Flicker Read online

time between reappearances had increased. After some guy threw him off a roof, it was nearly two months before he returned, and then he was a sad-eyed, chubby loser for a while.

  Distribution was changing. There was talk about VHS becoming extinct. Alex began to wonder if The Stranger might reconsider the terms of their agreement.

  Perhaps the best course of action was to retrieve the tape, keep it under lock and key. A Dorian Grey painting.

  He crossed the road in his usual manner, failing to notice the oncoming traffic, and was struck by a speeding police car.

  Good punchline, Alex thought. And died.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  And waited….

  You’ve reached the end of Flicker, but read on for a preview of Blood Sex & Scooby Snacks, the book that mocks the films that reduce horror to the level of Scooby Doo Where Are You?

  Say you’ve been sucked through the screen at your local plex, but unlike that kid in Last Action Hero, you haven’t been transported into a Schwarzenegger movie. You don’t know where the hell you are. But there’s an old timer up ahead and he’s hollering at a bunch of teenagers that if they don’t turn around and go back, if they don’t skedaddle toot sweet, they’re gonna be sorry. And, by the way, don’t go near the Miller place after dark.

  Uh oh. The local prophet of doom, a handful of kids and a creepy location. That means you’re either in a horror movie or that episode of Scooby Doo! Where Are You? where the Mystery Machine arrives in this ghost town, and instead of helping the others, Shaggy and Scooby sneak off in search of food but a monster chases them so Fred devises a plan and they set a trap but it fails and leads to a climactic chase that ends with Scooby colliding with the villain, who’s then unmasked as….

  Come to think of it, that’s every episode.

  Anyway, you can’t tell where you are, and even looking at the cast doesn’t tell you much because it’s two attractive leads, a nerd, a stoner plus a brown-skinned comic relief character who speaks in a peculiar dialect, eats watermelon and shows more interest in “Scooby snacks” than the ladies. Then there’s the dialogue. Whenever somebody finds themselves trapped, they say, “We’re trapped!” Upon entering a haunted house, they say, “This place is spooky!” There’s also the Talking Villain scene, where the culprit gives a speech explaining his sinister scheme, which he might’ve gotten away with if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids and their damn dog.

  Scientists, Mayors, college Deans, police officers and, now you mention it, pretty much every other person in a position of authority, right down to the parents, cannot be trusted. Also, the Sheriff is either unhelpful, corrupt or thoroughly evil, and probably has a dark secret. Also a Deputy dumb enough to deny the monster’s existence without first looking over his shoulder. Although that’s no guarantee that he’s not the villain.

  You see, our more-evil-than-Enron fiend will, for most of the running time, appear where and when he damn well pleases, and to hell with logic. In his presence, power supplies will fail and cars refuse to start. Characters will wander alone down dark corridors saying, “Hello?” Fire exits will be mysteriously blocked.

  And if you’re thinking of phoning a friend and saying please oh please get me out of this movie, forget it. The phones don’t work. And there’s a thunderstorm moving in.

  Then, as you run out of fuel and hike through the middle of nowhere in the dead of night, searching for a gas station that isn’t operated by Brad Dourif, the thought occurs: how did it come to this?

  It all started when Nixon was in the White House, the Manson Family were at large and Vietnam was more than just a talking point. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, and if you hadn’t yet figured out times were changing, then a controversial new film called Midnight Cowboy, the first X-rated movie to win Best Picture, would change your mind.

  Into this muddled-up, mixed-up world came four teenagers named Geoff, Kelly, Linda and WW, who roamed the country with their sheepdog, Too Much. Or they would have, if CBS executive Fred Silverman hadn’t nixed the idea for a show called Mysteries Five. He wanted a series that would repeat the ratings success of The Archie Show as well as placate parent-led pressure groups that considered Saturday morning television too violent, so between them, Silverman, writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, plus animator Iwao Takamoto came up with Who’s S-S-Scared?, whose teens were modelled on characters from CBS’s previous comedy hit, The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis.

