CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

BLOOD ON THE RACKS

TRUE DETECTIVE, OFFICIAL DETECTIVE, INSIDE DETECTIVE, DETECTIVE DRAGNET, ET. AL.

by Rick “Lust-Crazed Pimp” Johnson

HE CHOPPED UP ANGELA FOR TWO BUS TOKENS! QUEEN OF THE HORMONE WHORES— SLAIN! THE SOCIETY BEAUTY AND THE LUST-CRAZED PIMP!

Quick—what magazine do you think these headlines slithered from? C-Span Update? Dismantlers Digest? Cancer Today? No, but you’re close—they were all dragged kicking, screaming and bleeding profusely from the perfect late ’80s entertainment device: detective mags!

Nicknamed “dick mags” in the trade, these friendly little books are even more fun than a strip search in the round! They’ve got everything the average CREEM reader looks for in a publication—sex, death, blood ’n’ guts and free stain matching!

Detective mags are pretty hard to miss on the newsstand, thanks to their editors’ brilliant ear for sleazeinducing overstatement. These bouncy blurbs fall into several categories. Most famous is the just-plaindisgusting genre, like VICIOUS SHOTGUN SLAYER BLEW OUT GARY’S GUTS! and KILLER STOLE HER FALSE TEETH AS A SOUVENIR! Or how about my personal fave, THE HOOKER SHROUDED THE NAKED BODY IN CAT FOOD!? Hey—maybe the cat was finicky!

They’re not all as endearingly repellent as that, oh no. Take the helpful hints genre. HOMICIDE EVIDENCE IS NOT FOR EATING! informs one. SAYING NO TO A PAROLED KILLER CAN KILL YOU! explains another. Or take this little gem of useful everyday knowledge: LOVING A NYMPHO DEVILWORSHIPPER CAN BE FATAL! Darn! No more Patricia Neal movies for me!

Some of the very best are those that are funny for no apparent reason. IMPOTENT PSYCHO’S WEIRD TORTURE TOOL suggests some hilarious mental images to me, not unlike DONNETTE’S GRIM CHOICE—HAVE SEX OR DIE! How much you wanna bet Donnette got both wishes?

Subtle, descriptive phrasemaking like the above suggests some pretty keen journalistic minds are at work here. That’s right, dick mags are loaded with wonderful writing. “It was obvious to police,” writes Special Investigator Don Unatin in True Detective, “that Theresa’s killers had savaged her with* out regard for her beauty, her dignity or even her right to continue living.” Can’t argue with that! The “obvious” can be a little tricky for some of these slice jockeys though,} as demonstrated by Special Investigator Richard Shrout, also in T.D.: “He took one look at the slightly-built man lying face up with a gaping bullet hole in the back of his head and called for backup units.” No sense publicizing that X-ray vision, I guess.

The true master of cheap dickery is John Dunning, who covers sensational European cases with his intuitive knack for slyly-disguised editorializing. Check out this tidbit from his beloved LETHAL LUST FOR LITTLE BOYS piece in Official Detective: “The victim, it seemed, had been one of the few 14-year-old girls in the city who objected to premarital sex relations.” Trying to imply something, John? Better yet is the VendA-Bait philosophizing in the intro to his aforementioned NYMPHO DEVIL-WORSHIPPER tale: “...if there were any similarities in the anatomies of pigs and human beings, the blade of the knife was planted in Mato’s heart.” Doncha just love it? Got to be right up there with his theory on crimes of “equal” senselessness.

OK, so maybe you’ve never actually read a detective mag, but I know you’ve looked at the covers, which inevitably featured a strategically-disarrayed female model (loser’s bracket) being menaced by some dummy with a beet prong. Recently, however, in a bizarre, totallyunrequested effort to please feminists—who I’m sure all devour Startling Detective every month—the covers have begun to show toughlooking leather guys victimized by bazooka-toting women. About as big a cultural advance as the salad bar sneeze-shield, wouldn’t you say?

As I said up front, your average Front Page Detective embodies most of the same sales points that discriminating CREEM readers look for: funny captions (“Horribly disfigured faces of victims were ‘enhanced’ for these morgue photos.”), nutty ads (“Pearls Of The Orient Want To Write You\”) and photos of alleged perpetrators that could be anything from Uncle Dauph in the morning to some 99-year-old ex-Nazi’s reaction at being denaturalized in absentia.

So what are you little oviduct outlaws waiting for? Get out there now and snap up anything sleazy, as long as the word “detective” appears in the logo. And remember, THE DOORBELL KILLER CLAIMED SIX!

Ding, dong...

TEENAGE WASTELAND: A ‘FAST TIMES’ EULOGY

by Iman Lababedi

Fast Times At Ridgemont High was a novel by former Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe. Based on the true story of his year spent masquerading as a student at a California high school, its unique appeal was summed up in its introduction: “Kids only act like kids when adults are there.” Fast Times At Ridgemont High was also a teenage exploitation movie which failed to exploit its audience. Besides introducing Sean Penn with his classic “Hey bud, let’s party,” director Amy Heckerling paved the way for John Hughes & Co.’s subsequent serious takes on teens. However, unlike Hughes, and in keeping with Crowe’s ethos, the working class characters’ lives revolved around school and workafter-school jobs at fast food outlets deciding their positions in the school hierarchy.

Fast Times was a recent half-hour CBS sitcom based on characters created by Crowe and Heckerling’s movie. Still directed by Heckerling, Fast Times diluted the hormonal excess and emphasized the zany adolescent hi-jinx (pizza delivered in the middle of class) for TV consumption. But the storyline remained similar. Self-aware and self-reliant Linda Barrett (Claudia Wells of Back To The Future) and naive-butlearning Stacy Hamilton (Courtney Thorne-Smith of Lucas) were unlikely best friends, even though they were in the same class, worked at “Hot Dog On A Stick” together, and Stacy’s big brother, Brad, had a notquite-requited crush on Linda. Along with the quintessential odd couple were the usual flotsam of friends, foes and authority figures, including My Favorite Martian Ray Walston as the teacher (a role he created in the film). Fast Times didn’t deal with its progenitor’s racier aspects (i.e., Stacy didn’t lose her virginity at 15 and have an abor tion, Spinoli wasn’t a pothead, Linda didn’t catch Brad masturbating), but it didn’t have to. The program retained what was most important to book and film: young, white American proletariats convulsed by the new Puritan work ethic.

The sheer innovation of such an unromantic view of youth saved the far too populated, overtly respectful and tailored-for-CBS-family-hour scripts. In TV’s never-never land, it’s entirely subversive to show teenagers working crummy jobs for cash to buy crummier consumer items: a lethal cynicism on the packaging of third-hand desire.

Followed by a crappy Robby Benson show and competing with Michael Landon’s sappy and fake Highway To Heaven, Fast Time's audience never found it and the show was cancelled in early May. The cancellation was too extreme. The network should’ve only rid itself of the obtrusive Vice video techniques and the teacher characters. The majority of the cast, especially Claudia Wells, were the handsomest, smartest, funniest actors on TV. Their assimilation of the ticks and talismans of Reagan Youth put Saturday Night Live to shame without the irony and near ridicule of Late Night With David Letterman.

Fast Times humorously, compassionately and accurately reflected your world. Suck on that the next time you’re watching a fat, ugly cop or an over-coiffered angel reuniting a billionaire with his son.