13 Toilets of Halloween #13

I had about a gazillion possible choices for today's final entry in my "13 Toilets of Halloween" series, but twas Frank Henelotter's 1988 sleazeterpiece Brain Damage that won out in the end. Because if there's one thing that Frank Henenlotter has earned after all these years and after all the sleaze, it's to be top of the toilets, bless him. And this scene never gets enough love --everybody walks out of Brain Damage thinking about the blow-job scene and I understand that, I posted that scene here at MNPP myself ages back. But this scene is the capper to the gayest sequence in an extremely gay movie -- our leading man Brian (the extremely fine Rick Hearst) has just been eyeing a naked soapy bodybuilder in the group showers...

... as his potential victim. But Brian's penis -- excuse me, his brain-eating alien parasite named Alymer who just happens to look like a big dick -- has other ideas! So Alymer slithers into the toilets where it makes a meal out of that poor young man who's just trying to read his Deadworld comic while doing his business. As we've already been trained by the film (via the blow-job scene I mentioned earlier) to see Alymer as an extension of Brian's "desires" (so to speak) we can most definitely read this death as some dastardly Glory Hole business. Metaphorically, of course. Brain Damage is Queer Horror, dammit!

Click here to see all of the "13 Toilets of Halloween"
and Happy Halloween, everybody!

13 Toilets of Halloween #12

Hey not every entry in my list of the "13 Toilets of Halloween" has to be gross or scary says me. And so if I want to include the moment in American Psycho where Peak Christian Bale wearing nothing but tighty-whities takes his morning leak while staring at himself reflected in his Les Miz poster I am going to include the moment in American Psycho where Peak Christian Bale wearing nothing but tighty-whities takes his morning leak while staring at himself reflected in his Les Miz poster. My house, my rules! Oh, Patrick....

13 Toilets of Halloween #11

You know those flashback episodes of The Golden Girls where they'd sit around eating cheesecake and tell stories and then we'd see flashback scenes from earlier episodes? Doesn't it feel like there were five of those lazy episodes every season of that show? What the hell were those writers doing that required so much time off? I'll tell you what they were doing. They were doing cocaine. They were sitcom writers in the 1980s anyway, so one assumes. Anyway that's what this post in our "13 Toilets of Halloween" series sort of is today -- it's Saturday and I have other things to do dammit. So I'm going to link you up with a couple of old posts that I've done here at MNPP that fit our theme. And this isn't really a cheat because these were two of the scenes that first popped into my mind when I decided on this theme. I mean I could have technically written new posts about them but... cheesecake. Just think cheesecake.

First up click here for my "Ways Not To Die" post on the 1987 classic Street Trash. This was literally the first toilet scene in a horror movie I thought of for this list, but then I realized I'd already posted it, and here we are. This movie is such a blast, I love it so very much. 

Next up there's the scene where a woman gets killed on the toilet in Psycho III, which I previously posted about right here -- one imagines that Anthony Perkins (who directed Psycho III) was looking to one-up Hitchcock's toilet shot, which we talked about earlier in this countdown. Psycho III reads like a laundry list of one-upping Hitch in a lot of ways, specifically with the sleaziness, and I totally dig it for that.

And finally, funny enough I have done a post about movies and toilets before! Nobody call my therapist -- I really don't need anybody going all Freud on me about this. Anyway click here for a gallery I gathered up in 2010 of some memorable toilet scenes in movies. One of the shots that you see therein will actually be showing up here in this countdown tomorrow! Can you guess which one? 

13 Toilets of Halloween #10

Ten entires into this series of "13 Toilets of Halloween" and the above gif was by far the most difficult, most terrifying one for me to make. And it's from what's supposed to be a horror-comedy! I haven't watched Arachnophobia in decades but for a person who is legitimately shit-my-pants terrified of spiders I've seen this movie a surprising amount of times. It was one of the first VHS tapes I owned back in the 90s and I saw it a dozen times at least. That's what we did in the 90s! Watch videotapes and make zines. Anyway now I'm going to have to spend another year in therapy telling the analyst why I have to go to the bathroom in the bathtub because I am too afraid of the toilet because spiders. Sigh. Not that again! The entire bathroom sequence from the movie is down below but I will warn you that it's pretty dated, in that it's all a set-up for father to stare at his teenage daughter's breasts. They sure don't make 'em like they used to!

