Originally I was going to post about my experience shooting my new Mossberg Shockwave that I got this week. Unfortunately, after buying $200 worth of ammo and driving 30 minutes out into the desert I find out that it’s closed to target shooters due to extreme fire hazard. I guess all those taxes I pay don’t actually mean they go and put the fires out. Not that I’m bitter or anything. Then I thought I would celebrate Independence day and make a post about the guns of the American Revolution. It turns out that’s actually a pretty boring topic overall, with one notable exception I’ll mention below. So, I’m phoning it in this week with a hodgepodge of random gun tidbits. Think of it like the evening links, but gun themed. ZARDOZ would be proud.
The new Tavor 7. Fuck to the Yes!
The Hearing Protection Act is back! This time it’s called the SHUSH Act. That’s an acronym for Silencers Helping Us Save Hearing. I swear to god I picked the wrong line of work. No idea on the odds of this passing, but I sure hope it goes somewhere.
IWI announced they will be producing my favorite gun in 308. The new Tavor 7 will be 100% user reversible from right to left handed and be almost entirely ambidextrous. If this thing comes in at or below $2000 they are going to sell like ice water in hell.
Apparently the American Revolution was the birthplace of military sniping. Using Kentucky Long Rifles, American soldiers were able to pick off British officers from the treeline while the redcoats strutted around the open fields on horseback. There’s even one story of a particularly gifted individual making a kill shot from 400 yards, which quite frankly I would be hard pressed to do with a modern gun.
Speaking of snipers, no matter how tough you are, you aren’t as tough as this chick. I know I would have needed a new pair of depends after that.
One final thing I wanted to mention before I go. Someone mentioned this in the comments yesterday so I thought I would take a few minutes to tell you about the can cannon. It is an AR 15 upper receiver that attaches to any milspec lower and fires blanks. What good is a blank firing upper? By itself, it’s fucking useless. The can cannon, however, is designed to accept standard 12 ounce soda cans. It can launch these cans a phenomenal distance and they explode quite spectacularly at the end. It isn’t limited to cans, though. Tennis balls, apples, and just about anything you can cram into the sucker will launch when fired. They even make grappling hooks that load into the can cannon, for all your 80s ninja/mission impossible fantasies. Here’s a little demonstration video.
While these things look fun, they aren’t cheap. Right now they’re damn near $400 for the regular upper and almost $550 for the XL version. That’s a lot of scratch. I have some good news, though. If you want the fun of the can cannon but don’t have that kind of scratch, NCstar has you covered. For a mere $25 on Amazon you can pick up your very own golf ball launcher. This puppy will thread onto your AR barrel (or any barrel that uses AR threads) and let you drive those balls farther than Tiger Woods from 10 years ago. Just like with the can cannon, you can stuff whatever you want in there and see if it launches, but I would be a little more careful with this version. For one, there’s nothing stopping you from loading a live round instead of a blank, and that could cause some serious damage depending on what you have lodged in the launcher. The other issue is if something goes wrong and the gas can’t escape from the launcher it’s probably going to split your barrel, which will almost certainly wreck your day. Still, for 25 bucks you really can’t beat it, and in theory you can use it on any gun you want, not just ARs.
When you first think about it, you probably wonder why you would ever want to take a gun into space. After you think about it a little more, though, you probably wonder why you would ever not want to take a gun into space. Thousands of miles from everywhere, in a hostile environment, with no chance of escape or rescue… sounds like exactly the kind of situation to require some ballistic backup. Whether you need to un-stick a broken escape hatch or simply quell an interplanetary mutiny, a gun is a must have for any space faring humanoid. Okay, in all seriousness, some astronaut crews did take a gun into space, at least for a period of time. They weren’t designed for use during the trip, however. Well, most of them weren’t, anyway. They were for use afterwards. The thinking was that if a capsule went way off course and landed in the middle of bumfuck nowhere the ‘nauts would have a survival weapon they could use to defend from predators and forage for food until the cavalry arrived.
The Makarov. Great against spies and dissident. Useless against bears.
Shockingly, the Americans are actually not the most tooled up group of people outside of the atmosphere. I can find no record of NASA issuing or allowing any sort of guns on shuttle missions or the space station. There is a possibility that at one point they were equipped with M6 survival rifles or even Beretta 9mm pistols, but I can’t find any definitive proof of it so your guess is as good as mine. The Russians, on the other hand might as well open up a branch of the NRA on the moon, cause as far as I can tell every fucking manned spaceflight they went on had a gun on board. Originally they started out with Makarov pistols. These reliable little handguns carry 8 rounds of 9×18 (similar to .380) in a very compact package. This went on for a few years, until a mission went a bit off. One of the capsules missed it’s landing area by about 600 miles and ended up in the middle of Siberia. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Siberia, but it’s a bit like Australia or Florida, in that everything wants to kill you. Unlike Australia or Florida, however, most of those things would laugh at you for pointing a 9mm pistol at it before mauling you and eating your steaming intestines like spaghetti while you were still alive and screaming. Thankfully, the cosmonauts survived, and one of them, Alexey Leonov, apparently developed a lasting impression of that particular feeling of terror since he mandated that a new survival weapon be developed for the space program after becoming a major general.
TP-82, with ammo and buttstock/machete.
Thus was born the first gun designed to go to space: The TP-82. I will give the commies credit, when they design a rifle they really go all out. The TP-82 is a triple barrel short barreled shotgun/rifle combo. The top two barrels are 12.5x70mm shotgun bore (roughly 38 gauge), while the bottom center barrel is chambered in 5.45×39, the common caliber of the AK 74 assault rifle. The gun has a detachable stock that doubles as a machete (no I don’t know how they fired it without cutting their arms off either) and came with birdshot, rifle rounds, and signal flares. This gun flew with all of the cosmonauts from 1986 until 2007, and even made it into the space station according to rumors. In 2007, Russia announced that there was no more shotgun ammo for the gun and no more could be produced, and the weapon was officially retired, with the cosmonauts returning to a standard semi automatic handgun. Let’s hope their search and rescue response times have gotten better.
