B-Movie Reels (6 page)

The butcher ambled from the table over to the two headless human bodies hanging by hooks driven between their shoulder blades. The corpses were naked, their breasts, pubic hair and penis visible. Andy was surprised there was so much nudity. He burst out in a spit-laden hoot when he caught the peg-board of pronged hooks on the background wall. The board was stocked with dozens of breasts, each with a bluish hue and of varying cup sizes.
 

He’s got a wall of breasts in his shop!

What the fuck?

The butcher retrieved a scythe and swiped the hanging woman’s torso in half in one slash. The legs pounded the ground with the sound of shoes striking cement. He dropped the pieces into an aluminum meat-grinder the size of an industrial dish washing machine. Cranked, the chopping beast chugged out smoke and ground the legs. Blood spat from the top, spattering the ceiling in a reverse rain. A filter on the other side coughed out bones, hair, blood, and then in the other tray, strands of grainy pink meat heaped tall. The butcher sampled it raw, oinking like a pig. “Perfect cuts. Tender like veal. The younger they’re butchered, the finer the taste.”

The music changed into doom synthesizer mode when Jorg stepped into a back room stocked with piles of clothing, purses and personal effects. He moved through that room to reach the storefront. The butcher stared up at the clock, reading it with widening eyes. “Lunch time.” He then licked his lips.
 

The butcher picked up a five-inch knife from the front countertop, wrapped it in a newspaper and walked out of the shop.
 

Jorg: the Hungry Butcher
was shot in Pittsburgh and released in 1976. It starred James Keoge as the butcher, Wilson Breadley and Julia Switzer. The movie has an interesting conflict: Jorg murders a man’s wife, but the husband is also a cannibal. Jorg’s shop is emptied of the human remains, and Jorg hunts for the person responsible for pilfering his prized cuts. I expected a hack and slash fare—which is what it was—but it also focused on the mechanics of a cannibal. Jorg was born in Germany shortly after the Holocaust. Local shops had an economic falling out, and the small town of Strausenburg turned to alternative forms of procuring food rations since the bread truck no longer rolled into town every week. Jorg’s a victim of his father and mother’s voracious appetite, two murderers that cannibalized many homeless and drunk beggars from the streets. The shot with the bones of dozens of victims in his parents’ basement is harrowing. Filled with over-the-top violence, the visuals and reasoning power of characters is the best aspect of the film. The panoramic views of city buildings were impressive, but the camera is shaky; average low-budget amateur fare in the filming department. The finale stays with me: Jorg and the flesh burglar, his enemy, lock each other in a basement and sample the meat from one another’s body until they’ve both picked themselves clean.
 

Professor Maxwell would be amused to hear he was starting to enjoy these movies. Their carefree attitude toward logic and human reasoning lightened the guilt over how Mary-Sue reacted to him turning her down for sex. It was amusing the way she assumed food equaled sex. Even Ned speeding from the house was humorous now. Was this house that awful? Sure, the water from the faucet scalded him, and the attic stairs almost tumbled onto him, but he was having fun in his digs. He was master of his domain, set free from college and watching forgotten horror films.
 

It was a quarter till midnight, and Andy had at least another movie to put under his belt. So far, sludge and butchers comprised the double feature—now he was entering new ground: the triple feature.
 

Caretaker of the Zombies
grabbed his attention in the newest stack of reels. He set up the first reel in the projector, and again turned the lights off. The opening shot focused on a set of wrought-iron cemetery gates with the name Rover Hills Cemetery over them. The gates parted, and the camera shifted over miles of headstones. It was dark outside, the moonlight reflecting the marble and bronze headstones eerily. A haze of fake smoke obscured the distance, blinding most of the background. Next, footsteps crunched over gravel, and a man in a black overcoat carried a medicine bag in his hands. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, the cherry-red tip bobbing on the verge of breaking. The man scoured the headstones for a certain name. He stopped at the slab reading Christopher Alan Jenkins.
 

