The Stud (1978), by Quentin Masters

This movie was pitched to me as "British Saturday Night Fever." What?! Not only are the plots completely dissimilar, but before this movie, the idea of a British disco movie struck me as being about as likely as dubstep in Puritan times. Well, I can now finally have a double feature with Disco Godfather. You have no idea how glad that makes me.

The film opens with a surprisingly catchy disco song that I had stuck in my head for--well, actually, it's still in my head, and I think I first saw this movie, like, a year ago. The only lyrics consist of "Ooh--Stud! What's his name, what's his game?" It implies immediately that we're dealing with a man of mystery; one who we've already seen to be the recipient of dozens of signed photographs from beautiful women that allude to his tremendous sexual prowess. The man in question is Tony Blake, the manager of a club called "Hobo" which is owned by the wealthy Fontaine Khaled. Fontaine is married to a diplomat, Benjamin Khaled, who is unaware of Fontaine's many affairs. Her favorite is Tony, who we learn she "made," training him in management, class, and sex. She says of him, "You know, when we first met, he thought a 69 was a bottle of scotch!" Fontaine has sex with Tony in an elevator where she's hidden secret cameras. Not only does she enjoy watching the tapes for her own satisfaction, but she uses the tapes to advertise Tony to her friends. She's planning a big trip to Paris, where Tony is the intended centerpiece of a massive orgy. He isn't to know until the last minute, though, an unnecessarily rape-y twist that shows off that Fontaine is a libertine in the style of de Sade. She loves wealth for wealth's sake, even though that wealth has left her bored enough where she's bound to completely collapse if she doesn't have sex constantly. The Paris plot develops slowly and runs parallel to a thread which has Tony trying to open his own club, so he can be free of Fontaine forever.

Of course, we also get plenty of eyefuls of the action at Hobo. (That actually is the worst nightclub name I've heard, ever.) We have Tony's pedo friend who "waits for 'em to get off the schoolbuses"; we have Molly, a black woman who Fontaine (the white bitch) calls "an interesting creature"; then there's the seemingly endless "disco" song which mostly chants, "Let's go, disco, let's go disco." That last bit is probably the funniest thing in the whole movie--I mean, I laugh at music from all eras, and I especially like laughing at the music I like. But disco can get so goddamn goofy sometimes. I'm on the floor every single time I realize that the fucking song has been playing for like seven solid minutes.

Tony hates his situation. Sure, he gets laid more than any other man in London who's not David Bowie, but even his conquests from outside Fontaine's social circles fully know about his place on the ladder. Molly calls Tony a gigolo, and while he's frankly a sexist pig, Tony knows that it feels wrong to be used. When Ben Khaled comes down to Hobo to visit with his wife, Tony falls in love with--or makes himself fall in love with--Ben's daughter from a prior marriage, Alex. Alex is turned on by Tony, even and perhaps especially after she learns that he's fucking her stepmother. Her own boyfriend is so no-sex-before-marriage that her attempts to make out with her are met with confusion and disgust. So she and Tony sleep together and something of a relationship starts. But then Christmas comes. It's time to go to Paris.

And oh my God, I'm glad movies exist, because you'd never see this in real life. Fontaine's Parisian friend has a gigantic sex-mansion, complete with what is probably the world's hardest-to-maintain swimming pool. Have you seen Caligula, or at least, Brad Jones' review of it? I immediately thought of Tiberius' grotto during this scene, albeit less ridiculous. I mean, the place has a fucking sex-swing on it! Anyone who is into sex-swings or fucking in pools is in the right because there's nothing wrong with what you're into (as long as it's not animals or children). However, I'm going to speak from my own personal perspective and set of kinks, when I say: 1) sex-swings sound extremely painful and dangerous; 2) fucking in a pool sounds even more extremely painful and dangerous because YOU DON'T WANT TO GET CHLORINE INSIDE YOUR FUCKING GENITALS. Also, orgies in a pool? Get ready for some floaters. Brrrrr.

Inevitably, Mr. Khaled learns about his wife's dealings, because that's usually what happens when you create dozens of sex tapes featuring yourself and your extramarital lover and store them in your husband's house. Tony is on his way out, because surprise, being drugged with amphetamines and raped is incredibly disturbing to him. At least Fontaine burns with him--or does she? I guess we'll have to find out in The Bitch! Because yes, this did get a sequel.

Thank Disco God!

Not only does The Stud offer us a fascinating glimpse into the British side of disco, but it's a pretty progressive movie for a film full of homophobic slurs and ruthless misogyny. It depicts the rape of a man with the same sort of gruesome focus as many movies of the period where women are raped. In fact, that's one of the central themes: that men, too, are harmed by patriarchy, because they're expected in all senses to be fuck machines. And naturally, not every man wants to be a fuck machine--in the sense of having sex frequently and/or intensely, or in the sense of being a genuine machine, so slavishly dedicated to his base desires that he'll accept anything that comes his way. And it does so in a way that doesn't show all women as monsters; only the characters in-universe are sexist. Everyone in this movie is pretty much awful, or at best severely obnoxious. Nearly everybody is a pedophile, a rapist, a racist, or just cruel for no reason. The richer you get, the bitcher you get. And this is a movie about the super-rich.

The dialogue is very pointy and sometimes it gets ridiculous. People talk about how snappy and dire Valley of the Dolls is, but Valley of the Dolls just made me a bit sleepy if I can be frank. This movie has about as many barbs as a drag show, but the costumes aren't nearly beautiful enough--it is a good-looking film, even if it never does anything too bold with the visuals. As far as the barbs, though, you do need to have a high threshold of tolerance, for both acid and camp. It's like if the Adam West Batman villains could say fuck.

Overall, The Stud has much to offer and its 3.6 on IMDB perplexes me. The movie made a good deal of money when it came out, and contemporary reviews were positive, it seems. I mean, it does deal with some dark topics, particularly that of male rape. Why would a film about male rape get such low reviews? Surely that's not a reflection of any aspect of our society? Hmmmmmmmm...

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Disturbia (2007), by D.J. Caruso

2007 logic: if you are an utterly disrespectful creep, you will get the girl. I had fun ripping into this one.

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Bloody Pit of Horror (1965), by Massimo Pupillo

Can you survive the chest-greasing horrors of the Crimson Executioner?!?

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Samurai Cop (1991), by Amir Shervan

Samurai Cop starts off pretty normal. Two cops, Joe and Frank, are going after some cocaine smugglers, aided by Peggy, their eye in the sky. Everything is straightforward and by the book. And then the car chase begins.

It's a familiar thing, in a way, though I can cite no other movies off the top of my head that do it. There are actions films just like this that have a few scenes right near the start that mimic "real" movies almost perfectly. Perhaps this is the footage they shot first, and showed to investors, to trick them into thinking they were getting anything other than Samurai Cop. And then, once they had their budget secured and squared away, they filmed that car chase scene. And Amir Shervan's apparent desire to be the world's biggest ten year old began.

