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

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.
]]> http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com/2010/08/that_david_carradine_is_one_ba.html http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com/2010/08/that_david_carradine_is_one_ba.html Movies Michael Moriarty, Q, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree, Monster Movie Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:02:09 -0500 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

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.

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.

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!.

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.

Chief Zed from Men in Black

Zeddicus Zul Zorrander from Legend of the Seeker

Zed the guy from Pulp Fiction

Lord Zedd from the Power Rangers

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.

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

[Devestator]: DEVESTATOR! DESTROY!

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!

[Devastator]: DEVASTATOR! DESTROY!

[Devastator]: I AM DEVASTATOR!

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.

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?

An hour later, they found the third one. Her body had been left at the landfill, half buried in garbage. The others, they were nobodies, but she was one of those heiress types. A couple more years, and she'd have had her own reality show. Trashy pop album. Celebrity sex tape. The works. Instead, she's hip deep in shit with a broken neck. They can't find her dad either, but the press doesn't care about that yet. Not when they've got a serial child murderer to fawn over.

It was dawn when the last body turned up. Another boy, just like I knew it would be. The news is saying he was tortured, medieval-style, his small body broken on a rack. I know better. I know he thought he was having the time of his life. Having a great adventure. Right up until his arms popped out of their sockets.

Maybe things would be different if I'd stayed with him, all those years ago. Maybe I could have played along, played his game. Let him dress me up like his little Mini-me. Maybe it would have stopped. Or maybe I'd have ended up like my friends.

Friends? No, not really. I've spent the last twenty years telling myself they were, because it was easier than the truth. The truth is, I hated the others. Thought they deserved what they got. I didn't get it, not till later. They were just kids for Christ's sake. They weren't perfect, but who the fuck is? I can tell you, I wasn't no prize. Just some cheery little shit who could smile and look pretty and not give a fuck as long as it was happening to other people.

It was only later that I got it. That I understood what he'd done to the other kids. What he wanted to do to me. So I ran. Dyed my hair and lived on the streets for a couple of years. I never went home again, because I knew he'd find me. I read in the papers what happened to my family a couple of weeks later.

No one ever linked it to him. No one ever linked what happened to my family to what happened to the other kids. I don't know why. No one's going to link these ones to him either. No one's even going to suspect him. But I know he did it. I know. And I have to stop him. Because I'm the only one who can.

Willy Wonka must die.

In my unwillingness to commit to a whole movie, I've been watching a lot of short web originals, getting all caught up on the works of the folks over at Channel Awesome, the YouTube series "Is it a Good Idea To Microwave This?", and the collected works of Cinemassacre.com, home of The Angry Video Game Nerd.

Now, some Halloween or other, James Rolfe, who in real life is an actual person who does things other than swearing at video games which are almost as old as he is, did a top ten list of the best giant monster movies. I was pretty well familiar with everything on the list -- giant monster is really just a supergenre of giant robot, and you know how I feel about giant robots -- but there was one movie there which I'd never heard of: a movie that earned a place of honor in the list for the sheer craptacularity of the monster's design, and the strange habit the film has of comparing the creature to a battleship. So, I sought this movie out, and I'm about to watch it, and you're coming with me.

The Giant Claw
1957
dir. Fred F. Sears

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.

These radar operators are concerned, because Radar tells them that their test plane is at 9,000 feet, but the pilot's altimeter says 10,000. This is quickly ascribed to the fact that they've let a WOMAN be involved in the complex mathematical calculations needed to make Radar work.

They order Mitch The Pilot to perform some maneuver, which triggers ominous music as he... buzzes the radar base. I guess this was meant to be a cat scare? Anyway, the stunt spooks Miss Caldwell, prompting the Manly Radar Men to exchange a quick, knowing look that basically shouts "Women. Typical."

Miss Caldwell, being Just A Dame, thought that pilots weren't allowed to do that, and the Radar men explain that, while Air Force pilots aren't allowed to do that, Mitch is actually an Electrical Engineer, with no flight training to speak of, which makes it okay. Miss Caldwell bizarrely suggests that Mitch needs to be spanked like a three year old, but as she's Just A Woman, she neglects that the radio is still on, he hears her, and suggests that a spanking is just the sort of action he's into.

I have a feeling you're going to be seeing this picture a lot

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.

