HALLOWEEN RAMPAGE 2008-UPDATE

9:28 PM, Suzi's apartment on Bleeker Street-

Jared and I just parted ways and he hightailed it off to Port Authority for the bus trip back to Rockland County. After making my way through the horrifying human traffic on 6th Avenue in the West Village I found a quiet, sane refuge here at Suzi's place and I'm gonna sit here for an hour or two relaxing while waiting for Jimmy and Amanda and Suzi's friend Sonya. And I had to immediately get on the Vault and post a preview of the Halloween gallery that's going up in a couple of days! Keep in mind that is just stuff I witnessed during the first two and a half hours of the evening; Suzi and Sonya still have to get into costume and we're a stone's throw away from Christopher Street, so who knows what awaits in the hours before dawn?

In honor of the late, great Dolemite and two of his foxy all-girl army.

Fay Wray, well in hand.

Zatanna and J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter.

Ain't it the truth!

Japanese Red Riding Hood and Wolf: what the fuck's up with the gas mask?

Two drag Jeannies.

Iss Tony Montana, joo fucking cock-a-roach!

Jame Gumb: "It puts the lotion on its skin!!!"

A woman in Angus Young drag. Simply awesome.

Is there anyone foxier than Miss Pamela Grier? Hell, no!!!

And the winner for the "Sheer Elephant Balls" award goes to:

Some white guy in blackface as Tyrone the crack-addict from CHAPELLE'S SHOW.

HALLOWEEN RAMPAGE 2008-prologue

Yer Bunche awaits the R train at Brooklyn's Union Street subway station.

I awoke this morning at 7AM, giddy as a child on Christmas morning, and looked over at my limp and vacant Ro-Man costume, my head filling with probable crazy scenarios for this glorious day's adventures to come. I had plenty of time for the "three esses" — shit, shower and shave — and once the morning ablutions were complete I donned my tatty alien invader garb and set off for work. The subway ride provided my fellow passengers with an amusing distraction from the lurid headlines of the Post and Daily News and I was only too happy to oblige. Once leaving the subway and returning to the world above ground I was shocked to see only one costumed person on the street other than myself, but at least it was a dude rocking a pretty decent Don King.

At the design 'ho house there were a couple of people in costume and I'll get to them in a subsequent post, but the one standout getup has to go to Phil, the self-described "stuck-up sales guy," as Flavor Flav.

A severely melanin-deficient Flavor Flav.

It's genius in the first place, but the fact that it lacks any form of blackface "corking up" sends it over the top into the realm of the extra-stupid. Well done!

So tonight I'll be hooking up with Jared for the annual photo safari, and as of last night I got word that we'll probably be joined by my old pals Jimmy and Amanda, so it's gonna be a blast!

Oh, and when did they start making window display manikins with racks like that seen here on Catwoman?

Not that I'm against it by any means, but YOWZA!!!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

It's Halloween
It's Halloween
It's time for scares
It's time for screams
It's Halloween
It's Halloween

The ghosts will spook
The spooks will scare
Why, even Dracula will be there!

It's time for games
It's time for fun
Not for just one
But for everyone

The jack-o-lanterns are all lit up
All the dummies are made and stuffed
By just looking you will see
It's this time of year again

It's Halloween
It's Halloween

All the kids are happy and gay
There doesn't seem to be a cloud in their way
But when it's over and they've had all their fun
They'll wish that Halloween had just begun

Oh, there are witches, goblins, vampires, devils, Frankensteins and zombies
And there are tramps, Cinderallas, pirates, angels and gypsies
So let's have lots of fun and give many cheers
For Halloween comes but once a year

It's time for games
It's time for fun
Not for just one
But for everyone

It's Halloween
It's Halloween
It's Halloween
It's Halloween

It's Halloween!

