TRUE CUDDLE.

 

I found this great podcast. It's a bit like a mystery. It's trying to determine the exact moment a cuddle begins. To this end, a high tech investigative team focused on the actions of a brindle pitbull named Sugarplum. Sugarplum loves to jump onto people's laps, loves to lick people's faces, and surely loves being petted and scratched and rubbed. True Cuddle attempts to determine if a cuddle begins in the mind, or is it to be marked at the moment of body contact. And what if someone doesn't like dogs? If a dog tries to cuddle a cat person, is it really a cuddle? Sure, the cat person might accept the dog upon their lap for the sake of politeness-but is that a true cuddle? What of the dog lover who thinks back to the time they've spent cuddling with Sugarplum-does a memory of a cuddle count as a true cuddle? And what of imaginary cuddles-'notional cuddles' as they are called in the relevant literatures of expertise-that may occur as conscious anticipations of actually cuddling with Sugarplum? Do notional cuddles count? Drama breaks out among the research team between the faction that believes in counting notionals/anticipatories/dreams of cuddles as legitimate and the faction that consists of strict physicalists who only recognize body-to-body contact as eligible for the official tally. Barricades are erected. Bunkerization of mentalities ensues. The consequential war is both brutal and total. Few survive. Good omni-folk soundtrack done in the post-ironic, pre-panic style. I especially appreciated the backing vocals provided by Sugarplum herself. Pacing issues, but I recommend it. A moderate recommend. 7 out of 10.

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW # -3: BAD ENDING.

 

Congratulations.

You fucked up the timeline. Life failed to evolve human consciousness. Everyone dresses badly. The Monkees eclipsed The Beatles. Eric Stoltz starred in Back to the Future. Oedipus loves his mom. E.T. on Atari became a paradigmatic bestseller influencing gamedev best practices to this very moment.

Congratulations.

Your save file is more corrupt than Congress. You didn't feel like writing down a longass password before the global warming heatwave melted the power grid when you were right at the final boss. Your adult diaper burst right as you were finding your grind-groove in the fortieth consecutive hour of your MMORPG session. Your hand's cramping up as the Second Quest of The Legend of Zelda's gettin' good to ya'.

Congratulations.

Your spiteful roommate deleted all the save slots from your EarthBound and Chrono Trigger carts making you hate original hardware for the rest of your days. No matter how hard and how long you blow into that Double Dragon cart it never says 'I love you' or even gives you a wink or a pat on the head-not so much as a goddamn 'Good job, my dude!' You crash the market in Wall Street Kid at the exact moment an actual stock market crash occurs in meatspace laying the groundwork for both your eventual unemployment and homelessness-impressive how you doubled up on all that, my dude! Most impressive!!

Congratulations.

You were the real monster all along. You were the true final boss but never knew it. The rubbled landscape was Earth all along. In the final cut scene you strip off your powered battlesuit to reveal embarrassing tightie whities. All this time you were nothing but an errand boy for grocery clerks. They were using you to get to them. Your imaginary friend turns out to be a serious asshole.

Congratulations.

You prevailed, you zapped all the bad guys, you saved the fuckin' day, the people owe you their lives, the elders are eternally grateful . . . however, you're too much of the world, you no longer fit in with the gutless normies and conformists, try not to look too fornlorn as you wander off into the vanishing point-

-as you wander away, you walk past John Wayne babying his arm as he halts along; you see Yojimbo throwing a stick into the air; you come across Mega Man's helmet; you arrive at the shore just in time to see Godzilla wading out into the middle of the water tank-

Congratulations.

In the end, Hell was the only reality-now march into the fire.

But if money is made in sufficiently large stacks a sequel becomes an attractive prospect-now march out of Hell, forged stranger and sharper than you ever were in your life, my dude, your quest log is overflowing!

Oh, but they cancelled the sequel when it was ninety percent complete-amble around the leaked build purgatory 'til the code derezzes.

Congratulations.

Victory has become indistinguishable from defeat. You and your nemesis destroy each other. Techno-civilization collapses and everyone's a caveperson all over again. Robots take over the whole operation. Your ass hurts. 

