BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #72:

 

SOLAR TAKE #1:

 

Citizen Kane is pretty good, but Rodan has a way cooler giant bird.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #44: POSSESSION (1981)

This delightful Cold War Anxiety relationship drama is like a tabletop Call of Cthulhu campaign played entirely within the parameters of a permanently failed Sanity Roll.

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #26:

I like it when Humpday refuses to acknowledge my existence.

Oh, yes.

Sounds terrible.

To love and to never be loved in return.

But here’s the thing . . . Humpday’s cruel indifference just highlights the purity of my devotion.

THE DISPOSABLE ANGST OF A PROTAGONIST MAN.

 

PHOTO #4:

Photo of a VHS cover. Posted to some 1980s VHS nostalgia account. Justice Prevailer. Not the real Justice Prevailer. It’s just the same title. It’s not even the real title of the movie. For cryptic reasons, it has circulated under the title of Justice Prevailer. Perhaps because this fake Justice Prevailer shared elements of the “dead mall aesthetic” or whatever you want to call it that could be construed as similar enough to the real Justice Prevailer to fool people, but this has never been confirmed. The actual title is A Fool’s Storm, which isn’t very good, either, but it’s not totally inaccurate. It has a character you could describe as foolish, and there’s a storm that impacts the story, and you do see a title card for A Fool’s Storm, but the box claims that it’s supposed to be Justice Prevailer, which it really isn’t. You can watch it online, it’s all over the place. It never actually came out on VHS; the box in the picture is a mock-up. But it has been circulated online as Justice Prevailer. For some reason. I like the box. It’s got an image of the main character-the “fool”-in his filthy suit, splattered with fake blood, with a Samsara-6 Service Revolver in his fist, smiling strangely. In the movie, every time the fool shoots somebody he gets this weird, cocky look on his face, and he seems to relish aiming at his victims. Especially in the second half where he shoots a lot of people. The first half is mostly him getting his ass kicked. Lots of fist fights, and dudes grappling each other and rolling around in filth and trash and knocking over shit ‘til someone gets on top, slams the other guy’s head against a hard surface, or maybe strangles the guy, or the one scene where he puts his thumbs through the dude’s eyes, or that one scene where he dunks the guy’s head in a shitty toilet, and then the guy gets away, but then we get a scene where he vomits so hard he seemingly drops dead of heart attack or stroke. It’s all rough and scrappy and convincing and, you know, kind of a fuckin’ chore-but I love it. The fool’s just so beat down. He’s so shit upon. You see his anger building. He gets tougher and tougher. His first kill is a struggle in which he nearly dies himself, but with each victory it’s clear he’s getting off on his growing power. No justice, but he definitely prevails. The whole thing has a nasty, dangerous vibe true to the 2020s, in which you had these yahoos tearing it up inside dead malls and other abandoned structures, firing off real guns, doing the drawn out hand-to-hand combat scenes, rolling around in filth and dust and debris. Of course, A Fool’s Storm dates back to 2012-it predates the actual Justice Prevailer-but it very much feels like a 2020s thing. Frankly, it’s better made than actual 2020s shit, more of a real film with an edge of madness, as opposed to reckless behavior dressed up into a kinda-sorta movie thing. A Fool’s Storm has good blood and gore effects. Chunky, syrupy squibs. A half dozen slow motion headshots. Good stabbings. Three impressive neck cuttings. It even looks cool. Shadows. Dust. Very much an underground feel. Apparently they shot it inside an abandoned corporate campus in either suburban Illinois or central Florida or outside Atlanta-nothing’s ever been confirmed-which has become legendary since that corporate campus has long since been demolished, according to all the rumors, so people look to this movie as a sort of documentation of that space, even though the movie has no identifying information whatsoever. I don’t find that stuff all that interesting-I like the actual movie itself-but this is all that people seem to say online about it. The people who made the movie don’t seem to have much to say about it, and the names in the credits are all fake. I think this was all done on purpose. I used to joke about things like that in college-”let’s make a movie where we credit ourselves as Brad Pitt and John Holmes directed by Orson Welles”-so it just feels obvious to me that A Fool’s Storm was meant to have a prepackaged air of mystery, an instantly microwaveable cult appeal thing. And it kinda does. Like I said, I actually enjoy watching the movie itself. I’m mildly tempted to print out a VHS box of it, but I don’t actually go for this kinda stuff. I’m bored, I’m cycling through possibilities, having fun trying on things that don’t matter. But what I really like about A Fool’s Storm is that no one’s taken credit for it, even though it’s a pretty good flick. The