Henenlotter Strikes Again

It was a cold, evil night in the dead of winter in 1986 around 9:45 pm. I ventured from my parents home, staggered to my 1983 Plymouth Champ drunker than a monkey, and set out for the Network Video, the first and only rental joint in town at that time. I was looking for a copy of The Evil Dead on VHS, but unfortunately, although the empty box was always there on the shelf in the horror section, the actual tape was never in stock. I have a feeling that the goddamned thing had been checked out under a false name by some miscreant who had no intention of ever bringing it back. The beta version sat there taunting me, a filthy arm reaching out from the grave on the smaller of the two boxes dragging a lovely brunette under the ground by her throat with the immortal words of one Stephen King ("...The most ferociously original horror film of the year...") floating in the dark blue sky above her head. Then, I see it. Fangoria had just run an article complete with the gory photos accompanied by jokey captions that would make the Cryptkeeper wince. A basket on the cover opened just enough to see two eyes and part of a deformed hand reaching towards me. Basket Case. And it was on VHS. I scooped it up, shelled out the $1.50, then stopped at the corner store with my newly minted fake i.d. for a pack of Marlboros, a twelve pack of beer, and some Cool Ranch Doritos. I arrived home, hit my basement bedroom, popped the tape in, cracked a beer, and settled in. Nothing would ever seem the same.

Since then, I've tried desperately to pitch Henenlotter to whoever would listen. No one listens. But I'm gonna try again now that I've just checked out his first movie in 18 years, a foul little foray into sexual deviance, Bad Biology. First a lil' background...

Henenlotter directed 3 brilliant films prior to Bad Biology. Basket Case (1982), his first, is the story of Duane and Belial, Siamese twins who, after their dad decides to split them up, develop a telepathic bond. Duane is a comparitively normal guy, and Belial is what you might call slightly deformed. And homicidal. They decide to head to the big city, Belial in tow in the titular basket, to seek revenge on the surgical staff who cut them apart and tried to dispose of Belial. Gory murders, romantic entanglements and general mayhem ensues. If you have somehow let this film slip by you, stop reading this right now, and go out and find it. It remains Henenlotter's greatest work. The director lensed two sequels to Basket Case, both of which are definitely worth a look, but the original is king.

After a six year wait, Henenlotter dropped Brain Damage (1988) upon an unsuspecting public. This is the tale of a boy and his brain parasite which happens to be about the size of a possum. It features brilliant voice casting for the Aylmer (or "Elmer" as Brian calls him) in the form of late night creature feature host Zacherle, who absolutely tears it up in a role that seems to have been created for him. Elmer supplies a hallucinogenic, highly addictive drug to Brian in return for victims whose brains he greedily devours. The classic scenes are plentiful here, but I have two faves. The first is when the previous keeper of the Aylmer returns to reclaim him and gives Brian the history of the parasite. The second is a showdown in a seedy hotel room as the Aylmer and Brian compete to see if Brian can go without the drug for longer than the Aylmer can go without grey matter. Rick Hearst does a nice job here as Brian, but went on to waste his talent in soap operas, where he continues to wallow as of this day.

After Basket Case 2 (1990), the director filmed his third masterpiece, a horror-comedy (although more comedy than horror) called Frankenhooker (1990.) This is the story of a med school dropout who proves that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Young Jeffrey Franken invents a self-propelled lawnmower that mutilates his beloved girlfriend. He decides to reassemble her with parts from hookers he murders for that purpose. As you can imagine, things go awry. Jim Lorinz is perfectly cast as Franken and its hard to believe that his career did not take off with this performance. He's still working, but not getting the type of roles that I was sure he would be getting after this. Henenlotter followed this up with another sequel to his original opus in the form of Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1992.)

Mr. Henenlotter then spent his time doing heroic work saving older exploitation films for Something Weird Video including one of my favorite films, The Curious Dr. Humpp, an Argentinian sci-fi sex flick that defies all description. Just see it.

So, here we are, 18 years after Basket Case 3, and Henenlotter has decided to once again assault us with an original creation. And that monstrosity is Bad Biology.

Early in Bad Biology, we get a look at a man piercing his member with a hypodermic needle. Jennifer picks up a guy at a bar and kills him during rough sex by slamming his head repeatedly into the floor during an orgasm. She is a sexual mutant of a sort, and the fetus fully gestates within her in two hours. She delivers the baby in the bathtub and leaves it there. Through her narration, she tells us that because the baby has only gestated for a short time, it is not a "real" baby and can be ignored. And this is all in the first few minutes of the film.