An actual, honest to god, laser gun. Holy. Shit.
Don’t think for a second that all space weaponry was for boring old hunting and survival, though. It turns out that the reds are much more ambitious than we like to admit, because these sons of bitches went full fucking Moonraker on us and actually developed and fielded laser pistols. That’s right. Laser. Fricken. Pistols. Take THAT, John Browning! They were magazine fed and used flashbulb technology. Their reported function was to disable enemy spy satellites, but it is said that they could burn through a helmet or fry someone’s eyeballs at 60 feet. Whether or not this is actually true or a load of crap is anyone’s guess, but hats off to them for bringing energy weapons into reality.
The R-23 autocannon used on the Salyut space station.
So, what could top directed energy weapons in space? Oh I don’t know… how about an armed satellite? In the 1970s, the Soviets developed the Almaz program, which launched 3 manned reconnaissance satellites into orbit. These satellites were supposed to monitor comms traffic and do orbital imaging, but don’t think they were just for show either. Each one was fitted with a 23mm belt fed autocannon capable of 2000 rounds a minute. Of course, they didn’t carry very much ammo, but then again it doesn’t take much damage to really wreck your day in space. While they never actually attacked anything (there’s no record of it, anyway) they did successfully remotely test fire the weapon on multiple occasions.
All of this research has led me to one inescapable conclusion: The Russians will eventually own space and become fearsome interplanetary pirates, while our hopeless and disarmed astronauts fall victim to their merciless supply raids and wanton destruction. If only we hadn’t elected Trump…..
From the Staff: By popular demand (or at least a couple of vague questions about it) we will be presenting a (somewhere between weekly and sporadically) column on the soccer, or football as most of the world calls it. Also, to keep it really interesting, we will also include Australian Rules Football and Rugby Football. First up is…
Euro Futbol! And a lesson in Spanish tax compliance.
It’s silly season in European football. Sillier than normal so far, because thanks to a new TV deal, Premier League clubs have more money than ever, and they’re spending it left and right. Manchester City spent £35 million to replace a keeper they bought for £17 million last season (after it took about 3 games to realize he sucked). Outside of England, not much is going on, though there are lots of big money rumors. Makes sense, because the transfer window (the period during which player transfers are allowed to take place) doesn’t start until July 1.
Even though it’s mid-June, the first qualifying round for the UEFA Champions League starts in a week, featuring teams from countries where you could probably get onto a top division club if you wanted to.
Champions League, First Qualifying Round (First games June 27/28, second games July 4/5)
Víkingur (Faroe Islands) v Trepça ’89 (Kosovo)
Hibernians (Malta) v FCI Tallinn (Estonia)
Alashkert (Armenia) v FC Santa Coloma (Andorra)
The New Saints (Wales) v Europa (Gibraltar)
Linfield (Northern Ireland) v La Fiorita (San Marino)
Expect each of the victors to lose to bigger opponents in the Second Qualifying Round.
Since not much is going on, we’ll go to an actual libertarian subject: Taxes. More specifically, the Spanish government prosecutions of Lionel Messi, Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo, and possibly Jose Mourinho for tax evasion.
Under Spanish law, individuals who spend 183 days or more in a year in Spain are considered to be residents for tax purposes. Since footballers would naturally spend more than 183 days a year in Spain, they became residents for tax purposes (even if their true home was elsewhere), and thus owed Spanish tax on their worldwide income.
In 2005, the Spanish government approved Royal Decree 687/2005, which allowed a foreign resident who has relocated to Spain from another country the choice of being taxed as a Spanish resident or non-Spanish resident. The choice was valid for five years. By choosing to be taxed as a non-Spanish resident, such individuals could avoid Spanish tax on their worldwide income, paying Spanish tax only on income actually earned in Spain. This came to be known as the “Beckham Law” because the first foreign individual to take advantage of it was David Beckham, after his move from Manchester United to Real Madrid.
What all of this meant was that such individuals would not pay Spanish tax on their non-Spanish derived income and would pay a 24% tax rate on their Spanish income, as compared to the 24 to 43% progressive rate paid by Spanish residents. The law also disallowed deductions, meaning it was only applicable to higher net-worth individuals.
In November 2009, the Spanish government reversed the law, and individuals entering Spain after January 1, 2010 would not be able to benefit from the law. The law was fully repealed by 2014. Higher net worth individuals, of course, looked for ways to reduce their tax burdens.
Lionel Messi, who had entered Spain before he law had taken effect, was the first to face prosecution for tax evasion (or tax fraud, according to Spanish authorities). According to the Spanish prosecutors, Messi and his father had used companies in Belize and Uruguay to sell his image rights, thus hiding the income from Spanish authorities. Messi and his father were thus accused of hiding €4.1 million in income from Spain as a result. Messi ended up paying €5.1 million in back taxes, was convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to 21 months in prison (suspended, because all Spanish prison sentences under 2 years are automatically suspended where the individual does not have a prior record) and paid another €1.7 million in fines.
My taxes are thiiiiis high!
Neymar’s case has less to do with taxes and more to do with an outright fraud case, though taxes do play a part. When Neymar moved from FC Santos to Barcelona, the transfer fee was a reported €17.1 million. At the time, 40% of the ownership of Neymar was in the hands of DIS Esporte, a Brazilian investment group. As such, they were entitled to 40% of the fee, or €6.8 million. The accusation, however, is that an additional €40 million fee was classified as a wage instead of a transfer fee. This had the effect of reducing Barcelona’s tax burden (for which they’ve already paid a €5.5 million fine) and potentially defrauding DIS of an additional 40% cut from that €40 million. Like Messi, Neymar is unlikely to see prison even when he’s convicted.
How about we settle at 3 million?
Cristiano Ronaldo, who moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2009, is now facing a similar fate to Messi. Ronaldo’s lawyers claim that, since he entered the country before the termination of the law, he had the right to protection under the Beckham Law. Ronaldo, according to Spanish prosecutors, was paid €153 million in December 2014 – just before the full repeal of the Beckham Law – for image rights for a future time period, 2015 to 2020, where the Beckham Law would not be in effect and the tax burden would be higher. Ronaldo fully paid his required taxes on that amount. Again, like Messi and Neymar, he’s unlikely to face prison even if convicted.
Hark! The Taxman Cometh?
And now this week, Jose Mourinho has been accused of a similar fraud, with Spanish prosecutors accusing him of evading €3.3 million in taxes between 2011 and 2012.
Are you saying I might have to assume this position?
But back to Ronaldo, this has him fed up with Spain, and there are rumors abound that he could be headed back to England and Manchester United for a ridiculous sum (£175 million plus £60 million rated goalkeeper David de Gea according to one rumor). Outside of very famed clubs (Barcelona, Madrid, Paris St. Germain), players are seemingly starting to become more interested in heading to England (or Monaco) than to Spain and France, because of the tax burdens their footballing income create.
I’ll try to end every one of these columns with a footballing quote. This one comes from the greatest manager in football history, Bill Shankly. On football and on the Merseyside derby.
I’ve seen supporters on Merseyside going to the ground together, one wearing red and white and the other blue and white, which is unusual elsewhere. You get families in Liverpool in which half support Liverpool and the other half Everton. They support rival teams but they have the same temperament and they know each other. They are unique in the sense that their rivalry is so great but there is no real aggro between them. This is quite amazing.
I am not saying they love each other. Oh, no. Football is not a matter of life and death … it’s much more important than that. And it’s more important to them than that. But I’ve never seen a fight at a derby game. Shouting and bawling … yes. But they don’t fight each other. And that says a lot for them.
The Auld Syte may be the best band you never heard of. Formed in Los Angeles during the Summer of Love, the five-piece was influenced, of course, by the psychedelics of that summer, but also by something darker that haunted LA’s urban canyons. Guitarist Carlo Lentini (ex-Doorknobs) and bassist Sal Zummo (ex-Cymbians) met at an acid party at legendary producer Kim Fowley’s Laurel Canyon pad. The two musicians shared a love of psychedelics, and also shared the love of singer Lauren Huitema. The Auld Syte added rhythm guitarist Alan Paris and drummer Blair Brinsley, and by Autumn of 1967, they were a fixture in the clubs of Sunset Strip. Playing alongside contemporaries Sagittarius, and Arthur Lee, The Auld Syte combined baroque pop three part harmonies with acid edged guitars and sometimes sinister song subjects. Played live, the twelve-minute long “Apollyan” was a crowd favorite with its rhythmic chant that produced a locust swarm on more than one occasion. Another crowd favorite was the psychedelic rocker “Man’s Son”, featuring the mamba-like intertwining of Lentini and Zummo’s guitar and bass.
However, by late Spring of 1968 tensions within the band began to tear The Auld Syte apart. Lentini and Zummo came to blows over the love for Huitema. Tragically, Lentini shattered every bone in his left hand when he punched Zummo, and was never able to play guitar again. Zummo and Huitema were married in a pagan ritual in Big Sur in the Summer of 1968. Huitema left Zummo three days later and opened an occult bookstore in Sherman Oaks. Zummo continued to play music in the San Francisco scene and became a successful floor refinisher. Alan Paris later formed the soft rock duo Paris and Rome with wife Sylvia Rome. The duo had some minor success with their 1974 adult contemporary hit “Blue for You”. Brinsley joined a cult located in the Mojave Valley and was implicated in a number of bank robberies throughout the Southwest.
The Auld Syte never recorded in a studio, and any live recordings of their sets have yet to surface. Here are some songs from The Auld Syte’s contemporaries:
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.
Cold Mountain. Dir. Anthony Minghella. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Jude Law. Mirage Enterprises, Bona Fide Productions, 2003. DVD.
This novel, and the well-received movie based on it, can safely be said to belong to the canon of antiwar literature, though Frazier is enough of a storyteller that the lives and stories of his characters always hold center stage. This is no didactic Ayn Rand novel. As a civil war obsessive, I’m going to be giving some attention to the historical angles, but my review won’t capture the finely-crafted human story created by Frazier, and also by the film adaptation, which remarkably manages not to totally screw up the author’s vision.
Frazier comes from Western North Carolina, where not only does half the action take place, but it’s the longed-for destination of the male protagonist.
Let’s go back a bit and try to provide some setup. To put this story in Hollywood pitch-meeting terms, it’s like The Odyssey
Ulysses, by Anna Chromy, Monaco Harbor, 2011
meets bizarro Gone With the Wind meets a chick flick.
W. P. Inman (Jude Law in the movie)
Jude Law
is a Confederate soldier from, of course, Western North Carolina. He’s fighting at the Virginia front, defending Petersburg, Virginia from Union besiegers. Inman is homesick for his sort-of sweetheart Ada (played in the movie by Nicole Kidman).
Nicole Kidman
It’s complicated – at least in the novel the two aren’t formally committed to each other, but he’s managed to stick with the war, until he participates in the Battle of the Crater. This is an actual battle (July 1864) where the besieging Yankees manage to undermine the Confederate position and create a crater penetrating the Confederate front. For some reason, the federals then rush in to the steep-walled crater, as if they’re chivalrously giving the Confederates a chance at target practice. A nasty and bloody business, in which Inman is wounded. He’s sent back to a Raleigh military hospital to recover, and he decides, “screw you Confederates, I’m going home.” (In the movie, he gets a letter from Ada begging him to come home, a realistic touch since many wives, sweethearts and family members wrote soldiers begging them to desert so they could come home and help on the farm and preserve the family from starvation).
Then begins Inman’s treck west, back to his home county. He has to keep on the lookout for Home Guards – state troops who, exempt from going to the front themselves, are supposed to chase down deserters and draft-evaders and send them to the front (or sometimes just kill them). The organization generally referred to as the Home Guard was established by the state legislature in the middle of the war, though in the movie the Home Guard has been set up at the war’s very beginning. Hollywood has to do its part to avoid strict historical accuracy.
