#ron sharleton

[robsheridan]

No film defined the late-70s “McSplatter” wave of grindhouse horror like DRIVE-THRU OF DEATH (1977). Writer/director Ron Sharleton's (Cannibal Quarterback, Garfield: First Blood, CoacHELLa) unapologetically manic debut gore-fest wrote the blueprint for the fast-food sub-genre that would be followed by many more films such as Wiener of Blood (1978), Ice Scream Truck (1978), and Sharleton’s own pizza-themed follow-up Slice of Hell (1979).

Drive-Thru of Death opens with old-fashioned circus clowns in a shadowy ritual with a cult of evil cows (the film does not explain why the cows can speak, nor are they seen again after the opening scene). The groups are angry at the giant fast food chain “McDungles” (an obvious reference to McDonald’s leading to extensive litigation) for their aggressive factory-farming and their clown-themed branding that “cheapens the sacred art of clowning.” The cow priest puts an ancient black magic curse on the blood of all cattle in the region destined for McDungles beef plants.

As the cursed beef makes its way into McDungles’ restaurants, burger patties begin coming alive as ferocious man-eating beef demons. Meanwhile, the curse has a special effect on the restaurant’s birthday clowns, who become gradually more psychotic as they mutate into grotesque homicidal monstrosities whose flesh drips like melted cheese. The clowns kill the staff and turn McDungles into madhouses of relentless zany violence. The clown working the drive-through window asks unsuspecting patrons the film’s much-quoted catchphrase, “would you like TO DIE with that??” 

The infamous third-act birthday party scene is an off-the-rails escalation of horror where the demon clowns infect children with the curse, which their turns their flesh into french fries before possessing them to become demonic murderous clown children.

Eventually, townspeople are able to kill the beef demons and the clowns by burning them alive with deep-frier grease. But the damage is done, and the McDungles chain has to shut down permanently.

The film’s final shot of a child who survived the birthday party massacre warns ominously, “the children were never the same.”

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

With Coachella 2023 wrapping up, let’s revisit the 2007 direct-to-video gore-fest CoacHELLa.

The film opens when a group of bitter old Palm Springs goth Satanists, angry about the growing crowds of shallow LA hipsters who swarm the region each year, set up a stand at a Coachella party to give away free samples of organic home-brewed small batch alcoholic kombucha. The fashionable young partiers arriving for the festival can’t resist the free drinks, but the potent liquid contains a dark secret: It’s brewed with an ancient potion cursed with dark Satanic magic that unleashes a horrific revenge on Coachella’s beautiful people, turning them into hideous carnal demonic creatures who know only madness and bloodlust.

As more blood is spilled, the curse spreads, from pool parties to dance tents to the vast open desert fields, where the cursed blood awakens massive ancient demons from beneath the sand. The festival becomes literal hell on earth as thousands of zombified hipsters consume each other in mindless rage, and the uncursed trying to escape are torn limb-from-limb by elder gods hungry for souls. In the end, the military bombs the entire Coachella site before the curse can spread to the general population. In the film’s final scene, the goth Satanists return to survey the charred grounds, scattered with human bones and flowers from Coachella girl flower crowns. The crowds are gone, the parties are over, the land is deadly quiet, and no one is likely to ever return: Just how the goths wanted it.

CoacHELLa marked a surprise return to writing/directing for legendary “splattercore” auteur Ron Sharleton, who had mostly disappeared professionally after the Cannibal Quarterback 2 disaster. Unable to get a deal with a major studio, Sharleton made CoacHELLa on a direct-to-video budget. The film was panned by critics as “a disastrous attempt to bring trashy shock cinema from a different era to more refined 21st century audiences” and “dripping with the resentment of an old man angry that the world was moving on without him.” But fans of camp horror were delighted, and the film has since gained a cult following.

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

[robsheridan]

Poster for the unproduced 1984 live-action horror adaptation GARFIELD: FIRST BLOOD.

Following the success of CUJO in 1983, studios were scrambling to find the next hit “killer pet” flick. Notorious grindhouse auteur Ron Sharleton, seeking a big-budget movie deal to fund his struggling production of CANNIBAL QUARTERBACK 2, set his sights on the most unlikely of properties: Jim Davis’ beloved comic strip Garfield. Sharleton, a self-proclaimed fan of Garfield who called the strip “a subversive celebration of misanthropy,” believed an “alternative, adult” spin on the character could thrive in tandem with its kid-friendly cartoons. Describing his rationale in an interview later, Sharleton said: “You have all of these R-rated films that come out and become big hits and the studios want to suck every penny out of one idea, so they sanitize it and repackage it as a cartoon for kids. So I said, why can’t we do the reverse?”

GARFIELD: FIRST BLOOD was pitched as a dark, gritty reimagining in which the titular cat, pushed to the brink on a particularly bad Monday, finally snaps and kills Jon’s dimwitted dog Odie. As he tastes Odie’s blood, Garfield is overcome by how good it felt to put a permanent end to something that annoyed him. He then realizes that everything and everyone annoy him, and his murderous rampage begins.

Describing his take on the character, Sharleton said: “Garfield never really sat right with me as a children’s character. He’s so much darker, more complex. You have this cat who is filled with contempt; he looks at the world around him with radical skepticism and scowls at the prison of tedium mankind calls ‘society,’ and he responds with this very self-indulgent nihilism: Be lazy, be a glutton, don’t participate in anything because it’s all bullshit. Garfield looks at Jon waking up early on a Monday and putting on his tie to go to a job he hates, and he sees a pathetic fool. It’s all such a powerful rejection of the Reagan Wall Street capitalist disease that has poisoned the 80s. ‘Work hard, climb the ladder, buy a boat!’ Garfield says fuck that, stay home, eat lasagna, accept no master. But living as an iconoclast in a conformist world has filled him with all this tension. There’s anger in there, you know? So I wanted to examine what would happen if Garfield was finally pushed over the edge. Where’s the line between a passive nihilist and a violent anarchist?”

Warner Bros execs were intrigued by Sharleton’s pitch (and the lucrative cash cow of the Garfield brand) and funded a short “proof-of-concept” trailer, directed by Sharleton, to convince Garfield creator Jim Davis of the idea. The trailer reportedly went “all-in” on Sharleton’s signature “splattercore” horror, including a scene where Garfield grinds up Liz Wilson alive in a meat grinder and bakes her flesh into a lasagna he then serves to Jon. The presentation to Davis was described as “one of the most disastrously miscalculated meetings in modern Hollywood,” with Davis stopping the trailer midway to ask the room “are you people completely fucking insane?” before storming out.

Reflecting on the meeting years later, an anonymous former Warner exec said “we knew it was a long shot, but we really felt like the only way to sell the concept was to push it as far as possible. In retrospect I think yeah, we did let it go too far. We were so absorbed in it that we didn’t realize how jarring it would be for a guy like Jim Davis to just be thrown into this cold. I think it was a mistake to open with the Nermal blender scene, but we wanted shock, and we thought… I don’t know, everyone was doing a LOT of cocaine back then. Well, everyone except Jim Davis."

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UPDATE: T-shirts and poster prints now available!

NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series. NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.