Jennifer is a photographer and physically addicted to sex. And completely homocidal. She beats another lover to death with a lamp. And then tosses the resulting infant into the garbage as she leaves his pad.

Batz has a reattached member that he has repeatedly injected with animal steroids that has developed a conscious of its own. His genitalia finds a way to detach itself and wreak havoc throughout his apartment building upon a number of attractive residents.

These two sexual freaks find their way to each other. And until you witness it, you won't believe how this one works itself out.

Don't miss it. Outside of John Waters, no one has ever made films that register on such a visceral level as Frank Henenlotter. This is the way movies should be made. 5 out of 5 stars.

Pandorum: He's Got the....Spaaaace Madnessss!

I'll start this with a minor quibble I've developed with sci-fi films. At the beginning of Pandorum, we get the past few hundred years of human history all wrapped up in a few seconds of text superimposed over the vast expanses of outer space. I used to think this was kind of a cool way to get us up to speed without wasting any precious screen time actually developing the plot. Who needs that? But the more and more I see of this technique (usually in science fiction films,) the more I'm thinking it's just plain laziness. It seems to me that with a few extra lines of dialogue (especially if those lines are shouted over a communicator that doesn't seem to work all that well, but I'll be getting to that later) all the material covered in that text prologue could have been conveyed quite nicely. And with the way Pandorum is set up, with two space travelers awakening to find that they don't remember who they are and what the hell it is they are supposed to be doing aboard this spaceship, wouldn't it have been more effective if we didn't know all the stuff we are told in a crawl at the beginning of the film? (A crawl? Is that what the Hollywood term for that? Seems I've heard that somewhere. I suppose I could look that up, but I just don't feel like it. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, laziness.) But, some of the greats are guilty of this as well (The Star Wars films) and although this film may not reach those heights, it's still pretty dang good, so I choose to forgive here.

So what we learn in that crawl(?) at the beginning is that the Earth is pretty much all used up. And the Elysium has been sent out to find a planet that can sustain human life so that we can ship a whole bunch of people out there and get busy destroying a new planet. Not a terribly innovative concept, but that's not really what's important here. That's just an excuse to get people on board a spaceship out in the middle of nowhere with some pasty, mean as heck, faster than greezed lightning space orcs who like to chase people around, and then, upon catching them, disembowel and eat them. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A guy named Bower wakes from hypersleep and finds that he can't remember a heck of a lot. Like what his name is and what he's supposed to be doing. Then Dennis Quaid wakes up and the two of them discover that the doors aren't working so they sit around being confused together until they decide that Bower needs to get up into the duct system and find his way to some reactor that powers the ship and reset it manually. Although he can't remember his name, he does know how to do that, which is weird. But, that's a minor quibble. So Bower, after some minor difficulty, squirms his way through the ducts and drops to the floor on the other side of the door. He soon befriends an oriental guy who's really good with a spear type weapon thing, but can speak no English, and a really hot chick who always seems to be sweaty. Hyper hydrosis is a good thing when you look like this, trust me. Bower convinces the two of them of what they need to do to save the ship and that they don't have all kinds a time to do it. Adventures ensue including many close encounters with the space orcs and a cannibalistic guy who's holed up in an orc-proof room and gets most of the best lines in his limited screen time ("I wouldn't have survived this long if I had a heart.") Poor Dennis Quaid doesn't get to do much in the first half of this film except walk around in his hidey-hole and say stuff like, "Hey Bower, are you there?" and "Bower, do you copy?" Which leads me to my next minor quibble. Here in 2010, you can basically talk to anyone on the planet, whether they're at the Pyramids in Egypt, the Mississippi bayou or the mountains in Montana with a cell phone they give you for free when you sign up for the service. So you're telling me that hundreds of years in the future we have somehow lost this ability? These are the worst communicators ever in the history of film. I seem to remember Kirk and Spock talking to one another from different dimensions back in the 60's, for God's sake. Anyway, after much trouble with the communicators, Dennis Quaid finally gets something to do. Which is basically go bat-s#@t. He discovers a slimy, nekkid guy in the ducts, and and away we go.