Joe is a samurai as well as a cop, and with Frank he chases these coke dealers through the requisite City of Boxes, all of which are smashed. Yes, it's one of those car chases. At this point in cinematic history, it's not a true car chase if there aren't some conspicuously-placed boxes (fruits and veggies optional) for everyone to smash into. Anyway, once they arrest/slaughter the coke dealers, Joe and Frank start going after the Katana Gang, controlled by the mulleted Mr. Fujiyama. Aiding Fujiyama in his drug empire are martial arts master Okamura (a creatively named character played by Gerald Okamura) and evil samurai Yamashita. Yamashita must be a codename of some kind, because he's played by Robert Z'Dar, who, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, is as white as a sheet of printer paper. He turns in a legitimately great performance here, which easily rises over what most of his colleagues turned in. Fujiyama commands him to kill one of the hospitalized victims of Joe and Frank's coke bust: "I want his head! And I want it right here, on this piano!" "I will take his head, and I will place it on your piano," Yamashita replies.

Joe ends up getting involved with Jennifer, whose family owns a restaurant that Fujiyama helped raise out of debt. This angers Fujiyama, who wanted Jennifer all for himself. The war between the Katanas and the Samurai Cop heats up until Fujiyama is torturing Joe's friends--threatening to castrate Frank, burning Peggy with hot grease, and killing a cop he worked with on raids, along with his wife. But this is an action movie, so you better believe all the bad guys end up dead, one way or another.

There is so much that is just done wrong in this movie. The sex scenes are astonishingly bad, even by the usual "sex through the undies" standards. We get many scenes of men in Speedos with full cock outlines visible, and none of it is welcome, especially if it comes from Joe. Joe is perfect, though. His beyond-shoulders hair and ludicrously intense face make him seem like the opposite of someone who should be a cop. The fact that he runs around shooting wantonly and chopping people's limbs off doesn't help matters. This is yet another movie where laws are more like guidelines, along which those in authority may impose their own moral beliefs rather than following those that might be "popular" or "ethically acceptable." I think there are a few moments though where it questions its own stance on police brutality (which is that it's okay as long as the people you're dismembering are bona fide evil). There's an amazing bit were Joe is making full of Chief for "not wanting no more dead bodies," plus a later bit where he says, "If it's Okamura [at this house] we'll arrest him; if it's the wrong house we'll apologize the owner, standard police procedure." They don't go in guns blazing for this scene but it's easy to imagine them doing so. In this universe, unarmed civilians are shunted to a pocket dimension for safekeeping when fights break out, unless they're romantically involved with the main characters--then they can be used as hostages.

This movie does some other stuff wrong besides saying that police brutality is an okay thing to do. It's kind of hella racist? Joe messes up the Japanese characters' names on purpose (calling them "Omaha" and "Yamaha"), brings up their ethnicity for no reason, and calls Jennifer, the white girl in Fujiyama's company, "all-American." There's also an oddly-inserted gay waiter character from Costa Rica whose "comically" long name is brought up for no other reason than to drag Hispanic people. Finally, there's the bizarre incident where, when Frank (a black man) is threatened with castration, his dick is called "a gift--a black gift." I don't even know what to make of that. This movie is fucking weird.

Finally, there's a wonderful cascade of trash besides all this. When sneaking into the hospital to put that guy's head on Fujiyama's piano, Robert D'Zar disguises himself as a doctor--for no reason. This never comes up in any way. While he and his assistant are escaping the hospital, they're confronted by two security people who have the same dub actor. When someone asks Joe what katana means, he translates it as "Japanese sword," which is, um, not exactly correct. Fujiyama sends guys to break Joe's legs twice, because the screenwriter keeps forgetting scenes that have already happened. Then, when we see Robert D'Zar having sex, we have the opposite problem of the sex scene from The Room--here, the woman in question seems to think that Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his belly button! (You fool, everyone knows Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his chin.) Oh, and I can't consider this review complete without quoting this scene--an exchange between Joe and a random nurse.

Nurse: "Do you like what you see?"

Joe: "I love what I see."

"Do you want to touch what you see?"

"Yes. Yes I would."

"Would you like to go out with me?"

"Yes. Yes I would."

"Would you like to fuck me?"

"Bingo."

"Then let's see what you got." *Gropes his pants* "Doesn't interest me. Nothing there."

"Nothing there? What would interest you? Something the size of a jumbo jet?"

"Have you been circumcized? Because the doctor must have cut a big portion of it off."

Both of them deliver these lines like they're kids doing bad impressions of Robby the Robot.

I think that's a good place to end this review.

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The Zodiac Killer (1971), by Tom Hanson

Most of us at this point are familiar with the story of the Zodiac Killer. In the late '60s through the early '70s, an as-yet-unidentified murderer killed at least five people in the San Francisco area, leaving behind mysterious ciphers which remain as unsolved as the case they belong to. Many theories have emerged citing a number of suspects, and similarly quite a few films have been made on the subject of the murders. Like the theories, some of these movies are sound, while others are not. The 1971 film The Zodiac Killer, made by Tom Hanson as part of a harebrained, probably-bogus scheme to catch the Killer in the theater it showed at, is decidedly not one of the sound Zodiac case adaptations, being instead a fascinating portrait of ugly people thrown into a classic exploitation backdrop.

The film is a relatively disconnected series of vignettes. We first follow the Zodiac Killer without knowing who he is, and two suspects emerge for us to consider: the meek, rabbit-keeping vegan mailman Jerry, and the violently misogynistic, drug-addicted, alimony-dodging Grover. The police begin to close in on Grover, seeing as he's the more readily obvious suspect, but he's shot down after trying to kidnap his daughter with a Ultimate Weapon, a handsaw. Jerry is the actual Zodiac, believing that his victims will become his slaves in the afterlife (which the Zodiac Killer claimed to believe), after Atlantis rises from the ocean (which is horseshit concocted by the director). He keeps on killing and, as in real life, he is never caught.

Tom Hanson here takes the Ed Wood route of exploitation and tries to make a movie that teaches us something. At first, the movie is rather cynical--it flat-out calls the audience stupid for not being more paranoid about serial killers, for not suspecting the un-suspicious. This is a rather uncomfortable view to take, especially in an age where kids are now being told that their shy classmates are potential school shooters in the making just because they're quiet. Jerry being the killer fits in with this mentality; he is the very "guy next door" that he warns us about at the beginning. Grover's arc exists to demonstrate that sometimes the most vulgar and openly-violent and Trump-esque of us are just bad people, and despite their loudness and brashness they shouldn't be the only ones we look at when it comes to looking for murderers. Of course, that sort of seems to normalize people like Grover, but the subversion, I think, goes deeper than that.

