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If it wasn't bad enough that the D.C. sniper chose to register his murdermobile in Camden, now there's another Jersey evildoer making headlines.
13th Child - Legend of the Jersey Devil, Volume I opened Friday, just in time for Halloween.
The film stars a parade of B-listers. You've got Cliff Robertson as a peculiar Piney and Robert "Benson" Guillaume as a cop who blathers on about his terrifying tango with the Jersey Devil from his bed in a mental ward.
Don't blink, or you'll miss the lovely Lesley Anne Down - and her barely disguised British accent - as the state attorney general whose father was killed by the creature.
Folks, it's just that bad.
But as low-budget horror flicks go, 13th Child's worst offense may not be the absence of actual horror (or humor), but the twisted take on a tale New Jerseyans have proudly told and retold for more than 250 years.
Don't just take my word on it.
After a screening in Cherry Hill, I grabbed a bite with three members of the Devil Hunters, a group of twentysomethings who love nothing more than to forage the Pine Barrens searching for traces of the terror.
In their expert opinion, the movie stinks worse than the headless corpses the big-screen beast leaves behind.
"Decapitation? I don't know where they got any of this," said an obviously irritated Laura Leuter.
Leuter, 24, works in a brokerage firm when she's not researching the legend, going on scientific-sounding "hunts" at night in the Pine Barrens and updating her all-things-Jersey Devil Web site, http://home.adelphia.net/~leuter.
"The only consistency I found in the movie," she said with a snort, "was that it was set in New Jersey."
Evil among us
As legends go, the Devil is a doozy.
Witnesses swear it has the body of a kangaroo, the wings of a bat, the head of a horse, the feet of a pig, and a tail.
One of the most widely repeated versions of how the Devil came to reside in these parts blames its mother.
As the story goes, an exhausted, impoverished Mrs. Leeds already had 12 children. When she realized she was pregnant with her 13th, she wailed: "Let it be a devil!"
And so the Devil was born in 1735, though it was also known as a "two-legged cow with wings," a "jabberwok," and, my personal favorite, "Flying Death."
While many of the sightings have taken place deep in the woods, the infamous "Phenomenal Week" in January 1909 had the Devil making the rounds of three states in seven days.
During that spree, the J.D. spooked thousands, from Bristol to Burlington. He even made his wicked way through Camden and Center City.
Leuter and her fellow Devil Hunters have read and researched just about every account around.
What always stands out is that while the monster is menacing, it's not out for blood.
"No one's ever died from it," she said, sipping Coke and munching on a turkey sandwich. "I have no record of it ever hurting anyone."
That's one of the reasons the movie didn't sit well with the Devil Hunters.
These Hollywood types, why, they stereotyped a stereotype.
Artistic license?
To add insult to injury, the filmmakers' take on South Jersey was bleak.
To watch 13th Child, you'd think we are all:
a) Beer-chugging, tobacco-chewing, pot-smoking, deer-hunting old farts who
pass out in pickups, making them ripe meat for the Jersey Devil;
b) Horny teenagers losing their virginity in abandoned trailers in the
woods, making them ripe meat for the Jersey Devil, or;
c) Two-bit, know-it-all investigators who traipse off alone in scary
settings, cuing the Jersey Devil's eerie theme music.
"They made South Jersey look so backward," said Devil Hunter Beata Blyskal.
"We're not hicks cut off from the rest of the world," added Bel Connolly, an aspiring actress who went to Stockton College with Blyskal and can polish off a pork roll like a true native.
It's enough to make the Devil Hunters despair.
"It did say 'Volume I,'" Connolly groaned. "That's a bad sign. Everybody knows sequels are always worse."
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