Congratulations.

You've suffered. You've doubted yourself. You receive an ambiguous ending-nothing worse than gnawing doubt. At least a burst adult diaper is an objective phenomenon that must be dealt with concretely. Fuck gaseous philosophizing.

Congratulations.

You lost. You're a loser. Maybe video games aren't really your thing. Your ass hurts. You stand up. You go outside. You almost weep at seeing the sun. You see people walking their dogs. You see couples smiling, holding hands, kissing, petting their dogs, taking selfies, throwing frisbees, all kinds of activities. A dog shits and a human with a repurposed plastic shopping bag over their hand cleans up the dogshit. You see, now, that you don't have to go it alone. People do things for each other, even for their pets. You smile serenely. You drop your tightie whities and take a fat shit in the green, green grass. Police assets arrive and show you no love. But now you know-the world is a braid of lies.

Congratu-

In the end, you become one with the global warming heatwave-you had to level up to 99 to do it-and you melt all the power grids your own self. You become the Power. The TRUE Power. You are now the Dispenser of Congratulations.

Like . . . Good Job, My Dude!!!

-May 2012-July 2022

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #29: WURM: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1991)

 

Camera pans across people in a science fiction setting inside a letterbox rectangle suspended in an abstracted void

Bridge scenes a la Trek

But your vessel is a mechamorphosing Jules Verne burrowing drill tank that also has a fighter jet mode

Captain of this ship is a beautiful green haired woman named Moby

Who is, um, a pop star?

She's got a great look in any case: green hair, red knee-high boots, shiny red superhero fetish gear all around,

and Moby's got a crew of much less glamorous people all around her,

game wasn't clear who or what these people are supposed to be-scientists? explorers? musicians? college students? 

I assume the instruction manual explains things, 

but I didn't have access to that, 

so I'm going by what's in the game. 

And it's kinda vague. 

I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be scientists, some kinda governmental survey team-their transforming flying drill tank is clearly an output of some kind of pricy military-industrial complex-but maybe they're some kind of private sector outfit? 

I guess that's possible. 

Maybe this world is one in which ultratech military-industrial-scientific complexes exist on the scale of small groups or families or teams, some kind of a post-nation state type of deal,

and/or

maybe the people are the outputs of sentient flying drill tanks who need meatspeople puttering around inside their bridges and cockpits to feel whole

-to fill hole-

some kind of posthuman longing for the creator-bipeds of yore type of deal,

some kinda whomadewho type of deal-

-the flying drill tank can alternate between a fighter jet form and a drill tank-but the drill tank can fly and drill through geological obstacles whereas the fighter jet can't drill through anything

-it's like the drill tank dreams of being a fighter jet, soaring through open skies, as opposed to burrowing deeper into the underworld, deeper into a dark past better left forgotten-

-your journey begins in the middle of things, visuals, terse dialogue, launching into side scrolling shooter action, wherein you lay waste to scores of strange, huge organisms who seemingly just happen to live there, 

or maybe they were bred for war by some secret nation beneath the surface of things,

and all this alternates with first person battles with giant boss monsters which you can only defeat by increasing your POSSIBILITY to 100%

which you do by a combination of communication 

and devastation

the communication part entails consulting your crew members for scientific analysis of the hulking boss beasts

the devastation part entails aligning your targeting reticle over scientifically determined weak spots on the monster's body,

and then Moby disembarks from the drill tank to wander mazelike passages until she stumbles into battles with acrobatic underworlders who flicker in and out of existence until you definitively end them with a combination of your raygun and your martial arts high kicks-

I was never sure if I was fighting high tech enemies with malfunctioning thermoptic camosuits or if they were merely half-ghost/half memories fighting one last hurrah against invading overworlders such as myself,

tedious little final stands

down here in the dark

but sometimes that's all an underworlder's got left-

but it shall all end 

once you've harvested power orbs from the corpses of all the boss monsters

which allows you to unlock a final cut scene

with a spectral hologram woman of yore filling an abstracted void 

with a segmented text scroll revealing a secret history of ancient vendettas sparking off into antediluvian Forever Wars-

usually you get this kind of text at the beginning of a science fantasy saga, but here you have to work for it, exposition dump as final reward-

-and then it's over.

