Post-American Pride: DEATH RACE 2050 (Roger Corman Lives!)

Brought Gulliver-low through Lilliputian micro-managerial fascism on the one side and kamikaze cabinet-casting by a rabid right on the other, America--by which I mean me, the ghost of Woody Guthrie, and maybe you--are in serious trouble, maybe. To the left I say don't take it out on me if I seem too slack for your snooty food co-op; to the right I say at least do dystopia right, as in public executions, and televised death games for condemned prisoners, and cross-country road rage races with points awarded for pedestrians killed. Roger Corman can help you with that. And DEATH RACE 2050 is here - on Netflix, and perfect for an angry beer-and-rage-soaked wochenende. 

I confess, reader, I been blocked. I been brought low by horrific panic in all my usual sources of solace (even Facebook) I couldn't read another step, either from work or the news, couldn't handle even a droplet from the terrifying cascade of perceived injustice. Then, the scariest thing of all is my my own aging face in the black mirror. Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, like the Weenie King says. It's all too awful. There's no respite for this alcoholic still stuck and sniffling in and out of these rooms. Relapse for Dollar$ then, with moderation as impossible a dream as a javelin landing on the head of a pin.

But then DEATH RACE 2050 came and saved me, Woody Guthrie, and maybe you.  Not only does it satirize the Idiocracy of the Post-Trump America so trenchantly it feels pulled from tomorrow's headlines, it does so without making me get so angry I start to tremble and shake, blood pressure spiking like I just funneled a carload of salted meat. In 2050's overall blackly comic post-meta deadpan tone lurks a whole box of coping mechanisms as yet unopened. I came to it in despair, and within its brief runnig time found fuel for a catharsis, and lo, I was reborn in the bloody joy that's always there at the core of our fucked-up nation.

Now I can relax, because I know the truth: no matter if it's the uptight self-righteous co-op crowd or the NASCAR beer-necks running up the sails, our great American craft of madness will find some fertile breeze to blow it.

After all, when the world drowns in its own tears, we'd be fools not to jump into the ocean after it, like a consolatory Ahab with a Harpoon (Ale) in hand. No worries if we too vanish below the roiled surf. We'll Rise Again within the Hour! 'hic'!

In case you don't know, the original DEATH RACE 2000 (1975) was a huge hit for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. It boasted a terrific 'it's what everyone's thinking but no one has the guts to say' hook right up there with ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK's: a national cross-country race where you earn points by running over pedestrians, a mix of NASCAR and the Roman coliseum. The cast of star drivers included a young Sylvester Stallone as Joe Peturbo, David Carradine as Frankenstein, Mary Woronov as a cowgirl bull rider, and Roberta Collins as the Nazi-ed up Matilda the Hun. How could it fail? Directed by Paul Bartel from a Charles B. Griffith script, it's a gem that's held up over the years remarkably well. Not only was I inspired to re-watch my Blu-ray of it it immediately after 2050, but I even unearthed my unopened copy of its "sequel" DEATHSPORT, the Shout DVD of which includes--I learned-- a great Allan Arkush commentary track.

None of these have much in common with the Jason Statham remake and its sequels, on which Corman had no part, and which I tried to watch but are too dark, literally and figuratively. (In the words of Tony Camonte's secretary, I like a show with jokes and it ain't got no jokes). Either way, the Bartel 1975 version is so good it shouldn't be sullied with comparison to anything except... maybe we're finally ready... this official 2050-set sequel.

Produced by Roger and Julie Corman and directed by G.J. Echternkamp, DEATH RACE 2050 brings in Oculus Rift-stlyle headset and projection technology to the TV-viewers at home and a grim and very plausible future in which 95% of the population are unemployed but don't care because their headset goggle things make their surroundings BLACK MIRROR bright (an artificiality that perfectly fits the film's copious use of green screen) Everyone lives in a state of besotted numbness, seeing their ugly elderly roommates as gorgeous models, waking up only to clamor for blood at the big race. Malcolm McDowell is the fey president, a cross between Donald Trump (hair jokes), and a straight Elton John (he's dressed all super-glam but sits at his office flanked by broads feeding him grapes ala Malcolm's two biggest hits: CALIGULA and CLOCKWORK ORANGE ).

