The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Geek Pin-Up #11: Barbara Crampton

"NYAAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!"

"That was great, darling. Try and emphasize the moral dilemma of your Hippocratic Oath being tested by the wounded 10-penised killer space-slug calling for help."

"NYAAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!"

"That's great! Now, with more ass."

"NYAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!"

Scream-Queens are great. We'll be covering one a week with our love here on TFL this October. First up: Barbara Crampton. NYAAAARRRRGGHHH!!!

Barbara gains geek immortality through her working relationship with Stuart Gordon. Stuart Gordon is a very smart, educated man who was involved in counter-cultural theatre in the 60's, worked with David Mamet in the 70's, and made some of the best (violent, gory, perverse, obscene, intelligent, hilarious) horror movies of the 80's. Stuart is one of those great unsung heroes who realised, by chance or design, that his intelligence and skill was best suited to z-grade horror rather than 'high' art and, like an inner-city school-teacher, dedicated his career to making his un-loved and forgotten world better, one decapitation at a time.

Stuart is great, but what he isn't is hot and blond, which Barbara Crampton is. Look:

In Re-Animator she was cast as the cute girlfriend and 'daughter of the school dean', where she starts off wearing nice sweaters and ends up naked on a dissection table being molested by the severed head of an evil doctor.

In From Beyond she was cast as a repressed research scientist who wears glasses that ends up in full on bondage gear, stimulating her co-worker's engorged pineal gland while being molested by monsters from a different dimension.

She could pull off the trick of starting out very prim and sweet and ending up really dirty better than anyone and for this my adolescence salutes her, if only for a few seconds at a time.

Barbara has kept a roof over her head by appearing on soap operas and other shows not involving re-animated corpses, which is good for her but, good for us, she is now lined up to play the first lady in Stuart Gordon's House of Re-Animator, in which the zombies get into the White House. Let's hope she ends up in a shredded burka being molested by the severed head of Dick Cheney.