You learn of humanity's cursed nature,

its vindinctive, bloodthirsty desires going all the way back to long vanished Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu,

our forbears constructed the Bomb within our Deepest Background,

our most subterranean selves,

source of all dreams of apocalyptic annihilation,

atomically permafucked from the jump,

only a hologram anime girl left to instill us with our most secret history,

to tell us that love is the only way,

to send us out of subterranean depths of vengeful ghosts nurturing obscure grudges with fading technologies,

maybe now

the drill tank can let go of its nagging dreams of bipedal meatspeople,

loose its supersonic self

to soar through open skies

no more shame in the posthuman

ever again

-May 2014-July 2022

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW # -2: LEAKED ENDING.

 

-a huge battle that obliterates the Flying Ziggurat of the Broken Emperor, but the occultic fallout zaps peoples' brains transforming them into hordes of Velveteen Executioners. A gauntlet of overwhelming foes feeds the player into a final dialogue with Agent Feldsparr, who reveals that the Broken Emperor is already dead. We see that the Emperor's attending physician was corrupted by Feldsparr, and used an obscenely long drill to put out His Worship's eyes. Quite graphic and protracted. Agent Feldsparr further reveals that he has absorbed the power of the Crawling Chaos at the heart of the world and afflicts the player with yet another gauntlet of infernal demon children who spam nonstop combat vomit that is both sticky and corrosive. Allegedly, the demon children were just supposed to be placeholders for the true enemies, since the demon children are the same assets from the substitute teacher minigame from earlier, but the leak made everyone think that the penultimate battle involved slaughtering scores of little kids. Both the phony outrage types and the phony edgelords fired up the hot takes for and against, and Obligate Interactive was 'pressured' to issue a statement that the leaked ending was a 'work in progress and did not necessarily reflect the final form in-game content would take.' Of course, the conspiracy clowns said this was all a staged controversy designed to gin up sales. There was also consternation that Agent Feldsparr-the beloved protagonist of three previous Excellent Blazer installments-was revealed as both a traitor and the final boss. Analysis of a leaked build further frustrated the fans as it seemed that much of Agent Feldsparr's heel turn happened offscreen. Clues were spread throughout, but these were considered too subtle, bending the reliable Excellent Blazer action roleplaying formula towards an unwieldy mix of postmodern science fantasy swashbuckler and hair-pullingly granular police procedural. In an interview with Noncritical, lead developer William D. Tucker said, "So, our overall vision was that Agent Feldsparr was overdue for promotion from protagonist to questgiver, which we thought would present us with so many opportunities to evolve the paradigm of in-game emergent storytelling beyond anything in the previous games and also give us the synergistic leg-up within the 21st century context." Anomymous sources revealed that Tucker was absent for much of the production, and only swooped in at the end when half the creative sub-leads ended up in ICU from toxic overwork and cluster-nervous breakdowns. Tucker allegedly had no interest in sword and sorcery and would often give the surviving staff long, winding, utterly impenetrable discourses about the 'deep metaphysical paralellisms of crime and heroism in This, our post-9/11 Context.' He would then proceed to host screenings of perilously obtuse re-edits of popular television shows such as Miami Vice, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cop Rock, and an apparently limitless number of animatics he had devised for a mecha-themed wholly unauthorized reboot of The McLaughlin Group. An anonymous source said, "William was a lot of fun. But he was out of his depth. Most of the cycle he was gone, attending acrostics themed orgies at various undisclosed locations deep within the suburbs of Illinois, Minnesota, and Atlanta. And he seemed to have an interest in infusing that sort of content into the already convoluted braided questline 'tangle structures' that the previous lead developer-H.H. Brill-had gone thoroughly insane engineering from scratch. None of us wanted to cross the boss, y'know, I mean Brill was a genius but also an utter tyrant. I never had any problems with Brill, since I was one of his favorites, but the guy was a monster. Brill was actually the one who put most of the team in hospital. And so along comes William, also insane, but in a benign way, and now we're losing productivity, we're behind on our benchmarks, looks like the money people are gonna shut us down-and that's when William just bought the whole opearation out from under everybody, which was a shock. I guess those acrostics orgies were raking it in-who would've guessed? And from that point onwards William declared a new phase of development. Oh, what did he call it-it was something like,uh, something like 'The Reinstatement of Timelessness Initiative,' or words to that effect. In effect this was what we now call Permacrunch, so in a sense, you could call William a pioneer, right? And pioneers, if they don't die horrible deaths, then they tend to survive but with a lot of trauma, an abundance of recurrent agonies, and not much joy in living-but the breakthroughs are killer. So, y'know, I'm mostly positive on William. If I were still capable of leaving my secure compound without screaming uncontrollably in irrational panic, I'd love to work on another project with the guy. Like, in an instant. But, well, y'know, I'm not really up for that these days. So . . ."

