Call it the Jim Powers Halloween weekend. Powers on Thursday shot three scenes for Legend Video's Perverted Stories - one a little weirder than the next. There's one scenario with a bum coming up to a girl and asking to fuck her. She runs him over with a car but he keeps reappearing - a little more bloody than the last time. Finally he shows up in a garage and he fucks her. Then there's an emotionally uplifting scene involving a girl who has her arms and legs amputated, and she gets fucked as a stump. BUT the big scene is one that involves creatures of the night. No, not vampires or Internet gossip reporters.
Jim Powers say this scene may be the most expensive single girl masturbation scene ever shot. One is not inclined to doubt him. For this one, Powers has assembled a location that features a lagoon, a waterfall, loads of dry ice, an octopus, yes, you read that right, an octopus [Powers claims the octopus is a nocturnal creature]; and newlyweds Aspen Brock and Buck Adams. Yes, you read that right, too.
With Powers, everything seems to be fair game in his sexual equation - dinosaurs, dummies, now octopuses. There's nothing too weird, too goofy or too tasteless for him. As this scene is described by Powers, the name Ed Wood somehow jumps out at you. It's almost the same scene as in Bride of the Monster. Then it clicks. That's it. Jim Powers is dying to be Ed Wood.
Buck Adams, from nextofkin.com, on the other hand, is out of the hospital, looking chipper but not necessarily fit-as-a-fiddle yet. He displays a huge black and blue mark on the crook of his right arm, the results of attempts at blood work after what was believed to be another heart attack. It wasn't. Because of Buck's apparent ability to live forever, Powers and I have nicknamed him The Highlander.
Adams: "I went in [the hospital]. They checked me for a heart attack. They couldn't find anything. Now I have to go in Tuesday of next week. They have a virologist there. They think I got meningitis from a bug bite. And that's what shut all my stuff down. They think it was meningitis because I have real bad pains in my back and going up my neck. I was having really bad headaches. They were going, oh, it sounds either like encephalitis or meningitis. I was going, oh boy."
G. Ross: "Did you get bit by some nasty shit that you can recall?"
Adams: "Yeah. I got bit by a couple of mosquitoes the day before and that was it."
Powers: "You should have seen it; he was dead."
Adams: "I went in the hospital and I must have literally had at least 100 blood tests over two days. That's why my arms look like this. They came back and the guy goes, well, you didn't have a heart attack. Oh, cool, then I'm outta here, right? Oh, no. You can't go anywhere. We don't know what's the matter. Then the next morning, this guy who looks like some representative from Sony comes in. He goes, 'How much money you got?' I'm like I don't know. Who the fuck are you? He hands me his card. He says he sells electrical devices. 'I make this thing called a defib unit; they'll sew it underneath your chest and if this ever happens again, you already got the unit inside you. It'll shock you from the inside.'
"I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. They don't even know what's a matter with me, and you're sewing car batteries into me? I go, what are we talking, 20 or $30,000? He goes, Ah! I go until you know what's a matter with me, you don't come back and bother me anymore. Then the hospital people came in and it's like 20 or 30 more samples of blood.
"Then they tell me they can't figure out what's a matter with me. 'You didn't have a heart attack, and your heart rates normal; no PVC's, no anything going on. We don't know what's a matter with you.'
"I said there was some guy in here from like Mitsubishi trying to sell me a fucking car battery to plug in. 'He what?' They started laughing at me. I said keep that fucking guy away from me. When I checked out, I thought about it. When I had the heart attack [several years ago] you knew what was happening; you knew what was going on; you'd go to the hospital and go through the experience and come out all beat down. When I was rolling into the hospital [this time] I was sitting up in the gurney going what the fuckin' hell happened here? Nobody could find out anything for three days, and they just kept taking blood tests, fucking with me and keeping me in the critical care unit.
"Then they go we can't find anything the matter with you, and your heart's all normal, we're going to move you into the ICU so we can keep an eye out for you. I said, what, 'At $10,000 a day?' He said, yeah, roughly ten grand. He goes three or four days and we should have it all figured out. I say, well, if there's nothing the matter with me, why don't I go to a cheap room at $2,000 a day? Then if there's something bad, you can stick me back in the expensive room. 'Well, that's not hospital policy.' I go, aren't you the guys who tell women they can't have epidurals unless they have 400 bucks cash on them when they come in to have a baby? He goes, 'Ah, that was months ago.'
"I go, you know what, I'd rather deal with the doctors over at the county hospital. From my room I called up my old doctor who did the angioplasty on me and he goes, they want what? They're doing what? He goes, when they come in there and ask you for an authorization, tell them I'm your doctor. He goes you didn't have a heart attack. There's no reason for you to be sitting in that room. He goes, 'Have them do a virology test on you to see if you've got meningitis or encephalitis.' He goes, were you bit by any insects? I go, yeah, I've been trying to tell them that for two days. He goes, what are your symptoms? I tell him about the pains up the back of my neck so bad, I couldn't move my head. I was really stiff and was having blurred vision.
"He goes, wow, I think you might have got a case of meningitis. Is it subsiding? Or is it still the same. I said it was going away. The more it goes away, the better I feel. He said he was going to set up a meeting to come in. He said if they try to sew shit in you, pull the plugs and get the fuck out of there. Aspen showed up, and she was sitting there. I go, we're outta here. I was yanking hoses, trying to get out of there. The one nurse who kept poking holes in me tried grabbing me. 'You can't go anywhere!' I can do anything I damn want to. You guys don't know what you're doing, and I'm tired of you guys poking holes. At one point it took 17 tries to set an IV in me.
