Hello once again and welcome to A Mind Occasionally Voyaging, where I pretend terrible old movies are actually pretty good, while showing you screenshots that demonstrate that the body text has been making use of sarcasm. This is the point in the article where I pretend to introduce this week's movie, up until I get interrupted by this week's guest star who will pretend to be just dropping by unexpectedly.

We're in part three of the Michael Moriartython, wherein we enjoy the cinematic stylings of the greatest action-horror hero of the 1980s, Michael Moriarty. A man with the wherewithal to speak out against such evils as, to quote Wikipedia, Bill Clinton, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, anti-Catholicism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George W. Bush, both major U.S. political parties, Halliburton, Kenny G, the College of Cardinals, and Islam. Though he later recanted his ill-considered statements against Islam, we can only assume that I should not approach him to play the lead if I can ever get funding to produce my spec script, Sherlock Holmes and Kenny G Team Up To Save The Pope.

But that's a story for another day. Our movie this week is.

Ahem. Our movie this week is.

Oh come on. I know you're out there. I'm not going to start going into my review only to have some robot or ghost or video game character pop up and interrupt me, so let's just get it over with.

Hey, keep your freakin' pants on, I'm molting over here!

Aaaah! It's the bird from The Giant Claw! A horrible eldrich monstrosity as big as a-- Hey. Wait. I thought you were bigger.

That is, point of fact, a popular misconception. You see, in the film, when they referred to me as being as big as a battleship, they were in fact speaking of popular Milton Bradley board game of that name.

I see. So when they went to make the movie, they got confused?

Oh no. Youse have only seen the film in its theatrical edit. There is a deleted scene in the director's edtion which reveals at the end that the entire film has taken place on a parallel planet which is exactly like earth in every way, except that it is approximately 1/60th your size. The entire cast consisted of smurf actors. That is why they decided to film in black and white. It's actually quite obvious if you watch the scene in the general's office.

You mean this one?

Yes. The matte painting of the Capitol building there is in fact a post card from their gift shop. The late Ray Harryhausen himself did something similar for The Beginning of the End

Well, I'm quite impressed. Um. Would you like to have a seat and watch a movie with me?

I would be happy to partake in a film with you, but I will avoid sitting, as I'm surrounded by an inpenetrable antimatter shroud which destroys anything with which I come into contact.

Oh! It sounded so nonsensical in the film that I just assumed they made it up.

No, in point of fact, their science was mostly right. I am from a distant galaxy composed entirely of anti-matter, and hence the physical laws are very different, hence the gibberish about mu mesonic atoms.

Fascinating. Then why do you sound like a Brooklyn mob enforcer from a thirties noir film trying to sound smart?

The laws governing our accents are very different in the anti-matter universe.

Fascinating. Oh, by the way, I never got your name. In the movie, they just call you "The bird". And I assume that "Giant Claw" isn't your real name?

Being as I am, from an anti-matter universe where the laws of physics and accents are radicallty different, the language of my people is extremely complex. Why, a single letter in my native tongue contains over twenty-nine letters. If I were to speak just one syllable of my true name, the sound of it would cause your spleen to sublimate, leaving behind only a gooey pile of Vick's Vapo Rub. However, since I am a strange and horriffic creature whose very existence is an affront to the standards of logic, decency, and physics in this part of space, according to the traditions of your race, you can call me "Glen".

Glen?

Glen Peck. After the actor, Gregory Peck.

Riiiiight. Okay Mr. Peck, it turns out that you've dropped by right in the middle of my Michael Moriarty Movie Marathon. I realize this might take a little getting used to. Just the other week, I had the ghost of Orson Welles over, and it nearly drove him to try to unleash the forces of armageddon over the earth.

Oh, no, do not worry. I'm a big fan of Michael Moriarty myself. Why, in fact, we beings from the other planes of existence have been all abuzz over the unfortunate incident with Mr. Welles, and among my reasons for coming here was to assure you that we beings from beyond your mortal comprehension aren't all total douchenozzles. In fact, when I heard you were reviewing the film work of Mr. Moriarty, I dug out a copy of this classic piece, which I think you will find relevant to your interests. My cousin, Glen, he's got a major part in the film. They approached me, of course, but I retired from acting back in the fifties. Wanted to spend more time campaigning for my political causes.

Political causes?

Yeah. I've been a spokesman for Quebecoise independence and statehood for Puerto Rico since the early 70s.

Fascinating if true. But what's this Michael Moriarty film you're talking about?

Well, it's a 1982 film by Larry Cohen, who you wills remember from such films as It's Alive and God Told Me To.

That's the one with the glowing gold alien with the chest-oriface, right?

Quite. This is a film that such a personage as Rex Reed celebrated as complete and utter drek. Only he pointed out that even amidst the gigantic ball of my own antimatter droppings this movie is, the performance of Michael Moriarty was a shining gem. A shining gem in the center of a ball of crap.

Now you've got my full attention.

Our film is one of the last and most grandiose examples of the Harryhausen school of stop-motion special effects youse are liable to see. I'm talking, of course, about Q

Q: The Winged Serpent
1982
Directed by Larry Cohen
Starring Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree

You had me at David Carradine.

Don't get too excited. This is an entirely non-Kung-Fu role for Carradine.

Our story opens in scenic New York, where high up on the Empire State Building, a blonde whose name I do not think we ever learn (But based on how her office is appointed, I will call her Carrie Bradshaw) is being sexually harassed by the window washer, who appears to be played by Liam Neesen with a Porn Stache.

Sadly, Liam Neesen's pervy stalkerish behavior is cut trafically short when something from above triggers a cheap process shot where he tries to pretend he's hanging from the side of the building instead of walking crouched down along a horizontal prop. Seconds later, the Empire State Building's strap-on Liam Neesen gets circumsized by something we don't yet see, but it sounds kind of bird-like, and, well, we're watching a movie called "Q: The Winged Serpent".

Next thing we know, our heroes, a pair of cops played by David Carradine and Richard Roundtree, make snarky comments about the victim, while David Carradine checks out his partner's ass. This causes me to finally remember who Richard Roundtree is...

Just as soon as David Carradine and Shaft proclaim their total lack of any kind of idea how the window-washer was decapitated (Carradine suggests that maybe his head was just loose and fell off. This is meant to make Carradine look like a cynical cop with AttitudeWhich technically qualifies him as a Power Ranger, but actually just makes him look like a dick with a terrible sense of humor), we cut to the Man of Action himself, Michael Moriarty. Moriarty's playing a guy named Jimmy Quinn, who is apparently a small-time hood who makes his living as a wheel man for armed robberies. He's also suggested to be a jumpy, paranoid type, and, I am starting to suspect, developmentally challenged. If he doesn't turn out to be Kaiser Soze, I will be mightily disappointed.

Don't hold your breath

That's David Carradine's job.

SQUAK! Too soon, man, too soon!

Sorry. The setup, you know. Anyway, Moriarty and some other hoods are plotting a crime, for which he's being solicited as a wheel man. And suddenly we're in a hotel room, where a maid screams, and suddenly we're a few hours later as police photographers are photographing a crime scene. Does this movie have ADD or something? Anyway, the crime scene in question is the dumping of a man-shaped grilled hot dog, which police detective Captain Kangaroo declares is an expertly flayed human body (they say absolutely nothing to suggest that he was also burned, though the body is quite clearly charred). Shaft also consults on the case, but offers nothing beyond pointing out that the decapitated window washer was, like this case, pretty freaking weird. Did I mention that the other cop in this scene looks like Captain Kangaroo?

Captain Kangaroo casually smothers the dead man with a pillow, and, the movie's thirty seconds being up, we cut to... Um... Uh... The Red Balloon, I guess. Our regularly scheduled monster movie will resume immediately after the pretentious French masterpiece...

We return to find a blonde chyk sunbathing atop a skyscraper. Because the birds featured in this blog have not yet included the booby, she decides to sunbathe topless. Her luscious partial nudity proves too tempting for our resident for our faithful monster, and it swoops down to devower her, which gives us our first look at the thing. Or rather, it would, if it weren't for the fact that the camera is pointed directly into the sun. It will later be explained that the creature is clever enough to always fly in front of the sun so that no one gets a good look at it. And then they'll get to the big reveal of what it looks like, after which it will never attempt to hide itself again.

The sunbather is carried off, to the shock of the perv across the street who was watching her. As the bird flies off to its lair, the sunbather's blood drips down on, so far as I can tell, the Bee Gees. No one is safe from the horrific spray of gore, not even... Chicken Boo.

