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
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.
This has been your guest host, Glen Peck, bringing youse fun facts about ancient religions.
- 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.
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.
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here. No, wait, not that; 
this.
Awwk! Too soon!
It's been ten years and two wars!
Just so long as they don't try building a step pyramid within six blocks.
Anyway, David Carradine is rapidly becoming convinced that these ritualistic killings in honor of the winged serpent god Quetzelcoatl might just have something to do with the gigantic, man-eating flying creature currently terrorizing the city. Shaft, of course, dismisses this as crazy talk.
Elsewhere, Mario Mario is savagely murdered by Quetzelcoatl.
Really.
See?
This is also the point in the movie where they actually start letting us get a good look at the monster. He's only half-in-frame at this point, so I won't pull out a picture, but there's something really interesting about the look of the monster which has led me to a theory about this movie, which I will explain later.
Michael Moriarty wakes up the next morning to be chased by the hoods from the jewelery store robbery, who aren't prepared to believe his explanation about having lost the stolen gemstones in his wacky spastic chase scene. After a comically inept chase scene, they threaten to maim him unless he takes them to the swag. In a flash of inspiration, he leads them up to the top of the Chrysler building, where Quetzelcoatl obligingly murders them, conveniently off-screen.
His appetite whet by his gangster hors d'ouevres, Quetzelcoatl goes off to eat some more sunbathers, and we finally get to see the whole beast in frame at the same time, and let me ask you, gentle reader, whether or not you think there's something a bit off with this picture. For reference, 
here is an Aztec rendering of Quetzelcoatl, the feathered serpent of their mythology. Now, consider the antagonist of this movie:
And this leads me to my theory. I suspect that this movie was originally written as an entirely non-Aztec-themed giant flying monster movie. I can't find anything on the internet to confirm this theory, but look at that thing. That is quite clearly some kind of Harryhausen Dragon or something. Its skin is leathery, it's got an entirely non-serpentine torso, six more limbs than your average serpent, no orange bill, no long tongue, and its head looks a lot like the heads you'd see on some of the more complex Harryhausen dinosaur-creatures. But anyway, my main point here is that he has no feathers. Now, I know that technically, the title of this movie refers to him as a winged serpent, not a feathered serpent, but we've got compelling evidence that 
the movie knows Quetzelcoatl has feathers. And we're never going to see our heroes on screen at the same time as the creature. Those few times Q visibly interacts with an actor, all we see is a disembodied claw that looks nothing like the claws on the actual bird. No, I think that what happened was that they wrote Q to be this big epic about the restoration of the ancient Aztec religion, while simultaneously, a special effects studio was working on this big "Flying Ironically, we now know that many dinosaurs had feathers. And not just the odd feather here or there; a full downy coat of plumage. Double-Ironically, the flying dinosaurs weren't feathered. Triple-ironically, the largest species of pterosaur was a memeber of the genus Quetzalcoatlus. And looked absolutely nothing at all like Q.
This has been a Fun Fact About Paleontology with your guest star, Glen Peck.Dinosaur Attacks New York" movie extravaganza, and there were some budgeting issues, so they scraped together all the footage they had and stamped a Q on it.
Actually, my cousin Glen, he was originally planning to play the role feathered. He had himself plucked just before shooting because the director liked the symmetry of having a bald Winged Serpent acting alongside Michael Moriarty.
Michael Moriarty decides that he's fucking money what with knowing where the lair of the giant flying fatherless feathered serpent dragon who's terrorizing the city. He manages to negotiate millions of dollars and exclusive movie rights out of New York City in exchange for the location of the nest. Everyone berates him and tries to shame him, which is supposed to make us think ill of Michael Moriarty, but instead, it just makes the city government look like a bunch of cheap douches who are trying to weasel out of paying to save the city. The fact that they will later screw him out of the reward does nothing but reinforces this view. Because the movie is really committed to the idea that Michael Moriarty is a bad person for daring to want to be a Big Man and Make Millions of Dollars while saving countless lives, his girlfriend will leave him when he gets home.
