A Scream In The Hot Desert Air

The earliest Penetrator novel I have is #2, BLOOD ON THE STRIP, published by Pinnacle in 1973. And it's pretty badass, pitting the Penetrator against an evil bitch called the Fraulein. Through a corrupt talent agency called Starmaker, the Fraulein and her people lure young girls into the fold with promises of making them movie stars, and then drug them and "train" them in sundry sordid sexplay. One highlight finds Mark Hardin stumbling into a large dark warehouse where nude girls are caged during their training, which consists of the Fraulein's brutal henchmen raping them.

Hardin gets involved when the Fraulein's latest victim happens to be Sally Wilson, who is a friendly waitress at a diner he frequents. Sally's stubbornness leads to a nasty facial disfigurement, pissing off the Penetrator to the point where he flies his private plane to Las Vegas and penetrates the Fraulein's base of operations, a casino called the Pink Pussy.

Chet Cunningham (writing as Lionel Derrick) injects plenty of sleaze and violence into the story, including a couple of big building explosions. The kinky finale is an odd one, finding the Penetrator chasing his quarry literally into a snake pit. Great stuff, showing that Pinnacle had the Penetrator formula down pat from the beginning.

My Voice Is My Passport. Verify Me.

Someone has written a darned good defense of 1992's SNEAKERS as "one of the more tragically overlooked films of the 1990s." And I heartily agree. SNEAKERS is one of my favorite movies, one that never fails to entertain me and one of the smartest movies I've ever seen. Sadly, it's too late now, but I used to say that, if I had the money to bankroll a sequel to any film ever made, I would make SNEAKERS 2.

I won't write much more about SNEAKERS, if only because "TK" at the Pajiba Web site has done such a fine job, even giving the wonderful Stephen Tobolowsky a shout-out, that I would merely be repetitious. SNEAKERS is a clever, witty, exciting adventure with a terrific all-star cast that you should Netflix as soon as possible.

Do Italians Make The Best Killer Croc Movies?

Judging from the trailer for 1989's KILLER CROCODILE...maybe!

"Anthony" Crenna is actually Richard Crenna, Jr., the son of the well-known film and television star. And what the heck is Van Johnson doing in this?

Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer—The 15-Years-Later Affair

During the early 2000s, I penned a pair of articles for MICRO-FILM, a locally produced zine edited in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois by Jason Pankoke. I didn't do as much writing for MICRO-FILM as either Jason or I would have liked, often due to my busy schedule. Besides the two articles, I also reviewed a few films on DVD. Interviews with actor Robert Forster and director Bert I. Gordon were originally intended for MICRO-FILM, but the zine's haphazard publishing schedule made the pieces out-of-date by the time they could have been published, and I eventually posted them at Mobius Home Video Forum, where I have served as a moderator for nearly a decade.

Since no one has had the opportunity to read these articles since they were originally published in MICRO-FILM, I thought it might be nice to make them available here. The following piece was included in MICRO-FILM #5, published June 2002. It's still on sale from Jason for just $3.50 and is of interest to anyone with a love for independent cinema. "HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER—The 15-Years-Later Affair" was a look back at the Illinois-lensed horror classic fifteen years after it was made (though it was more than that by the time the article was published). For historic purposes, I have left the copy as it was originally written, so please forgive any outdated information.

Many words have been used to describe HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER--intense, frightening, shocking, heartbreaking. No matter how one feels about the horror genre in general, there's no question that HENRY leaves its mark on all those who watch it. The lead character, a placid sociopath named Henry who leaves a squalid and bloody trail of corpses in his murderous wake, doesn't punctuate his kills with a groan-inducing series of one-liners like Freddy Krueger of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series, nor is he a mindless, unstoppable killing machine like HALLOWEEN's Michael Myers. What makes Henry almost unique among horror movie icons is that he could--and does--exist in our own neighborhood. Henry could be the quiet neighbor next door. Or the mailman. Or the guy standing behind you in line at the convenience store. Even, as in the film, the exterminator ridding your home of rodents. HENRY is not a fun movie. But it is illuminating, fascinating and more than a little bit scary. It's also a stunning debut for those who made it, including its star Michael Rooker, producer Steven A. Jones and director John McNaughton.

