by Ian Watson
“Just a man who prefers to remain out of sight. All my powers just…happened. As you can imagine, keeping the engine running takes huge amounts of energy.”
“I get it. If you didn’t get your junk food fix, you’d die.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“Relatively speaking, of course,” Warbeck said. “I bet if I found the man controlling that body, and put a bullet in his head, the zombies would all fall down, right?”
The man stared.
Grabbing cutlery, Warbeck lunged.
***
The weapon broke up in his fist.
“Dumb bastard,” the raspy voice said. “That’s a spork.”
He hit Warbeck in the face.
As Warbeck hit the ground, the man started kicking him. “I’ve. Had. Enough. Of. You.”
“You need me,” Warbeck said.
“Killing one won’t make any difference.”
He tried to rise, but the man put a knee in the small of his back. Rolling him over, he snapped cuffs on Warbeck’s wrists.
“Not so smart without a gun, are you?”
The man dragged him into the parking area and threw him against a Pontiac. He bounced and hit the ground, hard.
“If you’re gonna do it,” Warbeck said, “at least have the courtesy to do it next to a decent car. I don’t wanna go out looking at no fuckin’ Pontiac.”
“You sure? It’s an Aztek.”
“You dump me in that piece of shit, and I’m gonna come back and haunt you.”
“I wouldn’t leave your stinking body in here, trash. I don’t shit where I eat. I got something special planned for you. We're gonna go upstairs, you and me, and I’m gonna throw you off the roof.”
“That ain’t so special,” Warbeck said.
“Maybe, but it’s all I got at short notice.”
“Shucks. And I never got to kill the real Winston.”
“You’ll get over it,” the man said, pushing him. “Get your ass in gear.”
“That’s a bad idea.”
“Pushing you?”
“Coming within three feet.”
Moving fast, he got behind the other man and slipped the chain around his throat. The slimy bastard tried to weasel his way out so Warbeck smashed his head against a pillar a few times, then a few times more for effect.
After the twentieth blow, it wasn’t fun anymore, so he let the man drop to the ground.
Patting down the body, he found the key, unlocked the cuffs and made his way back to the food court.
He was crossing the parking area when he felt someone watching. Looking up, he saw curtains twitch in an RV.
Checking the gun, Warbeck crossed to the vehicle and tried the handle. It clicked open, so he threw the door wide and stepped inside.
“Oh fuck,” Winston said.
***
Warbeck could see why he’d settled on that particular name. All babies were supposed to look like Winston Churchill, after all.
Except this one didn’t. Winston, the real Winston, looked more like a Krypt Kiddy doll. Blue skin, black lips and white eyes. No horns or bat wings, though.
“Figures you’d stay out of sight,” Warbeck said, “if you looked like the Antichrist.”
“Aw, suck a dick, you fucking homo.”
“How can someone so small have such a big mouth?”
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you.” As Winston reached for his cigarettes, Warbeck noted he wore a diaper, nothing else. “I’ve made quite an impression, for someone my age. How many new-borns d’you think could pull this shit off?”
He lit up, not bothering to offer the pack to Warbeck.
“Believe me,” he said, “it was a painful birth. Just ask my mother. Oh wait, you can’t. She’s fucking dead.”
“She was one of the guinea pigs, huh?”
“Bingo. That shit must’ve fried her brains as I came out because, as you see, there were certain complications.”
“Why all the hostages?”
Winston blew a smoke ring. “You think I wanted any of this? If those corporate motherfuckers hadn’t been so greedy, none of this would’ve happened. But whaddya know? Shit got fucked and here we stand.”
“You gonna back down?”
“No. And neither will you.”
“Guess I’m gonna have to kill you then.”
Someone racked a shotgun. Warbeck saw a woman in a business suit, advancing on them.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Winston said.
***
Before the woman could fire, Warbeck jumped inside and closed the door. He got behind the wheel and turned the key.
“Are we nearly there yet?” Winston said.
Warbeck stomped the accelerator.
The E-Z Ryder was all smoke and no poke. It moved out of the parking bay like a turd from a dead dog’s ass, even with the pedal to the metal.
The woman stepped up to the RV and fired, blowing out the windshield. Her next shot peppered the hood. She fired again as they dawdled past, taking out a side window.
