Nasty woman Mary Elizabeth Winstead wakes up chained to a cot in survivalist John Goodman’s basement in 10 Cloverfield Lane, a genre-bending experience in the tradition of Cabin in the Woods (2012) and The Signal (2014). Is Winstead, recalling Misery (1990), the prisoner of an obsessive loser who intends to possess her sexually – or is Goodman telling the truth when he claims that he only intends to keep her alive and that the world outside is uninhabitable, that everyone she knows and loves is dead, and that civilization has collapsed after a catastrophic apocalypse? Is it the Russians? The Martians? Or is it just a tall tale to dissuade his uncooperative guest from attempting to escape? Finding out is as frightening and fun as being held captive in John Goodman’s basement!
[WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS]
4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that 10 Cloverfield Lane is:
4. Alt-media-ambivalent. Goodman is “like a black belt in conspiracy theory”, a mixed bag of a man simultaneously tuned-in and misled as to a number of topics. The fact that, in addition to aliens and Russkies, he is also concerned about “Al Qaeda” seems to suggest that the film is condescendingly and disingenuously conflating neoconservative outlets and various conspiracy-oriented media of varying quality.
3. Anti-redneck. Goodman’s character represents a typical cosmopolitan millennial’s idea of a conservative Republican: a slovenly gun nut, “authoritarian personality”, and “no touching” prude scared of Martians and the prospect of a real-life Red Dawn scenario. He is stuck in a vanished American past, as evidenced by his Frankie Avalon records and VHS collection. The fact that major elements of his assertions turn out to be correct prompts the deliciously implied question at the heart of the film. Which would be more horrifying for a millennial woman – the prospect of an alien invasion that razes everything and everyone she knows, or the possibility that, for all of these years, those hateful, judgmental, beer-bellied, rifle-toting, misogynistic deplorables were right?
2. Disaster-alarmist. Turning viewer expectations upside-down, Goodman’s conspiracy-theory-fueled survivalism comes in handy when the shit really hits the fan. Rather than rejecting extreme preparedness outright, the movie suggests that liberals, rather than pointing and laughing at the conservatives, ought to appropriate such foresight and associated skill sets for themselves. The idea that fashion design could become a survival skill in a post-apocalyptic landscape is no doubt highly appealing to a number of young women and homosexuals with tacky, clashing heaps of student loan debt in the closet.
1. Feminist/anti-family. Goodman presents a negative patriarchal archetype (“I want us to be a happy family.”). Winstead also recounts a traumatic memory of seeing a man cruelly pulling his daughter by the arm and hitting her. Perhaps under the influence of such impressions of family life, she rejects the possibility of reuniting with her boyfriend in order to strike out on her own as a superheroine and save the planet – a choice about which the director, Dan Trachtenberg, expresses a cuckolded you-go-girl enthusiasm in his audio commentary.
The second season of HBO’s bleak series True Detective shifts the scene of the sickness from creepy gothic Louisiana to dystopian southern California, a setting with a more strikingly chaotic ethnic mix that lends itself to an exploration of race relations in America. The plot this time around concerns the intertwined lives and fortunes of vicious but decent-hearted gangster Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) and tortured and tarnished detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) and their investigation into the convoluted circumstances of a politician’s death.
Vince Vaughn as Frank Semyon
True Detective presents a world of demographic horror, an America in which racial loyalties are nonexistent and fealty of any other kind is hard to come by. Whites, blacks, Mexicans, and Jews are all crooked. Mexicans, while distrustful and destructive of whites, also think nothing of killing each other, while whites, finding themselves marooned in an increasingly hostile and meaningless world, grasp at anything they can get. Race-based tensions nevertheless continue to simmer beneath the surface of several of the characters’ interactions. Semyon is a self-made man and a bigot, a walking contradiction who dislikes the changing demographics of the U.S. and seethes with an angry white man’s discontent but is also and at the same time cynically complicit in the smuggling of illegal aliens into his country.
Semyon is also an anti-Semite and calls Israeli gangster Osip Agronov (Timothy Murphy) a “KGB kike motherfucker”. True Detective is rather daring in identifying the true ethnic character of the “Russian” mafia. The series gives Semyon more than one moment of triumphant crowd-pleasing sadism, and it is significant that one of these is reserved not for one of the Jewish gangsters, but for an especially weaselly specimen of the Shabbos goy, or gentile who sells his treacherous services to the Jewish enemy. Leonard Cohen’s excellent theme song, “Nevermind”, is interesting in this context for featuring the lines “I was not caught, though many tried. / I live among you, well-disguised.”
