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TRASH THEATER, Part 3
VIVA LAS VEGAS & CLAM BAKE Last time, due to a nasty
accident in which a would-be drive-in sneak-in lost his testicles to a snapping
barb wire, we were forced to go overtime in describing the necessary emergency
techniques used to, hopefully, have this guy's nuts sewn back on, and therefore
lost valuable movie reviewing time. We're going to return now and pick right up
where we started. The rest of the movies are: Viva Las Vegas, 1964 86 min. Starring: Elvis Presley, Ann
Margret, Jack Carter (Remember him from . . . something. Hey, was this
the Maverick guy or the shitty comedian with the same name?),
William Demarest (Remember him from My Three Sons?) Directed by: George Sidney The Brain That Wouldn't Die, 1963 81 min. Starring: Herb Evers, Virginia
Leith, Adele Lamont, Leslie Daniel, Paula Maurice. Directed by: Joseph Green Clambake (Goin' to uh,
Clambake. Clambake.) 1967 97 min. Starring: Big N, his
own goddamn self Shelly Fabares, Will Hutchins (Remember him in Sugarfoot?) Bill
Bixby (Remember him in The Hulk?) Directed by: Arthur Nadel It should be noted that we are
writing this now in the cheery glow of a car fire, flaming two rows away. We
thought at first a barbecue grill had gotten out of hand, perhaps too much
gasoline tossed or an overly greasy pork chop that flamed up,
but turns out an eyewitness we talked to named Cletus, explained it like
this. "Well now, I was over'n that pickup right
there. The one with the gun rack in the back and the hippie's skull on the hood
ornament—got that back in 1968. One shot. Right through the liver. Well, I
was sittin' there and
whenever the movie got born', I'd take me a peek over there, cause the way my
truck is all jacked up, I could see what they was
a doin', and it wasn't
Baptist business, I can tell you that..." To make his long, meandering
story short, seems Cletus was watching this gal with a bouffant hairdo, and she
had her head bobbin' in the lap of this fella wearin' a Hawaiian shirt and polyester knits, and
she was doing a sword swallowing act, and damn if she and this fella didn't get
so worked up, he kicked a foot up and hit the lit skeeter coil on the dash and
knocked it into her hairdo, which was ripe with Aqua Net hair spray. That dude
went up like a dry wasp's nest, flames jumped to that ole boy's shirt, caught
them polyester slacks on fire, speedily spread to them goddamn vinyl seat
covers, and that was all she wrote. Damn car blazed like a rocket engine. Anyway, that was the lead up,
and by then, we were over there, and the car was a blazin', and hands and heads were pokin' out of the car—there were
only two people in there—but they were poppin' from one side to the next so fast, trying'
to get out, you'd have thought there were a dozen. It was just horrible. Someone yelled, "Kick
some dirt on the fire," but there wasn't any available dirt. Just asphalt,
so that didn't work. Some cold drinks were tossed, but that was like trying to
put out the sun by pissin'
on it. We were all frantic, then a fella yelled from the crowd. "Whoa!