The story of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER begins in 1985, when Waleed Ali, who owned a Chicago-based video distribution company called Maljack Productions, Inc. (perhaps better known as MPI), decided to make his own horror movie for MPI to distribute directly to home video, and gave McNaughton a $100,000 budget for his feature debut. McNaughton, a Chicago native who had directed a few low-budget documentaries for MPI, brought in Jones, a musician, designer and commercial animation director who had created MPI's logo. The two were inspired by a segment of ABC's 20/20 program about serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who claimed to have murdered as many as 300 people. Needing a writer, Jones brought in Richard Fire, with whom he had worked in Stuart Gordon's Organic Theater Company in Chicago.

Together, the threesome created the story of Henry, an illiterate ex-con who lives in a dingy apartment with a brutal prison buddy, Ottis, and Ottis' younger sister Becky, a former stripper fleeing from an abusive marriage. There is no plot; rather, HENRY merely displays the day-to-day existence of a man without feeling, perhaps without a soul. Henry feels no pain and no joy. He's incapable of emotion, although there is a glimmer in some of his quiet conversations with Becky. We see him go about his business very methodically, intelligently and, most frighteningly, cold-bloodedly.

To portray the tricky role of Henry, McNaughton and Jones chose an Alabama-born actor who had never before appeared in a film. "We were looking for that magic person for Henry," McNaughton told FANGORIA in 1991. "Then one day Jeff Segal, who did HENRY's makeup effects, brought Michael Rooker in. Michael was having a hard time working in Chicago theater. He was just too edgy. He was painting houses at the time. He basically came in as Henry, wearing the clothes he would wear in the movie--that jacket he wore was his own personal jacket. He was in character, and I thought, 'This is the guy! Oh, God, please let him be able to act!' As it turned out, he could act very well; he's extremely gifted." Although Rooker's performance may at first glance appear immobile, it's very clear that a lot is going on inside Henry, and Rooker does a stunning job of suggesting that inner turmoil.

35-year-old Tom Towles was chosen to play Ottis, and has remained loyal to his HENRY bosses. According to Jones, "Tommy was a member of the Organic Theater with Richard Fire, and had starred in many stage productions. We still try to find a place for him in all of our projects." Pretty Tracy Arnold nailed the role of Becky. "Tracy was another Organic person who auditioned for the role, " Jones says. "She was the first one to bolt for L.A. and she got some commercial work right away, then nothing. She's still on the west coast, but I don't believe she does much acting." It's hard to believe Arnold's career didn't flourish in Hollywood, since her turn as HENRY's only sympathetic character is equally as impressive as those of her two male co-stars.

Benefiting from a sharp, clinical directorial approach and three exceptional performances, HENRY is a great horror movie--truly disturbing and one of the most fascinating character studies of Evil ever filmed. As Rooker told the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS' Phantom of the Movies, "I didn't want to make Henry just this badass killer. I didn't want to play him 'big'. I wanted to play him as a person who'd been drained of almost all emotion...I think Henry reacts to situations...but Henry can also be very calculating. The first time I saw (HENRY), I came out with a real empty feeling in my gut...It's a very dark piece." McNaughton and Jones knew HENRY was a success on an artistic level right away, even if their financial benefactors didn't. "I wasn't so much surprised as gratified that the audiences felt something," Jones says. "When we left the first screening at Chicago's Music Box Theater, two women walked out ahead of John and I. One said, 'That was really great!' The other said, 'Whattaya mean it was great--it sucked!' That told me that something good was happening."

HENRY's most notorious scene involves Henry and Ottis videotaping their slaughter of an entire family in their victims' suburban living room, and then watching the tape at home in slow motion. The entire incident is seen only from the video camera's point of view, and it's one of cinema's most vivid examples of the senseless destruction of precious human life. Its filming was a raw experience for its participants. Jones relates, "The footage was actually shot by Michael Rooker, who then enters his own scene." Jones also confirms a shocking story that has long been rumored about this notorious scene. "The actress (Lisa Temple) who plays the wife required some kind of medical attention for a bit of a breakdown she suffered during filming. According to John, she's fine now!" The scene, which was partially improvised by Rooker and Towles, is grueling to watch, and perhaps more so when one realizes that the emotions of the woman being ravaged by Henry and Ottis are similar to those of the actress.