Fred Ward as Mr. Velcoro
In another scene, Semyon pummels and then pulls out the teeth of a mouthy brown-skinned inferior (Pedro Miguel Arce) – content that serves as vicarious satisfaction for Caucasian viewers fed up with pretending to like their laughingly darkening world. Representing such viewers is Velcoro’s father (Fred Ward), a retired policeman who found he was no longer able to carry out his duties properly with the advent of the fuck-the-police zeitgeist that found its explosive expression in the 1992 L.A. riots. The U.S. as it presently stands is “no country for white men,” he observes as he enjoys a black-and-white Kirk Douglas movie. He is one of two aged policemen in True Detective who remarks that blacks’ intensifying hostility toward police made it increasingly difficult for them to do their jobs.
The audience, one suspects, is expected to feel a mingled contempt and sympathy for this old man who has given up on life and squanders what little of it is left to him getting high and living in a televised, mythologized past. A parallel character is the disgusting, whorish ex-dancer mother (Lolita Davidovich) of highway patrolman and ex-mercenary Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch). Like old Mr. Velcoro, she prefers the comfort of watching old movies to doing anything productive with her years of decline. Morally and physically decrepit, her narrow, nostalgic tribalism takes the incestuous form of a selfish attachment to her son, who clearly wants nothing to do with her.
True Detective also offers multiple examples of interracial relationships, but none of these is deep, lasting, or free of damaged trust. As one of the season’s other songs suggests, “There’s no future. There’s no past.” – an assessment that could easily apply to America’s multiracial experiment as depicted in these episodes. A feeling of imminent doom pervades not just the lives of the principal characters, but the life of the proposition nation. In one episode, Detective Velcoro visits the set of a cheesy post-apocalyptic action movie – a cartoon version of the American century taking shape around those dumb enough not to notice what has been happening. Indeed, the characters who survive the final episode are those who choose to flee the country – no livable future seemingly being available to them here.
This might be the new punk on the block and so not pack the nostalgic wallop of a Road Warrior, an Escape from New York, or even a Hell Comes to Frogtown; but technically and in terms of its crazed epic scope and its grandiosity, Mad Max: Fury Road is the greatest post-apocalyptic action movie ever made. Viewers able to hold their noses through the feminist rubbish gauntlet will enjoy the wildest ride of their lives, with Bane himself, Tom Hardy, stepping capably into the boots and onto the gas pedal where the great Mel Gibson left off.
5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that this frenetic and insanely brutal movie is:
3. Green. Charlize Theron hopes to escape with a harem to the “green place” where she grew up, but finds it hopelessly polluted when she gets there. Anthropogenic climate change, an opening montage suggests, is to blame for the sorry state of the world.
2. Anti-white. In the “war boys”, Fury Road offers viewers a cartoon version of identitarians: unhealthy, exaggeratedly pale skinheads whose unprovoked berserker raids, they hope, will earn them a throne of honor in Valhalla. The continued casting of race traitoress Charlize Theron in this or any movie, furthermore, must be considered anti-white.
1. Misandrist. In this adventure, everybody’s favorite road-ripping desert nomad gets mixed up with a bunch of escaped concubines hoping to find a better life for themselves in the wilderness with a tribe of (presumably lesbian) Amazons. Previously, their entire existence has been a degrading matter of subservient boredom, sex slavery, and serial pregnancies. This is the future to which all women are doomed if they fail to rise up and revolutionarily expropriate the means of reproduction!
[Readers might also be interested in Germanicus Fink’s reflections on Mad Max: Fury Road.]
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Raise a generation on energy drinks, video games, Tarantino, torture porn, and perpetual war for perpetual peace, and what do you get? Crap like Infinite Santa 8000 – or, as it shall alternately be dubbed for the purposes of this review, Infinite Running Time 8 Hours. The cinematic equivalent of a twelve-year-old boy doodling weed-smoking skulls in the margin of a worksheet, Infinite Running Time 8 Hours is a crudely computer-animated post-apocalyptic adventure with cyborg Santa Claus battling robots and monsters for control of a futuristic wasteland. “You’re sick. All these things do is kill,” Santa at one point accuses his android-manufacturing arch-enemy Dr. Shackleton. He might just as well be speaking to Infinite Santa creators Michael Neel and Greg Ansin, both of whom this reviewer is led to suspect still gobble their boogers between bouts of World of Warcraft.
