CNN reported the birth of http://www.mydeathspace.com/, a website that archives the pages of deceased MySpace members. I’ve visited the site and found it as addictive as we all know celebrity magazines can be. But is the intoxication of “peering into” these “stranger’s lives” any different from unearthing a mummy’s tomb? I endorse cemetery archeology and, for the sake of history and knowledge, I have no problem with digging up our ancestors, even our more recent relatives.
I love cemeteries for their architecture and serenity, but a corpse is a piece of rotting flesh and the sacred tomb is a tool for the living to mourn their immediate dead. I’d love to dig up one of my Civil War ancestors and see what he wore to his grave. Maybe dig out the bullet that killed him (or pick it up from the bottom of the casket) and have it enshrined at the Library of Congress. I wouldn’t mind if someone dug me up 150 years from now. Well, a girl can dream.
On July 31, Spike TV will premiere a new reality television game show where “real people” will “solve real crimes.” Ratiocination as a game show? Would Edgar have approved? I’d like to know how many of the “guests” will have read Poe’s theories on ratiocination?
“All CSI viewers think they can solve homicide cases, now they have their chance! Texas’s most decorated homicide detective Tommy Le Noir hosts this groundbreaking reality crime scene investigation show. Each episode of MURDER will feature one real crime, complete with a gruesome recreated crime scene and real crime footage, ripped from the closed case files of Homicide Departments across the United States. Two teams of real people, comprised of three members each, will compete to be the first to solve the case, correctly, in 48 hours.” - Spike TV website
The first two episodes:
Hometown Homicide, July 31
Real people try to solve a homicide case involving a husband and wife, shot to death in their own bedroom.Shot and Stashed, August 7
Real people try to solve a homicide case involving a 200 pound woman who is found with gun wounds inside a car in an abandoned, burned-out garage.
Steven Rachman’s Strand Magazine article: “Edgar Allan Poe and the Origins of Mystery Fiction”
Years ago, I took Dov Simens low budget filmmaking class and he told us something I frequently remember. (Due to the increasing number of similar films in this genre, I am given cause to remember all too frequently.) In his introductory remarks to the class, he advised us on the best way to make a lot of money with a low budget movie. Dov said, “Take a bunch of kids out to nowhere and chop them up.” Now this statement wasn’t particularly prophetic, but I thought it was funny at the time. Of course cinema history has proven this advice to be profitable. Everyone seems to make money in
This afternoon I stumbled upon REEKER (2005), a “chop them up nowhere” movie directed by Dave “Alien Terminator” Payne and starring his wife Tina Illman as the Ripley-like car owner and informal leader. There’s also a blind guy, a horny guy, a horny blonde, and an obnoxious frat boy. They all get stranded at a motel out in the desert where the former occupants appear to have immediately disappeared ala Mary Celeste. Then the killing starts.
Veteran pros Marcia Strassman and Michael Ironside round out the cast and elevate the material on screen and off. However, the inane dialogue between the “kids” on their way to the desert and the over the top attempts at humor all throughout the first act almost made me turn the channel. I think having a blind guy as part of the mix and wanting to see how possibly this character could change the genre intrigued me and kept me watching.
SPOILER ALERT
The blind character did advance the genre if only to give the director an opportunity to film a visual gag. The frat boy is running for his life and shoots a flare into the sky, but back at the motel only the blind guy faces in the correct direction to see it. So, we know the frat guy is screwed.
But my favorite scene has to be when the horny blonde, played by gorgeous Arielle Kebbel and wearing a Ripley-like tiny bra and panties, is killed in an old wooden outhouse and slides into the pit. In the best tradition of the genre convention, she is a bad girl and she pays for it with her life. She sure does scream. We’ll have to make her a Poe Forward Scream Queen.
Here’s a blurry screen shot from recapped.com:
The movie turns conventional after that with the killer/monster chopping everyone up, but the ending tries hard to twist the genre a bit. While the cryptic conclusion may seem pretentious to some, I found it to be at least a twist on a twist.