David Carradine tries to convince his chief that the ritualistic Aztec killings and flayings are related to the flying lizard beast -- he's become a true believer and actually thinks that the cultist has indeed ressurrected mighty Quetzalcoatl via human sacrifice, and the chief isn't buying it. Neither is the cheif imaginative enough to consider that, for example, maybe the cult is here because of the featherless feathered serpent. Instead, he insists that Carradine's theory are crazy-talk, and orders him to continue to pursue both cases in parallel, but specifically forbids him from pursuing any evidence or lines of enquiry that might link the two. He just declares by fiat that the cases aren't related and orders Carradine not to dispute it.
The New York Police Department arms themselves with machine guns and storm the Chrysler Building, where they shoot up the giant egg and we're treated to a long scene of a fetal flying lizard monster trying in vain to struggle free of its shattered shell, then dying. Since mommy wasn't at home, the city declares that Michael Moriary hasn't kept his end of the deal and therefore they won't pay him anything. Yay a major city defrauding someone just because he's an undesirable!
Captain Kangaroo finds one of those Red Phones That Direct Dials The Kremlin and calls... A mime. 
Really. He's under cover at a nearby university, on the lookout for the ritual murderer. I think they determined it was someone medically trained who had checked out a bunch of books on Aztec religion and had been late to work. Or something like that. The mime's under cover on patrol. Shaft, the Mime, Captain Kangaroo, and some other cop all 
go cruising for a bit, which as far as I can tell serves no purpose other than to highlight the fact that there's a scale model of the Statue of Liberty that was used to model the real thing before it was built on top of an auction warehouse somewhere in New York. They catch up to the killer -- I don't think they ever actually mention his name -- just as he's about to perform another willing sacrifice. The intended victim jumps up and asserts his willingness to be sacrificed and tries to protect the killer, so Captain Kangaroo shoots him dead. Thank god they saved him from being sacrificed.
The killer flees, but the chase is interrupted when Q shows up again and 
tosses Shaft to his death. Then Q flies back to the Chrysler Building. The place that Michael Moriarty gave them. And which they'd weasled out of paying him for because they declared his information worthless having given them only the egg and not the bird. I would like to give this movie the bird.
Hey!
Sorry. Anyway, the police announce that they're going to load tracer bullers in their guns even though it's broad daylight, because ordinary bullets wouldn't be visible on film, and so it wouldn't look like they were doing anything. Or maybe because that hypothetical other movie that the stop motion footage is from used laser guns. The bird finally shows up and we get on with what is apparently the climax of this film. Now, this part is really neat, thematically, since I think it's very intentionally an inversion of the climax of King Kong; instead of Kong atop the Empire State building, being attacked by circiling planes, we get instead the NYPD atop the Chrysler building, shooting outward at a circling giant movie monsterAnd incidentally raining down machine gun bullets on the denizens of New York below
That's my nephew's big death scene. Y'know, he modeled it off of my death scene when I did Hamlet in Summer Stock.
It's a very impressive death scene, too. A lot better than you usually get in giant monster movies. But his death serves the greater purpose of letting us get back to Michael Moriarty, who is sulking in a hotel room, having been, as noted, dumped for daring to want a reward.
Unfortunately, the killer tracks him down... Somehow... And decides to sacrifice him in revenge for leading the cops to his god's nest -- he refers to Quetzalcoatl as "The Plumed One", in spite of Q's lack of any visible plumage. Of course, the sacrifice must be made willingly, so he holds Michael Moriarty at knifepoint and... demands that he volunteer willingly. Seriously. In fact, he seems to have absolutely no backup plan when Moriarty refuses to willingly accept his own murder, and just sort of struggles with him looking confused and bumfuzzled. "Can I sacrifice you?" "No." "C'mon!" "No." "Please?" "No." "Be your best friend?"
Fortunately for Michael Moriarty, David Carradine has also tracked him down, and arrives in what would be the nick of time if there was any real sense of urgency to the struggle. Carradine reveals that Moriarty's girlfriend wants him back, and that he's not such a terrible piano player after all and could have an honest carreer ahead of him. They all enjoy a hearty laugh over the dead killer.