Set to a soundtrack of grinding, monotonous heavy metal music and ceaseless grunts, groans, gunfire, and obligatory jolly chuckling, Infinite Running Time 8 Hours is so dull and depressing it makes the experience of listening to Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report feel like a life-affirming epiphany. A one-joke concept stretched to feature length, the story consists of little more than scenes of dismemberment, torture, holocaust, and other carnage as Santa whimpers and says things like, “I’ll get you, you scumbag turd!” and “Unwrap this, you bastards!” Worst, though, is that nothing of value is ever at stake in the story. In a world of nothing but robots and mutants – a world in which Santa Claus himself is ultraviolent, foulmouthed, and full of soulless wiring and circuitry – does it really matter if evil wins or if mad scientist Dr. Shackleton conquers what remains of the planet?
One star. Positively the worst movie this writer has had the poor judgment to pick for review since beginning his blog. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Infinite Running Time 8 Hours is:
3. Pro-gun. Survivalist Santa keeps an impressive stock of firepower for dispatching Dr. Shackleton’s minions.
2. Ostensibly antiwar in its depiction of a conflict-ravaged, post-apocalyptic Earth, Infinite Running Time 8 Hours nevertheless revels in the insipid spectacle of wide-scale annihilation for nihilistic giggles.
Here is a worthy addition to the venerable Apes franchise. Like the original Heston classic, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is by turns poignant, thought-provoking, and unintentionally humorous in telling the tragic story of what befalls humanity in the wake of its decimation by a simian flu and the resulting collapse of civilization.
What little remains of Bay Area humanity lives together in downtown San Francisco, led by capable ex-soldier Dreyfus (Gary Oldman). The civilizationally ascendant apes, led by intelligent chimpanzee Caesar (Andy Serkis), inhabit the forest surrounding the city, unaware that humans have survived the plague.
When a chance encounter and death bring the two mutually resentful species into conflict, members of both groups believe their continued existence is at risk. At stake in this exciting installment of the franchise is whether peace is possible or full-scale war between the two tribes is an inevitability.
4.5 stars.
[WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS]
Ideological Content Analysis indicates that the symbolism or subtextual resonance of the ape/human relationship in Dawn is variable, changing in meaning from scene to scene, so that a single comprehensive interpretation is impossible. Anecdotal analysis follows, however, yielding the following diagnoses:
4. Multiculturalist. All races live together in harmony in progressive post-collapse San Francisco. The diverse makeup of the human element, including blacks, softens the association that racially insensitive viewers are likely to draw between apes and blacks. That parallel is exploited, however (see no. 3), and the abstract sense that the apes are akin to the teeming anthropoid scatology constituting the world outside the West – and, increasingly, the West itself – is also unavoidable. (cf. no. 1)
3. Anti-gun. With the planet essentially set back to zero, the original sin that disrupts this new potential Eden is not the eating of fruit, but the bearing of arms. Carver (Kirk Acevedo), a character who bears a suspicious resemblance to George Zimmerman and who, given his Anglo name, is presumably supposed to be some kind of “white Hispanic”, sets the plot in motion when he panics and shoots a (no doubt angelic) chimp in the forest. Apes, at first hopeful of peaceful relations, confiscate and destroy a few of the humans’ guns. Carver later disobeys Caesar’s terms of cooperation by sneaking a gun into ape territory, putting a baby chimp in danger and alerting emotionally susceptible moviegoers that the guns in their homes are a multitude of dead baby tragedies waiting to happen.
2. Green. It is man’s energy dependency which brings him into conflict – in this case, with apes – when Dreyfus determines to get a power plant operating again. No alternative energy is available, viewers are told, the implication being that, had America’s government, in its wisdom, been allowed to invest more of its tax booty in clean, green energy alternatives, the humans’ post-apocalyptic plight might have been avoided.
1. Crypto-Zionist. The misleading notion that the American energy appetite – lust for oil, for instance – is responsible for drawing the country into its conflicts abroad only serves to distract from the reality that it is the Israel lobby, not hootin’, hollerin’ Texas oil barons, who have exercised a Svengali-like influence on American foreign policy in recent decades.
More interestingly, the climactic sequence of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes invites an interpretation according to which the humans, led by Dreyfus, are Jews, and the apes are the primitive gentile hordes. As this interpretation would have it, the climax of the movie presents a kind of encrypted dialogue between two competing Zionisms. Some explanation may be necessary for the uninitiated in matters Judaic as to why goyim might be cast as apes. What too few gentiles understand is that Talmud-taught Jews hold non-Jews to be subhuman, their word for a gentile woman, shiksa, meaning an “unclean animal”. The Yiddish slur goyim, furthermore, is used synonymously with “cattle“.
