It is summer time, which makes me think back to summer trips from my childhood. This always included a week-long trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama without fail. However, it is a day trip to Six Flags over Georgia in the summer of 1975 that left me scarred for life. Sounds like fun right? A day trip to an amusement park, what could be terrifying about that right? Well, any child that visited Six Flags over Georgia in the 1970's already knows the terror that was waiting there.
So here was the family of six (Dad, Mom, oldest sister 17, evil older brother 14, older sister 11, and me 4) ready to enjoy a summer day at the park. For some unknown reason that I have never been able to fathom my parents decided that we would all go through the Horror Cave. Yeah, that's a great idea! Take a four-year-old through a "haunted house" nothing could possibly go wrong! Well, it is 33 years later and here is what I remember from the Horror Cave. Entering through the mouth of a monster the first scene I remember was a bubbly, foggy bog where not one but three Creature from the Black Lagoon monsters rise up (okay, now I am climbing my mom trying to escape this place and get passed to my father), next scene simply made me go mad, there was a woman's bedroom and she is lying across the bed, then I notice that the two creepy looking men in the room are holding her head that they just cut off (now I am climbing my dad attempting once again to escape), the scene that followed was like Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory with a creature strapped to a table and a mad scientist throwing the switch on some electrodes or something (so now I have figured out I can't escape so I close my eyes), so the last thing I remember looking at were two caskets one contained Dracula and the other the Bride of Dracula it looked as though they were breathing, and then you had to walk over a suspension bridge to get to the exit. To exit you had the choice to walk down some stairs or slide down a slide.
After that, I could not handle going through haunted houses. Over the years, I began to wonder if I remembered the Horror Cave accurately. I started searching the Internet in hopes that others had accurate descriptions of the terrors of the Horror Cave, better yet pictures from the cave. I wasn't disappointed because I found the FOLLOWING with PICTURES. I discovered that I wasn't crazy after all. My memories of the events from the summer of 1975 are accurate.
When I was about 7, there was a great prime-time childrens' show by the name of THE JIM HENSON HOUR. It had a memorable motley '80s cast of new Muppets (many of you may remember Digit) and some old favorites . There was one segment that had a detrimental affect on my perception of death. It was a segment titled THE STORYTELLER, staring JOHN HURT as a wizened, well, storyteller. In the particularly traumatic story, "The Soldier and Death," JOHN HURT regales us with the story of a kindly soldier returning home after a long war. He happens upon many strange circumstances and comes into possession of magical affects: a deck of cards that he cannot lose with, a magical sack that will hold anything that he commands into it, and a crystal chalice with which he can see whether death is going to claim the life of a person lying sick in their bed. The soldier returns home with the tools that he had scored upon the way, and becomes a king. One of the reasons was that he could tell people whether or not they would die, by using said magical crystal chalice. There was the effect that the Henson studio had whipped up that gave the viewer the same perception the soldier had through the chalice to show the most chilling creation of death. This episode had its share of frightening JIM HENSON creations, the waxy snarling demons standing out. But none were as frightening as the infantile, globe-eyed, hoarse-voiced death in his tiny, shiny robe. The bony grimace and scythe of the traditional death, even INGMAR BERGMAN's SEVENTH SEAL incarnation seems comical and approachable to the HENSON creation. When they first showed him through the chalice, my younger brother ran from the room, without speaking. I couldn't take my eyes away, locked into his giant, creepy blue eyes. I got the entire collection of THE STORYTELLER on DVD this past Christmas, and that awful little Muppet still chilled my heart 18 years after the fact. There have to be others out there who were just as shaken by the blue-eyed child Death from the HENSON studios…
…and Captain Kirk becomes so insecure that, I swear to God he seriously almost made out with Spock in the elevator!!! If either they or I was a little more drunk I think it would have happened!
This episode guest stars puppy activist and official Traumatot PAMELYN FERDIN and is pretty damn good as well even though it is usually considered the WORST episode ever made by most STAR TREK fans. (You can watch it HERE). I guess the truth is the only thing really keeping Unkle Lancifer from becoming a full-blown Trekkie is actually watching the show because I sorta loved both these episodes. Well, it's too late for me to change my Colonial spots now and there ARE Cylons a' calling. Maybe if that make-out session in the elevator had actually materialized it would be a different story.
