#sorry gang the SAD is attacking me and shredding all my schedules

[delimeful]

just a little rush (2)

G/T July Day 5: Caught

warnings: angst, remus POV w more theoretical gore than usual, mentions of surgery & gore, jerk giant minor oc, panic, dissociation, dehumanization  

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Remus hated to admit it, but Pattycakes had been right.

He definitely should have waited a little longer before trying for his next escape attempt.

It was the woulda-coulda-shoulda sort of regret that he didn’t usually waste time on. He was well aware of how many of his plans were bonafide bad ideas, and he generally went through with them anyhow.

The alternative was letting the fire ants under his skin grow more and more intolerable until he ended up doing the dumb thing anyway, but even more recklessly. It wasn’t so much a ‘choice’ as it was a ‘delay of the inevitable’.

After all, he was the only one getting hurt in the end, right?

Now, watching helplessly from behind birdcage bars as that bastard human loomed over Patton, he was finding that there were some consequences that could make him feel regret, after all.

Initially, the bastard had seemed eerily unperturbed by catching Remus in the act, even if his grip had gone dangerously tight for a heartbeat. He’d dropped Remus back in that gaudy cage without even a single word of scolding, turning away with a preoccupied gaze.

That should have been the first sign that something was about to go horribly wrong.

As it was, Remus’s bad feeling didn’t catch up with the reality of the situation until the human walked in mid-phone call, stopping right in front of them. The bastard looked them over with a calculating eye as he spoke to the tinny voice on the other end about prices and procedures, as though they were too dumb to put the pieces together.

Patton hadn’t stopped shaking until hours later, his wings tucked as tight against his back as they would go. Remus had forced himself silent for once, knowing that the gory thoughts he had to offer would only make the situation worse, and simply squeezed Patton against his side as securely as he could.

It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. No matter how hard they tried to cling on, it only took a single human hand to wrench them apart.

When the bastard had walked in with heavy leather gloves on, Remus had thought he was ready. He’d been prepared for his wings to be mangled, for tiny hollow bones to shatter and wiry muscles to be ground to a pulp, for even the lifelong pain of a botched amputation.

He hadn’t been prepared for the human to grab Patton, instead.

He was shouting, barking swears and threats and pleas that he barely registered as words as Patton was pinned against the polished wood of the nearby table.

It was like he had to make as much noise as possible to counter Patton’s awful, tremulous silence. His cellmate’s face had gone blank and pallid, eyes distant. A few of Remus’s shouts had made him twitch, but nothing seemed enough to bring him back to himself now.

The human— the monster pressed down on Patton’s wing joints and forced the feathery limb to flex open, soft blue plumage on full display.

It picked up a pair of narrow scissors, ignoring the compulsive twitches of the overextended wing under its hand.

The howl that Remus made was inhuman, shredding out of him like razor blades in his throat, and the human paused to glance over at him for the first time.

“Huh.” Its expression was pleased, almost smug. “That vet was right on the money with that ‘social creatures’ thing. Maybe this will finally teach you that there are consequences to your actions, hm?”

It flicked the scissors open with a metallic sound, and as though it was a signal that all was lost, Patton went entirely limp with resignation.

Remus forced himself to keep gripping the bars with numb hands, to keep his ears uncovered, to keep his gaze locked on the only friend he had here. His heart felt like a hammer against his ribs, his mind conjuring up a hundred different gruesome imaginings that were all nothing in comparison to knowing it was about to happen for real.

Patton was going to be grounded forever, at best, and it was his fault. The least he could do was witness exactly what he’d caused.

The monster slid the scissor blades into place, adjusting the angle once or twice, and then snapped them shut with a sharp snkt!

A fistful of feathers tumbled free from Patton’s wing, jagged at one end from where they’d been sheared off. Another cut, and more downy blue scraps fluttered down to the desk’s surface.

Remus felt his breath catch in his throat, a sick and sudden hope twisting through him.

He waited on pins and needles as first one wing, and then the next, had their feathers cropped short with snip after snip of the scissors. There was no split flesh or severed bone, only the near-silent whisper of more and more feathers being cut away.

There were a few moments where the scissors got dangerously close to clipping a blood feather, but ultimately, when Patton was deposited back in the cage, it was without a single wound.

Well. Without any physical wounds.

