Hey Parker Poseys & pansies! Yes, even on horror sites Six Feet Under earth-worms its way into gay discourse. There’s no escaping it. Like how Claire can’t escape Unabomber Season Five Billy. Like how Ruth can’t escape her most random, unexpected outbursts and the flustered face that follows. Like how Nate‘s gonna die and Brenda‘s gonna become a shrink – just like their parents! Oh, if it hasn’t been apparent yet, SPOILER ALERT, BABY! Millions of ‘em.
These dudes and more inside!
In this post we celebrate – for your salivating pleasure – the most gruesome and/or unforgettably thrilling Fisher Home clients from HBO’s gone-but-not-forgotten treasure trove of death, camp, blood, and hot, gay sex with Sarge the Paintball Guy (Season Three). Created by Alan Ball (True Blood), need we say more?
Oh, and tell Rico to get off the phone and stop yelling at Vanessa in Spanish. We like to keep a certain decorum around the dead.
Dorothy Sheedy, “In Case of Rapture” (ep 4:2)
No one does it to you like Dorothy Sheedy! Played expertly by camp/gay pseudo-icon Beth Grant (Child’s Play 2, Donnie Darko, Sordid Lives), Dorothy is a Godfearin’ folk who, as her bumper sticker announces, “breaks for The Rapture!” To her delight, the Rapture occurs, right there in Los Angeles! Or so she thinks. It’s actually a bunch of helium-inflated sex dolls floating upwards from a truckbed headed to the Porno Oscars, the AVN Awards. That doesn’t stop Dorothy from cutting her engine, running out onto the highway to praise the lord, and getting smacked by an eighteen-wheeler. Have faith and reap rewards!
Kenneth Macdonald Henderson, “Untitled” (4:11)
Utterly reminiscent of some serious Final Destination slaughter, Kenneth Henderson is sliced in two when he heroically tries to save the three other people trapped in an office building elevator with him: a middle-aged mousette, a newly preggers twentysomething, and a paranoid mailroom guy, who we probably think is gonna die. But no: it’s Kenneth’s blood that’s sprayed on the on-lookers when his innards are forcefully exposed. It’s like that recent movie Devil, except this one doesn’t suck huge cock.
Rebecca Leah Milford, “In the Game” (2:1)
Possibly my vote for Most Classy, this wonderkill takes place at the Hollywood premiere of Whack Job, a shitty slasher movie! After we briefly enjoy a movie-within-a-movie that would make He Knows You’re Alone pink with envy, we follow the film’s “leading lady” Becky (Dead End‘s Alexandra Holden) through a stressful afterparty and into the bathroom stall. The starlet snorts coke ’til her poor nerves give way. As she convulses in an overdose on the tile floor, two unwitting female audience members exclaim, “That piece of shit made Blair Witch 2 look like Titanic!”
Robert Lamar Giffin, “Nobody Sleeps” (3:4)
A beautiful death, and a beautiful example of Six Feet Under‘s love for its gay and camp-appreciative viewers. Bob Giffin, partnered and proud, dies holding his lover Kevin’s hand as they and a group of friends enjoy a viewing party of – what else? – The Bad Seed, cocktails and hilarious commentary included. Bob passes expectedly of an enlarged heart condition (how dear) silently during the screening. Later in the episode, the widow Kevin makes a point by saying to straight Nate, “It wasn’t AIDS. Even though we both fucked like bunnies in the seventies.”
Andrea Kuhn, “A Coat of White Primer” (5:1)
Gets her eye gouged out when she falls onto a firepoker, and how. Equally gruesome is the story leading up to it: Andrea spends the extended sequence confronting, on her therapist’s recommendation, all the people in her life who, well, make Andrea feel small! She talks to her sister, best friend, and father, all of whom are surprisingly receptive. Andrea is satisfied, until she confronts her husband, and he shoves her into the mantle to her demise. And that’s why you don’t go to therapy.
Bruno Baskerville Walsh, “Falling Into Place” (4:1)
Bruno literally falls to his place, specifically the roof of a car, after taking acid in 1972 and leaping off a high-rise. It’s a fascinating and terrifying sequence in which he (Jonathan Tucker, Texas Chainsaw ’03) and his wallflower girl (Angela Goethals, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon) run through a love-in filled with happenin’ people, Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” blasting, until they reach a breath of fresh air and his death on the roof. He jumps and floats, as he observes his body fall to a parked car beneath him. Trippy, y’all.