Although finished in the spring of 1986 after a 28-day shooting schedule and a final cost of $112,000 (the additional $12,000 was the cost of transferring the film negative to 1" videotape--no theatrical release was originally planned), HENRY sat on MPI's shelf for four years. Waleed Ali and his brother Malik, who owned MPI, were expecting a typical slasher film in the HALLOWEEN vein. "They didn't like it at all, so they gave up on it," says Jones. Chuck Parello, MPI's publicity director at the time, states succinctly, "I wasn't there when the Alis first saw the film, so I can't really say what they were thinking. But I don't think anything can prepare you for the impact of watching a film like HENRY for the first time, especially when it was being viewed in 1986, way before films and television became as violent as they are today. I suppose that the brothers may have expected something a little more conventional. This was their first time investing in the making of a feature film, and they were probably worried about making their money back, as most producers are apt to do." Tim Lucas, whose VIDEO WATCHDOG publication is perhaps the "bible" on science fiction, fantasy and horror films, says, "I had some connections at MPI Video while the film was in production, and for awhile afterwards, and I remember them sending me screeners dubbed over cassettes of HENRY a year or two before it was even released. The film would run out, and there would be the bathtub scene or whatever. They had no idea what they had, that the movie would be so well-received, and they actually had some fairly savvy film people working there at the time."

HENRY was also saddled with an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, and since the X was due to the movie's general tone, and not to any individual moments of sex or violence, there was no way to recut it for an R. So it sat quietly in MPI's vaults. McNaughton, Jones and Fire moved on to do THE BORROWER, a science fiction/horror movie starring Rae Dawn Chong as a detective chasing an alien that decapitates people and possesses their bodies that was eventually released directly to video by Cannon (Towles and Arnold also appear in supporting roles).

HENRY's story is just beginning, however. "I had been working at MPI for about a year when John and I started to talk about ways to get HENRY off the shelf," says Parello. "I started showing it to film critics I knew and arranged screenings of it in New York." Among the screenings was a film festival run by infamous performance artist Joe Coleman and his wife. That's where Elliot Stein of THE VILLAGE VOICE saw it. "He went on to call HENRY 'the best American film of the year'. Then Peter Travers wrote a rave in ROLLING STONE, and the ball started rolling from there." Noted documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (THE THIN BLUE LINE) saw a 16mm print of HENRY, and chose it to screen at 1989's Telluride Film Festival. With HENRY's word-of-mouth spreading every day, distributors started calling MPI with offers to release HENRY, and it eventually received a small city-by-city release with no MPAA rating attached. "It wasn't a huge financial success," says Parello, "but the release helped the film generate tons of publicity."

Enough to awaken the sensibilities of no less a Hollywood genius than Martin Scorsese, who marveled at the way HENRY's creators had made its title monster sympathetic. He hired McNaughton to direct MAD DOG AND GLORY, which Scorsese was producing. Executive producer and screenwriter Richard Price (CLOCKERS) told CHICAGO TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in 1993, "When Marty saw HENRY, he told me he thought it was the best debut of a director he's seen in ten years." McNaughton brought along Jones as co-producer and Parello as his assistant.

Although HENRY's primary benefactors had long since moved on to more lucrative pastures--Rooker had appeared in nearly ten features, including MISSISSIPPI BURNING and EIGHT MEN OUT, by the time HENRY received its 1990 release--HENRY's story wasn't yet over. Parello, who had graduated from promoting video releases at MPI to working on big studio movies with McNaughton, was getting the itch to direct. "I was running John and Steve's development company in Chicago, when I went back to my old bosses in Chicago to see if they were interested in making another film. I knew they would be interested in a HENRY sequel, because by then they had to have been enjoying the handsome profits that the film was generating. Making a sequel to one of the highest regarded scare pictures of all time would not have been my first choice of a project, but I knew that it would speak to MPI's bottom line, and they worshipped me at that company as 'the man who saved HENRY.' So I started to write a script that I hoped would be true to the original, and it wasn't until much later that I was asked to also direct the piece."