Pandorum, by he way, is apparently what Ren and Stimpy called "Space Madness" in the classic episode in which Commander Hoek and Cadet Stimpy are in space for an extended voyage and Ren goes insane. Pandorum however takes an hour and 48 minutes to tell the story, where R & S wrap up their tale in about 12 minutes.

I don't wanna give away too much here, because the fun in this film is in the discovery of what's actually going on, and in all the jump shocks which are cheap and easy, but damned good fun. The space orcs are fast and meaner than rattle snakes, and all actors acquit themselves nicely here. Ben Foster has been in some very cool films (3:10 to Yuma, 30 Days of Night, X-Men: The Last Stand and The Punisher) and is convincing here as Bower, the guy who gets to run all over the ship with a hot, sweaty babe (Antje Traue, who is very cool and has a great German accent as well) and shoot mutants while Dennis Quaid is stuck in his room. Quaid is his usual dependable self, and his character gets some much needed perking up in the last half hour or so. Supporting cast is fairly minimal, but a couple perfs stand out. Eddie Rouse as Leland, the aforementioned crazier than a s-house rat cannibal guy, gets all the best lines and makes the most of his minimal screen time. The slimy, creepy guy that Quaid pulls out of the ductwork is also quite good and it turns out he cleans up rather well too. Director Christian Alvart gets the most out of his people here and the film looks fantastic. Looking forward to his next project.

A couple of scenes stood out for me. The slow creep and crawl through a sea of space orcs was pretty suspenseful. And the scene in which our three heroes kill their first space orc is memorable for its extreme violence. Pretty good stuff. Again, I don't want to give away too much here so I think I'll just shut the hell up and tell you to go ahead and send this flick straight to the top of the Netflix list. Oh, and dig out that old VHS tape with the old Ren and Stimpy shows on it.

4 outta 5.

See "Saw VI" or Something Terrible Might Happen to You

Every time I decide to take in the next Saw flick, I plan on going back and at least watching the previous installment for a quick refresher. Then I quickly decide against it because the realization dawns on me that nothing at all ever goes on in a Saw flick that makes even the slightest bit of sense. The only things that matter are the twisted, utterly ingenious and gag inducing torture devices that some seriously warped Edison of Evil must be sitting up all night doing blow and drinking whiskey to come up with. 15 minutes after the credits rolled, if I hadn't taken a few notes, all I would have remembered about Saw VI is the shotgun merry-go-round with a bunch of insurance company slugs strapped to it, the hydrochloric acid sprinkler heads, the hold-your-breath-vice-grip-rig, and the contest to see who can cut the most body weight off themselves before one of those crazy headgear contraptions screws two big old bolts into your head and crushes your skull. Oh yeah, and the can-you-get-through-the-maze-with-hot-steam-shooting-in-your-grill-before-another-contraption- strapped-to-your-chest-shoots-a-spike-up-through-your-chin-and-on-outta-the-top-of-yer-melon. Did I mention that one?

All that being said, here is the plot as best as I could figure out without actually going back to watch the movie again or referring back to previous movies: John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, is one clever serial killer. And must have some kinda serious engineering degree. He gets himself all worked up after dying of cancer and seems to be (from beyond the grave or through a series of recorded messages) controlling his widow, and some cop named Hoffman, and an ex-junkie named Amanda, who may or may not be alive (I got confused there and went to the fridge for another beer when they may have explained that.) The motivations for any of these characters to buy into Jigsaw's plans are shaky at best, but who cares? It's all about the gore. So, through a series of insanely inventive and well thought out death traps and torture devices, our hero wreaks havoc on a set of deserving (if easy) targets, such as a health insurance company executive and his claim investigators, money lenders, an attorney and a smoker (who dies because he can't hold his breath as long as a health insurance exec!) There are envelopes with numbers on them, a couple of cops investigating the death of a colleague who seems to have been framed with the jigsaw murders by the cop who is actually committing them, but none of this really matters and thinking about it really has started to make my head hurt. What matters in a Saw film is the acting.