13 Toilets of Halloween #9

Are any of you old enough to remember the Great Gay Ghoulies Riots of 1985? I was just a wee one when they happened but I distinctly remember my mother sitting me down on the training potty and telling me about how some homosexuals were very very angry because they had gone to see a scary movie called Ghoulies that had a poster that had promised...

... that there would be smartly dressed little toilet goblins attacking people in their butts, but then the movie had come out and there had been nothing of the sort! That all there was was just that shot you see up top of the totally naked goblin popping out of a toilet for a split second -- and that didn't even happen until the last ten minutes of the movie! Not a single character gets their butt munched! And as everybody knows...

Well naturally the gays went crazy -- it was worse than Stonewall. It was like ten Stonewalls! A Stonewall is every city and small town where there was a single screen showing Ghoulies. The gays wore red-and-white suspenders over sassy little blue crop-tops and they gave swirlies to every person they came across. It was total madness. Ronald Reagan was like, "Hey let's invent AIDS" and I didn't come out until my 20s. Look it up. This is all a true story, kids. Listen to your gay elders.

Anyway cut to 1988 and they knew better with the sequel Ghoulies II. They didn't try to trick us with sassy outfits but they did include lipstick, because Gays love lipstick. And then the filmmakers actually included a scene where a dude gets his butt munched! They weren't tempting fate this time! And so I give you today's "Ways Not To Die"...

Ghoulies II (1988)

Now that's the sweet stuff. And then

Homosexuality was cured after that. The end! 

Was planning on making the bf watch BARBARIAN tonight (as an excuse to give it another shot) but forgot he's got a work thing. So now in honor of this year's Halloween countdown I think I'll do a double-feature of these flicks which I have never seen! Will I hate myself after? pic.twitter.com/LEo0Cio0un

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) October 26, 2022

So to bring us back to reality -- I watched the first two Ghoulies movies last night (so you don't have to?) and this was for the very first time! They are extremely bad, and extremely strange, but also pretty easy to watch as far as dumb horror movies go. I sort-of live-tweeted them above, if you click on that tweet. The first one is one of the most nonsensical movies I have ever seen, with its plot of Satan worship and the suburbs and a bunch of toothy little hand-puppets run amok. Both are clearly rip-offs of the Gremlins movies but the second one, which is set at a carnival, manages its goofy tone better -- I'd say if you were gonna watch one, watch the sequel. And not just because it has actual butt-munching, although, as we all know, butt munching doesn't hurt. (Rim shot!)

Click here for all of the "Toilets of Halloween" and

hit the jump for links to all of our "Ways Not To Die"...

13 Toilets of Halloween #8

I very well couldn't do a series called "The 13 Toilets of Halloween" and not talk about The Toilet To End All Toilets (or rather The Toilet To Begin All Toilets) -- the scene of Marion Crane flushing ripped up pieces of paper down the Bates Motel commode in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho. Long heralded as The First Film To Show A Toilet On-Screen, although the internet has apparently shattered that myth -- Reddit is telling me that we see a toilet in King Vidor's 1928 silent masterpiece The Crowd, and that we see and hear a toilet flushing in the 1930 comedy Going Wild. Take that, Hitchcock! Toss Psycho in the garbage can, I guess! Or rather...

Anyway to make this post slightly more interesting (since what else is there to say about the goddamned toilet in Psycho) I re-watched Gus Van Sant's 1998 color pseudo-shot-for-shot remake of Psycho last night just to see if he did anything interesting with The Toilet in it and -- he does not! Lucky us. I got excited for a second because it looked like there were a couple drops of blood (I was praying it was blood anyway) on the toilet seat, but my boyfriend insists they are simply marks from those little protective nubs that keep the lid from slamming down too hard? You can make up you own minds on that. In summation...

... here is a gif of Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates jerking off at the peephole while watching Marion change in her room. That was always my favorite update from Hitch's film to Van Sant's -- just the blunt crudeness of it makes me laugh, and I think it would make Hitch laugh too. Would he have done that if he could've gotten away with it, you think? I can't decide. So much of what makes Hitch's films last was the restrictions he was forced to work around -- the sleaze is there, but you have to lean in to get it. Now if somebody remakes Psycho again they'll probably have Norman shoot ejaculate right through the peephole the next time. In 3D! Gaspar Noé's Psycho, lol. Dare to dream. Actually Karl Glusman (who did indeed shoot ejaculate for Noé already in his 3D porn film Love) would totally make a good Norman, now that I think about it?

