Warning labels and stacked zombies

Peacock films is an aussie distributor of straight-to-dvd crap. If you want shitty production values, digi-cam quality cinematography and CGI effects belted out on your nephew's macbook, then be sure to look for the Peacock icon on the back of the cover next time you hit the vid store. I've seen dozens of these efforts, and they're all painfully poor rip-offs of something that may only be B grade to begin with. The thing is, some of the scripts are probably pretty good, but you'll never really know, what with the horrible casting and grade-school production. I realise that the good people at Peacock films have nothing to do with the actual making of crap like Adam & Evil, When Thugs Cry, or Killer Flood: The Day The Dam Broke, but by gods their label serves as a signal flare to anyone who doesn't want to waste $3 on an visual enema. Ever wondered where Corbin Bernsen, Stacy Keach or The Hoff ended up? Neither did I, but I now know anyway, thanks to Raptor, Frozen Impact and Fugitives Run.

The good news is that if you're struggling to get your $12 000 vampire/natural disaster/sci-fi epic distributed just give the 'Cocks a call.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me tell you about a sci-fi horror called Plaguers. I usually check imdb before downloading any film, and when I read their page on this pulp Aliens tribute it had scored 5.1. Two days later it was rated 4.6 and falling. The first few votes obviously came from Brad Sykes and his extended family, and even they could not, in all conscience, give it more than 5 out of 10. Take a look at Mr Sykes Filmography and you'll soon see he set on becoming the Ed Wood of our age, only without the girlish charm or ironic appreciation from his fans.

Here's the premise: a spaceship called Pandora (uh-huh) is returning to Earth in an attempt to smuggle a glowing alien artifact called Thanatos (uh-oh) which is apparently a powerful yet unconfirmed new energy source. Enroute the ship responds to a distress call and rescues 4 nubile space nurses. BUT, the nurses turn out to be sexy space pirates instead and they set about taking over the Pandora. During the ensuing struggle the green, glowing fishbowl artifact gets cracked and starts turning the dead or dying into space zombies. The surviving crew and pirates team up to vainly fight their undead comrades. The cheerleader-looking ship's captain finally escapes via a lifepod, only to find that the glowy bowlingball thing has inexplicably snuck into the pod with her. And, yep, the ill-fated pod is tumbling towards Earth as the credits roll.

That's the plot. The entire thing is shot on stage - the same gritty corridor accounting for most of the ship's interior in between pianted plywood cabins and bridge (all weirdly different paint styles). External shots of the simple model ships, superimposed over a starscape, come complete with maneuvring jets that hiss smoke in random, contradictory directions, or lazily overlayed CGI lighting for the main drive ports. I love Blake's 7 and it's '70's, low budget space effects, but even that shits all over this.

Now for the Aliens references:

Initial Suspense: 5 minutes in the Pandora's pilot uses his Bluetooth earpiece to call Capt Cheerleader on her 1960's apartment intercom to report: "I've picked something up on the screen - it's a ship 30 000 clicks south-east of here." I had to replay that bit three times. 'South-east?' In fucking space? The same way that the moon is north-west of Canada, right? The computer screen testifying to this contact has all the detail and colour display of an Atari 2600. Anyway, their ship docks with the other ship and the crew's two creepy space janitors (or something, their job titles are never mentioned but they do look like a couple of stoners in overalls) are sent on board with Dolphin flashlights and breathing gear similar to (but less cool than) that worn by Han Solo when he was cleaning Mynochs off the 'Falcon. Tension and suspense apparently ensues until the 4 mini-skirted, high-heeled space nurses/pirates are found and rescued. These two creepy dicks really pissed me off, not because of their creeping dickiness, but because they constantly mumbled their repartee. As far as I cared they couldn't die soon enough.

