VACANCY & ARIEL

He goes to the refrigerator, pours another vodka, and watches the rest of the movie. The queen escapes through the surrounding jungle, but is killed by Ricky, who throws his magical dagger at her. It tumbles end over end, traveling hundreds of yards through the darkness, swerving around clumps of bamboo, tree trunks, bushes, and impales the fleeing queen through her malignant heart. Dak grieves for Isabel, but is bucked up by Ricky and rises to the moment with renewed zeal. With the help of a friendly shaman, they plot the attack: Dak will lead the simple villagers (there are always simple villagers in Filipino fantasy movies) in an assault on the wizard’s palace, distracting the evil one so that Ricky can sneak inside and do him in.

The battle goes badly for Dak at first. The villagers are being hacked to pieces by the wizard’s guard. All seems lost, but the ghost of Isabel appears, wreathed in swirling mist to disguise the fact the actress is no longer Isabel (a love scene between her ghost and Dak was intended for the night before the battle, but she vanished from the project and a rewrite was necessary), and she inspires him with a message of undying love and tells him of a secret tunnel into which they can lure the guard and fight them in a narrow confine, thus neutralizing their superior numbers. As this is happening, the Black Demon accosts Ricky outside the palace and all, again, seems lost. Not even he can defeat a giant. But the ancient gods, played by white-bearded men wearing silk robes and several busty Filipina babes in brocaded halters, intervene. They whisk Ricky and the Black Demon away to a cosmic platform surrounded by a profusion of stars and clouds of nebular gas (glowing, Cliff notices, rose and purple, green and white, like the lights he saw outside his cottage), shrink them to almost equal size (the demon still has a considerable advantage), and let them fight. Fending off blows with a magic bracelet given him by his dying father, a silvery circlet wrought from the stuff of a dying star, Ricky bests the demon and takes his sword—it is, by chance, the only weapon that can slay the wizard. He is returned to planet Earth where, after a torrid chase, the wizard changes into a huge serpent that Ricky chops into snake sushi.

In the final scene, also rewritten late in the game, a big celebration, Ricky wanders about the village, a girl on each arm, searching for his pal. Following an intuition, he divests himself of the ladies and enters the local temple, where he finds Dak on his knees, praying for the soul of Isabel at an altar surmounted by her portrait. He puts his hand on Dak’s shoulder. The two men exchange sober glances. Then Ricky kneels beside him and adopts a prayerful attitude. Solemn music rises, changing to a bouncy disco theme as the screen darkens and the end credits roll.

Cliff thinks now that the last scene might have been intentionally ironic. He recalls that the director dogged Isabel throughout the shoot and seemed miffed when she got together with Cliff. He may have fired her because she wouldn’t sleep with him and rewrote the scene to make a point. Not that this bears upon anything relevant to his current problem. He drains his vodka, idly gazing at the credits, puzzling over the film, wondering what Shalin wanted him to take from it. Maybe nothing. Maybe she just wanted him to endure the pain of watching it again. And then he spots something. A name. It flips past too quickly and he’s not sure he saw it. He hits reverse on the remote, plays it forward, and there it is, the logical explanation he’s been seeking, the answer to everything:

Special Effects: Bazit Palaniappan

He knew it! They’ve been trying to gaslight him the whole time. He remembers the F/X guy, a thin man in his fifties with graying hair who bore a passing resemblance to the owner of the Celeste. He must be Bazit the elder’s son and dropped the Jr. after his father died. Why didn’t he mention the connection? Surely he would have, unless he was too excited at seeing Dak Windsor. No, he would have mentioned it. Unless he had a reason to keep quiet about it…which he did. It occurs to Cliff that Bazit might be one of those soul transfers such as Shalin claimed to have undergone, but he’s not buying that. With knowledge gained from his father, Bazit tricked up the dunes around Cliff’s cottage and put on a show. Shalin must have assumed that he wouldn’t watch the end credits.