Kidding, of course, but there are a couple of perfs I would like to quickly mention. Costas Mandylor, who plays Hoffman, the cop who actually has taken over for Jigsaw, actually proves at the end of Saw VI that he can do a little more than just look angry and contort his lips. Upon regaining consciousness and finding he's strapped to a chair with one of those wonderful death lids strapped to his pouty mug, he looks pretty scared and then when the thing tears a big chuck outta his face, he screams in pain pretty believably. And Tobin Bell, who plays Jigsaw, should get some props for being effective enough to still be in these things even though the character died like 4 movies ago. No offense to Tobin (although the puppet on the tricycle is much scarier, and emotes a little more believably as well,) but if this character fell off the face of the planet and never appeared in another Saw film, I'm not sure I would even notice. It wouldn't be like an Elm Street without Freddie Krueger or a Camp Crystal Lake without Jason Voorhees. Now if the Saw guys retired those strapped on tuques of torment, I would seek out my torture porn in some other dark alley. No other perfs really stand out here, but acting really isn't why we watch Saw films either, is it?

What is the reason we return to the Saw franchise year after year after year? Cringe inducing scenes of bodily mutilation, spewing gore and inhuman torture and painful death, that's what! Three scenes stand out for me in this one. 1.) Jigsaw gets all Shylock on our asses. In the opening scene, a fat white guy and black lady who has, judging by her mid-section, apparently spent a great deal of time in the gym, are locked in two cages separated by two chutes that lead to a scale. We are given enough information to lead us to believe that they are money lenders of some sort (sub-prime mortgages?), but the reason they have been chosen for this gruesome episode is a tad vague. They have apparently lent people money who couldn't pay it back. Jigsaw is gonna be awful frigging busy if he sets out to kill everybody who was guilty of that over the past 10 years. Both of the offenders are equipped with Stetsons of Suffering which I mentioned earlier will cause one of them some minor discomfort if the other is able to slice off more of him/herself and dump it down the chute. Of course, our maniac hero has left the two unfortunates all the tools they will need to do the job. Carnage ensues. 2.) A flashback scene in which the aforementioned framed cop shows us what might have happened to Han, Luke, Leia and Chewie in the Death Star if R2 hadn't been able to shut down that trash compactor. The compound arm fracture and the aftermath are really something to behold. 3.) And the scene towards the end of the film in which a man is impaled by multiple spikes attached to hoses that pump him full of acid. The special effects money pays off here as he slowly melts from the rib cage down into a lake of goo. Tasty.

My favorite scene, however, isn't particularly gruesome, but extremely clever and effective. It involves a playground spin ride, a shotgun, and spike being driven through a guy's hand. Gotta see to believe. Good stuff.

As long as the makers of this series can continue formulating these bizarre and ingenious devices of torture and mayhem, keep the films right around an hour and a half, release them at Halloween time and bring them in on the cheap, this franchise could last longer than the Friday the 13th's. By my count, there are 12 Friday the 13's (including the Freddy v Jason thing and the "remake.") And the temptation must be overwhelming to make a Friday the 13th Part 13, so Saw has a ways to go yet.

The only problem may be finding a fresh bunch of "villains" for Jigsaw to grease. Maybe the fast food drive-thru kid who forgets to put a straw in the bag? Or the office co-worker who takes the last cup of coffee and doesn't start a new pot? (You kill the joe, you make some mo!) Or the horror movie fan who loses interest in a longstanding franchise and refuses to plunk down his hard earned cash at the local multiplex for the newest installment during a recession.

I guess the last 4 or 5 of these movies have started running together for me. I enjoy these movies, I really do. I just don't really remember much about them. Except the death pit full of syringes. And the hand crusher stopper thing for the swinging pendulum. Oh, and the circular saw hand choppers filling up the blood beakers. And there was the head-crushing blocks of ice/noose/electrocution gadget.....

4 outta 5.

Jager Bombs and Quarantine

Apparently Quarantine, a film starring Jennifer Carpenter (better known as Dexter's sister,) and a whole bunch of other people you've never heard of, is a remake of a Spanish film called [REC], which I'm sure is infinitely better. Not to say that Quarantine is without its positives, it's actually scarier than hell, in a "HOLY SHIT! THAT THING CAME FLYING OUTTA F@#KING NOWHERE, DIDN'T IT!!!" kinda way. It rips off a plethora of better horror films from the past 40 years, including Night of the Living Dead, Rabid, The Silence of the Lambs, and most obviously, The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, with which it shares a wing in the motion sickness hall of fame. The entire thing is seen from the POV of a news cameraman who has tagged along with the local fire department for what they figured would be a routine evening. There is a longish, annoying, "getting to know you" sequence that opens the film which had me on the precipice of shutting the whole damn thing off so I wouldn't harm any of my video equipment.