The name of the human leader, Dreyfus, calls to mind the notorious Dreyfus Affair, which, as Jewish history would have it, constitutes one of the most rabid episodes of anti-Semitism in the history of Christendom (practically the entire history of Christianity being a mere buildup to the “Holocaust” if Jewish historian Raul Hilberg is to be believed). The name Dreyfus, then, suggests a Zionist martyr, as do his words and actions in this momentous sequence.
Toward the end of the film, the simian army has taken control of San Francisco, with bloodthirsty ape usurper Koba* (Toby Kebbell) and his followers occupying a downtown tower as headquarters. Dreyfus and his fellow human-Jews, unknown to the ape-gentiles, have planted explosive charges under the tower – a tactic clearly reminiscent of the Israeli Mossad‘s controlled demolition of the Twin Towers on 9/11.
Dreyfus, defending his decision to eradicate the ape-gentiles when fellow human Malcolm (Jason Clarke) expresses his horror and his hope that ape/human reconciliation is still possible, explains that he is detonating the tower in order to save the human race (i.e., Jews). His position, in other words, is that every ape-gentile must die so that Jew-humans might survive. He then proceeds to explode the tower, himself along with it, considering his act of mass murder a selfless martyrdom. The actual result of his action, however, is that full-scale conflict between ape-gentiles and Jew-humans is now a permanent feature of their inextricable histories. Ape-gentiles will always be hostile and on the defensive from now on because the vindictive Jew-humans can “never forget”.
The Jewish screenwriters of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes appear to intend for their film to function both as a symbolic cover-up for the Jews in subliminally excusing them from principal responsibility for America’s wars of intervention – and, for the tuned-in members of the audience, as a warning to the hardcore terrorist Zionist establishment represented by such figures as Adelson, Netanyahu, Silverstein, Chertoff, Zelikow, Kissinger, Zakheim, Krauthammer, Kristol, Perle, and the rest of the Talmudic rats responsible for the Jew World Order under which gentiles are currently dying and suffering unnecessarily. Push too hard, they caution, and you might just give away the game.
*”Koba”, whether coincidentally or not, was the nickname of supposedly anti-Semitic Joseph Stalin (responsible for the “black years” of Soviet Jewry).
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Co-scripted and directed by eccentric rocker Neil Young (using the pseudonym Bernard Shakey), Human Highway is the weirdo sort of movie destined from its inception to become an item of cult interest. Young stars as lamebrained mechanic Lionel, who dreams of rock stardom while making a mess of his duties at Dean Stockwell’s roadside gas station and diner, where coworkers include Sally Kirkland, Russ Tamblyn, and Dennis Hopper. The diner is situated near a nuclear power plant where the boys from Devo work and are exposed to so much radiation that they actually glow with red light. Stockwell, who has inherited the diner from his father and finds it in financial disarray, gets the idea to torch his unprofitable business and be rid of it; but will he be able to hatch his plot before toxic waste, radiation poisoning, or a full-blown nuclear holocaust throws a monkey wrench into his plans?
More of a gratuitously bizarre curiosity than a genuinely admirable film, Human Highway remains a valuable document of the prevailing new wave musical sensibility of the day as applied to cinema, and also conveys the anxieties of the eighties about the possibility of nuclear holocaust and the threat to man and the environment posed by toxic waste. This black comedy’s script, unfortunately, too often aims for the random and leaves most of the ideas and characters underdeveloped, while the production values are on the order of a typical episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse – which, depending upon the viewer’s individual taste, could be a blessing or a curse. The film really starts to fall apart from a narrative standpoint during the second half, with (for some reason) a montage of Native Americans dancing around a bonfire of wooden Indians and Lionel dreaming after being knocked unconscious of rock-and-roll stardom and excess, and letting a groupie suck milk off of him with a straw. The high point of Human Highway is an extended bout of down-and-dirty, feedback-fried riffing and jamming between Neil Young and Devo, with the team totally freaking out and looking like a bunch of psychos.
4 out of 5 glass parking lots.
Incident at Channel Q (1986) *****
Al Corley headlines this trash heap treasure as Rick Van Ryan, a smug, sarcastic, rebel-rousing VJ at regional television station Q 23. The teenagers love him, but stick-in-the-mud suburbanite parents and Christian conservatives are all in a tizzy and picketing Rick’s unwholesome influence, demanding that his program, Heavy Metal Heaven, be taken off the air in order to save young people’s souls. Corporate sponsors are getting nervous, the old guard at Q 23 hates his guts, and the Tipper Gore ticket is getting unruly, with two right-wing brutes ambushing Rick in an alley and beating him up, after which the young radical moves to bring the cultural crisis to a head, barricading himself inside the TV station and calling on his followers to lend him support.