We cut to Michael Moriarty playing a piano. Yeah. I don't get it either. I think the scene is there just so that Michael Moriarty and David Carradine will have met each other already (He's in the bar, drinking between cases) a few scenes later. Pointless

We then proceed to the heist, which is at a jewlery store named -- I am not making this up -- Neil Diamonds. This appears to be a fine establishment specializing in blinged-out Stars of David and what appear to be goatse.cx-themed diamond rings. Michael Moriarty is strongarmed into participating in the heist directly rather than waiting in the car. A few gunshots later, and Michael Moriarty emerges, clutching a satchel of stolen gemstones to his chest. To his horror, he realizes that one of the other hoods has the keys to the car, and so, being a man of action, he runs away like a spaz and gets kneecapped by a taxi, dropping the satchel and running halfway across the city in an awkward, limping panic before he comes to the Chrysler Building, where his lawyer apparently works, when he's in, which he isn't, so Michael Moriarty instead decides to get chased by a security guard into the Chrysler Building's unfinished atticAccording to Wikipedia, the area under the cone of the Chrysler building really does look like an unfinished attic, and the scenes set there where really filmed on location. This sounds like utter bullshit to me, but hey, if you see it on Wikipedia it must be true.. There, he makes a shocking discovery in the form of a giant process shot of an egg. At the topmost point, we get a little more character development for Michael Moriarty. We've previously established that he's a coward, and now we reinforce it by seeing that even the littlest thing makes him totally lose his shit. For example, see what happens when he's surprised by a decayed zombie that tries to sodomize him:

Luckily for Michael Moriarty, his assailant turns out to just be a mouldering female corpse. Being a theif of class and sophistication, he immediately tries to steal from the dead, but can't quite manage to slip the charm bracelet off of the corpse. It's more or less now that the movie gets bored with this scene, and wanders off to watch the hijinks of some construction workers who have stolen their coworker's sandwich. Oh the hilarity. The sandwichless worker sulks off, where he is eaten by the giant bird monster. Which I think is supposed to be ironic, but really it just makes his coworkers look like giant dicks who got their buddy horribly killed.

The makers of this film, in their zeal to depict the complex moral enigmas of god-summoming and willing human sacrifices, have spread some unfortunate misinformation about the ancient Nahuatl religion. Namely:

• The primary source of human sacrifice for the Aztecs were prisoners taken in raids and skirmishes. They were only "willing" insofar as there was a general cultural understanding in the area that occasionally being rounded up by Aztec warriors and sacrificed was the price of doing business.
• Human sacrifice was typically done to placate the gods, not to ressurrect them. The closest analogue was the process of becoming an "ixiptla", wherein the sacrificial victim became a representative of the god, and was effectively awarded rockstar status for the time leading up to the sacrifice.
• Many popular and important Aztec gods were served by human sacrifice, but the cult of Quetzelcoatl mostly sacrificed butterflies and hummingbirds.

This has been your guest host, Glen Peck, bringing youse fun facts about ancient religions.

That out of the way, we return to the David Carradine side of the plot. Having finished up with his boozing, he visits a local museum doing research on the ritualistic flaying. Which I guess means that he's working that case as well. So the reason that Shaft was at the crime scene with Captain Kangaroo instead of him was, I guess, because David Carradine was on his booze break. He learns about Quetzelcoatl, the feathered serpent of Aztec mythology, whose worshippers, according to the museum person (Professor? Curator?), believed that summoning their god into existence required a number of human sacrifices -- and a key point of their belief was that the sacrifices had to be willing.

David Carradine gets some readings on Aztec mythology, which he takes home with him to read at home. With that, day 1 of this epic draws to a close, and David Carradine goes home to do his homework and make sweet love to his wife, Cousin It from the Addams Family.

I have noticed that youse have been leaning heavily on the rollover popups for this review.

Just worked out the CSS to do them properly and I am proud. Anyway, Michael Moriarty goes home to his girlfriend and whines for a while about how he's far too inept to adapt to life outside of prison, then takes a nap.

The next day, Shaft and David Carradine find a new sacrificial victim, in what is undoubtedly the most horrifying scene in this entire movie. A scene so disturbing that I shall hide it behind the jump, and also behind a hover link.

Continue reading "That David Carradine is one Bad Mother-- (Moriartython, Part 3: Q)" »

Shallow Thoughts/Movies

By Ross at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Leah and I just finished playing through Tender Loving Care, a mid-nineties example of the largely defunct genre of Interactive Movies -- essentially a B-movie wherein you're given occasional chances to interact with events in a limited sort of way. It's a genre that flopped pretty hardcore due to a combination of high prices, limited interactivity (Though realistically speaking, only a little lower than your average adventure game of the time; this was an era where shallow, underimplemented games outnumbered the really good ones several billion to one), and bad acting.

Tender Loving Care has the distinction of starring William Hurt, featuring a a bit of nudity roughly comparable to what you'd see on Cinemax around midnight, coming from the minds behind The Seventh Guest, and being released on DVD -- not DVD-ROM (It was released on DVD-ROM, but that edition is well out of print), but an actual stick-it-in-the-box-under-your-TV DVD. The DVD edition is even more limited in its interactivity than the PC version (which used The Seventh Guest's "Groovie" engine), but your expectations are lower for a pure DVD. We found it a fun play all the same.

Baf recently played through the PC version to completion, so I won't bother with interrupting the Moriartython for a full review, but I thought I'd like to share with you a couple of scenes from this game's gimmick: the Thematic Apperception Test. It's the closest thing this game has to puzzles -- their purpose is to generate a ersatz psychological profile for you, on the basis of which the game chooses between various alternate scenes and edits -- indicate that you're not in the mood for a little spicyness, the camera cuts away a few seconds early when the nurse changes her top. If you're into harsh punishment, one character uses a hammer instead of his fist at a key moment.

Occasionally throughout the game, the questions get a little... Surprising:

... And why is she shoving a laurel in it?

... Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O. And on this farm he had a penis, E-I-E-I-O

... Because it's your dog!

... What never? No, never! What never? Hardly ever!

... Those eighties chicks were always getting this "Mmm, not-so-fresh" feeling. I'm not exactly sure what the solution was, but it seemed to involve vinegar and water, and may have been some kind of salad dressing.

Look at the smile on that Kangaroo's face and tell me you don't want some of what he's on.

... Damnit, deputy, I told you to round me up a little POSSE!

This game has issues.

... Don't worry. Temporary Rondo Hattenism happens to a lot of guys...

... Don't worry little boy, the librarian with the rifle will shoot the doctor before he can use that phallus on you!

Addendum: If you happen to have a copy of this game and would like to see the version of the story Leah and I made, use the code

76, 80, 35, 8F, 75, 42, 61, 9A, 6C

Games

By Ross at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greetings again, mellow readers, and welcome to A Mind Occasionally Voyaging, where my ceaseless efforts to recapture my long-lost youth will take me to the very depths of terrible old movies I dimly recollect from childhood. This week we're going to look at an old classic from--

Rosebud.

Huh?

Rosebud.

EEEGAH! It's-- Um. It's. Okay, No idea.

Roseb-- Oh. Sorry. Is this better? I forget what I look like to morals sometimes.

EEEGAH! It's the ghost of Orson Welles!

Yes. Long ago, I shuffled off this mortal coil, and since then, my meanderings in the great beyond have led me to acquire deepest knowledge of the great mysteries of the universe.

Wow. And you're going to share them with me?

Of course not. Why, the merest sentence of the infinite knowledge I possess would cause your thyroid gland to dissolve into delicious frozen peas. Mmm... Peas...

Right. So then, what brings you here, former Mr. Welles?

It recently came to my attention that you expressed concern over my later carer in a conversation with a Mr. Prime.

Oh, that. Yeah. I thought it was really a shame how you never got the respect you really deserved in your later years.

That's why I have appeared to you now. I wanted you to understand that here in the afterlife, I am beyond all such material concerns. I can see all the days of my life laid out before me, and I realize that, all in all, I had a pretty good run and I regret nothing.

Not even Future Shock?

Not even Future Shock.

Wow. The afterlife sounds awesome.

Yes. But I have come to you with a grave warning.

Oh crap. Am I going to be visited by three spirits?

