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The Juice is Loose at the Horror House! |
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“Look at this,” the wife says to me over breakfast. “That has-been convention you’re going to – it’s in the paper.” And she hands me the Metro section of the L.A. Times, which indeed has an article about Necrocomicon, a relatively new horror movie convention that’s taking place this weekend. But the article is not the usual “check out the freakshow” piece that’s usually run about these sort of things – nope, it’s all about one of the celebrity guests. Seems that in addition to cast members from The Devil’s Rejects and Cabin Fever and the Russ Meyer girls and Dolemite, this year’s Necrocomicon will offer attendees the chance to meet and get autographs from O.J. Simpson. Yes, you did read that correctly. |
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| Why O.J. is appearing at a horror convention doesn’t seem to have been explained anywhere – when I checked the convention website a few weeks ago and found his grinning mug beaming back at my from the guest page, there was no reason given for his addition, just a picture and a grainy WAV file of O.J. saying how much he was looking forward to seeing me at the show. I’ve got to admit that for about five or maybe ten seconds, I was really amused by this – I mean, getting the most famous murder defendant of the last ten years to appear at a convention celebrating wholesale slaughter just drips with the richest, blackest irony (John Waters would probably bust a side over the news). |
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But
you know, the more I turned the idea around in my head, the queasier I
felt about it. Listen, I got into the whole serial killer/circus
freak/modern primitive thing when I was in college, and even now, at 35, I
still appreciate entertainment that tilts towards the outré (after all,
I’m the guy who gave fairly glowing reviews to
OgrishMag and
Dominatrix
Without Mercy and
Long Jeanne Silver, about a woman who fucks people with
her stump, on this very site). But you know, you get older, you start to
see things for how they are – that you’re no longer the Indestructible
Kid, that if you’re not wise or careful (or both), you can end up working
at McDonald’s at 65 because you didn’t save your money, or hooked up to a
dialysis machine because you didn’t stop eating like an eight-year-old.
All of those particular futures are laid out before you when you hit your
mid-30s, only the paths that lead to them – and the paths that lead to
healthier, less devastating outcomes – aren’t particularly well-lit, so
you need to have your wits about you. And this sort of blind man’s bluff
really puts the kibosh on that life-is-cheap crap that you believed when
you were 21 – life is actually very precious, along with happiness, a good
cable line-up, the ability to take a vacation every once in a while, and a
good crap after breakfast. So when you’re faced with something like
running into O.J. Simpson, whose innocence in the murder of his children’s
mother is about as tenuous as a getaway rope made from dental floss, and
whose penchant for beating the living hell out of that woman before her
death is well documented, you really don’t see the irony anymore. You just
see the sickness and the death, and if I can avoid that on a daily basis,
I’m a happy boy. But you know, I still went to the convention. Necrocomicon is happening in Northridge, a particularly bleak stretch of North Hollywood best known for crumbling like a wet soup cracked during a massive earthquake in ’94. Unlike most of the cons out here which take place in hotel ballrooms, it’s situated in what appears to be an abandoned movie theater, which gives the event the right sort of desiccated, Hollywood-horror vibe. My primary reason for going was to hook up with Geoffrey Lewis, a long-time character actor from The Devil’s Rejects and countless Clint Eastwood movies (he’s Clint’s pal in the Every Which Way But Loose movies, and the chief heel in High Plains Drifter) who I’m hoping to interview for Shock Cinema. And I wanted to meet Dick Miller, who starred in Roger Corman’s Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors and Hollywood Boulevard and The Howling and about six thousand other movies, always in the same role: Brooklyn wise guy. Nobody plays that part better than Dick Miller, and his performances in Corman’s movies are deeply intertwined with pleasant memories from my childhood. So it was a distinct pleasure to shake his hand after all these years and hear that Little Tough Guy voice (worn by age as it was) in person. ________________________________________________________________________________ |
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And yeah, there were a lot of other interesting and odd guests, as is often the case at these things: Linnea Quigley, looking leathery in a sorta bondage corset thing, with Don Calfa, her Return of the Living Dead co-star, standing nearby and barking into a cellphone, “I’m 65 years old and I feel great!” (right on, Don). They were across the aisle from Marilyn Chambers, who had little pieces of white tape over her bare nipples in her promo photos, and behind her were the Meyer Girls – Tura Satana from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Kitten Natividad and Raven De La Croix from Up!, and Cynthia Myers from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, all gussied up and boosted and lifted to get those famous racks into the faces of the aging fellas that crowded around their table (Erica Gavin was supposed to be there too, but I didn’t see her). There was the guy on the roof of the pet store in the new Dawn of the Dead, and Joe Pilato, the evil army captain who gets ripped in half at the end of Day of the Dead, and gentle giant Irwin Keyes (who told me |
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great stories about The Exterminator
1 and 2 and The Warriors), and the weirdo kid from Cabin Fever
that does the kung fu routine, and lots and lots of actors even more
on the fringe than them. And there were a couple
of bands, like Sloppy Seconds and the
KISS-fits (I think they do
Misfits
covers dressed as KISS) and the
Kids of Widney High, who are a
long-running group of mentally handicapped children who write and perform
their own original rock tunes. Oh, Sleaze wanted me to give a tally of
which aging scream queens was the most well-preserved, which is a tough
call – Priscilla Barnes from
Devil’s Rejects certainly looked like she was
lobbying for votes with her naughty nurse outfit, and Hellraiser’s
Ashley
Laurence had a Courtney Cox vibe, so I guess the winner in that horse race
is Danielle Harris from the
Halloween sequels (although to be fair to the
others, she did get her start at age 10 or something, and is now probably
cresting 30 at best). My personal nominee,
Tiffany Shepis, was nowhere to
be found, unfortunately (oh, and as for the Meyer Girls, let’s just say
that they all look like they had fun and exciting lives for a very long
time, and now time and gravity have caught up with them. But you know,
those dames all got class). |
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But as fun/weird/surreal as it is to meet these folks face to face, you couldn’t help notice how bewildered everyone looked. And that’s the reality of horror movie conventions, or science fiction conventions, or maybe even sports conventions or boat shows too – this is nowhere you plan to be as a working entertainer. You’re basically selling your image and your signature to people who liked you in movies that more than likely, you have little or no recognition of making (or if you do, they aren’t your finest work), and even less pleasant to consider, they liked a version of you that is younger, sexier, and was employed a lot more than you are now. My good pal Don Edmonds (the director of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS) just started hitting the convention scene last year, and he echoed this sentiment. “It’s amazing that they remember all this stuff you’ve done,” he told me. “But I don’t want to do too many of those – they’re depressing.” I guess that’s the underlying emotion at conventions like Necrocomicon: the push and pull of being wanted for something that you only understand a little bit, the reality of selling pictures of yourself for money. It’s got to be more than a little like being underwater. |
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– Paul Gaita Home |
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