I don't know, maybe there's something wrong with my head, but I get a special thrill from a dummy death in a movie. No, I'm not speaking of the death of a stupid person but rather the use of an articulated dummy to perform a stunt that no sane stuntman would agree to… falling off a glacier, being blown up by a bazooka, having one's head removed by dint of shotgun blast, being run over by a train, etc. I'm sure this is something only 1% of the movie-going demographic actively thinks about… but once the topic is broached I'll bet people will flash, with the clarity of a repressed memory of Satanic abuse, to their favorite dummy death.

There's a new blog in town… Destructible Man . A corruption of the title of a homely, cut-price sci-fi crime thriller that Lon Chaney, Jr. stumbled through late in life (as the sublimely named "Butcher Benton"), this blog celebrates the use of dummies in all manner of movies, from the silent era straight through Hollywood's Golden Age and beyond… in exploitation fare, in Euro-Cult product, and presumably to the present day… although the employment of CGI has greatly diminished the number of available gigs for articulated dummies these days… and that's a pity.

A few months back I rhapsodized about The Zen of Fakery and of how patently artificial elements in movie storytelling once drew the viewer into the process. The unreality of the staging assumed a tacit agreement between the filmmakers and the audience, as if to say "we all know this isn't real but…" and made the experience a shared one, as ritualistic as a village fertility rite or a demon-cleansing. These days, great pains (and millions of dollars) are spent to make special effects look as though they are really happening. On one hand, I applaud the technical advancements and the intelligent design (cough) behind these advancements. On the other hand, the fake one that's sculpted in the act of clutching, I miss the dummies. There was always something special about the way a falling dummy's legs bent upward as it drifted downwards that telegraphed, like a flash-forward, the full body bone shattering to come.

Destructible Man is the brainchild of "The Maciste Brothers." Named for the hard-bodied hero of Italian mythology, the Macistes are in reality award-winning documentary filmmaker Howard S. Berger and special effects man (and occasional actor) Kevin Marr. In their hands, what could have been a one-note joke has been transformed into a thoughtful and amusing concordance of essays on the use of dummies in cinema. They've just gotten started but have already waxed insightful on the use of destructible men in John Brahm's Hangover Square (pictured above), George Pollock's 10 Little Indians (top), Enzo G. Castellari's The New Barbarians (second from top), the Charles Bronson vehicle Death Wish IV: The Crackdown (third from top), to name just a few.

I'm hoping the Macistes get to some of my favorite dummy deaths: the apartment dweller who loses his head in Dawn of the Dead (above – I always got a kick out of the fact that he had his hands in his pockets), the mannequin who stands in for Susan OFlannery's window dive in The Towering Inferno, the rapidly descending plastic surrogate of the killer in Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture the Duckling and the patently fake Mummy head (standing in for the Indestructible Man himself, Lon Chaney, Jr.) that takes a flaming torch to the kisser in The Mummy's Tomb.

Drop in on Destructible Man today!