The Jakes

Exploding Heads, Ranked

One day during college I was watching David Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly,’ and my roommate Mike walked in right at the part where Jeff Goldberg secretes acid onto John Getz’ arm, burning it to a nub.

“What if we went to Reily (Tulane’s student athletic center) and turned this on all the televisions in front of the treadmills?” he said. We were lazy college kids so we just finished watching the movie instead, but I loved the idea of popping on Cronenberg body horrors on the close circuit TVs stationed in front of unsuspecting coeds as they peddled away on the ellipticals.

I love a good practical horror gag, and the exploding head shot is the creme de le creme of the genre. Thanks to a healthy dose of Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs in recent weeks I’ve watched enough noggins ‘splode to provide a proper ranking. In descending order:

№5 Southern Comfort (1981)

A cavalcade of That Guys (Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, Fred Ward, T.K. Carter, Peter Coyote) star as a platoon of dopey Louisiana National Guardsmen lost in the bayou and, through their own dumbass actions, end up under seige by a band of ornery Cajuns. I remember stumbling over this movie on HBO3 at 1 a.m., obviously put there to confuse the sleep deprived into thinking they’re about to watch First Blood or Deliverance.

Early in the film the Guardsmen, under orders from Coyote’s Staff Sgt. Poole, commandeer several pirogues to cross a swamp. A group of Cajun hunters return to find their boats stolen. Instead of immediately returning to shore, as a joke a Guardsmen fires an M60 full of blanks at the hunters. The Cajuns return fire with live rounds, and Staff Sgt. Poole gets a load of buckshot to the skull:

The head gag is simple but brutal, like a hunting accident or flesh wound during a military firefight. Shit only goes down hill from there for the Gaurdsmen.

№4 Chopping Mall (1986)

According to Joe Bob Briggs during season two of the Last Drive-In, Chopping Mall Director Jim Wynorski considered the head explosion in his movie the second best behind this list’s №1. “We need some exploding head perspective here,” Briggs duelly noted, but it is a solid scene regardless. The flesh certainly flies off the blonde coed’s neck after a killer version of the Robot Butler from Rocky 4 nails her with a pastel laserbeam.

№3 The Prowler (1981)

Special effects master Tom Savini pos up a twice on this list. He pioneered the modern head explosion in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, and continued to perfect the technique through ensuing movies. His work in 1981’s The Prowler, a hard edged slasher channeling Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is particularly on point, especially when said Prowler meets the wrong end of a double-barrel sawed off.

№2 Maniac (1980)
I’m currently watching HBO series The Deuce, about a quasi-fictionalized version of New York’s seedy underbelly during the late ’60s through to the mid-1980s, written and produced by The Wire’s David Simon and George Pelecanos. Maniac is a bonafide product of that era.

Pock-faced character actor Joe Spinell (Cicci from the Godfather movies) stars as Frank Zito, a deranged serial killer who channels Norman Bates’s Oedipal issues and murders in a ripped from the headlines style that recall Richard Speck or Son of Sam. Director William Lustig played fast and loose with his production, guerilla shooting around Times Square, under bridges and in subway stations.

He also took advtange of the ‘natural terrain’ as it were and cast a plethora of New York porn actresses (Abigail Clayton, Sharon Mitchell) as murder victims. Caroline Munro, a British actress and model who confirmed my hetero-ness in movies like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, is the tangentially the lead actress but she’s the least sexy thing in this movie and that includes Spinell (Munro and Spinell’s date to fancy Italian restaurant Clams Casino on Staten Island may be the most ‘70s moment captured on celluloid).

Tom Savini took a pay cut to work on the film because he wanted to live in New York. During production he pitched different murder gags to Lustig, eventually selling him on a head explosion. Savini had a latex mask of himself, so he rigged it up with charges and food from craft services and built a body out of chicken wire. Lustig wrote Savini into the movie as Disco Boy, a New York nightlifer trying to make it with a date while parked near the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island.

Zito pops out of the bushes with a shotgun and blows Savini’s head into chunky bits.