And that's Q: The Winged Serpent. More than anything, it's really a blast from the past; it feels a lot like a really good 50s monster movie. Of course, for a movie from 1982, it's ridiculous and overblown and light on plot. And when I say "ridiculous and overblown", I don't mean in a fun 80s way. Really, it's a movie that focuses mostly on being a character study, all about the Carradine and Moriarty characters and how Moriarty's Jimmy Quinn transitions between a cowardly rogue, to a desperate hunted man, to a bastard who delights in leading people to their deaths, to a self-serving opportunist, back to a simpering moron. And --
Hey, you forgot the tag
Oh! Right! There's one last little reveal at the very end showing that there's a second egg somewhere else in New York. I assume that this was meant as a hook for the proposed Larry Cohen movie "R: Son of Q", but sadly, it was not to be.
The reason I bring it up is that, while in your world, the implied sequel was never made, there was a followup in my galaxy that ran for about ten years off-broadway. My nephew, he wasn't in it -- couldn't yodel, see. But man, it was a fun show. One flay more / Another day another sacrifice / My skinless victims don't smell too nice / This police man who seems to me / Would be happier practicing karate / One flay more! Or how about Do you hear the people scream? / Screaming the cries of freaked-out men / It is the screaming of a people / Who've got blood dripped all over them
Now that's a play I'd like to see.
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EEEGAH! It's the ghost of Orson Welles!
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.
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 
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.
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.
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?
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 
Talkin' 'bout my generation!
They don't really accomplish aything in this scene other than give Good Moriarty a context to be in when he has another murder-vision.
Evil Moriarty goes back to his hooker (she may be his girlfriend. She seems attached to him, though she also mentions him paying her for sex) and goes full-on crazy about not wanting to be a guinea pig in his brother's experiments, and about how his brother "took too much" from him. He then very politely asks his girlfriend if he can pretend-murder her in order to induce another vision, so he can look out the window, tipping off his brother to his location.
Finally, the two moriarties meet, each politely keeping to their respoective sides of the screen in order to make the matte shots easier. Evil Moriarty does the whole "Let's Have a Creepy Tea Party with the Serial Killer" thing, beign very polite and very crazy, and mocks Good Moriarty's hair-playing-with tick, which he has only done in this scene and the one where they introduced the concept at beginning of the movie.
Actually, they decide that this is enough evidence to hook up Good Moriarty's experimental electro-accupuncture device, which gives Good Moriarty a vision of Evil Moriarty trying to escape into East Germany (Which existed back then), and gives Good Moriarty a vision of Julie. Which surely won't backfire. Evil Moriarty then proceeds to blind himself by staring into some headlights, intuitively guessing this would stop his brother from seeing him.
Evil Moriarty, wearing sunglasses to keep Good Moriarty from seeing him, confronts Julie, disrobes her, and questions her motives. Julie claims she wants to reach the bits of Evil Moriarty that aren't evil, though Evil Moriarty concldes that it's a trick to get him to take off his sunglasses. So she offers herself to him sexually, which may have been a bit of a moot point since he was planning to rape and murder her anyway. But since she does him as an active participant instead of resisting him (Though from the camera angle, it looks more like she straddles him and has some kind of seizure), he's completely thrown off guard and is finally able to hold his -- actually, y'knw what. Let's just say this: the climax of this movie involves Julie resolving Evil Moriarty's sexual hangups.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
We begin our tale, in a sort of not-quite-in-medias-res fashion. We're in a cave. An old man bends down, touches some creamy white goo, tastes it, and declares it very tasty. We will never see this man again, so we will never get a chance to learn what horrible fate befell him. How fortunate that it turned out to only be slowly lethal, instead of instantly lethal. 
Specifically, behind the titles, we cut to a shirtless Not-Wil-Wheaton
Not-Wil makes his way downstairs dodging some very strange credits. Danny Aiello is the "Guest Star" in the film, apparently in a very subtle role, as I have no recollection of him in this movie. Not-Wil is "Introducing", and, most bizarrely, 
Amid the production credits, Not-Wil makes it to the kitchen, and decides to look in the refrigerator. There, he catches the antagonist of our film: the tub of dessert food, having been interrupted in what I can only guess was a late night stroll to spy on the milk, is startled by the refrigerator light coming on and scurries back to its tub, in order to make sure it's safely away before Not-Wil's jackass dad appears, berating Not-Wil for being downstairs in the middle of the night. He sends Not-Wil back to bed with a slap on the posterior that looks just a hair too pederastic, and, deciding that there is clearly no reason to be concerned about the lidless and overturned pint cup of The Stuff in the fridge, decides it would be perfectly cool to have a little late-night snack himself.
