“Perverts and sluts...
They’re doing everything they can to take him away from us...”
At age 3, Billy Lynch (Jimmy
McNichol, former teen idol and brother of Kristy) is left to the care of Aunt
Cheryl (Susan Tyrell, in one of the most over-the-top, scenery-chomping roles
of her extensive career) after his parents are killed in a horrific car wreck.
Under Cheryl’s tutelage for more than fifteen years, it’s time for young Billy
to start making plans for college.
But Aunt Cheryl isn’t ready
to let Billy go.
When a brutal murder follows
an “attempted rape,” Billy finds Aunt Cheryl covered in blood, the lifeless
body of a television repairman sprawled on the kitchen floor. As Detective Joe
Carlson (Bo Svenson) begins to peel away the crime’s many layers, he discovers
that Cheryl’s alleged assailant was actually a homosexual, betrothed to Billy’s
basketball coach, with whom Billy shared a close friendship.
As Detective Carlson
continues his investigation, Billy, wrapped up in a nightmare whirlwind he
never could’ve foreseen, begins to do some investigating of his own. In the
process, he comes to find that Aunt Cheryl has a mountain of buried secrets and
will do anything not only to keep them hidden, but also to keep Billy close by.
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare
Maker, also released as Night
Warning, is an odd little gem that explores some very uncomfortable
subjects, including rape, implied incest, and...pickling. That’s right, I said
pickling—and no, that isn’t a euphemism.
Rubber-faced Susan Tyrell
was a woman of many strange expressions, a number of which are present during
the final moments of the film. With a wide-eyed glare and an animalistic snarl,
she quickly sheds the skin of a happy homemaker and transform into an
uncontrollable monster—and man, is it a hoot and a half to witness.
For this commentary, I
discuss my frustrations with Code Red for taking approximately four years to
finally release the DVD they’d promised (Tyrell actually passed away by the
time the disc was available), some behind-the-scenes dirt on the making of the
supplemental materials, and some interesting comparisons between the screenplay
and the novelization.
Note: During the opening
episode’s opening, I reflect upon a comedy sketch involving a car-driving cat
who always ends up careening its passengers over cliffs. What I neglected to
mention was that this was actually a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch
from the early ‘90s, so I wanted to include a little notation here to avoid any
confusion.
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