“Hello Father.” He spat out the cigarette. “I’ve been waiting for this chance. The gypsy whore next door made this concoction, Dad. She promised me it’d bring you back. You owe her money, and you owe me even more money, Father. You hid your savings from me, Father. You were being so selfish. You buried it somewhere without telling anyone, Father, you son of a bitch. But I’ll bring you back, and then you’ll tell me where it is, FATHER!”

The nightwalker unzipped the medicine bag and produced a dark vial. He unscrewed the top, and with an eye-dropper, sucked up the fluid and dripped six milliliters worth onto the grass. It sizzled and smoked through the ground upon touching it. The man yipped in delight, smiling and clapping his hands. “Yes, it’s working! The gypsy whore was right. Father couldn’t keep it in his pants. Oh, he owes a lot of whores money—including that gypsy! That’s why she helped me, Father. She wants her money too.”

Moments later, the grass—more like turf from a golf course—parted and a gnarled hand covered in dried oatmeal reached out. A skeletal face with worms slithering out of both eyes and mouth poked its head free. The corpse bared its teeth and a collection of earthworms spilled forth from its gangrenous chin. The sternum was bared, the bones randomly cloaked in rotten skin. The zombie was brittle in appearance. The bare phalanges pointed at the man, and then the zombie ambled toward him with rigor mortis speed.
 

“Father, it’s me. Your son. Father… Father, can’t you hear me?”

The zombie cocked its head to the side. The cold, dark eyes carried no emotion. Again, the teeth opened and more worms were coughed up, pounds of mealworms, maggots and night crawlers.
 

This guy’s a bait shop
.

The son stumbled backward. “Father, why are you approaching me like that? I’m not here to hurt you. I just want my money. Where did you bury it? Tell me and leave me alone. Back off, Father!”

The zombie towered above him, its chest breathing in and out hard, the lungs leather sacks beneath the bone.
 

Good make-up effects,
Andy thought.
Even though I don’t know why the dead guy is breathing.

“Stay away from me. Back in your grave! I don’t need your money that badly. Go away! I didn’t want it to work out like this, not like this, Father.”

The shot suddenly skipped to the bony phalanges poking out the man’s eyes. The fingers stirred the sockets until a stew of blood and brains fizzed down the victim’s cheeks, as if someone had mixed dark red Kool-Aid and Pop Rocks as special effects. The zombie’s teeth clamped down upon the man’s trachea and removed a liberal chunk, devouring it hungrily.
 

The son choked. “GACKGRAGH!”

The zombie chewed up the morsel, its lips dripping blood. The man’s throat ejected crimson, his back against his father’s headstone as he suffered death spasms. Leaving the victim behind, the zombie picked up the medicine dropper and walked about the property awakening the other graves. Then, the scene ended with more hands outreaching through the grass. The next shot displayed a horde of awakened zombies stumbling out through the opened gates of the cemetery.
 

Caretaker of the Zombies
is an interesting concept, and there was plenty of gore and flesh-tearing action, but the idea of having a leader zombie attack a ghetto to reach a gypsy whore who created “zombie juice” to bring the dead back to pay their debts to her is ridiculous. There’s no way the gypsy could’ve slept with all those men and they just so happened to each owe her money. Loophole. The Roma curse of being an unpaid whore is laughable, and a gypsy in New Jersey didn’t make sense either. And the end with the zombies returning into their graves after the gypsy was killed off, I didn’t understand. Sure, the Roma curse was lifted at her death, but why go back to the grave? If I was a zombie, I’d want to roam about and live again—not put myself back in the grave! It was made in the same year as George A. Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead
, so I guess that’s why it was so overlooked. People considered it a cheap rip-off.

Andy rubbed his tired eyes. It was past one o’clock, and after a day filled with traveling and hashing things out with his uncle about the house, he was exhausted. Everything happened so fast after graduation. His parents threw him a party with all his relatives in Iowa—minus Ned, who waited for him in Anderson Mills—and now he was here.

