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.