Mitch and the Girl take a flight back to New York, but the Weather Started Getting Rough -- which surpises Mitch because he "Thought the poop on the weather was we'd have it soft all the way to New York." This film seems weirdly weather-obsessed. Their flight, Zebra Love 759 (By the way, "Zebra Love" is my favorite Equinesploitation hero), moves to a higher altitude to avoid the storm, but this runs them afoul of the invisible-to-radar flying battleship thing. 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...

The unheard General accuses Mitch of having crashed a plane and badly injured the pilot as a joke. Fortunately, Pierre's applejack calms Mitch down before he says something impolitic. Pierre goes out to check the animals, but then screams and has to be rescued. He wakes up screaming about the carcagne, the French Canadian equivalent of a Banshee -- fortunately, both Mitch and Miss Caldwell dimly remember obscure bits of French Canadian folklore. But the plane is there for our American heroes, so they leave Pierre to cry himself to sleep, somehow failing to notice that in the matte painting of Pierre's backyard is a clawprint the size of a battleship's foot if a battleship had feet like a chicken.

I'm guessing he just picked a random word he knew went with "map"

He marks some ENTIRELY RANDOM spots on the map, and then draws a spiral through them, which "proves" that the UFO is working to "a perfect pattern in time and distance!" . 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!

Mitch concedes that he's being foolish, and they go back to making out. I don't think this merits a ring of the Casual Misogyny Counter bell, though, just because it seems less like him taking advantage of her womanish weakness and more like her trying to shut him up.

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 bird eats the plane, then, just to be contrary, also gobbles up the parachuting survivors. Or, rather, the bird bits the toy plane, and then an unconvincing process shot of the bird flies up behind an actor hanging from the ceiling.

The next morning, Mitch gets woken up early by an air force officer, as the general wants him. Mitch cautions the officer to "Keep your shirt on, I'll go put my pants on," and then shows his random spiral drawing on a DEFINITELY NOT ORTHOGRAPHIC map to the general.

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 SCIENCE^tm is very much like another.

My favorite instance of the Very 50s Attitude Toward Science was from the classic Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost". In this episode, parents wake up in the middle of the night to find their young daughter missing. Now, it turns out that she fell through a freak tear in the fabric of space and time into the FOURTH DIMENSION, so in retrospect, they mde the right move, but there, at that first moment of waking up and finding your child missing, what was their reaction? Dad immediately, without even thinking about it, says, "I'll call Ted: he's a scientist, he'll know what to do!"

The general realizes that of all the men who have seen the bird, only Mitch is still alive -- which, Mitch realizes, "Makes me the chief cook and bottle-washer of the birdwatching society," because no one in this movie has the slightest idea how to construct anything resembling a cogent metaphor. But Mitch didn't get a good look at the thing, and wishes he had a camera. This makes Miss Caldwell -- who I think might be named "Sally", and will proceed from that hypothesis because I am getting tired of typing out "Miss Caldwell" -- remember that they used balloon-mounted cameras to calibrate their radar for the curvature of the earth, and therefore might have gotten a picture of this giant bird. But what really interests me in this scene is this:

Can't make it out? Here's a close-up:

I'm not just imagining this, right? That's the Starship Enterprise, mounted on the general's bookshelf. Compare:

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.

Incidentally, out the general's window is a matte painting of the Capitol building to esablish that these events take place in Washington DC. Now, I know a thing or two about parallax and perspective geometry, and I think I can safely say based on the visual evidence that the General's office is on the third or fourth floor of the Ulysses S Grant memorial. Which is a statue.

The general turns on the radio so that our heroes can hear the full force of the USA kill the bird, which they will obviously do with ease, because, after all, it's just a big bird. One of tie pilots catches sight of the thing and comments, "I'll never call my mother-in-law an old crow again!"

But this movie is no War of the Worlds. General #1 starts to crack up, and General #2 becomes defensive, and Mitch has to reassure them that he's not talking shit about the air force, and that just because they had a bad time of it, it doesn't mean their mommies don't still love them. Fortunately, they get a call from Scientists^tm, who think they have something. General #2 explains that he's given the order to nuke the bird if it turns up anwhere where the fallout won't be a problem (This is the fifties, when it was common knowledge that as long as you weren't killed in the blast itself, and you took a really thorough shower afterwards, there was no lasting harm done from exposure to radioactive fallout.). Mitch apologizes for ever having doubted the military superiority of the US Air Force. General Number 2 hugs him and asks him to keep climbing on their backs. Nope. Still not making this up.