Even as Remus gathered his friend into a crushing hug, Patton remained unresponsive. Checking him over revealed dull eyes and his shorn wings laid out limply behind him.

He didn’t twitch, not even when the human reached in and clicked a thick, bulky piece of plastic around his shin.

More than willing to pick up the slack, Remus lunged at the intruding digits with a snarl and bared teeth, his wings flared out aggressively.

There was no biting through gloves that thick, though, and with a few casual movements, it had him pinned down with suffocating force. A pair of fingers pinched around his leg, pulling the limb straight and maneuvering something hard and smooth into place around it despite his best efforts to kick and writhe.

There was a click, and the bastard finally, finally withdrew, closing and locking the cage door thoroughly behind it.

Remus barely spared a glance for the thick plastic cuff that had been latched around his lower leg or the wire cord connecting it to the other half of the restraint where it sat on Patton’s own leg. It didn’t matter, not compared to the insistent urge to reach out and make sure that Patton was really there, really alive despite his current lifelessness.

At first, he scoffed at the idea that it was a punishment to be linked to his only companion in this sterile gold-leafed hell, but a closer inspection of Patton’s wings revealed the truth.

Almost every single primary had been severed, an obvious gap with a long stretch of jagged angles left behind. Patton wouldn’t be able to fly like that. Remus would be surprised if he could even manage to glide like that.

Oh. He understood now.

Without use of his wings, the chances of them escaping dropped as abruptly as a piano from the top of a skyscraper, going from challenging to near-impossible.

Hurting Patton and making him watch had been the punishment. Cuffing them together, making it so that any attempt to fly, to escape, would end with Patton inevitably dragging them down— that was a reminder.

Maybe they could still manage to find a way out, if Patton could be persuaded once he came back to himself.

Maybe next time they got caught, it would be the wing itself that was snapped, instead of just the feathers.

Maybe the punishments would continue to escalate until all that was left to cuff Remus to was Patton’s bloodied corpse.

“Sunshine,” he tried with an unsteady voice, desperate for a response, anything to get his mind off the miserable hopelessness of their situation. “Can you hear me?”

Patton didn’t even blink, his mind far away and his body unresponsive. He stared through Remus with glassy eyes, and Remus bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, forcing his breathing into something steadier out of spite alone.

Okay. Patty Wagon wasn’t quite ready to come back yet. That was alright.

Remus could take care of them both for a little bit.

He drew Patton closer, folding his friend’s wings back in as neatly as he could and resisting the urge to run his fingers obsessively over the irregular edges of the cut feathers– they’d need to be removed, but not now. Not now.

Once his mangled wings weren’t laying askew, Patton started looking a little less like roadkill. It was alarmingly easy to maneuver him into a hopefully-comfortable sleeping position, as simple as wrapping an arm around his shoulders and squishing him against his side like they were dead fish in a tin.

It might have been his imagination, but when he ran his hand over Patton’s back, he thought it was a little less tense than before.

With nightmarish visions still playing on the back of his eyelids every time he blinked, Remus mantled his wings to hide the both of them as best he could, and settled in for a sleepless night.

[myhahnestopinion]

The Night AN UNSEEN, UNCHALLENGED, UNSURPRISINGLY OLD GHOST Came Home: SCREAM (1981)

Wes Craven’s Scream is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, chock full of creativity, intelligence, and frightful thrills. It’s excellent blend of horror and parody made the film a critical and commercial success, revitalized the slasher genre, and started one of the most iconic and successful franchises in scary movie history. It is also is one of my favorite films of all time! I love Scream! What is it doing in this blog series?

Oh, not that Scream. Turns out that 15 years before Wes Craven created one of the best slasher films ever made, a filmmaker named Byron Quisenberry directed a film titled Scream that is often regarded as one of the worst slashers ever. Yes, for a brief period of history, the title Scream was synonymous not with a witty dissection and celebration of the horror genre, but with an absolutely bewilderingly inept attempt at a murder mystery plot. 1981’s Scream is a film so confusing that I found myself frequently rewinding the movie and endlessly pouring over a plot summary in a desperate attempt to figure out just what exactly was happening at various points in the movie. Perhaps the only thing from Scream that I understood in the end is that, when your group of tourists is being stalked and killed one by one by a mysterious foe, you should really learn to live without your morning coffee.