13 Toilets of Halloween #7

I've been pretty relentlessly ripping on David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy for the past week (see this Twitter thread here or read my review of Halloween Ends right here) -- and with good reason! He really shit the bed with it! It's an incoherent jumble of half-thought-out ideas, and I am being extremely generous when I call them "half" thought out. But worst sin of all is I could cut several fingers off of my left hand and still be unable to count up as many scares as I had left fingers stretched across the entire damned run of films. DGG proved himself to be wildly inept at building tension, and I shudder to think what he's about to do to The Exorcist. (As long as Ellen Burstyn gets paid really really well I suppose we should be happy with that much.)

All that said as the world's tiniest olive branch I will say that this moment in Green's 2018 film where Michael Myers drops a handful of bloody teeth over the bathroom stall door? That shit is wildly effective. Maybe the only legitimately creepy moment in the entire trilogy? The scene with the motion-sensor light in the backyard in the first movie, the scene with Kyle Richards being hunted in the park in the second movie... honestly what else even is there? Certainly not a single goddamned second of Ends, that's for sure. What a waste of time and money and legacy these movies turned out to be. Also I was gonna ask where the hell Michael got those teeth from, but it was probably the dead gas station mechanic he stole his coveralls from, right?

Click here for the "Toilets of Halloween"... if you dare!

13 Toilets of Halloween #6

Ever notice that Omar Epps' character probably dies with his dick hanging out in Scream 2? I mean we don't see his dick (unfortunately) but he clearly whips it out to pee in the bathroom and then he never seems to put it away before...

... Ghostface stabs him in the side of the head. I think we under-rate what a humiliating death this is -- dead on the floor of the men's bathroom at the local multiplex with a glory-hole in the side of his head and his dick hanging out. Only a gay man would write this shit.

And only a gay man would do an entire post about this nonsense, haha. Anyway ScreamWiki says it's Laurie Metcalf who commits this bathroom kill but that it's Timothy Olyphant who kills Jada Pinkett in her theater seat -- anybody know how they decided that? Whoever kills Jada is wearing Omar's character's leather jacket...

... so I guess they do a whole swap-out thing? Seems overly complicated to me but then the logistics of who's doing each kill in the Scream movies usually make very little sense. That said all of that creepy whispering that Bathroom Ghostface is whispering in the stall ("Billy tell Mommy what you did" et cetera) does seem like it'd be coming from Laurie Metcalf's character, aka Billy's Mommy. In summation, give it up again for Laurie Metcalf in this movie. Queen!

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13 Toilets of Halloween #5

The scene in Bernard Rose's 1992 film Candyman where Helen (Virginia Madsen) visits the local public men's restroom of the Cabrini Green projects has been one of the hardest for me to watch ever since I realized that Candyman's tagline of "Sweets to the Sweet" that's scrawled on the bathroom wall is done so in...

... human excrement. (Happy Sunday, everybody.) For some reason I didn't realize this for a long time? It should be obvious, but I think I'd put a mental block up on that fact honestly -- I'd thought it was graffiti for ages. But then on one re-watch a few years ago my boyfriend pointed it out and there ain't no coming back from that.

You add on the fact that immediately before going into this restroom Helen is told a story by that kid Jake who's showing her around about a little disabled boy who was castrated by Candyman in there, and then the fact that the toilet itself...

... is full of christing bees and hoo boy is this scene is a world of "No thank you" from me every damn time. With regards to that castration legend though -- that feels like a weird thing for Candyman to do, doesn't it? I mean obviously castrating children is a weird thing for anybody to do! But it's not exactly Candyman's modus operandi, is what I mean. My guess is somebody else did this violence to that little boy and Candyman got blamed. But castration is exactly what Ghost Helen is supposed to be doing to her ex Trevor in the final scene of the movie, right? We never get a concrete look at what she's doing as she kills him (it's all just out of frame) but this face says it all, I think: