Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

movie? Years of being alive, having friends, making an impact—however slight—would it all be eclipsed by a bizarre equation resulting in Gabriel Reynolds dying on Taste of Death 10, 11, 12 , or whatever? Would he stop being Gabriel Reynolds and become “that dude who got snuffed on candid camera?”

The shockumentaries were a paradox. Even when you were certain that what you were seeing was genuine, it was still a concept that could not quite be grasped. How could these people you were seeing for the first time already be dead? Their deaths seemed real, but they didn’t.

He ran a search on the Internet for Chosen Few Pictures. Thankfully it wasn’t one of those names that would return hundreds of thousands of results. He found what he wanted right away—an official homepage for the company that had only recently gone online. It didn’t tell him much, aside from their past releases ($39.99 per . . . thank God he could cherry pick the damn things when overstock wound up in the “previously viewed” sale bin) and the announcement that the new Taste of Death would be out August 6th (it had been pushed back, though, according to the Movie Heaven release schedule, and wouldn’t be out until August 20th). It did, however, give him the contact address.

Chosen Few Pictures was run out of a post office box in Bartok.

III.

Not all of the clips could have been made in Bartok, though; Gabriel would have heard about it. For instance, Taste of Death 3 featured a burning skyscraper where several people chose to plunge to a messy death rather than burn alive. There were no skyscrapers in Bartok; the clip had to come from elsewhere. It was probably true of most.

The common way to accumulate all this footage was to take out an ad in Variety or some other movie trade magazine and request news stations, police departments, departments of transportation, and the like submit videos with violent footage to the address.

Did this mean a few deaths were faked in Bartok for supplemental footage? The series was good about not borrowing from other shockumentaries. Maybe the only way to reach ninety minutes without resorting to recycling footage was to create new scenes. It made sense, and it was hardly the first time a video was guilty of false advertising.

Gabriel thought it was somehow unnatural that Chosen Few Pictures was run in his city, but of course it had to be somewhere . It could have just as easily been some other skyscraper-less city with a horny video store clerk who thought it almost conspiratorially bizarre that a mondo video company would have its home base there. He became less apprehensive about the coincidences, but was more curious than ever to see how the next installment turned out.

IV.

On August 20th, he got his chance. Taste of Death 9: Grave Matters came out with no further delays. He took it home that night. Its plastic box seemed to radiate energy, something that promised his eagerness would be rewarded. He watched it slide around on the passenger seat as he drove, as if it would accidentally slip and reveal its true self.

The cover had been decorated with an autopsy table and a stainless steel tray featuring the tools of dissection. The back of the box warned of the violent content within, promising the death clips of a man who should have paid more attention to a DON’T FEED THE BEARS sign, movie stunts gone horribly awry, results of drunk driving on the Autobahn, alligator farm mishaps, PCP addicts in shoot-outs with the police, the final escape attempt of famed magician Isaac the Invincible, riots, tightrope walkers who laughed at safety nets, and assorted other punishments for hubris and just being in the wrong place at the right time. It promised to be the best shockumentary yet, a veritable extravaganza of morbid atrocities.

It sounded like just what the doctor ordered after an unproductive five hours of half-hearted banter that left no impressions on Carrie and Renee, or at least not any good ones.

He nuked himself a TV dinner, took it to his room, and parked in front of the screen. He was especially on the lookout for any possible Bartokians and local settings. As it turned out, they were more obvious than he would have believed.

“This young woman should have just called Triple-A,” the narrator opined, with the assurance of one who knows he has just gotten off a sterling quip. The scene was purportedly captured by a nearby security camera. The female in question was leaning underneath her car hood in an otherwise empty parking lot, hands constantly fidgeting to signal she had no idea what she was doing. The scene occurred at night and was somewhat obscured by shadows. Another figure, probably male, appeared beside the woman, his face a silhouette. He seized the car hood and repeatedly brought it down across her back and head, instantly bringing her to her knees. The killer stepped back to admire his handiwork, his face still cloaked by the night. Without the overdone shadow work, Gabriel would still have been able to assess the authenticity—or lack thereof—in this scene. Though her tormentor had remained hidden by the unrealistic lighting scheme, the victim herself had not.

It was Carrie, whom he’d been admiring at Movie Heaven a mere two hours ago.

V.

“I didn’t know you wanted to be an actress,” Gabriel said to her the next day.

“I didn’t know I did either,” Carrie replied smartly, rolling her eyes for Renee’s benefit. Renee giggled in that shrill fashion that always made her a distant 2nd to Carrie in his private list of Hottest Movie Heaven Trim. When his attempts at mirth with them inevitably failed, her refusal to laugh became a silver lining unto itself.

He smiled bitterly at Carrie’s predictably evasive response. Weren’t they a class act? Hiding things from him, sharing their meaningful looks, whispering to each other off in the corner (which always resulted in Renee’s ear splitting histrionics, like Carrie was Eddie Murphy or something, and of course Gabriel knew they were talking about him), playing their little games. How long had they been perpetuating the charade? All along?

“But I’ve seen your work,” he announced when Renee’s laughter blissfully ceased.

“What’s he talking about?” Carrie asked Renee.

“I don’t know . . . but I bet it’s sexual harassment, whatever it is.”

“On Taste of Death 9 ,” Gabriel explained, with a calmness that really surprised him. He felt anything but, especially with Carrie talking about him like he wasn’t there. He was already tossing around the idea of taking one of Movie Heaven’s rental VCR’s home so he could get a copy of Carrie’s death, just for ha-ha’s.

“ Taste of Death 9 ?” She couldn’t have looked more disgusted if a leper had tried to solicit her for oral sex.

“Yeah,” Gabriel grinned. “You know, the one after eight, but before ten?”

Renee didn’t laugh at that, he noticed.

“How can you watch that trash?” Carrie asked, her face all knotted up into almost a natural Renee Zellweger look. “That’s really sick, Gabe.”

“At least I didn’t star in it.” He turned to check out a customer, a beady-eyed man who had selected an interesting variety of videos: Dumb & Dumber, The Ten Commandments, and Gaping Anus.

Gabriel felt compelled to comment on the last choice. “That one’s four hours long.”

The customer’s lips split apart to reveal teeth stained by nicotine and coffee as he smiled. “Yeah . . . I know. ”

By the time Gabriel had collected the man’s money and warned him about his snowballing late fees (he had a feeling that the customer, Greg Bracken, probably wouldn’t be getting these back on time either . . . four hours was quite a commitment), Carrie and Renee had deployed themselves to other parts of Movie Heaven, probably just trying to put some distance between him. He saw them huddled up over in comedy, inconspicuously standing in front of ‘80’s sex comedies like The Last American Virgin and The Joy of Sex.