Tense Combat: When the teen-stripper characters aren't engaging in gratuitous catfights with each other, they're fighting latex and cornsyrup zombies. Hand-to-hand choreography is limited to flailing around or waving sharp things at the undead. There are guns available too, but the props department must have been unfamiliar with the genre because two of the three guns to be had in far future space consist of a Glock semi-auto with half a clip, and the typr of snub-nosed .38 historically popular with 1950's federal agents. Luckily the Glock is enchanted because despite being lost in a fight halfway through it magically reappears in the hands of its owner three scenes later. Only the nubile captain has a real blaster pistol, but the SFX money ran out after the third shot so she has to discard it. And that brings me to the next Aliens tribute.

Welding Stuff in Desperation: remember in Aliens when the survivors of the initial sortie have to hurriedly weld up a barricade with those cool little plasma torches? Well, in Plaguers, two of the characters attempt something similar with equally shrunken versions of oxy-acetylene welders. Only, and this is the kicker, the torch flames are CGI'd. Whether used to pretend weld inconsequential airduct hatches or to wave in the face of unimpressed zombies, the three inch sparkly flames are post-edited on instead of simply using a blowtorch for the same effect. The entire CGI effort was consumed by this, along with three blaster shots, spaceship ion trails, and making an alien snowglobe glow green for a few seconds.

Synthoid: Say hi to Tarver. He's not an aging, blatant Bishop-the-android rip-off. He makes that clear by announcing that, despite trying to emulate the Lance Henriksen character in every way, he's a 'synthoid'. Oh, and the scene where he has to crawl along airducts is extremely different in every way to Bishop's crawl along an access tunnel. To be fair, he doesn't share the complex, bio-mechanical circulatory fluid system of Mr Bishop. Instead when you cut him open you'll only see brightly insulated copper wiring and maybe a valve. Tarver plays a very important role in the film - crap merchant. During a 90 second gap in the action he explains the back-story of the evil, Day-Glo basket ball that's causing all the trouble.

"We found it in a crate that had a letter written on the side in an unknown language. It roughly translates as 'Thanatos'."

Huh? Not only do you somehow translate an unknown language using a single letter sample, but you do so into Greek instead of English? Maybe if you bothered to go all the way and tell the crew that this mysterious, evilish artifact was conveniently labelled 'anthropomorphisation of Death' a shitload of grief could have been avoided. Especially as it's about to be loaded into a ship called Pandora! You'd be better off hopping aboard the spaceliner Titanic for a round trip to an icefield asteroid belt.

But seeing as Steve Railsback won a Science Fiction Genre Award for this role, I now know that this tribute was ultimately a deliberate act of irony. Or not.

Conclusion: open ended, like I said before. The life pod hurtles towards Earth with its blonde, nicely-racked captain screaming at glowing, spherical zombie maker rolling around her feet. There could be a sequel, but only if the perspex pod survives re-entry and a terminal velocity impact. Or maybe a space coastguard will pick it up and, through a chain of well-intentioned yet fateful events, unleash hell.

Like the movie's tag says: In space, nothing stays dead forever.

I can't wait to find out, so I won't.

UPDATE (5 May 2010): Plaguers has now fallen to 2.3 out of 10 on IMDB.

The Realme & New Heaven

I'm racking my head trying to piece together a comprehensive back story for an entire fictional city set in an alternative, modern Earth where people with paranormal abilities have manifested. Writing about paranormal people used to come a lot easier to me, but nowadays I'm all too mindful of that sceptical monkey on my back, so I'm constantly having to tell myself that fiction is important too. Previous projects based on high fantasy or advanced sci-fi were much easier - poetic licence and illogical plot devices are necessary when dealing with magick or super-luminary travel.

