Screams, more screams, enemas

Scream and Scream Again (Dir. Gordon Hessler, 1970)

This is the ultimate example of mod-horror, a genre so exquisitely rare that it’s probably limited to one film. As far as anyone can tell, Scream and Scream Again is about lab grown vampires with Let it Bleed-era Mick Jagger hair running amok in a totalitarian state that looks exactly like London in the ‘60s. But it’s hard to know, since the film is so elliptically plotted as to be completely incomprehensible—hardly a virtue for a low budget horror film, but a big plus for the paracinematically inclined among us. Once seen and never forgotten, the key image is a hapless jogger who collapses during the opening credit sequence. After that, he keeps waking up in a hospital bed with another one of his limbs mysteriously missing until finally there’s nothing left but a trunk and a head. I’ve seen Scream and Scream Again about 100 times and I still don’t really know why this keeps happening to him.

Water Power (aka The Enema Bandit) (Dir. Shaun Costello, 1977)

Director Shaun Costello, a smut movie veteran who made films for the “porno unit of the Gambino crime family” during hardcore’s “golden” years, evidently considers Water Power to be a comedy. The rest of us can only watch in appalled silence as Times Square legend Jamie Gillis forcibly “cleanses” all the dirty, dirty whores in his squalid New York neighbourhood using a Bardex Inflatable enema kit. Although based on the true story of the Illinois Enema Bandit, Costello’s template was obviously the previous year’s Taxi Driver, since he cheerfully stole Bernard Hermann’s score for his grimy little scat epic while coaxing an all too convincing, largely mumbled voice-over from his scarily intense star (“I have to do it right. I can’t just stick tubes up their asses and hope for the best.”) Obviously, this is a film for those of us who overdid it on gateway midnight classics like The Pig Fucking Movie, Salo, and the XXX version of The Sinful Dwarf. Sorry, mom.

Georgia Straight, January 2012

Flashback: Life after death study freaks everyone out

The largest ever study into after death and out-of-body experiences strongly suggests that we don’t know dick about shit, man. As reported in the U.K.’s Telegraph, scientists at the University of Southampton led the four year study which investigated 2000 victims of cardiac arrest at 15 hospitals in the U.K., U.S., and Austria.

Forty percent of those interviewed reported “some kind of ‘awareness’” during the period of clinical death, in some cases describing in accurate detail the efforts of doctors to save them. Nothing we haven’t heard before, of course, except that now a bunch of experts have written it up in a fancy report. Other common experiences included an overwhelming feeling of peacefulness, seeing a bright light (classic!), and—more chillingly—the terrifying sense of being slowly drowned. (Shitfuck!)

Team leader Dr. Sam Parnia speculated that drugs used in the resuscitation process might explain the absence of these memories for some patients, kind of like how I can't remember my dreams because I go to bed blitzed every night.

“Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best. Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions but they do seem to corresponded to actual events," said Dr. Parnia. "These experiences warrant further investigation.”

Dr. Ian Stevenson went further than anybody with his investigation, documenting over 3,000 cases worldwide of children whose past-life memories—including vivid descriptions of locations, people, and events—were frequently verified by research. Stevenson also found that birthmarks and irrational phobias often corresponded with a traumatic or violent death in the child’s previous life.

Professional non-scientist James “The Amazing” Randi was not available for comment. 

Georgia Straight, October 2014

Flashback: Alistair Cooke's corpse illegally harvested for tissue

Note: “Following an investigation in Ukraine…” Unless you have the flag in your Twitter bio, you know that Ukraine has been doing the West’s very dirtiest work for a long time now.

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Do you know where your penis implant came from? How about your new cornea? Or that bone anchor you just received from your dentist? In an article published this week by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the true and horrifying extent of the global market for human tissue is laid bare. “It is an industry that promotes treatments and products that literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and the lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee repairs),” writes the ICIJ. “It's also an industry fueled by powerful appetites for bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies.”

As the world’s largest supplier of medical products, the U.S. conducts minimum oversight on the industry. Suppliers merely need to register with the FDA. “Yet of the 340 foreign tissue establishments registered with the FDA, only about 7 percent have an inspection record in the FDA database.” The result is a black market of human product, obtained illegally and without permission, often papered over with bogus documentation, and then sold without adequate testing for pathogens including HIV and Hepatitis.

Following an investigation in the Ukraine, Lubov Frolova was informed by police that her son’s cadaver had been stripped in a criminal harvesting operation. “Two ribs, two Achilles heels, two elbows, two eardrums, two teeth, and so on. I couldn’t read it till the end, as I felt sick,” she said. Frolova noticed something was wrong when his shoe fell off in the hearse, and there was no foot.

In one of the rare convictions obtained against tissue harvesters—Biomedical Tissue Services was busted in 2005 purchasing “raw material” from undertakers in New York and Pennsylvania at a cost of $1000 per cadaver—a weird factoid emerged: “One of more than 1,000 bodies that were dismembered was that of the famous BBC broadcaster and Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke.”

Georgia Straight, July 2012