Fall Creepings

The Continuing Chronicle of Everett Stillwell’s Holy War With Hollywood

by Everett Stillwell

… For the first few months after I arrived in L.A., it seemed like there was only the sun with its vapid heat, baking the contents of my skull into an even more rosy confusion. I was staggering around Hollywood, sweating my way into tighter and tighter concentric circles, all the while with that goddamned sun turning the skin of my face and head into cheap, cracked leather, just like the kind they use for those wallets made in Singapore that get sold here in Wal-Mart or any other low rent department store catering to the limited and desperate.

I went to see Blade.

Such disappointment. I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s just say that while making a fantasy action comic book into a fantasy action movie should be the easiest thing in the world (after all, isn’t a comic book just a screenplay and storyboard wrapped into one?), it keeps getting screwed up (Spawn, Tank Girl, etc.).

Everything is so right in the first reel. We have Traci Lords, we have underground techno clubs, we have blood instead of dry ice, we have scrawny little vampire club kids getting blown apart by a Dolomite-looking Wesley Snipes. What goes wrong is that, despite the plethora of ideas offered by the comic, this opening is all the filmmakers had for material. Everything that comes after the first sequence is just the same tired and cliché shit that usually gets thrown into these kinds of movies when there’s a drought of originality – the same tired shit executed without even the most basic competence. Which, in turn, only makes the story’s serious flaws of plot and internal logic stand out even more.

Even if the filmmakers hadn’t had done such a lousy job, Blade still would have sucked because all the characters are basically badly written. Now you might scoff and say that action/vampire movies based on comic books don’t have to be character-driven, but let me remind you that the real reason people read comics has nothing to do with the sex and violence and that other crazy bullshit. The great comics, like everything else, suck you in because they offer cool, well-written characters you can hang out with for a little while. Anything else basically amounts to sniffing glue. Watching Blade, however, is like sniffing Elmer’s Glue.

I also have to add that having Wesley Snipes sound like a high school Halloween party Dracula through those 10¢ vampire teeth doesn’t cut it as camp; plus the man should seriously think about taking a vacation from all those steroids – even Mr. T knew when to quit.

Despite all this, after I was done watching Blade, I felt better than I had in weeks – ecstatic even – for I realized that the plot (Wesley Snipes taking on an empire of vampires) was actually a Holy message meant just for me, encoded in metaphor. I suddenly understood who I was, and what my mission was.

I, Everett Stillwell, used to be merely a humble film guru and prophet. No more. The forces that caused me to travel to L.A. last summer also transmutated my soul which I now know to be divine. I, Everett Stillwell, am now an angel of The Lord.

Of course, when I say “Lord,” I am referring to the true God of mankind; the God of Projected Light. My mission is to infiltrate the enemy – the Hollywood establishment – which currently enslaves my God, and learn its organic structure so that I might, like the other renegade angels who have come before me (Lynch, Cronenberg, Black, Coen, and Bigelow, to name but a few), bring my Lord to the masses free from cancers of ignorance, greed, banality, and cynicism.

…It was the end of August. I wasted no time, deciding that as good a way as any to begin infiltration was through a graduate film program. Both UCLA and USC were too academic and irrelevant, so I picked the other big school in town, the Conservatory. Getting in was a piece of cake – I just went to the Red Rock Bar on Sunset the Saturday before classes began. In ten minutes, I had befriended a young incoming screenwriting fellow who, as luck would have it, I bore a striking resemblance to. Forty minutes and several overpriced beers later, I was back at his one bedroom in Los Feliz Village. Before he knew what was going on, I’d clocked him over the head with the Yellow Pages, hog-tied him with some twine I’d stolen from 7-11, and stuffed him in the closet. The following Monday at registration, I found out the poor bastard had even paid all his tuition bills in advance. Nobody at the Conservatory ever gave me so much as a second look.

I blinked my eyes and it was the end of September. I was watching What Dreams May Come, which, like Blade, should have been fantastic but falls very, very short. The director, Vincent Ward, made me cry with Map Of The Human Heart, but this new film only made my ass fall asleep. Five times. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.