Grover is violently misogynistic, true, but grotesque sexism is a running theme of the whole movie--almost as if Hanson wanted to demonstrate, at least subliminally, that the Zodiac Killer could not exist without a confining culture that encourages men to be violent. Jerry is not as sexist as Grover, but only barely. He shares a conversation with his hideous pimple of a neighbor Doc, who opines that "once women are over 20, they're no good...Chinese have a term for it, it's called the Year of the Dog. [That's...not what that is, but 'kay.] Or as I like to call it, the Birth of the Bitch!" Following this Doc adds, "if you get any leftovers, though, send 'em my way...remember, I like 'em plump 'n' juicy...and DUMB!" Jerry is generally on Doc's side during this, and the rest of the movie will show him throw sexist remarks out of his own volition. Jerry and many other characters also sling around the word f*ggot, and Jerry himself takes deep offense at being called such. This latter incident takes place in a bar scene where we get glimpses of various relationship dynamics, nearly all of them portrayed negatively. Bad sexual dynamics, negative gender roles, and institutionalized homophobia are all major parts of the world that makes the Zodiac Killer who he is.

Actually, this movie in some ways is all about subversions. After Jerry is shown to us as the Killer, we see him first share some hotdogs with some beachgoers, where he doesn't kill them--then he goes to a park full of vulnerable children, where he doesn't kill anyone. But then we get the biggest and most infamous murder scene of the whole movie, where he first claims to be a crook escaping from a prison in Montana, and that he just needs to steal his victims' keys and money to get to Mexico. But after he ties them up, he chuckles casually, "I'm gonna have to stab you people." This sort of sadistic joking-around follows as he plays games with the police. He takes genuine pleasure in shutting down the power of those who can stop him. At the end, this is played with, where it's briefly put forth that maybe if the police didn't need to get so many fuckin' permits and warrants and whatnot they'd just be able to arrest/kill all those dirty crooks all the time like we want. It's uncomfortable (because time shows that cops perform worse and commit more crimes without those regulations), but it's presented alongside the suggestion (put forth, admittedly, by the Zodiac himself) that the Killer may in fact be a sane person, which means there are other reasons for his killings aside from simple "mental illness." While it is the Zodiac Killer himself putting forth this view, it also obviously stands in for the sentiments of the filmmakers, so this is a point they're interested in exploring. It's interesting. It's almost like unscientific views of mental health and biased explanations/solutions for crime are excuses for the violence of the patriarchy or something. 

Of course, this movie is also ridiculous. Grover is absolutely disgusting inside and out, which becomes kind of comedic after a while. ("Suspect proceeded to urinate in customers' drinks, proclaiming...'The Fountain of Youth lives'?") The Zodiac Killer wears a Paul McCartney wig and a beaglepuss. The police consult a psychic, Mr. Koslow, who has some Mysterious Foreigners in his apartment for no reason. It's a weird movie, and I may have understated that, despite the fact that this is a fictionalization of a series of murders that was released while those murders were still happening. To say nothing of the fact that for all the hard facts about the case Hanson gets right, there are plenty he just makes the fuck up.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's not an easy watch, for quite a few reasons, but every time I pop it into I'm completely engrossed in its world for 87 minutes. Like, I will actually forget about outside reality when I throw it on. That's another way it's weird. Watch it.

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Ace of Aces (1933), by J. Walter Ruben

By coincidence, this film was the next entry on my to-watch list following The Man from Colorado, a 1948 Western about a former Union officer driven mad by the Civil War. While those movies contrast wildly as far as budget and artistry are concerned, the two films are similar in many ways. Both of them are about good men who War makes into monsters; consequently both films deal thematically with the dark side of humanity that lurks inside everyone, the side that causes Wars to begin with. As such they can both be interpreted as anti-war films, but Ace of Aces is much more directly about protesting conflict. That directness certainly makes it a bit dumber than The Man from Colorado, but that doesn't mean the film's wiping its drool off the floor. What makes Ace of Aces so enjoyable and indeed compelling is its emotional intensity and earnestness about its message.

Rocky Thorne is a sculptor engaged to Nancy, a fellow intellectual. They share rambling, pretentious conversations with each other but generally seem to be good kids. Then America enters World War I, and there's a need for fighter pilots. Nancy turns on Rocky when he dismisses the value of the War, and that's enough to make him enlist. Despite his early hesitance, Rocky faces his duty with honor, and a terrible change begins to occur. It turns out Rocky really likes killing...and he's willing to sacrifice whatever parts of himself don't apply to that. What's more, he becomes secluded, refusing to let anyone else service his plane or guns. Not even Nancy can turn him back, even though her own job as a nurse has taught her how foolish it was to support this war. Is it too late for Rocky, or can some new horror yet reach and change his heart?

Many of the old cliches are rolled out for this one. Before his enlistment, Rocky compares the marching troops outside his soldier to lemmings--at great length. At such great length, in fact, that I couldn't help but envision an enormous red alarm flashing over the whole screen, shouting "SYMBOLISM" the whole time. Adding to the SYMBOLISM is the fact that Rocky's unit is singing a song to the tune of a funeral march when he enters the bunk. It's moments like this which couple with the occasionally over-flowery dialogue to make the whole thing seem heavy-handed. But I think this hamfistedness comes from a place of caring.

There are a plenty of strange details about this film which make it a joy to watch from the perspective of one who like eccentric movies, while also showing, as those eccentricities often do, a precision and care that went into this movie's forging. When Rocky is meeting his squadron for the first time, each of them have a witty or "witty" introduction/sobriquet. The best being "Tombstone Terry the Tennessee Terror, aka Dracula." I could read 80 years of comics centered on a WWI ace with that name. There's also the fact that each of the pilots has an animal mascot--a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a goat, and Rocky's own lion cub. These animals aren't just for cheap gags--they, too, bring symbolism, because they start fighting around the time that Rocky's violent obsessions start ripping the unit apart.

The film's heart serves it well, as those trips into eccentricity also lead to genuine darkness. Witness Rocky whipping a man with an ammo belt after he failed to load it properly, sending gouts of blood gushing from his crushed skull. Witness Rocky turning Nancy's pro-war arguments on her to convince her to have drunken, sweaty beer sex with him (which is truly skin-crawling by the way). And finally witness Rocky turning straight again after being forced to spend the night with a German teenager he shot down, whom he eventually helps commit suicide when it becomes clear he's got nothing but a slow death ahead of him. War. Is. Hell. It's tough to watch the early scenes where Nancy is trying to justify to Rocky what seems to him to be coldhearted murder, and remember that that was the common attitude of the day. Of course Rocky's arguments, that war is pointless and without true glory in the end, make sense, but when this War broke out people put so much of their pride and fear into their nationalism that relationships really were destroyed over "dishonor," for whatever meaning honor has when you're up against lung-dissolving gas.