Probably. But that's not really relevant to my warning. As the maker of what is unarguably the greatest film ever made, I have come to warn you: your choice of films to review lacks any sort of cohesion. Why, it's as if you're choosing films entirely at random without any thought to how your body of reviews work as a whole.

My God, you're right Former Mr. Welles! If I don't clean up my act and fly right, will I be doomed to wander the earth after my death, bound in chains, never stopping, never knowing a minute's peace?

No. You'll just go to hell. But I wouldn't worry too much about that. You're pretty much damned anyway for practicing the wrong religion.

What? But I thought all religions were paths to God!

Nope. The only true religion is Frooblintarianism. Unfortunately, the great prophet Froblintar was born on the planet Gelgamar IV in the year 500,023 BC.

Oh. Sucks to be us then.

Quite.

So I guess there's really only one thing for it. One way to make my reviews more coherently themed. I need to do... A miniseries. A movie-thon all bound together by the common thread of one man. A man whose contribution to modern film is unquestionable. A man whose name is already famous in the annals of cinematographic history.

Good to see you've come to your senses.

Yes! I can see it now. There's no other choice. I shall do a marathon. A marathon dedicated to the greatest star of film history. A marathon of the film masterpieces of... Michael Moriarty!

Yes! No, wait. Who?

Michael Moriarty! Isn't it obvious, Former Mr. Welles?

Um...

I mean, with last time's The Stuff, I'm already one film in. There must be ones, nay, tens of ones of fine films starring the most fantastically-foreheaded man of action that the 1980s ever produced.

I think I'll be leaving now.

Oh no you don't, Former Mr. Welles. You got me into this, and you're going to see it through with me. Now, let's pull up IMDB and see what we've got...

Oh. Huh. That's... Okay. Well, maybe we'll have a spot of luck with this one..

Blood Link
1982
Starring Michael Moriarty (and Michael Moriarty)
Directed by Alberto de Martino

We open from a peeping-tom shot looking in on a freeze-framed ballroom as the credits run, gently reassuring us tht this film will indeed star Michael Moriarty and -- HOLY CRAP!

I mentioned once before that Moriarty, during this phase of his career, bore a striking resemblance to a doughier Ben Browder. Cameron Mitchell is, of course, the recklessly loveable Air Force Colonel who replaced General Jack O'Neill in Stargate SG-1's final seasons. And he was played by none other than Professional Michael-Moriarty-Impersonator Ben Browder. And now we find mention of a Cameron Mitchell in a Michael Moriarty film. Clearly this can be no mere coincidence, and must point to some kind of deep occult link between the two, like how Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy had one named Lincoln.

The action finally starts up and we are treated to the back of Michael Moriarty's head as he dances with a slightly older womanWho kinda looks like but is not Ma'am from Web*Ster to no music. Bystanders comment on how the couple seem so happy, what with the continuing to dance even after the music stops. Moriarty courts his date using his seductively honeyed southern accent (Michael Moriarty is from Michigan, I think). She is clearly smitten, and a little flabbergasted by the fact that someone so rich, so handsome, and so full of forehead as Michael Moriarty could be so loving to a woman so hideously wizened as her, what with her advanced age of perhaps 35 or 40. The music starts up again, maybe. I can't tell. The music sounds like incidental music and while the other dancers take the floor, they aren't moving anything like in time to the music the audience hears.

Michael Moriarty thanks the aged crone for the beautiful gold watch she gave him, then dances her into an empty area and apparently hugs her to death. It takes only a second. One good squeeze and she's dead. I'm reminded of the Cybermen in Revenge of the Cybermen, who similarly like to kill people with what's meant to be a show of cyber-strength, but look like they're administering death in the form of a vigorous shoulder massage

As Michael nonchalantly leaves the part, his date's body slumps forward a bit, showing what I'm guessing is a small scratch on her shoulder, which is no where even close to where Michael Moriarty's hands were when he killed her.

Suddenly, Michael Moriarty wakes up in bed to a phone call. Ah, the first scene must have been a dream -- surely the great Michael Moriarty couldn't be a murderer! On his way to work, he stops to apologize to his maid for not gathering up his laundry for her. And then he kisses her. Given the reaction it gets, I'm going to guess that this was an unscripted addition by Moriarty.

Entirely unprofessional. I would never have kissed a woman in a film. Utter rubbish!

Moriarty next encounters the maid's husband, Santa Claus, so they can get off some exposition to let us know that Michael Moriarty is a doctor and is in a sort of relationship with another doctor named Julie Warren. As he walks to work, he has a flash of Moriartyvision in a dome mirror, seeing the tuxedo'd Moriarty of the previous night.

His drive to work is punctuated by several beer-goggle'd visions of himself picking up a trashy blonde in a fur coat and nothing else. She seductively removes her coat, then puts it back on, and then Moriarty sees himself in a gray coat, murdering the blonde. Black-coated Moriarty cuts his hand on some window glass trying to run away, giving us a good chance to notice that he's not wearing a watch.

When he arrives at work, he gets cuddly with Julie and explains how he's had one nightmare and one hallucination of himself killing women, and he's worried that his new experimental therapy technique has unlocked some kind of evil Mr. Hyde side to his personality. He also plays with the hair at his temple, so that Julie can point out the the audience that it's a very distinctive mannerism that he has.

A board meeting expositions to us that Moriarty (Whose name is "Dr. Craig Mannings", but I object to that, so instead I will continue to call him Michael Moriarty for as long as possible) is working on a new therapy tehnique which can control dreams, memory, fear, depression, and all personality flaws using a combination of accupuncture, electrocution, and "courage".

Moriarty has another vision during his next self-therapizing session, and it prompts him to fly to Cleveland.

While I am forbidden to hand out the secrets of the universe, I do feel compelled to tell you that nearly two thirds of all electo-therapy-induced visions lead people directly to Cleveland.

In Cleveland, he visits a senile old woman in a nursing home, who recognizes him, but calls him "Keith", prompting Michael Moriarty to reveal that he is, in fact, Keith Mannings's identical twin brother! More, Craig (grr) and Keith were... Siamese Twins!. His parents had died, and, I gather, as is the usual practice in movies, the state made a concerted effort to separate the twins and ensure that they never ever met again. Does this ever happen in real life? I mean, I know that, in spite of their attempts, it's not always possible to keep families together in foster care, but even when they end up having to break upfamilies, they've got to make an effort to keep siblings at least in contact with one another?

Well, they never tried to keep you in touch with your Siamese twin brother.

I don't have a Siamese twin brother. And also, I think "conjoined" is the polite term for that.

That's what you think. Didn't you ever wonder about that strange scar on your hip?

I don't have a scar on my hip. I -- HOLY CRAP HOW LONG HAVE I HAD THAT SCAR?

I've said too much already.

Y.e.a.h... The senile old lady tells Michael Moriarty #1, thinking that he is Michael Moriarty #2, that she'd been kind to him by keeping him out of is court-ordered therapy for his nacient insanity. Moriarty notes that both his own caretaker and the senile old woman both are unwilling to admit to their respective wards that they'd had a conjoined twin, and the old woman reveals that Moriarty #2 had not, as Moriarty #1 thought, died in a fire when he was 17.

Back home, Moriarty #1 enjoys a gratuitous topless scene from Julie as and explains that he didn't really need to go to Cleveland, because he'd intitively known the entire time that his long-lost brother was still alive and that his recent visions had been him seeing through his brother's eyes. Rendering most of Good Moriarty's scenes so far entirely pointless. Still, I guess it was polite of him to take the audience with him as he demonstrated all these things he already knew. Julie is understandably worried that the effect might work both ways, allowing Evil Moriarty to see her moderately nice breasts. Neither one of them is especially concerned by the fact that they've just discovered the secret to psychic remote viewing powers, or that Good Moriarty's brother is a serial killer. I think the idea here is that Julie doesn't really believe Good Moriarty, but as the alternative is that her boyfriend and research partner is insane, she seems to be taking it in stride.

Good Moriarty gets another message from the Big Giant Forehead, leding him to a harbor in Germany, and he's off on the trail! Evil Moriarty sets his eyes on a new victim, but is cockblocked by a Cameron Mitchell. No, not him: him, who I now remember is the guy who played the santa-like captain of the space ship in Space Mutiny and the heavy in that Fugitive-In-Space pilot that they did on MST3K. Cameron Mitchell is a washed up prize figher who mistakes Evil Moriary for Good Moriarty, who'd fixed his broken arm some years back. (Wait. He's that kind of doctor? That makes no sense. I thought he was some kind of psychiatric researcher.), Evil Moriary plays along. Meanwhile. I think Good Moriarty visits the ballroom from the opening scene and meets the dour majordomo. But it's hard to tell when you've got your main character in a double role and don't ahve the decency to give one of them a goatee.