-October 2021-July 2022

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #28: METAL GEAR NES (1988)

 

self-destruct sequence: engaged

cue the music of desperate escape

the music of ferocious exhilaration in defiance of the Grim Reaper riding your ass

your guns your bombs your blades your stealth your key cards your bullshit

let it all drop

now is the time

for your legs to work'n'pump'n'carry all of your cheeks across the finish line,

there's no one left to rescue,

there's no more ranks to attain,

there's no one left to kill,

there's no place to hide,

there's no more nonsense to collect,

you must run from the annihilating spite,

the sore loser auto-destruct grudge, the final gift of a bitter final boss, 

fuck that guy forever,

fuck his guns, fuck his hardened survival bunkers, fuck his ammo dumps, fuck his mercenary errand boys, fuck his minefields, fuck his tanks, fuck his flag, fuck his memory,

run for your life, for your Now,

don't stop 'til the staff roll,

never feel asleep ever again,

and maybe just never stay still ever again,

there's no Heaven Beyond,

there's only the Now,

don't ever get locked into the Paranoiac's Militarized Happy House: the Siege Fortress,

the mausoleum,

the monumental man,

stay meats,

stay Now,

stay running . . .

-May 2022-July 2022

MOVIE REVIEW: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

 Produced/Directed/Additional Photography by Tobe Hooper

Story/Screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper

Cinematography by Daniel Pearl

Lighting by Lynn Lochwood

Art Direction by Robert A. Burns

Grandfather's Makeup by W.E. Barnes

Music by Toby Hooper and Wayne Bell

Edited by Sallye Richardson and J. Larry Carroll

Starring

Marilyn Burns as Sally

Paul A. Partain as Franklin

Allen Danziger as Jerry

William Vail as Kirk

Teri McMinn as Pam

Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface

Jim Siedow as BBQ Old Man

Edwin Neal as Self-Mutilating Hitchiker

John Dugan as Grandpa (Non-Munster)

Ed Guinn as Helpful Trucker

John Larroquette as Narrator

. . .

"A whole family of Draculas . . ."

. . .

"If I have anymore fun today, I don't think I'm gonna be able to take it!"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

We begin with scrolling text onscreen. No Star Wars in sight, babe. Text scroll tells us that what we're about to see is all true, but we know it's a movie, so we know this is bullshit. But it's a nice text scroll. Logical. Step by step. Clause by clause. We are promised horror. John Larroquette nicely overplays the bogus moralistic tone. Real cute. He should narrate one of them thar true crime podgrifts. That would be the cutest. This logical, moralistic text doesn't exactly lie to us in any meaningful way, but I think it also exists to be cut to pieces by all that follows. 

Following boring, respectable text we get gristly corpses staged as studio art installations and images of solar flares-I flash on Michael Ironside telling Ronny Cox that he's got sunspots in Total Recall-and I'm put in mind of the nonsensical outer space explanations offered up for why the dead are up and roaming around on flesh patrol in the background of Night of the Living Dead. We get photographic flashes on gruesome meats-I flash on the swinging photographer from Blow-Up, like this is a sequel, where the guy ended up after fucking around with tennis mimes-and we wonder what kind of people dig up corpses for art school projects. 