people behind it just made it, uploaded it, and then left it up to whoever comes across it to preserve it or forget it or mismarket it or remix it or whatever. They made a movie for the sake of making a movie, not to grift off of plastic junk molded in the image of comic book characters who were created by artists who got fucked outta their labor decades ago. Kirby. Ditko. To name a couple. And the filmmakers have made no attempt to police alterations or hoaxy versions or whatever. There’s a deep fake AI remix that casts that sneaky Burger King character as the fool. There’s a John Wick version of course. My two favorites are the one where they put in Tequila, the Chow Yun Fat character from Hard-Boiled; and I also like the one starring Moby. Not Moby the baldy musician guy who did “Porcelain” and “South Side,” but Moby the hot green haired chick from Wurm, which was this NES game based on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Hollow Earth, and the Ishiro Honda flick Atragon. Yeah, Moby the hot green haired lady gets put through some shit in A Moby’s Storm. And there’s a bunch of others. The formula is, put simply, A X Storm, where you solve for X. You could probably consume nothing but AI deep fake derivatives of A Fool’s Storm if you wanted to-you could make your own. Wouldn’t take much. You could put yourself into the action. Wouldn’t take much. There’s this one deep fake starring Mulder and Scully, but they’re merged into one body-A Sculder’s Storm-except when they split into two bodies for whatever reason. Or in that one scene when they’re three bodies ‘cause Skinner spontaneously jumps outta them. Faces look like twitching elbow skin. A hand manifests out of a hand. Mulder and/or Scully frequently have two left hands except when their cell phones merge with their wrists. Near the end, they embark upon the Death Star trench run for some reason even though the final boss is an elbow faced Sephiroth. It’s definitely my favorite variant. Oh! I should tell you about the scene with the storm. I’ll try not to spoil too much, but the storm scene-well, actually, there’s two storm scenes, so I’ll just tell you about the first one. The second one’s even better, but I don’t think I should spoil it, so . . . the first storm scene. Basically, the fool is an assassin for a crime boss known as “Mr. Reality.” Mr. Reality is in a war against a rival gang called the Devil Doers, who all wear devil masks atop post-apocalypse padding and athleisure fits. The Devil Doers are having a big drugs’n’strippers orgy, and that’s when Mr. Reality and his crew-including the fool-burst in and start shooting everybody. Mr. Reality and his gang are all wearing button-up shirt sleeves, ties, and silly Clark Kent-looking eyewear-a murderous IT team vibe. The Devil Doers are led by a guy known as the Mr. Solar Cosplayer, who doesn’t wear a devil mask, but he does wear a custom designed military uniform with a chestful of phony medals. There’s a big battle in which most everyone is killed except for Mr. Reality and the fool. They run out into the rain because they’ve been lit on fire by one of the bionic strippers who came equipped with a napalm gimmick inside her right arm. Mr. Reality is howling in victory. Of course, the real Mr. Solar is hiding deep underground, but Mr. Reality doesn’t know that at this point. The fool’s utterly exhausted. He sinks into the mud, looks to be at risk of drowning. Mr. Reality strips out of his burned flesh to reveal a strange puppet armature underneath his meats and juices like he was just a living special effect this whole time. The grisly armature staggers off into the night. The fool sees this bizarre sight through the torrential rain, losing consciousness, not sure if he can trust his own eyes, sinking into mud. Honestly, for me, this is where the movie peaks, but the rest of it is fine. The fool wakes up deep underground. He’s been flushed down into a bizarre labyrinth by the storm. That’s where he does most of his killing. The fool kills his way back up to the surface where the storm still rages, and he starts to rip his own puppet self free of his meats-but he stops. I guess you could say he’s choosing to exist as a gimmick, as a special effect. Hard cut to a blazing summer bright expanse of asphalt. A parking lot. The fool walks into frame, totally naked, from behind the camera, and stalks off to the vanishing point. Shimmering heat haze. Of course, there are legion porno deep fakes of A Fool’s Storm, many of them focused on the motif of asses erupting like lava to dance free of their original backsides. Faces like elbows. Hands emerging from hands and they’re all left hands. All the bugged fucking you can conceive of and then some. What I hope for, truly, is that there’s such a proliferation of remixes and hoaxes and pornofied versions and every other kind of hallucination that the original gets forever buried. I end up being the last person who remembers the original version of A Fool’s Storm. But even I’ve forgotten it, I’m just incapable of realizing that I’ve forgotten it. Or I’m in denial about forgetting. Something along those lines. I even start telling people that I own the last original copy on VHS.

THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #10:

I’m so Godzilla that King Kong pitched me on doing an Off-Broadway revival of The Odd Couple.

BOOK REVIEW: INTER ICE AGE 4 (1958, 1959, 1970)

by Kobo Abe

Illustrated by Machi Abe

English translation by E. Dale Saunders. Published in 1970 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Original Japanese language version serialized in Sekai magazine in 1958 and 1959. Novel published in 1959 by Hayakawa Publishing.

Publication information sourced from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the Wikipedia article for Inter Ice Age 4, and the 1970 Alfred A. Knopf edition of the novel.

. . .

“This dog, can it catch fish?”

. . .

“The most fearful of monsters is the well-known friend slightly altered.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

One discovery leads to another.

A mystery is interwoven into other mysteries.

The more data you collect the more nuanced your overall picture of life becomes, until, inevitably, there’s no more mystery to it . . . right?

Hmmm.

Or is it more like you ask questions that just lead to more questions with no end in sight?

You’re asking me?!

Katsumi is a government computer engineer who works with a powerful forecasting machine in a near future Japan. This adorably retro predictive engine utilizes punch cards, presumably by the truckload, although the ability to reduce human nature to patterns of holes on paper could be a sly commentary on the vaulting ambitions of those who dream of totally reductionist quantification schemes . . . and/or the arrogance of novelists presuming to capture a convincing portrait of existence via language marks on pages. Science and literature make for quirky, dysfunctional comrades in Inter Ice Age 4. 

The Russians and the Americans also have predictive engines. Japan-a nation that’s already been nuked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki-is sandwiched between the atom bomb armed factions. Protracted Cold War Nuclear Jitters has everyone wondering about what’s around the corner. Is Communism the future? Capitalism? Can technology solve the problems created by technology? What about other horizonal crises? Resource depletion? Petroleum shocks? Carbon pollution? Global warming? Rising water lines? Can a future predicting machine be sustained by hard, unyielding quantitative facts and logic alone, or does it also require soft, squishy qualia? Also, if a machine tells us what’s going to happen next . . . is that the machine ordering us around or an infallible prognostication? What’s the difference? How do we know we’re not feeding prejudicial parameters into the system? Is it possible to counteract unconscious bias? Do the experts running these miraculous machines care about anything other than locking down their own domain of hyper-analytic power so governments and corporations have to come calling politely with hat in hand? Could this all be a pseudoscientific scam?

Meanwhile, parallel to the computer shit there’s a bunch of bio-shenanigans going down. Human and animal fetuses are being secretly harvested/kidnapped to be used as fodder for sinister genetic experiments. Two murders have seemingly been committed to keep the lid on this next level Frankenfuckery. 