To be fair, the English Home Guard in WWII didn’t show the same cruelty to draft-dodgers, probably because there weren’t as many as in Civil War NC
In many parts of the state, including the mountain West, deserters and draft evaders “lay out” in the woods, or in holes in the earth. A lot of them just objected to fighting, period. But some thought they were being called on to fight on the wrong side. Many young men with such views navigated the mountain trails to Tennessee to join loyalist Southern units of the U. S. Army. North Carolina had a good number of Union sympathizers (“Red Strings” or “Heroes of America”), and a peace movement (trying to get the South back into the union with slavery intact), and a state government which distrusted the Jefferson Davis administration and insisted on protecting states’ rights against the Confederates (the Confederacy weren’t actually as states-rights-ish as one might think given their rhetoric).
Jefferson Davis in 1874
But getting back to the plot –
Not knowing where Inman is, Ada makes do as best she can in Appalachian North Carolina. And at first she doesn’t do very well at all. She grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, apparently with slaves to attend to her needs, until her minister-father went on a mission trip to this rural Tar Heel community, taking Ada with him. When Dad dies, Ada is alone on a farm which she doesn’t know how to care for.
Then some sympathetic neighbors ask a young woman named Ruby to take care of Ada. Here is where the movie had every opportunity to screw up embarrassingly. The movie’s Ruby, played by Renée Zellweger,
Renée Zellweger
is a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense rural Southern woman who had to learn self-reliance when her father was too busy drinking and playing the fiddle to raise her properly. Normally, Hollywood would find an actress to do a cringe-worthy performance with a character like this. Somehow, Zellweger manages to do a more or less convincing job in her role. It probably helps that she grew up in Texas (according to Wikipedia). Zellweger manages to remember at all times that her character has a Southern accent, something which sometimes slips the minds of the other actors.
So Ruby teaches Ada how to manage the farm and its livestock and grow crops. We get a bit of a training montage in the movie. Meanwhile, the two women try to keep away from the local Home Guard, with its commander, Creepy Bearded Fad Dude, and CBFD’s top aide, Scary Blonde Guy Who Wished He’d Been Born Later So He Could Have Joined Hitler’s SS.
“Is true, blondes haf more fun, ja?”
The pro-Confederate Home Guard are the main bad guys. But just to underscore the point that this book and movie show the dark side of war itself, not just the evils of one side, there is a scene of federal soldiers behaving very badly.
The movie has a scene where –
BEGIN SPOILER
– the Home Guard kills a farmer and tortures his wife in order to make her reveal where her deserter sons are hidden. They put the woman’s thumbs under a fencepost and Scary Blonde Guy stands on the fence to make the pain worse. Scary Blonde Guy shoots the sons dead when they run out of the barn where they’re hiding in order to rescue their mother. This scene is based on actual incidents in North Carolina during the dirty war between Confederate forces (regular troops and Home Guards) and draft-resisting “outliers.”
END SPOILER
Neither the book nor the movie has a lot of black people in it. Those who make brief appearances don’t have real speaking roles, and one of them is unconscious. Given Hollywood’s awkward and embarrassing record on race, we can only imagine the sensitivity and delicacy with which they would have treated black characters if they had more screen time and more lines – which was no excuse not to try, of course. In any case, the limited number of black characters is arguably reflective of the comparatively small black population (whether slave or free) in North Carolina’s mountain counties during this time. To many nonslaveholding whites, the war was fought by slaveowning planters who wanted to keep their slaves but not to fight for that privilege, given the wide availability of draft exemptions which rich planters, but not poor subsistence farmers, could take advantage of. “A rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight,” many called it. To be fair, some rich planter types rushed to join the Confederate army without being drafted – chivalry and all that. They were generally able to come into the army as officers, though, not as lowly privates.
Inman’s journey back to home and to Ada has plenty of echoes of Ulysses’ journey back to home and Penelope.
Penélope Cruz
Inman does Ulysses one better because he doesn’t wait ten years before coming back – It only takes about three years before he realizes that his duties to his home community override his duties to a collapsing slave republic. Like Ulysses, though, Inman meets plenty of monsters on his homeward journey.
As if to balance out Ada’s dad the good minister, the narrative introduces an evil preacher – Veasey – whom Inman meets on the road. The wolf in sheep’s clothing is played in the movie by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
BEGIN SPOILER
Here is where the movie is a disappointment compared to the book. In the movie, Veasey has gotten a slave girl pregnant. Seeking to cover up his behavior, Veasey is about to throw the girl into the river to kill her when Inman comes by and puts a stop to Veasey’s evil. In the book it’s the same set-up, but the pregnant girl is a white woman named Laura Foster. This is sort of an Easter egg which Frazier, the novelist, planted for folklorists and aficionados of the ghoulish. Laura Foster was a real person in western North Carolina. One of her real-life lovers, Tom (“Tom Dooley”) Dula, was hanged for her murder soon after the Civil War.
END SPOILER
So, like a modern Ulysses, does Inman reach home and Ada? I’ve done enough spoilers, so I won’t add another.
But I’m not gonna lie, this is not the feel-good hit of the summer. Whether in book or movie form, though, it is a compelling story.
Greetings once again, boils and ghouls, and welcome to the final regular installment of Reviews You’ll Never Use. I regret to announce that the column will be ending as a recurring piece, though may reappear now and again in the future.
Our topic tonight is a film that I followed with some interest through its development, The Boy. Often with horror films, writers and/or directors will have a short film, a treatment, or sometimes even a fully finished movie (though usually badly in need of editing), but cannot get distribution. It’s a fairly common phenomenon that affects most low-budget filmmakers when they’re just getting started. Such was the case with director Craig William Macneill. The Boy was only his second full-length feature as a director, and I recall reading some years ago about how he was trying to drum up financing to turn his short, Henley, into a full-fledged movie. The concept he outlined was to do a trilogy, following the life of a serial killer through early childhood, into young adulthood, and then as an older man. I thought it was an interesting idea, and looked forward to the first installment. Certainly the whole, “what makes a serial killer tick” shtick has been done before – even Rob Zombie took his reboot of Halloween in that direction (though for my money, nothing has yet topped the excellent Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). However, it had never been done over the course of three films (unless you count the trials and tribble-ations of Anakin Skywalker). Eventually, the movie saw the light of day due in large part to Chiller Films, which is part of that horror-dedicated cable channel I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
A boy and his deer. Would have been creepier if it didn’t remind me of that scene in Freddy Got Fingered. At least the antlers come in handy later.