We cut to the inside of a yacht, where we meet a villainous character who will then proceed to do absolutely nothing again until the end of the film. He explains that within 60 days, The Stuff will go national. Which I guess means that it hasn't already, except that at the end of the movie, it quite clearly has, and Not-Wil's town has it stocked, despite the fact that it isn't the location of the inital product testing. Santa-Sanders is upset because their finest analysts have been unable to determine the chemical makeup of The Stuff. Because, apparently, no one finds it worthy of pants-crapping alarm that there is a food product on the market immune to mass spectroscopy. Not being able to reproduce the process -- not being able to recreate it, I can believe. But not being able to determine its very chemical makeup? What's it made of? Unobtanium? Giant Vulture Feathers?
Santa-Sanders is comforted by one of his hench-lawyers, who has summoned the mysterious Mo Rutherford, an industrial spy, to help them steal the formula for The Stuff. Santa-Sanders is reluctant to get involved with industrial spies, but he finally acknolwedges, in a scene where all the dialogue is very badly looped, to the point that I assume there was a major rewrite after filming was complete, that "I guess we do have to keep the world safe for ice cream."
Here, we introduce our hero, David "Mo" Rutherford, so nicknamed because "
Once he's gone, Vickers rushes off to placate his increasingly angry dog with another hit of warm delicious creamy goodness. One segueway later, Vickers is on the floor, frantically trying to make a call on his unplugged phone, but the dog rushes upstairs, apparently plugs the phone in again, and then rips the cord out of the wall. As Vickers tries to protest that he'll buy more Stuff, having apparently eaten the entire three cases he had before the scene change, the dog vomits up some Stuff, then playfully licks him to death.
Martin Landau tells Mo about Not-Wil-Wheaton's escapades in the grocery store, and Mo, for no discernable reason, decides that he needs to meet with this boy. He's in his room, watching a Very 80s Commercial for The Stuff, which is full of basketball and break dancing and graffitti and big hair. In the background, a trailer for Nightline mentions that all around the country, there's been an epidemic of people disappearing, though no one seems especially interested. Not-Wil goes downstairs and discovers that his family has thrown out all the food in the house, except for The Stuff, which they now insist is the Only Food We Need, and ONE OF US ONE OF US. Dad points out that "benign bacteria" is alive in yogurt, and yeast is alive in bread, and milk comes from a cow's behind, and honey comes from a bee's behind, and don't get me started on toothpaste. Dad even believes Not-Wil that The Stuff moves, but he thinks this is no big deal, as other microorganisms also move, just, y'know, microly. When he still refuses to see the light of The Stuff, his family restrains him and acts alternately Stepford-Smiley and Faculty-Angry at him for not eating his Stuff. He's dismissed to his bedroom until he eats it, which leads to the afforementioned shaving cream scene, where Not-Wil replaces the contents of his pint container with shaving cream, then eats it in front of his family.
Posing as Nicole's "male secretary" as she does some background work for the next batch of Stuff commercials, Mo and Nicole infiltrate the Stuff factory. On the plane, a character who I'd seen before, but can't for the life of me remember who he was appears, and we get the most unintentionally porntastic image in this whole unintentionally porntastic movie (see left) as the pilot is splooge-faced to death by a pile of The Stuff.
But the pillow-talk is cut short when the pillow explodes, disgorging a mound of shaving cream which seems determined to face-rape Mo. Nicole helpfully sets him on fire. I can't tell if this helps. Mo frees himself, then another Stuff-zombie rushes in shouting "I'll kill you! Leave us alone!", but for some reason, the bed decides to murder him, disgorging a mountain of white goo which pins him to the wall and kills him:
A gigantic lake of The Stuff. This is the thing on which the filmmakers really shot their VFX -- y'know what, I'm classier than that. I'm not going to go there.