TERROR IN THE AISLES is a film that has had a profound, lasting effect on the way I feel about horror films and some non-horror films that they, for some reason, included. It turned me on to NIGHT HAWKS, VICE SQUAD and one of my all time favorite's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE. I took it in to my middle school and for some reason did a report on horror films. Everyone cracked up when LINDA BLAIR did the rolled-back-eyes hoochie coochie dance (even my teacher cracked up). I had just started buying Fangoria magazine (CELLAR DWELLER was on the cover) and brought it to school,this movie made me want to seek out more gore films and especially makeup effects people like TOM SAVINI and ROB BOTTIN (This is the first time I saw the clip from JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING and even THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE ). The way DONALD PLEASANCE and NANCY ALLEN hosted the film, it seemed like an infomercial for the worst nightmare that you could not escape from.
Right after I watched THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK I came down with a nasty cold, and my illness induced several nights of nightmares in which I was an underpowered Luke Skywalker, stranded on Dagobah. As it turns out, Dagobah didn't have a DAMN thing on the San Fernando Valley. For a long list of reasons I was sent, two summers after Empire hit the theaters, to live with foster parents in San Antonio. That might've been tolerable, if… I wasn't from Portland. Seriously. Name two places in these United States of America that are more different.
…So of course, there I was, 2000 miles from my family and everything I knew worth a damn, still feeling totally stranded, going through hell in school because OF COURSE I'm a discipline problem (gee, really???), when E.T. goes into theatrical release. Using a Speak & Spell to "phone home" when home is zillions of miles away? Getting dreadful sick and lying dying in the sterile beating heart of a funky polypropylene tent, surrounded by guys in positive pressure suits? Jesus on a pogo stick, talk about isolation piled on isolation. Â I had nightmares for weeks afterward, in spite of spending a good part of the film with my eyes screwed shut.
…The guardianship arrangement that had caused me such grief was ended in the summer of '83. Â Even after 25 years of chances to get over it, I've never watched it again, and if I go the rest of my life so bereft, I'll be okay with that.
If CATHY'S CURSE were just incompetent that would be one thing, but it goes far beyond that, it willfully defies rational thought. It laughs in the face of human comprehension. It dares you to follow its lead and then pushes you into a pit of mental strain that only those who have suffered severe head injuries could possibly understand. It's really more of an endurance test than anything else because CATHY'S CURSE is cursed alright. There is something supremely unnatural about it. Maybe it is evil in its truest form, a black hole that tears to shreds the fabric of everything we believe to be natural and real and good. I have come to fear that the atrocity's creation was no accident. If you handed a camera to a mentally disabled monkey, it could deliver a film that reflected something of what day-to-day life on earth was like. No, this is the handiwork of a diabolical madman.
On the surface it masquerades as just another child possession movie. You would think following the action would be simple as the ground it presumes to cover has been tread countless times before. Unfortunately, the "director" stubbornly insists on presenting us countless inconsistencies that go far beyond what viewers would be used to witnessing in a so-called "bad movie." (Imagine a mean-spirited TROLL 2 and you're not even half way there). The instances of counter logic are simply too frequent and too obvious to be a mistake. Why didn't anyone stop them? Considering that the production involved at least as many adult humans as we see on the screen, I can't help but wonder why no one had the wherewithal to intervene and inject at least a granule of sanity to the proceedings. Surely they had some inkling of what they were doing!? They HAD to know!
Maybe future generations will understand. Maybe visitors from outer space could decipher it. Is it an anarchistic treatise against cinema as a whole? An experimental Dadaist poem about the perils of puberty and the dismantling of the nuclear family? By exposing us to random images whose meanings are obtuse or non-existent, are we meant to experience first hand what it's like to be as insane as the people who inhabit this film are?
I am afraid. I am afraid that death will be like CATHY'S CURSE. I am afraid that the curse-a-verse is something real, another dimension beyond or own, a place where only wrong things happen. I fear that only a wall as thin as an onionskin separates our two worlds and that slowly that world is being absorbed into our own. I look in the mirror, am I Cathy's curse? Did I make this happen? Is this movie my punishment for unknown deeds in a previous life? Will it ever go away? If you have not seen it yet, do yourself a favor and stay away. Nobody deserves to live in this kind of turmoil. I am no different than a heroin addict. I know this wretched thing is killing me but life without it is now unimaginable. Me and Cathy are joined for life. She guides me to the abyss and I follow. Turn back gentle reader before it is too late!!! (more…)
