Art House Fodder

La Mariposa Amarga

As you all know, dear readers (all three of you), I have a bunch of notebooks full of titles, story ideas, obscene doodles, etc. The fruit of my writerly inclination + enough pens & paper to beget a stationery junkie's wet dream. Browsing through those notebooks now, I see that back on May 12, 2006, I came up with the title The Bitterfly. How or why, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't 'cause I was sitting there thinking, "Hey, what if you take 'bitter' & 'fly' and put 'em together?"

Whatever the thing's origin, I'm sure it'd make a good title for a movie about these 8-year old twin boys whose father, a lepidopterologist, abandons his profession to become a stage magician after the boys' mother leaves him for the winner of TV Land's annual Magnum P.I. look-alike contest. The problem is that dad's not very good at magic - in fact, he stinks (which is two strikes against him, the first being the red & silver tuxedo he wears all the time now).

What with his wife's decampment and his perilously negligible skills in the art of prestidigitation getting him nowhere, the poor guy descends into madness à la Jack Nicholson in The Shining and ends up trying to kill the twins - with magic instead of an axe, which is fortunate for the twins 'cause as we've already indicated: dad ain't no David Copperfield (thank God).

From the Bottom of My Bard

The Merry Wives of Wilshire: Dominick DiNapoli (the Dom DeLuise character from Fatso) comes to L.A. to woo a couple of Mrs. Robinsons but is thwarted by Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Khorda (the Robert Quarry character from Deathmaster).

All's Well That Ends Dead: Helena Jekyll, daughter of the infamous Henry, is in love with Sir Ebenezer Scrooge, a despicable businessman. But Ebenezer shuns Helena, presumably 'cause she looks like Mohandas Gandhi.

So Helena studies her father's notebooks and learns how to make the potion that used to turn him into Edward Hyde, except she adds estrogen, cinnamon & nutmeg to it so she'll turn into a "hot babe" instead of a seething sociopath. Ebenezer's still not interested, though, 'cause it turns out he's gay. This upsets Helena so much that she goes insane and tries to kill him.

The Taming of the Killer Shrews: Patrick, a geneticist, falls in love with his boss's repulsively bitchy daughter, Katherine, as they work together on Project Lilliput, a plan to shrink humankind by 50% and thereby instantly "increase" the world's food supply (including chocolate).

Things get messy when the lab mice start getting bigger instead of smaller and go insane as a result, attacking their human overlords. In order to survive, Patrick'll have to tame both Katherine and the mice! (Surprise ending: we reveal it was Dracula who tampered with the mice in order to derail the project, 'cause if humans get smaller they'll have less blood in them by volume.)

And on screen # 2...

That Damn Cat!: a cat possessed by Satan sets its litterbox on fire just by looking at it.

The Vulcan Bitch: the story of Spock's secret short-lived marriage to T'Niqua, a hair stylist from South Central Gol.

Field of Screams: a destitute farmer discovers an Indian burial ground in his cornfield and turns it into a tourist attraction ("If you build it...we will kill you."); meanwhile, his son dreams of applying to the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

The Completely Bonkers Hunchback: Rollo Ditmeyer, a hunchbacked ophthalmic surgeon, is kinder than Mother Teresa but uglier than a Horta. He's in love with Esmeralda, a blind Mexican hottie who works in a taco stand near his office. He offers to restore her sight with a radical new surgical technique he's developed, in exchange for her hand in marriage. Esmeralda agrees, figuring she'll learn to love Rollo eventually, but when she finally gets a look at him after the operation, she starts screaming her head off (he ugly, man!). The marriage is called off, and Esmeralda hurries home to Quauhnahuac. Rollo goes insane with grief, despair, hurt feelings, etc. and follows her, kills her & her parents, then stays on as U.S. consul, slowly drinking himself to death. "No se puede vivir sin amar."

Copyright © 2010 by Diego Baz

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