THE ONE MAN WHO WILL ALWAYS BE AROUND

 The Strange Case of Jeremy Bentham: At his request, he was taxidermied after his death. Supposedly, the process to preserve the head went terribly wrong and left his face showing lack of expression therefore, unattractive. So, his head was replaced with the wax substitute and for a time was placed on the floor between his legs. It now sits in storage, safe and sound.

SHITTY FLICKS: SHARKS IN VENICE

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant, camp-girl penis. 

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

I went to Venice once. It was beautiful. The canals smelled of rainwater. Bistros perfumed with the scent of fresh garlic and spicy meat-a-ball-as. 

"Hey-a, Giuseppe!" called the dude operating the gondola. "Ciao, bella!"

It was my favorite day.

And then a shark bit my fucking neck off. 

I was never the same after that.

Because I was neckless.

Of all the sub-genres previously featured on Shitty Flicks, killer shark seems to be leading the pack. Is that because I gravitate toward them, since I find sharks to be genuinely captivating creatures? Or is it because there are so many bad movies made about them?

You might could ask director Danny Lerner, because he's not only made three killer shark movies, he's also made three of the worst killer shark movies of all time.

America's got talent!

Sharks in Venice begins with brilliance; after showing some stock shots of Venice, we cut immediately to Bulgaria, where Bulgarian actors sport the absolute worst Italian accents since Lady and the Tramp. A crew of who-fucking-knows sit behind computer screens in the most archaic looking command center since North Korea's nuclear missile tests. Turns out these dudes are looking for artifacts from the expeditions of Marco Polo (Italian!) within the canals of Venice. They locate some kind of buried plaque, leaving one of the command-center guys to call out "Grazie!" (Italian!) for no reason. Then things go very poorly very quickly.

Before I can wonder if composer John Debney was paid for the use of his score from End of Days, a shark comes up quickly from nowhere and makes all these divers sleep with the fishes.

Cut to: Professor (of diving!) Stephen Baldwin giving a presentation on the S.S. Andrea Doria (Italian!), a real ship that sank in the mid-1900s. When he air-quotes the word "unsinkable," try not to notice how fat he's gotten.

"I miss you, chalupas..."

Because there's never been a scene in a movie before in which an esteemed professor is giving a presentation to his class when he is interrupted by a school official, and must leave the class to confer with this official, well, that happens. The official tells him that is father – one of the divers in the film's intro – has gone missing. Professor Baldwin almost looks like he might react to this news, but then doesn't. He might as well have looked directly into the camera and said, "Well, off to Venice, then."

And off he goes, with his girlfriend who works at the same university and apparently knew the bad news before he did.

In Venice, Professor Baldwin is forced to identify the bodies of the two divers.

"Is either of these men your father?" asks the Bulgtalian police detective, as a coroner insensitively whips off one of the sheets concealing the dead men, which they love to do in movies for some reason, and I have to tell you, if someone did that to me in real life, I would say, "What the fuck kind of horrid monster are you?" and I would probably stick that coroner's head directly into a pile of human man poop, which is probably somewhere in every coroner's office, no matter how well hidden.

Anyway, based on Professor Baldwin's non-reaction, it's hard to say whether or not his father lies upon the corpse bed.

"This was not a propeller accident," he says, stealing a line from a better film about sharks. Music sting. "It was a shark."

We meet some more "Italian" characters, one of whom is named Captain "Bonasera." I shit you not and fucking seriously: his name is Captain "Good Evening."

While speaking with Captain Good Evening, Professor Baldwin asks to help with the investigation. Captain Good Evening agrees, but forbids him from speaking to the press. He also tells him:

"Venice has no sharks. Capisci?"

My ancestry has never been prouder.

If animals were given royalty payments, this specific fucking shark
would be rich, given how many times the SciFi Channel have used him.

At his missing father's flat, Professor Baldwin finds a hidden briefcase that contains a notebook, which brings with it a chorus of soprano voices whenever one looks upon it with immense intrigue. The notebook provides a lot more back story on Italian conflicts than a killer shark movie has ever needed. All you need to know is, one group of Italians sacked another group of Italians, stole a bunch of treasures, and then fucking lost that same treasure instantly. 