Here’s a clear shot of her that you can twist on:
Robert John Bardo, 37, the maniac convicted of stalking and killing actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989, got a little more pay back from karma. Another inmate at Mule Creek State Prison, where Bardo is serving a life sentence, stabbed and punctured him 11 times on Friday while he was walking through the prison yard on his way to breakfast. He was treated for his wounds at UC Davis Medical Center and returned to prison. I wonder if Bardo asked his attacker at the moment of the attack why the attacker was doing this to him? That’s what Rebecca Shaeffer said to Bardo when he shot her at point blank range.
“Be happy in jail!”
- Dana Schaeffer, Rebecca’s mother, to Bardo
Poe Forward Rebecca Schaeffer Dead Girl page.
Posted by: aldrich @ 7:32 pm
Beautiful actress Laura Devon has died. Her career spanned the sixties and included roles in television’s “The Twilight Zone,” “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “I Spy,” “The Fugitive,” and “The Invaders.” Her feature work includes “Goodbye Charlie” (1964) with Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds, “Red Line 7000″ (1965) with James Caan, “Chamber of Horrors” (1966) with Patrick O’Neal and Cesare Danova, and “A Covenant with Death” (1967) with George Maharis, Earl Holliman, Sidney Blackmer, and Gene Hackman. Coincidentally, before I found out she had died, I watched “Chamber of Horrors” two weeks ago and found that image of her just as desirable now as I did when I first saw the film as a teenager. Her horror-mystery credits and intoxicating beauty lead us to name her a Poe Forward Dead Girl. RIP
(Btw, Laura’s son with composer Maurice Jarre is Kevin Jarre, the screenwriter of “Glory,” “Tombstone,” “The Devil’s Own,” and “The Mummy.”)
Doctor’s Family Killed in Home Invasion
Posted by: marlowe @ 12:09 am
So, I’m watching Dean Martin and Inger Stevens in FIVE CARD STUD (1968), a classic Hal Wallis western with a young Yaphet Kotto as well as Robert Mitchum playing a minister and Roddy McDowall playing the town jerk. Dean plays the ethical gambler and Inger the high priced hooker who gives shaves as a front. When I hit puberty, Inger Stevens and Barbi Benton were on the same level for me. After watching a summer’s worth of Elvis and Corman Poe reruns, my best friend and I got to see THE GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN (1967), a hysterical, ribald comedy with an all star cast to rival IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963). Directed by Gene Kelly, Robert Morse’s middle-class adulterer teaches his best friend, Walter Matthau, the tricks of the trade for cheating on his wife. The big irony of the film is that Matthau’s wife is played by Inger Stevens who is more beautiful and desirable than any of the other women in the movie.
Inger proved herself to be an incredible actress. Most everyone will remember her from her two TWILIGHT ZONE episodes. In one, she plays the daughter of an elderly couple and eventually learns she is a robot. In the best of the two, she plays a woman driving cross country who keeps seeing the same hitchiker until she realizes she is dead, having died in an auto accident. But I see her as that babe (milf) on the beach in a bikini, handing her doofus husband a burger, meanwhile he’s taking her for granted and lusting over Sue Ann Langdon (who’s still alive and really hot in Elvis’s 1966 FRANKIE & JOHNNY).
Inger supposedly killed herself. During her time on this planet, she had a lot of sex, a lot of relationships with her leading men, and a lot of romantic disappointments leading to several suicide attempts. According to history, she was found unconscious on the floor of her kitchen by her housekeeper and died en route to the hospital of acute barbituate intoxication = drugs and alcohol. After her death, her secret marriage to Ike Jones (the first African-American to graduate from UCLA Film School) became public knowledge. Since then, William T. Patterson’s biography “The Farmer’s Daughter Remembered: The Biography of Actress Inger Stevens” speculates on the possibility of homicide.
At fourteen, I heard the TV anchor, probably Walter Cronkite, tell me that Inger Stevens had died. My heart broke, but I still continued to fantasize about her. Now that I think of it, the first woman I made love to looked a little like Inger Stevens. Hmmm. Blonde, beautiful; beautiful, blonde; willing.
Whether her death proves to be murder or suicide, Inger Stevens remains my model milf and qualifies to be a Poe Forward Dead Girl. The mystery of Mary Rogers’ murder is whether it was homicide or the result of a botched abortion. Inger’s mystery joins the ranks of mysteries the like of our dear Mary Rogers/Marie Roget.
The Original Dead Girl: Mary Rogers/Marie Roget