-"It's Halloween" by the Shaggs (1969)

Fuck, YEAH! It's Halloween once more, and I could not be happier. It's my favorite day of the year and I'll be rockin' the Ro-Man outfit from ROBOT MONSTER, so all is right in the world. I've gotta tell ya, it's so much fun to ride the subway looking like a total goddamned idiot (moreso than usual, that is), delighting the usually unsahkable denizens of the Rotten Apple and getting special appreciation from bad movie fanatics who recognize what I'm supposed to be.

Tonight I'll be doing the photo safari thing with Jared at the SOYLENT GREEN-level crowded annual Halloween parade, after which we'll hit the Christopher Street area and get pictures of the wondrous madness down there. The amazing Suzi and her equally cool Standard Poodle, Reggie, live in the area so I'll be seeing them as well, and that's always fun. I have no set gameplan other than what I've outlined here, and I think I've left plenty of room for improvisation, but after midnight I may hit the local haunts back around my nabe in Brooklyn. It's a good bet that the mighty Rex will be out and about, rockin' her Sheena look and raising hell, so I'll probably give her a call.

As for tomorrow, I plan to recouperate and possibly see both ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO and a rare screening of my favorite horror movie, Roman Polanski's 1968 masterpiece ROSEMARY'S BABY, perhaps the ultimate tale of spousal betrayal(the plot in a nutshell: asshole hubby makes a deal with a coven of Satanist witches so they can use his innocent catholic wife as the broodmare for Satan's baby, all to further his going-nowhere acting career). Yeah, it's all good for the first time in weeks, so I'm gonna enjoy it while I can. I'll most likely take a break from the Vault until Monday or Tuesday, by which time I plan on having a gallery of crazt photos up for all of you to feast your eyeballs upon, so from the bottom of my heart, have a safe and happy Halloween!

-Yer Bunche, keeper of the Vault of Buncheness

THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: LOTA THE PANTHER WOMAN

Poor, abused Lota (Kathleen Burke).

The creepily twisted horrors found in 1932's delirious ISLAND OF LOST SOULS have been discussed here on the Vault at length, but I had to give props to Lota (Kathleen Burke), an innocent panther that was altered into a human form and intended for her creator's most vile and questionable experiments. In short: the sicko wanted to see if she could successfully mate with a human castaway and produce offspring.

(Long pause)

Okay, kids, all together now: Eeeeeeeeeeeew!!!

When introduced to the bland castaway, the sad-eyed Lota’s curiosity is piqued and it’s quite obvious that she’s attracted to the guy, but even though the script manages to get away with planting the concept of inter-species humping within our heads, it was still 1932 so there was simply fucking way that the movie would go all the way (so to speak) with that element (one of several plot points that got the film banned in the UK for nearly twenty-five years). That hitch was solved by having Lota and the castaway getting very close, the sexual tension building to an uncomfortable level (he’s engaged to be married, but when on an uncharted tropical island and some hotness in a sarong throws herself at you…), only to be defused and carried into another area of horror altogether as the guy notices the sultry beauty’s hands and has a bit of a freakout.

Lota's animal gentics revealed.

Despite Dr. Moreau’s considerable (if admittedly fucked-up) surgical skills, Lota’s once-dainty mitts have begun to revert to sharp, ghastly claws, jarringly blowing her fully human aspect to smithereens, so upon seeing them Moreau declares that he’s taking her to his lab, charmingly known to all of his altered-from-bestial children as the “House of Pain,” in order to “burn out” what remains of her original traits. It’s at this moment when we realize Lota’s tentative (though nonetheless sexy) demeanor stems less from her once having been a full-blown panther, but rather from a wholly understandable and deep-seated fear of the unimaginable, probably anesthesia-free tortures she endured at her “father’s” hands on the long, hard road to Homo Sapiens. And once the rest of the animal-men on the island finally get fed up with not only the medical torture but also their status as unnatural “things,” the whole place goes to hell in a handbasket, with things ending quite badly for the island’s inhabitants, including poor, innocent Lota.

