A Five Second Mystery: Inspector Griffith Park and the Case of the Old Dead Lady

“Phew,” the dashing mustachioed Inspector Griffith Park exhaled as he stepped into the cramped, messy kitchen on a routine call, “What's that awful smell?” 

“Sorry sir,” Constable Hammond said, fanning the air. “I had one of those breakfast burritos this morning. Always ties my stomach into knots.”

“No,” Inspector Park said, squinting. “It smells like murder.”

The elderly Mr. Martin Smithwick was seated at his breakfast table, staring morbidly at a copy of Cheeses of the World Monthly. “It's funny you should mention that, because my wife was murdered three days ago today.” 

Hammond’s eyes bulged in shock and he spat out his coffee, which was odd, because he wasn't drinking coffee. “Why didn't you call us sooner?”

“The place was a mess. I didn't find her body until yesterday afternoon. I tried to call the police as soon as I could, but it took me all night before I realized I was dialing a fish.” 

“Ah.”

“It is a bit of a mess in here,” Park noted, glancing around the room. Smtihwick was obviously a packrat. Stacks of magazines, dishes, blankets and bed sheets, towered over the kitchen table, dwarfing their humble owner in the process. Also, it was kind of dusty.

“The body’s over here gentlemen.” Smithwick stood, pushing aside a chair filled with towels to make a path. A bald eagle, which had made its nest in the towels, shrieked in despair and flew into a wall. Park and Hammond followed Smithwick around plastic model of the Taj Mahal cradled on top of some cardboard boxes, and saw the body. The late Mrs. Smithwick’s head had been sawed brutally off and was missing; a sticky trail of blood dripped into the adjoining room. 

“You don't,” Hammond ventured, “You don't suppose it was a suicide sir?” 

Park glanced down at the body, glanced up at Hammond, back to the body. He scratched his head and cleared his throat. “No,” he said softly, “That would be stupid.”

“Well I thought,” exclaimed Smithwick suddenly, “That some of these boxes might have fallen on her head, cut it clean off. A pure accident.”

Park closed one eye, stuck out his tongue, and blew a raspberry. “Yes,” he said finally. “That seems a most sensible solution.”

Suddenly, a sharply dressed, hawk nosed man entered the room. “Will you be taking any breakfast this morning sir?” All eyes turned to him.

“Who's that?” Constable Hammond asked. 

“That's my butler, Rawlings,” answered Smithwick. 

“No gentlemen,” Inspector Park exclaimed, pointing a guilty finger at the servant. “That's the murderer!” 

How did Inspector Park know that Rawlings killed Mrs. Smithwick?

Solution: When Rawlings entered he was carrying Mrs. Smithwick’s severed head in a plastic bag and a bloody butcher knife. As soon as Inspector Park pointed at him, he sheepishly looked around before backing slowly out of the room.

Horror...Comedy? Pt. 2

Well...we took down the Halloween decorations today. For me, that's a big step in some direction somewhere, and not an easy one...it's a bit like when we had to unplug grandpa, only less fun. Except it turned out that we'd just unplugged the vending machine, and I'd already popped in a dollar for a Snickers bar....in hindsight, the experience wasn't actually that much fun, so yes, I suppose it WAS a bit like when we unplugged grandpa.

Damn. I should visit the old man.

Wait...where was I?

Ah yes, the genre of "horror comedy."

Specifically, for the moment, the genre of The Pumpkin Karver. I think I left off before spoiling the ending. As you recall, murders were going on at the old Old Farmer Creeply farm, and Child X (Jonathan), despite his long history of being blamed for pumpkin slashings, was not being blamed for these particular ones. Why not? Because he keeps seeing things.

Things kind of like this. 

So you can imagine he's under a lot of stress. The picture kind of tries to set it up like it's ambiguous: either the kid is crazy, or people are being possessed by the demonic ghost of Dick Boyfriend 1, or Jonathan himself is being possessed by the demonic space bat, and you'd have the best of both worlds.

In the end, the situation resolves itself completely. By which I mean, I have no idea how the movie ended. It set up a lot of possible endings, but then seemed to want to have all of them at once (and still leave room for a sequel), so suffice to say that Jonathan is both dead AND possessed by the Dickmonic Ghost. In short, the movie's efforts at psychological depth and horror failed.

But then again, so did most of its attempts at (intentional) humor.

 When all's said and done though, Pumpkin Karver ended up being a thoroughly watchable movie, as long as you're not expecting Psycho or something. Not so much with another film we have to discuss, a film which was definitely NOT Pumpkin Karver or Psycho...