This here car's got Yankee license plates. It's from Michigan." A silence descended on the
crowd, and they began to move back. A woman with a baby gently instructed
everyone: "Back off. Let 'er burn." Dave and Joe didn't share
these sentiments. We think Yankees are okay. Well, they're kinda okay. We don't mind
some of them. Some of our best friends are Yankees. They're all right you don't
associate with them, too much. Don't be seen with them. Well, they're all right
in their place. Anyway, them
damn Yankees burned right up. They weren't watchin' the movies anyway. Little later, on our way to
the concession stand, we saw a sign spelled out in popcorn on the asphalt next
to the charred hull of the automobile containing the burnt skeletons of the
amorous Yankees. In bold popcorn letters someone had written a touching
sentiment: WELCOME TO TEXAS, GODDAMNIT. Anyway, this little
distraction is soon forgotten when Elvis starts blatting "Viva Las
Vegas" from 165 drive-in pole speakers. In the background, back there
in them cars and pickups, you can actually hear them
blue haired cracker ladies sucking them stretch pants up their cunts, they're
so excited 'cause Elvis is on the screen. Lot of old
fat peckerwood fellas ain't had
a round of snatch since Elvis's Hawaiian special, are now getting their poles
greased, and it's a sure thing the bulk of them peckerwoods will be purchasing
Elvis's collected works on video and CD tomorrow at K-Mart, maybe combing
what's left of their hair back and coloring it black, and splashing on that
Elvis brand cologne. So Elvis is on. His name in fourteen-foot,
1964-style gold glitter letters. The sucking of cunt flaps ceases in the background
as we breathlessly await the moment when Elvis's voice hits right on target
with that quintessential hon-key attitude: "Gotta whole
lot of money to burn, so get those stakes up higher! If I wind up broke, I'll
know I had a swinging time." You see, Elvis, Big E, is a
fiercely independent racecar driver. He's on his way to L.A. to pick up an
engine for his racecar, but he gets sidetracked by a girl. He sees her. He's
hot for her. He doesn't know who she is, and she takes off not telling him, his
sausage hanging in defeat in his trousers. 'Course, we all know who that
gal is. She's Ann Margret. E goes to Las Vegas, and he wants this
chick, as they like to refer to them in these movies. A term that designates
something stupid and mindless, cute and fuzzy, which, in the case of this
movie, is right on. So Elvis, convinced this "groovy
chick" is a showgirl, goes from one Las Vegas club to the next in search
of her. It's a search designed to treat the males in the audience to a bevy of
big-butted showgirl babes dressed in ostrich feathers and tank suits. This part reminds us of the
1963 movie, The Brain That Wouldn't Die. (Well, it does
remind us of it. Otherwise, do you think we would have bothered to mention it?)
Part where this doctor's good-looking girlfriend gets her head pinched off in a
car wreck, and he wraps her head in a rag, and runs like a scalded-ass ape to
his lab, and wires that sucker up to some tubes and wires and an Eveready. This keeps the head fresh.
(Try this with a deceased pet, and let us know how it comes out, will you?) And
while it's kept that way, Doc goes out in search of a new body for his Eveready
Bunny's head. He goes from club to club (see the connection now?) eyeing female
butts, babes in tank suits, looking for just the right one to fit his sugar
doodle back at the lab. This, of course, causes some
problems. People really don't want their heads cut off, no matter how much Doc
loves his babycums.
Tragedy ensues. The head is unhappy. The Doc's plans to acquire bodies turns
into a mess, so it ends up the Doc's sex life is ruined, and all he can get
from now on is, you guessed it, a little head. But that's enough. What's most
important about The Brain That Wouldn't Die is you shouldn't
confuse it with The Brain That Couldn't Die or The
Brain That Shouldn't Die (wait a minute, did we make that up?) or
even, They Saved Hitler's Brain, which has got to be one of
the worst movies made since film was invented, next to a couple of episodes
of Barney the Fucking Purple Dinosaur. And, there's The Brain from
Planet Arous, and there are brains with
spinal cords that strangle people in Fiend Without A
Face and turn to shitty oatmeal when they get a .45 slug
through the grey matter. There's also Donovan's Brain, The Man With Two Brains, and one we here at Trash
Theater are financing called, That Brain Ain't Gonna Fuckin' Die. And that just touches the
surface on Brain movies, something we hope to do a column on eventually. Right now
