Dragon Fury (1995), by David Heavener

I'm not gonna lie, guys, I have trouble reviewing action movies for some reason. Especially post-apocalyptic ones. I love myself plenty of post-apocalyptic action movies, but they make me feel so passive. I can't find the words to describe them. Yet, all the same, I know people out there wanna read about strange action movies, especially ones which might got mutants in 'em. Unfortunately there are no mutants here, just weird pseudo-albinos. Despite the severe lack of disfigured rubbery creatures, Dragon Fury is still a pretty good time, a minor time-travel epic that only the '90s could produce.

Mason is a dragon warrior in the year 2099, in a world ravaged by "the Plague." He saves a woman and her daughter from the evil ninjas who have murdered her husband. They are pursued by a pasty-faced dude in black robes named Vestor, and Mason has reached the end of his patience as far as this whole post-apocalyptic thing. With the help of his scientist friend he and his wife Regina travel back in time to 1999 to find a scientist who once created a cure for the Plague. The Plague, it seems, was the creation of an evil corporation, which Vestor may work for (?). In any case, Vestor sends some of his minions back in time to stop Mason and Regina. And they're on a time limit, too--the time portal can only stay open for 36 hours!

This is the exactly the sort of movie I would love to see on TV if I had a time machine to take me back to 1999. Resembling an unholy blend of The Terminator, Time Chasers, Games of Survival, Jack Kirby's OMAC and Kamandi comics, a Deathstalker/Ator-style adventure film, and a lot of other stuff ripped off that I couldn't even begin to mention, the movie is a perfect artifact of the era it was created in. Everyone has horrible hair and wears leather in places where leather shouldn't go, and the villain is a grungy middle-aged guy in a doofy costume. Just a few degrees in a certain direction and I would hate this movie as well as I love it in its present form.

What helps make this movie a treat is its weird balance between grungy '90s edginess and low-budget '90s comic relief. You can imagine my surprise when we snapped suddenly to a hotel room on a 30ish couple's wedding night. "C'mon, babycakes, daddy's waitin' for you!" coaxes the husband. Suddenly, Regina falls back through the time portal, only half-clothed for...reasons. The wife, of course, assumes that he is already cheating on her. If only they'd had the tact to include wah-wah music.

But then, we have the scene where Vestor's minions arrive from the future. They are confronted by a gang of punks who assume that they are shirtless and passed out because they have just gotten done having gay sex--never mind that they still have their pants on, and they're in the middle of the dirtiest alley I've seen in a movie. After shouting a bunch of homophobic slurs, they threaten to gang-rape them, leading to them getting their asses kicked. I'm always happy to see homophobic rapists get their asses handed to them. Bonus points if it's by shirtless barbarians from the future.

And then there's just the strange stuff, which may not be meant to be funny. For example, time travel gives you amnesia, but don't worry! Regina went along on the trip because she knows that time travel amnesia is curable by sex. The scene leading into their big sex scene is astonishingly scripted, and it's amusing to note that this movie even went so far as to crib the lighting and shadow from The Terminator's sex scene in their desperation to rip off The Terminator.

I don't know what else I can add to that, aside from the possible fact that one of the fight scenes has graffiti in the background of Marvel's Green Goblin. That's pretty fucking cool. So is the rest of Dragon Fury--I'm always happy to have a post-apocalyptic time travel action movie, especially when it involves a metric shitton of samurai swords. May the spirit of the dragon never die.

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Book Club of Desolation #17: Jason X: Death Moon (2005), by Alex S. Johnson

I've been trying to finish this book for over five years. I still didn't finish it in time for this review.

But even though I did not read every single page of it, I think I get the general gist of things in Jason X: Death Moon. I heard of this long, long ago on TV Tropes, which listed it on its So Bad It's Horrible / Literature page. It is almost certainly the worst of the Jason X tie-in novels, which I can't imagine being stellar to begin with. It is also one of the most self-assuredly delirious novels I've read, and for perspective, my current reading is Tristram Shandy. I guess I have my limits--there is such a thing as excessive absurdity. While I can give Jason X: Death Moon points for trying something I've always dreamed of doing, I do have to condemn the book for being an overall waste of time, a Jodorowsky film in prose--an eager start, followed by a thoroughly pretentious and obnoxious string of disappointments.

Let's start with the plot. Jason Voorhees is still a superhuman cyborg in the mid 25th Century, as seen in the "classic" film Jason X. A bunch of scientists who may worship him/be sexually fascinated by him (?) resurrect him and send him to the Moon (?) just in time for a bunch of horny, drug-crazed teenagers to arrive in time for their summer at Moon Camp Americana, whose awful, awful name is written out way too many times. Then, Jason kills a bunch of them, before being defeated (?).

That's it.

I am told by other reviews that the conclusion features Jason being sent back in time to fight his past self, or something similar to that, but having skimmed the last few pages as much as my brain will allow doesn't indicate that, plus, there are other books in this series that are still set in the future. The plot details are unimportant, and the author makes it clear that we don't have to pay attention to them because we meet a new set of characters every few pages. The novel was seemingly written in blocks, usually following one vague "plot" motion before jumping into a chunk of rambling nonsense, then jumping into our next "plot" bit, which has almost nothing to do with what we've already seen. This patches up any sort of leaving-behind I'd surely ordinarily experience as a result of not having seen Jason X. This is a standalone work!