Based on H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS tarts up the book’s disturbing anti-vivisection material considerably, most notably with the invention of the human/animal-chick crossbreeding experiment, and the movie only benefits from the addition of prurient elements. I mean, what’s not to like about a hot half-big-cat chick (other than the bestiality element, that is)? I think it’s rather telling that some variation on the Lota template has been found in each version of the story released since the 1932 landmark original, including boner-igniting Barbara Carrera in 1977,

Fairuza Baulk in 1996 (since she possesses the most distinctive eyes this side of Meg Foster, did they even need to provide her with contacts?),

and even Marge Simpson in 2002’s “The Island of Dr. Hibbert” segment from the annual “Treehouse of Horror” special on THE SIMPSONS.

Guess you just can’t keep a good chimera down.

Kathleen Burke.

And, just for the fuck of it, one more of the awesome Fairuza Baulk.

EARLY HALLOWEEN HIJINX: SHEENA HUNTS AGAIN!

Thanks to having read my post on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle from a few weeks back, two of my favorite women on the planet, specifically naughty pixie Rex and the toothsome Sukihoshi, are dressing up as the comics' greatest jungle badass for Halloween. Sukihoshi's rocking her oufit on Halloween proper so I'll post her in all her leopardy glory when I get some pics from her, but Rex already got her animal print on last weekend at a pre-Halloween shindig.

The mighty Rex represents as Sheena.

Those of you who've never had the singular pleasure of meeting Rex won't get how totally appropriate it is for her tiny self to represent for the Jungle Queen. She's a fierce and feisty Canadian menace to society who's every bit as tough as the chracter she's impersonating, and I nearly shat myself with happiness when she clued me in on her plans.

Here she is with her roomate, "Hutch" — better known to some of you out there as Tower 2, the last of the barbecue joint's bartenders — as She-Pirate. Love the tattoo body stocking!

Here's a scale comparison shot: Hutch looms over Rex at a good six-foot-two, about a foot taller than the Jungle Canuck. Months ago I tried to convince them to go as Asterix and Obelix, two of Belgium's world-renowned classic comics characters, second only to Tintin in international recognition, but they had no idea what the hell I was talking about so they passed on that suggestion.

Asterix and Obelix (and don't forget Dogmatix!): oh, what could have been...

With a few weeks time to do the costumes up right, it would have been a natural! Oh, well...

And do not ask me what the fuck she's doing with those plastic vampire teefus.

STRONTIUM DOG: THE KREELER CONSPIRACY

There are those who were drawn to Britain's 2000 A.D. weekly sci-fi anthology comic during its prime (roughly 1978-1983) thanks to the popularity of the magazine's flagship character, Judge Dredd, but what hooked me was a recurring strip with the bizarre title of STRONTIUM DOG , featuring the "Spaghetti Western in space" adventures of grim mutant bounty-hunter Johnny Alpha and his partner Wulf Sterhammer, a hulking time-displaced Viking warrior. Their jobs took them all over a far-flung galaxy and through time itself — in one memorable case they pursued Adolf Hitler — and their testosterone-glutted exploits were perfectly offset with an appropriately quirky sense of humor. Created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra, STRONTIUM DOG was a series to be reckoned with when it was firing on all cylinders, frequently coming in second only to JUDGE DREDD in the reader's popularity voting, debuting in 2000 A.D.'s sister comic, STARLORD, in 1978 and taking up residence in Two-Thou when that mag got canceled, remaining a mainstay until 1990 when Wagner decided to kill off Johnny Alpha. Ezquerra refused to draw the death of the mutant hero, which resulted in what was at the time the final STRONTIUM DOG arc being handled by other artists (the less said about those sorry efforts the better). Eventually Wagner realized he must have been out of his fucking mind to snuff a great character and a terrific series in the process, so he rebooted STRONTIUM DOG in 1999 with Ezquerra back and in fine form, setting the new series before Johnny's death and passing off much of what came before as "folklore." The new series of STRONTIUM DOG still retained its signature tone, but it had also grown up in much the way 2000 A.D. itself had, offering a more adult edge to its heroes' tales and adding elements of mild sex to quell longstanding charges that Johnny and Wulf were actually star-hopping homosexuals (that angle had been attempted without much success in the original series with the murder of Wulf and the introduction of the textbook assembly line sexy vampire, Durham Red, who spun off into her own rather dull strip). Jeez, just because two manly men buy a house together on some secluded colony planet...