With the blessing of both McNaughton and Jones, Parello set about capturing lightning in a bottle twice. His first hurdle was landing Henry himself, Michael Rooker. "Michael would express interest in doing a HENRY sequel only when some other project had fallen through, although he would never admit that. When I became involved and it started to feel like a real movie might get made, he all of a sudden became very interested in doing it, but only if he could control everything. Michael's usually a very nice guy, but, like Henry, he has a dark side. I remember getting a nasty message from him on my answering machine where he cursed a blue streak because he didn't feel like he was getting his way. Then he sent his handlers in to negotiate his deal, and they were equally difficult. It seemed like they wanted Michael to get paid as much or more than he would make on some huge budget film, and that just wasn't possible on a film budgeted at $1,000,000. So ultimately the decision was made to hire Neil Giuntoli, which I liked because Michael would have never allowed me to direct him." Giuntoli played a major role in THE BORROWER as a rapist who stalks the cop played by Rae Dawn Chong. "It's interesting to me that people remark on Neil and Michael's physical resemblance. That was a nice bonus, but I cast Neil because he's a damned good actor, and I knew he could play a chilling psycho in his sleep."

Although less celebrated than its predecessor, HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER 2 was released in 1996, and received several positive reviews from such sources as VIDEO WATCHDOG, FILM JOURNAL INTERNATIONAL and THE NEW YORK TIMES. Parello then directed ED GEIN, which played the 2000 film festival circuit and starred Steve Railsback (THE STUNT MAN) as the notorious Wisconsin serial killer whose life reportedly served as Robert Bloch's inspiration for his novel PSYCHO. Railsback first gained fame as Charles Manson in the acclaimed '70s TV-movie HELTER SKELTER. "Steve is a great guy, very warm, unpretentious and down to earth. I think he could easily play other roles that don't require him to be evil or weird, but that's what Hollywood seems to expect from him."

Parello is currently working on a werewolf movie for Filmax International, an independent production company run by Brian Yuzna (RE-ANIMATOR). "ROMASANTA is the true story of a peddler who in 1852 in the North of Spain was tried for up to 12 murders and claimed he wasn't accountable for his actions because he was under the spell of an ancient family curse that turned him into a werewolf. It's an amazing story because it seems like it would have more likely taken place in medieval times, rather than in Spain 150 years ago. Barcelona is a wonderful city so I'm looking forward to spending a lot more time there. We'll be shooting there and in Gallicia, the part of Northern Spain where the story took place."

McNaughton and Jones have continued to work together on several Hollywood features, including WILD THINGS with Kevin Bacon and Neve Campbell (which became notorious for its onscreen menage a trois involving Campbell, Matt Dillon and Denise Richards). Surprisingly, they choose to remain based in Chicago. "John and I saw no reason to move west and become part of 'The Business'", says Jones. "We both thought, perhaps naively, that after our initial success, the projects would come our way. We were wrong on all counts, but we still got projects offered to us, although not as many as we would have liked. This is a roundabout way of saying that I never intended to be a 'Hollywood' filmmaker and that hasn't changed. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to get and work on any film projects from here. As a producer of films which have for the most part been more critical and artistic successes than financial ones, projects are not flying to my mailbox."

The duo's latest project, SPEAKING OF SEX with James Spader and Bill Murray, remains unreleased. "SPEAKING OF SEX is a much stranger story, more like the history of most of our other films. We made the film we intended to make, but the people who brought it to Studio Canal and got the $11 million for us to make it have been unable to find a distribution deal to their liking. It is a shame. We showed it at the Chicago International Film Festival to a sold-out crowd of 700 people who absolutely roared, then got a rave review in the Hollywood Reporter. The other producers refuse to communicate with John or me, so once again we have a good film in limbo."

Michael Rooker remains a busy working actor, appearing in more than thirty features since HENRY, including his most recent, REPLICANT, in which he co-stars with Jean-Claude Van Damme. All involved with HENRY have impressive resumes and undoubtedly more wonderful works of art to come, but it appears unlikely that any of them will produce one that clicks as strongly as HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, one of the best horror films ever made.

The Foundlings

For the simple reason that nobody else is doing it, I plan to begin compiling episode guides and reviews here for BJ AND THE BEAR and THE MISADVENTURES OF SHERIFF LOBO. Both TV series were medium-sized hits on NBC during the late 1970s and early 1980s when Fred Silverman was at the network helm, programming some of the dumbest and most tasteless shows you can imagine and plunging NBC to the bottom of the Nielsen ratings. My roundups of these two shows will likely follow the same basic format as the pieces I've done on WALKING TALL, THE ROCKFORD FILES and KAREN SISCO. I don't expect to see those page counts rip through the roof, but since I feel that every television series deserves some amount of love—and I know that somebody, somewhere, wants to know more about these shows—I'll periodically visit both BJ and LOBO right here.