Now, I need to clarify my reference to "rambling nonsense," because that is essentially what this book is all about. I could turn to literally any page in this and pull out a quote which defines the entire thing. Here, I'll demonstrate:

At first he thought it was a routine hard-drive swipe--an archaic, lo-fi term the Tribes still used to refer to cerebellar cleaning. That was when they took your brain, dumped its contents into the core of an artificial person; blew your brains out out in some dark alley. That's what happened sometimes if you lurked on Cityofdiss.com, as JJ was doing. Fucking head cleaners will pay for this, thought JJ, a little edge of anger pushing his usual poise to the edge of chaos. But JJ held it steady. If they wanted a firefight, he would give 'em a firefight. The mother of all flame wars.

Note that almost none of this is explained. The setting of this book is some sort of cyberpunk anarchist dystopia, where Internet technology can not only manipulate reality to some extent, but there are no regulations on the power of such, and everyone lives a sort of pseudo-illegal libertine existence in a desperate desire to end boredom. Like if everyone in Neuromancer was a Tessier-Ashpool and Earth was basically Gallifrey from Doctor Who in terms of technological achievement. I don't really know how much this clinches with the world we see in Jason X, but most of that film is set on a spaceship bound for an Earth colony, so anything's possible.

The point around which I gave up involved a tangent several dozen pages long about, I think, a mad scientist trying to use advanced video manipulation to make Bride of Frankenstein into Elsa Lanchester porn. I considered quoting from this part, too, but it's not worth it.

Much of this book tries very much to cash in on the things that make Cool Hipster Books Cool and Hipstery. To be more specific, it tries to be controversial. Egregious cursing, sex, porn, drugs, gore, and video games are set hand-in-hand with Hemingway and philosophically-reworked Marx Brothers quotes, plus a plethora of flowery adjectives that even the Romantics would have turned from in disgust. It is the last thing you'd expect to see in a book based on a movie where Jason Voorhees kills people on a future spaceship. But for that, I sort of low-key love this book? Sure, it may not function in terms of a conventional novel, but one thing I've always wanted to do is write a tie-in novel that completely fucks with the thing it ties in with. A surreal, postmodern Star Wars novel; a Dune novel that has a secret code in it; a Warcraft novel that's incomprehensible unless you've read the complete works of Jane Austen. I think that writing a bizarro Friday the 13th novel shows I'm not alone in having that impulse. I wonder if Alex Johnson laughed the whole time writing this. If he wasn't laughing I get the impression it was because his mouth was being used for bong hits instead. (I joke. It looks like Mr. Johnson has found a reasonably successful career as a bizarro writer, and I'm actually thinking of grabbing a couple of his other titles, if anything for the sake of the Book Club of Desolation. After all, it would be entirely against my ethics to ignore a book called Doom Hippies.)

While I didn't necessarily enjoy reading Jason X: Death Moon, I'm glad it exists for its status as an artifact. And, before I read it, I could not make this shit up. Now I can, in fact, make this shit up. Reader beware!

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Jimmy, the Boy Wonder (1966), by H.G. Lewis

There are a lot of things that make being a critic worth it, and I have to admit, to be able to force my readers to make the jump from Two Thousands Maniacs! to Jimmy, the Boy Wonder fills my stuttering, emaciated heart with some sort of sick joy. Any H.G. Lewis fan familiar with his filmography will know how weird is to think that the same man who brought us the first explicit tongue-ripping scene in cinematic history also made a goddamn kids movie. What's more, that kids movie is bizarrely imaginative--far from an unsung classic for the genre, but a breakout effort nonetheless. Of course, you already know I have a bias! This movie is weird as fuck, so of course I'm going to praise it!

Jimmy J. is a kid with a grown-up's schedule. His mom wants him to eat breakfast, take a shower, get on the bus, all at the same time! It's enough to make him wish that time would stop, and unfortunately this is a kids movie, so wishes can warp time and space. To be specific: every 1,000 years there is a single moment where the heart of the Great Clock, which rules all of time, is exposed to the sun, and as such, is vulnerable to wishes. Jimmy's words make time stop, as shown in a series of segments where clearly not all the actors got the same cue to "freeze." Fortunately, Aurora, the daughter of an astronomer-wizard, decides to help Jimmy on his quest to undo his wish by restoring the Great Clock. The two are stopped along the way by Mr. Fig, a checkered-jacket, Dan-Dare-eyebrowed motherfucker who wants to stop time permanently, because statistically there would be at least one individual who would want that. Mr. Fig is a legitimately creepy bastard, grabbing Jimmy, shoving his face up near his, and barely disguising the fact that he hates everything good in the cosmos. But Jimmy is no idiot (the whole time-freezing thing wasn't done out of malice or even misunderstanding, just a lack of awareness that it was a possibility) and throughout this entire movie Mr. Fig's plans fall flat one after another.

The quest takes Jimmy and Aurora to Slow-Motion Land, which is a great way to show off the fact that your editor is familiar with film-speed effects that were wowing audiences six decades prior; to the land of the Green Indians, which ends with Aurora pelting people with hard candy; and to a public domain cartoon that was redubbed by Lewis and Friends to fill out another twenty minutes of the movie. Yes, before you ask, there are musical numbers, and frankly, the songs are not horrible--those with bad lyrics are usually sung well, and those that are sung poorly at least have fun words to them. When we aren't breaking into song the soundtrack is pelted with generic cartoon library cues, and an astonishing number of these cues appear in a lot of the exploitation movies that Lewis' contemporaries were working on. It's a kids movie so there's not much more to it than that: singing, random goofy events, moving towards a general quest conclusion. Jimmy and Aurora don't really go through character development, but we at least learn who they are, and as a team, the two actors work well together.