Titan Books has been releasing many of the classic 2000 A.D. series — including JUDGE DREDD, ROGUE TROOPER, NEMESIS THE WARLOCK, SLAINE and NICOLAI DANTE among others — in thick and sturdy editions, and following the complete run of the original STRONTIUM DOG (five volumes) comes the first of the reboot collections, THE KREELER CONSPIRACY, and it's a hell of a lot of fun, more than making up for the awful previous Ezquerra-less volume. This latest book contains "The Kreeler Conspiracy" (the power of which stems from the events chronicled in Volume 2's "Portrait of a Mutant," a multi-part epic of family dysfunction, ethnic hatred, genocide and guerrilla violence that's one of the best origin stories on record, IMHO), a trip to a backwater artists' colony that leads Johnny and Wulf to an inescapable and deadly "Roadhouse," and "The Tax Dodge," in which Johnny's refusal to pay his considerable back taxes (a sum he feels no obligation to pony up because the government of Earth declared him an exile in years previous ) brings him to the attention of Earthcom Internal Revenue and persistent collections agent Orville J. Paxman.

While not as good as the stuff from STRONTIUM DOG's glory days, the material here earns a solid eight out out of ten and that's pretty good , especially when stacked up against much of the other stuff 2000 A.D. was turning out at the same time. I recommend it, but urge you to check out the first four collected volumes, especially Volume 2, before cracking open THE KREELER CONSPIRACY.

INSPIRED OR IDIOTIC? YOU DECIDE!

All of my large tribe of friends whom I consider more like family are creative individuals, sometimes to a fault, so it should come as no shock that some of them are masters of completely ludicrous last-minute Halloween costume concoction. Case in point, this horrific tableux from 1995:

(Photo courtesy of Jared Osborn)

This ungodly shibboleth features, from left to right, Little Eddie, Greaseball Johnny and Hughes as the Olsen Twins and the incredibly genius "Bat-Pope." Each outfit was cannibalized from a cheap-assed Ben Cooper kid's costume and must have amounted to a cumulative cast of perhaps thirty bucks, the wigs being the high-cost element. And, as if the Bat-Pope wasn't bad enough already, mere moments before arriving at that evening's party, John upped the ante by taping a hastily-fashioned box to his chest to act as a convenient holster for his cigarettes.

However this triumph would eclipsed the following year by Ed's conceptually insane "retarded pirate" getup.

(Photo courtesy of Jared Osborn)

Once more pissing on the legacy of the Ben Cooper company, Ed took a chintzy child-size pirate costume and augmented it with a halo and fairy wings for no adequately explained reason. Truly appalling, yet oh so wonderful.

MORE COLLECTIBLE ACTION FIGURE MADNESS

This morning my buddy Minh (aka Our Man from 'Nam), a Bruce Lee fanatic who puts my own zeal for the Dragon to shame, alerted me to these impressive ENTER THE DRAGON figures from — where else? — Japan, and once again I beat my head against the wall in frustration.

