Lincoln City
Well, thank God we weren't going to camp.
The market for terrible horror movies is, apparently, huge. If you go to one of those websites where they let you watch bootlegged movies for free online and type in a reasonable query, like The Hurt Locker or Afro Sluts IV, you’ll most likely end up with a list of formulaic, bargain basement horror movies produced in the last decade, such as:
The Hurter
Locked In The Trunk II: The Trunkening
Afro Sluts From Hell
BloodDrainer
You know what I mean – movies shot on a camcorder that was on sale at Best Buy and edited with Dad’s copy of Windows Moviemaker. Apparently the cheapest type of movie to make is the teen slasher, perhaps because in most cases it doubles as softcore porn, and thus significantly broadens its audience.
Every genre of film and television has its own set of cannon fodder, a set of stock extras who can be mowed down in droves for dramatic effect but keep coming back for more. Star Wars has Stormtroopers, Star Trek has Redshirts, Battlestar Galactica has Colonial Marines, 24 has everyone at CTU who isn’t Jack Bauer, Seinfeld had all of Jerry’s girlfriends, and What Not To Wear has shy, overweight women from the Midwest with no fashion sense.
It’s like they have cannon fodder recruitment in a warehouse somewhere, and all these unemployed people come in and look at presentations from every genre, like a career fair in which every career will inevitably get you killed before the end of the first act.
Horror movies employ college students, particularly horny ones, as their cannon fodder. At the cannon fodder career fair, I can see the horror movie people advertising free booze, condoms, camping supplies, and tuition at schools like “the prestigious University of Dreyskull” as a means to get sexy young people to come be massacred, preferably while naked.
At the moment, I’m spending Valentine’s Day weekend with nine of my band compadres in a wonderful beach house in Lincoln City belonging to one of my friend Jefe’s relatives. Of the ten of us here, eight are couples sharing bedrooms. We got a great deal on the house, and were left the keys to the liquor cabinet. The potential for hedonism here is endless. The potential for serial killers? Double endless.
In the movies, drinking and sex are always punished, sooner or later, by gruesome and bloody death at the hands of a deranged maniac or, in some cases, amorous trees. The one person to survive is usually the one who doesn’t drink or have sex – hopefully, if a serial killer does find his way into the house, he’ll appreciate how little sex I’m having and be willing to look the other way on all the White Russians I’ve been knocking back.*
*However, I’m also sort of the wiseass of the group, and the wiseass is usually one of the last ones to die, gruesomely, usually at the most unexpected time. “Oh man guys, I can’t believe we made it out of OH SHI-”
College hijinx, which until recently I’d thought I was going to miss out on entirely in college, are only magnified by proximity to a major body of water. The other night, in the midst of revelry, I got a hold of a camcorder and took a couple of the stupid videos that make up roughly 95% of YouTube’s content. The ocean may or may not have been peed in. We have yet to build a pyramid out of beer cans, but the night is young.
The reason I believe the hijinx stand out more in Lincoln City is because once you get out of a college town, it becomes clear just how crazy some of the stuff that gets taken for granted in Eugene actually is. A good example of this was the other night, when I ran down to the local supermarket in search of a ping pong ball so my friends could play beer pong.
“Have you got any ping pong balls here?” I asked the friendly looking man at the checkout counter.
“’fraid not.” He said, with a sympathetic smile. “Guess you’ve got a beach house with a ping pong table, huh?”
“Uh…” I muttered, slowly remembering that outside of the college community ping pong balls have uses other than being thrown at cups of beer. “Actually, we’ve got a bunch of Milwaukee’s Best and some red cups.”
“Oh.” The man said, his smile disappearing. I could practically hear the shards of his destroyed innocence smashing onto the ground. “So I guess you’re going to play some… Games.”
“Uh, yeah.” I muttered. I could tell that I had instantly been written off as yet another hedonistic college student – and perhaps earmarked as a potential target, if this particular supermarket checker moonlighted as a serial killer. “But I guess we can’t play beer pong, though, because we don’t have a ping pong ball.”
“You could play quarters.” He suggested, eager to be helpful.
I thanked him, but what I really wanted to say was, ”Yeah, quarters! Say, do you have any Huey Lewis tapes we could listen to while we play? Oh, hey, did you see that new Spuds McKenzie commercial during Dallas last night? Avoid the Noid, man!”
In the end, though, watching my friends try to create drop shots involving fire, I came to realize that hijinx were far more dangerous than any serial killer.
Truman Capps finds downtown Lincoln City to be one of the least appealing places in the world.