The upcoming release of Vampire Clay, a movie in which possessed clay comes to life with flesh eating gusto, has had me wondering about movies in which inanimate objects kill people. We have dolls, cars, tomatoes, refrigerators, beds, video tapes, tires—the list goes on and on. Pretty much anything that can kill someone has been filmed killing someone. Except, oddly enough, for one household object.
The humble gun.
In this age of imaginative bankruptcy, where everyone is looking for some hook to get noticed, and in the ongoing American social and political climate, I’m dumbfounded to think that no stupid shithead has come up with the idea of a gun coming to life and ruthlessly killing people as a central movie theme. But don’t worry folks. I’m a stupid shithead, and I’m more than happy to take you on a tour of what a movie about a killer gun might just look like.
Imagine how much scarier The Birds would have been, if the birds were actually guns.
Title: Gun DIE!
Tagline: Guns Don’t Kill People… Until NOW!
The setup takes place in present-day America. TV footage of arguing politicians, demonstrations in streets, talking heads yelling at each other. Tensions are high. Footage of a reporter, a young woman, comes more clearly onto the screen. She talks of another shooting death in the city. The death toll seems higher than ever.
This is Sally Parkfield. She’s a stalwart investigator searching for that big scoop to put her on the map. A string of unsolved gun-related murders have woven a mystery through the city. People have died alone in locked homes and cars, and the gun used is a suspicious WWII era model. Police are dumbfounded and won’t believe the one crazy homeless man that you always need to believe in movies like these. It’s a good thing Sally is there to listen, when he states that a gun floated down from the sky and shot the person right through his sixth story window. The gun was possessed, he claims. We soon find out the homeless man was right, in the following scene.
Now, it’s hard to ignore the truth with so many witnesses to the floating gun. The police eventually corner the pistol after it shoots down a man in an alley. The police try tasers and pepper spray to no effect. Then, they pull their pistols, but the guns fly off rather than harm one of their own. The gun shoots one officers dead and injures the other.
Sally, trying to run ahead of the rampaging cycle of headlines following the police attack, hears that one lone gun rancher out in the wilds of Montana has seemed to make peace with firearms of all kinds. She knows that if anyone is to solve this case, and if she’s to get her exclusive, she’ll need to visit this man.
Enter Conroy Steele. He’s a simple cowboy-type who knows the ways of the world far better than any over-educated city person could. Sally has to walk the last mile toward his home, past legions of Beware of Gun signs, but as soon as she arrives she’s struck by the man’s innate brilliance with firearms.
Sally explains the situation, but Conroy already knows and can already fix it. He’s been a gun man his whole life. Born from gun loins. He has oil in his blood, powder in his bones. City people could never understand how to tame a gun, how to treat it with the respect and dignity it deserves. He can explain why the gun is doing what it’s doing and how to stop it.
The two return to the city only to find the situation has worsened, and now the gun has amassed an army of disenfranchised sentient guns which are at war in the streets. To make matters worse, they also learn that the gun was of German origin and used by a top ranking SS officer in WWII.
Conroy teaches the army to treat their guns with peace and respect, to let them be free and not controlled by the hands and wills of any person or government entity. To partner with a good gun is to bond with its very soul. They all learn a lot about loving guns. But then the obvious bad guy double-crosses the group, revealing a huge reinforcement army of bad guns. Outranked and outnumbered, the army feels that failure is upon them. Good thing Conroy has one last trick up his sleeve.
With the best gun in the world, the army is essentially unstoppable, though the battle is hard and needlessly protracted to reach a 75 minute runtime. The best gun dies a hero’s death and is given a military funeral.
All seems well. The city is at peace with its guns. Violent crime is at an all-time low. Conroy is given the keys to the city, and Sally has the exclusive that finally earns her a prime-time seat. But Conroy returns to Montana with Sally tagging along, their mutual affection sparking like a match near gunpowder, and the two discover something horrible.
Now, that’s what you call a cliffhanger. Guess you’ll just have to wait to see how they handle this situation in Gun DIE 2: Right to Bear Harm!
Seriously, there’s no reason this franchise shouldn’t exist. It should have started as a slasher-era curio of the 80’s that morphed into a horrible parody of itself guest-starring Vanilla Ice in the 90’s, now gearing up for a gritty Netflix Original reboot that would promise to be very topical and very dark. The original director would be back on board and everything.
This is the timeline we’ve missed out on, folks. This is something that we could have had. People on internet forms should be arguing about exactly when this series about a sentient gun “jumped the shark,” but they’re not. No one is. It doesn’t exist. And everyone in the world is worse off for its absence.
Especially Vanilla Ice. Shit, he really needed that role.