we're working on an Insect Fear column, written around a trip
to The Philbert, Texas Fire Ant festival, but
that's going to be in a chapbook, and you ain't gonna see
it unless you buy it from Crossroads Press come Spring of '94, cause it ain't gonna be here in Cemetery Dance, brothers
and sisters. It will come with drawings too, but we don't know who the artist
is. We've got enough to worry about just putting our notes together on the Fire
Ant Festival and trying to heal our ant bite wounds, which have lingered. But, we don't believe in advertising our
stuff, especially in our column, so, the less said about the chapbook, the
better. Crossroads Press address is: P.O. Box 10433, Holyoke,
Ma. 01041-1833. We sincerely doubt anything
would happen to you should you not purchase this forty to
fifty page chapbook, but we just want to say now, and up front, we don't
want to be responsible if something does. I mean, these things happen. Remember, that's Crossroad's
Press: A Nest of Fear or, Trash Theater Goes to the
Fire Ant Festival. Anyway, this really isn't the time or place for
that, and since that is not our way, to advertise shamelessly, we'll move on. (Remember: Crossroads
Press. A Nest of Fear) But anyway, this Elvis movie,
it's like these Vegas gals could have been the same show girls. Maybe we could
re-edit this, you know, splice in the Elvis movie with The Brain That
Wouldn't Die. I mean, if that Doc had found
Ann Margret, he just might have turned off the electricity to sugar doodle's
head back at the lab, and kept Ann Margret, head and all. But say we put Elvis in the
Doe's part. You know, a race car driver, and he wrecks, and he's got Ann
Margret in the car with him, and she gets her head cut off, and Elvis, being
the kinda guy he
is, just throws the head away. Keeps the body. Maybe he doesn't even want a
head on it. Just cauterizes the neck. Hotwires the decapitated corpse to a car
battery with jumper cables, least when they have sex
he does this, and then we got us a serious movie, something with a little
existential angst. Like, does it really matter if your mate has a head or not,
that kind of thing. Something about what men with IQs of 3 really want. Call
it, Viva, The Vegas Honey Hole That Wouldn't Die. It could be a hit. But as for the movie of
record, Viva Las Vegas, Elvis, he's searching for Ann Margret.
He goes from place to place, even to a room full of—and we find this hard to
believe—obnoxious Texas tourists. Elvis takes care of this. Like a pied piper,
he sings "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You," and the Texans,
mesmerized, follow him out to a flatbed truck, and he
has them hauled to the dump. Finally, he finds Ann Margret.
She's not just your normal bimbo here. She's a swim instructor-singer-dancer,
and she steals the show when she struts her stuff wearing some yeller knit hot pants that are so tight, when she walks, her
clam looks like its chewing bubble gum, maybe shelling a walnut. Course, it was even more
interesting where we were sitting, up under the big tin corrugated screen. That
way, at times, when she walked just right, her clam stood out above us in bold
3-D relief, causing Joe to faint and horns to blow and random gunfire to go off
from an assortment of pistols and deer rifles brought in by the crowd. At this point, the plot, which
stands on spindly toothpick legs to begin with, starts to evaporate. Having
stunned the male audience with her protruding, mutant, fleshy article, which is
the whole point of Ann Margret's presence in this movie, and if this sounds
Male Chauvinist, well, fuck you, because this is an exploitation film, and we
know it, and we know stupid when we see it, even if you don't. And if you do,
we like you lots. And we're also males and don't mind looking at pussy. There.
We've said it up front. So, the male audience is
stunned by Ann, and the female audience have Elvis to look at, and he's got
tight pants too, not that we care, and we're assaulted by some musical numbers
with all the depth and artistic beauty of a colored light wheel flashing on a
foil Christmas tree. (In fact, there's an album of
this stuff, the worst of Elvis, mostly from the movies, maybe all of it from
the movies, called Elvis's Greatest Shit. No shit.) Anyway, everyone wanders
around for a while. There's a car race, and guess what, Elvis loses!!!! Just kidding. He wins, of course. Be sure and notice the force
field he has over his car which keeps the wind from mussing his hair. Either
that, or he's got the goldangest brand
of gel and hair spray this side of Essence of Tar Pit. "Clambake. Clambake.
We're gonna have
a Clambake!" We got to admit the title
threw us. We thought this was an In-And-Out movie, but it ain't. It's an Elvis flick. After a few seconds of
pouting, however, we got into it. "Clambake. Clambake. We're gonna have a Clambake!" We just can't stop hummin'
this little number. I mean, it kicks poodle ass with shitty and twangy studio
guitar solos, and it's backed up by perky whitebread trumpets that sound a little like a
one-lunged smoker blowing through a cardboard toilet paper roller. Elvis also performs several
songs where he glorifies mollusks and crustaceans. Long before The
Little Mermaid, and the singing crab, Sebastian, Elvis was doing his
tribute to the denizens of the sea. There's "Song of the
Shrimp," 1962, a real toe tapper. "Do the Clam," 1965,
something that'll really get you off your ass. And, of course, "Clam
Bake," 1967. According to what we've read,
this was quite a stretch for Elvis, who (if Brenda Arlene Butler, the author
of Are You Hungry Tonight: Elvis's Favorite Recipes, can be
accepted as gospel concerning his culinary delights) didn't even like seafood. About the only thing close to
seafood Elvis might have enjoyed, or desired to enjoy, was the tuna he dove in on,
wrapped in white cotton pull-ups. By the
way, Are
You Hungry Tonight, from
Gramercy Books, shows us why Elvis had a weight problem later in life, and
checked out early. Drugs didn't help him any, but considering this boy thought
a meal wasn't complete unless it could be wrung out to deliver enough grease to
comb and plaster down an unruly head of hair, it's amazing he lived as long as
he did. If it wasn't fried or full of
sugar, he didn't much care for it. Well, not entirely true. The fact that he
did eat vegetables is also revealed in the book. Under a special heading: Vegetables—Yes,
The King Ate Vegetables. When it has
to be pointed out like that, you got to have your doubts about how many
of them good healthy vegetables he ate. Considering these vegetables include
such fine but fattening foods as Heavenly Mashed Potatoes, Mustard Greens and
Potatoes, Southern Style, and Butter-Baked Sweet Potatoes, maybe he'd been
doing about as good having a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Which, of
course, he often had, referring to it as a peanut butter and 'nanner sandwich. You eat a
couple of these babies back to back, your blood
pressure's gonna go
up so high your balls will swell up. If you're a lady, we're not sure what
swells, but something will. They sound pretty good,
though. Clambake opens with Elvis
tooling down the road—he's always tooling—in a fabulous custom 'Vette. He's got
that force field around him again. His hair don't
move, no matter how fast the scenery on the back screen whizzes by. He wears a
cowboy hat sometimes, and it won't blow off neither. That sonofabitch is welded
to his head, even when he tops out at 90 miles an hour. In this one, Elvis plays a guy
named Duster Heyward. Seems this poor Duster feller has too much of his Dad's money, and he is just fed up with it. This money is
pissing him off. People don't take him serious. His
hair doesn't blow. His cowboy hat stays on. And he's a chemical engineer with
plans. No sir, he's a walking,
talking bank account. Nothing more. He's so pissed off about it, that in a kind
of play on The Prince and Pauper (Elvis's literary nod to Mark
Twain), he trades places with a "regular guy"—played as a goofy
asshole water ski instructor by Will Hutchins—and sets out for a zany reality
check. The Regular Guy Asshole heads
for Miami in Duster's ride, and Duster goes off on Regular Guy Asshole's
Harley, complete with saddlebags. He hits the same hotel where Regular Guy
Asshole is supposed to show up, and takes over his
life as the new water ski instructor. Now a new plot angle, as
elusive as swamp gas, wavers into sight. Shelly Fabares is
a gold digger on holiday. She wants to meet someone and marry them for money.