Wait a minute – missing father? Venice? Historical conspiracies? Hidden treasure? A father's notebook of clues?

I guess it is time to rip off The Last Crusade.

Professor Baldwin and a couple other prepackaged shark dinners go diving...to locate the treasure, I guess? Or find his missing father? Both?

It doesn't matter, because a shark comes along and says hi to everyone with its teeth. Professor Baldwin survives the attack and finds himself in an underground tunnel, out of the water, and discovers a whole mess of treasures.

AND skeletons!

Professor Baldwin takes a step further into this tunnel and sets off a series of booby-traps that nearly kill him.

Seriously, people – you may have well just called your film Fat Indiana Baldwin and the Last Mysterious Mystery of Marco Polo OMG Sharks.

He finds some kind of handsome rhinestone, gets back in the water, and is instantly attacked by the shark again, and somehow miraculously survives, even though there's no way he could have. Honestly, the only thing that saved his life was the film cutting to the next scene of him waking up in a hospital bed, where even he looks irritated at how cheap this is.

"Someone's in my butt!"

Later, Professor Baldwin and his girlfriend have dinner with Vito Clemenza (yep; Puzo/Ford Coppola were truly honored), and the film is finally blessed with its sole actually-Italian actor playing an Italian. Clemenza offers Professor Baldwin a buttload of money to help him find the rest of the treasure, but he declines, because of pride or something.

Idiots.

Meanwhile, some Bulgarian teens are pretending to be both Italian and drunk...right next to the canal. If you guessed what happened next – an unsurprising shark attack married to the worst CGI you have ever seen – well, no one's proud of you.

Professor Baldwin and his girlfriend walk the streets of "Venice," as the poorest Dean Martin imitation the filmmakers could find croons on the soundtrack and soothes the savage soul. Watch as Girlfriend wears an orange scarf and looks at all the surroundings. Then, watch as Professor Baldwin buys that same orange scarf for her later in the scene. (?)

And then watch as Girlfriend gets kidnapped by Clemenza's henchmen.

Mi amore!

Oh, 49 minutes in and Girlfriend has a name. It's Laura.

Another shark attack occurs in the canal; a poor unfortunate gondola driver is mercilessly attacked by a bunch of Animal Planet footage, and his black-and-white striped pajamas are torn to shreds.

Back with Professor Baldwin, he looks nearly as bored as I feel. As he attempts to sleep, a bunch of dudes in ski masks attack him in his hotel room and try to kill him, but because Professor Baldwin is the hero in this film, he covers his head with his hands and flees down the hotel corridor, bellowing, "He's got a gun!" and a bunch of hotel security lose their lives.

Heroism.

The longest chase scene ever filmed in Bulgaria then unfolds, where Professor Baldwin manages to take out his pursuers one by one. He threatens the last man with a buzz saw into spilling the beans on where Laura has been taken. It works until he is attacked by a bunch of bikers, and even MORE security is killed in the process.

Yo, but P. Baldwin don't care, 'cuz he steals a boat and he's out of there, his man-boobs pressing against his tight shirt as he looks majestic under the Bulgarian moon.

His evasion of Clemenza's men is short-lived, as he's kidnapped a few minutes later.

I'm exhausted.

So, it turns out Clemenza has purposely been putting baby sharks into the canals to keep people from diving there. He wants the treasure THAT badly. 

With Laura still being held hostage, P. Bald has no choice but to dive into the shark-invested waters to recover the treasure he'd earlier discovered. 

It plays out pretty much the way you'd expect: the sharks eat everyone but P. Bald and one of Clemenza's henchmen, who have a slap/punch/gun fight in the treasure room, which is so beyond thrilling that Stephen Baldwin manages to look awake for most of it. Baldwin literally kills the henchman with laughter by telling him several behind-the-scene anecdotes about the filming of Bio-Dome.

