The Secret of Evil Read Online Free

chair.
    I was stunned. I could tell right away the film was bad, or the sort
we call bad — poor fools that we are — because the actors aren’t much good and
the director’s not much good and the cretinous special effects guys are pretty
hopeless too. But really it was just a very low-budget film, pure B-grade
schlock. What I mean, just to be perfectly clear, is a film that cost about four
euros or five dollars. I don’t know who they conned to raise the money, but I
can tell you that all the producer shelled out was a bit of small change, and
they had to make do with that.
    I can’t even remember the title, really I can’t, but I’ll go to my
grave calling it
The Colonel’s Son
, and I swear it was the most
democratic, the most revolutionary film I’d seen in ages, and I don’t say that
because the film in itself revolutionized anything, not at all, it was pathetic
really, full of clichés and tired devices, prejudice and stereotypes, and yet at
the same time every frame was infused with and gave off a revolutionary
atmosphere, or rather an atmosphere in which you could sense the revolution, not
in its totality, but a fragment, a minuscule, microscopic fragment of the
revolution, as if you were watching
Jurassic Park
, say, except the
dinosaurs never showed, no, I mean as if it was
Jurassic Park
and no
one ever even
mentioned
the fucking reptiles, but their presence was
inescapable and unbearably oppressive.
    Do you see what I getting at? I’ve never read any of Osvaldo
Lamborghini’s
Proletarian Chamber Theater
, but I’m certain that
Lamborghini, with his masochistic streak, would have been happy to watch
The
Colonel’s Son
at three or four in the morning. What was it about? Well,
don’t laugh, it was about zombies. No kidding, like George Romero’s movies, more
or less; it had to be a kind of homage to Romero’s two great zombie flicks. But
if the political background to Romero is Karl Marx, the political background to
the movie last night was Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry. Pure French
insanity.
    Don’t laugh. Romero is straightforward and tragic: he talks
about communities sinking into the mire and about survivors. He also has a sense
of humor. You remember his second film, the one where the zombies wander around
the mall because that’s the only place they can vaguely remember from their
previous lives? Well, last night’s film was different. It didn’t have much of a
sense of humor, although I laughed like a madman, and it wasn’t about a communal
tragedy either. The protagonist was a boy who — I’m guessing, because I didn’t
see the start — turns up one day with his girlfriend at the place where his
father works. I didn’t see the start, like I said, so I can’t be sure. Maybe the
boy goes to visit his father and that’s where he meets the girl. Her name is
Julie and she’s pretty and young, and she wants to be — or seem to be — up to
date, the way young people do. The boy is the son of Colonel Reynolds. The
colonel is a widower and loves his son — that’s obvious right from the start —
but he’s also a soldier, so the relationship that he has with his son is one in
which there’s no place for displays of affection.
    What is Julie doing at the base? We don’t know. Maybe she went
to deliver some pizzas and got lost. Maybe she’s the sister of one of the guinea
pigs that Colonel Reynolds is using, although that seems unlikely. Maybe she met
the colonel’s son when she was hitching a ride out of the city. What we do know
is that Julie is there and that at some point she gets lost in an underground
labyrinth and innocently walks through a door that she never should have opened.
On the other side is a zombie, and it starts chasing her. Julie flees, of
course, but the zombie manages to corner her and scratch her; at one point he
even bites her arm and her legs. The scene is suggestive of a rape. Then the
colonel’s son, who’s been searching for her, appears, and between