They're from a company called Enterbay that specializes in limited edition figures of and suchlike, and the Bruce figure seen above was listed as starting at $200 (it's sold out, so expect it to be about twice that if you find one online) while none of the others were found on the site at all, and to be honest the only one of these that I would love to have on my shelf is the one of Afro-badass Jim Kelly as the ill-fated Williams. There's no way I'd turn up my nose at a Bruce Lee as good as the one seen here, but how the hell could I not want Williams? Where was that toy when I needed it back in 1973? He'd have shown G.I. Joe just how limp-wristed his so-called kung-fu grip was, right after he'd made Big Jim and his P.A.C.K. his collective bitch, I can assure you of that, and then he'd have made women out of Barbie, Skipper and Ken! (Ken's kinda already there anyway, but you know what I mean.)

While searching Enterbay's site for the Williams figure (which I could not find. What the fuck??? Maybe this is a prototype?), I checked out the whole Bruce Lee Collection and my jaw just went slack at the quality. I mean, just look at these (and keep in mind that they're all sold out and originally listed from $200 to $350):

FIST OF FURY (U.S. title THE CHINESE CONNECTION). A picture-perfect depiction of Bruce declaring "We (the Chinese) are not sick men!" to an entire dojo full of Japanese karate douchebags whose asses he's just righteously kicked. This is so beautiful I nearly wept.

As Tang Lung from THE WAY OF THE DRAGON (U.S. title RETURN OF THE DRAGON).

This one comes with two pair of 'chucks and the character's peasant jacket, but these shots sooooo nail the likeness and attitude.

ENTER THE DRAGON is probably the most popular martial arts movie in cinema history, and these figures commemorating it certainly do it justice.

Lee in his "out of uniform" look from the scene where he kicks the motherfucking piss out of that scarred O'Hara asshole.

The iconic look from the spectacular underground dungeon battle.

Traditional gear as seen at various points in the film.

Lousy and necrophilic though it may be, GAME OF DEATH gave us Bruce in what amounts to a superhero outfit and he simply looks terrific. And the figure comes with a selection of hands and weapons, including my favorite, that bizarre blue buggy-whip thingy.

Too bad it's doubtful I'll ever be so flush with disposable cash as to be able to afford all of these. Pfooey. But if there were ever a Sonny Chiba as The Street Fighter figure...

THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: THE DEER WOMAN

A deer — and then some — caught in the headlights. 

A detective investigates a series of bizarre slayings that at first bear all the earmarks of animal attacks, the male victims’ bodies trampled to unrecognizable hamburger by what is apparently an incredibly powerful deer, and as he delves deeper he discovers each of the deceased were last seen with a beautiful Native American woman of inhuman allure. 

Cinthia Mauro as the enchanting and completely fucking deadly Deer Woman. 

As the strange clues begin to pile up, the detective awakens to the possibility that the murders may be supernatural in nature, perpetrated by what a worker at a local Indian casino informs him sounds like “Deer Woman,” an irresistibly sexy spirit who lures men away with her seductive charms, has sex with them — in one case snapping off a victim’s penis — and fatally stomps her bedazzled lovers until they resemble steak tartare. The casino worker fills the detective in on all the pertinent info regarding his impossible suspect, such as the fact that she’s physically a deer from the waist down and wears outfits that hide her half-doe aspect, she’s a spirit so there’s no motive behind her murderous behavior, and that the fact that she’s a spirit means that you can’t stop or kill her. The last outbreak of identical stomping deaths occurred one hundred years previous and claimed the lives of several loggers, so any way you cut it, in an encounter with Deer Woman you’re shit outta luck. The 2005 DEER WOMAN installment in the MASTERS OF HORROR series is only fifty-seven minutes long, and as such it’s a model of tight storytelling economy. Directed by John Landis — he of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and INNOCENT BLOOD renown (I’ll leave out A VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN) — , DEER WOMAN features his patented blend of scares and humor and is a lot of fun while it lasts, but the real draw here is Brazilian actress Cinthia Moura in the title role. She’s mouthwateringly stunning, and the Deer Woman’s totally silent presence, remaining utterly wordless even as her horny prey chat her up, only adds to her unknowable otherworldliness. Looking every bit like the forest goddess/siren she’s supposed to be, Moura is so easy on the eyes that one can see how any guy would find himself bewitched, probably grinning from ear-to-ear as she removed her top, revealing a pair of the most perfect breasts in all of Creation…until the hooved blunt force trauma began. 