But the racist asshole's suspicions are proved valid when Chocolate Chip Charlie reveals himself as a Stuff zombie and tries to disgorge his white slime 
The final scene begins with Mo entering an office. I'm not sure whose, but based on the bust by the door, I'm going to assume it's Donald Pleasance's office. The owner of the Stuff company is in this office, and he brags to Mo about how, in spite of blowing up their quarry, he can always get more Stuff, as it bubbles up through the ground. Because after this, people will be sure to continue to trust any old addictive desert product whose ingredients aren't disclosed. Mo discovers to his shock that Evil Santa is now in league with the Stuff guy (Seriously, does he even have a name?). They're preparing a new marketing campaign for "The Taste", a product which is 88% ice cream, 12% The Stuff. They're sure, despite having done no research, that it'll be enough to make it highly addictive without being enough to let it control your mind. Because THe Stuff was all about mind control, and not about hollowing you out and using your body like a skin-suit. Mo summons in Not-Wil, whose parents and brother have conveniently died off-screen, and also pulls out a gun. Not-Wil produces a crate of The Stuff, and, in the world's worst reenactment of the last scene of Hamlet, he makes them choose whether to suck down one of his delicious bullets, or eat a whole case of The Stuff. In front of the kid. Our hero!
Thanks to the time compression in this movie, in seconds, our two villains are surrounded by empty cartons, giving Mo a chance to toss off the tagline of the film: "Are you eating it, or is it eating you?"
You!
Moontrap
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
They pull up to explore, and take out their moon-guns, pausing to reflect on the moral suckiness of bringing guns to the moon. 
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."
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.
Our heroes awaken on the alien ship, now halfway to Earth. Their space suits and bits of the other astronaut have been nearly stowed in some nearby compartments, which causes Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) to finally work it all out: "That's what we are to them: Spare Parts!" Which I assume means that the ship they're on is the SS Madame du Pompadour. Just as he starts speculating on a means to escape, a robot that looks kind of like the Cyberman Conversion Machine drops down from the ceiling and attacks Mira Sorvino with its buzzsaw hand. Fortunately, it seems intent on disrobing her one strip of fabric at a time before it actually hurts her in any way, so Jason (WALTER KOENIG of STAR TREK) is able to slip out of his restraints. 
The robot just stands their patiently waiting for about forty-five seconds while Jason (WKoST) looks around for an inanimate carbon rod with which to beat the crap out of it, whereupon he repeats The Penetrator's one-liner, "We don't take no shit from the machine!". 
Why of course. It's like Saw; they made a new one every year.
We open with a globe spinning in some smoke. Some might think this is meant to actually be an FX shot of the earth in space, but I am fairly sure that even in 1957, they knew that the map lines were not visible from space. 
A narrator drones on for a bit about SCIENCE! and TECHNOLOGY! and shows us a radar installation to prove he means it. I do not think this has anything to do with the story, but it's hard to make a feature length film out of five minutes of Giant Vulture footage.
At this point, the narrator takes over, explaining, "A Radar officer. A mathematician and systems analyst. A Radar operator. A couple of plotters. People doing a job well, efficiently. Serious, having fun. Doing a job. Situation, normal for the moment." Then, he bizarrely launches into a weather report, having found this film so boring that he's forgotten that he isn't just reading the news: "Date, the 17th of the month. Sky cloudy, overcast. Visibility limited. Time, 1332 hours. A significant moment in history. A moment when an electronics engineer named Mitchell MacAfee saw something in the sky." And we see Mitch react with dull surprise as something blurry flies by his plane. Instead of having this exciting scene acted out, the narrator just tells us what's happening as we watch the actors wordlessly react. As Mitch turns his plane, the unidentified flying object turns too, and the narrator, for the first of several times, pulls out an analogy to explain how big this thing is: "Something, he didn't know what, but something as big as a battleship had just flown over and past him."
They scramble interceptors, but don't find anything. Which causes the radar officer to declare Mitch to be a liar, and threatens to have him arrested and ruin his career. Thanks to Mitch's "joke" -- which the officer is implacably convinced is what it was -- not only didn't they find what he saw, but one of their planes vanished. So clearly, there was NOTHING OUT THERE and Mitch was LYING, LYING I TELL YOU. Mitch maintains his honesty while the officer gets a phone call, and Miss Caldwell warns Mitch that he's "Already caused enough trouble with his flying battleship nonsense." The call, however, exonerates Mitch, as a passenger jet has just gone missing shortly after the pilot radioed in about a UFO. So now he believes Mitch entirely. 