Here the movie shines the brightest, because it's ultimately a film concerned with how war happens. The answer I feel it gives to this question is "peer pressure." Rocky is a gentle man largely ruled by his love for Nancy, but Nancy is able to use that to lever him into doing something he's afraid of, by forcing him to face what seems an even greater fear. Once this layer kicks in and pushes him out to the barracks, the encouragement becomes positive: he's rewarded by the comradery and praise of his fellow pilots, who all treat each other like brothers. It's notable that even when his squadron turns on him for his change in behavior, it's not enough to turn him back to good--but he does change his behavior when they turn on him once more after he announces he's leaving to take on a prosperous teaching job instead. In this case, this later scene, where Rocky loses all his friends in the squad for accepting his CO's offer, shows that the positive reinforcement of the squad's brotherhood was really enforced by implicit violence this whole time. The friendship of the armed forces, the film seems to say, only goes as far as one friend is useful to another. That's pretty cold, given that in my experience the military does create sincere friendships as well, but these pilots stand in for the war they fight and the horror it in turn represented, and how entirely without honor and compassion that conflict was. I know this probably makes me seem dumb, but it was really nice to see a movie that flat-out condemned World War I with such vitriol, especially one made in such a precarious era as the inter-war period. All wars are fucking horrible, but that so many of us still rank World War I as one of the top worst points in all of human history shows that it in particular was especially fucking horrible. It deserves to be condemned in big bold letters.

This film was something of a marvel for me; an airplane thriller with some serious war drama. And trauma. Watch it as I did, with The Man from Colorado, or maybe with another airplane thriller, and you've got a good day carved out for yourself.

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Serpent Island (1954), by Tom Gries

I'm going to level with you: outside of Daughter of Horror and a few others, there aren't many 1950s horror movies appropriate for the site that I enjoy. That's why I'm sort of cheating with this one--finding material for both the '20s and this decade will be a challenge next year, assuming I pursue the same format for our Spookyween celebrations. My one justification for including Serpent Island on the itinerary is that it features a voodoo subplot, plus a killer creature sequence at the end. Other than that, this movie is a sailing drama about adventure on the high seas, featuring a scurvy underdog hero who gets the girl at the end. Call me a sucker for voodoo, no matter how mild it is, but there's something about this one that feels like October to me.

Peter Mason is an old marine engineer working dockrat shifts out in San Pedro, CA. One day a woman named Rikki Andre comes up to him asking use of his sailing services; you see, her ancestor was Michel Andre, a gold fence who hid a million dollars in treasure out near Haiti. Using the ship called the Constellation, belonging another sailor she's hired, a rival of Mason's by the name of Kirk Ellis (Captain Kirk, huh?), they set off, traveling to the Seas of Padding. This includes things like gut-punch brawls, shark attacks, and the lamest stock footage hurricane ever. When they land, Mason and Rikki consummate their romantic tension in a surprisingly explicit scene for 1954, but of course, there's voodoo afoot. Pete is captured by the voodoo cult where he learns that their leader is an old flame of his, a woman named Ann Christoff, and she's bound to protect the gold--after all, it constitutes the mass of their sacred idol. Rikki is allowed to see the idol, but is attacked by a boa constrictor; Pete saves her, Kirk is killed by the snake, and the two lovebirds escape the island safely.

Serpent Island is largely notable because it's the first movie that Bert I. Gordon had a hand in producing. As is easy enough to point out there are no giant monsters in this one, even if that boa is pretty big. In a sense, this is one of the most successful monster movies Gordon made--not in terms of monster content, of course--because I actually found some horror in the scene where Rikki is attacked by the snake. They managed to make the actress being choked to death look strangely real. I found it grotesque, but maybe I'm a big sissy--or maybe a crusty print does things to me.

I was pulled into this movie because it has a strange self-awareness about itself that makes it and its characters charming. Pete is well-acted as an aging former sailor with extreme cynicism about life at sea. Rikki is strikingly convincing as a young woman who is figuring herself out. And Kirk is a true bastard like any evil ship captain in a sailing adventure film worth his salt should be. We get this sense of winking from the oddities the script insists on indulging in. For example, after Pete stops a thief from stealing the letter that will lead Rikki to the treasure, he says, "We never did find out who the uncommon thief was; I still have my own ideas on the subject." Yet we never learn those ideas; moving on. How about his later zinger: "My dad always said to never fight a man in his own territory. I never listened to him and that's how I became a success in life." Pete has a sentimental sort of narration over the whole of the film, with pseudo-poetic reflections on all they come across, which seems to be a fixture of sailing segment in these types of adventure flicks. Some of these bits of narration reminded me of Infrasexum in their own way. He also makes jokes which appear to be at the expense of the Republican Party, which earns him a thumbs up in my book.

One last note on the dialogue before I move on. Kirk comes up behind Rikki one night and looks her up and down like a creep. She knows he's there without looking and he asks how she knows. She says, cheerily, "You're real quiet, and so when it gets real quiet I know you're around. If that sounds confused, that's because I'm confused. About a lot of things." Wow! You know you're a master scribe if you've got that in your screenplay, folks.

There's a lot to riff here, because it's a '50s exploitation movie. For example, we see what might have been some of the film's raison d'etre during a scene where Rikki runs out on deck in her nightie, and gives us a big face full of hot lingerie'd booty. There's something for the androsexual, as well, as there's no shortage of Pete's weirdly-shaped shirtless torso. I never really thought I'd get a chance to see Rob Liefeld's interpretation of Captain America extrapolated into real life, but I was not disappointed. Finally, we have Jacques, Ann Christoff's voodoo enforcer, who I like to headcanon is a zombie, just 'cause then I can claim this is a zombie voodoo movie. Every time he makes his sudden appearance I remark on his stunning resemblance to a shaved Mr. T. Because it's a '50s voodoo movie, there is trace racism, including white people being afraid of burly black dudes just 'cause they're burly black dudes. Fortunately, it's not even in the same galaxy as West of Zanzibar.

Serpent Island may be one of those movies which can only be appreciated so idiosyncratically that it's almost not worth it. It may also be a movie I enjoy exclusively because I had to go to surprising lengths to find a copy. If you like sailing dramas with a touch of killer creatures and the threat of human sacrifice, this one's for you. Give it a try.

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D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' (1988), by Chuck Schodowski

Let me see if I can even begin to name all the cash-ins and ripoffs of Spielberg's E.T. that have emerged over the years.

There are the two Turkish ones, Badi and Homoti. There are at least five or six porno spoofs. We can't forget about Pod People...or Mac and Me...and now, there is D.T. Hallelujah! D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' (because Single Quotes Are Cool) was a short video made by the Cleveland Browns alongside the barbarian fantasy epic Masters of the Gridiron, probably in a gesture of fanservice to Browns fans. Both films became something entirely else--something which man was perhaps not meant to witness. But we'll see. We'll see if our minds are ready to take the long step into the depths of Dawg Territory.