Katsumi stumbles across the fetusnappings while running an experiment with the forecasting machine. At first, Katsumi dismisses the bio-shenanigans as delusional ravings but then his pregnant wife is coerced into what at first seems a forced abortion by mysterious people who managed to impersonate him. Katsumi receives threatening phone calls from someone able to perfectly impersonate his voice. In a world where everything can be totally quantified it may end up being a purely procedural endeavor to output copies of human beings. 

Narratively, Katsumi functions as a detective who grapples with mysteries outside and inside himself. His interactions with the forecasting machine resonate with our contemporary dilemmas of generative AI and its attendant hype and hallucinations. Katsumi begins as the technician maintaining the machine intelligence, but ends up facing his own obsolescence within its oracular insights.

Of course, Katsumi could be cracking up under work stress. Inter Ice Age 4 has a peculiar narrative hiccup wherein we find out sorta late about Katsumi’s personal life outside his job. Katsumi-who narrates much of the tale-describes his marriage and home life almost as though he were recounting a hypnotically repressed alter ego. I choose to interpret this as a satirical commentary on the notoriously grinding demands of Japanese work culture, but it may also be a consequence of an already complex narrative being imperfectly translated into English.

The forecasting machine develops some wild talents. It’s artificially intelligent. It can talk in convincingly human tones. If used in conjunction with specialized probes it can scan brains-even dead ones-to formulate semi-self-aware simulations of people that can communicate. That’s right: a computer as a medium in both the technical sense and the spooky sense. Technology even encroaches upon the realms of the occult in the world of Inter Ice Age 4, as it would seem supernatural/spiritual phenomena also submit to radical quantification. 

There’s a big twist, of course. Everything’s connected. Inter Ice Age 4 seems to suggest that humans operating under high tech nation states will have extreme difficulties adjusting to global crises that demand massive changes in how we all live. This is due mostly to rigid hierarchies and overspecialization. Each of us has our job, our role. We go to work secure in the knowledge that we have our chosen/imposed thing that we do. But if a big enough crisis threatens to overturn this order, how do we get everyone on board to make necessary changes to prevent disaster? Inter Ice Age 4 assumes that the powers that be would act coercively-that, in fact, a new power base would secretly emerge from within the established order to make otherwise impossible decisions for all of us. The reality disrupting crisis is just too severe to realistically expect squabbling atomized individuals to make effective democratic decisions. Even totalitarian Communism is too rigid, too stratified by the dictates of its cumbersome party elites to react in time. Inter Ice Age 4 is a provocation, in this sense, asking us to look beyond our current limits and roles to consider what lies beyond our specializations, our professionalisms, our nationalisms, our bigotries.

Inter Ice Age 4 also takes perverse joy in describing an aquatic mad science facility and what all it is doing to those human and animal fetuses. These passages are grotesquely comical in the way one expects from the cynically deranged Kobo Abe-a writer famously disillusioned with Japanese Imperialism, Soviet Communism, all forms of nationalism, and capitalism. I’m sure these passages describe impossible things . . . and yet there's so much detail that it’s weirdly convincing. Inter Ice Age 4 functions well as a pitch black science fictional comedy of errors. It even has a happy ending. Sorta.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #43: THE BEEKEEPER (2024)

Makes me root for colony collapse disorder.

THINGS NEVER SAID #11:

“Once, you lived in a world full of products. Now, all you have left is the love of your friends and family, the satisfaction of an existence in harmony with nature, and the thanks of a grateful nation. How I pity you!”

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #42: MADAME WEB (2024)

Human and digital assets appear on screen for a specific duration of time.

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #25:

Archival Rubber Duckies . . . nothing finer.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #41: MORBIUS (2022)

Peak content.

THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #9:

I got so much humanity that the Hindenburg Disaster hired me as a life coach.

PIXEL HUNT FOR THE BEER BOTTLE'S REDUMPTION.