The pilot calls in a UFO, but is then incapacitated when the ship is harshly buffetted despite the instruments not registering "a hatful of wind" (This movie has no idea how metaphors work), and the plane crashes. As it turns out, if your plane goes into a nose dive from 12,000 feet, you won't be hurt on the landing even if you're not strapped in, and will be in fine condition to run from the plane before it explodes about 40 seconds after impact. Mitch blames the crash on "A Flying battleship that wasn't there," just to put Miss Caldwell in her place for doubting him. So you know what that means...
"Nothing so domestic as a flying saucer, officer; just a flying battleship," along with a pointed look to Mitch to indicate that, because, as a woman, she is the Designated Idiot of this movie, she still doesn't believe him. He then gets an angry phone call from the general, leading Miss Caldwell to remind him that, "Flying battleship, pink elephant, same difference." (I am not going to bother showing the counter again), and Mitch angrily points out that he only said that it looked like a battleship, not that it was a battleship. Which would entirely justify him, except that we're eventually going to see this thing.
. Again, she taunts him that to fly that distance in that time would take the speed of a... FLYING BATTLESHIP 
She taunts him for thinking something so silly as that the sudden rash of now five crashed airplanes, each of which was linked to a UFO sighting, could possibly be anything more than coincidence. Yeah! What a maroon!
As they play tonsil hockey, the narrator cuts in with a new weather report: Partly cloudy with a chance of battleship. As a recovery team flies to the site of Mitch's latest crash, the pilot spots a swift-moving fuzzy blur, this time making weird monkey noises. Unfortunately, the narrator ruins the surprise by telling the audience that the pilot radios in the report of the UFO (we see the pilot do this, but do not hear what he says. Instead, the narrator just tells us): A bird as big as a battleship was about to attack the plane. And it is here, dear readers, that we finally get our first look at the monster:
The general tells Mitch about two more crashes which (surprise surprise) fit his pattern perfectly, though he still refers to the whole idea as some kind of crazy joke Mitch is pulling on them -- he puts enough disbelief in the word "theorhetical" in front of "pattern" when he says it with enough force that you can hear the scare quotes around it. The general explains that the pilot had described the UFO as "a bird... as big as a battleship!" Mitch scoffs at the very idea, which seems small of Mitch. The general asks Mitch's opinion as an electronics expert on the feasibility of a bird as big as a battleship, because this is a 50s monster movie, and one SCIENCEtm is very much like another. 
They bring in the film from the camera balloons, and see... Nothing. And then... Nothing... And then... A tiny little bird. And then... The same bird, closer. And then... HOLY SHIT IT'S A GIANT VULTURE COMING RIGHT FOR US. 
The general freaks the hell out and passes the buck along to his superior general. His superior general, using the wisdom accumulated from his decades of experience, looks at the film and concludes: "Yep, it's a bird all right." He then yells at Mitch for the fact that it's impossible for something to be invisible to Radar (Radar is a blameless, holy creature), and Mitch gets defensive. But the previous General tells him to calm down, because no one's accusing him of anything. Except for the entire movie thus far, in which they were. General #2 then gives General #1 a hug. No, Really. 
which is The first time that this simile has made any sense at all The bird turns more toys into stock footage, and finally kills the pilot we've been listening to on the radio. The general laments: "Machine guns, cannons, rockets, nothing touched it!" Why does that sound familiar?
We then cut to a place of SCIENCEtm, where someone's fifth grade diorama of the Bohr model of the atom is used to explain that atomic weapons are awesome. A scientist explains that while it is widely believed that all atoms are alike, but this is not true: the theory of electrodynamics says that all of nature must be symmetrical, and therefore there must be atoms where the nucleus is negative and the electrons are positive -- ANTI-MATTER, and SCIENCEtm has proven that this must be the case, not on earth, but on alien planets elsewhere in the universe. And, quite naturally, anti-mater is invisible to radar. 
.
