INTRODUCTION
What you are about to hear is true.
No names have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty or anybody in between.
Have you heard of Uncle Fester?
Probably not.
There’s no real reason you should know him.
Because he’s still alive.
He’s one of those who become well-known posthumously.
[But that doesn’t mean we want to kill him with this film.]
Presently, he’s very busy building a monument to himself.
Let’s pay him a visit.
LABORATORY
This is my lab.
This is my lab.
This is my lab.
This is my lab.
This is where I do all the experiments that get me into so much damn trouble.
This is a weird place, with indoors rain, earthquakes, tornadoes and fires.
I can turn it on and off by this switch, which is pretty nifty.
My ultra evil lab assistant is running around here somewhere.
I used to have a human lab assistant, but that coward snitched on me to the Feds just to keep his own lousy butt out of gaol.
Now, I have an inhumane lab assistant instead, who at least knows how to keep his mouth shut.
His only drawback is that he’s a sadistic killer maniac, but he’s real good at watching over the lab; I just wish he’d recognise me a little faster when he’s on watchdog duty.
Look!
that’s him – that’s Chuckie.
He’s a rascal.
While I’m resisting Chuckie’s homicidal fury, I’d like to tell you a bit about myself.
My real name is Steve Preisler, although I have achieved a certain degree of world-wide infamy under the pseudonym, Uncle Fester.
I was born in ‘58 near Green Bay, Wisconsin.
I have two great kids, one dog, a house, and two cars.
I am 5 foot 9 inches tall, weigh 180 pounds, and exercise down at the Y twice a week.
I have lost most of my hair, smoke about a pack or two of Camels every week, and am single.
I’m from a large farming family, .
Boy, farming’s a bitch of a way to make a living.
My family is aware of my secret hobby but they have no idea about my global reach.
The less said the better.
They are unaware of my regular appearances in the global media SAT 1, MTV, TV Tokyo, and Czech TV; you name it, I’ve been on it.
I think they think I have just some kind of crackpot sideline.
My day job entails the supervision of the chemical works at an electroplating factory in Green Bay, where I am the chief chemist.
This job really made my publishing possible in the first place.
My boss oughta be charging me rent for the use of the laboratory.
When I’m working on a new book, I’ll get to work, get a good morning caffeine jolt, and then pound out a page or two on my typewriter, then go about my daily work duties.
It doesn’t take long to get a book done that way.
The only thing my boss demands is that I stay off the local TV and out of the fricking newspapers.
They run a respectable business, yah know.
They don’t want the world media camped outside the factory every time there’s an event for which Uncle Fester’s expert commentary is required.
The guys at work are rather entertained reading those little books I write.
A new book always elicits laughter for a few days.
And when they see the royalty checks -- huh, hey, woo -- their eyeballs start rolling around in their heads.
They start thinking of writing books of their own on topics they’re familiar with -- like drinkin, gamblin and bad marriages.
And a favourite thing there, one guy from the corner of the plant, when I walk in the door every morning, laughs [mad scientist laugh].
He shoots that mad scientist cackle at me, you know.
Our football team is named after the meat packing industry, which is real big around here.
It’s called the Green Bay Packers.
For us, football is a religion.
It’s no coincidence that games are played on Sundays.
The head coach is the high priest of the city, while head coaching changes resemble medieval religious strife.
FESTER’S BOOKS
My first book was Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, which I wrote while I was in the slam (for cooking meth, of course).
That’s my bona fides.
I must know something about it because I was doin time for doing it.
Beyond any doubt, this is the best book ever written on the subject of clandestine chemistry by anyone, anywhere, anytime, period.
Basically, it’s a Betty Crocker drug cookbook.
It’s also my answer to the so-called War on Drugs, which is, of course, really, a War on Citizens.
This book has ended the Drug War as we know it because it cuts out the middleman –- the drug dealer -- by enabling everybody to cook drugs in the safety and privacy of their own homes.
The idea for this book came to me one night when I was in my jail cell watching TV.
