The Crimson Tide¹

Warm blood has become a hot commodity as it splashes all over neighborhood movie screens. Wide-eyed audiences look on -- their mouths gaping in horror as the cheap crimson liquid oozes out and down the silver screen.

And forth-rate movie producers clean up. In some cases $50 million -- on a $300,000 investment. 17,000 percent blood money.

People pay blood to see bodies severed, hacked, gouged, mangled, and mutilated.

Directors appeal to the basest of instincts: The sole survivor of a massacre beheads the murder suspect in Friday the 13th -- the headless not-quite-lifeless corps walking around with arms still jerking the in the air. Kids boil their parents to death in The Children. A "man" impales a woman on a meathook in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Mr. Blond amputates a cop's ear in Reservoir Dogs. Blood flies back and forth from time-warped blown-off heads in Pulp Fiction. Ruby filth flies from Fargo . . . to Brainerd, to Minneapolis.

"Yah sure. Yuh bettcha."

As a joke!

As a god-damed f...ing sick joke!!

Even history movies are bloody sick: Glory glory-fies human cannon fodder. Platoon gore-ifies glory. Pre- historic fish-turned-four-legged monsters force their not-yet-severed appendages on reluctant women. While "he-man" warriors part still other parts.

Only imagination limits the gore.

Unless, of course, you're into illegal "snuf" films -- watching a real-life killing and dismembering of a once-attractive now non-aspiring porn starlet, who, no doubt, minutes before was sorry she got "a part" in the movie. Suddenly the saying "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" takes on heretofore un-imagined meaning.

Cannibalistic ghouls, with rotting skin dripping like candle wax, munch victims' body parts. Handsome cannibals fantasize flesh. Handsome Hannibal Lector reads Gormet magazine, envisioning having his neighbor for lunch.

When will producers run out of novel ways to rip and chop and shred human body parts?

As the cropped-off chopped-off close-ups lose their novelty, producers grope-on for new parts to sever and slice. Their sick minds have had the "imagination" to cut off, to shred off, to hack off, to peel off, to blast off . . . to rip off . . . people--parts and wholes.

And it's GREAT! Isn't it.

It's great . . . 'cause people are getting fed up on body steaks and body burgers. 'Though Hannibal not included, their appetite for disjointed, dismembered, blood-drained flesh is getting satiated in the face of unending crap-cheap cardinal liquid orgies. They're tiring of leftover ghoul-ash. They're sick of severed parts.

Vegetarian cinema is on its way!

Already nobody goes to see a Dwayne Bobbit movie anymore.

¹ Exercise from The Writer's Options: Combining to Composing (2nd ed.), by Donald A. Daiker, Andrew Akerieck, and Max Morenberg. NY: Harper & Row, pp. 354-356.