Kaitlin Elise Stolte, “Parallel Play” (4:3)
Oh, my God, this one’s hysterical. And I’m awful for thinking so. Three racist, over-sexed pre-teen girls sit on a bed giggling, totally enjoying their sleepover and jelly beans, distributing midnight prank calls to strangers like a neverending bag of candy STD’s. They really enjoy one particular call, so much so that young Kaitlin’s laughter drops her to the hardwood floor where she cracks her fucking neck. The sight of her mangled spine is almost as traumatic as the fact that she’s played by Hallee Hirsch, star of my very favorite Disney Channel Original Movie, The Ultimate Christmas Present!
Jeffrey Marc Shapiro, “Back to the Garden” (2:7)
An Orthodox Jewish husband and father spends his lunch break home from work masturbating in the exercise room – specifically, enjoying autoerotic asphyxiation, in which the masturbator suffocates until ejaculation, when he firmly bites down a lemon slice to wake him up. Unfortunately, Jeffrey’s lemon fails to aid his quest. It takes half an episode for his wife to realize it wasn’t suicide but the product of watching a VHS starring a buxom blonde and her two bestial “plumber neighbors.”
Loretta Smith Sibley, “Hold My Hand” (5:3)
Most disturbing here is how this death isn’t a Fisher client (the only opening not to be so), but rather a chilling backstory to one of the show’s more mysterious supporting characters. Ruth has her hands full with apocalypse nut George, and here we see the trauma of his younger years. As little Georgie (Chase Ellison of Gregg Araki’s powerhouse Mysterious Skin) waits at the breakfast table in 1954, his mom Loretta, a total lush, cooks breakfast and a deathly cocktail. As she takes a lethal bunch of pills with her mimosa, she forces little Georgie to hold her hand until she dies. Lord knows how long he obeyed her until realizing she wasn’t waking up. And therein lies the chill.
Karen Postell Pepper, “Making Love Work” (3:6)
& Chloe Ann Bryant Yorkin, “Crossroads” (1:8)
Oh, single ladies, we hardly knew ye! Karen Pepper and Chloe Ann Yorkin are the doomed divorcees who get it in two sympathetic, uncompromising situations, and don’t they wish their husbands got it instead. Chloe Ann loses a face when, while celebrating with two gal pals, she sticks her drunken head out a limo sunroof to get slammed by a low hanging streetlight. Damn LA! Sadly, I feel more for Ms. Pepper’s snafu: while waiting in line for a “Dr. Dave” live-audience TV talk show about making your man want you back, she suffers a nosebleed, and soon a nose-geyser – the decades-later result of a botched nose job. Oh, the things we do to our bodies!
Don’t forget:
The Gorodetsky Family, “Bomb Shelter” (4:11) An upper-class tech-obsessed family in an excessive SUV are too involved in their GPS system, Gameboy, headset convo, and in-car plasma TV to save themselves from a colliding driver.
Viveca St. John, “An Open Book” (1:5) The stacked sex diva, famous for her exploits in the fictional Fisher world, gets electrocuted by her own pussy (pet cat) when the feline knocks some electric rollers into her bathtub. Sandra Oh appears at her funeral as a grieving slut, and she’s fantastic.
Peter Thomas Burns, “The Silence” (5:7) Suffers a heart attack while “enjoying” an awful LA community theater performance of Uncle Vanya. Probably saved him from having to watch the second act.
Melinda Mary Bloch, “The Opening” (3.9) The suburban mom who plans her own suicide, leaving her labelled possessions and envelopes for the family left behind. A pre-cursor to (and better than) Desperate Housewives.
Emily Previn, “The Invisible Woman” (2:5) The single tenant who chokes quietly on her microwave dinner with not a single family member, friend, or loved one to claim her corpse. She rots until the landlord is called.
And, finally:
Thomas Alfredo Romano, “The Foot” (1:3) Sliced to bits by an industrial dough mixer.
Lawrence Tuttle, “Grinding the Corn” (4:9) Crushed by his comic book collection.
Daniel Grant Showalter and his three victims, “You Never Know” (3:2) Telemarketer office mass murder and suicide.
Anahid Hovanessian, “I’m Sorry, I’m Lost” (3:13) Crushed by some fallen blue ice from the lavatory of an overhead airplane.
Nathaniel Fisher, Sr., “Pilot” (1:1) The bus/car collision that birthed Six Feet Under.