(Continued after the jump...)

Continue reading "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important Michael Moriarties (Moriartython Part 2: Blood Link)" »

Shallow Thoughts/Movies

By Ross at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Lake George, NY looks exactly like what it is: a resort town most of which was built in the 50s, with a huge social gap between the poor townies and the fantabulously wealthy families who come up here for the summer and vacation in extravagant summer homes. I keep expecting a John Hughes movie to break out any minute.

2. Of the cars I have seen in this town, about 30% have been Subarus, and 30% have been Corvettes.

3. I just saw a commercial for PF Chang's new line of prepackaged meals for home use. Their version of General Tso's Chicken is called "General Chang's Chicken". I'm pretty sure that General Chang was the bad guy from Star Trek VI.

Shallow Thoughts

By Ross at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other day, Leah gave me a ride to work, which gave me the chance to give the scenery a more thorough look-over than usual. As we passed a church, I noticed this sign, lovingly recreated via internet church sign generator:

When I saw this, several things instantly popped into my head...

You can also pretend it's a fortune cookie: Prepare for the next level of blessing -- in bed!

Prepare for the next level of blessing, SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! With TRUCKZILLA!.

Inappropriate Thoughts

By Ross at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Updated June 24 with less-broken formatting and one new joke

The weekend before memorial day, a good friend of Leah's got married, and so as my wife attended to her bridesmaidly duties, I was left to hang out in our rather nice hotel room, armed with nothing but my Macbook, a TV-out cable, and a few thumbdrives full of films.

In the annals of eschatological film, there is one film about which I have found surprisingly little analysis. It is universally reviled, its very name turned code for a great old shame in one's past. And yet, none of the internet critics whose angry rantings have become my favorite television genre (Which probably says more about the state of television in 2010 than it does about internet critics) have done a detailed analysis. So far as I know, no one has yet indulged in the ancient and worshipful ritual of the rifftrack for this movie.

It is a film set in a post apocalyptic world, a world where one man dares to stand against the gods themselves, and strike a blow for freedom, and that man... wears a red diaper.

That man is Sean Connery, and that movie is Zardoz.

Zardoz
dir. John Boorman
Starring Sean Connery

But we're not actually going to be reviewing Zardoz today. You see, after a promising opening scene, in which a disembodied floating head spoilers the plot for us, and we have an exciting scene in which a flying stone head called Zardoz tells his followers about the relative merits of the second ammendment when compared to those of the free love movement (Zardoz is a Republican), prompting me to realize this film's social relevance: If, in 2010, you find that your political views align closely with a flying stone head which vomits guns, you should perhaps reconsider them.

But then Sean goes flying off in the stone head away from this post-apocalyptic civilization, and the whole thing becomes very cerebral and confusing and dull and, I strongly suspect, takes a stab at ripping off Kubrick, especially right at the end. The whole thing just left me dazed and mumbling "WTF?" continuously for about two hours. Which is, I believe, longer than the actual film.

So, that's about it for Zardoz. There's a few moments coherent enough to be worth mocking, but for my money, it would have been a better bad movie if Zed (That's Connery. Had this review gone the distance, I was hoping to do a sight gag replacing him with other famous Zeds in media, such as Chief Zed from Men in Black, Zeddicus Zul Zorrander from Legend of the Seeker, Zed the guy from Pulp Fiction and Lord Zedd from the Power Rangers) had just stayed in the wasteland and had ribald adventures there. But hey, they can't all be winners. Maybe next time I'll have better luck when I review--

I say there, boy, has the tea party already started?

For those of you not in the know, Naked Zombie Sean Connery is the boss of level 2 of the game Samurai Zombie Nation, an old Nintendo game in which, due to what I can only assume is a misplaced comma, you play not as "Namakubi, the great head of the samurai", but rather as "The head of the great samurai Namakubi". I'm not sure if it was cause or consequence of Naked Zombie Sean Connery's ascendency to memehood, but The Spoony One did a rant about the game, and, coincidentally, that rant was released on my birthday a few years ago. So go watch that if you want more information about this Terrible Old Classic of Eight Bit Gaming, because personally, I never made it past the first stage.

Oh crap. It's Naked Zombie Sean Connery. (To Leah) Honey? Have you been letting internet memes in the house?

Now there, boy. I've come to help you review my cinematic masterpiece, Zardoz

Ah. So you're not here to savagely kill me with your battleaxe and then eat my brains?

Please, now, boy. I haven't eaten brains in years. Not since Medicine Man

Glad to hear it. So, if you're not under the control of the evil Darc Seed, then, um... Why are you naked?

Well, why not, lad? I've always been a firm believer in letting them swing free. Except in the Amazon. There's a fish there that will swim right up you. Now, are we going to review Zardoz or not? Have you gotten to the part where they hold a special seminar on my ability to sustain an erection? I had to use my own erection for that scene of course; Viagra hadn't come out yet.

Um, actually Mr. Naked Zombie Connery, I was just telling my readers that I wasn't going to be able to review Zardoz.

It's Sir Naked Zombie Connery, actually, boy. But you can call me Sir Naked Zombie Sean. But why aren't you going to finish my film?

(Looks around for a defensive weapon in case Sir Naked Zombie Sean takes offense) Sir Naked Zombie Sean, uh, do you understand the sort of reviews I do here? I mean, they aren't, generally, especially favorable toward their subject matter.

I know that, boy. I've been around the block. I've seen that show with that Joe and his Tim Servo and Cow.... Mmm... That Gypsy, she was quite the filly.... (shakes head) It's all an affectionate ribbing, I've been to a roast before, m'lad.

Yes... Well... You see, that's the problem.... I just couldn't find anything really good for mocking. It was just... Well, truth be told, there were a lot of parts I didn't really understand. I-- I'm sure you could offer an informative perspective--

Ach, I doubt that, boy. I don't think anyone on the set really knew what was going on in that picture. Of all the films I've worked on, that one was the one with the second highest budget for cocaine.

What was the first?

A Bridge Too Far. I bet you were expecting me to pick one of the silly ones, weren't you, boy?

So anyway, I'm really sorry that I won't be able to review your movie today. It's really great that you'd come here to review it with me and all... My mom really loves your work.

Ah yes, boy. Your mum. She was quite the filly.

Ri-ight. So, um, thanks for coming and all, and I--

Boy, it's just... Well... I did fly all the way out here from Scotland...

You flew here? They let you though airport security with that axe? And naked?

Of course not, boy. I brought my own transport. By the way, do you think it's okay if I park my giant flying stone head at the end of the street?

I'm sure it'll be okay if it's just for a couple of hours.

And it may have vomited up a few assault rifles on your front garden...

You're trying to say that you'd like to review a movie with me, aren't you?

Well, boy, so long as you're suggesting it. You know, I have done quite a few other movies. Highlander 2 for instance

Oh no, I am not reviewing Highlander 2. Leaving aside for them moment the fact that far better critics than me have already done it (Most recently, The Spoony One), I didn't actually think that the movie was all that bad.

Not that bad? Have you been hitting my stash, boy? I'm a senile, randy, reanimated corpse, and I find that turdburger indigestible!

Well, sure, the plot's a little weak and the villians are obnoxious assholes, but it's got a few fun moments.

By god, boy. Planet Zeist?

Y'know, yeah, that was dumb. But look, we're talking about a movie called Highlander, where you, the quintessential Scot, play an Egyptian Prince, with a Spanish name who teaches Japanese Kenjutsu to a Highland Scot played by a Frenchman. Saying you were all really aliens frankly clears a lot of stuff up. And on balance, yeah, I think that a bizarre and outlandish explanation is a lot better than every other Highlander sequel at sidestepping that whole "There can be only one" thing. I remember all my friends saying how great Highlander 3 was because it ignored Highlander 2 -- but you really expected me to believe that at the end of the first movie, he's just, what, mistaken about having won the prize? Dumbasses.

Oh, and besides, I really liked that scene where you punched the globe.

Ah yes, boy. I smashed through that globe like a young girl's maidenhead.

Yes, well, okay. So, no Highlander. We could maybe do Outland, but you'd have to come back in a week or two so I can get it from Netflix.

Sorry, boy. I've got something important to do next week.

What's that?