We then cut to a place of SCIENCE^tm, 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 SCIENCE^tm 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. .

Even our heroes aren't quite so stupid as to think that this makes sense -- the Bird should have exploded when it touched the bullets or ate the planes. But, the scientist assures them, the bird itself isn't made of antimatter, but it radiates an invisible shield made of anti-matter. So that bit about other planets and galaxies made of anti-matter? ENTIRELY POINTLESS. Also, why does this sound familiar?

The bird can also clearly open its antimatter screen to use its claws and beak as weapons. Because, I guess, the antimatter screen it projects which annihilates any matter with which it comes in contact isn't good enough as a weapon. The scientist assures them that this is not just a theory, like evolution or the female orgasm, but is scientific fact, evidenced by the pile of debris left over when he tries -- as a last resort -- to analyze a shed feather from the bird in an ELECTRONIC ANALYZER. Since the feather ("We call it a feather, we don't really know what it is, just what it looks like.") contains no known element or compound, analyzing it caused an explosion. Because that's what happens when you analyze something unknown. But anyway, this proves that the bird is an alien, and also all that bullshit about antimatter, and that the bird comes from a "God-forsaken anti-matter galaxy, billions of miles from earth. Not a theory, folks, scientific fact. Incidentally, during this scene, you can clearly see the shadow of General #1 picking his nose from off-screen. I won't post a screen shot.

General #2 is going to do everything he can, but, unfortunately, "The last time I talked to a chaplain, there wasn't any telephone line to the one and only place where we can get the help we need." Because religious pluralism is for commies. So the general calls the next best person, after God: the secretary of defense. The narrator chips in and recaps that Mitch is the only person to have seen the bird and survived, and that "Among those who knew of it, its existence was a closely guarded secret." Among those who did not know of it, it was common knowledge. But all that changed when the bird "revealed itself" (eew) to the public at large, and "Complacency turned into panic." I am fairly sure that their actions so far do not really fit the usual definition of "complacency", but still.

To demonstrate this, we show some people in swimsuits at a pool in California, who look up in terror to see... a blurry dark blob. They react with horror. Given that for the first half of this movie, they've indicated that the bird works to a very precise pattern moving radially outward from a point which appears to be somewhere in Greenland, it strikes me as unlikely that "every corner of the globe" would be unable to look up without catching TEH TERRORZ. It also strikes me that this scene was probably meant to titillate, but the women in 50's bathing costumes does nothing for me. Well, maybe a little. Also, the bird is so blurry that the whole film seems to have gone astigmatic.

The vaguely blur-shaped bird terrorizes stock footage of London, stock footage of 1920s New York, and stock footage of a World War I battlefield trench. Sally brings over some calculations that she spent all night running through the "calculating machine", and this pleases Mitch, but she's disappointed that he does not reward her with a kiss until prompted.

Mitch has been working on a crazy and unlikely possibility that might kill the bird, but Sally has had the foresight to follow up with Pierre, and has found out about the giant clawprint we saw half an hour ago. They realize that the "only possible explanation" is that the bird is building a nest. This makes Mitch realize... something, but he keeps insisting that he'll explain later while he calls the general. The narrator, in the form of a radio announcer, explains that atomic weapons have proven useless against the bird, and all planes have been grounded, leading the bird to resort to ground attacks and an "orgy of destruction" to feed ("Does it eat, as we understand the word?") -- this involves it chasing stock footage of people running away, cattle stampedes, and cars driving off cliffs and exploding. The governments of the world have all declared martial law, declared a Blitz-style blackout and banned all non-essential transportation.

With the entire world cowering, the bird shows up... RIGHT OUTSIDE MITCH'S WINDOW. Mitch and Sally travel by plane and then by three different kinds of stock footage helicopter out to Pierre's farm, where they take some guns in hope of shooting the bird's eggs before the can hatch and the human race is really hosed. We're treated to an interminable "Walking around looking for the nest" scene . 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.

