Posted by LR on July 29, 2003 at 22:23:35:
The Isla De La Muerta magazine article in Sam's Death and Taxes novel repeatedly alludes to a hugely popular TV show called "Slaughterhouse!" Here's a review of the latest entry in TV's snuff craze:
TV Comment - by Susan Barnett (Explore! Internet Magazine)
“Deathboard” Delivers
It would be easy to dismiss “Deathboard,” the half-hour game show that premiered Thursday on the Flesh Channel, as yet one more knockoff of Necro Network’s hugely successful “Slaughterhouse!” But unlike most of the imitation bloodfests, “Deathboard” has a loony, self-mocking humor. It’s not afraid to say “here’s a silly excuse to kill some naked women.”
The game, such as it is, consists of seven nude beauties making their way along a trail of squares by the spin of a numbered wheel. If a girl makes it alive to the “No-kill Zone,” she gets a whole month of survival without coming back to the show (just to avoid any impression that babes are unduly spared, the winner immediately kills any other players still in the game). Once a girl is killed on a square, her carcass is left in place and the next contestant can’t die on that square. This allows at least a slim chance of survival
On Thursday’s premier, host Jack Waring maintained just the right mix of clowning and expediency as he moved the game along. His assistants were “the Killer Klowns,” three lecherous middle-aged ladies in ridiculous costumes, who scurried around the board ogling, fondling, torturing and dispatching the nude women.
Waring first pretended to introduce the delectable contestants by providing gag biographies: “Lisa, originally from Dayton, Ohio, landed in prison because she’s a tasty-looking babe who needs to get killed on TV.” The girls got off some good lines too - a luscious dark-haired latina, Vera, described herself by saying “well, Jack, I hope to finish my Ph.D. in anthropology – either that, or get dismembered on square six.”
Each time a girl lands on a square, she faces whatever ordeal an illuminated “Deathboard” assigns to that square. The non-fatal torments range from uncomfortable to excruciating, but slapstick humor prevails. On Thursday’s show, the Killer Klowns attacked smooth female flesh with flyswatters, nightsticks, garden shears, pancake batter, sandpaper, dishwashing liquid, cattle prods and gumballs. If a girl wasn’t being killed, it was being slugged in the stomach, walloped, spanked, pierced or pelted.
The girls on the Thursday show were uniformly delicious, the action nonstop and funny. In twenty onscreen minutes the Klowns sawed one babe in half, blew open a girl’s belly with a vaginal implant, drilled into a rib cage, and squashed a delicate Asian beauty under a paving roller.
All the executions were light-hearted and silly. When Vera, the latina girl, landed on the next-to-last square, she was obviously delighted to get the harmless-sounding “Rubber Chicken” ordeal as her final test. A heavyset audience member named Sheila was escorted down to stand behind the kneeling girl, and whack her over the head with – you guessed it - a rubber chicken.
After Sheila’s first limp-wristed attempt, a Killer Klown lady said “come on, Sheila, you’re trying to kill this babe and she thinks you’re a wimp!” Sheila then smacked the laughing girl again, hard enough to jiggle her tits, and the audience was in stitches.
Finally the Klown said “OK Sheila, one more try,” and slipped her a second rubber chicken – this one filled with ten pounds of lead. As the girl’s dead body slapped the floor, with the pretty head bashed in, Sheila gave thumbs-up to the audience and got a huge round of applause. After the show she took home the girl’s tasty right thigh as a prize (most corpses are distributed to a chain of animal shelters, while part of the show’s proceeds go to Off the Street, a lobbying organization that publicizes the social benefits of wider death penalties for young women – ed.).
Thursday a statuesque redhead survived the first show, although she was missing one eye, a nipple, several teeth and two fingers. After slitting the throat of the one player remaining on the board, the winner described her feelings about the game to Jack Waring.
“Naturally it was a little rough on the girls,” she said, “but it was really funny in a lot of places, and I hope the audience had a great time.”
Indeed we did. As “Deathboard” demonstrates, slaughtering naked women is still a great way to put on a show.