Your mum, boy.

I knew it was coming, and yet I had to ask anyway. So, I do have something we could review today -- not one of your films, sorry. But I watched a couple of other films while Leah was at the batchelorette party. There's a shot-on-video horror movie based around some jiggly, trashy-looking women with chainsaws. And there's a science fictiony sort of thing about a white creamy substance which tries to take over the earth... And I am in a lot of trouble either way aren't I?

You know, boy, I once produced a white creamy substance that tried to take over the earth.

And with that, thankfully, it's time for the jump. When we return, Sir Naked Zombie Sean and I are going to go wading hip-deep in the sexually suggestive goo pit that is... The Stuff

The Stuff
dir. Larry Cohen
Starring Michael Moriarty, Paul Sorvino, and Garrett Morris as "Chocolate Chip" Charlie Hobbs.

I'm in a lot of trouble...

Continue reading "The Gun Shoots Death, The Ice Cream Factory Shoots White Gooey Life (Zardoz/The Stuff)" »

Shallow Thoughts/Movies

By Ross at 3:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you're my age, it'll be the year 2041. The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty will be up for review. Antarctica will likely be quite temperate by then. Technological singularity might happen within the decade. A manned mission to the Jovian moon Callisto is on the books. The world population will be around 9 billion. Mankind will have walked on Mars, provided we get off our asses.

Marlene McFly will be released from prison in the timeline where Marty doesn't make his life better. Bruce WIllis will have long since departed to travel back in time and discover the secret of the twelve monkeys.

According to Star Trek, Television will have just become obsolete. The iPod will be available as a suppository. Civilization will be recovering from the great collapse of 2038 when unix timestamps rolled over, destroying all technology and turning the world into a hellish Mad Max landscape. Also, and I will admit this is only speculation, Mick Jagger will not be singing "Satisfaction" any more.

You'll have taken classes with students from the opposite side of the world, via telepresence, and won't even think that's weird. You will never have known a world where personal computers were something strange and rare. You will never have known a world where cars run on leaded gasoline. You will never have known a world where televisions were square and had a curvature to them. You will never have known a world where there hasn't been an African-American president, or where there's no such thing as same-sex marriage. The terms "East Germany" and "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" will be ones you know from history class, not from world geography. You will never have used a rotary telephone. If someone asks you how many planets there are in the solar system, you will instinctively say "Eight" (Unless my plans to explode Neptune by 2021 come off).

You'll never see a slasher film where the bad guy cuts the heroes off from civilization by cutting the phone lines. You won't know what the word "newspaper" means. You will never have said "Four hundred TV channels? Why would anyone need more than three?" You will intuitively understand which of "Venti" and "Grande" is bigger, and will not consider it at all strange to pay four dollars for coffee. The phrase "Don't touch that dial" will not make any sense to you. You'll never have used a floppy disk. You'll never have had to wait 6-8 weeks for shipping. If, as is, sorry, the genetic likelihood, you turn out to be nearsighted, you'll never have lived in a world where glasses were the only option.

You will never have known a world where you could leave your shoes on at airport security, and you'll never have felt a little twinge of loss when you saw the New York skyline. It'll be a bit warmer, and there will be a lot less wildlife about. You'll never have paid less than two dollars for a gallon of gasoline, if you've ever bought it at all. You won't know a world free of pollution, of zero-tolerance laws, of terrorism, and of batshit insane responses to terrorism. You'll never have flown on a supersonic commercial jet. You'll never have met Fred Rogers. Sorry about that.

The idea that "friends" are only people who you know by accident of geography will be alien to you, and I hope that means that you'll be from a world that's more connected and less lonely. That you'll have grown up in a world where it's hard to dismiss the needs of people just because they don't live in your town or have the same color skin as you. And that you'll live in a world where whatever passion takes you, you'll be able to find friends to share it with. I hope you live in a world where we don't use our common hatred and common enemies to define us, where when we see the suffering of our fellow man, we say, "What can I do to help?" and not "Screw you, I got mine!" I hope you live in a world where no one has to make the decision between food and healthcare. Where it's not a contentious issue to suggest that the overwhelming opinion of scientists across the world might just be the truth. Where we don't consider profit the true measure of success, and recognize a difference between someone's personal worth and the amount of cash in their bank account.

I also hope we all have flying cars and jetpacks. But I'm not holding my breath.

Madalynn Elizabeth Ransom, welcome to Earth. Enjoy.

Love, Uncle Ross and Aunt Leah

Personal Thoughts, Personal Thoughts

By Ross at 1:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hi everyone, and welcome back to A Mind Occasionally Voyaging. You know, after my last article, a lot of concerned readers wrote in to let me know that I was basically a complete fucktard for my opinion on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And by "A lot of concerned readers", I mean "A voice in my head", largely because I am actually writing this article at some point before the article in which I made an offhand crack about Transformers 2, because I didn't want to forget all the jokes I had lined up.

But none of these myriad fictional complaints prepared me for the fictional complaint I received this morning when I stepped into my library.

You!

Me?

Yeah, you, punk.

Optimus Prime?!

I heard you were talking trash about my movie

You heard that? I -- (Glares at Devestator) -- I didn't know you guys talked.

We don't. But you were right down stairs. There are like 13 of me up here.

[Devestator]: DEVESTATOR! DESTROY!

Shut up, Devestator.

Shut up, Devestator.

So, um, Optimus Prime. Um.

Look, you're entitled to your opinion. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings

Yeah...

So you have the right to be a total douchenozzle about my latest film. I just thought we had something, man

Look, Optimus, it's not like that. It's totally not like that, man. I -- you know what, I hated how this movie treated you. This movie was beneath you, man. It was like Raul Julia doing Street Fighter, or all that crap Orson Wells did right before he died.

I'm not familiar with his later work.

Well, it was pretty dire. It was sad, you know, there was Citizen Kane, the Third Man, the guy who made half of America crap its pants that the Martians were invading, and here he is, shilling for frozen peas and doing voice-over work.

That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with 'in' and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say "in July", and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me by saying so. That's just stupid, "in July"; I'd love to know how you emphasize 'in' in "In July"...impossible! Meaningless!

(Sigh) Rambling anecdotes are the right of all sentient beings...

Right. Anyway, that's what it was like, seeing you in another Michael Bay film. Man, you were my idol. Seriously, if it didn't contravene the laws of God and man, I would totally worship you as a god. This movie? This movie was beneath you, man. Seriously, you were dead for like half of it.

(Grumble)

When I put down my twelve dollars to see a movie-- okay, when I pay my monthly fee to Netflix-- Okay, when I mooch off of my wife's Netflix account to see a movie with The Optimus Prime in it... Well! I can tell you, I really expected somethign better out of the robot who singlehandedly defeated the Drule empire.

Um... That was Voltron.

Oh. Right. Sorry. Um... Defeated the evil forces of Lord Zedd?

Sigh. That's the Power Rangers

Dr. Wily?

Mega Man. You just watched a Let's Play of it earlier tonight.

Right. Sorry. King Ghidorah, then.

That's Godzilla! You're not even trying now!

Sorry. Sorry. Um.. Who did you singlehandedly destroy again?

MEGATRON! You know, "Autobots wage their battles to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons" and all?

Riiiiight.... Only I thought he got away at the end.

Oh nevermind. I didn't even want to be in that stupid Bay movie anyway.

You didn't?

Of course not! Have you You ever tried working with that man? Frakking Wheelie has a longer attention span. And by the Allspark is that man racist. I mean you saw what he did with those twins, right? (Conspiratorially) You know those weren't even their own teeth. He made them get those.

I had my suspicions

That wasn't the half of it. You should have heard the things he said about people from the middle east. I bet you didn't know this, but Bluestreak and Cliffjumper were originally supposed to be in the movie too, but they walked off the set in disgust after he asked them to wear turbans and fight with scimitars. Terrible man to work with. God knows how many times I had to bite my tongue whenever he started talking about money. You know the stereotypes.

Um. No. There's a stereotype about robots and money?

You didn't know? I'm Jewish.



I was not aware of that.

I haven't been practicing in years, but it's still an important part of my heritage. (At this point, I deliberately steered the conversation away to avoid the temptation to make a hackneyed "bot mitzvah" joke.)

So if Bay was so terrible, why'd you do the movie?

(Sigh) I, uh... I needed the work. It's... It's a hard out there in the industry, when you're a giant robot of a certain age. The phone doesn't ring so much, and when it does, a lot of the time they want you to play the old mentor type who buys it in the third act

Like Jetfire?