We've got a group of young people travelling in a van to see someone's grandparent's grave. They also plan on checking out the deceased's property. Unknown actors. Perhaps we can better project onto people that look normal, that don't look like movie stars-

You wander off the beaten path, find the house behind the house, get killed by people who have also wandered off the beaten path. But they wandered off awhile ago, and they don't want company. Not in the usual sense. Let me put it this way: they have a use for you, just not a social one. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre these people who wandered off so long ago-it's like they've become living traps. They lie in wait, you blunder into their area, and then they spring on you. Not for survival reasons. Yes, they will torture, butcher, eat you, and wear you-but it's kinda more for entertainment than for essential nutrition. They could just buy their food at the grocery store and go clothes shopping at a department store like everybody else. But they have to be extra, I guess. It's a bit of a paradox: they want to be left alone, but once you're in their clutches they have so much fun with you that you're easily the highlight of their week. You have become their playmates, their products, their breakfast/lunch/dinner, their snack-I flash on the strange dark goo running down Rudy Giuliani's head as he blubbers incoherently to the press-their furniture, their art, their sport, their fashion-

Redneck cannibal hipster fucks who just cannot settle for storebought. They just gotta craft like a motherfucker from locally sourced materials-I flash on a crossover between Portlandia and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-

Imagine you're walking through the woods at night. Maybe you're a regular for night walks in the woods. You might be a true outdoorsperson. Or maybe it took a lotta psyching yourself up to get out into nature. Perhaps you're freaked out by the dark, by unknowable shadows, by bears that are stronger than you, by large spiders, by venomous snakes, by sinkholes that twist your ankles, by allergens that puff up your face and choke off your oxygen, by phantom serial killers 'cause you spend too much time listening to dumbass true crime podgrifts produced/hosted by talentless hacks-and what's with all the phony moralizing they thread into the true crime podgrifts? You know very well rape and torture and murder are atrocities. It's not like you're a conservative Supreme Court Justice-

Imagine you're walking through the woods at night. You become aware of heavy steps and heavy breathing. You look towards the noise. You see a hulking man hustling towards you with a chainsaw in his hands. You run. The chainsaw wielding man mountain chases you. You run forever. The hulking chainsaw dude chases you forever. Maybe you get used to it over time. Maybe this situation becomes your New Fake Normal. Maybe the chainsaw guy is just kidding around, y'know, maybe this is just his version of horseplay and/or grabass. You never know if you can never trust, Dear Reader.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a frightful sequence of a woman being chased for what feels like forever through woods at night by a man with a chainsaw. It's pretty simple, really. An implacable killer chases a potential victim. The potential victim screams for help-no help is coming-and she runs and runs and runs. And her would-be killer runs and runs and runs after her squealing and gasping with orgasmic delight. We know this guy means business 'cause we've already seen him kill. Time stretches in my mind as I watch. I'm sure if I timed the chase, it wouldn't be that long. Objectively. The movie's total running time is under ninety minutes. It'll all be over soon enough. What's the big damn fuss about, eh? 

Later, this woman is tied to a chair and tormented by the chainsaw guy and his family. We get a series of extreme close-ups of the woman's eyes bugging, and we hear her nonstop screaming. Absolute terror induces absolute attention, a widening of the victim's awareness. Earlier, we see her crashing through a window, and we'll see her do it again. Absolute terror propels the victim to bust through artificial barriers in pursuit of survival and safety. Is this a hint about the true origins of the brickwall shattering Kool Aid Man? What hounds the Kool Aid Man through that wall? Will we ever know?

Earlier, we're told through an audio collage of radio news about all kinds of things going wrong. We hear about corpses getting dug up out of graves. Some parts of these corpses are missing, presumed stolen. Some corpses are posed and propped up like pranks and/or art installations inside of cemetaries. An exploded oil rig burns out of control. Inexplicable murders, suicides, and murder/suicides. A sheriff insists that this rash of depravities are no doubt caused by out-of-state elements. Not our people, no-sirree-Robert. Artificial borders and boundaries don't do shit except give authoritarians bogus talking points to rhetorically jerk off the Nixonian Silent Majority. It's fine. 