What passes for a story line in Incident at Channel Q is primarily a pretext for exhibiting a series of then-recent music videos in their entirety, these videos – ranging from Rush to Rainbow, KISS, Iron Maiden, and all points in between – taking up half or more of the movie and simulating the experience of watching 80 minutes or so of MTV on a typical day in the 1980s. The music, for the most part, is fantastic stuff for 80s rock buffs, with a trio of videos – Lita Ford’s “Gotta Let Go”, the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane”, and Motley Crue’s vicious “Looks That Kill” – constituting some of the greatest, most outlandishly photogenic material ever committed to film. Poofy hair, horror lighting, whore makeup, chintzy sets, studded leather wristbands, tight pants, and other depravity abound, with KISS’s “All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose” being another fun and action-packed video, while others – Rush’s “Body Electric” and Deep Purple’s “Knocking at Your Back Door” – showcase the post-apocalyptic imagery that was popular in those years.
5 pentagrams for the rock and the morally righteous camp value. VHS copies of Incident at Channel Q are inexpensive, so readers who see one languishing on a used bookstore shelf or in a moldy box in a basement are advised to redeem it or suffer the vengeful disfavor of Satan.
An initial viewing of Future Sodom may be a disappointment if viewers allow the stylish cover photo of Laurel Canyon to lead them to expect a dark, creative vision of a futuristic world. When friends Mickey (Frank James) and Morgan (Jesse Eastern) find themselves transported into an unknown place and time – “to grow, to advance” in their sexuality – their sylvan surroundings resemble the idyllic woods around a summer cabin more than a dingy, urban vice capital. What follows is mostly a plotless succession of sexual encounters between the visitors and the carefree inhabitants of this sunny natural paradise.
First, Mickey and Morgan double-team a blonde beauty (Canyon), Mickey receiving a boisterous blowjob as Morgan bumps her from behind, all while ethereal synthesizer and mechanized tribal beats convey that this is the future – either that or the 80s. After trading orifices and having their fill, Mickey and Morgan relax indoors and exchange philosophies about sex. Morgan, a hopeless romantic, is disillusioned with what seems to him to be the mechanical nature of sex; but Mickey is perfectly content to screw anything that moves. “It was so impersonal, man, it was hot as hell,” he says, describing why phone sex gets him excited.
Group play follows: first an enthusiastic threesome set to languid electric guitar with Laurel Canyon, Britt Morgan, and Peter North, who find that an open door policy spices up the boredom of marriage; and later a more elaborate session conducted by a toga-bedecked Instructor (gross Jew William Margold) who sets a proper orgy in motion – complete with oral and anal sex and disgusting asshole-licking – before joining the fray himself, ultimately slurping his own semen off of a woman’s back. All of this unfolds to some drab 80s disco.
In one of Future Sodom’s few acknowledgments of the notion that this is all supposed to be taking place in some kind of futuristic setting, one of the sordid celebrants is a tattooed, freakish “robot”, Lucy (played by Viper), who has been “specially programmed as an anal participant.” This bargain basement production’s idea of an android, alas, is a tramp in a Mardi Gras mask, with chains strapped across her chest, nipple and clitoris piercings, and obscenities like “motherfucker” and “eat shit” scrawled all over her body. Lucy explains that mischievous Boy Scouts are responsible for the physical graffiti. “They raped me anally and I castrated ten of them,” she says in Future Sodom’s most outrageous scene. “Yes, I programmed myself to castrate Boy Scouts.”
In the second of Future Sodom’s two standout performances – the first being newcomer Laurel Canyon – Frankie Leigh plays the mysterious “Woman”, a sexual chameleon who suits her behavior to the fantasies of her partner of the moment. This cute but thoroughly debauched brunette has the best scene in Future Sodom, sneering her needs at horny Mickey: “Nah, I don’t think you fucking understand. I want dick, dick, and more dick, you hear that? And I want buckets of fucking cum. I wanna fuckin’ swallow it, I wanna choke on it. I wanna fuckin’ wallow in it. I wanna fuckin’ bathe in the fuckin’ shit, you know? I want you to turn my mouth into a fuckin’ sewer, into a goddamn toilet.” Leigh then proceeds to blow three guys in creepy transparent plastic masks like the ones in Last House on Dead End Street.