Overall, the acting is pretty solid. When people fail they are catastrophically awful. But for a kids movie, this is acceptable. You get an impression of earnestness throughout the whole thing, a dedication to the director if not the concept, which is prioritized over the sense of a paycheck. In a kids movie, this is everything. While kids movies have always been decadent and money-hungry, it's hard not to want to give up on a world that will turn out commercialized garbage like The Oogieloves. These movies need heart more than they need economic focus--I mean, they're for kids, after all! H.G. Lewis had nothing, and yet he still made something that's better than even a lot of the recent Dreamworks productions.

It's interesting because as it turns out, kids movies really depend on comedy, or at least a sense of fun, even if they should be allowed and encouraged to go into dark places. The general wackiness of the movie gives it a good atmosphere, and guess what, there are actual jokes that sell in this thing! That's something it's got over me, that's for sure. In a last-ditch effort to stop Jimmy, Mr. Fig tries to say he's turned good and wants to offer him food after his long journey: "Hot dogs...peanuts...popcorn...soda... handcuffs...oh, whoops!" Man, that's a joke that was probably way more innocent in '66...

Actually, that same scene offers a little tidbit that my brain wanted to use to transform the whole scope of the film. Mr. Fig barks at Jimmy, after he refuses again and again, "C'mon, kid! It's not an apple, it's a hot dog!" I had already been joking to myself about Mr. Fig being Satan in Jimmy's Christly Temptation, but there is something symbolic about a villain offering his hero food...in a jungle, no less! Of course, Mr. Fig is simply promising bodily nourishment, not knowledge of Good and Evil or the ability to turn stones to bread. But to view Mr. Fig in the Satanic tempter sense, perhaps literally, gives him an added depth, and indeed depth in the first place--he's not human, we know that much, as he fades away all creepy-like just like Charlie Evans from Star Trek when he's beaten. Plus, whoever he is, he's immune to time itself halting in its tracks. There are probably some Lovecraftian tentacles hiding behind that Robbie Rotten-esque face.

There's some other creepy stuff about the movie besides the slimy Fig. How do you account for the weird half-second close-ups of the strange faces the Green Indians keep making? It jars me every time. Oh, the Green Indians are exactly what you think they are, by the way, and they're racist to be sure, but there's something about being gawked at by a white man in greenface dressed as a Native American stereotype that is visceral even outside of racism. Weirder still is the fact that the Green Indians wear purple pants. This was four years after Marvel Comics started publishing the adventures of a certain green-skinned fellow. Coincidence?

The Green Indians of course represent the main fault in the film, the main thing that's aged poorly. I feel like it's doubly offensive for a kids movie to be racist, because racist media, of course, makes people feel excluded and encourages that exclusion; to exclude kids, and encourage kids of differing races to reduce their peers to stereotypes, is particularly foul. They're not around for long, though, and the good nonsense comes back again.

H.G. Lewis was a filmmaker who cared when he could, which was often, and had luck where he lacked talent. Jimmy, the Boy Wonder is an artifact of what happens when underground or outsider artists aim for something a bit more socially acceptable. As long as they don't compromise their personality, there's bound to be a spark of something in it. And I don't think Lewis could compromise his personality if he tried.

Book Club of Desolation #11: The Ferocious Fern and Other Stories (1943), by C.B. Pulman

One of the most indispensable sources of knowledge I've found in my quest to fill out the meetings of the Book Club of Desolation has been Chris Mikul's Biblio Curiosa, a zine dedicated to exposing the weird writings and weird lives of some of the forgotten writers of this world. I encourage you to look into it when you have a chance, if you're interested in seeing a good hard look at some unjustly--and sometimes justly--forgotten regions of literature. Through Biblio Curiosa I came across Clement Barker Pulman's The Ferocious Fern, a book apparently composed of plant-themed stories. I had no idea what to suspect when I found a copy, and suffice it to say that it delighted me. The Ferocious Fern is a lost minor classic, deserving a wider distribution than it ultimately obtained...I don't know if I can do the book justice in this review alone. In celebration of Bookvember I've decided to fill in the otherwise scanty information on this book for an Internet audience--I hope to be informative more than anything else!

Some brief notes before I talk about the individual stories, one at a time. The book does have something of a plant theme to it. Many of the stories have references to nature and natural themes, which ties in with its status as a regional work. I'm told the label of "regional literature" is kind of considered to be literary poison, and indeed, the thick Britishness that Pulman employs, along with the tedium he sometimes invokes in his lengthy description of rural English life, can be a bit of a deterrent. But Pulman's charm is intoxicating and you recognize quickly that he is a writer very much in charge of what he's writing. The regional/rural quality of his stories suggests a peace that he craves, in refuge from some of the horrors this world presents. To some degree, the book has some indescribable qualities, so perhaps it's best that I simply disclose my notes about the stories.