All I have to say to this is: What a way to go! 

Other than the unmitigated pleasure of taking in her spectacular beauty, the thing I enjoyed most about the Deer Woman as a character was that we’re told in no uncertain terms that she’s an unkillable, unfathomable spirit, so she rightly remains unexplained and simply vanishes into thin air at the story’s climax, just after the detective has shot her several times and totaled his car against a tree while running it into her at full speed, demonstrating the impotence of science and technology in the face of ancient Earth-magicks. In other words, you can do your damnedest to control or even destroy nature, but it’s kind of like attempting to face down a ravenous zombie horde with nothing but your limp dick in your hand. Native American lore has been little explored to viable effect in the horror genre and its myth base is very rich indeed, so I hope to see filmmakers return to that territory and mine its vast resources. With hockey-masked machete-wielding slashers and other serial-killing madmen defining the face of the American horror ethos for the better part of nearly the past five decades, it would be awesome to see the nature-inspired myths and legends of this land’s original inhabitants brought to wondrous and fearsome life on the big screen, and I hope that DEER WOMAN won’t be the last of its ilk. And I swear that when Moura’s top came off — twice!!! — I exclaimed “Holy fucking shit!” out loud, and I bet you will too. 

THOR: THE TRUTH OF HISTORY (ONE-SHOT)

While the overblown and turgid THOR relaunch lurches along, writer-penciler Alan Davis shows up to remind us what the adventures of the God of Thunder are all about, namely cool mythological stuff, ass-whuppin' against monsters and other assorted miscreants, fun characterization and a truly epic scope. I don't know about you, but I'd rather see Thor and his Asgardian cohorts running around and mixing it up all over the many mythic realms rather than hanging out in fucking Oklahoma like they're currently doing (yes, I'm serious), and with this one-shot Davis — aided by his most perfectly-suited inker since Paul Neary, Mark Farmer — gave me exactly what I wanted to read in a Thor yarn. Davis, a product of having devoured the same classic period of Marvel lore that many of us did, clearly gets what makes a Thor adventure fun, and he skimps on none of the requisite elements.

THOR: THE TRUTH OF HISTORY opens with two renowned arcaeologists bickering over the truth behind the visage of the Sphinx at Giza, and the story proper skips back in time by nearly four thousand years to provide the answer to that ages-old mystery, a tale in which the Mighty Thor and his pals the Warriors Three (Fandral the Dashing, Hogun the Grim and Volstagg the Voluminous) unwittingly figure. Upon putting much foot to the collective ass of a bunch of out-of-line Jotuns (monstrous stock villains in Norse mythology and the progenitors of Thor's adopted brother and arch-nemesis, Loki), the heroes discover that Nedda, the queen of Jotunheim, has opened a portal to ancient Egypt and her warriors have been busy there looting and violating the law of non-interference with the earth, but they must travel there themselves to rescue Volstagg after he falls ass-first through the rift. From there it's just plain fun that I'm not going to spoil, so if you dig Thor and the gang, especially from the Lee-Kirby period, you should check this mamma-jamma out. It's only four bucks, the Davis-Farmer artwork is both epic and stunning and it contains more genuine entertainment than six months-worth of the regular monthly book, so what's not to like?

THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: BARBARA CRAMPTON

Barabara Crampton vamps for the camera on the set of FROM BEYOND. I dunno what you think, but there's just something about a hot chick in glasses and a lab coat...