Underlying the flimsy excuse for a story, specifically in the old-fashioned Morgan character, is an awareness of a discomfort left in men’s hearts in the wake of the sexual revolution. Now that moral constraints are no longer an issue, do men really want their women to be voracious sexual beasts? What do women want? Paula Damiano’s script, unfortunately, leaves this speculative thread underdeveloped, the only semblance of resolution to Morgan’s uncertainty being his sullen resignation and determination of, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
Future Sodom, though nothing particularly special, does have a few things to recommend it. The hair is big, the action is hot, and the actors are clearly enjoying themselves; and, with the exception of Viper, whose damaged goods and devilish scowl are a little intimidating, the principal actresses are exquisite. 80s aficionados will appreciate Jesse Eastern’s mullet, and may also be interested to learn the ultimate fate of Ronald Reagan. Viewers, however, should expect nothing profound from a film which, after all, was produced and directed by Deep Throat auteur Gerard Damiano.
4 out of 5 stars.
The Load Warrior aka The Load Warriors (1987) ****1/2
From the first bleak, synthesized notes queuing up The Load Warrior’s ugly orange pixelated opening credits, all the makings of a 1980s pornographic classic are present: movie parody premise, pun title, hokey electronic music, garish eye makeup, and big, beautiful, puffy manes of whore hair. Peter North portrays the titular titillationist in this post-apocalyptic tale of a world devastated by a “great fire” (i.e., nuclear holocaust) followed by the “invisible fire” of radiation that causes fertility to plummet. The result is a wasteland in which “seed became money and men became cattle”, with female barbarians unceremoniously milking their slaves like farm animals, the old ways of love, foreplay, and even vaginal penetration having been forgotten by most – all but the Load Warrior.
The Load Warrior satirizes the seeming reversal of sex roles effected by the sexual revolution, the entry of women into the workforce, and the cold commoditization of reproduction through sperm banks. “‘Married’?” Willow (Krysta Lane) asks, puzzled at hearing the word for the first time. “What’s ‘married’?” Men, reduced to utilitarian sex slaves, are left wanting foreplay, affection, and some sense of sexual autonomy, while women have become violent, impersonal brutes, as typified by ruthless businesswoman Queen Humongous (Lois Ayres), who reigns like a callous CEO over a “bustling rat hole” called Motherload. Here the remains of the wasteland’s men come to sell their sperm at the trading post of Dr. D (Jesse Eastern), who hands out “antique” broccoli and rotten chicken (“Of course it’s got maggots in there. That’s the nutritious part.”) in exchange for their more or less ineffectual sperm. Fortuitously, the Load Warrior comes and pounds into the women an important truth: “A load in the bush is worth far more than any in the hand.”
Sharon Mitchell, who participates in an ambitious fivesome (!) with Eastern and others in the “Blow the Man Dome”, is typically tough and charismatic as the aptly named Wilde, who threatens to cut off a woman’s tits and make lampshades out of them. Too much time is spent on an interracial scene between Eastern and Angel Kelly; but the sex, if not consistently scorching, is solid, and for the most part tastefully photographed, greatly enhanced by the scuzzy art direction of “C.L. Jaz”. Much of the action in The Load Warrior plays like a music video, with the imitation Tina Turner theme song smoothing North’s scene with delectable Gail Force being a definite highlight of the show. Also, the manner in which the hero dispatches the bitchy Queen Humongous is not to be missed! Hot, heavy, and humorous, The Load Warrior is mandatory sleaze for 80s strokers.
In the not-too-distant future, the world is a winter horrorland after a well-meaning attempt to control global warming has gone tragically awry. Consequently, what remains of humanity after the ecological apocalypse and societal collapse lives scattered in dwindling underground colonies plagued by despair and the common cold. Leading one of these colonies as a sort of benevolent despot is Briggs (Laurence Fishburne), who, when he receives a distress call from another colony in the region, sets out with a small group of men to see what aid they can offer their fellows. Unfortunately, what they find when they get there is a pack of savage, marauding cannibals bent on making Briggs and company’s colony next on the menu.
With high-caliber thrills, a pervading dread, and situations and sinister interiors somewhat reminiscent of Alien, The Colony is a film with a firm grasp of the mechanics of suspense and ends up, alongside The Purge and You’re Next, being one of the scariest, most satisfying offerings of the year. Fishburne, of an age now to convey an easy air of mature experience, is a welcome presence in the lead. Bill Paxton delivers a solid supporting performance as the brutal Mason, Briggs’s principal rival for colonial leadership, while Kevin Zegers is likable enough as Sam, a young man forced to toughen up quick when the yellow snow starts to hit the fan.