P. Bald demands that Clemenza trade Laura for the treasure, which he doesn't go for, and then the police randomly show up, leading to the longest shoot-out ever filmed in Bulgaria. Clemenza falls into the water and gets eaten by sharks, and if you didn't see that coming, I've got a bridge I can sell you.

"I stole this from that fat Goonie."

In full view of everyone, P. Bald takes out a huge piece of stolen treasure and proposes to Laura with it.

"As long as we don't honeymoon in Venice!" she replies.

Might I recommend Bulgaria?

HEY, KNOW WHAT'S A REAL MOVIE?

WEEPING ANGEL

BATTY

"Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shoulders...
burning with the fires of Orc."

If we don't, remember me.

BASEMENT ROOM

Years ago, my family went on a vacation in Cape Cod and we rented a small old house to stay in for two weeks. On the main floor was the kitchen, the living room and a bathroom. The bedrooms were on the second floor. There was a basement room downstairs, with a washer and dryer, a sofa and a television.

On the fist night, we were all awakened by a terrible scream from my sister’s bedroom. When my dad burst into her room and turned on the light, he found her sitting up in bed, screaming and crying. My parents sat with her and comforted her until she finally calmed down enough to tell them what had scared her.

She said that she had been awakened in the middle of the night by a horrible stench. When she opened her eyes, she had seen the entire bedroom soaked in blood from top to bottom. There was blood all over the floor, bloody handprints on the walls and blood spatter all over the ceiling.

We all thought that she had just been having a nightmare, but she refused to go back into her bedroom and stayed in our parents’ room for the remainder of the holiday.

One evening, my mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen upstairs and my father had gone out on an errand in a nearby town. My sister and I were in the basement room, watching TV, when all of a sudden, the lightbulb popped and the TV went off, leaving us in complete darkness. The basement was unfinished and had old stone walls, making it a bit of a creepy place. For a few seconds, we just froze, not knowing what to do. Then we started to smell something horrible.

It was a terrible stench and when it hit our noses, we felt nauseous. It smelled like rotting flesh. The smell quickly grew worse and worse and then we just heard a scratching in the darkness. Something seemed to be scratching at the floor or the walls. We screamed and began scrambling around in the pitch black, trying to find the door. Eventually, we managed to open the door and ran upstairs screaming to our mother.

We kept telling her about the disgusting smell and we heard something scratching and scraping around down there. My mother eventually agreed to go down to the basement, replace the bulb and check out the source of the horrible smell. She took a flashlight and a new bulb and disappeared into the darkened basement, as we waited for her at the top of the stairs. We expected her to return quickly but she seemed to be down there for an eternity.

Suddenly, we saw her emerge out of the darkness and come running up the stairs. She slammed the basement door behind her and bolted it as fast as she could. She turned to us and we could see her face had completely drained of color. Her eyes were wide with fear and she just said “I don’t want you going down there again.” Then she went into the kitchen and called the police.

We overheard her conversation on the phone and managed to figure out that she’d seen someone down in the basement room. As we waited for the police to come, we huddled together in the living room, staring at the basement door. At any moment, we expected to hear someone banging on it or trying to break it down. My mother refused to tell us what she had seen.

When the police arrived, my mother greeted them at the front door and ushered them inside. She unbolted the basement door and they went down into the darkness with their flashlights out and their guns drawn. They searched the entire basement room, but found nothing. There was no other way out of the basement, no windows, no doors. Whatever was down there would have had to come up through the basement door.

After the police left, my mother finally revealed what she had seen down there in the pitch black basement room. As she spoke, she became very still and quiet. She said that she had been changing the lightbulb downstairs, when she began to smell the horrible stench we had described to her. Then she started to hear a faint scratching noise. She shone her flashlight around the room and suddenly caught sight of something crouched between the washer and dryer.

It was a man, crouched on all fours. His clothes were tattered, his hair was wild and tangled, and his face didn’t look human. It was twisted in an expression of pure hatred. In that split second, he looked up at my mother, his eyes reflecting the beam from her flashlight. 

Then he suddenly crawled forward and disappeared through a wall.