Upon arriving at their first call of the evening, they slowly realize that they shouldn't be getting too close to the tenants of the building who seem to be foaming at the mouth and whose skin has turned all greenish-gray because those are the ones who will soon be pulling people's throats out. This realization comes much more slowly than you might think.

I haven't seen the film from which all the ideas for this one were stolen, but I would hope that we could be spared some of the "realism" as far as the camera work is concerned. Yeah, probably if some idiot local news camera guy were thrust into a situation where he was trapped in a building with a bunch of bloodthirsty apartment dwellers who have been infected with a mutant form of rabies by the lovable neighbor girl's dog, he could certainly have shot some footage that might come out looking very similar to what we find in Quarantine. Does that mean as producers of a Hollywood film, that we have to submit our audiences to that kind of torture in the theater? At home watching horror films, I sometimes find myself yelling things like "ARE YOU STUPID? DO NOT SOLVE THAT DEMONIC PUZZLE BOX!" Or, "JESUS, NO! DO NOT DANGLE YOUR FEET OVER THE SIDE OF THE BOAT!" I could go on and on. However, during this film, I was yelling things like, "COULD YOU POSSIBLY HOLD THAT F#%KING CAMERA STILL FOR FIVE AND HALF GODDAMNED SECONDS!!!" At one point, the camera guy drops his goddamned camera, and until he picks it up maybe 10 seconds later, it was like stumbling upon an oasis in the desert. The last half an hour or so of this movie is truly a test of your intestinal fortitude. I dare you to turn off the lights, fire this thing up on the 55", and do three or four shots of Jagermeister. Your nostrils will taste the acid. Trust me.

But if you can put aside the highly annoying perf by Carpenter, who deserved better, (her work on Dexter is top-knotch,) and some way-too realistic camera work, Quarantine is definitely worth a look for a bunch of gut wrenching scares. Fun and fast paced once it finally gets moving, (which takes far too long) I give Quarantine 3 out of 5 stars.

Mr. Crowley

We all know heavy metal music demands that its hypnotized, denim clad, tattooed, brain dead followers sacrifice homeless people to Satan. And skin cats. That goes without saying. What you may not know is that it also makes some pretty good reading suggestions. Inspired by various metal songs, I've read Dante's "Divine Comedy," Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. I've read many books after hearing a song and being curious enough about a subject such as Jack the Ripper, Countess Bathory, Lizzy Borden and Gilles De Rais to hit the library or, more recently, to scour the web in search of information on these fascinating historical figures. However, for whatever reason, I never read much about Aleister Crowley. And I consider myself a pretty big Ozzy fan. So when I came across a huge ad for a film called Crowley in a recent issue of "Revolver" magazine, I figured here was my chance to brush up on a guy to which the Great Wizard of Ozz had deemed worthy of dedicating an entire tune. And a damned good one at that. And upon, further study of the credits, I discovered that the screenplay had been written by none other than Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson (with some help), for cripes sake! How could it get any better than this?

Well, it gets better than this, thankfully.

First the good stuff. Simon Callow, who plays a stuttering college professor who may or may not be possessed by the spirit of occultist Aleister Crowley, a bisexual drug addict with some disturbing sexual fetishes, is all kinds of fun to watch. He chews the scenery real hard, first as the bumbling college professor, then as the self-assured deviant who rampages through (fairly) modern day England. This perf alone is worth the rental. The rest of the leads pass most cringe tests, even if they offer uninspired performances in many cases. The scene that opens the film with two young men visiting the elderly Crowley at his home on the day of his death actually had me wishing they had flashed back to the actual events of Crowley's life, rather than the fictional nonsense that follows.

As best I could make out, a computer program is designed for creating a virtual reality of sorts. But to engage in the reality, the user must gear up in what looks like a 1930's deep diving suit. Somehow, Callow's character, while in this suit, is possessed of Crowley's spirit, whether in actuality or by electronic means, and Crowley is again unleashed on an unsuspecting public. As far as I could tell, the real life Crowley was never implicated in any murders, but the new Crowley soon is on a homocidal rampage, and dispatches a hooker and the leading lady's room mate. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but the murders actually seem quite unneccesary. Sexual humiliation and degradation would have been enough here, and Crowley's foul perversities would seem even more devastating had his victims been allowed to live with them.