Wes Craven’s Scream begins with one of the most iconic scenes in movie history, as Drew Barrymore’s deadly horror trivia game with a mysterious caller reveals to the audience just how surprising, clever, and gruesome the film would be. Byron Quisenberry’s Scream, meanwhile…. does not. The film begins by panning over a mantelpiece, where a clock and several small porcelain figurines sit. The shot fades into another shot of the mantelpiece, but now all the heads of the figurines are broken off, save for one mustachioed figure who stares with wide porcelain eyes at the camera. Cut to title.

No, this is not a film about a living, murderous porcelain figurine, nor is it about a clock, nor a mantelpiece. No, the rest of the film has pretty much nothing to do with this opening. But, perhaps, it does do a good job of clueing the audience in to what to expect. The porcelain dolls clue us into how lifeless the actors in this film will be. The broken heads inform us of how bloodless and cheap the kills will be. The clock notifies us of how often one will be checking their watch, trying to decipher this film’s sense of pacing. And, of course, the cumulative effect of this opening reveals to us that absolutely nothing in this dreadful, incompetent dreck will make sense.

The film’s soundtrack, which sounds like it was plucked from a cloying 80s family sitcom, plays over the lengthy opening credits, as we watch a group of tourists make their way on rafts down a river. Upon reaching the shore, they walk to their destination: an old West ghost town. Ah, yes, the perfect tourist destination. Come to Old West Ghost Town, where there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nowhere to meet! Old West Ghost Town: rates starting at, according to the characters, $100, which means their vacation probably cost more money than the movie that they are currently starring in!

So, the gang of tourists all settle into what is surely going to be the most thrilling part of their vacation, though some of them have hesitation. When older man Al tries to bring up some undetailed business venture to his friend Ross, Ross suggests that he relax. “Relax? I am relaxed!” Al replies, as he stands there stiffly, posed for the camera, making deliberate, robotic motions with his arms.

Later, the group is preparing their sleeping bags for the night, because this vacation schedule apparently involves arriving at this ghost town just in time to sleep. Though, to be fair, there wouldn’t be anything to do there anyway. One tourist picks on hapless tourist Lou for choosing to wear a baseball cap on his head as he sleeps. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of ghosts,” the tourist mocks. Why do baseball caps ward off ghost, you ask? Why, because ghosts won’t attack someone with team spirit, of course! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! 

Honestly though, I don’t know. Considering this whole exchange was re-dubbed dialogue, I assume it was thrown in late in the game to suggest to the audience that the villain might be a ghost, because the film otherwise... just kind of forgets to explain its villain...

Anyway, the tourists have settled into their new ghost town home, but they won’t be able to relax for long. Al gets up in the middle of the night to get some coffee, as one is wont to do when trying to get to sleep. Being in a horror film, he decides to investigate a door that moved. Later, one of the female tourists also gets up and wanders the deserted town, but stumbles upon Al’s hanged body. The tourists gather in the saloon in wake of this discovery. “Someone here is a murderer!” Bob shouts instantly. Yeah, he’s right! I mean, have you ever heard of someone hanging themselves?! 

So, tensions erupt among the tourists. It’s like And Then There Were None or The Thing or something, but not like that at all. When tourist Rod tries to state that he doesn’t believe any of the tourists would murder someone, Bob instantly shoots down this ridiculous notion. “It’s interesting you would say that,” Bob says, pausing for dramatic effect before pointing his finger and adding, “BECAUSE HE WAS YOUR FRIEND, WASN’T HE?” Uh, you got him there, Bob! That’s a motive if I’ve ever heard one!

This film feels like it was written by a five-year-old who was just exposed to Sherlock Holmes for the first time.

Perhaps shaken by this dramatic accusation, Rod suddenly decides that now would be the perfect time to have some beer. “The beer is in the jail,” tour guide Jerry informs him. Why is the beer in the jail, you ask? Eh, something about a “cold case” or something. Look, I’m not going to put much effort into my puns if the filmmakers aren’t going to put any effort into their excuses for why more tourists decide to break off from the group! 

So, with the whole group frightened over the prospect of a murderer in their midst, Rod goes off alone to get the beer. When he enters the jail, sounds of a struggle are heard. The tourists go out to search for him a few minutes later, and discover his dead body. “They’re must be something in here to help us find who is doing this,” tour guide Stan remarks as he stares into the dark jail. However, while Stan may understand that clues are one of the central components of a mystery, the film does not, and at no point bothers to write any.