The next day, Mitch pitches his new exciting idea, involving SCIENCE^tm: One of the newest discoveries in science is the "Mu Masonic Atom With A hydrogen Nucleus", which I believe is the secret society responsible for the treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. I had a look in Wikipedia to determine how much of this speech was gibberish, and the answer is either "all of it", or "This topic is so complex that I can't even work out enough of the vocabulary to google the right thing. Also, I think this may predate the standardization of the terminology. Muonic atoms, which seem to be what he's talking about, are hydrogen atoms which have a negatively charged Muon where a normal atom would have an electron. Because muons are heavier than electrons, Muonic atoms are smaller than ordinary atoms (In Bohr-world, the heavier muon orbits closer to the nucleus than an electron would. In a quantum world, it has a smaller "ground state waveform", which means the same thing, only with an added "But electrons don't really orbit the nucleus like a planet around a sun" at the end). That much is actual science, and I could understand. The next bit, according to Mitch, is "Because the (sic) mesic atom is so small, it can pass through the atom's electromagnetic defenses and fuse to the nucleus" of either matter or antimatter. Close as I can tell, that doesn't make any sense. The closest thing I can find is that Muonium (which is the opposite of a muonic atom: a positively charged Muon nucleus with an electron in orbit) can form compounds with normal atoms the same way hydrogen would. But that doesn't seem useful. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that (a) if you shoot a stream of freemasons at the bird, it will neutralize its crunchy antimatter shell, leaving the bird defenseless except for its razor-sharp talons, beak capable of crushing a jet plane, and feathers which explode under mass spectroscopy. Also, (B), I now know more about subatomic particles than I did when I woke up.

This will allow them to attack the bird by throwing kitchen sinks at it. The general is excited, but settles for a hearty handshake instead of hugging Mitch again. Sally and the Scientist both suggest that this plan is a miracle. You know, I wasn't especially bothered with George Pal implied at the end of War of the Worlds that the Martians' vulerability to bacteria was the result of divine intervention. But this is just getting to me.

As they struggle to produce "mesic atoms" in quantity and with lifespans measurable in more than a microsecond, the bird attacks a model train, and carries it off like a string of sausages. Then Mitch accidentally blows himself up.

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.


They're forced to launch early, because the bird has been sighted doing this movie's big VFX shot:

The bird pecks the top off of the paper mache model of the Empire State Buidling, then takes to the air, chasing people across a wide open grassy field in the center of Manhattan. The bird takes a bite out of the UN building, but since it's above the 9th floor, no one cares. . 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:

Isn't that building supposed to be in San Francisco? Anyway, just as the bird catches up with them, Mitch finishes wiring up the device and fires a few film scratches at the bird. Smoke billows up from somewhere offscreen, as opposed to, like, emanating from the area around the bird, and they take this to mean that the bird is now vulnerable. The generals fire some rockets, the bird falls from the sky, one of the generals shouts, "We got it!" Mitch and Sally kiss, and The movie just ends. No explanation. No closure. No giant vulture soup. No giant vulture sandwiches. Just "The End."

So that's The Giant Claw. I won't swear that it's the most ridiculous giant movie monster out there, but it is certainly... The most shameless attempt to repurpose an early draft of the script to War of the Worlds. Shame on you, Fred Sears. I leave you with this parting shot, a last look at the slowly sinking beast...

Now, like most Linux projects, it's not all sunshine. I've got two cheap TV tuner dongles, which don't work with it (There's several very nice tuners which work with it, but I really wanted just a cheap one to use as a secondary tuner). And the usability is not nearly as polished as, say, TiVo (That said, it's miles beyond most cable box DVRs in the UI department). There's a few annoyances that I have yet to be able to overcome (The size at which subtitles render is hard-coded, which means that it displays at a size which was plainly selected for a Standard Definition screen, making it slightly microsocopic at 1080p), but, like I said, it's a whole computer, and you can bring to bear all that implies.

I'd been meaning for some time to write a series of articles about the cool things I've written to bend the Mythtv to my will, but actually banging any of my hacks into a presentable state has required a bit more time than I've been willing to invest. But this week, I found something so handy and so elegant that I thought it was time to share it.

So, MythTV trick Number One:

One problem with playing back video from various disparate sources is the volume level. You know how when you're watching regular old-fashioned TV, more often than not, the commercials will be about a million decibels louder than the show? The volume will be different from one channel to the next. When you're also downloading New Media from The Intertubes, those too will be at radically different levels from TV, and from each other. DVDs are usually at a much lower level than TV (I think this may be caused by the downmix from 5.1 to stereo). And if, say, you're watching a third generation rip from a grainy VHS of a film so rare that no one involved in it will even admit to having heard of it, you're talking borderline inaudible.

With months of training, I've got Leah to the point where she'll actually give me a fair chance to reach the remote control and turn the volume down before she yells at me to turn it down the instant the sound starts, but it's still not really an optimal solution for me to keep having to adjust the volume from one video to the next.

