A week ago today, I got a call from Darryl Wiggers, whom I met by
chance while picking up some lunch at the Liberty Market, a
deli/grocery near work. Daryl is the programming director for Scream,
the all-horror movie cable channel. He had a couple of tickets to a
party being thrown by Rue Morgue
magazine (Gothica, horror and general Rob Zombie-ism) in conjunction
with last weekend’s science fiction and horror convention. I’d planned
on having a rare quiet Friday night at home, but since the event was
taking place at the Pussycat Club, a mere couple of blocks from my
place, the Law of the Rare compelled me to go.
(The Law of the Rare is a personal philosophy: if I’m having trouble
deciding between two things, always choose the more rare one.)
I met Darryl at the Second Cup at Queen and John Streets and we walked
around the corner to the Pussycat Club. It hasn’t been the Pussycat
Club for very long — last summer, it was a jazz-funk bar owned by a
guy who looked like a very well-dressed Heavy D.
While walking there, Darryl mentioned that Tom Savini would be there.
“Don’t recognize the name,” I replied.
“He was the biker guy in the original Dawn of the Dead.”
“Been a while since I’ve seen Romero’s version,” I said.
“Well, he was also in From Dusk Till Dawn. He was ‘Sex Machine’.”
“OH MY GOD!” I yelled out. “Sex Machine is my hero!”
How can I not be fan of a guy with a machine gun codpiece and a ridiculous name?
More later, but in the meantime, you might want to check out the photos
of me, Darryl, Sex Machine and other horror movie stars who were at the
party. You can see them in
photo album or
slideshow format.
“Dog must hunt! Dog must hunt!”
“Pinhead” from the Hellraiser movies
Actual quote from Hellraiser II: “You’re so ripe, Joey. And it’s harvest time.”
Machine-gun codpieces rule!
Gideon Strauss, in a comment on the photo with me and Doug “Pinhead” Bradley,
wrote:
I love people who even KNOW the word “cenobite.”
The traditional definition of “cenobite” is “someone who belongs to a
religious order. Priests, monks, nuns, rabbis and druids are cenobites.
However, in the case of the Hellraiser
movies, the captial-C Cenobites are Clive Barker’s creations: evil
beings from another dimension delivering pleasure that soon turns into
gory pain. Doug Bradley played the most famous Cenobite: Pinhead, the
Cenobite leader. In Kingston in the summer of 1992, I spent a couple of
creeped-out evenings in Rik “DJ Stinky Poo-Poo” Young’s liviing room
watching the entire Hellraiser series.
