TRASH CASKET

Well, well, well...a year or so late, and a dollar fuckin' short. So what the hell happened?! To be honest, everything, really. New house, new (er, sorta) gig, became a fucking FATHER, of all things...it's been chaos. A total personal holocaust of utter destruction, shaky-yet-vital rebirth, and all around tentative, if monumental mutation. With that tone in the air, I thought: fuck it. The time has come to return to my bastard internet spawn of borderline-useless creative venting, my mental jizz-spray of arcane, yet potentially vital musings, to guide us through these dark and odd times. So with that...let us jump RIGHT back into the wave pool I dropped you off at so very long ago, and smear ourselves with the pungent musk of...yes...the 1990s.

The '90s, as you may remember, were a weird time. Hell, maybe you DON'T remember. More likely, you're trying not to. Whatever you're up to in that brain of yours, it doesn't change the fact that the '90s were some weird shit, right out of the gate. Remember Tom Petty's FREE FALLIN' video, from '89? It pretty much predicted what the dawn of the '90s would be all bout.

Assholes

Those unbearably angsty skate kids just...you know...skating, dourly? Because, you know...like, the artifice of the '80s was behind them, and they just had to, like, SHED all that shit, and just BE, man? And like, just fuckin' FROWN, because they were too REAL to, like, feel joy anymore? Yeah, it was a bunch'a fuckin' bullshit. But it literally predicted grunge, right down to the last, phony drop. Now, I DIG Tom Petty, he's a rad motherfucker, and videos both previous and forthcoming - Don't Come Around Here No More & Last Dance With Mary Jane, for instance - prove that the scowling anti-rockstar horseshit the early '90s traded in was very much beneath him. But he DID see the shift in tide coming up around the bend, that's for damned sure. I bring it up to merely point out, that there was some very weird shit in the air right as the big Nine-Oh opened its gates. You could feel that the party was coming to an end, or at the very least, turning sharply sideways. Not all at once, mind you. But it was there.

So where the hell does this leave you humble host's increasingly uncomfortable ramble? Well, let's land the warship in, oh, say 1991. Right about when the '90s TRULY became The Nineties, and long before everything you nostalgically worship actually happened. That's where an eight-year-old CORPSE MONGER comes into the story. And he was not altogether happy.

Your humble host could tell that things were...off. The party that was life seemed like it was winding down, and for no discernable reason. Everything that was good - objectively, purely, beautifully good - was bizarrely going out of style, drop by drop, like when your best friend becomes, almost imperceptibly, a dickbag overnight once he hits middle school, and starts shunning you, just because. That's what culture was doing at around that time. And it was hard to put your finger on. There was just this ennui that replaced all the excitement. Societal pod-people type shit, but when you're little kid, you can't quite put a name on it.

But I had my obsessions. I still burrowed for the fruit beneath the trash, vigorously. The afternoon cartoons were pretty fuckin' fresh. Duck Tales was still ragin' on in repeats, and that begat Darkwing Duck, Tiny Toon Adventures was in its prime, Gummy Bears was still inexplicably delightful (and sweet Jesus, that theme song was sonic Crack)...but the one that pulled me in, with an unhealthy hold, was naturally CHIP AND DALE'S RESCUE RANGERS. Granted, Tiny Toons was easily the best of the lot, but the adventures of Chip and Dale held an unhealthy sway over my tiny mind...mostly because of my sweet, beloved Gadget.

My tiny underpants reeked of cheese

Yeah, judge me, fuck stick. Play it off like you don't exhaust your bandwith looking up caviar films until daybreak. Me, I saw beauty in that uflappably chipper rodent form. I dreamed about her. I was too young yet master boppin' my baloney, but the instinct...my god, man, it raged within my like a forest fire. It haunted me, turned my into a melancholic, pre-adolescent poet, yearning for a lust I could never fulfill...at least not until the internet age, some years later. But there was a long road ahead of me, until those gilded days.

In between bouts of crackling pre-teen sexual psychopathology, I dwindled my remaining months in public school (before a full scale anxiety-fueled meltdown saw me packing my bags at the start of 3rd grade, and turning my back on society almost altogether), doing kid stuff like obsessing over the Troll catalogs that heralded the arrival of the mythic book fair.

A window into a world I could never belong to

I suppose I should give, just a little bit, here. Yeah, I dropped some heavy shit, and tried to move on, but you were too quick for me. Grade 3 was begun by yours truly, but never finished. I didn't attend public school again until 6th grade deep into the '90s, and after that spectacular failure, never again until I got my GED a couple years into The Oughts. To put in plain, as we southerners are wont to do (wait, what?), my family was unraveling faster than the goddamn Mummy from Monster Squad. Whether that precipitated my massive childhood anxiety, or merely added boundless fuel to that already-raging fire, the fact remains that I was losing touch with society, and had just about zero coping mechanisms to interact with it. This was the edge of my becoming borderline feral for a good couple years, there. But not yet. Not, quite, yet. I had my cartoons, and my Castlevania, and more comics, and my Fangorias. Speaking of...

Yeah. Speaking of. There was a little something in the air at the time, and my constantly leering over the newest issues of Fangoria, GoreZone, and whatever off-brand rag was handy at the time hipped me up to it, whether I totally grasped it or not. A weird little tidbit that caught my eye and somehow deemed itself important in my tiny eyes...the controversy, such as it was, surrounding LEATHERFACE: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. Now, here's a little something that might not make sense to you kids now - or maybe it'll make a little too much sense to you by the time any of you read this - but TCM3 was viewed, at the time, to be the absolute limit the God-fearing mainstream could allow, and just barely at that. Apparently, it was a straight up scandal, and as such, it spoke to me somehow.

As important to me as Santa

Like every ne'er do well horror kid, I had heard of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And like most 8 year olds, I still hadn't seen it yet. But Leatherface was still an icon, just like the fuckin' Kool Aid Man, or the President, whoever the fuck that was...you knew him just by looking, and his reputation was legendary, even if you half made it up yourself by filling in the countless blanks. He romped through the pages of Cracked Monster Party, he was a reference you'd make on a lonely road traveling somewhere late at night, you knew what he did...basically. But like sex, you didn't really know it 'til you knew it. So the sudden, big fuss about it was like someone bitching about tits in your general direction...you always knew they existed, you always knew you kinda dug 'em, but now, you NEEDED to know what all the sweat and spittle was about. And like tits indeed, Leatherface lived up.

It may have been mangled, crippled, hobbled, and generally folded-spindled-mutilated from what it originally set out to be, but even before you saw this thing, you could feel the sick rolling off of it. And let me tell you bunkie, at the dawn of the PC era, that was INTOXICATING. Particularly if your balls had practically just dropped. Suddenly, sight-unseen, Leatherface became your best imaginary friend.

My idolatry did not match my spelling prowess

Like Gadget, I had a new obsession. Although this one tickled some very different impulses than my rodent paramour...though maybe not as far apart as the sane might admit. Somehow I knew there was a distinctly sexual edge to the whole TCM thing...no, not sexual, exactly...perverse. THAT was the ticket, even though I couldn't quite articulate it, even in my mind...again, the sickness of it drew me in. A secret, special sickness. I began drawing pictures of Leatherface, making my own little comic books, dreaming my own deranged adventures for this twisted, forbidden boogeyman to slash about in, based on nothing but my own cobbled-together, fractured understanding of the character and his inner workings...in spite of the fact that I had him face off against fucking Predator once, I was actually pretty close to heart of it all. TCM is one of those funny things in life where whatever unthinkable depravity you can dream up, is actually likely to be represented in some way, shape, or form at some point. "It's exactly what you think it is", as PIECES, TCM's most infamous knockoff would later come to crow. And fair enough. Truly, for once, fair e-fuckin'-nuff.

"Wait, this has TITS?!"

As it stands, I wouldn't have to guess for long. Leatherface and his bastard sequel were in every horror rag I feasted my eyes on at the corner drug and grocery store, and I knew that there was a REAL comic book based on the flick coming out...but thanks to the afore-mentioned family meltdown, my dad was living at my semi-estranged half-sister's house, and, to escape the constant malevolent turmoil that my immediate siblings usually targeted me for (or I was at least adjacent to), I got into the habit of staying with pops, eventually more-or-less living with him and my half-sis' family. One good thing about that chaotic situation, was that these cats hit the video store on a damn-near nightly basis, and they had a habit of renting some pretty wild shit (they were into some pretty wild shit).

Occasionally, it was even wild shit that I got to pick, and when the chance finally presented itself to rent the still-steaming Leatherface video, you'd goddamn better believe I took it. Well, and I took a shot at Mutant Hunt too, but my dad shut that down at the first sight of tits. That was dear ol' Dad...you could cut a woman's face off, but she'd better keep her shirt on. My mom on the other hand couldn't handle gore at all, but basically shrugged off tits, probably because, well, she had some.
My dad was the kind of guy who, succumbing to basic human urges, would pick up a porn mag at a truck stop, but sneer at it in case anyone was looking, yet understood my primal urge to watch Dawn of the Dead when I was still in single digits. Whereas my mom started laughing hysterically when someone accidentally popped in a porn in front of all the kids at a family Halloween party once, yet thought I was going to become a serial killer because of my obsession with horror. Parents are weird. Then again as this rambling missive clearly illustrates, I had exactly zero healthy preoccupations across the board, so maybe they were both onto to something.

I should visit my parents more

Anyway, the movie was as I'd hoped. It WAS "exactly what I thought it was", and gasoline rained freely on the fire that had been sparked by all the photos, all the indignant, shocked word of mouth. In the post-"torture porn" era we live in today, it's hard to image Leatherface creating the moral panic that it did (however briefly), but the ENTIRE vibe of the early '90s was to get shit that had been going berserk in pop culture for the past 20 or 30 years FINALLY under control. To make things safe an' sane for our culture, to think of the children, to put a condom on your very mind just like your well-behaved, God-fearing Republican cock, and to let the PMRC take you by the hand and lead you up to the mountain, where Abraham was waiting. Neutered as it may have been, Leatherface wasn't having any of that shit.

Neutered? Did I say neutered?

As most of you horror-adept reading this know (*in which your author and host pretends for his own edification that anyone is, in fact, reading this), TCMIII began its ill-birthed existence as a legendarily ultra-violent script by splatterpunk lauriete David J.Schow. And while a jobbing Jeff Burr took a decidedly more pedestrian approach to the material whilst sitting in the director's chair, the sheer nature of the material itself couldn't be tamed outright, and the resultant cinematic atrocity was assaulted and brutalized by limp-dicked New Line execs with more furor than even the characters onscreen, then FURTHER defiled by no-dicked clowns at the MPAA. After passing through no fewer than three well-meaning entities looking to do nothing short of turn Leatherface into a gelding, the debauched flick wound up nowhere NEAR as deranged as it so dearly sought to be. But at the time - only glimpsed at, through my still-inexperienced eyes - there was one frontier where anything and everything truly went...the comic book page.

NEXT UP...FOUR COLOR DEBAUCHERY, AND A TRUE LEGEND RISES TO BECOME A PERVERSE SAVIOR IN A MALIGNANT AGE!