Not that it would matter to Stan much anyway, as, after making this observation, he immediately decides that he’s not interested in investigating anyway, leaving elderly man John to enter the dark jail all by himself. John is promptly sliced up with a butcher knife. Wow, it’s almost like splitting up and going off alone when people are being mysteriously murdered is a bad idea! Who knew? Oh, that’s right, the other Scream film did. 

Back in the saloon, Marion is distraught over the death of her father John. “Poor Marion, I feel so sorry for her,” one tourist says. “Yeah, for several reasons,” a tour guide responds. One reason is presumably because her father was butchered, but I’m not quite sure what the other ones are. Is it that she has to be a part of this terrible movie?

The next morning, the group heads to the river, only to discover the rafts were shredded in the night. A tour guide notes that the nearest village is 30 miles away, meaning that the gang is now stranded, because when one has frequents tours of old abandoned ghost towns, it just simply doesn’t make sense to have, I don’t know, a vehicle stored away for emergencies, or at least some form of communication. It’s all about the authenticity, I suppose.

Lucky for the group, two motorcyclists ride into town later that afternoon in a convenient and not at all contrived occurrence! Tour guide Jerry takes one of the motorcycles, and heads off with the other cyclist to find help. So, while the gang waits for the two to return with a rescue team, then engage in all the fun activities that one can do when visiting a ghost town, which, again, is nothing. Why go to Disneyland when you can stand around an abandoned town for hours, drinking old coffee? 

This lack of meaningful events to fill the runtime does lead to one bizarre moment, where the gang is standing around and eating beans, as is their only option. Everyone suddenly stop eating their beans, and glare at Lou, who is also eating beans. Noticing everyone staring, he slowly puts his bowl down, and walks away, his head hung in defeat. That’s the scene. He is judged and sent away for eating the same amount of beans at the same exact pace as everyone else. Yes, this movie is so inept that it can’t even do a terrible thing like fat-shaming right!

Lou’s sad-sack nature is a recurrent focus of this film. After Lou wanders off alone, because these characters still haven’t learned the most basic of survival techniques, he is frightened when he thinks he sees some of the dead bodies move. He tries to inform Bob, but Bob dismisses him, causing Lou to once again walk away, his head hung in defeat in the exact same manner as before. It’s like Charlie Brown, but almost sadder, because all his misery and rejection is simply the result of the film desperate flailing when it realized it never wrote a plot.

Later, Lou wanders off alone again, and is started when a dead body falls out of a dark doorway onto his shoulders. There’s no real reason why this dead body would suddenly fall at that exact moment, but maybe they were just trying to give Lou a hug, because this dude just really needs one. 

It’s been six hours, and Jerry has still not returned with help, and so the tourists decide to start preparing for another night with this murderer on the loose. Part of this involves, of course, getting more coffee. I mean, I know coffee is technically a drug and everything, but maybe you guys should just hold off for one night, considering that the motorcyclist is murdered when he goes off to fetch it. Or, you know, maybe stop sending people off on their own after several people have been murdered for going off on their own.

Another part of preparing for this night involves an effort, led by Bob, to create traps for the killer. One such trap involves stringing together a bunch of aluminum cans at the bottom of the saloon’s doorway, so that they can be alerted if someone tries to enter. This trap, of course, fails, because it’s almost as if a determined murderer could easily step over a string of cans if they wanted to remain undetected. The tourists presumably would have gone with a less noticeable trap, but they couldn’t afford to lose the Dr. Pepper product placement that this string of cans allowed them!

At the stroke of midnight, the remaining members of the group heard a noise outside, and watch as a cowboy on a horse-drawn carriage emerges out of the fog. No one seems too terribly concerned with this cowboy appearing out of nowhere, until they discover that he brings Jerry’s body with him, indicating that help is not coming. “Ask him about Stan,” one tourist remarks. So, with a mysterious stranger showing up, with the body of their dead friend, on a night when an unknown killer is picking them off one by one, the tourist group makes the natural decision to invite this man in for some coffee.  

It takes a while for anyone to speak. I guess it’s hard to know what to say in such a situation. I might start with asking him who he is, what he’s doing here, why he had the body of their friend, if he is the murderer, or if he is benevolent and can give them a ride to safety, or something in that vein. But, hey, what do I know? I don’t even like coffee!