THE REALME

But as I look back at these imaginary settings I realise that even then I imposed certain constraints. The Realme - a medieval fantasy setting - is a prime example. As much as I admire Tolkien and the generations of dragon n' sorcery epics he inspired, I have much more empathy for the late, great David Gemmell and his sagas of heroic fantasy that somehow distilled and rationalised the pulp concepts of Robert E. Howard into a far less misogynistic yet equally manly portrayal of valour. While drafting the imperfect and incomplete RPG of The Realme, I focused on what made a human-based fantasy world fun and scary. Demi-human species were more or less shunted into the annals of mythology from whence they spawned. Dwarves, goblins and elves were actually just races distinct from the anglo-european based peoples. The closest thing you would find to a halfling was a race of forest dwelling pymies, for instance. Magick, too, was conveyed in more of a sense of the strange and inexplicable, because I couldn't reslove a universe where (unlike so many commercial versions) there seemed to be as many warlocks as peasants, wandering the countryside chucking fireballs and summoning demons.
I broke one of the unwritten genre conventions by introducing primitive firearms, albeit with the inferred disclaimer that gunpowder was tantamount to witchcraft. Alchemy played a much larger role than ritual magicks too, a concept shamelessly borrowed from the classic Darklands PC game. Religious evocations were also applied, but only in the sense that if your prayers happened to coincide with a favourable outcome then a preist-like character was likely to assume divine credit (much like the real world). Villains in the somewhat improvised plots I contrived to face our heroes during gaming sessions were less likely to be dragons or arch-mages and more so corrupt aristocrats and megalomanic cultists, or even each other*. Minions were more likely fur-clad bandits, not werewolves, but in such a superstitious setting who could tell the difference? In short, I wanted a D&D style game that took the mythology back to the ambiguous analogues of its historical origins.

*The adventures in The Realme were both perilous and hilarious. In one module our heroes explore a vast wilderness and find a lush waterfall. They strip off for a swim, during which one naked character discovers a small secret tunnel behind the fall. Unfortunately he manages to fumble his exploration roll and his upper body becomes wedged in the hole. In a Brokeback Dungeon moment one of the other heroes declares "Me first!" and the rest of the skinny dipping party starts fighting over who gets to push their trapped comrade through the hole with their penis. Hey, what happens in module stays in module, alright?

NEW HEAVEN

And now I reprise the other draft I started over a decade ago - the super-powered world of New Heaven, named after an imaginary, independent city-state in which the canon characters operate. I've always pictured it as a cross between Hong Kong and Monaco, a thriving, advanced city wealthy enough to stand apart from the rest of North America, but corrupt enough to invite the worst of capitalist traits - a near future noir setting where paranormally afflicted characters fight to survive the machinations of well resourced criminals and shadow agencies amidst an ignorant general public. This world is devoid of the ideological subtext of the Heroes tv series or the public political pressures of the Wild Cards books edited by George RR Martin. It's not about 'mutants versus humanity', let alone superheroes versus supervillains. What it is about is a group of loosely associated individuals, gifted or cursed with special abilities, who must work together in order to protect themselves from the clutches of those who would exploit them. Think of an anti-Watchmen place where socio-political issues are substituted by the mundanely evil motives of silent selfish needs.

We had a lot of fun with New Heaven back in the days of our pen and paper rpg sessions. (We even experimented with a historical spin-off of an 1860's version which met with a great reaction from my peers.) The characters became defined more by their variety of incredible personality quirks than their powers*.
Ed The Ferret's 'kryptonite' for instance was a rare psycholigical disorder that compelled an irrational urge to attempt to fly helicopters at any given opportunity (despite no training to do so whatsoever). The one and only scenario in which such an improbable opportunity arose led to the near death of the entire team and millions in property damage.
Scalpel the illusionist assassin would literally stab you in the back for the right price, and could probably get away with it by blaming someone else.
Molly the psionic barmaid preferred to telepathically assault foes by making them shit themselves, while Barfly's teleportation powers were either inert while sober or dangerously unreliable when drunk.
I'm currently in the process of refining the origin stories of each character as well as the city in which they live. I just hope I can do it justice.