"The guys at the county hospital asked me if I had a neighbor. I said, yeah, I rattled off her name. They said she was in the emergency room right now with severe neck pain, severe headaches and a heart rate of 220 beats. 'She said she was bitten by an insect, too.' Now, they got guys trapping insects in my neighborhood to find out if it's the same thing that's happening on the east coast where they're spraying all of New York. They're worried now that those insects with meningitis or encephalitis have gotten to the west coast. It seems pretty weird. New York which is a big fruit distribution center, now, all of a sudden in LA they've got three areas where they've got four or five cases of this with those symptoms: where your neck gets stone-stiff. You can't move it. When you try, there's this immense pain. When you do move your head there's almost this blinding light on you. Your eyes start watering and you're in so much pain.
"So I just tried to sit around and eat aspirin. Then he told me that's the worst thing you can do 'cause aspirin causes the lining around your brain to swell which is what the meningitis does to you. The sac of water around your brain swells up and the pressure causes everything to start short circuiting. He said that can very easily shut down your heart. Now he says once I come in, they've got to test me for brain damage! I said you don't have to test me for that, I can tell you got that already. It was wild.
"I was sitting in this hospital bed, I'm thinking, before, when I had the heart attack I knew what was going on, and I knew what medicines to take. They give you a course of action. But something as simple as a bug biting you, can just kill you like that. If I had been someplace where there wasn't a phone, or wasn't on a set...I felt good enough to be working...if I would have been someplace where there wasn't all that stuff, I would have wound up dead. So I thought right then. I'm not going to dick around. Aspen showed up, and I said, fuck it, we're not waiting a month or two months, till everybody's happy. Let's go Saturday. We were already planning on going Saturday to get married. I said let's go do it. You know what? If you can die that quick from something as stupid as a bug bite, I'm not about to waste one more second of my freakin' life. If I don't like something, or something's not quite right with me, screw that, I'm outta here. It just ain't worth the trouble. Tomorrow you maybe fuckin' dead."
Adams said Brock was in shock that they were leaving from the hospital to get married. Adams said he and Brock have been together about 2 1/2 months. "We were going to wait a little while longer, but my daughter loves her," Adams said. "That's my only criteria. As long as my daughter loves you, that's good enough for me. I'm crazy about the girl. She never yells at me. She never has a cross word for me. There's no arguments with what you deal with all day long on the phone, the companies, or this person trying to cheat that, or weaseling out of paying this bill..."
G. Ross: "She's going to be doing an octopus tonight. Are you jealous?"
Adams: "Not really. As long as they don't freeze her to death in that ice-cold pool."
Brock said she won't do men other than Buck, octopuses notwithstanding. Buck says he's not going to work anymore, that he doesn't have to.
G. Ross: "What was the thing that clicked between the two of you?"
Adams: "I don't know. When I first met her, I just knew. It was just a matter of living through whatever we had to go through at that first point. But I knew first thing. I never thought anything different. 'Cause I had to keep her half-drunk through the relationship. She had a little bit of a drug problem and cleaned that all up."
Brock says Adams was quite supportive. Adams: "When people make those kind of efforts to be in your life, let's face it, I'm not getting any younger, and the girls don't get much better looking than this. I figured, fuck it, I'll just keep her half-toasted all the time, and I'll get away with something here."
Back to the lagoon where the shooting area is lit up for a World Series night game.
Powers says he's always wanted to do an octopus fucking a girl. "Like in the Japanese cartoons," he says. "You always see in Japanese porno, girls getting fucked by beasts." This octopus, however, isn't real. It's constructed of papier mache, rubber, varnish, chicken wire and a few other odds and ends thrown in with dildos attached to the ends of its tentacles. The tentacles, attached to puppet strings, will be operated by crew hands.
It's really a marvelous job, but Slain Wayne, who assembled it, apologizes. "I only got a weeks' notice," says Wayne. "But I don't think it's going to hold up in the water." We'll see.
The gag, as it's set up, has Brock lollygagging through a resort at night where she's warned by one of the hired hands about dangerous, nocturnal creatures. The crew goes about working the lagoon area with a fog machine, and dry ice is set into the water to achieve the smoky, bubbling effects. The script calls for Brock to begin dipping her toes in the water, seductively, and start masturbating. Then, out of nowhere, a tentacle reaches into the frame and wraps around her neck. The next frame has Brock pulled into the drink screaming holy hell with this huge octopus staring her in the eyes. Powers yells out instructions: "You're fighting it! You're fighting it! Hit him in the forehead! Try to get out. Try to get out of the water!"
At this point, I feel an insect biting my arm. Painfully reminded of the conversation I've just had with Buck, I take my leave. However, Brock's cries echo all through the Chatsworth neighborhood where this is being shot. Brock's screams were the last thing I heard when another mosquito got me in the neck.
In what has to be a totally bizarre postscript, Jeff from Legend called Friday morning claiming the octopus shoot was raided by the cops. "Jim said six police officers showed up," said Jeff. "The police are saying something about a sex movie. Jim goes, 'Sex movie? Let me show you what I was doing.' Jim took them to the backyard and showed them the octopus. 'What kind of idiot would use an octopus in a porno movie?' "So the police were laughing with him, and he shut down the scene," Jeff said. Jeff seems to think that Aspen Brock and Buck got into some kind of fight afterwards. "Buck left and called Jim this morning from jail," Jeff said. "Apparently she got a ride home with one of the octopus crew. She goes home. Buck's all upset with her. I don't know exactly what happened. Apparently she called the police on Buck. The police showed up. She was all bruised. She said it was because of Buck, but Buck was saying no, it was because she was fucked by an octopus.
"The police didn't believe him so they arrested him. Only in the world of JM Productions do you get stuff like this."