The titular story, "The Ferocious Fern," is an interesting choice for opening the collection. For readers unfamiliar with Pulman--i.e. everyone--it's a fantasy story, and as we'll learn, Pulman is good at genre fiction when he chooses to do it, and it's a shame that the rest of the stories in the collection aren't like this one. But it's also probably a bit of a good thing, since I found "Fern" to also be charmingly awkward from a writing perspective. My first thought was that Pulman was someone who read often but wrote rarely, probably a botanist or gardener. Later stories shot up that opinion because he really does show that he's someone who refined his craft, but "Fern" is a little clunky here and there. Plus, it doesn't have an entirely original premise: an unseemly fern turns out to be sentient and evil (or at least misguided), and kills a man. (Don't be mad that I spoil the ending, as Pulman himself does it on the inner flap and back of the book.) However, Pulman manages to have an interesting theme, one of conflict between magic and science. Two vague explanations are given for the fern's behavior, one being that chlorophyll and blood are not dissimilar (therefore allowing for predatory plants just as there are predatory animals), the other being that the plant figures into a 17th Century prophecy involving the Eve of St. John. The scene where the mysterious backwoods landlady talks about the prophecy explanation is effectively chilling, because Pulman suggests a secret, creepy world that exists far beyond the secure bubbles of our precious cities. It's very much like the quiet-but-real magic of The Witches' Mountain. I loved it.

"Murgatroyd has his Dinner" lacks horror or fantasy elements, but carries on the plant theme, and is one of his feel-good pieces to boot. Murgatroyd gets the wrong dish served to him at a restaurant, with unexpected results. Like many stories in the collection, it's more a scene or vignette than anything else, and thus really needs to be experienced for itself.

"The Speck" is a return to horror, albeit without paranormal elements. A man trapped on an island begins to hallucinate that the specks on his furniture are moving around. It was this story that made me realize why I was so quick to label Pulman as amateurish when I started the book: this is the sort of horror story I wrote when I was ten. When I first decided to be a writer, I was obsessed with deriving terror from subtle emotions. Being probably more bored than anything else, I had this habit of observing my emotions and my reactions to quiet observations, like looking at patterns in furniture. My conception of horror at the time was something "loud," or at least obviously horrific. The stories I could come up with for the patterns of my furniture and how I felt about them was sort of an untapped market, I felt. I think a lot of that must have been the fact that I was reading a lot of British literature at the time, which is usually "quieter" than what we see in America. To see that emotional obsessiveness put on paper by another writer was pretty awesome.

"Nothing Much in the Post" is another psychological horror story, of another kind. What the story ends up coming down to is what is surely a firsthand account of the London Blitz. The descriptions of bombs dropping puts this story among some of the best war literature I've ever read, period, and if for nothing but the account of the Blitz contained in this story, this book should be remembered. This is also a platform for Pulman to examine some of his views on class. Most of the time it seems like he's one of the good guys--the poor are sympathized with more than the rich, usually.

Next is "The Sound of a Voice," a story where unfortunately Pulman loses a bit of his pace. It is a ghost story with some of the leftover regional creepiness of "Ferocious Fern," but it is also overwhelmed with a sort of Dickensian sentimentality that I feel has aged poorly. There are a lot of descriptions of men's choirs choosing the songs they want to sing, and they are all supposed to be old favorites to the reader, and yet modern readers are unlikely to recognize or know the words to most of them.

"The Maid Goes Out" is another story about classism, though it is more optimistic than "Nothing Much in the Post." One of those ones that you have to read to experience. Brace yourself for some cheese--but otherwise know that this is a good one.

"Audience for an Exile" is another feel-good piece, albeit a somewhat complicated one. The exile of the title is an Eastern European refugee named Vestrovic, who is a wizened master piano player. One of the locals of the English village he lives in asks him to play a piece that no one else in the village can--playing the piece causes Vestrovic to walk back through his life, including to visions of a concentration camp. I assume that Pulman was aware of the Holocaust and this is a reference to it. The finale has an air of victory to it, but it's a fascinating avenue to travel down. I want to reread this to make sure I get everything out of it.

"The Road" is less optimistic and less interesting. In essence, an old roadman is called to plow a mountainous road so a doctor can reach a sick man in time. As the roadman plows his path through the mountain, he reflects on how hard his life has been. I may have missed something, but I find that unlikely: this one is as tedious as plowing a mountain, which may have been Pulman's intention--but it doesn't make the story very good.

Regrettably, "Tale of an Idiot" is another one that doesn't hold up well to time, and it suffers from perspective issues. It centers around Daft Davie, a mentally handicapped man who ends up helping to save a burnt town due to apparently being able to talk to water and use divining rods to dig wells. The story's theme, in essence, is "mentally handicapped people are useful too!" but repeatedly referring to a disabled person as "daft," "mad," "crazy," "stupid," or "an idiot" will probably bring about some cringing. As I said, the perspective jumps around too much as well, making it difficult to make sense of the events. And the usual vagueness as far as the supernatural events is a weakness rather than a strength in this case: I was left wondering if Davie did have some sort of superhuman ability, but not in the way that I felt that Pulman knew the answer. The story felt hollow or unfinished.

Thankfully, we're on solid ground from here on out. "The Great Quiet" is the story of Hamlin, a tortured poet whose desire to work in silence leads him to the realization that the mortal realm will never be quiet enough for him. It has a first person narrator, which is a nice departure from the norm, and through this narrator we have some interesting subtexts here. The narrator is ostensibly Hamlin's butler in his spooky old house on the hill, but there is something beyond just a desire to serve in him. I seriously read the narrator and Hamlin as lovers, and I have a bias, being queer myself, but there's something about how the narrator reacts to being shoved out of Hamlin's life by his obsession that screams "jilted." And there's a mutual connection between them that's not entirely a boss-employee sort of thing. And no, the narrator is not Hamlin's maid, because Hamlin has a maid whose femininity is always put in a different context from that of Hamlin and the narrator.