If you're unfamiliar with BJ AND THE BEAR, its concept was pretty simple, really. Billie Joe McKay (Greg Evigan) was a chopper pilot in Vietnam who spent four months in a POW camp. Upon returning to the United States, BJ (the on-screen title uses no periods) used his Army salary to plop down a down payment on a brightly colored red-and-white Kenworth cab-over semi truck. Pledging that no one would ever again keep him cooped or locked up, BJ and his sidekick Bear, a chimpanzee dressed in a vest, shorts and funny hat and named after Alabama football coach Bear Bryant (!), drive around the country, hauling freight for $1.50 per mile, "no questions asked." As usual for this type of show, BJ rarely got paid for his work, and spent more time solving mysteries, helping strangers in trouble, and digging his way out of one scrape after another than actually hauling. This used to be a very common show conceit that sadly no longer exists. The opening titles for the series should give you some idea of what BJ AND THE BEAR is all about:

Series creator and executive producer Glen A. Larson, whose credits include KNIGHT RIDER and THE FALL GUY, is credited with penning the theme, which was performed by star Evigan. BJ's pilot, which aired in a 2-hour time slot on October 8, 1978, is titled "The Foundlings," and was later split into two 1-hour episodes in syndication.

Written by Larson and producer Christopher Crowe, who went on to produce NBC's shortlived SWORD OF JUSTICE that season, and directed by veteran Bruce Bilson (grandfather of THE O.C. cutie Rachel Bilson), "The Foundlings" is BJ's first brush with Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo, played gruffly by Claude Akins, an extremely popular character actor coming off his own shortlived cop show, NASHVILLE 99, in which he and country singer Jerry Reed (SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT) played detectives in the Music City.

Lobo would become so popular with either audiences or Silverman (or both) that he received his own spinoff series a year after the BJ pilot. I'll discuss THE MISADVENTURES OF SHERIFF LOBO when I begin reviewing those episodes. What I have done is stagger the episodes of both BJ and LOBO in original airing order, as a way of examining the shows as they were originally seen on NBC.

One note about Lobo is that, when he became the hero of his own show, Akins portrayed him as a rogue and something of a scoundrel, but basically a good guy. That is a long way from "The Foundlings," in which he, as the sheriff of Orly County, seemingly located somewhere in the Southern United States, is operating a white slavery ring. He and his assistant Perkins (Mills Watson, who would later become Lobo's buffoonish deputy) kidnap teenage girls, beat them, and sexually abuse them before selling them to the highest bidder. One of the girls, Florence ("special guest star" Penny Peyser, just coming off THE TONY RANDALL SHOW and looking scrumptious in Daisy Duke shorts), leads the rest in an escape, and tricks BJ into hauling them across the county line in the back of his semi. When BJ finally discovers Florence's ruse, he agrees to help the girls, leading Lobo and his deputies on a wild cross-country chase past obstacles such as roadblocks, muddy roads and pneumonia.

2^nd unit director John Peyser, normally a television director who also served as a producer on the pilot, is kept busy staging crashes and car explosions (and also the uncle of actress Penny, whose father Peter was then a U.S. Representative from New York), while Bilson attempts to stretch the thin story to feature length. "The Foundlings" would have worked better as an hour, but you can sort of see why 1978 viewers might have been drawn to it. Evigan, who had very little on-camera experience before landing the BJ lead, evinces an relaxed charm that makes his implausible character, a 'Nam vet truck driver who sings, plays guitar, and travels around the country in a red semi while talking to his pet monkey, easy to take. He and Penny Peyser, who usually played nice girls, do a lot of bickering early on, but surprisingly don't take the typical path toward falling in love, perhaps because of her assumed status as "broken goods."