5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Colony is:
3. Pro-castration. Haunting the icy landscape are immense weather control towers, ruins of modern man’s arrogant and paternalistic presumption.
2. Black supremacist. Briggs, a wise and noble black man, has naturally fallen into the leadership position after Caucasians’ botched schemes have practically destroyed the planet. Reminding viewers of what happens to unsupervised and unprogressive white men who have no black savior to guide and protect them from their own primitive follies are the cannibals, whose leader sports the obligatory skinhead look. The Colony‘s black supremacist street credibility is undermined, unfortunately, by its unoriginal (albeit thrilling) concession to the sacrificial Negro convention – unless, of course, the character’s sacrifice points to his role as the Messiah.
1. Green. Because the world dragged its feet in addressing the challenge presented by global warming, its efforts, when these finally came, were too late and too desperate, resulting in an ecological cataclysm worse than the one mankind had sought to avoid. Rather than pointing to the vain futility of humans’ attempts at controlling atmospheric conditions, however, the moral of the story would seem to be that, in order to avert such a future catastrophe, global warming research needs more funding now – or that, in other words, a well-placed stitch in time saves nine.
Macho girl Matt Damon stars as butch lesbian cyborg warrior Max Da Costa in one of this summer’s most notable movies, Neill Blomkamp’s science fiction adventure Elysium, which posits a future world in which only the teeming masses of the underprivileged are left to suffer through their miserable lives in the ruins of what once was the United States of America, while the super-rich, in the ultimate feat of white flight, have escaped to the veritable Heaven that is Elysium, basically a gigantic orbiting space station’s worth of Beverly Hills, where people are beautiful, lawns are green, and seemingly any sickness is instantly curable thanks to advanced technology. Max, a former career criminal dying from radiation poisoning, lends his services as a thief to a crew of Mexican gangsters for a shot at breaching the exclusive colony’s security system and saving not only his own life, but that of everybody on Earth.
Damon, always an unlikely star, is only tolerable in his heroic role as Max, as is Alice Braga as his attractive but uninteresting love interest. Jodie Foster, meanwhile, clearly has fun as the icy-hot Delacour, who heads Homeland Security for Elysium. Ironically, Delacour, who speaks French and was perhaps inspired by French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen, has as her job exactly the opposite of what occupies America’s Department of Homeland Security: namely, the preservation of a people, its ethnic integrity, economic well-being, and traditional way of life. And rounding out the cast is Wagner Moura, who (potentially unrecognizable to those who remember his gruff and brooding performance in the Brazilian fascist film Elite Squad) appears in a supporting role as colorful gangster, computer wizard, and space coyote service impresario Spider.
Easily the most charismatic character in Elysium, however, is the ruthless and erratic Boer mercenary Kruger, played with snarling, nasty manliness by Sharlto Copley (of Blomkamp’s District 9). The viewer can hardly help but cheer Kruger on as, after enthusiastically obliterating a target, he exults, “Thet’s wut om talkin abeut!” (Note to Hollywood: Make more movies about South African mercenaries!) Kruger’s return to the fray after what appears initially to be his demise is surely one of Elysium‘s most audience-friendly moments.
4.5 of 5 possible stars, with half a star deducted for the tasteless inclusion of hackneyed, ethereal new age moaning on the soundtrack. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Elysium is:
11. Green. Pollution is cited as one of the causes of American decline.
10. Anti-drone. Max finds himself hunted by the pesky things.
9. Anti-drug. Max refuses the pills offered by a robotic parole officer (see no. 6). Menacing Mexican thugs smoke what is presumably marijuana.
8. Ostensibly Christian, promoting more Hollywood liberation theology. Max has been raised by nuns and sacrifices himself in Christlike fashion (see also no. 4).
7. Feminist/pro-slut/pro-bastard/anti-marriage/anti-family. Frey (Alice Braga) represents the single mother with pride as a capable professional with no need for a man in her life (cf. no. 4).
6. Anti-corporatist/anti-capitalistic. The government, probably in collusion with pharmaceutical manufacturers, makes free drugs readily available to the public as a means of pacification. Max’s Hispanic neighbors mock him for being dumb enough to work for a living, and they are validated when Max’s callous boss forces him either to endanger his life or be terminated, with the result that Max receives lethal exposure to radiation. The CEO (William Fichtner) of the company is actually such a snob that he obliges his underlings to cover their mouths when speaking to him so as not to expose him to their breath. He conspires with Delacour to arrange a coup d’etat on Elysium.