The over the top lecture scene , in which the possessed professor perverts the Bard, ends with him urinating on some horrified students unlucky enough to be sitting in the front row (another reason to pick a seat in the back row at lectures.) There's also a scene in which we get a nice close-up of the dean's desk which has been adorned with Crowley's defecation. In a later scene, we get to see a seance participant wetting herself in a manner that would make a horse jealous. It's all been done before, and yet still somewhat shocking, but to what use? Salo, an Italian shock film from the mid-seventies, made vigorous use of the human excretory system to mixed results, and partially camouflaged the fact that there was little else going on in the film. The material here seems to be quite disturbing and voluminous, and if used correctly, could yield a very rewarding film. It's too bad scenes like this got past the cutting room.

Overall, this film is worth checking out. Not to learn anything about the titular character, but for the tour-de-force performance by Callow, who should be getting some beefier roles. 2 out of 5 stars. Here's hoping that some young filmmaker sees this and decides he want to make a truly biographical film about one of the twentieth century's more fascinating characters.

Ugly Kids Die Too

I don't remember where I was when I heard that JonBenet Ramsey had died. It was 1996, and as I recall I was pretty drunk that year. I feel guilty about this now, because I should certainly remember where I was when such an unfathomably important person was taken from us. I deduced that this little girl was so important because her murder was all I heard about for years afterwards. Every newspaper, TV newscast, radio talkshow and internet news site would fall all over the smallest, most minute detail of the investigation. Every news outlet in the world wanted to be the first to report that JonBenet had eaten seven Wheat Chex and half a slice of rye toast with the crust cut off (she was watching her weight for the next big pageant) that fateful morning. And then, out of nowhere, it stopped. The lurid accusations against the brother, the parents, the gardener, the butler (an odds on favorite as I recall) and anyone else who happened to have moseyed through the life of this heavily made up 6-year old, all ran into dead-ends. The murder of the moment would never be solved. The tabloids, the cut-rate news programs and the water-cooler Kojaks all over the country would have to move on to the next big mystery. Which I believe had something to do with how Bill Clinton's underpants ended up in Janet Reno's glove box. But I'm not sure because that was 1998, which found me fairly inebriated as well. The biggest effect the whole sordid JonBenet story had on me was that it turned me off of news in any of its forms for almost a decade. I still have not watched the evening news since that story broke. I just recently started getting a daily newspaper again. Old wounds had started to heal. Then it happened.

JonBenet's mother, Patsy Ramsey died of cancer. When I first ran across her picture on an internet news site, I thought to myself, "Man, that dead broad looks familiar. Who the hell is..." Then it hit me. Good Jesus help me, it's JonBenet's mother! And she's been buried with her umbrella of suspicion! This will invigorate the gossipwhores and set off a whole new flurry of JonBenet inspired pseudo-news. It's all starting again! We'll have to endure stories about the things JonBenet would be doing now had she not been so rudely stolen from us before her prime! Why, she'd be sixteen by now! She would have had her first boyfriend! She would be threatening to throw herself from the roof of the servants' quarters if daddy refused to buy her a Maserati before she even got her driver's license! As a budding model/beauty pageant contestant, she most surely would have bulimia and an addiction to amphetamines by now! She might even be doing her first stint in rehab, for the Lord's sake!

I laid low, and would only turn to the sections of the paper that I was sure would bear me no JonBenews. Like the Sports section, and...the Sports section. And, lo and behold, none came. There were box scores, and NASCAR standings, and stories about Bill Clinton's underpants ending up in Annika Sorenstam's glove box, but I did not run across one single story about JonBenet Ramsey in the Sports section. Which I counted as a miracle. Then I began to scan the other sections of the paper... carefully. Nothing on the front page. Nothing in the classifieds or job finder. Then, the real test. I turned to the most dangerous section of the paper. The section in which you could be subjected to interminable, cruel stories like the piece about the sounds that Ben and Jennifer make at their newborn demonchild to make it sleep, or Brad and Angelina's disgust when the help changes their satanspawn's diapers. That's right. The Life and Arts section. My hands shook as a separated the offending section from the rest of the paper. The front page had stories about how Madonna balances her home life with her onstage blasphemy and how sick Paris Hilton's hamster is. But nothing on the Ramseys. I turned the page. More crap about totally irrelevant, inane people whose talents for performing have completely over-inflated their sense of self-importance to the point that they actually believe people gave a good flying f*#k what they think about the state of world affairs. But nothing on the Ramseys. Liz Smith reporting on the state of Lindsay Lohan's virginity, Lance Bass and his empty closet, and more news on the world's most useless person, Paris Hilton. But, nothing on the Ramseys.