If you are a modern person who keeps all your music in digital format, you may be familiar with the concept of volume normalizing, which analyses a whole song and works out how to adjust the overall volume to the song so that you don't blow out your ear drums if Shuffle Play puts a John Tesh song right after one by Alice in Chains (Which is not to say that you don't deserve deafness for your taste in music).

But the tools for doing this to video are less mature, and besides, you might be willing to spend 2 minutes preprocessing a 4 minute song you're going to keep for the rest of your life, but I'm not willing to spend 30 minutes processing an episode of Stargate Universe which I'm going to delete as soon as I've finished watching it.

As it turns out, though, since you're running a whole computer, and it's Linux, the Magical World Where You Can Basically Do Anything You Want So Long As You're Willing To Carve It From the Solid Granite of the OS With Your Bare Hands, it's possible to just order your sound card to do that normalization for you as it plays -- in this case, it's called Compression and Limiting.

I could just about muddle through the science of how it works, but probably not well enough to explain it to anyone in detail. The general gist of it is that a "compressor" squishes audio such that it reduces the difference between the loudest sounds and the softest. When a sound is louder than some threshhold, it reduces the volume, but it does it in a very smooth way that sounds good. This is something radio stations do so that you can turn the volume up loud enough to hear the soft bits without blowing out your speakers for the loud bits. A "limiter" is the same basic process, but it's much more powerful and lacks the subtlety of a lower-rate compressor. Basically, the purpose of the compressor is to make the audio all "fit" within a certain range of loud-to-soft, and then the limiter boosts the gain (ie. "Turns the volume up") while keeping it from exceeding a certain threshold.

In Linux's ALSA sound system, you can create plugins which (long story short) basically act like virtual sound devices. You tell an application to use that sound device, and any audio the application tries to put out will be sent through the plugin before it's turned into sweet delicious audio. Here's an audio compressor that I threw together based on some stuff I found on the ALSA wiki:

pcm.ladcomp {
      type plug
      slave.pcm "ladcomp_compressor";
  }
 pcm.ladcomp_compressor {
      type ladspa
      slave.pcm "ladcomp_limiter";
      path "/usr/lib/ladspa";
      plugins [
          {
              label dysonCompress
              input {
                  controls [0 1 0.5 0.99]
              }
          }
      ]
  }
 pcm.ladcomp_limiter {
      type ladspa
      slave.pcm "default";
      path "/usr/lib/ladspa";
      
      plugins [
          {
              label fastLookaheadLimiter
              input {
               controls [ 15 0 0.8  ]
              }
          }
     ]
  }

This code can be put in your /etc/asound.conf, then just tell MythTV to use the sound device ALSA:ladcomp (It's under Utilities / Setup -> Setup -> General if you're using the default menus. I've hacked mine up a bit, so it took me longer to find it). It should have defaulted to something like ALSA:default. Restart MythFrontend, and voila: all your audio should play at around and about the same level. To use this, you'll need the ladspa plugins. If your MythTV is running on Ubuntu Linux (I use Mythbuntu, a version of Ubuntu oriented toward MythTV (For the non-Linux experienced, you can basically run any Linux software on any Linux box. The major difference between various Linux distributions is basically which software it installs by default, as opposed to which ones you have to download and install on your own. Ubuntu is a distribution which takes the radical step of assuming that its users may include actual human beings and might want to spend more time actually using their computer than assembling it.)), you can get them by running "sudo apt-get install ladspa-sdk swh-plugins".

If you want this trick to apply to other applications, you can tell them to use ladcomp as their audio device too. For instance, with mplayer, try mplayer -ao alsa:device=ladcomp.

If you want to do some fine tuning, you can try changing that 15 to other numbers to change the range for the final audio (You have to restart MythFrontend before the changes will be honored). I haven't found quite the right setting for me personally yet -- 15 is a bit higher than I want, I think, since it makes the "comfortable" position on my stereo's volume dial around 6 out of 30 -- I think somewhere in the 10-15 range would be better. But, at least for me, it does put MythTV in about the same volume zone as the Nintendo Wii, so I'm not racing to turn the volume down when we turn the game consoles on.

So, with any luck, and a little bit of work, you too can bend the sound system to your will, and watch whatever you like without fear of getting yelled at by your fiancee for having the TV turned up too high.