He's the big name star here, of course, but his performance is kind of broad and too similar to past crazy monomaniacal dictators he's played (and, brother, he's played his share). Not that he's bad, at all. He's Malcolm. But the rest of the cast, holy shit! They're in all the way, all ten nails dug deep for the long haul.

Acidemic Top Honors in the great over-acting school of classic drive-in fare first must go to foam-at-the-mouth Burt Grinstead--channeling the spirit of Dick Rude in REPO MAN--as a closeted 'perfect male.' Anessa Ramsey is second as a tidal wave of fundamentalist Christian mania, named Tammy ("All hail Saint Elvis Presley!"); a true force of crazy nature, shed be right at home in FASTER PUSSSYCAT, KILL KILL. Next car over is Folake Olowofoyeku as an African American woman driver who pedals her vaporwave single (Drive! Drive! Kill! Kill!") while racing across redneck stretches of this post-Trump wasteland of a nation by day, and by night, quietly confessing her dad is a black history chair at Columbia. Shhhh. Another car is driven by an AI computer (who promptly has an identity crisis) with the navigator a Ballard-CRASH style auto-erotic hedonist (Shanna Olsen); there's also sweet Marci Miller as Frankenstein's right hand woman (and requisite rebel assassin); and an all-in Yancy Butler as the leader of "the Resistance." Frankenstein himself is played by New Zealand Male Manu Bennett. Shizz yeah, as April Wolfe points out "Roger Corman's 'Death Race 2050' is the only movie that matters in 2017" - Gurls is always right.

Termite details matter: zoom in to read words on upper jaw

Here's a movie that doesn't just man up, it mans off: Marci Miller just whips out  the aboveand puts it in after the projection of rebel leader Yancy Butler berates her in the shower for not killing Frankenstein yet "as a symbol" (and Miller answers in shower-song-speak so Frankenstein in the next room doesn't hear her conversation - genius). Will it joing the cop-outs of Hard Candy and Teeth, or man-up and man-off like Spit on the Last Grave from the Left? For once it almost doesn't matter, it just fits like a reverse glove in a layered free-for-all of metatextual green screen savagery so rife with piled-up details it never needs to explain its few confusing glitches.

Evoking great Corman slap-dash jobs of the past, like his underrated CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, and GAS-S-S-ss, DEATH RACE 2050 deserves a spot in the pantheon of genius low-budget green-screen hipster sci-fi genre pastiches ala JOHN DIES AT THE END, BOUNTY KILLER, and IRON SKY. Don't even try to question why this kind of crunch car smash surreal green screen zip feels more real than most of Hollywood's gritty dramas. That's just 'the future' talking and you're already in it. I bet even now there's a difference between how you see yourself in your mind's eye (and the mirror with good lighting), and how deranged you look in a selfie. Don't listen to that selfie, son or daughter! Know that you look like everyone else in the rooms of your nearest beginner AA group, not some spectacular bleary-eyed butterfly. Just floor it on through the illusions, jump that uncanny valley, and fear no hard landing future, left or right of the dial. Even if the next crunch you hear is your own hard candy cracking, thou wert only ever pixels.

Not even their heads shall be right-sized 

5 Psychotronic Gems on Netflix: Badass Babes for a Bernie Nation

By popular request, here's the idealistic third entry in the Streaming Future canon, five films that reflect a grass roots toughness in places where grass is rare. Psychotronic in their outlaw spirit, these tales of tough warrior babes convey flagrant disregard for your mannish gaze's woeful tantrums.

It's strange to me that most badass foxes I know in real life are for Bernie and uninspired by warrior clan alpha Hillary. For them it's not a matter of gender but a whole new sort of post-internet age disregard for tradition, even tradition of woman empowerment--is this the arrival of fourth wave feminism, or merely post-Christian patriarchy in a way the just bypasses fighting it and just lets it topple of its own volition, like when you're pushing against someone pushing against you and then you stop and just step out of the way and they fall over? Either way, a bespectacled, hunched-over plain talking elderly Jewish senator has inspired them to vote and care the way they used to, before Obama let himself by hamstrung by his Quiet Man schoolyard pacifism and fear of Executive Order writs. It wasn't intentional that this list includes so many badass young warriors but here they are, cage-free, no abductions, no HMOs or HPOs or HBOs. These women aren't waiting to be abused before fighting back. They're not waiting for their insurance card before collecting what is owed. These women look askance at the subtextually clueless Jurassic World-style cinch-your-blouse, roll-up-your-sleeves and pout-to-make-nature-behave feminism that passes for strength in mainstream Hollywood. This shit is gonna get bloody, and fucking fast, and as Bogart said in Cult of the Damned, screw anyone who hates killing! And that means you, mainstream Hollywood!