"The Apple Thief" is essentially a thriller, and it is a good one. Fate has constantly forced two men, Cawthron and Hemingway, to fight each other, ever since Cawthron stole an apple from Hemingway years ago. Hemingway is now the dictator of a small island called Tierra, while Cawthron has decided to pose as a socialist rabble-rouser to incite a rebellion and get Hemingway killed. I will not say anything further because this story is excellent and really shouldn't be ruined. Again, it is a testament to the fact that, at least for me, Pulman was better at genre fiction than he was at his literary vignettes, if anything because I feel like his conflict is better presented and more interesting when he tries something like a fantasy story or a thriller. But that's just me.

"Faltering Furrow" is another regional vignette but has more depth than some of the others we've seen so far. A farmer strives hard to cut straight furrows on his father's farmland so that he can prove to his father that he's worthy of inheriting the property. The twist to this one is almost cruel, and that's why it warrants attention.

"Wind Struck" ends up slipping a little again, because not only is it a love triangle story but it is a love triangle story that uses weather metaphors. It really doesn't help that the female love interest that the triangle sides fight over is presented in a flat, sexist fashion. Fortunately, the prose is some of the best that the book has, so it's worth checking out for that.

"The Square Watch" may well be the best in the collection, if anything because it shows how much imagination Pulman possessed. He was a good recorder of a life that probably doesn't exist anymore, save for in Britain's deepest depths, and "Ferocious Fern" showed that he could conjure up fantasy worlds, but this one takes the cake. As the title suggests, it may be a time-travel story. At its very least, it's a philosophical, pseudo-scientific reflection on the nature of time, written in a compelling and fascinating way. Professor Oughtershaw seeks the last of a set of thirteen Roman coins, because they may be the key to solving his model of time--and the personal stakes he has in it.

And finally, we have "Love and Mr. Portway." Dull, depressed Mr. Portway encounters his double, the robust, trophy-wife-marrying Mr. Forthergill, and relates to him the story of the only real excitement he's had in his life: an encounter with a beautiful young woman in the woods during a rainstorm. The twist at first is a comedic one, before a second twist unleashes the most hilariously depressing final sentence I've seen in a book in a looong time. It is a great way to end the collection and it's a great story in general.

I hope that provides some insight into a book that I hope reaches a wider audience. In fact--hm. I'll stay quiet for now.

If you have the chance to find this book, give it a shot. It's a tough thing to love, as you may have seen, but it doesn't disappoint.

Now, as you may expect, I've saved the best for last with Bookvember...the very best. The Ferocious Fern is a holy grail of sorts, but there's magic in our futures. Till next time...

---

Image Source: Kearn's Rare Books

Book Club of Desolation #10: Operation H.A.T.E. (2012), by Richard Franklin

Well, this ought to be easy. I get to talk about Doctor Who again.

Welcome back to the Book Club of Desolation, as we continue to celebrate BOOKVEMBER! This week's book is Operation H.A.T.E., by actor Richard Franklin. Franklin famously played Captain Mike Yates of UNIT during the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee)'s era of Doctor Who in the 1970s, and Operation H.A.T.E. is essentially "official" Mike Yates fanfiction. I put quotes around "official" because, like a lot of the productions put together by BBV, the creators of Cyberon, Operation H.A.T.E. does not operate with an official BBC license (or licence, I suppose I should say). The book began life in 2002 as an audio book put out by BBV as one of their more controversial releases, as written and narrated by Franklin. The original story, called The Killing Stone, seemingly has almost no differences from Operation H.A.T.E. aside from a stronger emphasis on the Doctor Who elements. While BBV had acquired the licenses to aliens like the Krynoids and Sontarans, and characters like Liz Shaw and the Rani, they got in trouble for The Killing Stone as there was no way the BBC would have given BBV the licenses for the Doctor and the Master even if they'd asked. When Richard Franklin chose to release the text of the novel, he of course had to change the names to avoid copyright issues.

So that's the backstory. Did I mention this review is gonna be a lot of dry trivia? I do love a good dry trivia session but I realize it's not great reading. I do have some complicated feelings about this book and so I'll try to focus on those rather than simply annotating Doctor Who continuity references.

With the flimsy excuse that I am not the first person on the Internet to do, I am going to have spoilers in my synopsis. There will be helpful [brackets] along the way to explain the codes Franklin uses. Our protagonist is Captain Martin Bigglesworth [Mike Yates], and he has been discharged in the wake of his betrayal of the Special Terrestrial Operations Project Intelligence Taskforce, or STOPIT [UNIT]. He has retreated from public life to find himself as a person [as Yates did in Planet of the Spiders], and we learn that his betrayal involved helping an ecoterrorist plot [just like in Invasion of the Dinosaurs]. He reminisces about his STOPIT family, including an exiled two-hearted Guardian of Time named Professor Cosmos, or The Brain [The Doctor]; gruff STOPIT alien-buster General Hycock-Bottomley, aka "The Bum" [Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart/The Brig]; thick but charming WO Bloggs/"Smudge" [Sgt. Benton]; and The Brain's traveling companions, Joley "Dizzy" Darling [Jo Grant] and Mary-Ann "Sniffles" Peabody [Sarah Jane Smith]. Captain M, as Martin is sometimes called--making him one letter away from being the Game Master--is encouraged to take a long stay in Morocco. Along the way the text sees fit to give us many details about Richard FranklImean Captain M's life, including his hunting achievements, acting achievements, and knowledge of British geography.

