variety of subjects, including menswear, ancient Egyptian mummification rituals, bonsai trees, and his favorite topic of all, movies—the cheaper and trashier, the better.
His books have been published in Russia, Poland, France, India and Japan. But not one has been published in the United States, because as Minty said, “Most Americans don’t want to know what I think. Besides, that’s where Momsy and Daddy live, and I’m not talking to them.”
Minty’s parents, Momsy and Daddy, are in fact multimillionaires Regina and Cuthbert Belasco, owners of Belasco Beer, Belasco Premium Cigarettes, Belasco Fried Chicken, and Belasco Funeral Homes.
Minty can write and speak in thirty-five different languages, but these days he only writes in Croatian. He told me, “My new massage therapist speaks Croatian and I’m just mad about that tongue—that language, I mean.”
The article below, written by Minty, appeared in a Croatian film magazine with a name that translates to Eye Feces. Fortunately, I know several languages myself, so Minty said that if I wanted to go to the bother of translating the article, he would give me his permission to sell it to an American editor, making it his first publication in this country.
On behalf of America, I thank you, Minty. Some of us really do care what you think.
* * * *
Minty Belasco’s Top Ten Most Hideous and/or Splendid Movies of All Time
No. 10 and Stinkingly Hideous:
I Took Piano Lessons from a Zombie (1939)
Lots of folks consider this a horror classic, but I think it’s a steaming bucket of goat dung. Glubb the undead piano teacher strikes the keys at random while staring off into space. Are we to assume that only a mindless zombie would play the piano that way? That’s just how avant-garde pianist Feng Pao Goldstein, a visionary, a genius, used to tickle the ivories. I once went to one of his concerts, and I loved listening to Feng as he played the baby grand in the middle of that cattle-yard. You see, even the locations of his concerts had to be avant-garde. He was on life support for five months after the stampede.
* * * *
No. 9 and Hideously Vile:
The Amnestyville Horridness Part XVII: Better Latte Than Never (1997)
The movie that started this series, The Amnestyville Horridness (1979), was pretty much a supernatural kitchen-sink drama about a family trying to adjust to a new house and all its nutty little quirks: creaky floorboards, drafty hallways, faucets squirting pus and tentacles flailing out of the refrigerator. It wasn’t great, but it had interesting main characters and some nice creepy moments, with a satisfying ending that still left the door open for a sequel. Well, so far no one’s been able to shut that damned door.
In the first five sequels, the house changed ownership time and time again, before the local priest wised up and burned it down in No. 6. But that didn’t end the Amnestyville curse. In this one, No. 17, a haunted coffee-maker from the evil house is given to a perky, innocent family in a suburb of Chicago. Soon their happy home is crawling with undead spirits, all hopped up on caffeine. The machine is never shown making latte, so the title is just a cutesy witticism. Actually, that’s the only clever thing about this plodding exercise in plot recycling. Elements from the previous sixteen movies are tossed in like wild greens in a salad from Hell. To be fair, the coffee-maker angle does deliver one nice chill—like when we find out that the couple’s breakfast coffee was brewed from the cremated remains of another couple that died in sequel No. 16.
There’s one thing I can’t understand about haunted house movies. Why don’t the people just buy another house? Houses can’t cost that much—Daddy had dozens of them. He even had one he never told Momsy about—that was where he kept his lover Pasha. I can’t remember if Pasha was male or female ... probably a he/she. Daddy always had trouble making up his mind.
* * * *
No. 8 and Ridiculously Hideous:
The Legend of Flaming Arrow (1993)
This big-screen, mainstream release was about five-thousand times worse than most of the cult films and shoestring-budget drive-in oldies I usually watch. Classically trained actors think they can play anything from baby chicks to Siamese twins. Fine-boned blond British actor Basil Cheltenham has played Hamlet and Romeo, but sorry, he is simply out of his league as Indian warrior Flaming Arrow.
This was supposed to be a very intense film, and a bit of a dark fantasy, with Flaming Arrow going on spirit quests in his own head and talking with bear gods and eagle ghosts and other celestial Nature types, but the whole effect is ruined by Cheltenham’s presence. They dyed his hair black and gave him brown contacts and slathered him with shoe polish to darken him up, but under all that one can tell he’s still just a snooty pretty-boy. My nanny Helga raised me right: I simply will not tolerate pretense.
* * * *
No. 7, Hideous Corporate Propaganda:
Let’s Learn More About Soybeans! (1993)
This wasn’t ever a theatrical release. It’s a trade-show videotape I watched while spending the weekend at my friend Roger’s beach house. Roger’s family is even richer than mine, if that’s possible. His brother sells soybeans and soybean-related products, whatever those are. The brother had left the tape behind so Roger could learn more about the world of soybeans and perhaps want to get involved in it, but Roger is doing quite well as a butt model. That’s his rear in all those Calvin Klein underwear ads.
This wretched little trade-show video is narrated by some fat, awkward soybean executive with a triple chin and sideburns. It seems that soybeans can be made into anything—cattle feed, protein shakes, plastic, medicine, cars, buildings, you name it. Roger and I got drunk on rum-and-cokes and made fun of the tape from beginning to end.
It’s funny, though. I look around at things now and think: Is this made out of soybeans? Is that made out of soybeans? Exactly how much of my world is made out of soybeans? Ten percent? Fifteen? Fifty? More? The mind boggles. For all I know, I might be surrounded by the damned things. So hurray for soybeans, I guess.
* * * *
No. 6 and Hideously Nauseating:
Sidewinder Sally (1954)
Usually I hate big, lush Hollywood musicals, especially ones set in the Old West—crusty geriatric campfire cooks and square-jawed ranch-hands bursting into song over sunsets, sycamore trees and newborn calves staggering toward their loving moo-cow mommies. Yes, usually I hate them, but there’s something I hate even more: big, lush Old West Hollywood musicals starring Marla Malone.
Saccharine-sweet girl-next-door leading lady Marla stars as Sidewinder Sally, a scruffy Nebraska tomgirl who cleans up right purty. In fact, she’s gosh-darned glamorous, with straight white teeth, shining golden hair and perfect skin in a wild-and-wooly frontier without toothpaste, shampoo or astringent.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Minty, don’t you usually critique movies with monsters and killers and aliens in them? Sidewinder Sally is just some corn-fed cowboy chick.” To which I reply: “Whole generations of women grew up feeling woefully inadequate because they weren’t as perfect, as winsome, as talented, as zit-free as Marla Malone. Men