1. BOUNTY KILLER
(2013) Dir Henry Saine

****

It's one of those cult-deserving films that is, I think, undone by its generic title and poster art. It should be called MARY DEATH, KILL! (a play on both that 'Mary, Boff, Kill' game, and 'Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!') or something that conveys the sheer badass good-time of this film that does what TANK GIRL never could, successfully brings a graphic novel / comic to life in ways that are playful but violent, action-packed and homage-ish without being too heavy-handed. Newcomer Christian Pitre is Mary Death, a famous bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic time when bounty hunters are the new rock stars, and their quarry are the executives of now outlawed corporations (who all wear yellow ties). Mary Death is a gleaming national symbol of a new post-corporate order, followed by adoring photographers and magazine piece writers as she tools around the wasteland in search of targets. She's such a cool cat that when her lover and trainer Drifter (Matthew Marsden) tries to get serious about a house and a home away from the killing, she stabs him in his spleen and roars off on her badass bike. Think a fusion of GAS-S-S-S pumped into THE ROAD WARRIOR via a Jack Hill-directed pump. I love this movie to death, and the casual way it has with total over-the-top gore and brutality makes my heart soar like hawk. I'm sure some stuff was green-screened here and there but frankly I didn't notice, because the characters are endearing and the action refreshing, even Hawksian at times.

Lookin' slammin' in mod dress cream-and-dark red dress and packin' guns like the little sister of Gina Carano (as in she can believably kick ass and not like in the 'don't bust my nails' condescending heavy-handed way of action heroines in countless lesser films), Pitre is amazingly assured here in her feature debut. And if you think it's easy to put a good Corman-esque babes-n-guns action film together in our day and age then you've never seen SUCKER PUNCH or TANK GIRL or AEON FLUX or ULTRA-VIOLET, BITCH SLAP, CAT RUN, BARB WIRE, SALT, HANNAH or ELEKTRA. Everything those gets wrong, this gets right. Even Marsden is cool and--as his evil corporate ex-wife-- Kristina Loken is well into the full-fanged spirit of the piece. Mary's got more tricks up her sleeve than her old crew of Post-Pagan matriarchal vehicular guerrillas have suspiciously clean-lined Mexican-style skull face tattoos. Did my higher self make this movie in heaven and send it back through time to perk my spirits up? Like the Bern was himself so sent? (See: Pharmageddon)

Why the BERN: What part of open war against the 1% corporate raiders did you not get?! Blam Blam! Let their yellow ties be spattered in gore, their golf courses and office cubicles awash in the blood of the surviving 1% of the .001%. And the surviving 10% of the 99% shall inherit the radioactive wind, the antique Budweiser six packs, and the black rain. 

HARDWARE

(1990) Dir Richard Stanley

***

It's one of those foxy girl vs. murder machine movies --think the last ten minutes of the Terminator and Demon Seed rolled into one hell of a Blade Runner-sque future, which sounds very erotic, I know, but instead... it's Hardware. Directed by the Peter Weir of 90s sci-fi, Richard Stanley, it's filled with the sort of weird termite detail we expect from the blighter who gave us the almost-great Dust Devil and then was kicked off his own adaptation of Island of Dr. Moreau. As with great pastiche gems like the above, Bounty Killer, you can see the influences and homages from a mile off, but they're the right influences, and there's a smartness about using what's available at the stereo junkyard (to a level of true outsider folk art derangement) to fill the techno-pagan loft apartment of said foxy girl, who is a crazy outsider artist with lots of dirty video monitors and drills and saws and shit. When the erotic shower occurs with boyfriend Dermot Mulroney, he keeps his metal hand still on! And that's the Stanley difference!