But she meets Duster, and goddamn, if she doesn't fall for the big no-money
lug. Spot the irony here? Silly Shelly tries to just
stay pals with Elvis. One time, while they're taking a cruise on the Regular
Guy Asshole's Harley, riding along the beach, Shelly confides to Duster that
she has a desire to marry a sugar daddy, and Duster says he'll help her bag
one. (We don't remember much about this part of the plot. Seems like she meets
someone with money, or something. Frankly, we don't care and we're not watching
it again.) Needless to
say, they have a
perfectly safe afternoon where Elvis, in another moment of poignant, crushing
irony, sings Shelly a song about a sad girl who marries for money not love. There's a race in this movie
too. A boat race. Seems Duster, that clever shit,
has developed a super hard varnish in his dad's lab, and needs to prove that it
works. He comes up with this only 24 hours before the big race. (You following this?) Anyway, he whips up a batch,
and a bunch of babes show up to have a twist-and-varnish-the-boat party. It's
fun and games. Only thing, if the varnish isn't perfect, the boat will
self-destruct. And it's never been tested.
Tension crackles in the air like an ignorant lineman straddling a 4,000-volt
power line. Personally, we had invented
this, and were worrying about it self-destructing, we'd skip that race, or maybe talk Neal Barrett into driving the boat. Tell
him it's okay, or something. What we might try is putting
the varnish on our dicks (Why doesn't that surprise you?) or have the bimbos do
it.* The varnish worked, made things hard, think of
all the money you could make with it as a marital aid. Talk about a woody. Meanwhile, we get to attend a
cool clam bake party, and it's complete with bongos, twistin' hip huggers with hips in them, and of
course, the sacred Baking of the Clam. Time for the big race, and the
suspense builds like a stack of boiled rice kernels. But not to worry, Duster's
boat stays in one piece—which is a disappointment—and he wins the race.
Meanwhile, Shelly, that silly girl, has come around and decided she'd rather
fall for Duster, the water ski instructor. Imagine her goddamn surprise
when he says he is Duster Heyward, and has lots of
Dad's money. She just passes smooth out from shock and happiness. And so do we. Numbing. What's the snack on this one?
A greasy cheeseburger with lots of cheese. No ketchup, as that would make it a
Yankee burger, and the King, he didn't eat no Yankee burgers. Make it with
lettuce and pickle, sliced 'maters, sliced red onions, mustard and mayonnaise
or salad dressing. Maybe that fried peanut butter
and 'nanner sandwich
would be even more appropriate. That was Elvis's signature meal. This is our end-of-the-year
column, coming to you at the first of the New Year, so, a belated Merry
Christmas and a Happy New Year. The ballots are in. The
decision for placing the Canned Yam is about to be made. And, the envelope please. And, the winner is, Rush
Limbaugh, the Honkey Guru, the conservative Jerry Rubin of the '90s, whose
cracker minions follow mindlessly in his wake, and it's a big wake, as he
seems to have Elvis's former chef. Recently, Rush criticized
Nacogdoches on his radio show as being populated by nothing other than a bunch
of stupid, uneducated crackers. We know this, but we don't like to hear it from
him. Actually Nacogdoches is just like any other place
in the world. It's mostly stupid, but it ain't all stupid, and where the hell does Rush
"Fat Ass" Limbaugh get off calling Nacogdoches stupid merely because
someone from here disagreed with him. We'd also hope Rush would
share his award with his followers here who make us want to fucking throw up.
Maybe he could drive it up his ass for a day or so, then he could pass it
around, then he could get it back up his ass later. So Rush, from Trash Theater, the Canned Yam
Award, and up your ass! Footnote: * Well, it's our column, and
if we say bimbos would varnish our dicks, then they'd varnish our dicks. We are
celebrities, after all. Head on back Thursday,
April 24, for a clambake-free selection from Champion Joe! "Trash Theater, Part
3" originally appeared in Cemetery Dance Magazine. It later
appeared in A Fist Full of Stories [and Articles], a
collection published by CD Publications. "Trash Theater, Part 3" ©
1992/1993 By Bizarre Hands, LLC, and David E. Webb. All Rights Reserved. |