 

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #40: VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE (2021)

This film contains minimal content.

AFTERMATH OF A WELTER OF OPIOID CONFESSIONALS.

 

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #39: VENOM (2018)

This film contains no discernible content.

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #24:

Internet Archive.

On a humpday.

On any day.

Every day.

NURSING A SERIOUS RESENTMENT OF THE SUN.

 

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #38: BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)

Now this would’ve been a perfect Joker movie.

THE WORTHY TRACE 2

 

. . . in the Final Era, they were even sequelizing WDT2099's shit . . .

. . . oh yes . . .

. . . that's how bleak it got . . .

. . . advice from those barren days . . .

. . . don't even say the word "sky," because people will just start weeping and re-enacting World War III with all the wrong costumes . . .

. . . but then everybody got used to everything . . .

. . . it was fine, or a near enough approximation of same . . .

FLOATING TOOL ICON.

 

OVERPRICED BONDAGE GEAR.

 

CRAP EXPECTATIONS #1:

I thought I would come and sit in the food court of an actual dead mall.

I’ve watched so many dead mall exploration videos on YouTube.

I figured I should get beyond the screen for a change.

I’ve got my notepad and my pen. I think of them as “mine” in the common sense, but I suspect that in the actual sense it might not be possible for mass produced objects to truly be mine. And yet . . . I just don’t have the time to manufacture my own supplies. Plastic is a hassle to manufacture on one’s own. Paper would be easier . . . but still a pain in the ass. I don’t have any idea how to make ink. There’s probably a how-to DIY video on YouTube. 

You know what? I should just save up my money and buy the damn paper, pen, and ink factories! That’s what I should do! And then I could avail myself of practically unlimited writing supplies and make billions selling the rest to my fellow consumers.

And then, once I’m a billionaire, I can launch a podgrift where I have ass-kissers and sycophants and fringe right-wing political figures and stand-up comedy jerkoffs praise my nuts for being such a brilliant businessman. 

That’s exactly what I should do.

That’s exactly what I should doo doo, isn’t it?

Because it’s a bunch of shit.

But, hey: this world runs on shit, doesn’t it?

Of course.

But that’s where the action is, can’t fight it, may as well get paid.

Sure.

Hmmm . . .

I should order some imaginary food.

Like a pretend tea party, but with overpriced pizza slices on paper plates, a styrofoam container of General Tso’s chicken, a miniscule side salad imprisoned within a plastic container that sorta resembles one of them Platonic solids-an octahedron-and a large soda in a paper cup with plastic lid’n’straw. 

It occurs to me, as I’m pretend picking at my salad, that any time someone walks out of sight around the corner of some structure that there should be a beat and then some sort of horrifying ripping’n’squelching’n’bonebreaking sound effects followed by blood squirting back into our frame of vision. I’m not saying people have to actually be dying or anything. It’s just an effect for fun, to add a little interest to the normal flow of events.

And, of course, if you go around the corner to investigate there should be a bloody trail across the floor, up the wall, and into a cinematically oversized air conditioning vent. Just for fun.

And if you investigate by crawling through the a/c vent you eventually find your way to a secret monstermaking lab that’s clearly gone to hell. Shattered glass. Sparking consoles. Chewed-up coils of intestines. Dismembered limbs. Severed heads. The lighting is shadowy, noirish. You keep getting glimpses of unutterable monstrosity out of the corners of your eyes. Just for fun.

And then, and then . . . oh ho . . . it gets better. Because then a shadowy figure steps out of the, uh, shadows-but he’s still shadowy. ‘Cause, like, he is the source of all shadows, you see, uh, and so all of the shadows are concentrated-not like shadows from concentrate because these are freshly squeezed shadows-but like all the freshly squeezed shadows have concentrated themselves in the entity of this sinister man who will give a really, like, just, uh, like, a super-fuckin’ dark speech explaining why he’s making monsters in the heart of the dead mall. I figure we can hire the folks who write True Detective to rip off Thomas Ligotti-again-for this bit. Or, y’know, if we’re on a budget I can just rip off the Ligotti stuff myself. I was reading Ligotti as a teenager well before that True Detective crap came along. I bought the Carroll and Graf edition of The Nightmare Factory from a discount pile at a Books-A-Million in 1998, so fuck all these Johnny Come Latelies. 