Truth be told, that was a few years back, and I’d kind of forgotten about the whole thing until recently when I saw it for sale on the cheap at Movie Trading Company. So I brought that bastard home & popped it in the ye olde Blu-Ray player. And an hour and forty-five minutes later, I awoke with a start as something finally fucking happened at the end of the movie.
So let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: the director, bless his heart, had more brains and artistic chutzpah than your average trash low-budget horror filmmaker and didn’t want to do another throw-away slasher. Okay, cool, I get it, more power to you. But I think he goes a bit off the rails in trying just so damned hard to make you take this film seriously, and to not lurch into being a stereotypical horror film. Camera angles are static, the background sounds are exaggerated for effect (with no background music through the entirety, except what characters play on their stereo), and there are just too many cock-tease moments before the final payoff.
We open in 1989, at a crappy roadside motel run by David Morse, and his troubled son, Jared Breeze. The motel is clearly dying, and Morse has taken counsel of despair and despondency. He does pay his son a quarter per carcass to keep roadkill scraped up off the highway, I suppose to make the place less creepy-seeming to passersby. Breeze is stultified by this life, never interacting with other children except when the increasingly scarce guests happen to have their own crotch-fruit. His father, though going through the motions, seems to have checked out of having any sort of vitality, and his mother ran off years ago with one of the guests.
Rainn Wilson and Jared Breeze, shooting the breeze. Yeah, I went there. This movie is that fucking boring.
Eventually, curiosity gets the best of him, and instead of simply waiting for the highway to provide his income, he decides in true capitalist fashion to go out and make shit happen. So he seeds the middle of the road with potato chips & chicken feed, to draw animals that will then be hit by cars. This plan goes slightly awry when Rainn Wilson (I always hated that fucking first name) hits a deer and totals his car, causing him to have to stay at the motel. The titular Boy grows close to Rainn over a number of days, though the reluctant guest gives plenty of clues to us in the audience that he may not be a wholesome person. Another couple with a little boy stop in, and Breeze disables their car so that they’ll stay an extra day (and almost drowns their son while playing in the swimming pool). Our little protagonist (antagonist?) displays unusual behaviors, such as stealing Rainn’s dead wife’s ashes and looming over the guests in their beds at night.
By the end of the film, he’s managed to coerce Rainn into chasing him through a junkyard where he laid a tarp over a deep pit, trapping a severely wounded Rainn presumably for forced boy-on-man sex at a later date. He also cops a feel off a drunk girl at a prom party that has rented out a few of the motel rooms. The boys at the party kick his ass pretty bad, and his drunk father only yells at him for having disturbed the guests. So Breeze takes things into his own hands, waits until everyone is passed out asleep, and burns the fucking motel to the ground while everyone screams inside.
Fucking FINALLY something happens. The kid takes the antlers his dad sawed off the carcass, wires them to his head, and kills a bunch of people by burning them alive. He was inspired by heated political rhetoric.
I don’t want to bash this movie. It was ambitious, to do a slow-burn think piece as your first big horror film, and that takes both guts and some level of thinking above and beyond what most hacks in this field are capable of. So I applaud Mr. Macneill for that. I would much rather someone make this attempt and not quite succeed than give in to the siren song of doing Friday the 13th Part Eleventy. The problem is, up until the end, the entire fucking thing is nothing but an hour and thirty minutes of atmosphere and set-up, and by the time you finally get to the payoff, it’s too damned late. Nobody cares anymore. Shit fucking fire, I’d fallen asleep in my (admittedly very comfortable) Lay-Z-Boy. The vanishingly few non-superhero films that are being made anymore should find their strength in being the opposite of Fortress Mouse and its motto of “There Is No Such Thing As Too Many Overwrought CGI Battles”. These movies should take their time with pace, and rely on solid performances and writing to build engagement with the characters and situations. And this film does that. Both Morse and little Jared turn in quite good renditions of their bleak characters, never going into absurd “look how awful our lives are” hyperbole. But it does it too fucking much. At this point, I realize I’m starting to sound like a crank, but it really is like Goldilocks stealing the porridge from those fucking pedobears. Just because some things are too much one way, and you quite rightly realize that a correction is in order, doesn’t mean that you necessarily go a full 100 mph in the exact opposite direction until you hit a wall. It’s okay to go partway. Just the tip. It won’t make you gay, and you never have to tell anyone else about it if you don’t want to.
Anyway, I think Macneill has promise. My criticisms are harsher because I perceive the film to have so much more potential than what was realized. There’s honestly a really good movie lurking in their editing room somewhere, and that’s nothing to sneeze at considering what most young auteur horror directors crank out. This one just doesn’t quite rise to the occasion.
I typically read a lot of other reviews online to try and help focus my own sense of how I view the films I write about, and also to make sure my criticisms aren’t solidly addressed by some aspect that I might have just plain missed. I found one that seems to echo my thoughts entirely, only better written.
Weighing in at 105 minutes, “The Boy” traps itself in a corner by giving its sights, sounds, and story so much room to breathe that the suspense ratchet cannot retain its tightness. The movie has more time than it needs to get where it wants to go, giving excess duration free reign to defuse dread with unfulfilled setups and unnecessary asides.
Preach it. I award this film two Pretty Marines and one Cat out of three possible of the former, and two possible of the latter.