"The Foundlings" ends with Sheriff Lobo arrested on white slavery charges, but a good villain is hard to keep down, and Akins returned just a few months later when BJ AND THE BEAR began its regular 3-season run on NBC. Other guest stars in the pilot are Harry Townes as a friendly doctor, Woodrow Parfrey as a befuddled storekeeper, Dennis Fimple as a dumb deputy and Julius Harris (LIVE AND LET DIE) as an Army colonel who comes to BJ's rescue. One of the escaped girls—really, the only one we get to know anything about, besides Peyser—is played by Kristine DeBell, who was trying to live down playing the title role in Bill Osco and Bill Townsend's X-rated musical comedy ALICE IN WONDERLAND a couple of years earlier.

So, What Was It?

What was the book I used in last Friday's post? As you've probably already ascertained, it's something trashy: NIGHTMARE IN NEW YORK, #7 in Pinnacle's series of Executioner novels, written by Don Pendleton in 1971. Review coming soon.

For A Cop, He Has Style

Well, that's what the back cover blurb says, but, actually, Stryker is an ex-cop, and his style I could best characterize as "blunt." I don't know what happened in the first Stryker novel, but in #2, COP-KILL, published by Pinnacle in 1973, Colin MacGregor Stryker is pretty pissed off. Somewhere along the line, presumably in the previous novel, a thug named Kell killed Stryker's wife and blinded and crippled his six-year-old daughter using a car bomb. Stryker went after the hoods responsible and killed most of them, but made sure Kell went to prison to live out the rest of his life in misery. Because of the extra-legal methods he used to enact justice (or, rather, his version of justice), Stryker is kicked off the force and sentenced to six months in prison, where he loses weight, gains a tan (on a chain gang), and becomes stronger and meaner.

COP-KILL finds Stryker out of the joint and back to kicking bad-guy ass. Much as JACKIE BROWN would do later, author William Crawford plays a few games with time, presenting some scenes out of order and then showing them from different viewpoints (not saying this is original to JACKIE BROWN, just giving you an example). Crawford's weird episodic structure doesn't completely work for me. For instance, he builds up a hotshot young mobster named Johnny Cool early on, giving him a chapter or two to himself, establishing his character in a way that we naturally assume he's going to be Stryker's main foil. Except that he is quickly murdered—off-page!—and he and Stryker never even meet.

If you like brutality and cruelty in your crime heroes, then Stryker is your man. He really busts up some motherfuckers big time.

Tagged By A Meme

My pal Richard Harland Smith over at Movie Morlocks tagged me with a meme this evening. It works like this:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Here's what I got:

"Yeah. I heard of this guy in Washington. They say he'll put your whole family away somewheres and give you twenty-four hour protection, for the rest of your life if he has to."

I wish I had a funnier page 123 handy, but that's the book that was nearest me. Can you guess it?

I sent this meme to five friends with blogs, just as RHS suggested, so check them out today and see what they've come up with:

Neil Sarver's The Bleeding Tree

Matt Toler's Something Burning

Katie's Cheeseburger's Condiments

Mike Buras' Lakeside Park

Mattea Garcia's Infinitefire2

He Is The Great Pretender

Decoy #2, MOON OVER MIAMI, may have been the last of Signet's series. Whereas the first book, THE GREAT PRETENDER, found hero Nick Merlotti on assignment for the government in search of stolen heroin, MOON OVER MIAMI plays like a TV mystery. For no good reason, besides the fact that his confidante, the mysterious Mr. Waves, talks him into it, Merlotti investigates the murder of an elderly Miami woman, who was beaten to death inside her home. A young Latino, who refuses to provide an alibi for the time of the killing, is arrested and presumed guilty. Waves is convinced of his innocence; Merlotti, not so much, though he looks into it anyway.

Jim Deane's mystery reads pretty well, though one must admit not much happens. The big setpiece involves Merlotti's capture by a mobster who's only tangentially involved with the plot. Merlotti's preoccupation with sex, which smacks you in the face from the book's first awkward sentence, is distracting, especially when he becomes intimately involved with the 17-year-old high school "fuck goddess," Vicki Greystock, who is a witness putting the Latino suspect at the scene of the crime.

When it comes to whodunits, Deane is no Rex Stout, and when it comes to bang-bang action, he's no Don Pendleton, but you could do worse than this jumble. I don't believe there were any other Decoy books (Merlotti does no decoying in either), and it's not hard to figure why.

Frank Quitely Draws A Terrible Superman

Why does the Man of Steel look like Huntz Hall?







This post exists solely to piss off Tolemite.