Sketch dump 7/14/16

Still grinding away during this hot, hot summer.  Been watching a lot of HalloweeN 5 lately.

Halloween Horror Nights - Michael Myers Returns!

Michael Myers returns to Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights

I might actually go this year for the Michael Myers maze.

Battle Truck - review

Civilization has begun its march to extinction.  It’s a steady pace, the cadence of violence and fear rings loud and clear for all. Panic is everywhere.  Cities crumble as survivors spread out to the wasteland in search of food and shelter; society decays.  On the streets it is a white line nightmare of Darwinian survival.  The highways are painted red with the blood of the innocent.  The high and tights, the ex-militia, the crazy and lonely and sadistic men that used violence to protect us and let us sleep at night have emerged from the maelstrom to take control.  The gas wars lead to the oil wars which lead to the water wars which end in a nuclear nightmare.  Resources are spread to the breaking point.  Tribalism rules the land.  Roaming bandits feast upon the weak.  It’s a new world, with new rules, learn them….

And amidst the rubble and decay of this post-apocalyptic nightmare, never stopping, never ceasing; BATTLE TRUCK!  A roaming death machine, twisted metal crushing bodies in its wake, unstoppable, unbreakable, and helmed by the sadistic ex-colonel Straker.  Straker sees the new world as it is; an opportunity for the strong to suppress the weak, to survive and flourish as warlords.  Politics of the old world are too soft and for the meek, “too much lipstick, not enough napalm”.  He roams the world doing what “the Generals” were too cowardly to do; instill order through fear and violence.  He has gathered a band of brutal mercenaries to impose his will on whomever he crosses, gobbling them up in his war machine to use as another resource in his unending search for conquest. 

Straker is polite, courteous, and willing to murder anyone with a cold reptilian detachment; anything for more oil.  His daughter however is a peace loving daisy hugging dreamer (bleargh!) who can’t reconcile her petty moral code with the harsh reality of the nuclear wasteland.  She runs away from Straker’s camp and is rescued by a loner with a cool motorcycle and night vision goggles; Hunter.  Hunter brings her to his thriving chicken shit farm.  After telling her he really hates people but helps them anyways he leads her to another community of hippies who are attacked by Battle Truck while picking apples.  They put up a pathetic fight, and a distressed Straker’s daughter runs back to Hunter as the raiders gather up the town women.  Let me tell you, when she is recounting the tale of the fallen town to Hunter it really seems like the actress is suffering from severe PTSD or something.  Snot is flying from her nose, she’s crying so hard she can barely speak her line; holy shitballs give this lady a Grammy or whatever; best supporting actress in a B-rated post-apocalyptic movie about a giant truck.  Later Hunter bangs her, and she gets all prophetic about humanity like she’s stoned or something; damn hippy.  The mailman from Cheers is in this too although his mustache is gone (must have been melted by nuclear fallout). 

There’s a shootout at night.  They must have used the same lighting guy from Humongous because I can’t see shit.  Straker ends up kidnapping his daughter back and Hunter works with the dude from Cheers to build a new battle wagon, which sucks ass.  It really kind of looks like a junky piece of shit but Hunter makes it work.  I’m assuming the film crew tried building something formable at first like the V-8 Interceptor from Mad Max but ran out of money or patience or both and just said “fuck it, let’s mount a machine gun to a beat up Volkswagen bug and call it a day”.   In the end the Battle Truck careens off into a gully and explodes although I’m not convinced Straker really died.  Seemed like they hysterically set up room for a sequel: Battle Truck 2: The Revenge of Straker.  Fuck I’d be there opening day.  Something about post-apocalyptic nonsense makes me feel free and long for the end of civilization.

JC to return to HALLOWEEN

From the OFFICIAL HALLOWEEN MESSAGE BOARD front page (aka one of the coolest places for Halloween fiends to hang their kitchen knives)

More gore in store....

Hibernating...but it's drawing to an end...soon fiends the next evolution in chunk blowers will be upon us...hail the gore vomit elite...