Barbara Walters was on, doing a story on the evils of terrorist publishing, abuses of the First Amendment, and whatnot.
-- the tears were nearly rolling down her surgically enhanced cheeks there.
Right then, in my revulsion, I decided -– hahaha -- to write my first book.
Nobody ever wondered what the hell I was doin, because, you know, convicts sitting in jail cells with typewriters are just as common as cockroaches.
The second book I wrote was Silent Death, which is a celebration of the ancient and fine art of poisoning.
This is the best book on poison since the days of Lucrezia Borgia.
In the good old days, governments kept poison-making techniques classified.
But why should governments have all the fun?
I’m jumping on the privatisation bandwagon, you understand.
Silent Death teaches citizens how to prepare poisons themselves.
Choosing the right poison for the job is like calling the right play in football.
There are several golden rules of rat poisoning, which is only right, since most targets are rats anyway.
Of course, the most important thing about a poison is that it should do the job well, meaning that the victim dies.
Hahaha, you can bet you won’t see my poisoning recipes on MacGyver!
My third book was Home Workshop Explosives.
We’re talkin major fire hazards here.
Since Big Brother doesn’t trust citizens with whole classes of explosive substances, and since I feel the same way about Big Brother, I wrote this book.
Plus, fresh on the heels of my drug book success, my greedy publisher felt it was time for the Uncle Fester treatment of the topic.
I actually got the nickname Uncle Fester because I liked to cook explosives in my dorm room in college.
Well, hackles were raised often by some residents of the dorm concerning my noxious cooking activities.
Gasping for breath, they’d complain, “Uncle Fester is fouling up the dorm again with his nitrogen dioxide.” Hahaha.
So when I started to write books I just stuck with the nickname.
My earliest fans and detractors had coined it, and I wanted to give them something back.
My latest book is Vest Busters.
Vest Busters explains how to coat bullets with Teflon so they can penetrate police armour with ease.
Why the hell did I write that?!
The FBI, and the BATF in particular, have been getting real cheeky lately.
They even managed to execute a tax protestor’s wife, son and even the poor sop’s dog.
We’re witnessing a zenith in the arrogance of officialdom.
Uncle Fester thought he’d better put a stop to that kind of behaviour.
Now, if the authorities use those vests for offensive purposes, they’ll have to fear for their own lives, and, as we all know, bullies quickly lose their zest for aggressive activity when their own butts might get kicked.
Vest Busters, your uncle’s gift to the domestic arms race.
What other projects I have in mind there I’m not exactly sure.
They come to me one at a time, and I deal with them one a time.
It doesn’t just depend on me you know.
FESTER’S PUBLIC SERVICE
Like Diana in her tunnel, Fester makes news in a funnel; in which he precipitatesMany headaches for the State.
After JFK Jr.’s recent dive, another George writer, still alive; stole from Uncle about 5 pages, ready for copy -- easy wages.
For a film Quentin made by debit, Fester never got a credit. He designed a meth lab without equal, I ain’t gonna work on no damn sequel!
Who is Lyle Swan?
Lyle puked on stairs.
Lyle puked on walls.
Lyle puked on expensive carpets, lining engineering school halls.
Lyle had a nasty wife,who saw no need for Lyle’s life.
Lyle being a lousy lover, she had another under cover.
After a spell to think, she concocted a murderess drink; a World War I poison tea, underground, soon, wedding vows would be.
Lyle couldn’t really stop the squirts.
Oh God, my ass!
It hurts.
It hurts!
What the hell did I eat.
Why’s my butt leakin on the street!
Desperate was he, to give Fester a ring; the poison expert,--and a very good thing.
Fester reviewed the ugly ale, and relayed a bitter tale.
Of love betrayed, poison phosphorus, and wives getting laid.
At last, Lyle understood, the very worst of womanhood.
Lyle, no matter how good lookin, I’d stop eating her lousy cookin!
TRUE
I’ll be calling up the TV station here this morning.
They’re interested in my video called ‘Cooking Crank with Uncle Fester’.
