Deserving Victims: Golden Grahams, Media Mayhem, and Babies at Movies

Paris Hilton in "House of Wax": Most deserving victim ever?

I’m not trying to fool anyone – while part of the reason I’ve kept this site going for so long is because I want to give freaks of all flavors a place to come and discuss horror and genre entertainment safely and without judgment, it’s also because I love to hear the sound of my own keyboard.

So … I’d like to complain about some shit.

And in keeping with the mission of the Camp, I will do so in the context of horror films:  for each of my grievances, I will select an equivalent Deserving Victim from the horror canon – a character who may have met an untimely end but totally had it coming. (Would that make it a “timely end”?)

This week I’m going to bitch about three things that I think deserve some old-school horror movie retribution. Enjoy the first of what will undoubtedly be an infinity-part series!!

1. Golden Grahams

I love the taste of this Big G cereal, but why the fuck have they not in the last 30 or so years found a way to keep them from turning soggy the INSTANT they touch milk? SERIOUSLY! I’m as all about organic ingredients and preservative-free food as the next homo, but I would gladly eat formaldehyde every morning if it would mean that my cereal would have the consistency of something slightly less resembling a bowl of slippery baby tongues.

Therefore, I think that Golden Grahams deserve a little…

Deserving Victim: Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) from Jaws. So not really THAT deserving, but come on – you get crunked up and go swimming in the ocean in the middle of the night by yourself, you get what’s coming to you. I have a feeling she too was a bit soggy, in the end.

2. Media Mayhem: Advertising Crooks

I really hate to air backroom grievances here on the front page, but in this case I’m really pissed, so forgive me the lapse (or just skip this). Last year I was approached by an advertising company to place better and more targeted ads on the site that would also help me make a little coin to offset web serving costs, allow me to buy crap for giveaways and throw some kibble at my wonderful counselors, etc. The company – Media Mayhem – ran ads on my site for eight months, which added up to a not insignificant amount of money.

But I never saw any of it.

After months of emailing and calling my contact (who vanished) and then the company’s owner, Scott Messick, and getting nothing but brushoffs, I had to go through the annoying process of terminating the contract (which they’d been in breach of for months) and still never saw a single penny of my commission. They charged companies to run ads on my site, collected the cash, and stole it from me – and since running into this problem I’ve found several other smaller sites to whom they’ve done the exact same thing. They clearly engage small online communities like this one, sell their space, and fill their pockets with advertisers’ money without any intention of sharing it. They are crooks.

Now I’m running basic Google ads. They maybe aren’t as interesting and don’t pay as much, but guess what – they actually write a check when it’s due, so at least I’m not losing money when I do business with them. More than anything, as a trusting person who believes in professional integrity, it hurts to have to deal with this kind of shittery and to have to resort to whining about it like this.

Anyway, again – I hate to talk shop with y’all, but in this case they seriously compromised my ability to keep this site running, so you should hate them, too. In fact, I think they deserve to go the way of…

Deserving Victim: Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) in Aliens. After befriending Ripley, this fucking worm deliberately releases a facehugger into Ripley and Newt’s sleeping quarters, and when the aliens come knocking he cowardly tries to escape. Fortunately, he is caught by an alien and gets what’s his.

3. Parents Who Take Babies to Horror Movies

There is this thing in NYC – and I don’t know if it happens anywhere else, but I’d love to hear – where if you go to a new horror movie on opening night at 10:00, you are guaranteed that there will be at least one child under the age of 8 sitting near you. Doesn’t matter how fucked up the movie is – I have sat down the row from toddlers at extremely scary, loud, or gruesome films like Deep Blue Sea, Hostel, Scream 4, and countless others.

Listen – I’m all a fan of kids finding their way to what entertains or excites them. But you can’t tell me that the baby with earrings that gets plunked next to me way past its bedtime to watch the Texas Chainsaw remake has any fucking clue what childhood-raping experience it is in for.

Parents, if you want to scramble your kids’ brains, have the decency to do it behind closed doors like us Midwesterners. If you’ve dragged your pre-schooler to see the latest Final Destination because you’re too much of a cheap-ass to spring for a sitter, you deserve this:

Deserving Victim: Frank from Hellraiser. Considering that he has stolen Kirsty’s father’s skin and has tried to feed her soul to the cenobytes, I think it’s fair to call Frank a bad parent. As such, he gets what he deserves when he is ripped apart. Oh that Manhattan movie theaters were equipped with meathooks…

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