I was being paranoid, I decided. JonBenet is yesterday's news. Maybe the world had come to its collective senses. There were so many things wrong with America's obsession with the JonBenet story, I'm not sure I can get into all of them. Or that I should get into all of them. But I'll hit a couple of points. First of all, the sick bastard that came up with the idea to enter six-year old girls in beauty pageants should be castrated. Beauty pageants are what they are, and if you parade a child around in make-up and clothes that makes them look like they're twenty-four in a contest that awards the most attractive pre-pubescent, you may as well advertise it in "Pedophiles Quarterly." Is this the most loathsome and disgusting socially accepted practice going on in this country today? There are many contenders, but this has got to crack the list's top five.

After weeks turned into months into years of hearing about this story, it occurred to me that ugly, poor kids die all the time. And their families were probably just as devastated as the Ramseys most certainly were. We don't hear much about them, and for the most part, we shouldn't. They probably don't want you to know what their names are, and they certainly don't want drooling, rabid packs of bloodthirsty "journalists" hounding them to their dying day. But their stories are just as important as JonBenet Ramsey's. In some cases, more so. But they were in no way as interesting as the Ramseys. Is it decency that stops us from hounding the couple in our community that loses a child in this manner? Hell, no. Our disinterest in normal folks masquerades as decency. But at least it looks like decency. Something we never found it in ourselves to show the Ramseys by just leaving them the hell alone.

And now, this. Unless you've been hermetically sealed in a tupperware room with silly putty crammed in your ear-holes and a roll of duct-tape wrapped around the rest of your head, you know what I'm talking about. Even if you have been sealed in tupperware, you probably know what I'm talking about. Some mental case in Thailand confessed. John Mark Carr (these high-profile killers love the three name thing, don't they?) claimed that "I was with JonBenet when she died." That's an interesting confession. It's like a shoplifter saying, "The DVD's were in my pants when they were stolen." Now I'm hearing all kinds of crap about how this guy just confessed to stay out of a Thai prison, and that there's no physical evidence, and that his ex-wife is saying that she was with him when the murder was committed and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you're back on the case, Kojak. Let's see if we can't wrap this thing up.

The Florida Alligator Massacre

My wife mentioned to me the other day how she might want to move to Florida. I assume that's because she is seeking to increase her exposure to 15 foot pythons, man-eating lizards, fatal hurricanes, bird-eating spiders and the sort of body odor that can only be coaxed from a human in +90 degree, 100% humidity type of weather. I got to thinking after hearing of the Florida Alligator Massacre that claimed the lives of three people down in the godforsaken jungles of the Sunshine State that living right here in Western New York ain't such a bad thing. We've been branded losers because of our sports franchises and bad weather, but as of last check, we don't have dinosaurs shooting out of Lake Erie or the Niagara River scooping up joggers for lunch. We haven't had anything resembling a real blizzard since that measly 10 feet of snow that fell a few years ago, and my house was still standing after that, unlike a lot of joints after those hurricanes blew through the southern states over the last few seasons. And now, according to the news, FLA is being overrun by enormous pythons that are eating the alligators and exploding, making a godawful mess of those lovely swamps down there. How did we get such an inferiority complex here in the Buffalo/Niagara Falls area? Why are people leaving this area as if the Ebola virus were running rampant and forcing our precious bodily fluids out any available orifice? There are immediate reasons.