Now, unlike Bounty Killer, this isn't a great gonzo nuthouse totally bonkers film destined to be a classic, but it is very close. It's full of period new wave and punk rock; and any isolated NYC artist with a messy studio workshop apartment will relate to foxy redhead Stacey Travis in her fortress of sculptural solitude, her high security paradise in a fallen city. And unlike Bounty Killer, which is perfect in every way, Hardware is all almost undone by too many shots of an obscene caller fat guy. I like to give Stanley the benefit of the doubt and presume the excessive scenes of his gross face smacking his lips were meant to be removed by the censors (2), but it illuminates why Stanley is so often railroaded out of final cut, because this would be a great movie if one could just snip 90% of that leering, boil-faced lecher's reaction shot peep camera cutaways. 

Luckily, once sad skeeve is dispatched to the hell of a thousand eye gouges, the robot--every population control advocate's dream machine--resumes setting about euthanizing any human it can find as a last ditch effort to bring the human population down to sane levels (ala something referred to in a radio news broadcast as "the recent sterilization act"). Its electrokinetic ability to re-build itself makes the robot impossible to kill and Travis' fortress-level deadbolts make it impossible for people to rescue her. All she can do is evolve her strategy and aggression. Moving in seamless momentum, from disaffected artist chick to primal savage, Travis delivers a ferocious performance. You can taste the fear and fierce determination in her jade green eyes, her tousled autumnal hair and blood and oil-spattered pale face are perfectly lit and even her blood looks good on that pale skin. She's such an arresting vision you'll want to date an Irish girl all over again. But don't! 

WHY THE BERN:  What this scrappy analog indie lacks in polish and budget it makes up with interesting, vividly realized ideas and utopian themes far deeper than a first glance would indicate. 

PS - If you're subject to anxiety attacks or epilepsy - be warned - lots of strobes and flashing lights.

3. THE LAST SURVIVORS

(2014) Dir. Thomas S. Hammock

***

In a once-fecund Oregon --now globally-warmed into parched desert--a handful of unwashed stragglers face death or eviction at the hands of the local water baron and his foxy redheaded daughter. He wants the aquifer below their feet all to himself, to ensure his daughter's survival, rather than just prolonging the inevitable for a bunch of scabby homesteaders. One hardscrabble teenage girl (Haley Lui Richardson)--her hair and clothes and skin perfectly bleached and faded to blend in with the surroundings like natural camouflage-- decides to bring the fight to them. Fearless and scrappy, sneaking across the landscape with her samurai sword and shotgun, like a mix of the Feral Kid and a less self-righteous Katniss, Richardson shoots, sneaks and stabs her way to aquifer access. Unlike so many of her girl warrior peers, she never misses her targets and always has a level head even when killing cowering disarmed opponents in cold blood. She's kind enough to give a handful of passing nomads a jar of water, but harbors no illusions that they won't circle back that night to try and steal the well. There's no right or wrong action in this future world, just stray--possibly fatal--moments of compassion spread against ever-mounting desperation just for another day's hydration.

It's in this sense, too, that we understand the enemy water baron and his daughter for being so ruthless. It's simple survival, long-term vs. short. Haley Liu should have just shot the survivors begging for water, rather than giving them just enough that they have the energy to come back that night and try to get the rest. She'd probably do the same in their shoes, but dead men steal no wells, so to speak

It's these traits that make Richardson's understated, quiet heroine stand out from most post-apocalypse dramas protagonists. She never hesitates to land the killing blow. I'm so tired of action heroines who have to let us know violence isn't 'cool' at every opportunity, so if they pick up a gun or knife, shoot once or stab, it's always because their opponent leaves them no choice, and then they have to quick drop the weapon right away and break down sobbing, as if the gun or knife has-- in saving their life --somehow sullied their innocence. I've turned off movies the minute this happens in the past (recently: American Ultra, Everly). And, even in the good ones, like Maleficent, the heroine has to first walk away from the unarmed, beaten opponent, announcing 'there's been enough killing today' as she turns her back, so said opponent can draw a gun or a hidden knife, allowing the heroine to wheel around and kill them with a clean conscience-- ugh! If someone does that again, I'll scream! Why wait?