Let’s take it down a notch and have a little fun this week. This… is Carnik Con.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFpvY1lIp4g
Carnik con is what you would get if you took Homestar Runner, added a class 3 FFL, and served it on top of some Monty Python. It is hands down the absolute funniest and most awesome gun related youtube channel, probably of all time. Carnik con was created by Dugan Ashley, who also starred in, directed, and edited the videos as well. It launched in 2013 and quickly gained popularity in the circles of the ballistically inclined for its humor, slick production quality, and fuckton of awesome guns. What’s notable is the sheer variety of different types of content produced. There’s general gun knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ACX6ZcqTU
Insightful firearms reviews:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZTRjXD7AVU
Tactical training for operators:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZepJFmFB7BE
Historical Content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqpHU0oLG2Y
And of course, the musical smash hit ‘Hold an AK’, whose single went triple platinum mere days after release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgpEuCUm6SE
Sadly, we will never realize the full potential of this bold visionary. Dugan ended the Carnik con program near the end of March 2015, which I have determined to be the cruelest and most effective April fools prank in history. Thankfully the videos are still up, and despite the last video airing almost 2 years ago it still has over 100,000 subscribers.
Just when it seems darkest, however, a light appears on the horizon. The torch may have been passed to a new generation. Allow me to introduce Firepower United, starring Phuc Long:
Marvel at his tactical skills:
Gaze in awe at his mastery of common vernacular:
Be dazzled by his historical knowledge:
Phuc’s videos lack the polish and finesse of his sweater clad predecessor, but I find his videos wildly entertaining nonetheless. Needless to say, I recommend you check out both channels.
Author’s note: Florida Man is a super-villain whose worthless minions are always causing him to run afoul of the law and press.
Florida Man regained consciousness in stages. With his eyes closed, he took stock of where he was. Industrial mattress, no sharp pain or fog of painkillers. Must be jail. Shit. Jail again. You’d think a guy who made meth for a living would take care handling product, but apparently not.
Florida Man had paid a lot of money, too much really, for the formula to the actual MK ULTRA drug. Exposure to which places its victim into a state of hyper-suggestibility for several minutes followed by about 12 hours of zombie-like attempt to comply with those suggestions. Finally, his useless minions would be able to execute simple commands like “go to the store and buy food” without getting themselves arrested for something stupid like road rage. “Note to self,” he said, “do NOT use anyone to formulate the compound if they insist on calling it a recipe.” That meth guy claimed to have helped make GHB for a biker gang, but if so, he must have done so by staying outside.
Sitting up, Florida Man found himself in a cell alone. Either the… whichever county… sheriff had finally started according him respect as a super-villain or this was going to be a bad one. Hearing footsteps coming up the row, FM came to the front of the cell. Coming up the line was the biggest, widest redneck FM had seen since he tried running a tutoring camp for football players too dumb to graduate from Florida high schools. This did not help Florida Man narrow down where he might be, except it wasn’t a Caribbean island. As the CO passed Florida Man’s cell, the redneck stopped for a second and looked down on FM with sparkling eyes. “Boy,” the CO said, “I jus’ want you to know that if was up to me, I’d let you go free. You was jus’ expressing an opinion. Except at that jew’s house, but he weren’t even there and you didn’t even try to steal his jew-gold. Like a jew rabbi can’t afford to lose a bottle of vodka once in a while. ” Palm Beach county uniform. Okay, at least he knew who to call for bail.
“Could I…” Florida Man swallowed hard, “Could I see the papers?”
“Sure, Boy. I’ll have that little black trustee bring them with your breakfast.”
Shit. Shit. That fucking knuckle-dragging, no teeth, white trash, loser meth cook had been ranting about a white ethnostate and the problems with “joos and mooslems” as he was bringing the formula out. The compound must have spilled. What in the Hell had FM done during his fugue?
About ten minutes later the trustee came down the line with breakfast. And the newspaper. This was going to be tough to explain to some of his foreign backers.
Hello my macabre menagerie of malcontents, and welcome once again to the only thing on the internet better than Asian spit-roast porn, Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, we’ll review…the sequel to the movie we took a look at last week *sad trombone sound*.
Actually it was a stroke of fortune; the reason I dusted off Class of 1999 last week was because I saw it on El Rey Network as I was channel surfing one evening, and it turns out they started playing the sequel, as well. So I taped it (yes, I’m old enough I still refer to all program capture off of a television as “taping”, even though it’s done on the dvr) and gave it a whirl. And let me say: worth it. I mean, not really, but in the sense of, it was every bit as dumb as I thought it would be, and so in that perverse sense, did not disappoint.
Released in some territories as “Class of 2001”, which I think goes with the theme of “Class of 1984” and “Class of 1999” a little better. But like everything else having to do with this movie, they took the stupid way out.
First, let me say some lovely words about El Rey Network. I’m not being paid to do this, but this and Chiller (the horror channel; I used to have two horror channels, but the superior Fearnet was bought out and ceased operations, to my never ending regret) are my go-to channels when turning on the television. Ostensibly started by Robert Rodriguez to try and cater to the young Hispanic market, instead it is simply a reflection of Robert Rodriguez’s (and my own) taste in film. Which is to say, grindhouse, kung-fu, big dumb action, and z-grade horror. Seriously, look at the site I linked and scroll down just a bit to where it says, “El Rey Is…” and see the categories. I watch that channel like 5-6 hours per week, and that’s a lot for me as outside of live sports, I’m not a big TV guy. What the fuck any of this has to do with young Hispanics I’ll never know, because I’m 90% certain from the many that I am acquainted with and friends with both professionally and personally (I live in Texas) that most of them aren’t into this shit. Robert Rodriguez is into this shit, and apparently nobody has the stones to tell him he isn’t representative of the young Hispanic zeitgeist in this country. I was zeroed in over the Memorial Day break because they ran a three day marathon of old The Incredible Hulk episodes. Over Christmas, they had Kaiju Christmas, and just ran Godzilla movies on loop for like three or four days. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH WEED THIS CAUSES ME TO BURN THROUGH? I DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CHAIR EXCEPT TO STUMBLE TO THE DOOR TO GET DELIVERY FOR LIKE 48 STRAIGHT HOURS. I LOVE THIS NETWORK!!! They do have some sort of Lucha show, which I suppose is Hispanic-y, but that’s about it.