  Though based on Dobie himself, Fred Jones, the group’s self-appointed hero/leader, would’ve been more familiar to teenaged viewers as the square-jawed protagonist who battled Blobs, mad scientists and rubber-suited monsters at the Drive-in every Saturday night. His supposed girlfriend, Daphne Blake, had the token damsel-in-distress role while her considerably less attractive (and feminine looking) classmate Velma Dinkley, a near-sighted bookworm, could lecture for hours on such topics as runic symbols, palaeontology, Viking history etc. Along for the ride, as well as provide comic relief, was Norville ‘Shaggy’ Rogers, a long-haired, unshaven coward based on Bob Denver’s Dobie character, Maynard G Krebs, primetime’s first beatnik. Rounding out the line-up was Mystery Incorporated’s mascot, a talking Great Dane whose name came not from Sacha Distel’s 1958 hit Scoubidou or even Frank Sinatra’s dooby-dooby-dooing on Strangers In The Night, but Denise by Randy And The Rainbows, which Blondie later covered as Denis.

  CBS President Frank Stanton rejected Who’s S-S-Scared? for being too scary for its intended audience, so Silverman, determined to revitalize his Saturday morning schedule, changed the title and toned down the material, which was apparently enough to obtain the necessary greenlight. In other words, Scooby Doo! Where Are You? came into existence because it was safe, formulaic and unlikely to tax an eight-year-old overmuch.

  When What A Night For A Knight was broadcast on September 13, 1969, Scooby Doo! hardly seemed like a show that would still be around, in one incarnation or another, some five decades later. Viewed today, the most striking thing is how little the show departed from the blueprint laid down by its debut episode. Shaggy’s bell-bottoms, the Mystery Machine, the chase and climactic unmasking are all present and correct. Even after umpteen different series, two big budget feature films, plus a slew of straight-to-DVD titles as well as specials, spin-offs and spoofs, Fred still wears his lucky Ascot, Daphne’s favourite colour is still purple and Velma remains an aficionado of chunky sweaters. If a show with mediocre animation, lame dialogue and recycled plots can enjoy massive success, even the most hopeless filmmakers can take heart.

  Lured into filmmaking by Glen Or Glenda producer George Weiss, Michael and Roberta Findlay unleashed on 42nd Street audiences some of the most inept and primitive sexploitation films of the ‘60s before entering the horror genre with The Slaughter (1971), which was later distributed as the notorious Snuff (“A film that could only be made in South America, where life is cheap!”). By 1972, the husband and wife team had fallen in with director Ed Adlum for Invasion Of The Blood Farmers, where dungaree-clad ‘Druids’ in straw hats eat dogs, exsanguinate their victims in a garden shed and murder a character named Jim Carrey. World-beatingly terrible in all departments, from Roberta’s blurry cinematography to Michael’s unique editing style (which leaves in shots of actors waiting for their cue), the film failed to recoup its $24,000 budget on release, so when the trio regrouped for Shriek Of The Mutilated (1974), it was with Adlum as producer and Michael as director, which at least cut down on the mix of day/night shots.

  It’s probably going out on a limb to describe Shriek as the first horror film to rip off Hanna-Barbera, but consider the storyline. When Dr Prell recruits four students – including a leggy clotheshorse, a redhead with oversized glasses, a cool-headed jock and a joker – for an expedition to find a Yeti in upstate New York (why not?), they travel to an isolated cabin in a van with flower decals on the side, encounter a mute, sinister housekeep
er and are chased by a silly-looking creature whose appearance causes the redhead to fall and lose her glasses. After setting a trap that fails, the ‘monster’ is revealed to be one Dr Werner in a costume, who along with Prell has been perpetuating the Yeti myth to draw attention away from their nefarious schemes that, in this R-rated version, include luring young people to a deserted locale so the flesh-eating academics can devour them.

  Okay, so the filmmakers probably didn’t sit down and say to each other, “You know what’d make lots of money? Scooby Doo with tits!” They were more likely cashing in on the Drive-in success of The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972), which proved the box-office potential of a cheaply-made man-in-a-suit monster movie, and the similarities to the show worked their way in. Which they were bound to do, because quick-buck exploitation reduces everything to the level of a cartoon. Hacks aren’t skilled enough to write scripts so they recycle clichés. They can’t create characters so they rely on ‘types’: the hero/leader; the damsel-in-distress; the brainy girl; the comic relief. You can tell who’s who just by looking at them.

  Moral: bad intentions result in worse pictures, especially if you’re