Sorry for the rant, but it's only to show why I like this film, because these young characters aren't like that. And actually the water baron and his cute redhead daughter are one of the more interesting and complex villain teams I've seen lately: there's just no one around to remind them their strategy is wrong, so they've confused mercy with self interest. Considering it's become a pretty brutal hardscrabble life, it's understandable they don't want to share or waste water on the doomed, worthless elderly. That's sound thinking for a viable future... for once, and unlike similar 'water rights' tracts in Rango and The Book of Eli, there's no Chinatown parallel, no idea all you have to do is turn the spigot and balance will be restored. There's no chance for balance, fairness, or togetherness anymore - just a waiting game until your kidneys shut down or the whole planet's a burnt-out husk. Hell, the baron isn't angry at Haley, but clearly impressed when she comes to his ranch to kill him. He knows it's not personal or even inhumane on either of their parts. He has an understanding too of honor in battle - and if this scrappy dame comes at him with a sword, he's going to fight her with a sword, not grab a gun and shoot her before she can get within swinging distance. He almost welcomes death, and his daughter (Nicole Fox from Cycle 13 of America's Next Top Model!) is no slouch with the samurai blade herself. Why does everyone in this film demonstrate at least medium proficiency with the exquisite and most deadly samurai sword? Who cares, is the question. It's awesome. Everyone not proficient across a spectrum of weapons is no doubt long-since dead in this drab and very believable globally warmed future. To its infinite credit, the script feels no compulsion to exposit this.

Other perks: Aside from sporadic, loping cello notes evoking some kind of scarcity-based frontier dustbowl past, Craig Deleon's score offers a lovely batch of drone sustains and the occasional blazing raw open string electric guitar. The one young child (Max Charles) neighbor is impressive, too; you look in his kid eyes and see a tough adult. So often, when kid actors try to play grown-up too fast thanks to a hardscrabble dustbowl style childhood, it's vice versa.


Nicole Fox, by the way, won that cycle of ANTM through her quiet but determined, slyly competitive spirit, a trait well-used here as she initially wrestles with qualms about killing all the unarmed settlers (so they bring a priest along to assure her it's mercy). The masks of their thug coterie are smart touches too--helping erase the emotional empathy between them and these families they grew up around and whom they now have to kill. And her gradual callousing over the course of the film is deftly done; her vaguely sleepy voice makes a perfect match with the score's eerie drones.

WHY THE BERN: A vivid tale of the youth of tomorrow paying for their parent's industrial hubris, Survivors presents--without preaching--the dusty future that global warming promises. A Daniel Plainview meets Noah Cross ogre determined to save his own child even at the expense of all others, the water baron makes a great example of the way conservatives fight to protect their own at the expense of everyone else's, even though the current crisis is essentially their own fault.

4. CENTURION

(2010) Dir. Neil Marshall

***

I'm one of the frozen chew who adore Neil "The Descent" Marshall's expensive 2008 flop Doomsday, though I missed it in theaters due to terrible advertising. Centurion tried it's best to sneak past me, too. I avoid gladiator movies as a rule, for I can't get past the terrible haircuts, closeted beefcake posturing, endless brutality, kinky slavery fetishism, relentless triumphant parading (showing off all the expensive extras), and pompous oratory. Even writing that last sentence makes me uncomfortable! To let you know how long it's taken me to finish watching Centurion, I started back before I knew or cared who Michael Fassbender was, and now I'm a huge fan. But in 2010 not even X-Men: First Class had come out.

Dominic West stars the general leading the doomed 9th legion deep into Pict country. His treacherous Pict guide (Olga Kurylenko) delivers them into bloody ambush! Well of course she did, genius! The inescapable Ulrich Thomsen plays the brutal Pict chief, who's all too eager to subject the Roman survivors to Pict-style unpleasantry. The Centurions escape, wander the hostile landscape and then run across eternally gorgeous Imogen Poots as an ex-communicated Pict herbalist. How convenient! She helps hide them because, of course, she was ostracized as a witch by Thomsen. She's got real chemistry with Fassbender, which is the main ingredient that helps the movie work. Together they're earth-magical like Oberon and Titania, parts I'm sure they've both played in some theatrical production or past life or other sometime somehow somewhere...

But the real star of the show is Olga Kurylenko as the mute huntress, who leads a band of Picts in pursuit of the surviving Romans. We never blame her for hating or betraying them, and Marshall refuses to judge either side; both Romans and Picts have good and bad people and conflicted impulses. Heh, sound familiar? The Romans are the invaders so clearly not the 'good guys' in any sense, putting them somewhere between the German U-boat survivors fleeing across Canada in The 49th Parallel, and the National Guard members in Walter Hill's Southern Comfort (1981).

