Three ghastly items about film

1. A few years ago, I photographed an unfortunate sequence of movie titles on the Somerville Theatre's owl-fortified marquee and asked, "Second-run movie theater marquee, or worst personal ad ever?"

A film blog called Focus Pull has found many more local listings for bad dates, ranging from the mildly unfortunate KNOCKED UP WAITRESS to the off-putting THE MEXICAN SNATCH JUST VISITING, and some indiscreet casual encounters: SPY KIDS BLOW CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES.

2. The current issue of The Believer delivers a much-anticipated (by me, anyway) interview with/by/between Errol Morris and Werner Herzog. I was not surprised to learn that they visit incarcerated serial killers together, and it makes a lot of sense that they'd have a falling-out over grave-robbing.

WH: I was there, but you didn’t show up. And we had a date. It was something like September 10, and I said, I’m going to be there, and you will be there, and you didn’t show up.

EM: He’s unfortunately correct.

WH: And I would have dug, even though Errol wasn’t there. I was kind of scared because people open fire easily in this town.

EM: Well, wait a second. I had been living there. I had become friends with this very strange doctor, Dr. George Arndt. He had written one academic paper in his entire medical career, called “A Community’s Reaction to a Horrifying Event.” Essentially it was a compendium of Ed Gein jokes. I had befriended Dr. Arndt and together we drove to Plainfield Cemetery. He had a very, very big Cadillac. [...] And Dr. Arndt, who was really quite mad—I should tell you at least one of the Ed Gein jokes. Do you remember any of them?

WH: I don’t think so.

EM: Why did Ed Gein keep his chairs covered overnight?

WH: I don’t know.

EM: To keep them from getting goose pimples. So I was there with George Arndt in the cemetery and Arndt had this theory that Ed was so devious that he wouldn’t have gone down directly into his mother’s grave. I had discovered that many of the graves that he had robbed made a circle around his mother’s grave. And Dr. Arndt took this new information and came up with the hypothesis that Gein went down into one of the side graves—he only robbed the graves of women who were middle-aged and overweight, like his mom. He went into one of those graves and then tunneled, that there would be this radial tunnel toward the center, toward his mother’s grave.

Arndt’s theory was that Gein would never have gone directly down into his mother’s grave. Psychiatrists have amazing theories. But he would never go down into the grave. As Arndt put it: Gein was too indirect, too devious. Hence, his radial digging, this tunneling. And I wondered, Wait a second—is she really down there?

I could never get an answer. I could never get a straight answer from anyone. Is Mrs. Gein still buried in Plainfield Cemetery? And I told the story—this was the big mistake here—I told the story to Werner.

WH: And I showed up in Plainfield.

3. On Film Radar's horror blog, Evan A. Baker has a meticulous blow-by-blow account of an exhaustive Mario Bava retrospective at the Egyptian and, on SF Signal, Gabriel Mckee wishes that Star Trek V had ended differently. He is also glad that it didn't:

In a way, it's a good thing that the film went over budget. The original plan was to have God summon an army of rock monsters to fight the Enterprise crew.

Comments

[brayden]

When you stare into the toilet, does the toilet not then stare back into you??