D.T. of the Planet K9 is on his way to the Intergalactic Fetchball Championship when he is knocked off course by his rival team, the evil Zomalians! (They keep saying it as "Somalians" which makes it awkward.) If D.T.'s team has to play without him they will lose, and if they lose, the Zomalians will take control of the galaxy; "Tyranny and bloodshed shall surely follow," D.T. helpfully explains. Fortunately, the humans who found D.T., and supplied him with his trademark Hershey's Kisses, are the kindly gentlemen of the Cleveland Browns, including Bob Golic, Dan Fike, and Tim Manoa. (I love writing sentences that are meaningless to me.) It isn't long before D.T. is captured by the Zomalians, led by their Thundercats-reject Queen and her right-hand demon, Revoltar. Revoltar looks like if Jack Kirby's Etrigan decided to rob the wardrobe of Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. This leads to a training sequence of a bunch of NFL dudes grabbing camo and guns to storm the enemy ship and rescue their buddy, highlighted in great detail with a soundtrack that wouldn't seem out of place in Lady Street Fighter.

D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' is what happens if pure juvenile id vomits on the camera lens. It's a strangely sobering experience to witness these colossal beefy chaps, so typically associated with masculine seriousness, display an innocent and earnest eagerness for shooting lizard-aliens with beam-rifles. Or having lightsaber fights with cat-people. All while channeling what the '80s considered the kid's movie to end all kid's movies. Perhaps the majority of their delight comes from the prospect of this being a blast for their kid fans, but in a way, this was probably a relief from the image football players are ordinarily required to maintain. Again, all of my speculation comes from faulty understanding--I know nothing about football, outside of what I've seen in this movie and Masters of the Gridiron. There may be worlds of information encoded deep in this movie that I'll never understand unless I watch tons of '80s football reruns. All I see, from my perspective, is a bunch of guys enjoying themselves with a man dressed in a dog costume. That's all I need.

And the movie isn't badly shot, either. Director Chuck Schodowski knows what he's doing, as far as duplicating shots from other movies. I don't know where I've seen the shot of a group of camo-clad troops striding out of an orange-lit fog before, but it's generic enough where it's probably a 4th-generation ripoff of something big. Schodowski's like a junior Bruno Mattei, and it's wonderful. I think it's also appropriate that the director of this nerdy football movie is named "Schodowki." That's like the secret last name of every white person's football-loving dad. Who probably gets over-nostalgic about all the trash from the '80s, including E.T.

Running not even a full half-hour, D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' is an almost-literally one-of-a-kind movie that shows a strange side to football, even if you do happen to be familiar with The Sports. It makes a great double-feature with the similarly-short Masters of the Gridiron, a love-letter to '80s fantasy in the same way this is a tribute to '80s sci-fi. Both of them are on YouTube, too, so shoestring fans rejoice.

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The Lonely Sex (1959), by Richard Hilliard

Are men really the lonely sex? I suppose if you think about stereotypes, maybe. We think of women as being gregarious social butterflies, and men, in turn, are the stoic, stony lone wolves. Of course anyone with a lick of life experience would understand the truth is more complicated than that. Perhaps the lonely sex, then, is intersex people. If you're reading this, there's a substantial chance you don't know what intersex even means--see? But alas, this movie is not about intersex people, as much as I'd like it to be, just because we don't have enough movies about intersex folk as of yet. Instead, The Lonely Sex is an early sexploitation movie that tries to raise some points about society and its gender roles, with results I can only describe as mixed.

An unnamed man is haunted by the idea of relationships, apparently because of his early sexual experiences. When he was a teenager he was taken in by a--gang? cult?--which forced him to copy sexual diagrams, and later, sleep with a prostitute. He was unable to perform the latter act, so he was kicked out, and when he told his dad he laughed at him. Ever since he's been jobless, homeless, and in and out of jail for various Peeping Tom-related misdemeanors. He resides occasionally in an abandoned tool shed out in the woods, where he draws faces on mirrors with crayons and listens to vaguely sexual radio ads. Eventually he kills a lady for rejecting his plastic rose. All this time, we've also been following the story of Annabelle Greene, the daughter of a psychiatrist who lives with her dad's friend Matt, a Peeping Tom worse than the protagonist who constantly looks like he might really rape someone someday. The unnamed man kidnaps Annabelle and keeps her locked in the shack, which Dr. Greene and Matt eventually learn of. Matt, despite his status as a predator supreme, believes that all perverts should be executed without a trial, so he shoots and kills the man. Father and daughter are reunited, and things end as happily as they can with someone like Matt still around.

Because Russ Meyer hadn't happened yet, this is a sexploitation movie much more concerned with exploitation than sex. There is some nudity, it's true, and the plot is largely about sex, but this is not sexuality which is meant to titillate. This, like a lot of '50s exploitation movies, is meant to make us think, and in particular, it's meant to make us think about the function of society and how that relates to deviance. The '50s were very much about order, and that was reflected in the sociology of the time: the predominant sociological theory in 1950s America was structural functionalism, which was all about that idea of looking at how the parts of society influence one another and create emergent behavior. Structural functionalism is a theory which is ultimately unable to account for social change, and which is grounded in the bigotry of the 1950s. The idea of privilege, for example, and inequalities in power on matters of race, sex, ability, etc. usually come across as unimportant to functionalism, which led to the rise of conflict theory in 1960s. To me, it's interesting to see this account for the popularity of moralizing in exploitation movies. Sure, a lot of movies were pinned to the mat by the Hayes Code, and therefore had to have black-and-white clearcut visions of good and evil. But there was a demand for movies that explored the battle of virtue vs. deviance, due in part to the Cold War and a desire to define the American identity as something more moral than Soviet Communism. (That's why they added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.) The Lonely Sex, in my mind, represents a weird interstitial state between the '50s and '60s. It attempts to consider the functions of privilege and sexual expectations from a conflict theorist point of view while still framing it within a 1950s portrait of deviance. And tellingly, it accuses a privileged portion of society of hypocrisy, blaming them for what's happened.

Matt is very much like those Republican senators who oppose LGBT rights and later turn out to be having same-sex affairs. He appears to have a relatively respectable place in society--he's close friends with a prominent psychiatrist, and he's well-dressed. It's never mentioned what he does, but it must be something good. From a certain perspective, Matt's bloodlust is a little understandable. There's a scene where he asks Dr. Greene, regarding the newspaper headline of the unnamed man's murder, "What do you think happened before the murder?" He seems to be fearful of the idea that perhaps the killer raped his victim before doing her in. I have no pity for rapists; I do not care what their stories are or why they did it, and I believe that they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But I also believe in justice, not citizens running around shooting people (or cops running around shooting people, for that matter). And that's ignoring the biggest elephant in the room, that Matt is still a worse creep than the main character. The protagonist is at least aware of the wrongness of his actions, but if Matt ever did rape or kill someone he'd likely have a convenient excuse. And unlike the protagonist, he is not mentally ill. Mental illness does not excuse one from crime--nor is it a singular cause of it--but Matt lacks motive for what he does. That makes him more despicable than the unnamed man in my eyes.