 

Story source.

Image source.

COUGHING DOG

Kristin had always been the “black sheep” of her family. She came from a rural and very conservative Middle Georgia clan, and had fought constantly with her parents since she was a child. Kristin wanted no part of the settled and routine life her parents had lead – she was an impulsive free-spirit who would travel to the far corners of the earth at a moment’s notice, sometimes not even knowing where she was headed, or why.

So it came as no surprise when, a few weeks shy of her 30th birthday, Kristin announced that she was leaving her high-paying job at a major corporation to fulfill her life’s dream – to become a professional sculptor. She sold her expensive suburban apartment and moved into an abandoned mill in one of the rougher areas of Atlanta. She planned on converting part of the space into a full-time studio and living area.

Her parents were horrified, especially when they learned that her studio was just a few miles down the road from the county jail. And Kristin didn’t see the need to rig her studio with an expensive alarm system, for her neighbors seemed nice enough. But like every other discussion Kristin had with her father, his words of warning went in one ear and out the other.

So on her 30th birthday, her father took matters into his own hands and bought Kristin a guard dog – a Doberman named Bishop from the local humane society. The dog had been abused by his former owners, and had become mean and distrustful of humans. But Kristin always had a strong love for animals, and she took the poor dog into her care. In a matter of weeks, Bishop became very attached to Kristin, and extremely protective whenever anyone else would approach her.

One morning, Kristin came home from a trip to the hardware store to find Bishop lying in the middle of the floor, coughing and wheezing uncontrollably. She immediately rushed him to the local veterinarian, who performed a series of tests. After a while, the vet was satisfied that Bishop wasn’t dangerously sick, but he couldn’t figure out why the dog was still coughing.

“Don’t worry,” he told Kristin in his calm and soothing voice, “Bishop looks perfectly healthy. But I’d like to run some additional tests on him this afternoon. Why don’t you go home and I’ll call you when we know something. There’s no sense in sitting in the waiting room all day.”

So Kristin got back in her car, made a trip to the health food store, then returned home. As she walked through the door, she could hear the phone ringing in her bedroom. Loaded down with shopping bags, she decided to let her voice-mail catch the call. But no sooner had the phone stopped ringing then it started ringing again. Thinking it may be an emergency – or perhaps an annoying telemarketer who needed to be yelled at – Kristin dropped her bags and ran to the phone, catching it on its last ring.

“Hello?” she breathlessly answered.

She was surprised to find her veterinarian on the other end. “Kristin, we have some results on Bishop. We need you to come back to the office.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in an hour or so…”

“…No, Kristin,” interrupted the vet in a barely controlled voice. “We need you to come down now.”

Kristin was taken aback by the sound of his voice. She could hear the tension lurking behind his words. There was something he wasn’t telling her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is Bishop okay?”

“We’ll talk about that when you get here,” answered the vet, his voice growing louder and more agitated. “Just get in the car now.”

“Why can’t you tell me over the phone?” asked Kristin.

The vet suddenly blurted out, “Are you in the house alone?”

A chill ran through Kristin’s blood. She slowly sat on her bed and replied, “Yes. Why?”

She could hear the vet taking a deep breath on the other end of the phone. Then, barely able to contain the tremor in his throat, he said in a hushed voice, “Listen to me carefully. We found out why Bishop was coughing.”

It was then that Kristin noticed her bedroom window. A hole had been punched through the glass, and it was unlocked.

“Kristin, are you there?”

“Yes,” Kristin answered, her voice starting to shake.

She then noticed drops of blood on her carpet. They stretched across the room and underneath her closet door. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but what we found in your dog’s throat were fingers. Human fingers.”

As the vet spoke, Kristin sat frozen as she watched the closet door slowly creak open on its rusted hinges. “Did you hear what I said? He bit the fingers off somebody’s hand!”

Kristin still didn’t answer. In the darkness of the closet, she swore she could see the hand of a large man, blood dripping from where his fingers had been gnawed off. And on his arm was the orange sleeve of a prison uniform.