*One game concept we had was a 'Cool roll' whereby whenever a character sought to say a memorable quip or catch-phrase or witty come-back during a high tension moment the player had to roll to see they pulled it off. The player would first draft their character's phrase (eg: Scalpel - "I may be small but I'm tough', or Kid Vengeance extolling "Prepare to suffer my Justice!") and if the roll failed they would screw it up George McFly style ("I may be tough but I'm small!" or "Prepare to suffer my Jaundice!").

Sea Patrol: protecting our borders from....stuff

I'd never watched this show before, and I certainly don't know anything about naval procedures, but I came away feeling a little concerned, like the subtext was an attempt to lull our enemies into a false sense of security by portraying patrol boat crews as guillible idiots.

Crew look on in horror as their zealous captain conducts an impromptu, wrist-deep cavity search.

In amongst the rest of the plot - something about weapon smugglers hiding on an island - there's a supposedly wronged innocent party (whose obviously a secret bad guy), who claims to be ex-navy and hence is inexplicably given the run of the ship.

I too was once a sea soldier for the Water Army.  Mind if I take your boatship for a spin?

The crew even take him on a guided tour of engineering and brief him on the fire control systems. Then some chromosonally challenged night-watch sailor lets this dodgy dude take over control of the bridge while Disable Seaman Douche Bag pops out for a coffee. Surprisingly (?), Mr Dodgy frees his fellow gun-runners and they nearly all escape. Dammit, but we trusted this dishonourably discharged total stranger!
As penance for simultaneously deserting his post and all but handing the keys over to a terrorist, Deckhand Douchebag (DB) is severely punished by...by not being allowed to play with the other boys and girls during shore leave for a few hours. I guess I'd handle it a bit differently:

Deckhand Douchebag, now with a screw-top lid.

Cap'n Kidd: "Okay, crew, you can all go enjoy your shore leave.....Douchebag! Where do you think you're going?"
DB: "On shore leave, sir?"
Cap'n Kidd: "You've got to be fucking kidding me. You'll report back to the ship for watch duty."
DB (shrugs): "Okay, captain, fair enough."
Cap'n Kidd: "Until SIB get here and put you in a naval sodomy prison for ten years."
DB: "Aw, captain -"
Cap'n Kidd: "After which you will be shot as a traitor."
DB: "Oh."

But, in all fairness, DB doesn't have the best of role models onboard.

The Commander of the HMAS Hammersley, whose name may be Captain Dick Bukkake for all I know, hardly inspires command confidence. After he initially foils the weapon smugglers on the island by unnecessarily dive tackling one off a hover craft as the baddies try to escape, he returns to the ship and orders an ensign or someone to deal with the contraband in a somewhat impractical way. Here's my version. See if you can pick which sceptical yet over-endowed ensign I'm playing.

Capt Dick: "Ensign?"
Ensign Megapecker: "Sir?"
Capt Dick: "I want you to put the ordnance we captured from the hovercraft back on the beach and post a couple of sentries. The Feds will be here tomorrow to pick it up."
Ensign Megapecker: "Let me get this straight, sir. You want us to take the anti-tank launchers and military grade explosives back out of our fortified arms locker and return them to the indefensible, deserted beach and then split our man-power by having to guard it out in the open?"
Capt Dick: "Um, yes, that's right. Then the Feds can get it from us tomorrow."
Ensign Megapecker: "Uh-huh. So, rather than simply rendezvous with our heavily armed patrol boat, the Feds would prefer the added hassle of having to get to the beach and haul the stuff away?"
Capt Dick: "Absolutely, ensign. Now, any other questions?"
Ensign Megapecker: "Only one, sir: whose side are you on?"

I'm Just Not That Into The Movie

2 hours and 11 minutes just to remind us that guys are assholes and girls are crazy. Oh, and that Ben Affleck's gormless, smug mug makes me want to kick nuns in their redundant ovaries. What I hate most about this flick is that there's actually not too much to criticise - the camera work was okay, the script wasn't too loose, all the cast were veterans who knew their jobs. And I only needed a couple of shots of insulin to endure the ordeal. I didn't laugh or cry. I think the most I managed was ".........." (a mental shrug at the highly predictable third act twists which weren't particularly twisty). Even the crazy women and asshole men didn't act all that crazy during their histrionics or ass-like during their lechery. Just the same old, mediocre, middle-class white america going about its business.