Of course, the fact that the "protagonist" kills someone really fucks up any sort of message this movie could be going for. Still, I'm going to attempt to find my own perspective on this: much of the conflict the unnamed man faces in this movie is a result of 1950s gender roles. His sexual dysfunction comes from his abuse at the hands of the group he attempted to join as a youth as well as the world's blaming him for it. The gang/cult's attempts to force him to have sex with a hooker is a sort of rape by proxy, which his father laughs at, and which the rest of the world says is a failing in his natural male predilection for sex. His friends and family can't understand why he wouldn't want to have sex with a woman, even under forced circumstances. Like many men in patriarchal societies, he feels trapped by obligations he can't or doesn't want to fulfill--even with his privilege, he is a victim of patriarchy just as any women would be. That's an interesting theme for a '50s movie to cover.

But few people seek out movies for their politics, so I will also say that there are also plenty of bad movie things in here to draw you in. It's pretty cheesy to see a character scrawl "HELP" on a wall after killing someone, especially how it's framed here. They also insisted on giving the unnamed man these big balls of makeup under his eyes to make him look more washed out--but they stand out so much that the effect only succeeds in the shadows, being quite hilarious otherwise. Plus, if you're an exploitation fan, especially of the old style, this will probably remind you of a C-list Wishman castoff, which is certainly better than nothing. This was directed by the writer of Horror of Party Beach, too, which is always fun. If you want to see something that's halfway between the anthropological sleaze of one decade and the identity politics of another, or you just want to join fat men in perving on stripping ladies, it's worth a watch. I was certainly surprised by the caliber of its entertainment.

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Massacre Mafia Style (1974), by Duke Mitchell

Careers in art can be tricky things. Sometimes you get your one-hit wonders; sometimes you get people who started out great before they crashed and burned; and sometimes--and I don't think we let this happen enough, because frankly we humans can be cruel people--there are people who start out horrible and rise to greatness. We mythologize our creators, sometimes perhaps a bit needlessly. We forget that they're people. I certainly don't mean to dismiss the trend of mythologizing artists, because in a lot of ways I think our culture needs it. By looking up to our painters, writers, filmmakers, etc. we are looking up to what they create. We're enjoying them and the things they make for us. But, for many of us involved in these fields, our work is also, in a lot of ways, just our job. For most of history, those of us who have faced the possibility of starvation have done what we've had to do to hang on--even if it's always love of what we do that brings us back. Thus, it is not always glamorous, but there's nothing in this world that is. And that means that a lot of us have done crap jobs before. Mistakes have been made, as in any job. Take the career of Duke Mitchell, for instance.

Duke Mitchell was once one half of the "comedy" act Mitchell and Petrillo with Jerry Lewis impersonator/plagiarist Sammy Petrillo, with Mitchell being Martin to Petrillo's Lewis. Together they made the movie Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which I would seriously consider a contender for the worst movie ever. Seriously, it's nearly as torturous as Disaster Movie. If I compare a movie to Disaster Movie, I am not fucking around. In any case, Mitchell's first "big" movie was an atrocity. But I'm glad he didn't give up a career in film. Without perseverance and a vision which I wish had been possible in the unworkable mess of Brooklyn Gorilla, we would not have Massacre Mafia Style, a decidedly fascinating attempt at aping (heh) The Godfather. There may be no human-ape transformations in this movie, but there's a lot to look at, both good and bad.

Mimi Miceli is the son of a famous old-time gangster; he has followed his father into Sicilian exile, as Miceli Sr. was deported as a result of his criminal activities. We are introduced to Mimi early on as he and his partner Rizzo shoot their way through a corporate office, slaughtering all the employees with a variety of armaments. Slowly, we learn that Mimi has returned to the U.S. to avenge his father's exile, by taking over the pimps and bookmakers of Hollywood. In doing so, he and Rizzo kidnap a Mafia head and cut his finger off, and then visit him at his son's wedding after getting their ransom dough and releasing him. He apparently appreciates their balls so much that he's willing to let the two take on what they want. We then loosely follow Miceli's adventures, which are meshed with subplots like the attempted formation of the Sicilian Defense League, a group apparently dedicated to squashing anti-Mafia voices in the media. In the end, a man loses everything, and there's a twist ending.

So this is actually, structurally and stylistically speaking, a really well put together movie. It's strange; the general critical opinion seems to be that the movie is clumsy and amateurish, and it's the gore that counts. I found the gore disappointing--red paint, as was the style of the time, but nothing featuring organs and whatnot, even when people are getting their guts shot out. Maybe I really am becoming desensitized (I doubt it). The gore actually is the fakest thing in the movie, at least as far as I know.

"As far as I know." Now, there's a trouble with my reviewing this movie: I'm not Italian. I don't know how strong Duke Mitchell's Italian heritage was but I assume he's on the level. This movie is apparently supposed to be some sort of alternate reality biography...my postulations, without facts. Maybe Duke Mitchell/Mimi Miceli really was a gangster. Maybe his father really was in the Mafia. But there are some things here which seem out of place. For example, I haven't been able to find any independence evidence of an Italian wedding ritual wherein money is put in a piece of bread, which is cut and tossed to the father of the groom. There's a strong sense of authentic sentimentality for Italian culture in Mitchell, but I would feel awkward if he was pulling a lot of this out of his ass.

The reason why I'm so suspicious is that this movie has strange attitudes towards race. It is, um. Horribly racist? At least, the characters are, and that's an important distinction. Part of the Italian characters' racial pride involves racism against black people and Jews. There's a long and uncomfortable sequence where Miceli intimidates a black pimp named--sigh--Super Spook, throwing around the n-word a bunch, and squishing his face around. I don't know what Mitchell was going for here. I mean, we are talking about fucking Mafia hitmen. These guys are monsters--they kill a lot of people, in some pretty bad ways, despite some of their likable traits, like their sentimentality and Miceli's love for his son. I think that means their racism is just meant to make them more monstrous. But again, this is a movie that blurs fantasy and reality (ironically invoking a lot of Italian art films coming out at this time in Mitchell's apparent homeland). Miceli and Mitchell are, in a sense, alter egos of each other. So maybe Mitchell really did hate Jews and black people. If so, I don't know how much I can like this movie.