The movie looks wonderful, but dies because the whole thing is supposed to be this super-great love story, and it just isn’t there. Blade has bad characters, but at least they’re, uh, there. To make things even more ass-freezing, Robin Williams, the king jester of two-note perfection, surpasses himself and gives the flattest performance of his career (it looked as if his face had been superglued into an expression of quizzical joy for the whole show).

The plot of the movie, particularly where Robin Williams has to navigate hell, proved good foreshadowing for what was to befall me.In what must have been response to my infiltration, the forces of Hollywood launched a covert attack against me, in the form of Palm Tree spores suddenly let loose in my neighborhood, inflaming my allergies and rendering me bed-ridden with sickness and unable to pursue my mission.

After several weeks of fearing death, I gathered up the last remnants of my strength and stumbled over to the local Los Feliz cinema to check out Permanent Midnight, which I hoped would offer some sort of tonic for my pain. It sure did. Ben Stiller plays a guy based on a guy who wrote for Alf in the ’80s who was a complete drug fiend. Now, usually there’s no way a drug movie can win, simply because – in the case of hard drugs – there’s only two directions the plot can go: rehab or death (or both) – making it fall under the curse of the three Ps: predictable, preachy, and ponderous. I’m very happy to report that Permanent Midnight beats these impossible odds. The director wisely avoids over indulging in the material, and Ben Stiller gives the best performance of his career. There’s one scene where he shoots heroin into his neck in front of his baby girl that I’m not sure how to describe, except when it was over, so were my allergies.

I went home feeling revitalized, then became horny. Very, very horny.

I don’t know how those black cloak bastards did it (microwave transmission? Subconscious synapse jamming? Simple black magic?), but suddenly my sex drive was out of control. Again, the mission could not be attended to. All of my senses were consumed with fantasies of cheap perfume-drenched pornographic thrills. I needed fast and easy sex – that’s all that mattered in that deranged state. Since I couldn’t afford hookers, I was forced to hang out at the ethnic market down the street and let myself be gigoloed by the thickly-built Armenian housewives who shopped there. This only made the ill cravings worse. Soon, I couldn’t even leave my apartment, let alone make it to the market, because I was compulsively masturbating so much.

In a desperate effort to cast off this spell, I forced myself to sit through an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It’d always looked really bad, and I hoped Buffy could drain my hormones and flush this sex nonsense out of my system.

This ended up being a very smart move since – for the record – Buffy is not buff at all, and whatever dark perverse urges I felt for the other female Vampire slayers were squelched when the show kept going back to all that high school shit. Hmmm, kind of like Power Rangers. My dick started getting limp for the first time in weeks.

I checked out Charmed, and was again rewarded. The show marked the return of Shannen Doherty to TV, and aside from the abundance of belly-button shots, the episode I saw was about as sexy and interesting as a liquid soap commercial. Take The Craft, which Charmed is a direct rip-off of (even down to having the same theme song) and get it rewritten by whoever did all those Sweet Valley High books. Even Doherty’s costar, Alyssa Milano, who has always been my favorite TV B-movie/TV sleaze nymph, looked like a sloth with the sex appeal to match.

Blood continued to happily drain from the dick.

It was now nearing the end of October. Feeling strong and focused enough to leave the apartment once again, I decided kill off the rest of the sex spell by seeing Practical Magic. I had a feeling this movie was total dogshit and was not wrong. Sandra Bullock plays a preppie, New England witch who doesn’t like being a witch, but sort of does, and thinks that wearing little tank tops and looking focused and irritated somehow passes for actual acting and sexiness. Nicole Kidman plays her sexy sister who isn’t really sexy because, this being Bullock’s picture, she’s only allowed to lamely gyrate her pelvis a few times – made even more unsexy because, for some reason, the director told her to spend the whole movie pretending to be Meg Ryan, the queen of perky unsexiness. Aidan Quinn, who is usually very sexy, looks like he’s been eating too many cheeseburgers and Quaaludes, and since it’s Bullock’s movie, doesn’t have any screen time. The picture starts off like it’s trying to ape Witches of Eastwick (the book, not the movie) and then, after a meaningless middle, ends in the vein of Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Total limp dick experience. I loved it. The movie was so ridiculously bad that not only did it rid me of all sexual desire, its power also made me immune to further industry attacks of biological warfare.

Back in the saddle of health and focused righteousness, I was free again to continue with my mission…

to be continued…