I made it so people could understand my recipes without all the technical bookish stuff.
Nobody reads today anyway, so, you know, to spread the Gospel these days you gotta be on video.
A subsidiary of Walt Disney Corporation, ABC TV, is interested in using my video for this special they’re doin on methamphetamines.
The storyline goes, there are these two babes who live together out in the cemetery in a cardboard box.
Of course, they have big breasts, which we really, really like.
They’re meth-fiends you understand.
Having failed to beg enough money to buy drugs, these two babes decide to pull a house burglary.
They break the windows of a private residence, and go about ransacking it for saleable items.
Well, exhausted, they flip on the TV during the burglary bit.
Surprise, surprise: staring out at them from the TV is Uncle Fester.
He’s hosting his own show: ‘Cooking Crank with Uncle Fester’!
Well, hehe hehe hehe, this interests them to no end, you know.
So, they park their cute little behinds in front of the TV screen and watch ‘Cooking Crank with Uncle Fester’.
They realise all the stuff they need for cooking meth can be had just by ransacking this guy’s house.
They learn that instead of stealing stuff to pawn to buy drugs, they can steal everything they need to produce the drugs themselves!
It’s a morality tale, you understand.
The paint thinner, the cold pills, the Red Devil lye – everything they need to make drugs is right there in that private residence!
The homeowner even has a coin collection containing some palladium, the precious metal catalyst needed for the hydrogenation of the ephedrine into methamphetamine.
So, these two big-breasted babes make their own stuff, and in the final scene there’s a nice little shot of their product.
Girl cheerleader medley: For we were sad, and you gave Us something to sniff.
We were depressed and you gave Us something to swallow.
We were strangers and you invited Us in.
We needed drugs and you drugged Us.
We were bored and you looked after Us.
WEATHER REPORT
Weather girl
Turning to the weather...
Tomorrow there will be a favourable wind, together with yellow and green chlorine clouds over Ypres, as a German front moves in a westerly direction.
France will shrink as Germany enlarges.
Scholar
The flames rage violently, threatening an end to life and the world and this brief speech.
(The speech at least has the advantage of being nearly over.)
Fester
Have you heard about the War on Drugs?
I got nailed by it, and put in the slam.
Yeah, I got gassed in the trenches in that one!
Hahaha.
Weather girl
The Allies are predicting unseasonably warm temperatures in Dresden today.
Scholar
A fire breaks out backstage in a theatre.
The clown comes out to warn the public.
They think it’s a joke and applaud.
The clown repeats himself.
The acclaim is even greater.
I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from those who believe it’s a joke.
Fester
For manufacturing and distributing crank, I got tagged for three and a half years in the pen.
Weather girl
Today, massive doses of radiation are predicted for Hiroshima, as the city plays host to an interesting physics experiment.
Scholar
Only someone who has been bitten by snakes knows what the victim of a snake-bite suffers.
Fester
I do believe each person possesses an inalienable right to control his own body chemistry.
Scholar
There’s a story of how a French soldier who had campaigned in Russia had his leg amputated at the knee due to gangrene.
As soon as the painful operation was over, he grabbed the leg by the foot, threw it in the air and shouted: “Vive l’empereur!
Fester
That made me a radical I guess, and I got in a shit-load of trouble for it.
Weather girl
Turning to the Americas...
dark clouds are gathering.
Scholar
On rainy days, I am very fond of talking to myself.
In myself I have found the most interesting of my acquaintances.
Fester
It was all quiet on the western front, and then – bam!
– Drug War!
Weather girl
This is not a watch, this is a warning.
Scholar
Genocide is not usually advertised.
The authorities do not come right out and say, “By the way, we’re going to annihilate an entire segment of the population this afternoon."
Fester
“Save our children from the evil druglords and the gangs, save our boys and girls from the gangs,” my enemies rant, over and over and over.
Weather girl
If you are anywhere in the computer projected path of this storm, take cover immediately.
Scholar
These things are not generally celebrated by their perpetrators.
