Only Endless Horror

I think I got everything out of Tuesday I possibly could.

First up was a navigation lesson, one of the bazillion in my clueless life.

Although I was sure I'd walked the buttermilk trail on the southside of the river last week, today I learned differently.

I'd walked the service road, not the trail. Oops.

No problemo, a willing walker joined me and we began at Texas beach, crossed the Boulevard bridge (my first time on foot) and wound our way down to the real buttermilk trail.

No, really. This time I had a corroborating witness.

With the heavens alternately spitting, raining and closing in on us with humidity, I arrived back at Texas beach with my shirt soaked through with sweat, front and back.

Very satisfying.

Lunch followed at Doner Kebab (inside so our sweaty clothes could dry in the air conditioning), where I convinced my fellow walker that the chicken shawarma is actually more delicious than the beef/lamb one, not an easy thing to believe until you taste it.

He gave me an amen.

Finally making myself sit down to write an article for which I'd done four interviews last week, the words flowed easily and the afternoon passed in a haze of winnowing down thousands of words to merely 800.

You know how I like to run on.

Once showered to removed trail sweat and worse, I did the easiest possible thing on a Tuesday: went to watch a bad movie at a bar.

River City Classic not so classic movie night was showing 1962's "The Flesh Eaters," considered one of the first gore movies ever for its graphic violence. In black and white naturally, but I guess that's what passed for gore in 1962.

Right up my alley? Not really. Sure to be a good time? You know it.

Getting there early enough to claim my favorite booth, I watched cheesy trailers to "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde," "Equinox" - "in supernatural color," it claimed, and "The Leech Woman" - "for her, there could be no love, only endless horror."

Must've sucked to be leech woman.

A couple came in just as the trailers ended, sat down at the bar and announced to no one in particular, "Let the flesh eating begin!"

Premise: faded movie star and her nubile assistant enlist ruggedly handsome pilot to fly them to Provincetown despite a forecast of a hurricane.

Ergo, the plane is downed on a remote island that happens to house an evil German-accented doctor working on cultivating the terrifying flesh eaters.

Totally plausible, right?

And soon enough, glowing, flesh-eating microbes began eating fish and hapless victims in the water.

Since they only ate flesh, that meant that they were always finding full skeletons in the water, bones picked clean (hair and bikini top left in place).

Once it becomes obvious the three are stranded on the island, they make do by retrieving the raft from the boat for the women to sleep on.

"If you'll excuse me, I'll go inflate the bed," our hero Grant says suavely.

"Cause we deflated it last night!" a guy in a nearby booth called out.

We soon learned that the has-been movie actress has some addiction issues when she insists on going back to the plane to get her suitcase full of booze.

"Gentlemen, I drink! Not polite cocktails, I drink!"

Which means when she finally gets to her stash, she cradles the bottle in her arms and says, "Everybody keeps trying to take my medicine away!" and a guy at the bar called out, "Bartender, I need my medicine!"

Of course she gets trashed and passes out on the beach for the night, waking up to blinding sun and a headache you could almost see.

"I know what that's like!" a guy shouted.

"You know what it's like to wake up on a beach with a rope around your hand?" someone else yelled.

Uh-oh, our drunkard had let the plane get away, leaving her holding the rope where the plane's anchor used to be.

Watching the comely assistant climb a dune, someone said in a German accent, "Ooh, zee junk in zee trunk!"

But it was when the actress spots her liquor suitcase bobbing in the waves and goes after it that a guy said, "I have a feeling this isn't going to end well..." but square-jawed Grant rescued her, losing only a little calf flesh in the process.

Just when I thought the film couldn't get any cornier, there appeared on the horizon a beatnik (using words such as kooky and jazz) on a raft with a record player and a flag with a heart on it flying in the breeze.

Real gone, man.

"That beatnik music won't keep the flesh eaters away!" someone at the bar yelled at him in warning.

He ignored it ("Don't worry, Omar's got the love weapon," he assured them) and sure enough, soon the flesh eaters were sizzling through the rope sandals that had taken him three weeks to make.

By then the actress was convinced that there was no chance of rescue. "Oh, heaven protect a simple lady lush in a place like this!" she said to the sky.

That's the kind of prayer I might want to pull out at some future date to dazzle party guests.

Her solution is to put on lipstick and perfume, unbutton her shirt a few notches and try to convince the evil doctor that she's on his side.

Doesn't work, he stabs her and leaves her for dead, but like in any good gore movie, she pops up unexpectedly later to help fight evil.

I wouldn't think of spoiling the ending or the suicide, giant hypodermic full of the castaways' blood and recorded death screams leading up to it, but I will tell you this.

After a back flip, Grant and the blond assistant have a shoreline hug before heading up toward the center of the island, away from the freshly dead flesh eater monster and dead doc.

"Let's just get naked," the guy in the booth to my right suggested to the happy couple.

"And they died on the island," deadpanned another. The end.

Moral of the story: as long as you've got the love weapon, you've got it all. Flesh eaters excepted.