. They find it, but mommy is there. Pierre wets them and runs away like the cowardly Frenchman he is (Battleship counter: 8 Misogyny Counter: 7. Offensive Cultural Stereotype Counter: 1) leaving Sally and Mitch to shoot the eggs on their own. Based on the relative size of the bird, these rifles put holes in the eggs approximately the size of a smallish television. This makes momma bird angry, and she uses her antimatter power and giant claws to... drop tree branches on them. And then she chases down Pierre and kills him for being a little bitch. Mitch explains that they'll need to send out search parties to find any other eggs, and then glibly steals Pierre's car. Unfortunately, a bunch of roudy Teenagers run them off the road while acting like jackasses because they ain't afraid of no bird. Also, they repeatedly call Mitch "Daddy-O". Because disobeying your elders merits death, the bird grabs them. And rather than eating the car, it just drops it again, letting it fall into the anti-matter shield and explode. Two of the teens managed to jump clear before it was too late, and survive, narrowly, though I don't think they'll ever be seen again. Sally contemplates their bottle of booze as if it is of keen importance. 
When Mitch wakes up, they all tell him that they're giving up and that he did all he could. But Mitch insists that he actually got the thing working -- they'd had the polarity reversed. And blew himself up on purpose. The general is ecstatic, and Mitch asks him to go get his pants so they can go.
Mitch needs a "calculator" for the plane crew. Since this is 1957, a "calculator" is a person who calculates, not a device. But plainly, Sally can't go with them, as she is only a woman (This one does not count, because the general has no qualms about sending her. I'm going to be generous and suppose that Mitch doesn't want Sally there because she's his girlfriend, not because she's a girl. 
. This causes unrelated stock footage of explosions to play. The Muon-armed plane approaches and the bird gives chase. Stock footage of ground batteries shoot at it, despite the fact that bullets are still useless against it, and we see the same shot of a radar tower as in the first scene. The bird clips the top of a pair of towers that I don't recognize (The film is too early for it to be the WTC, but I somehow doubt this scene will ever air on TV again), and then -- HOLY SHIT:
See, back in the sixties, when computers were still new and fascinating and called "Electronic Brains", General Electric invented this font which, when printed in magnetic ink, could be read by a device similar to a tape recorder. Because they were about the only ones with commercial use for computers back then this was snapped up by the banks, which is why it's entirely possible that if you are still enough of a luddite to use paper checks, it may even today have your account number printed on it in MICR font. The big, blocky, funny-shaped letters became ingrained in the public consciousness as being all futuristic and stuff, so it pretty much appeared any time you wanted to indicate a high-technology future from about 1967 until about 1988.
In the smurf village, the faeries are celebrating three-thousand years of uninterrupted good times, leading me to believe that this may be where Russell T Davies got his idea for how to cnvey a sense of scale by his choice of numbers. The elf queen senses something amis, and looks to the sky, where an evil looking cloud is played by a color effect on a real cloud -- this movie is diligent about avoiding doing any actual animation. This storm causes the elf queen Delia to suddenly give birth to twins, who everyone immediately concludes are powerful wizards, because that is the name of this movie so they'd better get on with showing up.
As almost always happens in cases like this, one twin is born with a severe case of PURE EVIL. the good son is named "Avatar", and the evil son is named "Blackwolf", just to make sure that he doesn't grow up confused over whether he's the evil son or the good son. Avatar is a bit on the short side, whereas Darkseid is tall and sort of skeletal, what with his forearm being in two separate pieces with a visible hole between the bones.
When Delia dies, Darth Vader is excited, we're told, just to remind us that he's evil. He thinks this means he'll be allowed to rule the kingdom. Because he's been such a dutiful son and all. Him and Avatar fight, and their battle takes the form of... yet more still frames of uncolored sketches with a creepy live-action VFX shot in the background. We're now going on five minutes and no actual animation yet. Thanks to the fact that Avatar actually loved his mother, his pain at losing her enables him to become a Super-Saiyan and kick his brother's ass.
Necron 99 is hunting a couple of elves, who are on their way to warn Avatar of the coming assassins. One of them buys it from Necron's photon torpedo gun, but the other elf manages to headshot Necron's bipedal anteater-horse-thing. Necron slouches off, looking really disturbingly sad for a soulless killing machine. 