It seems at first incongruous at first, but on wider contextual look, Centurion fits perfectly in with the totality of Marshall's oeuvre --showing his Hawksian love of strong warrior women and the small band of professionals/warriors/badass interlopers running afoul of pagan locals subgenre (ala fellow Hawksian John Carpenter). It also has my second favorite fight scene between Fassbender and a badass woman (can you guess the first?). So few actors get to fight even one woman to the death, let alone two in so short a period. For her part, Kurylenko moves way past her previous Russian mob party girl roles, and even her Quantum Bond babe, to a whole new realm of badass.

Romans during a good-natured brawl

WHY THE BERN: Trump is of the Roman lineage, in genes and fascist temperament; the Picts represent the American youth vote, their faces painted like they just got back from Burning Man. Hillary is the commander back across the lines who'd rather eliminate the last survivor to hush up a defeat than risk inspiring the other tribes to rise (i.e. Bengazi). Poots and Fassbender are the hope for the future, the merging of cultures like Hippolyta and Theseus in Midsummer Night's Dream (parts I'm sure they both played, too)--in other words, they're the Bernie future.

5. THE FURY

(1978) Dir Brian De Palma

***

De Palma's oh-so 70s telekinetic thriller  / govt. conspiracy Rollercoaster-style amusement park disaster hybrid stars Kirk Douglas as a CIA op dad using telekinetic Amy Irving to find the safe house sequestering his telekinetic son (Andrew Stevens). As always Kirk has to appear shirtless (it is the law), so the opening finds father and son lounging on a beach in Israel. Dad's just finishing up his CIA tenure there and son is.... Ooops! Palestinian jet ski assassins come rolling in! They make off with Stevens while Kirk is (apparently) assassinated. John Cassavetes--the head of a dark ESP ops wing of the CIA--is behind it all, of course. In fact, he's staged and filmed the whole thing to screen for Stevens later, in order to both trigger his abilities and leave him with a murderous hatred for Arabs (thus ripe for Middle East remote control assassination programming).

Fiona Lewis is the seductive older woman CIA analyst who keeps young Stevens pacified with sex so he won't want to escape the confines of his luxury safe house. Sure she's hot but she's also manipulative and all the experiments are really getting on his furious nerves! Meanwhile, over on the alternating chapters, Amy Irving --never lovelier--is coming to find him, like an ESP bloodhound, with daddy Kirk at the leash.

CIA-level seduction/manipulation leaves its mark on nearly every relationship: Ex-CIA man Kirk is allegedly better than Lewis, but he also uses sex and affection as a tool, to get sweet-natured Hester (Carrie Snodgrass), a teacher at Irving's school for gifted youngsters (also operated by Cassavetes) to risk her life helping Amy Irving escape the school, then he uses paternal manipulation on Irving so she'll guide him to his son, even if it puts her in the path of being re-acquired by the CIA. Naturally this explains why so many agency analysts are so attractive in real life (as seen in recent HBO documentaries) making them perfect for shows like Homeland. But hey, as long as Kirk's allowed to show off that still-fit barrel chest and be irresistible to younger women, he's cool with whatever (see also: Saturn 3). PS - Look fast for Daryl Hannah (below, center) in a bit part as a snickering classmate of Irving's. Though she doesn't seem to have any psychic ability other than sucking up to the mean girl, it's still fascinating to see a future star handle a fairly long scene as little more than an extra.

Though De Palma's previous hit Carrie is a better movie on the same topic (telekinetic teen angst), I personally find The Fury way more enjoyable as there's less sadism, snickering, maternal religious abuse, slow motion, overbearing music, and bad vibes. Everyone has motives and no one is all good or bad. On close examination Cassavetes isn't that much worse than Kirk, I mean, clearly Kirk's overbearing as a dad, and Stevens is old enough he shouldn't need to be 'rescued' from a love nest with Fiona Shaw. In fact, for all his boyish swagger, if you read the subtext, Kirk's really a bizarro funhouse mirror to Piper Laurie's bible-thumping mom in Carrie. But The Fury never disturbs or bums one out the way Carrie does. Repeat viewings are always rewarding. Like The Visitor, it's everything memorable about the telekinetic 70s, distilled and then dumped down the driveway and set on fire, and with no grim heartbreaking aftertaste. Cassavetes appears to be having fun in one of his slipperier 'doesn't consider himself a bad guy'-type of smiling villains; Shaw makes the most of one of the decade's great opportunities for sultry female evil. Though given a critical drubbing in the tosh papers of the time, Pauline Kael stuck up for Fury's "dirty kick"  with the vehemence of gifted child telekinetically forcing her conservative bourgeois classmates' heads down an electrified toilet.