Yulyeong part 1

To the living damned contained in Camp 22 the events of the night was the only miracle in memory; an insidious thought in these conditions where the mere hint of hope can drive a man insane.  If you dreamt of escape or freedom from Kwan-li-so it was almost a guarantee you wouldn’t make it through this hell on Earth; many had taken their own life to escape the torment of the hard labor camp.  The baby was born after the work shift ended at 10AM; the guards had locked them in for the night after the group finally recited all the prison camp rules without flaw.  Many believe the birth was ironically induced by the hard work put upon the women that day; they were forced to run carts up and down a hill like cattle for several hours, a production without any purpose beyond cruelty, the same large stones carried down the hill would be rushed back up.  The guards did this so pregnant women would miscarriage, but it seemed to have the effect of inducing labor for one nameless women, new to the camp, already haggard, hunched over, bleeding from scabs on her feet and hands.  When she wasn’t sleeping or working she was weeping, another wail to join the cacophony of ever present sorrow at Camp 22.   

There were at least forty of them in that cramped space.  Most nights nearly all of them would fall into sleep instantly upon selecting a cramped space on the floor, passing out from exhausting and starvation, but there was too much excitement in the air tonight, and electric charge that pulsated through the whole group.  They were careful to cover up their excitement, arousing the guards suspicions at this hour would result in the torture and beating death of a few.  Several offered scrapes of clothing to help stem the flow of blood from the women in labor, which was no small sacrifice; all prisoners were only allowed one pair of clothing to last the rest of their miserable lives.   The women had bitten down so hard on a pine comb that several of her teeth cracked free from her weak, blackened gums, bouncing off the floor into secret spaces.  Some saved the teeth; it would be all they would have to remember the nameless women by.

She trembled and heaved throughout the night, her body casting a wet blanket of steam over the cramped quarters of their cell.  Some tired of the spectacle; their dreamless sleep was the only escape from the daily dread of life.  Finally, with the last geyser of blood and amniotic fluid the baby quietly slipped out of her dark ruby interior as her body finally gave in to blood loss and exhaustion; she died with a weak barely audible rasp.  Some prisoners ate the afterbirth raw; cooking was strictly forbidden, and they were all starving, on the verge of collapse.  Starvation was the leading cause of death here; the daily diet of 30 kernels of corn and salt couldn’t sustain a ten year old, never mind a full grown adult working hard labor for all waking hours.  Food was more valuable than gold.  It was not uncommon to hear about a prisoner picking undigested corn kernels from animal shit for sustenance.  Eating rats and frogs whole was a treat; the prisoners are given no meat, they were forced to catch their own and skin them with their bare teeth.  Some were even considering eating the fresh cadaver of the new mother.

The most miraculous aspect of the birth was the baby’s quiet demeanor; it never cried out or made any sort of fuss.  The wail of a new born was not present, only ghostly silence passed from its lips.  Several women tried breast feeding the baby to no avail; malnutrition ran rampant.   It was thought that despite the miraculous birth the baby was doomed to be lost.  Surely it would be discovered by the guards as work resumed at 6AM in the morning, and they would cut the mewing youngling down like an errant weed. 

But when the shift began at 5AM it was nowhere to be found.  Those that fell asleep early in the night assumed the labor ended in miscarriage, and that is the story the guards received as well after a few broken bones.  The last person that had seen it alive had dosed off with the bloody thing wrapped in her caring arms, but when she came to her senses it was gone.  Some thought they had hallucinated the whole thing; their minds and bodies approaching the end of their meager existence.  The guards dragged the inert body of the mother from the cell; her crimson trail stained the cement and would be all that was left behind, when the prisoners returned they would be too exhausted to turn their thoughts to the events of the prior night, and like a bad dream all note of the baby’s birth would be passed from memory.

But the baby did not die, it grew up in that hell, behind the walls, and the secret places where the rats and bugs held council.  Its skinny, pale androgynous body could pass as either man or woman; nobody had seen enough of the poor creature to quantify it as either.  Its skin held taunt over a skeletal frame, like an animated corpse.   With deep obsidian eyes it has held silent witness to every barbarism imaginable, torture without end at Camp 22.  It would whisper to the prisoners being box tortured, unfortunate souls locked in a confining 4 foot boxes for days upon weeks without being able to stand or stretch out.  Many would die from blood clots after release; the few survivors would blame the whispering creature on their own fleeing sanity.