Heh. Jetfire's half my age. They just put him in makeup. But yeah, And with my ball joints not being what they used to be, I can't do so many of the action scenes any more. And if I throw a rod or something out there, I can't take anything stronger than STP for it, on account of my history...

Your history?

Uh... Yeah. Look, I'm not proud of a lot of things I've done. There were a couple of years back in the eighties when... Well, I, uh, well, I developed a pretty serious drug problem.

You had a drug problem? How does that even work?

Things started getting rough right after the movie. I knew they were going to write me off the show, hell, I asked for it. I thought it would be good for my career to try to move out of TV work and get some more movie jobs. I had some serious interest from the James Bond people, before that throttle housing Dalton got the part. And then they were talking about doing another Mad Max movie, I even got a draft of a script for a Killdozer remake. But the first time they brought that kid Hot Rod out on the set, man, I just knew right there that there was always going to be someone younger, someone who was still under factory warranty. So, the movie deals dried up, Smokey and the Bandit 4 got cancelled. Then, they called one day and said they wanted me back on the show. I was over the moon. But, well, you know how it went from there. They were going to have me come in mid-season on the Headmasters, shake things up, but they got canned five episodes into the next season. It was just a downhill spiral after that.

No, actually, I meant, how does a giant robot get a drug problem. What drugs do you guys do?

Energon.

No way. I thought you guys ate it for energy or something. Like us humans and food.

Heh. You ever hear of an intergalactic war over pizza? Nah, the whole Autobot-Decepticon thing was a drug war. The Decepticons were muscling in on our turf.

I had no idea. Though in retrospect, without that piece of information, nothing that ever happened in the show made the slightest bit of sense.

Tell me about it. I mean, seriously, you couldn't tell that Blurr was on something?

And Wreck-Gar

Surprisingly, Wreck-Gar never took anything harder than Nitrous Oxide. I think he got dropped a lot in his youth

Does that mean you were high the whole time you were doing the show?

No, no way, it was nothing like that. I was always a professional back then. Never sample your own merchandise, kid. Not cool. I mean, maybe a little on the week-ends, but nothing big, not until after they wrote me off the show. That's when it got to me. Pretty soon, I was doing two, three cubes a day. I'd go out partying all night, black out, wake up a couple of days later, stuck in a ditch somewhere. I'm lucky I didn't end up wrapped around a tree

So, I guess the drug problem was why we didn't hear much from you for a bunch of years?

More or less. But when I really hit rock bottom was that whole Tommy Kennedy thing.

You mean the kid who used to sit on your shoulder when you did the introductions for the reruns in the early 90s?

Yeah. Look, I swear, I never touched that kid. But all of the sudden there's reporters camped out around my parking lot, saying that I'd asked him to be my Headmaster. No one ever even had enough evidence to go to the DA, but there ain't no such thing as reasonable doubt in the court of public opinion... And then social services started hanging around all the time and (voice cracks) and then I lost custody of Roller... I... That was when I knew it was time to get help.

That's when you quit the Energon?

Yeah. I checked myself in to the Henry Ford clinic. Got clean. It was rough going. I had to take a few years off from acting.

Oh! That's why they got that other guy to play you in Robots in Disguise?

(Snorts) Yeah. You know, I wasn't going to come back at all, but after that piece of shit ran, I started getting calls from my agent. Seemed that they had a lot of complaints about trying to do the show again without me. So, here I am.

Wow. So what are you doing these days?

Bits and pieces. I tried to get back to my roots. I've been doing a lot of dinner theater. Drive-in dinner theater. And I opened for Truckzilla back in aught-seven. And then there was that sweet Knight Rider gig.

That was you? I knew it! You were great in that. I just wish they'd had the good sense to give you a bigger part.

Heh. They originally scripted me in for three more scenes, but they got cut after they saw what I looked like in a bikini.

So, the bit where KARR turned into a giant robot, was that your idea?

Ironically enough, no, they had that in mind right from the storyboard stage. Originally, they wanted Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson for the part, but he couldn't fit into the costume. I was as surprised as anyone else. I thought it was going to be a non-transforming part.

So what else are you doing these days?

Well, I'm doing a lecture circuit in the fall, motivational speaking to the auto industry. I auditioned for the next season of Power Rangers, but then I heard they finally got canned.

You know, they're still making it in Japan, if you were willing to take a gig over there. I bet they've got a lot of work for a giant robot.

Not Japan. Not after Kiss Players. Never again. Other than that, I'm just trying to keep busy until Transformers 3 starts filming

So you're doing Transformers 3? Even with Michael Bay?

(Shrugs) It's a living. 'Sides, it's got its up-sides.

Like what?

Two words, kid. Megan. Fox. She can give me a Lube Job any day.

Uh. Okay. So, um, are we cool?

Yeah, we're cool. Just lay off on the movies. We all know they suck, you don't got to be ignorant about it.

Riiiiiight... Well, okay then. I guess I'll see you later?

Later kid. And hey, can you do me a solid and shut the door when you go?

Um. Sure. Why?

(Sheepish) It's just a little awkward. The other day, your missus happened to, um, walk in on me.

Walk in on you?

Well, uh, I was, uh, kind of... You know. Uh...

Shallow Thoughts

By Ross at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of A Mind Occasionally Voyaging, and this week, we're going to look at an actually good movie for once. Yes, we'll be taking some time off from me making fun of bad movies to make fun of a good movie, and for that, we'll be watching--

[Devastator]: DEVASTATOR! DESTROY!

Devastator? What are you doing down here?

I AM DECEPTICON!

Riiiight. So, um. I thought Leah said she didn't want you hanging out down here.

DESTROY AUTOBOTS?

No. Bad Devastator. No destroy Autobots. Sheesh. You've got six brains in there, I would not expect you to be the Inspirationally Disadvantaged Decepticon.

I say! You don't have to get personal about it. And I don't find jokes about the mentally handicapped very funny

Devastator? You can talk like a normal person? And, since this is in writing and no one can contradict me, you talk with the voice of Johnathan Harris?

Just because one is proportioned in a manner reminiscent of G. beringei, one is not obliged to display reduced intellectual capacity. That the thing I do in movies, that's called acting. You may have heard of it?

Um. Okay. So, what brings you out here today?

My good man, I was given to understand that you intended on viewing some sort of cinematic endeavour.

As a matter of fact, I was, Devastator. I take it you are interested in joining me? I've always wanted a Robot Friend to Help Me Keep My Sanity.

A Robot Friend? Really? In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a ten story-tall killing machine with a cement mixer for a mouth. I think you'll find that "robot friend" is rather outside my repetoir.

Not friends then. Of course. But you do want to watch the movie with me?

That was the general idea, yes. So, what is it that we're watching this fine afternoon?

Well, I was thinking about watching the highly anticipated and well-received blockbuster--

Does it have robots?

Um. You see, no. Actually, I was going to watch--

Because I was so hoping that some robotic-americans might be represented in this feature

Well you see, I was going to watch--

Do you have some sort of issue with robot actors?

No, it's just that I wanted to watch--

DEVASTATOR! DESTROY AUTOBOTS!

Okay, okay, fine. We'll watch a movie with robots. I'm sure I can find a good movie with robots. We could watch Star Wars. No, wait. Everyone's reviewed Star Wars. And the Star Wars fanboys will roast me alive if they catch me saying something unkind about it. We could watch-- um... Uh...

DESTROY!

Um... How about-- No, that wasn't a robot. Or maybe-- Oh fuck it, we're watching Moontrap.


Moontrap
dir. Robert Dyke
Starring Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell


So, about (holy crap I am old) twenty years ago or so, me and dad went to the rental store, and I saw a VHS tape with box-art very much like you will see over to the side, only in the proper proportions and without the 'shopped in DVD symbol. And yes, that is exactly how Walter Koenig was credited on the box art. In fact, on the back cover of the box, he's also credited as "Walter Koenig of Star Trek", as in "Astronaut Jason Grant (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) travels to the moon..." This movie had an official tagline of "For Fourteen Thousand Years, it waited...", but I believe that in most promotional material, the tagline was given as "It's got that guy who said 'nuclear wessels' on Star Trek!".