My story appears around 11:44 into the program (Or 7:46, if you care to hear Dr. Pus's zombie-themed rendition of Joe Cocker's "The Letter", used to introduce the segment), and is a bit sad.

The podcast can be found here: http://dr-pus.podomatic.com/entry/2009-10-16T22_06_26-07_00

If, having listened to my story, you find that you want more, the entire "Library of the Living Dead" series can be found at http://dr-pus.podomatic.com/. It's a bit of a mixed bag, embodying both the strengths (If you're reading this blog, you know I have a thing for eschatology) and the weaknesses of the genre (Sturgeon's Law and rabid survivalist fantasy), but leaning heavily toward the awesome, and definitely worth a listen if you're into that sort of thing.

I knew of Bakshi, from his work on the animated version of "The Lord of the Rings" (Hence the title of this article, as Sarumon's name was inexplicably changed in the Bakshi version), but that was sort of creepy, what with the weird rotoscoped fight scenes and just generally not very good, so it never occurred to me that Bakshi might be recognized as a great talent in the field of animation.

Wizards is the tale of two brothers, Avatar and Darth Vader, one good, one evil, set a million years in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Yes. A million years in the future. Remember, this is literally decades before "Our world without us" was written, so, apparently anyone could guess anything they liked about how long it would take for all traces of human civilization to vanish.

Wizards
1977
Ralph Bakshi

Wizards starts off with a firm grip on this being the future-as-viewed-from-the-seventies. The opening credits use the MICR computer font. If you don't know what the MICR computer font is, here's a helpful hint: if you're over 25, close your eyes and imagine what "computer text" looks like. Yes, that's it.

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.

The opening of the movie is, bizarrely, a "live action" scene. The reason for the scare quotes here are because, although this was filmed with a camera in what appears to be a real location out in the real world, there isn't really any "action" or and "live"-ness. Rather. we see a desert, and the camera moves around to show us the first page of a book, which is helpfully also printed in the MICR font, which declares itself to be, "an illuminating history, bearing on the everlasting struggle for world supremacy fought between the powers of Magic and Technology." Because, y'know, that's the story of human history. The battle between magic and technology.

We then cut to a crude sketch of the globe, and then to a screen of solid, flickery red, as if they filmed a fire, but that wasn't firey enough so they put a red filter over it too. Our narrator, a bored-sounding woman who I am going to pretend for the moment is Judy Collins, explains that some terrorists set off some atomic bombs, which led to a nuclear holocaust, which took two million years to clear up a bit, which led to most of humanity turning into horrible mutants, and also faeries and dwarves and hobbits and the like making a comeback.

This is illustrated with some uncolored sketches of what this might look like. We're now about three minutes into our animated story, and nothing has actually been animated yet.

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.



Darth Vader is banished, but promises one day to return and TAKE OVER THE WORLD, and finally we get to see some actual animation. Some years later, an older Darth Vader dispatches three wacky looking monsterous folks to march off through what looks like the Paris Barricade from Les Miserables, with orders to kill. We follow Necron 99, who's dressed in a sort of cross between those red full-body underwear suits you see associated with yokelness, with the flap in the back and all, and a World War I German uniform, and he rides a sort of giant anteater through the mutant Red Light District, scaring the bajeezus out of green, winged prostitutes and diminutive spade-tailed johns, as Joni Mitchel explains that he's been sent out to kill everyone who believes in magic. Also, a semi-transparent dinosaur mills around in the background for no clear reason. Hey, it's the future, that sort of thing happens.

Seriously, there's just a semi-transparent dinosaur turning around in a circle as Necron 99 rides through the wasteland. No one ever comments on it. I don't know that it counts as a Big Lipped Alligator Moment, but it's certainly a contender.


A montage ensures, wherein Necron murders a family of snorks as their leader, Gandalf, reads them a story about how all technology is evil, and the other two assassins go to a pastiche fantasy medieval kingdom and gun down everyone there because Darth Vader does not approve of renaissance festivals. Their guns borrow the sound effect from the original Star Ship Enterprise firing torpedoes.

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.

Slutty McFairy teases Avatar about how the elves haven't returned yet, and acts as if this is somehow tremendously funny. Avatar implies that if they never return, this will indicate great danger out on the Big Wide World, because, y'know, people are dead. They all enjoy a hearty laugh at the prospect of the horrible deaths of their friends.