Yeah, y’know, maybe we’ll just economize from the jump.

Yeah.

Dead malls need more fun.

I watch all the dead mall videos . . . nothing ever happens. Do people really get scared of this liminal space bullshit? No wonder this country’s so fucked up. We’re literally leaping out of our skins at shadows, people, no substance to ‘em. You put me in the Backrooms you won’t see me running. I’d plant my feet, and beat the fuck outta anyone tries to mess with me. I’d take over the whole operation. Then I’d be the one chasing dipshits through the Backrooms-uwee hee hee heee!!

Oh, shit, I’m having too much fun.

As per usual.

Hmmm . . .

This imaginary salad’s alright.

Time to check out this imaginary overpriced pizza slice.

You know what mall food court food really needs?

I’ll tell you.

If you wanna know.

You do?

Okay.

Mall food court food would be so much more exciting . . . if . . . the overpriced pizza slices each came equipped with a cloaking device. We got cloaking devices for spaceships. Extraterrestrial big game hunters and cyborg super soldiers both avail themselves of thermoptic camouflage. Even that little punk Harry Potter has a cloak of invisibility. Pizza slices are way behind in the game.

Everybody wants convenience. People can’t handle the tension and terror of the hunt. Will you starve? Or will you eat? Or will you become a meal for a wildass slice? It used to depend on skill, didn’t it? We’ve tamed the pizza slices. No fight left in ‘em. No fight left in us, we’ve all gone soft. At least, if we give cloaking devices to these tamed pizza slices . . . well that could be something. Maybe not much. But it could be that nudge, y’know? Finally push the pizza slices into a new attitude, a new work ethic. Maybe that’s all it would take to even up the odds. 

Yeah, I dunno . . . this pretend pizza slice is kinda bland. It tastes more like bowling alley fare than mall food court food. 

I have only myself to blame. I knew I would be let down. I’ve been disappointed since I was born. When I was in the womb I just thought I was a god all the time. All those meats and juices existed to service me, my hunger, no difference between the two, Myself and the Hunger unified. That was Me. That was Universe. Me equals Universe. Fuck those Einstein equations. Then I get squeezed out. I grow up. And I eventually discover a disturbing truth-the reason for my existence . . .

My mother-bless her heart . . . or damn it.

I’m open minded.

My dear, sweet innocent mother . . . she thought cigarettes were birth control.

So . . . in a sense . . . I got an extra father in the tobacco industry. 

I’ll leave it up to your imagination whether you want to imagine the Marlboro Man or Joe Camel as my supplementary pops.

Tragic, but I do dig those Tony Scott directed cigarette ads. Banned from American TV, so thank the Sweet Risen Jesus for YouTube.

‘Tis a world of wonder.

So, here we are . . . closing in . . . on what must be . . . an apocalyptic finish . . .

Hmmm . . .

I got it.

Here it is.

Okay.

So.

We’ve got monstermaker labs in the secret heart of the dead malls.

We have a brave hero-me-who strides into these dilapidated places ready to kick ass.

Easy.

We just have me go into each dead mall, fight the monsters to the death, and have me run out chased by a big fireball as it all explodes.

A guaranteed dead mall demolition every episode.

Quality.

This ain’t that streaming piss.

This is streaming content, babe!

Uwee-hee-hee-heee!

There it is.

I did it.

Post-liminality.

I am here.

KABOOM!!!

It’s pretty neat.

I even have this imaginary General Tso’s chicken for later.

I just have this natural economizing instinct all the time.

Thought indivisible from action.

Action at the speed of thought.

Total economy . . .