Shrunken Heads and the Importance of Consistency

 Look, I get that while I fracking love Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax movies, the people who occasionally read my blog don't.  I mean, Tony Laplume even took a shot at it in one review, saying, "I am not a fan of schlock cinema. I don’t make a point even to watch it if it’s the subject of sarcastic commentary."  Which I find amusing because he hates "schlock cinema" but likes schlocky pseudosports like the WWE.  To each his own schlock I guess.

Anyway, like the Tool Time segments in Home Improvement, I think seeing things done wrong can often be instructive in telling you how to do things right.  Watching the recent Rifftrax of the 1994 movie Shrunken Heads provided a good illustration of how important it is to be consistent because this movie is not consistent in anything--except how bad it is. 

Shrunken Heads was made by Full Moon Studios, who also made the far better (but obviously still not great) sci-fi Westerns Oblivion and Oblivion 2:  Backlash.  It even stars Meg Foster, who was in both of those movies.  And it was directed by composer Danny Elfman's brother with Danny Elfman contributing the title theme to the soundtrack.  As far as pedigrees go it's not great, but it's not exactly amateur hour either.

The problem is as I said:  consistency.  The movie is supposed to take place in the present day of 1994 in New York or Baltimore or somewhere like that.  But the street gangs and shopkeepers in the movie are ripped right from West Side Story, which leads the riffers of the movie to describe it as the "Fifties-Nineties."  

The main characters of the movie are three young teenagers (15 or so) who mostly sit around reading DC comics, debating whether Green Lantern is better than Krypto the Dog.  I mean, that seems like a pretty obvious argument to me, but whatever.  Those relatively harmless teens record one of the street gangs chopping up an old lady's car and give the tape to the police.  And then the teens are brutally murdered and turned into shrunken heads by the Haitian newsstand owner to take revenge on the gangs.  Wait, what?

The lead teen has a crush on a girl who was going out with one of the gang members.  After he's turned into a shrunken head, the teen visits the girl in the cemetery and finally expresses his love...by flying up her shirt to suckle from her breast.  Um...what?

The Haitian shopkeeper seems like a wise old sage, but he repeatedly brags about being a member of the Tonton Macoute.  Who were they?  "The Tonton Macoute or simply the Macoute was a special operations unit within the Haitian paramilitary force created in 1959 by dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier."  In other words, they were a death squad akin to the Nazi SS.  Imagine if one of the "heroes" of your story bragged about being a former SS officer...yikes.  He should probably have been in prison for crimes against humanity.  And on top of that, this guy who's so nice to the teens steals them from the funeral home, saws off their heads, and then spends a year training them to be killing machines.  It's all pretty macabre.

Remember what I said earlier about Danny Elfman contributing the title theme?  The problem is he ONLY did the title theme.  The rest of the music then is some awful public domain Muzak shit.  It's a real one-eighty bouncing from a professional soundtrack to cheap, generic crap.

So pretty much at every level you have inconsistency, from the music to the setting to the characters to the story itself.  I mean did this want to be a brutal revenge story like Robocop, Darkman, The Crow, or Chance of a Lifetime?  Or did it want to be more of a Goonies or Stand By Me story with the relatively innocent and harmless teen main characters?

Like a movie, a book needs to stay consistent in its genre and tone.  You can't go bouncing from harmless YA stuff to grim and gritty neo-noir stuff and back again.  It will confuse the readers and it makes it harder to find readers who will actually like the book because some will expect one thing and some another thing and in the end neither will be happy when the book isn't delivering.  Unless maybe the whole point of the story is someone changing from a hard-bitten old detective to a cute young lady like in Chance of a Lifetime.  Most readers didn't really seem to mind that.

Anyway, maybe now you learned something.  Or not.