When I started this whole "Hot Babes of Horror" thing I initially intended it to be devoted to monsters who happened to be genuinely beautiful as well as scary, but for this post I feel I have to make an exception and pay tribute to an actress who while not ever portraying a monster certainly — and very memorably — ended up on the wrong end of the attentions of malevolent entities. That actress is the lovely and talented Barbara Crampton, venerated by genre fans for her role in Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND (1986), but most especially for her incredibly shocking contribution to RE-ANIMATOR (1985) also helmed by Stuart Gordon, and there was just no way that I could leave her out.

Both FROM BEYOND and RE-ANIMATOR kicked off the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation revival, both taking considerable liberties with the material but managing to please hard-to-satisfy horror addicts with their clever scripts, lashings of extreme gore and violence, twisted sex stuff and very game casts. Crampton stands out as the the requisite horror heroine in roles that have been more or less stock characters since the fright stuff hit the 1950's, specifically the "good girl" love interest who ends up menaced by something nasty and the brainy scientist/psychiatrist/doctor-type who finds herself wrenched from the world of the clinical and rational and thrown into the deep end of outright awfulness, but as her two classic turns occurred in the mid-1980's, filmmakers could get away with far more than their predecessors could ever have imagined possible. Far, far more, believe you me.

FROM BEYOND finds Crampton in the role of a bespectacled brain specialist who finds her inner slut unleashed after having her perceptions widened following peering into a monster-laden dimension just out of sync with our own. The emanations of the device that allows this window to open affects the human Pineal gland in bizarre ways, causing the once icy and prim doctor to let her hair down, ditch the Clark Kents and borrow a fetching S/M ensemble from the local mad scientist's well-equipped playroom.

She then attempts to get her hump on with the even more fucked-up lab assistant (my man Jeffrey Combs) who'd experienced longer exposure to the "resonator" device


and later gets molested by the machine's pervy inventor, whose consciousness has now fused with some hideous, slime-covered Lovecraftian wiggly from the other dimension.

As his K-Y-covered spidery digits dance across her bared breasts, I defy you not to feel a sense of deep, primal revulsion.

But the sequence that gained Barbara Crampton screen immortality is definitely the bit in RE-ANIMATOR where her character, the Twinkie-wholesome daughter of a medical school's dean, is rendered unconscious and kidnapped by her own dead-but revived and mind-controlled father at the behest of the re-animated headless corpse of an evil brain surgeon (David Gale). The sleazy bastard had lusted after her throughout the film, and since we all understand the power of horniness it comes as no surprise that when brought back from the dead he'd still want a taste of the innocent girl, and since he's now able to carry his own noggin about in a bowling bag why not live out his most amoral of illicit desires? So when Crampton's character finally comes to, she's stark naked atop an operating table with her wrists and ankles securely restrained, leaving her in an uncomfortably vulnerable state. As she begins to comprehend her predicament, her horror escalates as she beholds the very active headless corpse approaching her helpless, splayed-out form. It's at that moment that things move into an area that was jaw-droppingly unbelievable to those of us who saw it onscreen in 1985: the corpse firmly grasps its own severed head and maneuvers it between the captive co-ed's legs and, well, let's just say that the poor girl would most likely be turned against receiving "oral kindness" for the rest of her life (which turns out not to be for all that much longer).

I shit you not, I witnessed this in a theater where a couple had brought their gaggle of under-tens, about six of them, to see the film with them rather than shell out the scratch for a babysitter, an aspect that only made the incredible bad taste and sick-as-shit humor of the sequence that much more potent. I'm pretty lenient when it comes to what I'd let kids watch, but there's no fucking way I would have let a group ranging from two to eight experience the image of a crudely-severed head eating some screaming woman's pussy. Call me a prude if you like, but that's just beyond the pale.

Nonetheless, the scene was a landmark in horror that pushed the envelope into a whole other level and blew the minds of genre fans everywhere, so for her fearless venturing where no other actress had gone before I salute Barbara Crampton and give her immeasurable kudos. Plus you know she has to be one hell of a pro for not laughing herself silly at the crass absurdity of the whole thing like the rest of us did!