Avatar and Guy Fawlkes debate the necessity of arming themselves against the IMPENDING DOOM, in order that Avatar can explain, in direct contradiction to the backstory, that the world has been peaceful for millions of years, since technology was outlawed. Guy Fawlkes threatens to banish Avatar, which makes Slutty giggle, but she points out that "Only Avatar can make me a full-fledged fairy."


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.

Guy Fawlkes, who I gather is also Slutty's dad, starts bitching Avatar out for sending the elves from the previous scene out into danger based on his weird and vague theories, when Necron 99 shows up and pumps him full of lead photon torpedoes. Necron 99, the deadliest killing machine ever devised, however, falls down dead as a result of Avatar pointing a finger at him. Slutty starts uselessly clawing at the downed assassin when the elf guy shows up, and apologizes to Guy Fawlkes's corpse for failing him. Turns out that Guy Fawlkes was the president of Smurf Village.

Back at Darth Vader's base, an alarm goes off indicating that Necron 99 is broken. Vader interprets this to mean that Necron 99 has committed suicide after successfully killing the president. It seems that without the strong leadership of Guy Fawlkes, the other nations of the earth will basically crumble before his war machine. And then, in what would be subtle foreshadowing, if you were somehow mentally handicapped, he throws in an entirely random "Sieg Heil!" to punctuate just how evil he is. Really. Just like in Captain America.



About two minutes later, while a classic creepy Bakshi rotoscoped scene plays (Seriously, this is like nightmare fuel unleaded), Darth Vader rolls out his new magic weapon: a grainy 30s Nazi Propaganda film. Yes. His secret weapon is HITLER.

Elf-land and Fairly-Land unite and prepare for World War I style trench warfare, while a veteran of the last war recalls that the last time Darth Vader attacked, the elves easily slaughtered one million of the evil mutants. In this time of peace. Anyway, the point is to backstory and remind us that the mutants don't really have anything to fight for, and therefore always end up retreating.

But this time, things are different, because this time, Blackwolf is armed with HITLER. He projects his Nazi propaganda film, and the elves are basically so entirely flummoxed by it that they just stand around in shellshocked horror and let the mutants slaughter them.

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."

The elf guy (whose name I still haven't worked out) finds this scene as weird as I do and interrupts. Avatar renames Necron 99 "Peace", or perhaps he meant to rename Slutty as "Piece", but anyway, he sends the town whore and the mighty elf warrior off to pack while he "reasons" with Peace. This results in another non-animated segment, wherein I finally learn that Slutty's real name is "Eleanor" and Elf Dude is "Weehauk." Seriously? Isn't that a town in New Jersey? "Weehauk", "Avatar", "Necron 99", "Darkwolf" and "Eleanor"? Hm. If memory serves, this movie was made slightly before Lord of the Rings, so it's really a coincidence that Ralph Bakshi will go on to make a movie whose major characters are named "Frodo", "Aragorn", "Gandalf", "Smeagol" and "Sam".

Avatar explains to the bound Peace that "This has been the biggest bummer of a trip I've ever been on," which is really saying something since they haven't left yet. Or maybe Avatar is talking about all the LSD used in the production of this movie. He makes some pretty devastatingly creepy threats about what he will do to Peace if he screws them over, explaining that it "will take twenty years to kill you, and you'll be screaming within five seconds." Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. Peace responds that "Peace wants love, wants free, will help." Great. He's going to be one of those "cute" talks-like-the-mentally-handicapped monsters. Avatar reassures his friends by doing some magic. Like all the other magic he's done so far (summoning cigars and decanting wine), it's stupid and frivolous (He levitates himself into his saddle on the back of the anteater-horse-thing), but he ends up facing the wrong way, prompting Slutty to point out, "He's getting olda but not much bolda," in what seems to be some kind of Blackspoitation heroine impersonation. Ah, the seventies.

Avatar demands a song from Slutty, because "That's why we brought you." Because, y'know, she's a girl. So that whole "Avenge my father's death" thing, yeah, we didn't really give a damn about that. She hands off to Judy Collins to do the singing, which leads to a montage of the good and kindhearted freakish demihumans cowering and lamenting how their land is now in the grips of Darth Vader and his army, and that they have no hope of resisting them, because "They have weapons and technology; we only have love." This leads to a scene with the gas-mask-wearing mentally handicapped soldiers in Vader's army. They're searching a church to find some priests, since Darth Vader believes you really need to have organized religion in order to be an evil empire.