And so, the cowboy, Charlie Winters, speaks first. “I was a sailor, you know,” he begins. Wow, I didn’t know that! Probably because I’ve never met you before in my life, so I’m not quite sure how I was supposed to know that you were a sailor. And so, the tourists listen intently as Charlie goes on to… explain absolutely nothing. He rambles on about how he used to know this ship captain. This ship captain was no longer able to have a ship after some “cruel, company men” took it from him. Charlie then leaves. 

According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Scream’s script was unfinished when shooting began. My best guess is that one of the parts that they forgot to write was the rest of Charlie’s speech, in which he would go on to explain that this captain still remains in town, murdering people, for vengeance. Presumably, that was going to be the point of this exchange. Instead, though, Charlie simply mentions that he once knew a ship captain, and leaves, with no indication of why this is relevant information, either to the tourists or the audience. “He never told us about Stan,” a tourist notes as Charlie rides off again, as if to emphasize the fact that this entirely scene was completely unhelpful.

With the film somehow forgetting to write the scene where they explain the killer’s nature and his motivation, the film culminates in a truly confusing climax. After sending another person off alone to get, I kid you not, more coffee, the gang finally makes a sensible move and barricade themselves in a shed. I can’t give them too much credit though, because somehow, with all of them pressed against the door, they still manage to allow Lou to be pulled outside by the killer. Charlie shows up again, and shoots the killer, who remains off-screen the entire time, causing him to drop his scythe before he can kill Lou. Then Charlie leaves again, and some random old people instantly show up in a truck to rescue everyone. Oh, and the killer was invisible the whole time!

Umm… Yeah… So, I honestly have no idea what happened in this movie. Someone seemed to figure it out though, because the film’s Wikipedia summary fills in the gaps. Apparently the killer was indeed the ghost of this random ship captain that Charlie knew. I mean, cool, probably should have explained that in the actual movie, but cool. That still leaves me with several questions, such as “Why was this ghost killing these people?”, “Why was a ghost defeated by a shotgun?”, and “Why did this film set up an Agatha Christe-inspired murder mystery plot if the killer was some random ghost the whole time?”. The film’s Wikipedia page also notes that the identity of the killer was kept secret from the actors during shooting. It’s a common filmmaking tactic to enhance the tension of a murder mystery plot… but apparently Scream went one step farther and ended up keeping it a secret from both the writers and the audience as well! 

But wait, there’s more! The film ends by once again panning over that mantelpiece from the beginning. Yes, that mantelpiece that had no relation to anything in the film’s plot. The camera moves away from the decapitated porcelain figurines, panning up to reveal a painting of a shipboat captain, as voiceover of Charlie’s non-explanation plays. The camera then dramatically zooms into the corner of the painting, where a time signature reads “1891”. WOAH! WHAT A TWIST! That means that the ghost captain…lived a long time ago… because that’s just…. kind of what a ghost is… 

Yes, we all know that ghosts are the spirits of people who died a long time ago, but what this film presupposes is… what if ghosts are the spirits of people who died a long time ago…?

This twist seems like it was designed with the idea that one of the tourist would have been revealed to be the killer AND the ghost of a man who lived long ago… You know, that common trope in films such as these! But that’s not what happened! The killer was just some invisible force the whole time. An invisible force that was defeated by a shotgun blast. 

Maybe the film expected us to be surprised that it actually knew what a ghost was, considering that it clearly showed absolutely no knowledge of how anything else works, such as filmmaking, logical character interactions, and basic storytelling techniques, including techniques such as explaining that your killer was an old invisible ghost the whole time. It’s almost ironic for a film bearing the Scream name to embrace horror clichés so wholeheartedly. The film is just a painfully drawn out series of people wandering off one by one, and being picked off by a forever unseen and unexplained ship boat captain. It’s a film so inept that it even botches blatantly stealing its plot from Agatha Christe, seemingly having written two thirds of a (still terrible) mystery, before completely forgetting to write the final third. If there’s one thing I can figure out about Scream though, it is the importance of coffee. Maybe if the screenwriters had had a little coffee, they could have actually finished writing their movie before they needed to turn it in.

Scream is available on DVD.

NEXT: The Night SPAGHETTI-SCULPTING, BUG-BIRTHING FEMINISTS Came Home...