Score: M (for 'meh').

The Govt wants to control everything including your weight.

Today the local rag ran a front pager on obesity, or rather what the govt wants to do about it. Accessible bariatric surgery seems to be the main suggestion. Of course, the vast majority of such stomach stapling procedures currently occur in private hospitals (96% is the figure quoted). Not surprising given the $15k price tag. And that's why the govt was talking about it - pushing accessible and available gut jobs into the public health system makes this a generic tax payer issue rather than an elitist elective option. Now, whenever our sagacious leaders want to sell us an idea they have to convince the audience of the benefits and savings that are sure to eventuate (reduction in medical costs to treat physical and mental conditions associated with obesity). Of course, there is no way in hell we know if this will pay off like they say - a simple google search will tell you that morbidly obese patients are prone to surgical and post-procedural complications at the best of times, complications that also cost a shitload of money to treat.

But Australia is urged to do something about being too fat. The above-mentioned article states that :

"The 2007-08 National Health Survey (which measures the exact height and weight of adults and children using the Body Mass Index approach) found that 68 per cent of adult men and 55 per cent of adult women are overweight or obese."

It's just a pity that the difference between being morbidly obese, obese or just overweight was not clarified (it's explained wiki-wise here). Or that the method used (BMI) is over 160 years old and the least accurate way of determining actual obesity. I'm not discounting the issue as being over-represented (hell, for all I know, it's underestimated), just that these sorts of vague generalisations when it comes to stats that are meant to support huge tax investments should be better researched.
If the govt does go ahead and offer eligible obese folk the chance to have surgeons to play balloon animals with their guts, I wonder what some borderline problem eaters will do? "I'm currently sitting on 33% body fat. I could diet like hell for 12 months and reduce it to a healthy 20%, or I could double-up on Macca's for only 3 months and hit the magic 40% that'll get me a free lap band and let me then reach my ideal weight in half the time!" Yes, that's exactly how my mind works.

In a related topic, my prime compadre was telling me last week that he was watching a local ep of Today Tonight all about fat kids. He's a bit of an armchair sceptic like myself so he had a few questions about the program. After watching it myself, so do I. The segment was fuelled by a recent CSIRO study into children's health and eating habits, stating that 25% of the little shits were overweight or obese (once again, no distinction between the two). They also said kids eat too much sugar and fat, and not enough fruit or milk (ironically kids probably think that milk will make them fat). Some paediatric doc from the Women's & Children's Hosp also appeared to tell us that bad things happen as tubby sprogs become tubby grown ups. Bad things also happen for a lot of skinny kids come adulthood, because apparently another 43% of us inflate to unhealthy proportions anyway. Then there was the comfortably middle-class mum of 3 kids (none of whom seemed even a little tubby in their private school uniforms) squealing her alarms from her tv quality kitchen.
But what Shane was curious about (given his kids are lean and mean despite eating like machines) was how the CSIRO got these stats in the first place, as he couldn't recall his kids recently being sedated long enough to be weighed and measured by a lab-coated stranger in the first place. Electric scales hidden under the classroom seats? he suggested. Or, as a friend of ours pointed out on FB, maybe they got hold of some PE records with said measurements. Given the reported combined data (that also measured food intake habits and exercise) presented by the CSIRO, I'm guessing a survey was conducted at some random schools. Regardless, the facts are once again so watered down and generalised as to be rendered meaningless for anything less than a basic and unoriginal health message - if you keep eating crap you'll end up crap.

To me the answer is simple: tax people according to their body fat score in proportion to how much it exceeds the norm. Oh, and have a similar penalty for those significantly underweight too so as to discourage eating disorders.