While in Morocco, Martin has various adventures but eventually comes across a sinister snake charmer. The charmer reminds him of STOPIT's old enemy, another renegade Time Guardian whom STOPIT dubbed Moriarty [The Master], due to his role as the evil counterpart to The Brain's Holmes. As it happens, the snake charmer is Moriarty, and he has a non-lethal cobra spit in Martin's eye. When he awakes doctors inform him he has a gallstone. The gallstone, when extracted, resembles the amphora-shaped jug that Moriarty kept his cobras in. Upon returning from space, The Brain discovers that this gallstone is actually the Amphora Calculosa, a component which will enhance Moriarty's signature death-by-shrinking weapon, the Matter Mangler Gun, or MMG [The Master's TCE]. In a confrontation at a department store (far from the worst of the book's questionable choices), Martin outwits Moriarty and risks death to stop him. The Bum reveals that STOPIT was testing Martin's cool as an independent agent since they were interested in taking him back into the fold, with a promotion, to boot.

With a few lapses, I tried to keep that synopsis as objective as possible. By itself, Operation H.A.T.E. doesn't sound too bad. In fact, it sounds like a fun, if average, Classic Who serial. To be honest, my original interest in the story was piqued by several fan-nonsense things present in the uncensored Killing Stone version. For one thing, I'm a big fan of the Master. This story opens partway through Planet of the Spiders and ends after that serial has concluded, when the Third Doctor has returned from space. Given that that trip to space was what killed him and caused him to regenerate, the original story starts in the hands of the Third Doctor and ends with the Tom Baker incarnation. The Master, meanwhile, is portrayed as the bearded incarnation of the Third Doctor's era, played by Roger Delgado. Because Delgado tragically died in a car crash before the end of Three's era, the only versions of the Master that Baker's Doctor fought were the disfigured version played by Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers, and the again-bearded incarnation played by Anthony Ainley. I love every incarnation of the Master, but to see Delgado's take go up against the Fourth Doctor is a fantasy I share with a lot of Whovians. More relevantly to the book, however: I am also a fan of Mike Yates. While I love all of the UNIT family companions, Yates presented a lot of depth to the UNIT era, clearly having a vivid life outside of work, uncommonly for early Who, having a set character arc. I don't know if Mike would be in my Top Ten or even Top Fifteen list for favorite companions, but he was a nice character to see.

And this brings me to a pressing issue I have with Operation H.A.T.E.: there is a reason why, typically, actors do not write their own scripts. While certainly there are many actors who write and direct with as much skill as they show in acting, this is usually because their acting training has informed them that there are limits you have to impose on yourself when it comes to writing the characters whom you portray. Before I go further, I just want to say: Richard, I love your work. I am gladdened by the fact that you still love the character of Captain Yates, and you are an awesome actor--at some point I plan on buying the audio stories you with Tom Baker and AudioGo because they sound excellent. This is not an attack on you, and I will never oppose anyone publishing any book they want. If it's true that everyone has a story, by all means, tell it.

However, I can't read about the adventures of "Captain M" without the names Mary Sue and Miles Gloriosus coming to mind. Operation H.A.T.E. not only endows Yates/Bigglesworth with superhuman skills, cunning, wisdom, and handsomeness, but it does so while also shoving down the rest of the cast...and while continuously reminding us of just how amazing he is, and how stupid everyone else is. Now, I absolutely believe that this was done with the best intentions in mind, even though the ad blurbs for the book, and endless passages about Mike's backstory that suddenly become much more detailed than anything else, really do show us that Captain M is supposed to be Franklin with Yates' career (which complicates things when you wonder if some of the book's more damning offenses are meant to be products of Yates' perspective rather than Franklin's writing, and that the book's faults are done on purpose). I do have to wonder if any of Franklin's fellow Who actors have read his interpretations of their characters next to the Mighty Yates. To put it bluntly, everyone but Yates is an imbecile, reduced to their very base traits. Some characters end up getting fairer treatment than others, with there being at least one scene that only just exaggerates the spittle between the Brig and the Doctor, and where Benton gets one of those moments where he's genuinely clever, in his own way. Jo and Sarah Jane don't get that; Jo is a ditz in the show, but here it's basically her only trait. Sarah Jane cries, yes, but here...it's basically her only trait. Women are generally described only by their prettiness, and I think there are other female characters beside the pre-established ones ported over from Who, but they don't last, instead being present largely for Yates to ogle at.

As with himself and Yates, Franklin binds attributes of actors to their characters. It is briefly mentioned that Jo is "blind as a bat," and apparently Katy Manning, who played Jo, did require a lot of help on the set as a result of poor eyesight. Fair enough. But then we see that the last UNIT has heard of the Master was that he died in an accident with his traveling machine, in Turkey...the same fate as Roger Delgado. To throw the real-life death of an actor whom one co-starred with into such a farcical story alongside something like an inside-joke regarding an actress' bad eyes is more than a little tasteless. Unfortunately, the presence of the Master also exposes the story's issues with race. Franklin is someone who is probably not fond of "political correctness" but there does seem to be some implicit belief that the reader thinks Arabs are evil, or at the very least, weird and mysterious. The Master is disguised as an Arab when he poses as the snake charmer, but even afterwards there are references to the darkness of his skin, at one point even making the point of contrasting Mike's whiteness to him as a symbol of good versus evil. True, Roger Delgado was usually typecast as an evil person of color (usually Hispanic or Arabic), so presumably this is another inside-joke gone wrong, but there is a taste of imperialism here.