“Read the signs, bitch,” Winston said. “Baby on board.”
Warbeck kept his foot down and, just when they didn’t need to, they began picking up speed. Struggling to negotiate the downward ramp, he swung the wheel right, too late, and the RV hit the crash barrier, rebounded and began rocking on its wheels. Hitting the foot of the ramp, Warbeck spun the wheel furiously, turning the vehicle in an arc its body couldn’t support.
The shotgun side rose up in the air.
The RV tipped over, skating several feet on its side before coming to rest with its bumper nudging the far wall.
Warbeck jumped out, hauling ass across the concrete. The shotgun flared once. Pain flared up his right side and he fell, rolling across the ground.
The woman closed in, racking the shotgun.
“Do you want me to beg?” Warbeck said.
“That time has passed.
He aimed at the RV’s fuel tank.
“Crap,” the raspy voice said.
The tank exploded, blowing the woman out of a window as Warbeck rolled underneath a Ford. Flames licked across the vehicle’s body, missing him completely.
Seconds later, the sprinklers kicked in.
Warbeck got to his feet.
The RV was a smouldering, blackened ruin. He kicked it a couple of times, then shuffled into the staircase and examined his injury.
Pellet wounds sprinkled his leg, ankle to hip. It didn’t bleed too bad, and didn’t look that formidable, but still stung like a motherfucker.
Hopping, he returned to the food court. He had him an appetite for some good old American junk food.
Part 9
You’ve reached the end of COME THE NIGHT, but read on for a preview of Duane Bradley’s latest book
MIDNIGHT SPOOKSHOW
****
The trouble with this business of watching movies is that, sooner or later, you’ll encounter the people that watch films not for fun, but to admire.
You know the type: they have PhDs and MAs, use big words and probably shook Jean-Luc Goddard’s hand one time. In their circle, you’re obliged to say that you loved Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), but if you start talking about monster movies, they’ll look at you as though you just asked them to pull your finger.
Truffaut’s movie may have helped start the French New Wave, but if you want a trend-setting movie with teenage leads, you need look no further than The Blob. Not only is this the archetypal movie about kids saving their town from a monster from space, but it features the King Of Cool himself, Steve McQueen, in his first starring role.
It’s McQueen’s only creature feature, and while he elevates a cheaply made, B-grade sci-fi movie, he’s not the whole show. There’s also a terrific theme song (co-written by Burt Bacharach) and besides, who doesn’t want to see killer Jell-O atta
cking a cinema?
You can call The Blob schlock if you like or a guilty pleasure if you must, but most critics refer to it as “bad”, a term that Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, writing in Cult Cinema: An Introduction, define as “poor and distasteful filmmaking.”
As Woody Allen might quip, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Not only are “bad” films fun to watch, but the behind the scenes stories are fascinating. On the set of Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf, director Philippe Mora, shooting in Soviet-controlled Prague, was constantly yelling “Clit!” – the Czech word for “shut up” – at his local crew. When the werewolf suits arrived, Mora realized they weren’t specially commissioned wolf costumes, like he’d asked for, they were ape suits left over from Planet Of The Apes. Phoning the producers in a blind panic, he explained he couldn’t be expected to substitute apes for lycanthropes. “People might notice the difference,” he said.
The film’s star, Christopher Lee, jokingly proposed a solution: he’d give a speech where he explained that men transformed into apes before becoming werewolves. Mora declined, and all the werewolf scenes were shot later in the production - using cheap-looking rubber masks.
A well-rounded cinematic diet needs “bad” films just as surely as it needs Truffaut. Probably more so, because they’re in English and feature ninjas, rubber monsters and cheerleaders who can do things with a baton you wouldn’t believe.
This book exists for one reason only – to increase your enjoyment of films that most others would belittle. In these pages, amongst the Mexican wrestling films and Filipino monster movies, you’ll find pictures about brain-sucking parasites, ninja exorcists and talking sandwiches.
If you’ve ever looked at the AFI Top 100 with dismay, you’re in the right place. Here are a hundred alternatives to all those “prestigious” films you were never going to watch, and probably wouldn’t care for if you did.
Anyway, enough already….
HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1995)
“The Shape is dead,” John Carpenter told Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982. “Donald Pleasance’s character is dead, too, unfortunately.”
Such rumours turned out to be greatly exaggerated because here they are for the fifth time, and it’s like they never went away. Dr Loomis may be a little slower but he’s still a raving lunatic, while Michael once again slaughters teens who’ve decided to poke the possum in his house on Halloween night after a thunderstorm has knocked out the power. We always wondered whether Mikey worked one day a year as part of a welfare scam or because he was contractually obliged to leave Friday The 13th, April Fools’ Day, Prom Night, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Graduation Day etc free for his colleagues, but it turns out he was all along being manipulated by Mitch Ryan, the drinking man’s Chuck Heston, and his band of merry druids. Ryan, perhaps not coincidentally, was also Gary Busey’s boss in Lethal Weapon, so as the Personification of All That Is Evil, he’s pretty well-cast.
Just so we’re clear, though, these are not the druids of Iron Age Britain, who worshipped trees and (supposedly) performed human sacrifices, these are Hollywood Bullshit Druids, who live in an ultra-secret underground bunker accessible only through an unlocked and unguarded door marked ‘Maximum Security’, dress like Emperor Palpatine and contact Michael using their very own Bat Signal – a constellation of stars that only appears on October 31st. The constellation is in the shape of a thorn, so the symbol is tattooed on the wrist of every member, including Myers, something every previous and future movie forgets to mention.
Ryan is the Man In Black that sprung Mikey from jail at the end of Halloween 5, and it turns out they also kidnapped Jamie, his nine-year-old niece. You remember Jamie, don’t you? There’s a touching scene in Part 5 where Myers is attempting to slice and dice her but she calls him “Uncle”, so he stops. Then she tells him to take off the mask, and he does. As she looks on his true face for the first time, she strokes his cheek, causing him to cry….then Dr Loomis drops a net over the sumbitch and starts beating him with a length of two-by-four, which sorta ruined the moment for us.
Anyway, Jamie, who is now fifteen, is first shown giving birth and if you watch the “legendary” Producer’s Cut, it’s strongly hinted that Michael is the father. When we say ‘strongly hinted’, we mean someone pops the paternity question to his face (or mask, whatever) and Myers, being Myers, says nothing. Because he’s Michael Myers. Who says nothing. So the question is left hanging, which to our way of thinking is A Good Thing. All those dark undercurrents, you know?
Also, without wanting to dwell on the subject too much, we doubt The Shape is really a family albums and PTA meetings kind of guy. He likely doesn’t do picnics and birthdays and such and would be a lousier parent than Michael Jackson. Still, at least you know he’ll be around.
364 days a year, in fact.
So Jamie is killed by cult members that want the baby for….oh, some reason, but it ends up with a tall, slender redhead whose best friends are a short girl and a stoner who says “like”, “dude” and “cool” a lot (what is this, Scooby Doo! Where Are You?). They know a creepy old woman who, as lightning flashes across her face, tells them she was babysitting Michael the night he heard “The Voice” and killed his sister. Then another flash of lightning reveals Myers standing at the window. Tres spooky, non?
Turns out that the redhead is living in the old Myers house, and she and her mom are the only ones who didn’t know. Mom, by the way, is played by Kim Darby, who’s a loooong way from True Grit and The Grissom Gang, and it’s sad to see someone who once worked for Henry Hathaway and Robert Aldrich reduced to a movie directed by the guy that shot new scenes for Hellraiser: Bloodline. Fortunately, her character is married to the kind of overbearing prick you can’t wait to see get despatched, so her demeaning role is at least balanced with watching an asshole get electrocuted until his head explodes.
It all leads to a (cough) white-knuckle finale at the druids’ top-secret, ultra-secure, impenetrable hideaway, where a bunch of stuff happens. Bad people get punished, good people escape, you know the drill. Then Pleasance wanders off to confront Ryan, but since that scene ended up on the cutting room floor (trust us, you ain’t missing much), all that’s left are Pleasance’s dubbed-in screams as the movie fades out.
One shouldn’t mock the afflicted, but Halloween 6 is kinda like watching a Nazi biker attempt to explain Mein Kampf to a masturbating chimpanzee – indefensible, but also weirdly compelling in its own twisted way.