Neither Psycho nor Pumpkin Karver.

The Slaughter (2006) is, simply put, a dreadful movie that lacks any of the charm of Pumpkin Karver, or any of the wit of my retarded nephew. It's also poorly photographed, unevenly paced, the sound is often bad, and the script and acting are rarely good. The plot, if memory serves, starts off with a bunch of naked chicks trying to summon Cthulhu in a Victorian mansion. Okay, that sounds pretty good so far, right? Well, they're all dead in two minutes, so don't get your hopes up. 

Although this happens later in the picture, if you go in for that sorta thing...

A hundred years later (rough estimate), an evil businessman, so evil he never stops smoking an evil, evil cigar, hires six whacky teens (read: stereotypes) to start renovating the same house where the previously mentioned arcane experiment took place. 

If you've seen enough of these movies, you know how this one's going to turn out. Someone (the stoner) is going to unleash the evil, and it will be up to someone else (the nerd girl) to save us all, but not before some people are turned into flesh eating zombies (pretty much everyone else), and some people are killed gruesomely (...yeah, pretty much everyone else). 

From the start, the movie was...okay actually. Besides the naked chicks summoning Cthulhu. Seeing the old house, and just making out figures in the shadows or reflected in the windows for the first half hour or so of the movie did a fair job of building suspense. But of course, this movie wasn't in it for the suspsense. Oh no. It was in it for the horror. The horror COMEDY. And it fell on its fat face. 

For starters, EVERYONE in the movie is a stereotype of some form. 

A stereotypical zmobie.

Now, you might be thinking, if you're doing a movie of this sort and want to keep it "fresh" and "hip," why NOT mock some stereotypes of horror movies? Alright, then explain to me WHERE they got these stereotypes from? The "evil businessman" I suppose I can buy, that was a common enough stereotype twenty, thirty years ago (how's that for fresh?), and the "stoner" has been a mainstay in horror films since Friday the Thirteenth, but what about the "nerd girl?" That's very teen movie of you, The Slaughter. And even if I let that one by, what about the "anarchist boy?" Since when has that every been a stereotype of anything resembling horror? 

Keep in mind, when I say stereotypes, I mean it. Everybody's dialogue could be extended by adding the line, "Remember, I'm just a stereotypical stoner/nerd girl/evil businessman/anarchist/black guy/slut/person who doesn't realize how bad this movie is/person who's wishing they'd never tried acting/raging alcoholic."

Secondly, and most importantly, this supposed "humor" only manifests itself at the end. My theory? Has anyone seen Little Shop of Horrors? The original? Rumor has it, the movie started out as a serious crime story, and then morphed over time into a horror comedy involving a talking plant once Roger Corman and the gang started to realize that there was no way in hell anyone was going to take the movie they were planning to make seriously. 

Definitely not The Slaughter.

  

My theory is that The Slaughter had the same kind of history, the major differences being that the decision to turn pure horror, or even sardonic horror, into a pure horror comedy, happened on the set after half the movie had been shot. Remember how I said that the first half hour of the movie was kind of hopeful, or at least workable? After the suspense stops and the gorefest begins, the movie blunders on for a bit, and then bad jokes start popping up for no real reason at all. 

That's right, the movie BECOMES a comedy halfway through. Why? Because the filmmakers thought, first, this movie has become too stupid to take seriously. It must become a full blown comedy. There's already a sarcastic sense of humor on set, why not go all the way? That's the only way for us to save our artistic integrity! Secondly, if we're just trying to make a comedy, we don't have to try as hard! NO ONE expects real suspense from a comedy...

So, once most of the cast is dead and no one can leave the house, rather than hiding tensely from zombies, our mismatched heroes are attacking them with kitchen appliances and spitting one-liners faster than watermelon seeds. And of course, there's some nonsensical ending in which evil inexplicably survives, in the hope that enough DVDs will be sold to make a sequel. 

Unless...unless of course the movie honestly WAS shooting for being a comedy the whole way through. Which would mean that the filmmakers weren't just bad at writing scripts, directing actors and shooting film, they were also just really, really bad at understanding how you are supposed to make a horror movie. Or a comedy. Or, hell, any kind of cohesive story AT ALL. But I would prefer not to believe that. To believe that there are people out there THAT clueless would honestly be the most frightening thing I could possibly imagine...

Well...ALMOST the most frightening...

