I stumbled upon a real gem on Shudder this week. It was a 1981 exploitation horror film, “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker”, or “Night Warning” an equally random and confusing title that it was later changed to. Night Warning is a story of a woman named Cheryl, who likes to pickle things. She gets custody of her three year old nephew after both of his parents die in a dramatic car accident.
That car accident serves as the first sign that it’s going to be my kind of movie. Allow me to walk you through it. The couple is driving along what looks like a california highway when they discover their brakes are cut. The man thrashes the car around along the side of the mountain, yet never tries to pull around or avoid impact in the three minutes it takes to show them barreling toward a log truck. This film predates Final Destination and the scene is almost as lovely, but the log barrels through the windshield, forces his head back, and then just scoops up the car, causing it to dangle in thin air. As this happens, the woman tries to…well, I’m not sure what she tries to do, but it doesn’t help. The car finally gets thrown off the mountain with the sounds of her scream the whole way down. It lands violently on the side of a lake, and it’s clear that they probably didn’t survive impact, but just for good measure the car blows up. I’m sold.
Fast forward fourteen years. We see Cheryl waking up her half naked nephew by draping herself over his body, scratching his back and purring seductively. So this is what we’re doing…
Cheryl has this way of saying everything either sexually or just dramatically aloof. The nephew, Billy, acts like he is perpetually ten years old, but is about to turn seventeen. He asks if his girlfriend, Julie can come over for his party, but creepy aunt says no. “I’m your date” she says, so this is a healthy relationship. Billy is the star of his basketball team, short shorts and all, which angers some of his teammates for some reason, but his coach loves him. He tells Billy that he’s sure he could get a full athletic scholarship if he wanted. Excited, Billy tells his aunt while she’s making dinner, and she acts like he just told her that he likes to kill people. Seriously, he has Paul Allen in a freezer uptown in her mind.
She slaps him for wanting to go to college, throws the food on the ground and then, like any true drama queen, goes upstairs to lay down. This movie is so damn dramatic, it could be a telenovela. It’s a “horrornovela.” And that means we need a good sexual assault scene. I’ll describe it for you. She throws herself at the repair man, and won’t take no for an answer. She “needs a man!” and so she unravels the top of her dress and literally throws herself onto him, begging him to have sex with her. He finally hits her out of self defense, so she one ups her rapey vibes and stabs him to death. Billy comes home to the tail end of this but it’s too late to save the man. “He tried to rape me” she says. Next up we watch her in hysterics, putting her bloody hands all over her nephew’s face and clothes for no reason. It’s hard to believe that this film isn’t self aware at this point.
Probably my favorite character is the nose neighbor, Margie. She’s snappy, brass and always lurking around. She arrives with her husband to celebrate Billy’s birthday, but instead gets to sit awkwardly as all of this continues to go down. I should mention that when Margie walks in, Cheryl switches her gross, bloody grabbiness to her instead, ruining her dress. The cops arrive, and we get a classic good cop/bad cop. The latter berates them all, as he poo poo’s rape theories, and he tries to pin it on Billy. Then he starts to question Billy and Aunt Cheryl’s relationship, probably because as he stands there, Cheryl is wrapped around his arm like she wants to be ravaged by him.
Detective Douchebag goes to threaten the basketball coach, telling him to resign, as we find out he was the lover of the repair man. It would be a good find, knowing he wouldn’t have tried to rape Cheryl, except he is now convinced that Billy did it, so assumes it had to do with sex, trying to pin him as also being gay.
The movie gets a little harder to watch from here with all of the homophobia, slurs and bullshit from the cop, and it’s long overdue for another murder, but we continue and watch the good cop give us hope that justice will prevail. The highlights of the second half include Cheryl drugging her nephew right before his big game, locking him in the attic, killing his girlfriend, and cutting her own hair off for no apparent reason, all leading up to the finally not-so-shocking twist, (because who actually gives a fuck?) that Cheryl is actually Billy’s mother, which makes her behavior toward him somehow even more inappropriate now, and we find Billy’s biological father’s head in a jar upstairs, (say it with me) PICKLED. The overdramatic, homophobic final act has Billy calling the coach for help, killing Cheryl with a fireplace poker after she attacks him, his girlfriend revealed to be alive, the bad cop trying to still pin Billy for murder, Billy killing the cop, and then finally credits, but not until a forced “where are they now” segment. When I say forced, I mean what in unnecessary, under edited hell is happening.
Holy shit. I don’t know what I did to deserve this one, but I’d do it again and again. Deliciously horrible. Ten out of ten. Madame approved.
Til next time,
Madame of Horror
Madame of Horror 
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