Because Hitler Plus Jesus Equals World Domination

They find a couple of Obviously Jewish Stereotypes priests, who appear to worship the CBS Eye (Because it's THE FUTURE, get it?), and explain that they've only got time for war, not for taking care of prisoners, and would the priests please find something to do with all the civilians they've captured. The priests procede todo a weird little song and dance prayer number which I think was intendedto be sort of pythonesque, but instead manage to just be sort of offensive to your relgious sensibilities, regardless of whether you're christian, jewish, muslim, hindu, buddhist, or a worshiper of Whoops, the God of Serendipitous Calamity. Basically, if you could form a good analogue between religion and race, this would be the equivalent of a blackface minstrel show. The retarded soldiers get tired of waiting, or maybe have an attack of good taste, and blow up the church instead. For some reason. they don't decide to exit it first.

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?

Here, Darth Vader explains that he wants to conquer the world so that Mutants will finally be free from having to live in the shadows as an oppressed sub-class just because they're hideous, hideous freaks. This really humanizes Vader and makes him seem like one of those modern well-intentioned extremists, like Magneto or Poison Ivy or Michael Moore. Of course, it would be a lot more convincing if the whole rest of the movie didn't establish the evil brother as having simply been born pure evil with a lust for evil and conquest. Also, he then finds out from his magi (Because he's the brother who hates magic and believes in technology) that his son is destined to be a mutant, so he shrugs, says "Eh, the next one will be human," and implies that he's going to have the baby killed. Way to humanize the villain, movie.

We finally return to our heroes, who are approaching a faerie forest that Peace doesn't like. It seems that Elves and Fairies don't get along, and these particular faeries might be mischievous. Except that I thought that Slutty was a fairy. In fact, I'm quite sure she mentioned it explicitly at one point. But these faeries are tiny little naked things. I'd almost suspect that this was a translation issue, like the way that old Japanese imports often use the word "star" when they mean "planet", except that English is this movie's first language. Anyway, the faeries play with our heroes for a bit while Peace looks sad. Everyone's laughing and having a good time, and then, out of nowhere, Avatar becomes finds this playfulness annoying and summons all the forces of hell to smite the faeries. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.


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.

After getting lost in the mountains, Avatar and Slutty meet back up with Weehauken and his new boyfriend Peace, and then they meet up with some viking elves who are planning to attack Darth Vader, but Avatar objects to them just adding to the fighting, prompting some more backstory about how Avatar, in his younger days, roamed the earth, spreading the gospel of love and peace, and then they get attacked, in turn, by a giant evil cabbage, a bird, and a rotoscoped tank. In an utterly bizarre turn, Peace attacks the tank, and Slutty murders him, then jumps in the tank and rides off.

Avatar gets all mopey over Slutty's betrayal, and Weehauken basically has to drag him through the next part of their mission, into the stronghold of Darth Vader and his band of Nazis, which means we get treated to a scene of a bunch of mutant Nazis intimidating a young foot-tall winged faery into removing her top to sate their perverse sexual desires:

Because Ralph Bakshi knows how to creep me the fuck out with animation.

Avatar gets increasingly melancholic as the violence increases, because he's into love and peace and all that jazz, and then the viking elves attack. But because Bakshi doesn't particularly care for animation, the animated elves fight mutants played by rotoscoped humans who hover above the backdrop and are seen only in this weird sort of lithographic style. For some reason, the mutants are attacking on horseback, despite the fact that (a) they have tanks, and (b) We've established that horses have been replaced by weird bipedal anteater things.

In the close shots, the mutants turn back into animated mutants with guns, and manage ot kill a lot of the viking elves, but it's not at all clear to me who's winning in any given scene, especially with the continual changes in the art style. As before, they roll out the World War II stock footage, and the elves just stand around flabbergasted as they're blown to pieces. I'm not really sure what's going on here, whether the projected images are meant to be magically able to actually kill the elves, or if it's just a distraction.

Avatar sends Weehauken off the destroy the projector, and then plans his suicide, on account of Slutty's betrayal. He finds Slutty and prepares to kill her, but Darth Vader's Ridiculously Hot Wife stops him, and makes an incoherent, rambling speech about blood and death and fathers against sons and being fast with your blade, and this confuses Weehauken long enough for Slutty to explain that when she'd fondled Peace earlier, it had allowed Darth Vader to hypnotize her, because of Peace's mental link to the forces of Evil.

Now, the climax of this movie is one of the more awesome twists I've ever seen, so I'm actually going to put it below the jump...