Thematically, the movie is really hard to figure out, and I watched it four times for this review. At the ending, Miceli explains to his father that traditional crime--I assume the Mafia crime of the '30s and '40s--no longer conventionally exists, because racial politics have shifted, and the hippie movement's predilection for free love and drug use have severely damaged the old-school prostitution and drug-pushing markets. And gangster movies have reduced men like Don Miceli to cartoon supervillains, neutered and deprived of their power. This is subverted in a telling way in the movie's final moments. All throughout the film, people keep telling Mimi he can't bring back the old ways. But the old ways never go away; they just change. Crime changes. Immorality changes. There's always some fresh blood ready to step into the dens of thieves and murderers.

In any case, there's enough history to this film, enough quality, and enough graphic violence to make it worth checking out. Someone smarter than me probably has a better solution to the tangled themes. I hope there's even more words said about this film than what I'm saying here. Mitchell made another gangster picture a year later, called Gone with the Pope. Be back with that sometime soon.

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The Telephone Book (1971), by Nelson Lyon

Black and white sexploitation is a revelation. Like most statements this isn't universally true, though I always believe in the significance of anything, no matter how small. Hence this site. We haven't had a chance to talk about a lot of black and white sexploitation outside of the odd thing like All Women Are Bad, but for better or worse the genre has left a powerful impact on my life, even if it is a genre that most people have never heard of, much less experienced. Someday soon we'll have to talk about the wonders of Doris Wishman, or Larry Crane's The Love Captive, or, if I can handle it, Charles Morgan's Stick It In Your Ear. Despite the gruesome titles, to say nothing of the name of the genre itself, these movies are all pseudo-comedic explorations of sexuality through methods both crass and artistic. Oftentimes, the art arises accidentally, a consequence of a modern viewer responding to decades of pastiching this style in "highbrow" circles (or at least high-budgeted ones). But sometimes there is an intention to the craft, an actual attempt at low-budget artistry. I don't know how well intentional art films fit in with my broad and idiosyncratic definition of "trash," but let's just say that no matter how well-known or "significant" The Telephone Book is, it's become one of my new favorites ever. It's one of those movies packed with so much raw insanity that it's truly hard to believe it actually exists. Like Gretta, or Bloody Wednesday, or Evil Dead, this is a movie which hits every single button of what I like in a movie, while still containing flaws which keep it grounded in a realistic humanity. While nonetheless bursting out beyond anything anyone could properly prepare for.

Fittingly, this is a film about a woman who receives transcendent fulfillment from an admittedly flawed and perverse source. Alice is a sexually frustrated young stoner who lives in her small, barren apartment which is wallpapered with porn. One day, she receives a disgusting but largely implied dirty call from a man with black gloves calling from a payphone. This brings her more sexual release than she's ever felt before, so she's delighted when the man calls again, now represented by subtitles. He tells her his name is John Smith, and encourages her to track him down. It shouldn't be an impossible task--after all, he's in the telephone book.

Thus begins Alice's adventures in...well, a potential Wonderland metaphor would be superficial at best. First she meets a man who claims to be the caller, a stag film actor named Har Poon, and he's in the middle of making one of his movies when she comes across him. Then, she runs into a horny analyst who is astonishingly none other than Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Mustache and all. In exchange for money to make more phone calls, she tells him the story of how she helps a well-endowed middle-aged deal with his week-long priapism. Eventually Alice and Mr. Smith meet. And he turns out to be a homophobic, dog-kicking, homewrecking pedophile who wears a pig mask. No matter...he and Alice aren't meant to have sex in the conventional way. They agree to make one last call. And this leads to the film's final ten minutes.

The movie suddenly snaps to color.

And I will say no more.

Every single moment of this movie is unfettered surrealism. But it's calculated surrealism; little is done on accident. The movie has a habit of interrupting itself--especially when it comes to romance. It will be playing music that builds up the attraction Alice develops towards her mysterious caller when we are interrupted with vignettes of former dirty callers confessing their increasing strange and disturbing habits, like the man who used to call nuns while running his hand through a bowl of split pea soup. And the sex in this movie is always made unappealing in some way, despite the fact that Alice's actress, Sarah Kennedy, is one of the most attractive actresses I've been gay for in a while. It's like the movie never wants to be sincere with its romance or sexuality, presenting a contrasting cynicism to its apparent optimism. It does not take long for the film to get dark after Mr. Smith reveals himself, but Alice doesn't seem aware of it. I don't know what to take from the fact that his obvious anger issues, selfishness, and fucking pedophilia are not turn-offs for her. Like I said, the movie is flawed, but so is life. This movie is laboriously unlike life, but like religion it is made by humans and there are bound to be cracks. Or perhaps this is just Dada--the opening to the 1934 Mystery Ranch played out as a whole movie.

Despite its ventures into the tasteless, the movie is successfully funny throughout most of its runtime. The scenes with Rogel C. Carmel are especially great, because he is a great actor even off Star Trek. That is to say that I like to see Star Trek actors scream "fuck"--the only thing I love as much is seeing Star Trek actors face down giant killer rabbits. Because so much of the comedy arises from the surrealism, the movie invited some comparisons to other nonsensical comedies of a sexual nature, like A Clockwork Blue or Down and Dirty Duck. All three of these movies were probably made by stoners, but whereas A Clockwork Blue is weekend silliness, and Down and Dirty Duck is obsessed with being as offensive as possible at all costs, The Telephone Book has direction and drive. You feel like it's actually going somewhere, and rarely do its tangents subsume the themes of the film. Nothing is self-indulgent. It's stoned as fuck, but fortunately there's actually a brain in that THC-stormed skull.

The Telephone Book is a movie that reminds me why I got in this business to begin with. I feel like I've said that or some variant on it a lot recently, but that's just because I've had a string of good luck. This is some exceptionally pure and marvelous '70s B&W sleaze that was put together by people who actually cared. This is definitely a movie which more people should know about, and I really don't think anyone's life is complete without it. If you like art, if you like trash, if you like bad movies and good movies alike, there's something in it for you. Just mind the boobiez.

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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

Book Club of Desolation #9: Weasels Ripped My Flesh! (2012), by Robert Deis et al.

Even if I was a man, I wouldn't get men. I didn't get men when I did feel like I was a man. That's why I turned out not to be one.

I don't claim to get women, either. I don't claim to get humans. That's why I'm a shitty writer. Well, ordinarily, I would say that. Apparently, there's not great necessity to understand human function to be a good writer. I mean, the business is chiefly based around lying, and I like to think that I'm decent at lying when I do have to say I know people. And that lying, I think, empowers me. And I like the fact that writing gives me infinite power. It gives me the chance to use my imagination and it's meant that exact thing to billions of humans throughout history.