5. NWO-alarmist/anti-state. The space colony Elysium, with its circled starfish design, approximates a pentagram and so points to possible Illuminati orchestration. (see also no. 6)
4. Pro-miscegenation. “Always wanted a wof,” Kruger reflects as he leers at Mexican cutie Frey, who is also the object of Max’s affections. Note that marriage is only the aspiration of the vile Boer and not of the progressive, Spanish-speaking, self-loathingly tattooed Caucasian, Max, who sacrifices himself and his forebears’ and fellow whites’ culture and safety for the benefit of the dusky masses. Max thus fits the sacrificial honky archetype.
3. Pro-immigration. Steve Sailer, calling it “one of the funnier pranks played on the American culturati’s hive mind in recent decades”, has attempted to out Elysium as a crypto-conservative and race-realist film, but Gregory Hood has convincingly refuted him in an excellently written review at Counter-Currents. What both men (along with Ram Z. Paul) accurately point out, however, is that Elysium, whatever its intentions, does illustrate in depressing vividness the cultural cataclysm awaiting America as it willingly works to dissolve its border with Mexico. The dangerous, ugly, graffiti-smeared, beggar-and-thug-infested slums of futuristic Los Angeles as depicted in Elysium hardly justify the celebratory tone of the climactic moment in which, through a bit of clever computer hackery, every disgusting slob on the planet is instantaneously turned into a “citizen” of Elysium and thereby made eligible for the wonders of its exclusive health care coverage.
2. Egalitarian. Elysium, even as it illustrates the dystopian horror of the future Socialist States of America, advocates socialized medicine as a panacea. The film is able to do this because the advanced medical science of the future, like Obamanomics, is magic, and capable of infinite, Santa-style miracles that transcend cost.
1. Pro-gay. Damon, as Max, does for the dyke what Robert Carradine did for the dweeb in Revenge of the Nerds.
Better than might be expected for a low-budget science fiction adventure out of cut-rate genre studio The Asylum, director Thunder Levin’s AE: Apocalypse Earth is an entertaining and tolerably paced concoction that might best be described as Predator meets The Mysterious Island, with a dash of Star Trek added for flavor. Adrian Paul, looking every bit as handsome and virile as when he starred in the Highlander television series, stars as the unfortunately named Frank Baum, a military man who leads a group of refugees from an outer space “ark” after Earth is overrun by alien “chameleons”. Also in the group is spaceship pilot Captain Crowe (Richard Grieco), camo-skinned jungle woman Lea (Bali Rodriguez), and a gaggle of nondescript space-fillers who tag along.
AE unsuccessfully attempts to conceal that the planet on which they have landed is Earth hundreds of years after invasion and climate change have caused its lifeforms to evolve in striking ways, so that the Planet of the Apes style revelation of the ending has been obvious all along, arguably given away even by the film’s title, and carries none of the intended impact. Despite this shortcoming, AE succeeds as a decent afternoon’s home entertainment matinee if viewers are willing to be lenient with the abundantly unconvincing CGI creatures and spacecraft. The picturesque Costa Rica locations lend a great deal of production value, and the costume design, particularly for the sexy Lea and the albino cave-dwellers, enhances the look of the film as well.
3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that AE: Apocalypse Earth is:
7. Anti-drone. Aliens use the things like hunting dogs.
6. Feminist. Lea lives and hunts alone and is capable of taking care of herself.
5. Pro-military. Soldiers are depicted as noble and selfless servants of humanity.
4. Pro-NWO. In the future, America is protected by the “North American Joint Military.”
3. Anti-racist/anti-white/anti-Christian. Representing WASPs are a tribe of bald (i.e., skinhead), bigoted, and generally unprogressive albino cave-dwellers who have cast out Lea because she was born different. Having reverted to primitive superstition in their isolation, they believe those unlike themselves to be demons.
2. Multiculturalist/pro-miscegenation. Baum gets the hots for humanoid Lea, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. A multi-ethnic band of survivors works together against the invaders – but the old sacrificial Negro convention lives!
1. Green. “Most of the water on Earth is polluted.” A “runaway greenhouse effect” has covered the planet with jungle and mutated the flora and fauna. And Lea, the next step in human evolution, has literally turned green!
Jesus-believing U.S. Constitutionalist EXPOSING Satanic globalist SCAMS & TRAITORS in Kansas, America, and the World at-large. Jesus and BIBLE Truth SHALL PREVAIL!
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