WHY THE BERN:  Fiona Shaw is like some Fox News temptress, programming us to kill all Muslims on sight while keeping us pacified through sex appeal. Bernie is Kirk Douglas, a grey-haired little super-hobbit rescuing the kids of America from the tentacles of the corporate meat grinder. Since Kirk's quest is noble (he just wants his kid to have freedom to choose), the Amy Irving youth vote wants to help him to the presidency. A stretch you say? Alas, so's the Bern! Semper tyrannis, sed non hodie.

---

Runners up

(rating for each: ***)

BYZANTIUM

(2013) Dir. Neil Jordan

 DEAD SNOW 2: RED VS. DEAD

"Dod Sno" (2014) Dir. Tommy Wirkola

KISS OF THE DAMNED

(2012) Dir. Xan Cassavettes

THE FACULTY 

(1998) Dir. Roberto Rodriguez

THE MACHINE

(2013) Dir Caradog W. James

--------

And in interest of dystopian fairness, Stop by..

5 Awesomely Psychotronic films on Amazon Prime... TRUMPMERICA!

II:  Psychotronic films on Hulu Plus... Hillary Matriarchy!

NOTES:

1. First born sons in occupied countries had to join the Roman army for two years

2. -Filmmakers often overload their films with more gross misogyny and violence than they really want, so after the censor demands cuts for an R-rating, the end result will be what they wanted in the first place and the censor will feel like 'they made a difference'. 

Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy with these 5 Psychotronic Gems

From fish god cults to a cockeyed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD premake to maternal body horror so unseemly no one's dared try anything remotely like it in 30 years, these five psychotronic films predict the the new world orderless matriarchy of the Scorpio Sun / Pisces rising goddess Hulu-Ree Klinn-Tohn as handily as if they washed ashore with campaign bumper stickers in their rusty talons, and hammers to smash down the crosses from Middle America's fearful Christian churches.

My pick of Five Psychotronic Films on Amazon Prime for a new TRUMPMERICA post was such a hit I felt I had to balance the scale, so here it is. Evoking the coming liberal dystopia that can only result when a woman is or isn't elected president, there's less apocalypse and more matriarchy to worry about this time. A more inspiring future of liberal awareness, higher taxation of the rich, and massive un-deployment shall be enforced. With every new dead or symbolically neutered old white male voter we'll be sliding one step closer to socialism until we're so like Canada we'll forget how to pronounce "about" correctly.

PS - Dear Hulu: You should have a 'Resume' button. Instead we have to start over every time we press stop and that's crap (at least on my Blu-ray player). Also Hulu is a terrible name for a movie site. Don't try to seem playful! You've got enough dreary 50s-60s international art films on there to send even Ozu scrambling for the channel changer, and Hulu is a Hawaiian term, and some of us have never remembered to forget Pearl Harbor. So change yr name to FROGTOWN, and not just 'cuz there's so many insufferably French films on your site, but because you carry the one.. the only....

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN

(1988) Starring Sandahl Bergman, Roddy Piper 

**1/2

The lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman and pleasingly self-effacing wrestler Roddy Piper roam the post-nuclear wasteland looking for wild women to impregnate in this cheeky but irresistible Full Moon hodgepodge. He's one of the few men still able to produce viable sperm (fallout has left most men dead or sterile) in a world kind of the gender opposite of Handmaid's Tale --post-apocalyptic, sterile, now a progressive matriarchy vs. lawless frontier. Put under the thumb (via a remote shock chastity belt) of a 'no nonsense' health official (Bergman), the Pipe's packed off behind border lines to 'liberate'-- and then do his duty upon--a harem of fertile 'passives' currently held captive in a frog mutant warlord's stronghold (a combination abandoned oil refinery and R-rated version of a STAR WARS cantina). And though they drive in a pink 'Medtech' station wagon, there's a badass chick (Cec Verrell) on a .50 calibre sunroof mounted machine as his 'bodyguard' to balance things out. She does a lot of bemused, lustful smirking at Hell's discomfort while cleaning her ordinance.