So of course, we had to rent it. I was excited. This was pretty much at the height of the phase in my life where I was nuts for space exploration (Sorry, that's "Exploration... IN SPACE!"). Subscriber to Odyssey magazine, favorite movie Space Camp (Hey! That's a movie with a robot in it, can I review that? DEVASTATOR! DESTROY JINX!), even had Space Shuttle wallpaper (Which is still hanging in my childhood bedroom to this very day), so we had a movie about space, and we had Walter Koenig (of STAR TREK) -- and remember, I was only ten or eleven at the time, so it was still something I didn't quite comprehend that Walter Koenig-the-actor and Pavel Checkov-the-character were two different people. I mean, yes, on paper, I understood this, but the idea that one actor could play many completely different and unrelated characters? That was heavy stuff, man. And it had Robots! And SPACE! It was going to be PURE AWESOME, or so I thought. It turns out I was largely mistaken. Some twenty years later on, the only awesome thing I recall is something entirely unrelated to anything I have said before. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

You may notice who the box cover does not mention. Namely, one Bruce Campbell, who I gather is an acting person of some sort. I will confess that, in 1990, when I last saw this film, I would not have recognized Bruce Campbell by name, nor, I think, by anything else. But it occurs to me that this must be a fairly un-Bruce-Campbellian role he plays, because, for the life of me, I had absolutely no idea he was in this film until the moment that I looked up its IMDB page to find out who the director was.

What I am getting at here is that the stars of this movie are "Walter Koenig of Star Trek" and "Bruce Campbell of The Evil Dead", and when it came time to make the poster, they sat down and thought, "Hey, who should get billing on the poster?" and the answer was "We ought to give it to Walter. Oh, but make sure you mention that he was in Star Trek. People might not know who he is." Bruce doesn't get credit on the front, and on the back, he's only identified as "Bruce Campbell" -- no need to shout "Hey, we got Ash From Evil Dead!" Given the choice between one of the most famous cult-movie-actors of all time, and Walter Koenig, they decided that for the cover of this VHS, they wanted The guy whose name had to be qualified with an explanation of who the hell he was.

[Devastator]: I AM DEVASTATOR!

Yes yes, and I am Iron Man.

I AM DECEPTICON

And I am the Walrus, Goo goo ga-joob. Anyway, our movie opens with a title card giving the date as July 20, 1969, and then we cut to some grainy, badly distorted newsreel footage of Buzz Aldrin stepping down from the Eagle, saying "It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind*"

Sidebar: Whenever you see footage of the first steps on the moon, you're almost always seeing Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong. That scene pictured at the right, and the one you're imagining in your head. The audio doesn't go with the video. Armstrong came out and stepped onto the moon first. Which means that he was the one holding the camera

Also, the reason the footage is so shitty is not for effect; NASA lost the original tapes of the landing, and through the 80s and 90s, every time you saw a clip of the moon landing, it looked like this, a second- or third- gen off-air copy of the footage sent out to the TV affiliates for broadcast. Fortunately, last year, a team of dedicated restoration experts were able to reconstruct the footage using the latest video restoration techniques. We are given to understand that their next assignment is to restore episode 4 of Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet.

As Buzz and Neil goof around on the lunar surface, we're treated to a burrowing effect on the moon, which culminates in some kind of robot head popping out of the lunar soil, and watching via Video Toaster Vision as the LEM blasts off from the surface and returns to space. In real life, this happened about a day after the landing, not forty-five seconds. I assume he just wanted to give them a copy of The Watchtower.

We then cut back to credits, which are overlaid with the voice of a radio DJ announcing that we are now in the far-off year of 1990, where he's about to interview our hero, Jason Grant (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK), who immediately says "You guys must be as bored as I am."

Life imitates art, I imagine.

Now now, Devastator, you've seen that there's a robot and everything. Surely a bit of suspense is acceptable?

DEVASTATOR!

Jason Grant (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) whines about how routine and repetitive Space Travel has become, and then talks about golf and the weather, and bitches about his terrible view. Of SPACE. Let me remind you, this entire sequence has been done to a screen which is blank but for the credits. In fact, did someone forget to actually film a movie? Did they burn their whole budget on that one robot shot and the rest of the film will just be dialogue over the end credits?

Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) complains that he's been on this job for too long and is now bored with it. Also, he's only TWO WEEKS from retirement, and then he's going to go buy that boat he's always wanted. At four minutes in, the interview gives way to Big Important Space Music, and we finally have a title card:



The music has an orgasm or something and turns into what would have happened if the Star Trek The Next Generation theme had a child with a cheap whore who liked to hum the theme from Superman, and we get a shot of the space shuttle doing pointless barrel rolls in space, as Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) narrates: "The Final Frontier (awkward pause) The Space Shuttle Camelot journies (awkward pause) into the void, braving dark depths of the universe," and goes on a bit like this until some Paramount lawers file an injunction. Again, life imitates art, because Bruce Campbell is asleep. The premise here is that in the far-off year of 1990, shuttle missions are routine and very boring, because the shuttle is sent up all the time to do all the shit-work in space (Sorry. That's "shit-work IN SPACE!"). Because this movie was made in 1989, just two years after the Challenger disaster, and the writers hadn't yet realized that manned space-flight was going to find a way to become even more boring than their predictions.

Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) wakes up Bruce Campbell and they enjoy a tedious scene of lighthearted banter whose major plot points are: 1. They Are Old. (Which is hilarious given how young they are in this movie, compared to, well, how they look some twenty years on.), and 2. Bruce Campbell's fighter pilot callsign was "The Penetrator". Which is what I will call him from now on.

A few meaningless blips on their BBC micro indicate to Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) and The Penetrator that there's a quarter-mile Weird Thing in nearby space. They scan it (Space shuttles have scanners?) and it produces a fake 3D wireframe of what is quite clearly a space ship out of a cheap 80's sci-fi movie. Jason (of STAR COMMAND) decides to pull up close and take some pictures. The ship is in a decaying orbit, and NASA asks them to hop over to the ship to have a looksee. As Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) flies over in a space suit, The Penetrator checks the radiation sensors (Space shuttles have radiation sensors?) Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) sees some writing on the ship which he describes as "Strange heiroglyphics", unlike the orginary hieroglyphics they normally find on alien ships. He also finds some kind of egg and decides to keep it. But as he turns to depart, he finds a mummified humanoid corpse. Rather than react, we just cut to the shuttle landing.

Though it sounds ridiculous, NASA's chief expert in ancient alien artefacts, Santa, confirms via Carbon-14 dating that the corpse is 14,000 years old, and came from the moon (I was not aware that carbon dating could identify things as lunar in origin). However, the asshome guy from Washington (Which will serve him fine as a name, since I can't be bothered to recall it) derides Carbon-14 dating as "Only a theory!" and calls Santa's analysis "cockamaime", and thinks that this is all part of some elaborate stunt to increase NASA's budget. Yes. He's accusing them of fabricating an egg made of alien alloy, an ancient, dessicated corpse, and lots of pictures and scanner data of an alien ship, in order to get their funding increased. Santa is so offended by this attack on his professionalism that they're all forced to go get some coffee and leave the mystery egg unattended so that no one will see it when it opens up and disgorges a tiny little robot similar in design to the one from the pre-credit sequence. Only this one has RAPE TENTACLES which it uses to break the window to the room it's in, and prompt the computer to show us some animated sequences explaining what the analysis had turned up. The computer reads, in a very mildly flanged voice, so we know it's a computer, that the body is a 14,000 year old human, and it reconstructs a photorealistic image of what he looked like alive, and it reconstructs a photorealistic image of what his space suit would have looked like (Sort of like a red Lego-Person), what his ship looked like (Same picture as before), and its probable origin, "Earth's Moon", which is I assume how talking NASA computers of the early 90s referred to the moon. It also knows exactly where on the moon the ship came from. (Protip: When setting your movie in the future to justify the advanced technology, choose a date more than 1 year in the future of when the movie is scheduled for release)

Meanwhile, inside an elevator approximately the same size as my house, Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK), Santa, and The Penetrator try to talk The Douchebag From DC into letting them pull the last Saturn 5 out of storage and take it to the moon. In the unattended and unmonitored lab room, the robot uses its rape tentacles to rip down a ceiling lamp and spot-welds it into a deadly claw. DC Ass Guy is unconvinced, until The Penetrator reminds him that two years from now, in 1992, the Soviet Union has scheduled to make their first manned lunar landing. The Soviet Union. In 1992. I'm starting to wonder if this movie was actually filmed, like, in 1984 or something and sat on the shelf for a while before it was released. It would make a lot more sense that way.