Horror...Comedy?

Oh dear. Halloween is drifting closer, so my natural inclination is to drift closer to all that scary media I love so much. With an emphasis on the bad perhaps, but isn't it so much more fun to write about BAD things rather than good? I think so at least...

My initial hope was to plunge right into the world of H.P. Lovecraft, who might be, by default, my favorite author. He certainly might be my favorite American author; for a pulp writer, the man is fully worthy of any number of essays on my part (how Lovecraft's literary weaknesses were his strengths, how he fashioned a truly unique style that can't ever quite be replicated, why his Cthulhu mythos are the perfect way to create a fictional set of myths). But that's for another day. You'll have to tide yourselves over with this limerick I composed earlier this evening:
 

There once was a man named HP

Who was deathly afraid of the sea

Wrote cosmic horror dreams

Ate all kinds of ice creams

And hated each ethnicity.

That was the man in a nutshell.

But then...oh then...I saw The Pumpkin Karver (2006). And my plans changed.

Boo!

You can tell it's going to be a good movie when there's no one's name on the cover...and the monster on the cover isn't even in the film...

There are way too many amazing things in this film to even bother talking about. Amazing, by the way, means shitty. There is the:

• Dick boyfriend who is clearly a 30 year old playing an 18 to 19 year old who "scores a [single] beer" for a Halloween party. 
• The OTHER dick boyfriend dressed as a sulky pirate.  
• The fat kid dressed as the Hulk...because that's exactly what he'd dress as even if he wasn't in a shitty movie. 
• Tons of chicks using Halloween as an excuse to dress and act like sluts (dig the zany "touch me, no, just take pictures" scene!), as well as spout some of the most childish dialogue ever written (dig the Charlie's Angels scene).
• The "I can carve a pumpkin in the amount of time it takes most people to blow their nose" scene.
• And more bad acting than you shake a stick at. 

Suffice to say that the only characters I ended up caring about throughout the entire movie were two highly irritating stoner kids in togas...mainly because they seemed like the only type of people in the whole movie I'd consider hanging out with. Actually, the pair kind of reminded me of me and my friend Johnny when we'd get drunk in alleyways...

Anyway, the basic plot seems to revolve around this kid who's just really, really into carving pumpkins. He lives with his sister, and no parents. One must imagine that he's replaced the lack of parental love with pumpkin carving, because, as I said, he's really, REALLY into it. There is foreshadowing, and there is more-shadowing, and this movie is guilty of it all.

Dick boyfriend number one shows up on Halloween to prank the sister but good, acting out a long "I'm a slasher" kind of prank...you know, just an innocent prank. The kind you carry on with a knife, a girl in a bathrobe, a locked garage, and ten free minutes on your hands. The lil' bro (whom IMDB informs me is named "Jonathan")  comes in and saves her by STABBING THE BOYFRIEND REPEATED IN THE FACE WITH A CARVING KNIFE. Hmm...that might be important.

One year later, sister (Lynne) has absolutely forgotten ole what's-his-face, but Jonathan hasn't. She tries to cheer him up by taking him to a Halloween party on a farm, which happens to be a pumpkin farm, full of people they don't really seem to know. The owner of the farm is some kind of crazy old man, who needs special mention:

Giving a new meaning to "old man smell."

He honestly does need special mention, because all of dialogue is extremely overwritten "beatnik philosopher" meets "insane dairy farmer" hash. The most glowing example I can recall is: "The evil sticks in your mind like jowels full of taffy," or something like that. 

Naturally, when people start showing up being STABBED REPEATEDLY IN THE FACE WITH CARVING KNIVES...in a PUMPKIN PATCH, everyone assumes its the old man instead of the kid who has already proven that he's strangely attracted to both stabbings and pumpkins. Hilarity ensues.

Oh yes, I quite mean that. Hilarity ensues. See, this is what I've meant to be talking about all along; there seems to be a trend in the horror movie industry to create low budget "horror comedies." An odd, paradoxical breed perhaps, but a breed that has been with the film industry since the start. Hell, it's been a part of the horror genre since the genre was actually codified (Poe, arguably THE codifier of American horror, wrote parodies of his own style far more often than most people realize).

So what's so bad about horror comedies? Nothing perhaps. In fact, I can talk about a halfway decent horror comedy I saw not that long ago...but first, I'll have to bring up the movie that started me thinking about this subject to begin with. But this thing's too long already, and attention spans tend to be sadly short. I feel a part two coming on...