B-Movie Reels Read Online Free PDF Page A

best today. Something about her allured him. The size of her breasts, he easily admitted, but there was something else he couldn’t place. A good first impression, he supposed.
    He splashed cold water onto his face, remembering the problem downstairs. I’m a dead man. Professor Maxwell’s going to have my ass on a platter.
    His cell phone was tucked in his backpack. He decided to call Professor Maxwell before it was too late. It was already four-thirty. He would’ve had enough time to watch a film if he hadn’t tripped over the cord.  
    He postponed making the call to give the other rooms a more thorough inspection. Of the three rooms upstairs, two of them were empty bedrooms. The closed shutters turned the boxes into dark recesses. As he walked into each of the bedrooms, something reeked of cabbage. Perhaps moldy wood.  
    The last room was a glorified closet. Metal racks lined the walls, empty of clothing. The place was abandoned through and through. He’d have to find roommates to fill the place; he didn’t have enough stuff to fill ten percent of it.  
    He doubted he’d keep the house.
    Andy walked out of the closet and toward the staircase when something rattled and dust rained down upon him from the ceiling. Clump-clump-crack ! He dodged the folding steps to the attic that he knew would be coming from above. He tripped, landing face-down. The jolt of the impact rattled him, but he wasn’t bleeding or hurt. He managed to get back to his feet and stared at the attic steps that had come undone.  
    “The Amityville house,” he griped, rubbing his sore elbows. “Don’t worry, ghosts, you don’t have to work that hard to get me out of this house. Give me two weeks, and you can kiss my ass goodbye.”
    The attic light was on. “That’s weird. Ned must’ve left it on.”
    He climbed the dusty steps, curious at what could be inside. Each movement, the sensation of bugs crawling down his back and legs made him itch. The floating dust and mites in the air clung to his sweaty body. Insulation poked up from the floorboards. It was ten degrees hotter up there than below. Most of the corners were dark, and the longer he strained his eyes the more he saw that the space was empty except for a metal case wide as a briefcase, but taller. He decided to take it down with him. The initials J. L. R. were scrawled on a piece of duct tape in magic marker lettering.  
    James Lee Ryerson .  
    He lugged the metal box downstairs. It had three metal clips, and he unbuckled them. Andy studied what was stored inside the black foam padded lining. It was an Orion projector, but it was silver-lined, the model an earlier version than the one he’d broken. It was single-reel and played sixteen millimeter film.  
    All right, let’s watch a movie!

Chapter Two
    1
    Andy shut the blinds and closed the sliding wood partition that separated the room from the kitchen. Without the lights on, it was theater-dark in the living room. Earlier, the metallic case of fifty plus reels posed a challenge; which one to watch first? He had sorted through a few stacks: Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana, The Clothesline Killer, Jorg: The Hungry Butcher, Veteran’s Hospice Massacre, and stopped at the one entitled Attack of the Sludge. The reel case had a tagline marked in type font: THE SLUDGE EATS YOU FROM THE INSIDE OUT!  
    “This should be interesting. It sounds horrible already.” He groaned. “It’s a paycheck. Keep telling yourself that.”
    It was a foot in the door to other jobs, he supposed. Anything to get him recognized in the film industry, he decided, whether it was from co-writing commentary with a notable film critic and moviemaker/professor or not.  
    “The DVD market opened a new venue for forgotten movies to be resurrected,” Professor Maxwell had explained to him upon issuing him the job. “A lot of them are public domain now, like these. My father’s a collector and came upon these movies and bought them for a hundred bucks.