Not having film permits and knowing that shooting a gun for any purpose was illegal in New York, Savini said it was about sixty seconds from head explosion to scene breakdown. An off-duty cop snagged the shotgun and the staff peeled off. Two weeks later they tried to film secondary shots with Disco Boy’s date, but the car smelt so bad they just dumped it into New York Harbor and aquired a new one.

№1 Scanners (1981)
Few will argue with this choice. The question, though, is why does this particular exploding head continue to rank so strongly 40 years later?

There are levels to examine here. Part of it is casting. Just look at Canadian character actor Louis Del Grande’s noggin. It already looks like a pimple about to pop. And Michael Ironside, starring as the insane Revok, looks like a crazy enough motherfucker who could ‘splode a dude just cause.

Part of it is scene construction. While most of the other headshots are built for quick shock value, Cronenberg builts the tension at a methodical clip. The synthe chords start low, and then swell as Ironside, who looks like he’s humming happily along to a Bach concerto, takes over La Grande’s brain. There’s anticipation that some wild shit is about to happen.

And it does! It pays off spectacularly. According to a production documentary on the movie’s Criterion Collection release (Fuck yes Scanners is in the Criterion Collection) it took the special effects team some trial and error before they settled on a plaster skull and a gelatin exterior packed with “latex scraps, some wax, and just bits and bobs and a lot of stringy stuff that we figured would fly through the air a little better” as well as “leftover burgers.” Then, after several types of explosive charges failed to provide the footage they wanted, special effects supervisor Gary Zeller closed the set, laid behind the plaster skull and shot it in the back of the head with, yes, a shotgun. Movie cumbustion history is made.

ETC

Most of these films are an acquired taste but I do highly recommend Scanners. If you like Stranger Things, most of Eleven’s story is aped directly from the movie (and others like it but the one-to-ones feel most obvious here). Modern X-Men movies also carry Scanners DNA. The Criterion version includes the production documentary and a wildass interview with Ironside, who calls his Revok a Che Guevera type and proclaims his family wields lowkey psychic powers (“Instead of exploding someone’s head they could just turn off the lights”) with no sense that he’s fucking around.

If you do want to dive deeper, I recommend checking out streaming service Shudder, which brought Briggs back after he previously hosted movies on TNT and before that, the Movie Channel. Maniac and Chopping Mall are both there, along with a documentary about Savini. Briggs, real name John Bloom, is a fascinating and complicated writer, someone who I respect even when I think he’s wrong. If I had to describe myself via oneYoutube clip, it would be this 1999 interview between Briggs and Baltimore director John Waters.

What We’re Cooking

I’m sure after all that you’re hungry. How about some cornbread?

There’s a North/South divide over cornbread. Northern cornbread uses more flour and sugar and usually is more cake-like in texture. Southern cornbread uses just cornmeal and no sugar, making it more a true bread as well as a better conduit for sweet toppings like sorghum or honey. Opinions of which one is best, even among friends, varies.

I’m a border state guy on cornbread, which makes sense living 30 miles from the Mason-Dixon line. I enjoy the texture of Southern style, but I need a touch of sweetness especially if I’m planning to mix it into a homemade chili or bowl of beans.

Using this baseline from Garden & Gun magazine, here’s a recipe that combines Yankee Sweet with Rebel Rough for a decidedly Free State take on cornbread.

Mason-Dixon Cornbread

2 tablespoons melted bacon fat
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 cups course ground yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup honey

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put two tablespoons of bacon fat in a 12-inch cast-iron skillet. Put the skillet in the oven to preheat. In a large bowl, combine the cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt. In a separate bowl or liquid measuring cup, whisk the eggs, buttermilk, honey and melted butter, mixing until the ingredients are combined. Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients, stirring just until incorporated.
Remove the hot skillet from the oven and swirl the melted fat to coat the bottom and sides. Pour the batter into the pan and return it to the oven to bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Insert a thin knife or toothpick, if it comes out clean the cornbread is done.

Poem of the Week

In honor of the passing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poem “I Went to the Maverick Bar” from my favorite Beat, Gary Snyder

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness —
America — your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left — onto the freeway shoulders —
under the tough old stars —
In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”

-Gary Snyder