Their efforts are a bit more subtle.
Fester
It’s like I got caught up in some kind of witch-hunt.
Weather girl
The weather is highly unpredictable these days.
Scholar
As a consequence, it is very difficult to perceive when a holocaust is actually in progress because it proceeds by and through the rule of law.
Fester
My personal opinion is that dope fiends have been relegated to the status of the Jews in the Final Solution -- you know, fit to be rounded up and sent to camps, and that’s about it.
PUBLISHING ARMS RACE
My books have definitely had an impact.
Besides all of the people who follow my recipes to skirt the law, many critics acknowledge my books.
Killer!
Jerk!
Murderer!
Usually when I publish a new book or release a new edition of an old book, the authorities reconfigure the market to hinder my recipes.
I update my books regularly because the narco-swine are always fucking with my reactions.
For example, in the fourth edition of Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, I published a couple methods for cooking amphetamines using Sudafed cold pills or Dexatrim diet pills.
One method was just perfect for the extraction of a nice pure extract for the subsequent chemical conversion.
Anyhow, it didn’t take the narco-swine six months, and those ephedrine pills were chemically reformulated in such a manner that that old recipe just produced a bunch of slop
the most horrendous milkshake-looking gunk you could imagine.
I just knew lots of people were getting frustrated as all hell, you know.
So the fifth edition is out now, with a completely new extraction method,
which will work just fine with the new pills.
I wonder how long it will take for them to reformulate the pills and foil my new recipe.
Lord knows they’ll try.
The US Congress even legislates mindful of Uncle Fester.
Before the first edition of Silent Death in 1988, it was still legal in the United States to brew nerve gas and extract ricin, and all that sort of stuff.
So long as you didn’t wipe out a city block with it, the actual act of brewing it was no big deal.
Well, after the book came out, U.S. Senator for Wisconsin Herb Cole introduced his first bill to Congress
the Biochemical Terrorism Act of 1989,
which made cooking nerve gas, extracting ricin and things like that illegal,
with a penalty of up to a life term for doin it.
I’ll tell ya, if that guy’s a senator, then I oughta be president.
Another example, the Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture was attacked by the Meth Act of 1996.
It was sponsored by another Senate nemesis, Diane Feinstein.
It jacked up greatly the penalties for cooking meth,
made owning glassware for the purpose of cooking meth a separate felony with a 10 year bit,
and also put the mail order sales of those pills under intense federal scrutiny.
Yes, when Uncle Fester breaks wind in Green Bay, they hear it in D.C.
I am in a publishing race with the authorities and their corporate cronies.
Every time I write a new book, they answer it by passing new laws and altering the chemical formulae of the stuff they sell.
It’s like a religious war really. Hahaha. Both sides feel very righteous!
AUM
In the mid-nineties, I got a call from the Japanese TV network ‘TV Asahi’.
They wanted to come over to Green Bay and have a little chit-chat with Uncle Fester.
Of course I was honoured -- great, great, great, guys come on out.
Well, about a dozen of them came over, 2 of whom my neighbour Darryl identified as Japanese secret service types.
Being a bar owner, Darryl can make them just by eye-balling them.
In any event, they interrogated me politely.
They kept calling me “Fester-San, Uncle Fester-San. ”
I had no idea what the hell was going on because, well, the US media had hushed up what was going on in Japan at the time.
It turns out there had been a nerve gas attack in Japan – not the subway attack everybody did hear about - but an attack about a year earlier.
Must have been ‘94.
A Japanese apartment complex was nerve-gassed.
Well, this was an interesting concept. I had been writing on this very topic for quite some time.
Somebody put the idea into motion there.
The Japanese wanted Fester-San to help them track down the perpetrators of this attack, and I tried to help’em out.
They were thinking the gas was either Russian or American government in origin, but I nixed that theory real quick.
After reviewing their chemical analyses, I told’em I was sure the stuff was home brewed nerve gas, because it was too poorly brewed to have originated from a government stockpile.
