clown of death

Apparently Dave called me 'a psycho' after reading my previous posts. Thanks Dave. I'll take that as a compliment.

On a quite unrelated topic, Dave (but not the same Dave)lent me a DVD about John Wayne Gacy. Gacy was the American serial killer who liked to dress as a clown. For children's parties, that is - not, alas, while pursuing his victims. The film is a mess. Poor editing disposes of more characters than Gacy does. The trailer, also included, is worse than the film, but it does highlight one memorable line. Gacy is afflicted by a nasty stench and bugs coming up from his crawlspace (that's part of his house, not part of his anatomy). When his young housemate hears a mysterious sound emerging from there, he's rightly concerned, but Gacy is on hand to reassure him. 'That', he hisses, 'is the sound of a million maggots!' The sound of a million maggots! I now have a title for that West End musical I've been meaning to write.

When I was at university I used to hang around with a would-be film director called Paul Hancock. We were always intending to make a film called 'Sherlock Holmes and The Million Maggots Horror' Or, at the very least, a trailer for it. It would have been fantastically cheap. Sherlock Holmes is out of copyright. And the maggots would have been played by grains of rice. Imagine Watson gasping in horror as rice is poured down onto him by an unseen 'technician'. 'Holmes! No - !' But artistic differences scuppered the project. We could never decide whether the rice should be cooked or uncooked.