I won't comment on the quality of the prose itself, simply because writing is not Franklin's chief profession. Though he makes some shoutouts to Sherlock Holmes and the Bigglesworth books (as well as implying that Mike got a PPK from Q Branch), Franklin commits something I've seen in other inexperienced writers: the sentence structure, and word choice, to an extent, resemble something you'd see in a kid's book. It is passable, and I've been mean enough.

You'll note that I've been referring to the characters generally by their Doctor Who names; unfortunately I don't believe that this one really works as an original novel. It seems to have been intended to simply be a Who novel under code. I won't condemn that--I have some complicated views on fanfiction and copyright, which is another story for another day. But even if you can follow the background elements, referencing what are ultimately Doctor Who episodes, you're left with a book that exists in a world uncannily similar to Doctor Who, with characters resembling ones from Doctor Who, by an author who had a regular role in Doctor Who. And that's going to mean a certain degree of continuity lockout for the average reader, but let's be fair here. I don't know if I would've found this if I was not a fan of the show, and I think that's typical. This is a book for the most intense of Captain Yates fans.

Operation H.A.T.E. will never be one of the worst books I've read, but I can't say I was expecting the faults the book ultimately contained. It's a piece of Doctor Who obscura resurrected ten years after it's creation, for all the good and ill that that implies. There's certainly a fair share of fun moments...again, I won't pass up the fanwank fun of a Fourth Doctor/Delgado!Master meetup. But in the end, it is rather like your grandpa (a good and solid grandpa, not one who gets you Plug and Plays when you ask for XBox games) writing a sci-fi story for the very first time--clumsy and occasionally embarrassing.

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Image Source: Timelash.com

Beasties (1991), by Steven Paul Contreras

Over the years, I've been subjected to two particular movies repeatedly over the years: Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Hobgoblins. They are staples of the University of Minnesota Morris Bad Movie Club, which I was Captain of for two years. Hobgoblins was the MST3K episode variant of course, but Hobgoblins is one of those movies that even MST3K can't save from being abominable. Killer Klowns is a legitimately good movie, but I can only watch a good movie every so often every handful of years. I hate good movies that I've overwatched. I start to see flaws in them, and unlike flaws in the sorts of movies this blog is about, those flaws are legitimate faults rather than great boons. In any case, I sometimes have wanted to see a Killer Klowns-type movie, and a Hobgoblins-type movie (that is to say, a Gremlins-type movie), that has trash-like qualities. I didn't think that two such beautiful potentials would be fused into one film. Thus the beauty of today's film is squared. I can only say now what I will inevitably say in the end: it must be seen to be understood, for it is an experienced (blah, blah). Let's get down to it, because the devil's in the details.

So this movie in which everything is wrong opens with some couples making out and fucking at a lover's lane. They are attacked by the Gremlins, Hobgoblins, Ghoulies, Beasties, and some of them are killed. We are introduced to the fact that this '90s (but shot-in-the-late-'80s) horror film has tits in it. This is proper. Also proper is the presence of kitschy houses where bored babes are menaced. The dialogue is suitably clumsy and radical alike, too, and the effects and sets are good but also noticeably shitty (delightfully so). Unlike most movies which present this much awesome awfulness up front, Beasties sustains this craziness throughout the entire film, which escapes the boredom that plagues even some of the best movies on this site. A member of the makeout gang, a nerd named Nelson, discovers that the Beasties are the spawn of a hideous telepathic alien who lives inside a bio-ship. In their quest to discover more, Nelson and friends are captured by a group of BDSM-style punks led by "Hammerhead," who has gotten mixed up in the cult of an evil alien or demon called Osiris. It becomes clear on the introduction to this that Beasties is in fact a three-headed film--it's made of Gremlins, Killer Klowns, and possibly Mad Max (though there is an equal chance of 1989's Games of Survival). It is a fucking insane film.

I don't want to spoil the fantastic ending of the movie. However, I also want to talk about how absolutely astonishing it is.

Basically it turns out that Nelson will end up working for a military corporation that uses his research to start a nuclear war. Nelson mutates into the creature on the bio-ship, and travels back in time to pass on knowledge of the future to his past self. Apparently, Osiris will be the Nelson-monster's enemy in the future. In order to change the timeline, however, future-Nelson kidnaps past-Nelson's girlfriend. But can the future really be changed?

Holy shit, I wish I knew. I so deeply wish there was a sequel to this movie, and my heart hurts over the fact that Steven Paul Contreras never made another film. Given the lack of credits for most people in this movie, it certainly comes across as a friend-group production that actually had some money behind it. That's shit I like seeing--friends hanging out, doing awesome artsy things together. Yes, I called Beasties art, but if you don't agree, you haven't been reading. And if you have been, you need to see the movie.

The best thing about this type of movie is how awkward it is. Awkwardness and amateurishness are a deadly but intoxicating combo. Voice cracks, flubbed lines, stammers, stutters--all are wonderful and show the humanity of the participants. This movie's Killer Klowns attributes arise most significantly amidst the most awkward moments, such as the bizarrely placed comedy. We literally get characters who utter, "It looks like someone had a snot festival!!" They are then Larry-Curly-Moe s-s-s-scared into running away as Benny Hill-esque music plays. This particular scene, albeit with different dialogue, happens about three times in this movie. What I'm saying is: a bunch of adults got together and decided to make a buck ripping off Gremlins. Only some of them wanted to make a comedy, and some wanted to amp up the sci-fi to Doctor Who levels of complexity. Finally, there was the faction leaning towards the literal cyberpunk genre. Somehow four or five scripts were edited down into one and set to an 80-minute film. And it was deemed okay to send to distributors.

