Tetherd Cow Ahead

In Comments on the previous post about Julian Doyles forthcoming ‘Chemical Wedding’, JR made a remark that reminded me of a film that I saw quite some years ago – a cinematic treasure that I feel is my duty to introduce to all my devoted Acowlytes. Running with the tagline A Corpse is Bait in the Trap of Terror!, Michael Findlay’s Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) is a work that makes Plan 9 From Outer Space (a film widely held to be ‘the worst of all time’) look like Citizen Kane. Sure, there are many, many bad films – miles of wasted celluloid that is boring and incompetent and just plain unwatchable – but films like ‘Shriek’ fall into a very special category: Cinema that is so bad that it is entertaining.

I first saw SOTM sometime in the mid ’80s on late night tv, after I’d come home (relatively) early from a dull party and warmed up the tube to see what was on. A scene of a man attacking a woman with a broken gin bottle flickers into view, lots of slashing, lots of very fake-looking blood. Ho-hum. The man makes his way to the bathroom and fills up the tub, inexplicably climbing in fully clothed. Hmmm… I stay my hand from the off switch… Meanwhile, we find that the woman, lying ripped and bloodied on the kitchen floor is not dead. Slowly, painfully, she grabs the cord of the toaster, pulling it from the bench above and with her last remaining strength pushes it with agonizing effort down the corridor and into the bathroom, where she lobs it into the bath thereby electrocuting the man to death.

Awwright!!! I’m hooked! This couple has a toaster on a fifty-foot extension cord! With shameless disregard for the laws of reality like that at the fore, the film was plainly a work of genius! I fired the VHS into record (because my sixth sense told me I was watching a very rare event that might never repeat itself), rustled myself up some toasted cheese sandwiches and sat down for the most entertaining late-night movie fare of my life.

JR’s comment prompted me to see what I could find out about SOTM after all these years, and to my immense excitement I uncovered a YouTube vid of a trailer for the film. And, unlike most trailers of the modern era, it actually does capture a fairly true representation of the film you’re going to see, without giving away the best bits! So, without further ado, let’s crank up the Wurlitzer and give you a little taste of the kind of cinematic genius that they just don’t know how to deliver anymore (by the way, this is one of the very few film trailers where you can play ‘Spot the Armadillo’ – watch carefully, it’s cunningly disguised…):

“Sometimes… it almost sounds like… something human…”

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*Just one of countless memorable quotes from the film.

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It’s truly Science Week here on The Cow.

It’s not often that you happen on the words ‘pig brain mist’ in a sentence, and so when the headline of an article is ‘Is Pig Brain Mist Linked to Mystery Ailment?’, you know it’s a must read. But before you do read on, a warning: the following might make you even more nauseous than the notion of a Pork Martini.

From this week’s New Scientist:

WORKERS at two pork-processing plants in the US have developed a mysterious nervous ailment after using compressed air to blast brain tissue from severed pig heads. The end product is a pink food paste that is canned and exported, but the process also generates an aerosol of brain matter that workers may inhale… Neurologist Daniel Lachance of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, suspects that this is the result of autoimmune damage triggered by immune reactions to proteins from the pig brains.

I’m not quite sure which concept makes me gag more: the pink food paste, or the aerosol of brain matter. I’m developing a mysterious nervous ailment simply by reading about it.

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…and I wonder if Dr Lachance has considered that merely the act of blasting brains out of severed porcine heads is enough, in itself, to give someone a serious nervous ailment. Or nightmares at the very least. Maybe if the workers sang to take their minds off their troubles…

OK. So that’s not really gonna help with the nightmares.

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Imagine my glee when, during my Christmas expeditions to the Two Dollar Shop (as mentioned previously), I stumbled upon an eau de parfum! In a Two Dollar Shop! Smack me with a sockfull of wet lavender pulp! It wasn’t actually two dollars, coming in at a whopping five bucks, but, dear Acowlytes, this, by Two Dollar Shop standards, is a Luxury Item!

And, in true Two Dollar Shop fashion, this bottle of perfume is just like something in the real world only cheaper, crappier and made from toxic chemicals left over from industrial manufacturing processes.

Cowmrades! I present for your delectation: Bane eau de parfum.

This is the Dictionary.com definition of ‘bane’:

bane [beyn]
–noun
1. a person or thing that ruins or spoils

One imagines that this sense of the word is not what the creators of Bane have intended and they are in fact hoping to evoke a secondary meaning somewhat akin to spell or poison. Thus is the peril of attempting to be poetic in a language that is not the one with which you are familiar.

Of course, who am I to say? Going by the smell of the stuff, maybe the first definition is really what they had in mind. But more of that in due course.

The Bane packaging is a triumph of product-design tragedy. The designer could only be said to have been successful if the brief went something like this:

Hey Adelheld!* What we’re going for with this is some kind of a half-woman/half-cobra embedded in a rock and obscured by a curtain. It should be really difficult to make out exactly what it is. Oh, and if you can save us some money by, say, using up some old tubes of paint you’ve got lying around – you know, those murky bilious greens that you’ve had sitting in a bottom drawer for a few years – that would be great!

Of course, the whole thing is nicely set off by the gold foil text that just screams tacky! glamour!

Which leads me to the next exciting feature of Bane. A shiny gold button on the box lets us know that this is not just any old Bane. No sirree!

This is New Improved Bane. It is at this point that I wish The Cow was scratch ‘n’ sniff because in all truth that’s the only way I could convey to you the full magnitude of the claim of ‘New Improved’. My God. New Improved Bane smells like a blend of cough medicine, window cleaner and those deodorant lozenges they put in men’s urinals. I shudder to think of what it was like before they improved it. Then again, being generous, maybe the ‘improvement’ was just in the colour? The label lists nearly a dozen colorants. Now what’s that all about? Who cares what colour the perfume is? It spends all its life in a dark red glass bottle and now and then you spray out a tiny quantity that atomizes into a virtually clear vapour. It’s madness – they could have ditched the colorants and had the product on the shelves for four bucks!

Some sense can be made of the whole enterprise by examining a sticker on the cellophane packaging in which the box is shrouded. Here, the makers of Bane attempt to simultaneously align themselves with, and distance themselves from, Dior’s famous ‘Poison’ by telling us that Bane ‘compares’ to Poison but doesn’t use the same fragrances. This could be put more clearly on a label worded like this:

Dear Customer: If you lack discrimination, have no sense of smell and are a tightwad, you can buy this stuff and pretend it is Poison. It would be a fitting accompaniment to your fake Rolex, and the kinds of people you probably hang out with will never be able to tell the difference anyway.

Dear Dior Lawyer: Please don’t sue us. Even though we are attempting to trade on your reputation we are just trying to get rid of industrial fragrances left over from our disinfectant factory and only olfactorally-challenged cheapskates would think it was anything like your perfume.

Of course, I could be entirely mistaken here – the manufacturers might simply be equating Bane with rat poison. Or insecticide.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the gilded eau de parfum attribution, one could be easily forgiven for mistaking Bane for a competitively priced alternative to Mortein.

It’s just a shame that it smells so much worse.

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*I couldn’t dig up much information about Bane (or ‘The Dorall Collection’) on the net (unsurprisingly) but as near as I can make out it is manufactured in Belgium. If that’s not the case I apologize profusely to all Belgians for the slight.

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