But I digress. Four years after the world-record smashing success of Class of 1999, some sharp marble decided it would be a good idea to do a sequel. Most of the top names in Hollywood were attached to direct at some point or another, but the studio was very choosy, and told Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, et al to take a fuckin’ hike. I heard Spielberg even offered to pay them to be allowed to direct this film, but was given Saving Private Ryan as a consolation prize when he couldn’t get this one. What’s that Cameron? You already did a successful killbot movie, and want in on this action? FUCK you, I’ll kill your family. There is no one smarter than studio execs, and they knew that there was only man who could bring this puppy to life. And that man was career stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos. You will undoubtedly remember him as the deft hand behind six episodes of Team Knight Rider from 1997-98 which, if taken collectively and combined with this movie, constitute 2/3rds of his lifetime directorial experience. And so was born Class of 1999 II: The Substitute.
Eyeliner, lipstick, and purple hair spray? Once again, upper middle class white America, *this is not what a gang member looks like*
So now that they had their director, they needed a star. And nobody on the whole wide Earth was a bigger star in 1994 than Sasha Mitchell. He played the dumb older kid on Step By Step. The handsome leading man needed a sexy lady to play against, so in steps Caitlin Dulany, from no fuckin’ thing. She makes up for lack of pedigree by showing her tittays in a romping sex scene with none other than…Nick Cassavetes! That’s right, the much less famous son of the great John Cassavetes steps in to give Caitlin the ol’ D, and otherwise kind of play an on-again off-again douchebag. I shouldn’t make fun of him too much, though – he directed his own mother Gena Rowlands in The Notebook, so that’s legitimately kind of a big deal. Good for him. More than I’ve done with my life. I bet he got to fuck Rachel McAdams. I’d fuck Rachel McAdams. If I was a director, I’d be one of those sleazy old-timey ones you always hear about who makes the actresses “audition” their sucky-fucky skills. Hey, it’s a condition of employment, no physical coercion, and thus fully libertarian, so, you know…blow.
Anyway, the film is very loosely tied to the events of the previous one by the exposition of Department of Educational Defense agent G. D. Ash, played by some dude named named Rick Hill. I almost didn’t even check the link to his name while doing my prelim work for this article, but I’m glad I did, because hole-ee fucking shit, lookee lookee what I found. That bitch is goin’ on the list hard. That shit makes The Beastmaster look like big-budget Oscar bait. I literally have a hard-on in anticipation of the lovely, melty pure Velveeta that is that movie. Soon *strokes penis back to sleep*, soon my pet (for this one time only, “strokes penis back to sleep” is not a masturbation metaphor…or is it?). A hilarious part of the exposition and occasional flash-backs is that they only show the killbot played by the unfortunately named Patrick Kilpatrick. I get not showing Pam Grier, because she’s a “name” and the money to use her image might have been too much for this no-budget schlock-fest. But why not show any of the old English professor killbot, played by John Ryan? The only fucking thing that guy’s ever done of note was be the lead in It’s Alive, which is admittedly a pretty good thing to have done. That’s a badass movie, and I may review it at some point in the future here. You can’t go wrong with Larry Cohen directing, I’ll just leave it at that. If you check that link, ignore the “Known For” bullshit and just look at the directorial work. If you’re into this kind of stuff, at least three or four of those will jump out at you as classics.
I…I…I just can’t. It’s too easy. Feel free to caption this one yourselves in the comments.
Moving on, turns out there was one killbot left in a bunker after the whole operation went south, and it broke out and has posed as a substitute teacher going up and down the west coast murdering delinquent students. He winds up in a small California town, where a teacher (Dulany) is set to testify against one of her own former students, whom she saw fatally shoot another student. There’s a lot of tension as gangs in the school are trying to intimidate the teacher into recanting her statements and not testifying. Even the school leadership wants her to back down, because they can’t handle the heat. Here’s where Nick Cassavetes shows up and in one scene seems like a complete tool telling her how to run her life, and a few scenes later will seem to be all supportive. I don’t know if it was a ham-fisted way to try and display depth to the character or what, but it’s poorly written. He’s also some kind of military enthusiast who keeps a military “museum” consisting of a trailer full of memorabilia on his paintball range, which includes an underground bunker full of surplus MREs, weapons, detonators…you know, the usual. We never find out if he’s a militia guy or anything, but I suppose it was nice to show him as being a pretty normal dude for the most part who just happens to have an extreme interest in survivalism and military paraphernalia, instead of being the wild-eyed gun nut prepper of so many other films. He goes Rambo on one of the gang members at one point, but is strongly provoked into doing so, so I don’t think that counts.
Long story short (too late!), killbot Sasha does things like take inspiration from poems, look in on Caitlin as she’s undressing, and also look in her window while she’s fucking Nick Cassavetes. This is where we get to see her tits. Also, check out her bed – if this movie wasn’t made in 1994, I’d have sworn it was 1984, because her bed frame has functional neon lighting all over it. He alternatively saves Caitlin, and seems to be ready to kill her because she’s getting too close to him. Their whole relationship is very confusingly depicted.
I love this bed! So 80s sextastic! I’d do coke and fuck in this bed like a fucking champ. I’d fuck in this bed like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and listen to Flock of Seagulls while I PIIHB. Put the Disco Peacock from Suspiria on the nightstand, and it’s like my dream bedroom.
The day of the big JROTC paintball game arrives, and the nefarious gang-members are angling to arrange an “accident” to kill the stool pigeon teacher. Natch, Sasha shows up and kills everybody, including setting trip wires that somehow throw spiked metal ninja balls at people which Cassavetes describes as an, “old Navy Seal trick”. Uh-huh.
Eventually we find out that Sasha isn’t a killbot – he’s the demented son of Stacy Keach from the previous film, who is looking to take over his old man’s student-killing ways. He just acts like a robot because he’s apparently just fucking crazy. He wore a bullet-proof suit that looks like some Evel Knievel spandex because it’s future armor from the fantastic year of 1999. After taking several armor-piercing slugs point-blank and bleeding out, he still functions without any noticeable decline in ability, though eventually gets trapped in the bunker and blown sky high. It’s never explained how he found the damn bunker, or why he suddenly went off the reservation and started slaughtering innocent students along with the troublemakers. We end with Caitlin on the phone describing how she’s taking on a class of troublesome remedial students, because after all she’s been through, now she’s a badass I guess. A badass whose tits we got to see, as they were bouncing up and down while she was riding Nick Cassavetes like he was the horse son of a more famous horse, on her neon-bedecked bed.