Problem # 1: When I was in college a great many years ago, if you asked just about any student, they would tell you that the good jobs were all somewhere else. Of course, they would also tell you that they had drunk 22 beers and done a half a dozen bong hits at the "Save the Rain Forest" rally the night before. Unfortunately, that giant sucking sound you're hearing is not a night on the town for Hugh Grant, but a Ross Perot metaphor coming true. Our jobs are migrating down to the Carolinas and parts south. There are many, many Democrats in power here, and one great big drain on our State resources we like to call the Big Apple. Its the tax black hole so nice they named it twice. And its not that Democrats are always the problem. There are Democrats in power in many of the Southern states where all our jobs are going, but here in New York we have the worst kind of high-tax, politically correct Democrats. Both of our idiot Senators actually voted against making English the official language of the United States. Hillary worked hard to make our Federal Government (which has a hard enough time delivering the mail) responsible for controlling the entire health care system. Charlie Schumer would love to confiscate all our guns, abolish the death penalty and make life easier for all New Yorkers who have broken or are thinking about breaking the law. You may say, "But don't you guys have a Republican Governor up there?" Yeah, we do, but our Republicans up here run just to the left of Democrats in most other states. But, we keep on electing the same cast of baboons, so we get exactly what we deserve: high energy costs (although we have Niagara Falls, the greatest source of natural power and Indian gambling on the face of the planet,) high taxes and a fantastic abundance of economic malaise. So, on the political front, we're basically screwed. And I don't see that getting fixed anytime soon.

Problem #2: It gets kinda cold here. Of course, it gets kinda cold in a lot of places, so I guess I should revise the previous statement. It gets real goldang cold here. People who live down south probably don't know what it feels like to walk out of the house in the morning and have the mucous freeze solid in their noses. This is what we here in Western New York cleverly refer to as "snot-freezin' cold." You then proceed to your car and commence scraping. This can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, depending on how much glass your vehicle has, the temperature, and how much time you have to get to work. If I'm running late, I do a quick scrape job on the area immediately in front of where I will be looking through the windshield, and then kind of rub that spot as I'm driving to keep it clear. As far as looking through the side windows to take turns, I normally just pray and go. This may make it sound like harsh life here, but this normally goes on for only about a month, and then the slush season starts. Which goes on just into baseball season. It's still better than hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

Problem #3: Sports failures. Yeah, we lost 4 straight Super Bowls. How many teams even made it to 4 straight Super Bowls? None, that's how many. Everyone in this area, to a man, will tell you how difficult it is to make it to 4 straight Super Bowls. And every single one of them would most certainly give up the three blow-outs for that one 40+ yard field goal in XXV. And we went to 2 Stanley Cup finals and lost both of them (although one of those losses came via a goal that shouldn't have counted in 1999.) Oh, and we lost our basketball team back in 1978. And we got passed over for a Major League Baseball team during the expansion back in the 80's. There's other disappointments, but I don't have time to go into more detail.

Problem # 4: Low self-esteem. (See problems 1-3)

The bottom line is that this is still a great place to live. Niagara Falls is an awesome spectacle, and the Falls would be a bigger asset if we didn't have to share it with Canada. Those dang Canadians went ahead and made a tourist attraction of their side of the Falls instead of building countless landfills, ghetto style housing and allowing it to become a Mafia stronghold. What else would any responsible community do with one of the seven wonders of the world? Well, the Canadians built up scores of wax museums, souvenir stands, and one big mother casino worthy of Vegas. Sneaky, sneaky Canadians. So, after spending approximately 4 minutes on the U.S. side, Joe Tourist normally says something to himself that goes kinda like this: "Wow, all these landfills are really nice this time of year. I think I'll pack up the wife and kids and go to Canada now."

Buffalo is full of beautiful old buildings, many designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a fantastic downtown AAA ballpark, and the HSBC Center, a state of the art arena which is home to the Buffalo Sabres. The Sabres and Bisons are a tad lonely down there, and surrounded by a great number of empty, crappy looking buildings. The beginnings of something great are here. Unfortunately, they've been here for quite a while. And beginning is as far as we've gotten.

So, in conclusion, I would like to make a suggestion. We, as citizens/voters, should immediately un-elect literally every person who is holding office right now. If a retarded pedophile is running against an incumbent, vote for him. Convince your friends and family to vote for him too. He can't do any worse than the guys that are in there now. If you feel you can do a better job than the retarded pedophiles who are already in office and you have the constitution to be a public official, run. I'll vote for you. And I'll talk all my friends and relatives into voting for you too. As far as the weather is concerned, there's not much we can do unless you listen to these environmentalists and their global warming theory. If you believe that whole thing, you may want to drive your car more and do some serious polluting. We also need to win a Stanley Cup, and we're pretty dang close right now, but knowing us, we'll probably screw it up. We're playing the Carolina Hurricanes in the Conference Finals, so Carolina (that great Hockey town)won't be happy with stealing all our jobs, they want the Cup too.

You know what to do. Now get to work.