It would leave the guards secret treats and trinkets.  Tobaccos collected from discarded cigarettes were meticulously rolled into new joints and distributed in secret under the guise of night.  It held no special hatred for the guards or love for the prisoners of Camp 22.  It would donate a skinned frog to a prisoner one day, and then awaken a slumbering guard the next before his supervisor could round the corner.  Despite the cruelty of its conditions, despite never feeling the warmth of human kindness itself, the fire of compassion burned deep inside the creature that simply became known as the “yulyeong”, Korean for “ghost”.  

Concerning the biology and brief history of vampires...

Vampires are one of the earliest races of men, land sharks on two legs; they have rows of sharp fangs cramping the space of their mouth as they pile onto their swollen gums in chaotic order.  Many vampires are deformed with desiccated, skull like faces and cleft chins; blood is the main source of nutrition for the vampire, and the only source of true replenishment.  For this reason many vampires appear shriveled, slow moving, on the verge of starvation, ribs and bones jutting out of grey skin, stretching its leather like consistency, muscles atrophied and knotted, their nails black and thickly coagulated with keratin.  Only deeply gorging on the blood of many victims will make the vampire appear anything close to human as the hemoglobin revitalizes their flesh, gives it a pinkish hue.  The eyes of a vampire resemble giant blood blisters, red and swollen sacks that sit deeply in the sockets of their skull, edges frayed and cracked like a poached egg.  Vampires are either completely bald or have long flowing, albino hairs that are slow to grow and drape from the skull like dangling spider webs.  A true vampire would never be able to woo a sane human capable of sight, or smell, as the odor of a vampire is quite repugnant even to the most calloused sense of smell.  Despite the tall tales woven through time vampires have not been able to successfully blend with humans since the passing of the lepers, but the myth of the vampire persisted from the race memory of man, since the earliest tribes of man hunted each other to utter extinction.  During this time, when the oxygen was rich, and the mark of man’s footprint was fresh upon Pangea, many various races of man existed.  There were giants, ogres, trolls, and smaller gnomes and elves and various species of leprechaun.  There were reptiles that walked on two legs and spoke in slithering syllables that could not be replicated by mammalian tongue, lycanthropes that could bend their form at will, and different mutations of all kinds that took the shape of man.  The vampire was only one of them, and a small portion at that; most vampires can trace their lineage back to one or two ancient caverns, inaccessible now due to earthquake and mudslide, the ravages of time and the ever so slowly altering landscape of the world.  They were nearly wiped out by greedy human hunters who valued their many rows of fangs for trophy and trade.  The sun burned their parched pale blue-grey skin, only nocturnal travel was possible, but even Neanderthals could move at night under the light of the moon.  During the day the vampire would sleep in the shade or in loose soil below ground, discovery meant a slow death.  Extinction closed in as other humanoids hunted them across the planes of Pangea; their caves were ripe with the dead, stacked in the corners and burned to make room for more.  A plan was formed among the elders; the one benefit of being a vampire was the ability to hibernate below ground, taking sustenance only from dirt and rot like a dark flower.  The vampires surmised they could outlast all other tribes of man simply by hibernating underground and waiting them out as the tribes of humanoids on the surface world wiped each other out.  Hundreds of years would pass, maybe even a thousand, and the vampires will rise to a fresh new world.  A properly fed vampire could cling to life for centuries if careful enough. 

Life as a vampire is anything but romantic; it means hiding in dark alleys and underground, feasting on rats and vermin, the constant tug of blood lust never out of sight, always in mind.  Filth and darkness become your closest allies, the creatures of the night your subtle teachers.  Some vampires have been known to nest in septic tanks and sewage pipes; they need very little oxygen to survive.  For many vampires clothing is optional; their grotesque and pot marked bodies naked, like grotesque wild animals, a mockery of modern man made flesh.  Many are missing genitalia; the unused organs turn black, wither and fall off like rotten fruit.  Vampire reproduction is rare.  Female vampires can give birth, but first they must engorge their womb sacks with blood, a difficult achievement in the wild and even more difficult in the modern world of men.  After being impregnated by another vampire they will undergo a blood orgy, preferably the victims would be captured beforehand.   The couple would feast on the human blood of multiple victims until the female vampire drunk on hemoglobin, was ready to conceive.  Vampires give birth to broods; several siblings rise at once in a communal womb sac, this uterus is prematurely removed from the female vampire and placed deep underground to mature undisturbed in the rich soil, preferably a graveyard or crypt.