It means that writing has a lot of variety to it. I respect that variety, deeply, and I've tried to read everything. I like a lot of "good" books, and also, as you know, a lot of weird shit. I recently discovered I like some Westerns. I had a chance to read this thing called Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires, which appears to be a political brochure talking about anxiety in Argentina in the '70s which turns into Fantomas fanfiction. The Book Club of Desolation has brought me to a lot of these books, and I started to plan out this month's event, to follow up on the conclusion of Spookyween. I propose thus to the reader a BOOKVEMBER, where the Book Club of Desolation will meet weekly for a month to discuss this great variety in literature. We need to get to something that I never would have checked out before now, because I have mixed feelings about it, even after reading a full volume of it. Get your deodorant ready, bros, because we're diving into the Armpit Slicks--Men's Adventure magazines.

Don't get me wrong, the Men's Adventure genre had pulled at me for sometime, because to be frank, I find that shit hilarious. I've had regrets about passing up 100 Mack Bolans for a dollar at a garage sale. Lord knows that would be a fun piece for this site. And I'll probably end up checking out that Donald Westlake pseudo-James Bond novel at some point. But I will say this, and this is the only time I say it: the lure here is purely an ironic one, or, in more/less pretentious terms, an anthropological one. Most of the content on this site that I appreciate I enjoy unironically. If I'm going to be reading Men's Adventure, though, it has to be because I want to poke fun. For some time, I've known about the original "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" story, which I learned about through the film of the same name. It was convenient of Robert Deis, Josh Alan Friedman, and Wyatt Doyle to entitle this book after that famous story, so that people like me could strike the motherlode with a good intro primer for the Men's Adventure genre. And despite what I may end up saying about this book, I owe all of those fine gentlemen much, because stories like these are valuable and worth preserving. The variety of literature and art is worth preserving if framed in the right context. And yet, also, hanging it out in the air to dry, as it is, for everyone to form their own interpretations--that's important to me too. I guess I should just present this book rather than pass judgment on it--though, incidentally, I will also pass judgment on it.

Usually when I do a short story collection I want to examine each story on its own to the best of my ability. However, there are a lot of stories in this book, and so in general I'll be talking about the book as a whole. There are some common threads between the stories, and the book in turn presents more than just the stories, so it in turn has to be looked at in layers. We'll start with the stories.

I was able to pin down about four basic categories for the stories contained in this book: Killer Creatures, Sociological Studies, Adventure, and Woman-Haters. All of these overlap and interact in some ways, so they're not hard definitions. Killer Creature stories are the namesake of the book and this one has some good ones. It's satisfying to read the original "Weasels" story (which would inspire Zappa who would inspire Schiff), and it's also nice to know that I live in the same universe as a formally published story called "Monkey Madness." These stories probably inspired the wave of animals-gone-berserk movies in the '70s and '80s, like (just off the top of my head) Frogs, Dogs, Strays, Slugs, Grizzly, and Squirm--to say nothing of Jaws. This was seen by some as an opportunity to resurrect the good ol' giant monster flick, leading to movies like Island Claws and Food of the Gods. I'll probably delve into those soon enough with a collection of cryptozoology-themed Men's Adventures put out by the same team. The Killer Creatures are a blast, and it's a good idea to open with one. It drew me even if later elements shoved me back out. Plus, the editors included a master list of all of the animals that have been featured in this kind of story: it included the obvious ones like ants, lions, crocodiles, tigers, sharks...but also anteaters, lemmings, newts, badgers, and iguanas. Excellent.

The Sociological Studies are what they sound like--reports or inside stories about scandalous topics. They vary in quality and, as you may expect have not aged well. Stories about the horrors of Beat culture will be amusing--racism-laden tales bashing Calypso music won't be. I can't properly gauge the lesbian expose stories, of which there are several. These are the literary equivalents of Mondo movies. They are tedious, offensive, and have aged badly, albeit not as badly as some of the other pieces. Have I mentioned this book doesn't support modern values yet...?

The Adventure stories I found to be somewhat boring, though there was a story that was done pretty professionally by Harlan Ellison, shriveled prick through he was. I should say here that if you can imagine the narration from a Something Weird B&W release, you can imagine the prose style of most of the stories in this book. Hardboiled into oblivion. Throw in war stories played straight and you've got me snoozing, and throw in racism and you've got me mad. I don't know what else to say about these ones.

And then we come at last to the Woman Haters. Man, these were a hard sit, but in the trainwreck sort of way. I really had difficulty putting these down even though they were some of the most monstrous stories of the collection--I blame my immunization to such things on having watched so many exploitation movies. Some of these really do give you insight into the sick fucks who were behind a lot of this. I got excited for "Grisly Rites of Hitler's Flesh Stripper" only to be disappointed (when I shouldn't have been) that it was merely an excuse for a nameless, faceless sexy lady to be repeatedly raped and mutilated by a Nazi for x number of pages. While these stories are offensive to basically everyone, sexism is their most prominent issue. And yet there's always something that's compelled me to look into the sick side of our culture, and I know it's not a unique trait. In this case, I don't think I have an explanation for it. I am probably a bad person in my own right.

But, to defend myself somewhat, I do want to step away from the layer of the stories and instead look at the book itself. The editors feature introductions to many of the stories, along with several introductions to the book as a whole--this is also seeded with interviews from some of the guys responsible for the big content of this market, including Mario Puzo. All of this is loaded with a rich history of the genre, showing how fast-moving of a market it was. It's easy for a modern reader to view this material as the Kindle porn market or clickbait "news" sites of the time. And like any sort of "bottom barrel" market, it's an important part of history, because people aren't reading "art," they're reading this stuff. Of course, that won't stop us from writing "art," as well as also writing "this stuff" to pay the bills. Such is the life. Take Mario Puzo for instance: he wrote trash, and yet an adaptation of one of his novels is considered by some to be the best film ever. I'll always walk on the artsy idealistic side of things, but man, do those cynical, realist, "economist-type" writers get the big breaks...

So naturally, the editorial stuff is going to be great for history lovers. The third layer, then, is the art: the team has lovingly reproduced hundreds of vintage covers, pages, and ads from several decades' worth of magazines. This is pure eye candy for fans of the hilarious. Thrill to the things that made your grandparents and great-grandparents hot on the forehead! It's nearly impossible to believe that these images were once printed and sold, and yet more importantly it makes one wonder what will be considered trash-treasure in the future, which we take for granted today?

This is a book where the actual content would fall apart without context. The book itself is so well put together that it's worth getting for the notes and images. It creates a historicity for a genre that we can't take straight anymore--even if the values live on (we need look no further than to our modern politics for that). Deis, Friedman, and Doyle deserve recognition for their work, and to top it all off, Mr. Deis himself signed my copy. If you can survive the horrors of Wanton Witch, you can make it with this one. Try it out if it's your speed. All I can say for now is that I'm hyped for this cryptozoology book.

Bookvember continues next time with a look at English sci-fi...of a very particular brand.

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Image Source: New Texture