Later, they determined it was in fact really lousily home-brewed nerve gas, produced by the whacked-out Aum Shinrikyo cult,
and that the cult had apparently tried to follow a Fester recipe.
The police even discovered a dog-eared copy of Silent Death at their hide-out.
This cult is something special.
It contains the cream of Japanese society.
I mean, what the hell is going on over there?
Anyway, of the two attacks, the apartment complex one was actually better thought out than that stunt they pulled later in the subway tunnel.
In the apartment complex they got some of the nerve gas into the air by sort of boiling it up, whereas in the subway they just spilled it on the floor and relied on passive evaporation, which is too slow.
They should have used an aerosol to get that nerve gas up. That idea’s in the latest edition of Silent Death.
Oddly enough, that idea came to me while I was watching a Green Bay Packers game.
In the NFL they have a ‘Cool Zone’ in which huge cooling fans shoot a watery mist onto the players on the sidelines to cool’em down.
I thought to myself, “That technique would work real well.
I better update Silent Death right away!
It’s lucky that crazy cult didn’t have the latest NFL edition of Silent Death down in that subway system;
if that stuff had been airborne, then the trains would have pushed it all over town.
Anyway, do you know the Aum Shinrikyo actually wear antennae on their heads?
That was a popular Aum Shinrikyo thing – they buy antennae to put on their heads, they jump up and down, and by doing that they tune themselves in and pick up the thought waves of their great leader, that blind, whatever the hell his name is.
Ahhh, what can you expect from people who wear antennae on their heads?
They did extraordinarily well, all things considered, but they botched the God damn batch. Imbeciles.
DOG
DOG Taking care of Uncle Fester is about as much work as taking care of his kids, Casey and Alyssa.
If I wanna take them camping, I gotta drop Uncle Fester off at his folks’ house,
cuz if Uncle Fester comes camping, I’d end up with two drowned kids.
FESTER That’s a lie! You’re the one who’s gotta be dropped off at my folks’ house. ]
DOG Around the home I’m usually known as Ding-a-Ling but my Christian name is Bud-Lite.
When I smell bad, Fester calls me Nitwit.
Uncle Fester gets overly excited sometimes.
Uncle Fester’s getting a little old. And Uncle Fester’s a big stupid.
FESTER That’s it; give me the damn microphone.
OK, that poor dog, when it gets warm,
even though I cut his fur right down to the hide he still stinks to high heaven.
Even if I give him baths with antibacterial soap, which should help, there’s no improvement in the smell.
He loves to rub it in to the couch, loves to rub it into my bed, loves to run it into the carpets all over the house.
DOG hahaha!
FESTER When I start up the vacuum cleaner, it sucks up this foul smell out of the carpet,
and ejects it into the air of the home and just leaves the whole place reeking.
DOG a good doggy smell!
FESTER It’s like a rotted fleshy smell.
My ex liked to play baseball with the dog.
She never liked to play the actual game itself there, you know.
But uh, when it came to my dog, she took a different view to that game,
and really took to it.
She had an upstairs bat and a downstairs bat so she wouldn’t have to go running up and down stairs, for convenience sake.
She’d clobber him with those bats right between the eyes, hit him, chase him around the house, run him outside, slug him, and bash him and beat him. She was a real punk.
DOG I don’t like baseball.
FESTER Imagine! She even tried to kill him once.
She fed him some poisoned food. Like Aum, she just spilled the stuff right on the basement floor.
I can’t believe she lived with me for 2 years, and uh that we were a tag-team duo for about 7 years.
She didn’t pick up on a damn thing. One more thing she couldn’t do right!
From the murder attempt, Ding-a-Ling was suffering through the most awful case of the squirts imaginable.
DOG Terrible, terrible.
FESTER The poison’s active ingredient was methomyl, but luckily it was too damn old to kill him.
Say Ding-a-Ling, you don’t have any kind of residual chemical addiction to methomyl, do ya?
DOG Pardon?
FESTER Something I oughta be worrying about?
DOG Rrrrr!!