After the last reel of the film ended, the sense of loneliness was unavoidable. The large house was so empty, and Ned didn’t waste any time wandering back to his house in Hayden City. Ned was confident his guilt-trips would work to dump off the house on him that quickly.
 

You should be more grateful. He’s offering you a place to stay for free.

He let the concern go for the meantime. It was time for bed. Andy gathered up a toothbrush and toothpaste and walked to the upstairs bathroom. He brushed his teeth, washed his face, and when he was ready to sleep, he realized there wasn’t a bed in the house.
 

“Great.”

The only place to lie down was on the leather chair in the living room.
 

He gathered a sweatshirt and sat back down on the chair, satisfied to rest here. He closed his eyes, but after he couldn’t sleep, he decided to put another movie on. The background noise would drown out the random creaks of the foundation settling, he decided.
 

He pawed through the reels and chose:
Death Hawk
.
 

It started with a man wearing a large leather glove in an empty field. He placed a dead mouse on top of a wooden post and backed away. The man spoke to the gray and white hawk: “Get the mouse—use those predator skills, Willis.”
 

Willis sprung to the post and devoured the mouse with two pokes of its beak and a hearty swallow. The man raised his gloved hand and the bird returned to him. The trainer handed Willis another dead mouse, and the bird ate it voraciously. “We’ll have you trained for the zoo in no time. You’ll perform for children, and even adults will take enjoyment from your antics. I can’t see why anybody would be afraid of birds, especially a handsome white-crested hawk like you.”

Two men lurked nearby behind a copse of trees and watched the man talk to the bird. They both wore black leather jackets and shared a bottle of hard liquor housed within a paper bag. One of the punks produced a switchblade knife. “Weirdo is talking to a damn bird.”

The other waved a baseball bat. “Yeah, let’s take his wallet.”

The two stalked the bird trainer from behind. The punk with the bat swung it upon the handler’s back, the blow taking the man down to his knees.
 

The handler cried out, “What do you want from me? Stop hurting me, I’m begging you!”
 

Willis shot up to the sky, scared off.
 

“I wish I had a gun so I could shoot that bird,” the punk with the switchblade threatened. “I hate those squawking things. All birds do is shit on us.”

The other punk rummaged through the trainer’s vest and pockets. “He’s not carrying anything except for dead mice. The loser doesn’t have a penny on him.”

“You mean the dead loser. We’ll show him!”

The trainer was stabbed in the stomach, one sick sounding jab. After the trainer writhed and died on his back, the shot panned up to the sky. The hawk watched, turning its beady eyes down to the scene. The footage itself was of stock quality, and even the bird looked different than Willis.
 

The punk swung his bat at the sky, inviting the bird to die next. “Come down, birdie!
Squawk
—
squawk
—
squawk!
”

The music bleated in foreboding horror as the bird touched down on the man’s face. With three pecks and a steal, Willis gobbled an eye from the switchblade holder. The punk cupped his eye and shrieked, the camera spinning around him to create a frenzied effect. The other punk retreated. The bird took flight again, and in no time, it angled down on the criminal. It took one peck on his cheek with the sound of carpet tearing. The punk tripped over himself, crashing to the ground. With the man on his back now, the bird attacked again, the camera shaking violently. This time, a fake bird pecked at his face dozens of times until the man’s cheeks were serrated to skin and bone. Then the bird flew back into the sky, the tops of trees soon thinning out and leading into a small town.
 

Andy had fallen asleep by then, but the film kept playing on until the end.
 

Chapter Three

1

Ned Ryerson finished his third round of Jack Daniels and Coke. He sat alone on a barstool in Hank’s Sports Pub. He stared up at the television to view the local ten o’clock news report, but after a few minutes, he didn’t listen anymore. His tipsiness wasn’t enjoyable tonight. He was glad to escape the house, but for how long, he wondered. Andy wouldn’t live there. He read it on the young man’s face that he didn’t want to take on such a project. The house had been on the market for almost nine months. The property could be up for purchase for years and no one would bite.