Randomness is a big deal in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Chance. Luck goes one way, and then it goes another. Normal people blunder into a den of killers, but then the killers turn out to be equal parts stupid and creative. The killers have home field advantage. They know the terrain. They know what they want, which can get you pretty far in this life. But the killers don't have any flexibility. Which usually isn't a problem. But then this inflexibility collides with a victim's ferocious will to survive. Note that Right and Wrong have no major and/or supporting roles in this cast. Note that cops do not save anyone from anything, nor do they bother to show up, even though we get such certain pronouncements from a sheriff over the radio. Observe the flayed face that serves as a pleasantly glowing lamp shade. Give the killers their due: they use every last part.

MOVIE NOVELIZATION REVIEW: THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975)

 Novelization by Bill S. Ballinger.

From a screenplay by Robert Clouse.

Published by Warner Books in November of 1975.

. . . 

"There are times when a man must look at another and trust him with his life, or something even more valuable. He cannot ask that man whether he is a good man . . . or if he is going to betray him. He has to look at him and decide."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

In a nameless city-well, it probably used to be New York, so it's not a 'nameless' city, it actually/probably lost the name it had for so long-

In a city that lost its name due to all the cataclysms-nuclear war, famine, economic collapse, petroleum exhaustion, civil wars in every bedroom and on every block-humans have sealed off different groupings of what used to be apartment and office buildings and set up communes where people have rooftop urban agriculture and rainwater catchers so they can continue to eat and drink. One might assume they're also still using whatever's left of the aquifers, but it's best not to think about that. People horde canned goods, but those are going away, along with all the other delights and conveniences of the mass produced highly disposable societies of yore. The narrative is vague, but we are well past the 1980s. No more cars are being manufactured. Later for nation states-the logic of nationalism was so self-consuming. Later for religion-no great loss. Money don't mean shit-the logic of capitalism was so self-consuming. No electricity, no air conditioning-no Pac-Man, no Space Invaders, no Death Race 2000, no Missile Command-well, shit and fuck! Outside the communes are the 'Street People,' roving gangs of bandits'n'cannibals that allow the commune dwellers to feel superior to the unhoused and, also, terrified of same. I got the impression that some Street People groups were better organized than others, but this was not fully elaborated in the text. We are observing the action from the perspective of a commune known as the Barony.

Wouldn't you know it-the Barony is led by a man called . . . the Baron. The Baron isn't actual nobility, nor do the people of the commune actually believe in ranks or titles or noble this'that'or'the'other. They believe in jobs to be done, and Leader is a job which must be filled. The Baron was just a name picked on a whim to denote the job/role of a leader, and it somehow stuck. The Barony, by a similar process, became the name which these particular commune dwellers adopted to distinguish their turf from everybody else's turf. Nor does the Baron himself think he's anything special. He's old, but I got the impression he's been the Baron for a long time partly against his will and partly by his own choice, so we are not necessarily dealing with a cut-and-dried case of gerontocracy here. 

The Baron's gig isn't so bad, really. He gets his own office. He's got lots of books and maps to pour over. He fantasizes about leaving the city-just like many New Yorkers of yore did-and he's got a private stash of delicious cigars. Perhaps, once he's smoked his way through all those stogies, his mouth and teeth will fall off, and he can die of dehydration-or starvation if he can still take fluids.The downside is that the Baron has to make a lot of tough decisions: crime, punishment, security, street combat. If someone steals or kills or rapes within the Barony, the Baron is the guy who has to make the decision to exile that person into the urban wasteland with a vest of jingle bells to draw a cannibal mob of Street People. If the Barony's running low on supplies, the Baron's the one to lead foraging  expeditions out into the creepy ruins of the blighted city. If there's a war with a gang of Street People or a hostile commune, the Baron is dutybound to lead the charge. But, if all is calm, the Baron can sit in his office, puffing a cigar, and re-reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire(where did it all go wrong?) or Day of Trinity(who thought nukes were a good idea?) or Thirteen Days(how do you slick your way out of a doomsday standoff?) or Earth Abides(oh, that's what they thought would happen)  or The Story of O(just some leisure reading) or whatever. Better than Wal-Mart or McDonald's. 

