New Jersey’s April 2002 Chiller Theatre Convention remains noteworthy for two reasons:
1. I was broke at the time and I had to travel there from the Port Authority to the Meadowlands on a budget from my new job, accompanied by my DICK dick of a new boss.
2. It was there that I first caught site of Misty Mundae.
The five-foot-zero, gloriously flat-chested, luminously beautiful future Erin Brown stood in the oddly placed smoking section of the convention, which was the hallway right at the top of the entrance escalators.
Misty sucked a lit American Spirit while bedecked in the same brown bikini she wears on the DVD cover of Roxanna, puffing away next to the Ladies Room, with her preadolescent-in-appearance upper anatomy making not so much as slight dent in her stretched-tight swimsuit top, all the while radiating a star power on par with anything I ever stumbled across while wandering about Hollywood (and I have seen Judy Tenuta eating Chinese food, people).
The smittenness hit immediately. On my end, I mean.
In short order, I researched all I could about this petite powerhouse, and learned that she had arrived in softcore B-movies from a pseudo-snuff horror underground with which I was not altogether familiar.
As a teenager, Misty got repeatedly asphyxiated by various means under the direction of then boyfriend William Hellfire for Factory 2000 films.
By the time I was writing for Celebrity Skin, though, Misty ruled as the signature starlet of Seduction Cinema, the pride of New Jersey’s soft-sex direct-to-video production boom.
And boom was the word. Roxanna was, in fact, Misty’s 14th Seduction Cinema effort, and she had only started with the studio a year earlier. Before the dawn of 2003, she went on to light up the skinstant classics Play-Mate of the Apes, Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String, and Gladiator Eroticus (the last title is noteworthy to me as one that my DICK dick boss would send back to me for corrections if I didn’t use its parody spelling Gladiator Eroticvs with a “v” that only makes sense in the context of the logo, DICK dick).
Misty’s Seduction Cinema output only ran more rampant from there and, even more intriguing than the movies themselves were each disc’s bonus features. They typically showcased a Misty interview, or behind-the-scenes footage that not only revealed her to be utterly adorable, but also smart and hip and hilarious, with extensive knowledge of movie history, cool music (especially vintage psychedelia), and counterculture lore.
Thus, when I was establishing the our debut subject. How else was I going to make her fall in love with me to the point of psychosis (hers, not mine)?
Through the studio, Misty happily complied, and even posed in a Mr. Skin tank-top. Her Skinterview responses lived up to my expectations (except for her not knowing who Rainbeaux Smith was), and therefore I made an ass of U and ME by imagining that perhaps she’d been equally charmed by my queries.
Now, readers dear, please understand the pissant depth of my delusion here. When I would come to press the flesh with Misty in October, my hope was that she’d be tickled to see me, and maybe let me sit at her table for a spell, shoot the s-word about whether or not I should get a Tarkus tattoo. You know: make me feel like a Big Shot.
Nothing in this alternately miserable or not-quite-as-miserable existence is more important to me than that: feeling like a Big Shot.
So here’s what went down upon this hopeful Big Shot's arrival at the Halloween 2004 Chiller Convention.
First, I spent an hour or so searching for the esteemed Dave Szulkin of Grindhouse Releasing. I never found him, but I did get to chat up R. Bolla and Sage Stallone, who were on hand to promote Grindhouse’s Cannibal Holocaust DVD.
Eventually, I made my way to Misty, happily chatting away with Angela Bettis and Lucky McKee, who were there fresh off their blind-lesbian-Lady-Frankenstein triumph, May.
“Misty,” I interrupted. “Hi. It’s Mike McPadden. I’m from Mr Skin.”
Ms. Mundae looked perplexed. Then gave me a icy, “Oh, hi.”
“Yeah,” I gushed, “it’s me, Misty. Mike McPadden. Concocter of the greatest QA session you’ve ever had the privilege to experience. That coolest dude you ever came across in all your 20-year-old life. The hulking death-metal dork of your dreams. The former drunken maniac ’zine publisher, now well into sobriety and his 30s. That hap-hap-happy fella you want to park your carcass next to and blather back and forth all night with about Alice Cooper and Faces of Death and Uncle Floyd, even if you don't know about Uncle Floyd because he had already bombed on NBC overnights before you were born. You know, it's ME -- god-fucking-dammit -- MIKE McPADDEN FROM MIIIIIIISTER SKIIIIIN!”
Okay, I didn’t say that. I said, “Uh, we did an interview with you back in February.”
Misty, not quite annoyed but clearly standoffish, said, “Oh, yeah. Yeah, hi.”
“I’d love to interview you again,” I said. "Not only that, but I saw you hardcore throat-fucking William Hellfire's cock in Vampire Strangler and sure, that ectomorph is packing some respectable rod and, yeah, I may have ten or 120 pounds on him, but Hellfire's wang is a half-a-twig next to the Mighty Oak that has been my blessing and my curse since the moment I hit puberty after calling High Society magazine's free phone sex line back in 1983."
Only I really just said the first part, about wanting to do another interview.
“Well, I’m not doing those kind of movies any more,” Misty answered.
“Yeah, I, uh, know,” I stammered, “but we do all kinds of skinterviews with different people. Here take my card.”
She took my card, beamed her searing blue eyes into mine and made clear, “Okay, but I’m not doing those kind of movies anymore.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Okay. Cool. Bye.”
And that is how Misty Mundae -- just before she transformed into Erin Brown and co-starred in Lucky McKee’s Masters of Horror episode Sick Girl -- hurt my feelings in my heart as a person.
