Free Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker

picture’s finished, and almost midnight by the time everybody’s assembled at the party venue. It’s going to be a long night.
    Neiderman has persuaded the easily-distracted Miss Henslett away from her fans and down the carpet to the door. The big moment is at hand. The ushers cling to the gallows, their jobs depending on the per-pendicularity of their charges. The largest of the limos comes up to the curb. Even before the door has opened, the fans—especially the women—are in a state of ecstasy, shrieking at the top of their voices.
    “ Todd! Todd! Oh God! Todd! ”

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    CLIVE BARKER
    The cameras start to flash, as though the incomprehensible semaphore of their flashes is going to summon the man in the limo.
    And out comes Todd Pickett, the star of Gallows , the reason why ninety-five percent of its audience will be there when it opens next Friday (it is now Monday); Todd Pickett, one of the three biggest male action-movie-stars in the history of cinema. Todd Pickett, the boy from Cincinnati who failed in all his grades but ended up the King of Hollywood.
    He raises his hands like a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the shouts of the crowd. Then he reaches back into the limo to catch hold of the hand of his date for the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-model-again, with whom he has been seen at parties and premieres for the past four months, though neither will say anything about the relationship other than that they’re good friends.
    He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get pictures of them together. Then, arm in arm, through the blizzard of lights and the barrage of We love you, Todd! coming at them from every side, the pair make their way to the cinema doors, which, having gathered their most important guests into the fold, then close rather defiantly, as if to divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid from those who are simply objects of the night’s wind.
    Gallows is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone involved with it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some ninety million dollars, before prints and advertising costs add another thirty-seven to the bill) to the humblest publicist, knows.
    It is, in the words of Corliss’s review in Time , “ an old fashioned action-horror picture which lacks the full-bone theatrics of grand guignol, and the savvy, John-Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute Schwarzenegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor, is playing his scenes as though he’s Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in Denmark.
    From beginning to end, Gallows is bad noose .”
    Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what Time is going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the picture CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 57
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    very plain in a piece about the state of action movies he wrote two weeks before. Nor does it take an oracle to predict that there will be others who will not like the picture. But the extent of vitriol will prove astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In the next forty-eight hours, Gallows will garner some of the most negative reviews of the last twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers empowering minor names to pull out the stops. Besides the incomprehensible script, everyone agrees, there is a lackluster quality to the picture that betrays the cast’s indifference to the entire project. Performances aren’t simply uneven, they seem designed for entirely different movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst culprit in this regard? There is no question about that. All the reviewers will agree that the most inadequate performance comes from its star, Todd Pickett.
    People writes that: “ Mister Pickett is plenty old enough to know better.
    Thirty-something-year-olds don’t act the way