The most hardcore paintball session evah.
Look, I ain’t gonna sugar coat it – this one’s bad. The performances from Caitlin and Nick are passable given what they had to work with, and kudos to them for giving it the old college try, but Sasha is trying to pull a Terminator stoic thing while still making corny one-liners (“Class is dismissed” after tossing a hand-grenade into a car full of kids). Even if atrocious writing wasn’t his fault, he comes across as wooden, but not in the way I believe the director had in mind. More like Anakin from The Phantom Menace, and less like a killbot. There are no fewer than two shots of two different explosions happening behind him while he dramatically faces the camera without flinching. I mean, one is bad enough, but two? And the whole, “He wasn’t a robot the entire time!” thing doesn’t work, because 1) the robots in the first movie already made dumb puns and displayed maniacal emotions, so taking an interest in poetry and peeping don’t seem like that far of a stretch even though it’s supposed to clue us in that he isn’t what he seems, and 2) he stands there without flinching while being shot many, many times. Even in bullet-resistant armor, the force of the impacts would still throw you backwards. I mean, he takes a full magazine from an Uzi at point-blank range and doesn’t even blink or push back an inch. I don’t give a shit how much you think you’re a robot, that’s fucking stupid. Oh, and don’t forget being treated to sharp exchanges such as this:
Caitlin: Go to hell.
Sasha: You first.
Nick, standing behind Caitlin: You first.
This is merely the first of two identical scenes you get treated to, that are in no way, shape, or form cliched.
That’s right, a surprise rescue from the kinda-hero just parrots back the antagonist’s words before shooting him. I hope they paid the scriptwriter in party tacos, because that’s all this drivel is worth.
Or Sasha’s mantra that without discipline, there can be no order, and without order, there is anarchy. This is used to justify his mass killing, by the way. If you aren’t willing to meet out the death penalty for truancy, you support unfettered chaos in the streets.
So ultimately I can’t recommend this movie. Hell, it still hasn’t even had a Region 1 dvd release – that should tell you something. Fucking Killdozer has a Region 1 dvd release. I mean goddamn dude, this is just sorry all around.
I have to give Class of 1999 II: The Substitute, a paltry 2 1/2 Corgi Butts out of 7. It would have been two flat, except for getting to see Caitlin’s tittay’s bouncing all over the place, which will automatically add extra credit to any film. This is the first time during the run of this column that I feel I’ve actually suffered for my art, and that means ultimately, for you, my legions of adoring readers. Never say Gojira doesn’t love ya.
So last Saturday night I attended my first bout of the 2017 season with my new home team – the Charlottesville Derby Dames. Technically it was a doubleheader, but due to the location – about 45+ min away and my busy weekend, I didn’t stay for the second bout. Still, I had a blast watching the Derby Dames All Stars crush Mother State Roller Derby 318 to 104.
Apparently leaving early was a mistake though – it looks like the second match was a lot closer. That comes as a bit of a surprise though because most of the matches I’ve attended have been fairly one-sided. The scoring format tends to favor that – but it really depends on the teams too.
A little more background is probably in order – all the teams I’ve followed have been members of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) – which definitely seems to be the most common format these days (as opposed to the older tilted track). I attended one multi-team bout in Honolulu, but most of my experience has been attending bouts of the Fredericksburg Roller Derby (formerly 540 Roller Girls) team the last couple of years.
Rather than trying to explain it all, I’ll let the graphic above break down the basics (more here). Starting with what’s essentially a rolling scrum, it takes some effort to break through the inertial crush and get a good lead. Then to actually score, you need to pass at least one member of the opposing team on your second time around the track. And that gets to be a lot more complicated due to all the blocking and checking. The Jammer (scorer) can also end the Jam (play) at any point once they’ve taken the initial lead by getting through the initial scrum – whether or not any points have been scored. Generally, each team has 3 or 4 members that take turns as Jammers rotating on and off the track while the blockers stay on the track for extended periods of time.
On the whole, though, it tends to be very entertaining. I think for me it’s a combination of factors – between the overall athletic factor of amateur sports, the retro/vintage/pin-up crossover themes, the family-friendly entertainment and the general sense of humor involved (I also have a lot of nostalgia from rollerskating as a kid). I’ve never been a big fan of sports in general (at UNC-CH I attended a grand total of 2 exhibition basketball games and 1/2 a football game – and those were free) – but as a form of entertainment, this appeals to my sensibilities a lot more.
Every bout is a mini-event in itself – lots of merch (I like to collect t-shirts and can cozies – the pin-up designs are always a draw). Generally, there’s a variety of additional mini-events – pinball tournaments, raffles, giveaways and other family-friendly attractions – not to mention craft beer or local winery promotions along with the other sponsors – and after-parties (not that I’ve made it to one yet).
As I understand it, a lot of the recent cultural interest was reignited by Drew Barrymore’s 2009 film “Whip It“. I’ve seen some references that call out 3rd Wave Feminism as being a major influence in Roller Derby, but I can’t say that I’ve really seen much of that in the sport from my limited experience (certainly nothing toxic). I’d say it appears to be an empowering experience for the participants and entertaining for the audience, but it doesn’t have any of the negative side effects that come from some other cultural events – for one thing, there’s no competition with men (forced, implied or otherwise). Of course, that’s based on my experiences – I know in some areas they allow men or trans participants as well – for the bouts I’ve seen, men are only coaches, referees or other non-skating officials. From my perspective attending events in Hawaii and more frequently/recently in Virginia, these bouts have been far more “A League of Their Own” and far less “SJWs on Ice” – YMMV depending on region.
Unlike many sports (amateur or otherwise), there’s little to no barrier to entry – most teams host regular events for folks interesting in joining up. All it takes is an interest and some energy – no prior experience required.
I’m definitely looking forward to the next double header on 3 June. You’ll be able to recognize me in my new shirt.
If you’re interested in checking out local events, I’d start here. Alternatively just googling “Roller Derby [your location here]” seems to have pretty good results.
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