Back in the Smurf Villiage, the years have turned Avatar into a creepy dwarf with a red ball nose whose face is entirely concealed by a red beard and moustache, with a Groucho cigar. He's hanging out with the cast of an LSD-induced nightmare, including a slutty fairy and what looks like Goofy in a Guy Fawlkes mask.
Avatar concedes (Concedes what, I don't know) and offers up some exposition, which he promptly hands over to Judy Collins, so that they don't have to animate this bit. Before he does, though, we get a glimpse of Necron 99 climbing up to the top of Avatar's penis-shaped tower. Blackwolf, Avatar and Judy explain, had spent five thousand years studying the dark arts, because this movie thinks that big numbers will impress us more than a timescale as realistic as The Legend of Ra and the Muggles
Darth Vader raises an army and tries to invade neighboring countries, but his troops, as exemplified by a strange "Oh my god, they killed Kenny!"-like scene, are retarded, and would tend to get distracted and confused, and just wander off home instead of actually conquering anything. Darth Vader was understandably upset, having gone to all the trouble of creating hideous mutant armies via magic and summoning all the forces of hell to serve as his generals, but, for reasons Avatar has not yet discovered, he finally made some kind of breakthrough, and discovered some piece of pre-holocaust technology that has turned the tide.
A quick perusal of Necron 99's corpse (He's a robot of some sort, but this is never actually spelled out, which is strange given their penchant for exposition) reveals Darth Vader's plan to Avatar, and he promptly declares that the evil image-projecting maching MUST BE DESTROYED, and then goes to bed. Slutty insists that her father must be avenged, and threatens Avatar with her sword, but at no point does her tone ever sound anything other than airheaded and playful. Avatar suggests that she sit, stradling him on his bed with her breasts trying their darnedest to fall out of what passes for a top in Fairyland, but would probably class more as a sort of scarf in our pre-holocaust world, for a few hours and let him think up a plan. Slutty, taking a page out of Debbie Does Dallas, responds with a befuddled "Well... All right."
Back at Mount Doom, it is revealed that Blackwolf's about to be a daddy: he's got a ridiculously hot wife who is very pregnant. A strange mutant with a ridiculously hot wife and plans to rule the world's greatest power? How am I supposed to believe that sort of crap?
It's weird, like that tunnel scene in Willy Wonka, or that scary Yoda moment. Basically, it's like when you're playing with a cat, and the cat decides that it is done playing, and when you fail to intuit this, she explains it to you by defleshing your arm. Only he does it with ALL THE FORCES OF HELL. Fortunately, just as he draws back to smite, an especially fey faery summons a great feast, which instantly calms Avatar down. He explains that his name is Shawn, leader of the Knights of Stardust, a FABULOUS order of tiny little warriors. Avatar is still annoyed, but Slutty shoves his head between her boobs and this makes him happy. But then someone assumed to be Peace starts shooting the place up, and Slutty suddenly disappears into bondage high in the mountains. 
Weehauken falls into a pit which he has to fight and climg his way out of, which is entirely black and featureless, either because it makes it more dramatic, or because Bakshi got tired of drawing backgrounds, there he fights an invisible enemy because Bakshi also got tired of drawing enemies. The monster finally shows itself as a giant spider or possibly the hair monster from Looney Tunes. But Peace shows up and shoots it before he collapses for some reason. Weehauken then mounts him and falls asleep on top of him.
Slutty is put on trial for bringing the evils of technology into Fairyland, and the resulting death of Shaun the Fey. She sort of giggles at the idea of being held responsible for her actions, and then heaves her breasts around a bit, which causes her to glow red and shoot an energy beam out of her crotch.
Taking this to mean that she's come fully into her powers, Slutty then animates a gargoyle, which immediately turns on her. Avatar shows up and fails to do anything about the gargoyle, but does protest his important cause. Then, for no clear reason, Darth Vader materializes, shouts, "He lies!" then vanishes. Which causes someone to shoot Avatar in the shoulder with a tiny little arrow. The fact that this did not prompt Avatar to go on a killing rampage is taken by the King of the Faeries to mean that he can be trusted, and lets them go.