Some people climb Everest. Some people make Beasties.

Suffice it to say that this movie is something of a testament to the power of Gremlins. There are so many Gremlins clones that it's not funny, and I've only referenced some of them throughout this review. There are a lot of similarities between Gremlins and Troll, and of course while Troll 2 would have been born without Troll (it had been in production under the name Goblins), I'm not sure it would have quite stood from the rest of the insanity of Claudio Fragasso's career if it didn't have that fake sequel nonsense attached to it. In a way, Troll 2 and Beasties are like second cousins, which I find appropriate. Troll 2 fans may not like Beasties, though, as they are from very different branches of the family tree.

But that sentence is also one of my jokes. Everyone would like Beasties. It is Gremlins unbounded, Gremlins on DMT. Watch it as a testament to creativity, a gem among gems of those movies that will do whatever with no regards to budget, profit, or relatability.

A Clockwork Blue (1972), by Eric Jeffrey Haims

I shoulda known what I was getting into. As soon as I opened up the case for the Vinegar Syndrome DVD of Eric Jeffrey Haims' twin wonders, A Clockwork Blue and The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio, I noticed that the lefthand side of the case contained a brochure on how to activate a free trial for Skinaflix, a site which apparently contains "the finest and rarest classic erotica, in beautiful 1080p"! I'm sure someone out there will be greatly pleased by it, but unfortunately I think even the mighty Skinaflix has been reduced to naught but a mote of dust besides the other guest of the clamshell its brochure lives in. A Clockwork Blue, this little-known '70s sci-fi sex comedy, will satisfy any fan of anything for eternity, whether they like trash cinema or not. It is a shocking display of pure insanity that neither Kubrick nor Burgess could've ever hoped to keep up with.

Of course, that may send the impression that A Clockwork Blue is a ripoff of A Clockwork Orange. There are no droogs or milk bars on display here, however. Instead, there is a time-traveling Jerry Lewis clone named Homer who goes on an epic quest to avoid sex with historical figures as much as possible. Said quest specifically begins in Heaven, where we are introduced to a character who will appear often in a variety of unrelated inserts, a black man named, what else, Blacky. He spies on Homer and his misadventures using a TV made out of a watermelon. Yes, it's true, this movie is rather offensive. God gives Homer and Blacky each one wish. Homer wishes for a time-machine watch, whereas Blacky makes the mistake of wishing for a million dollars. It's hinted that Blacky wants to take revenge on Homer, as his useless wish is apparently his fault, but never pursues this revenge so I guess not.

Homer's great-great-grandson, also named Homer, is a lab assistant for a pretentious bearded professor whose actor seems unaware that he is in a comedy, and similarly unaware that his voice is often drowned by the soundtrack (no less than "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"). Homer stares at a girl's panties for what seems like eternity, but eventually he travels back to the American Revolution, finding himself having become George Washington. And that's when the madness begins...

A Clockwork Blue is always riveting, even during some of the sex scenes, which is a rare feat in a lot of movies having to do with sex. It reveals a handful of startling truths about our universe, including the fact that Heaven is full of pot-smoke, Louis XVI dated a man named Bitch, and the truth behind the Father of Our Country worded so eloquently put by Blacky: "For the intellectuals in the audience, if there are any, let it be known that the Founding Fathers frequently indulged in cuh-NAW-bis sativa." It's bizarrely historical, featuring factoids about presently-obscure figures like Madame du Barry, while also warping realism and reality in the wildest ways possible. The fact that it's not that poorly written of a film (the race humor is pretty lame, but, well, duh) and that it's a well-acted film heavily builds this effect.

The movie is a lot like The Tony Blair Witch Project, in that its random attempts to educate make it seem like a school project gone off the deep end, and in that the intoxicating substances shown on screen were really consumed by those actors. Specifically, as Betsy Ross entices "George Washington" with a fresh bowl, he says to her in wheezy stoner voice, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." When she replies, "And how do the Romans do it?" he simply shoots back, "I don't know!" And...scene. We cut back to Paul Revere screwing a girl. I assume this part was still scripted, by certain chemicals got in the way of remembering the lines. What a sight. God fucking bless America.

But in a more significant parallel to Tony Blair, Clockwork is made by no less or more than a group of friends clowning around. It wasn't intended to make a lot of money, and no money was spent on it. It becomes similar to Nosferatu in Brazil by Ivan Cardoso--a way to fill time, and doing so unprofessionally but memorably. It's something of look into the time it was made to boot, because it's very '70s. Watch it, and you'll know what I mean. You want to know what I mean, right? So watch it.

This movie has two cuts available right now, both from Vinegar Syndrome: the DVD has some (but not most) nudity cut, whereas the Blu-Ray apparently has some hardcore sequences. I reviewed this from the DVD because I owe a lot of money to some loan companies, and if I fail to pay they will remove my teeth (I assume). As such, I can only buy a couple of Blu-Rays per year or risk having to have aspic for the rest of my life.

It's a see-it-ta-believe-it sort of thing--the movie, that is, not me being forced to eat aspic. I've given some glimpses into its heart (even if I didn't tell you about the jarring dub work they do for Paris and Helen of Troy...oops). And I'll give just one more, in case you're not convinced: the words "By Odin" are spoken not once, not twice, but three times in this movie.