The Barony has a scientific greenthumb named Cal who has bred a strain of famine-resistant seeds. The Baron sees these seeds as a potential way out of extinction, but he has no faith in the ability of the people of the Barony or the larger city to put these seeds to good use. The Baron knows the cruelty and vindictiveness of his people all-too-well even when measured against the bloodthirsty Street People. The commune dwellers are just a little more comfortable and self-absorbed than their unhoused fellow humans is all. But what can the Baron do? He has been put into his job/role not to demonstrate moral leadership or elevate people's ethics or sense of social justice but merely to maintain status quo. The Baron knows not how to speak to the hearts of his people. 

There's a kinda-sorta no man's land outside of the communes that serves as a public square to facilitate barter and other forms of exchange. A muscular man appears here, all alone, standing shirtless, eyes closed, presenting himself to the highest bidder. This is Carson, the titular Ultimate Warrior, who is very good at killing people with his hands, his feet, and his big-ass knife. Carson makes such a ritual display to signify both his strength and his mercenary status, though it was not clear to me why a gang of cannibals would be put off from converting his impressive physique to nutritional purposes. The point is that Carson is a wandering badass motherfucker-like Shane, like Yojimbo, like the Man With No Name-and he's going to provide the action sequences for the next seventy or so pages. The Ultimate Warrior is a Wild West melodrama in post-apocalyptic drag. 

The Baron hires on Carson. The Baron had hired a mercenary previously, and there's a great speech describing the tragedy of such a life: accumulated wounds leading to escalating disability ending in suicide. Carson knows all of this already, and either doesn't care or sees no other way to live in a post-civilizational world. I interpreted Carson as a guy who preferred to die on his feet, but the narrative makes it clear that such a desire might be nothing more than a macho fantasy in a life that wears you down with a million cuts. All the same, Carson has plenty of opportunity to demonstrate his killing prowess against Street People and a particularly nasty bunch of goons led by a dude named Carrot, who turns out to be Carson's nemesis. The action stuff is somewhat perfunctory, and lacks the gruesome panache of later post-apocalyptic fantasias such as The Road Warrior, Fist of the North Star, and Fury Road, but it does lead to an acceptable payoff. The Ultimate Warrior doesn't completely back down from its bleak premises even as it indulges in one-against-all battle fantasies.

The Baron has a secret mission in mind for Carson, one based on the hardy seeds cultivated by Cal. The Baron is also looking to get his pregnant daughter, Melinda, to safer climes. But in a key moment, the Baron tells Carson to choose the seeds over Melinda if he can't save both. I appreciated the bleakness and cynicism of these machinations. But from another perspective the Baron is extending his sense of care beyond his own comfort and position since this secret mission will fatefully put him at odds with his own people. The Baron trusts a stranger over his 'family,' in a sense, and I find this fascinating to think about. It's like the Baron is developing a more global outlook even if it's too little or too late. 

A last minute twist suggests that maybe one of the core malfunctions of this world is breakdown of communications. Everybody's retreated into communes and gangs and aggression and paranoia-not wholly without reason-but the appearance of some friendly strangers suggests that the city isn't so dead after all. This is right at the end, so it must be significant, right?

The Ultimate Warrior is no masterpiece. It's movie tie-in product. You get about one hundred thirty pages of entertainment. I read it in one go on a Sunday night. The cover features a cheesy drawing of Yul Brynner as Carson and Max von Sydow as the Baron. Don't ask me about the actual movie, I've never seen it. If I was living in a post-apocalyptic world, this book would be the only option for enjoying this story. I could've even smoked a gross cigar like some asshole while reading it, but I didn't. I had some strong black coffee and that was good enough for me.