Downstairs, someone finally notices that the lab has been blown up and the mummy is missing. But since she's a doudy-looking woman, she is instantly killed by the erector-set robot. Upstairs, The Penetrator gets angry at the coffee machine, and wishes it harm in a foreshadowy way. Downstairs, the NASA branch of the SS turns up, heavily armed and wearing creepy black uniforms and train conductors' hats. They then immediately leave, and we cut back to The Penetrator, who judo-kicks the coffee machine into submission. The soldiers run by him on their way to the basement... Because the break room is between the lab you need to take the giant elevator to reach and the basement, though the evil erector set robot did not have to go past our heroes to get there... (Shakes head) Anyway, the Stormtroopers end up in NASA's OSHA non-compliant industrial manufacturing plant basement, and stand in formation, being all scared, while an unseen something watches them using the same Video Toaster vision as before. When Santa, The Penetrator, and Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) arrive, we finally get to see this menace from space...

The soldiers prepare to shoot it, but Santa steps out in front of them, and insists that it's incredibly unlikely that an advanced alien intelligence should be hostile, and they could learn much from it, and he goes and walks toward the robot with open arms, proclaiming peace and asking to establish contact and reading from the psalms. As you know, me=huge War of the Worlds fan, so I had my expectations for what was going to happen next. To my surprise, the robot doesn't vaporize Santa, but merely wings him, causing Santa to just wheel around and shout "Get the son of a bitch!" Everyone starts shooting, including DC Douche Guy (So, what, they just let anyone bring a gun to NASA?) but the robot retaliates by shooting lightning bolts at the stormtroopers while sort of, um, flailing randomly because this robot has very limited mobility. Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) climbs up into the giant-size ventilation ducts above NASA's basement, in order to crawl close to the robot from above. The robot seems to understand that something's going down, because it Video Toastr Vision locks-on to the sprinkler pipes above itself, but does not doe anythign about them. Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) shoots down from above and cracks open the egg, which made up the bulk of the robot's head.

With many good men dead, and Santa badly injured, we cut to the sterile inside of a futuristic 1990 home, where a young boy reads comics while someone off-screen makes sex-noises. We pan over to find Jason (WKoST) doing push-ups. Some dialogue passes between Jason (WKoST) and his son, the purpose of which is to mention that Jason (WKoST) has a son and is divorced. And apparently lives on the set of 2001 a Space Odyssey. A phone call comes in from The Penetrator, and Jason (WKoST) has to go rescue him from a strip club with a rotating sattellite dish on the roof (Because it's the Future). The Penetrator had lured Jason (WKoST) here to celebrate, as the word has just come down that their moon mission has been green-lit.

And then they're on the moon. Just like that. This movie fucking hates segues. Skipping all those potentially exciting scenes of take-off, model shots of an Apollo spacecraft, and the excitement of landing, we just cut straight to Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) jumping around on the moon in what is obviously not lunar gravity, acting like an idiot until he literally falls on his ass. As Teh Penetrator and Jason (WKoST) goof off, another one of them rape tentacle robots surfaces, notices them, then looks over and finds the LEM. It burrows up close, then tentacle-rapes the lander.

Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) calls up the orbiter, and complains that he's forgotten to bring the frisbee that his son (who I do not believe has a name) gave him. He claims it would have flown for miles, this disc whose flying properties are based on the way its shape leverages air resistance, in the airless environment. They stop to change the tire on the rover when they notice a giant space-ship-city sort of thing built into the side of a hill on the moon. They pull up to explore, and take out their moon-guns, pausing to reflect on the moral suckiness of bringing guns to the moon.

Inside the alien base, they a preserved human woman, and accidentally wake her up. She immediately grabs The Penetrator's space gun, then collapses. The astronauts take off their space helmets, as she's just demonstrated that the atmosphere is breathable, and manageto get her to identify herself as Mira Sorvino. She finds a bracelet on a skeleton nearby and indicates sadness. Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) and The Penetrator get a call from the command module, because one of those robocop robots has just stolen their LEM. This causes all the systems on the LEM to fail, except for Jason (WKoST)'s "special package". The astronauts wonder what to do about Mira Sorvino, but she, who dpoes not speak a word of english, intuits what's going on, and takes out an ancient legoman space suit and puts it on. Just before they can leave, however, the lights o out and a killer spider robot drops from the ceiling. Jason of Star Command and The Penetrator kill it with their space guns. They drive back to the landing site while the guy back in the command module expositions a little to NASA. Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) and The Penetrator exposition a little about the robots, who I think are called "Helium", because I am having a hard time making out Mira Sorvino's dialogue. Only she knows what they are, and cantell them once they teach her English, which she doesn't speak, despite the fact that she seems to understand everything they say, such as when they started speculating about how to get her out of the base without a suit, or when Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) asked "What the hell was that?" about the Robot Spider. At any rate, they find their LEM missing, and set off to follow the robot tracks across the moon. They eventually come to an alien space ship which is just starting to fire up its engines. Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) decides that this is what the Helium have been doing for the past 14,000 years: working on building this space ship (Must have been a government project). He tells The Penetrator to stay behind and watch his back, to which Bruce Campbell responds, "My ass!" and insists on going with him. They decide to partner up and work together, when another Robocop robot pops out of the ground and tries to kill The Penetrator. Fortunately, Mira Sorvino picks up Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK)'s dropped Space Gun and throws it to him, allowing him to dispatch Robocop. The Penetrator explains "Back on Earth, we'd say you just saved my ass." I assume this is intended to convey that The Penetrator has a thing about ass. Also, I am not sure why they would say it back on earth, but not here on the moon. "You have just saved one of our earth asses," I suppose.

This is, of course, a cue for another Robocop to show up and throw The Penetrator into the side of a mountain. Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) narrowly manages to dispatch it, but it's too late for The Penetrator, with whom he has to share a tender moment as he dies painfully. Meanwhile, something shoots the command module, causing it too to crash, killing the pilot, which would have more impact if I could even remember his name.

The Penetrator manages to stay alive just a few more moments so that he can get off one last one-liner: "(Cough) Just remember one thing... Take no shit from the machine."

Cretin. Take no shit from a the machine indeed! Entirely out of line.

Thanks for your input, Devastator. I guess this movie isn't quite what you had in mind, what with all the robot deaths?

Oh, that's to be expected. I gather this is some sort of horror movie in space, right? So, we'll see lots of innocent robots die in horrible ways, until the climactic scene, where the one robot who happens to be a virgin manages to defeat the evil serial-murdering human, and staggers away from the moon, shell-shocked by the traumatic experience but somehow stronger as a person.

Yeaaaaah.... So... Anyway, Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) mopes around for a bit, then goes back to their broken down rover and retrieves a backpack which instantaneously and off-camera inflates into an igloo. They climb inside, remove their helmets, and Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) spends the next five minutes complaining. He berates himself for beign too old and too uncool and for getting his crew killed and for the fact that he never should have tried to "go up against" that ship (I don't know what the hell he's talking about here, since they stopped the second they saw the ship and were attacked while they were just talking about attacking it, not actually going after it. And he whines about being stuck on the moon, and having woken Mira Sorvino up just so she could die with him, and then something happens which is the one thing about this movie I still remembered some twenty years later.

You see, I was eleven at the time. And my dad would rent all sorts of movies through the eighties and such, and I don't recall my parents ever making a conscious effort to filter which movies I was allowed to see. But maybe they did and I just don't recall, or maybe previously it just always happened that I was distracted or fell asleep before the relevant bits, or maybe it's just that I was very young and the brain didn't process. I don't know really. What I do know is that in the next few seconds, my eleven year old brain took in something it had never comprehended before:
(After the jump...)

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Shallow Thoughts/Movies

By Ross at 9:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just saw a teaser trailer for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

I don't know anything about this movie, other than the fact that it involves a girl with a dragon tattoo, but at the end of the trailer, after the bit where they show you the illegible list of people involved in the film, it cuts to a prompt that says "wasp>". An unseen typist types "run /ASPHYXIA.sys". This causes some kind of Unixish kernel panic announcement (it mentions a Darwin kernel. I've never seen a Mac kernel panic in console mode, so I can't say if it's legit or not). This gives way to an NT-style Blue Screen of Death. Finally, the BSOD text disappears leaving only a blinking cursor on a blue background. The cursor beeps as it blinks.

It is 2010. Surely, someone in Hollywood has seen an actual computer at some point in their life by now. No?

Shallow Thoughts/Movies

By Ross at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)