Frankly, there's no possible way--at this point--the film could go wrong.

The standout, for me, being of sound mind and a certain age, is the still-lithe Bergman as the health officer Spangle, able to project both carnal yearning and no-bullshit feminist authority (a very difficult combo to do right). This gorgeous, sexily assured ex-Fosse dancer is still as lithe, confident, graceful, strong and open-souled sweet she was six years earlier in Conan. Alas, Rodney's character is a bit on the broad side. Apparently--for some reason no sensible male in the audience will quite understand--Rodney is furious over his enslaved stud position, and keeps trying to escape! What a maroon, as Bugs bunny might say. Bergman merely touches one of her earrings and the explosive chastity belt shocks his nuts, but still he tries. Maybe that's why the scene where Spangle abducts--and then drugs--a wild fertile woman of the wasteland and compels Hell to mount her isn't as vile as it might have been. Instead it gets so ludicrously kinky on so many wrong levels, though, you just may remember, as I did, a whole mess of prepubescent sex fantasies you used to have in the first and second grade, before you really knew anything about sex so it was all tied in with leashes and master-slave dominance (but which the average 50 Shades-style film never gets right). With Hell expected to 'perform' while his two captors/guardian women watch with detached curiosity, ready to zap him at a moment's notice, we have a very satisfying inversion of the recent real life outrage with an all male government panel on women's sexual health. Here we have an all female team considering his phallus literally government property. It doesn't make things right but it's a start!


The big surprise though is Piper's ability to convey a surprisingly sweet and tender vulnerability in his softer scenes. Coming off a bit broad and flat when he's expected to play the sexist dingus, when he finally drops his guard, he becomes the most emotionally open character in the film! He's got a heart as big all outdoors!

If all this male subjugation gets to be too much then relax in knowing the second half of the film reverses the situation. As Sandahl goes into chains as an abducted slave led by Hell on a leash into Frogtown --their cover story is that he's there to sell her into the harem of the Frog warlord. Your feminist umbrage may start to kick in its stall but just know that the majority of the women characters in this bizarre slyly-satiric film are super capable and assertive, more physically agile and gutsier than any of the men, or frogs. In other words, rather than affirm male dominance, the film deconstructs the infantile frustrations beneath sadomasochism, harem-keeping, reptilian (or amphibian) sex slave mind games, and "dance! dance!" warlord cup-banging, revealing them all as pathetic attempts to reclaim the phallus from mighty Woman.

laugh while you can, monkey boy!

Such a thing might easily devolve into campy parody, but luckily everyone involved here has the good sense to play it straight. Even that semi-twee title is no obscurantist whimsy but strictest present tense fact: Piper's character is named Hell, and Frogtown is occupied by real frog mutants ("created as the by-product of your germ warfare") and the frog makeups/masks are pretty damned good.

That said, it's not perfect: a frog with a fez does a seriously terrible voiceover, there are too many close-ups (not Piper's strong suit) and it sometimes feels under-directed, but for every bad thing a good: Nicholas Worth pours on the sputtering malice as one of the frog warlords, Sandahl gets to do the 'Dance of the 3 Snakes' and lo and behold, there in the midst of the Frogtown cantina who should appear, but western character actor Rory Calhoun, wearing his good store teeth as a uranium miner!. During the big climactic wasteland car chase, when he's dying with his elderly head cradled in the laps of a backseat full of liberated pacifist concubines, a cute blonde warrior driving while a wanderer of the wasteland shoots from the passenger seat-- a horny mutant warlord in hot pursuit in his tricked-out, warrior-bedecked ride across the barren wasteland, you realize suddenly - holy shit! It prefigures the climax of Mad Max: Fury Road! Considering Frogtown is one of that slew of post-Road Warrior apocalypse road trip rip-off homages, it's almost spookily 'full circle' prescient (has George Miller seen this movie?)


Why Hillary: One look at the face of the odious frog king and you'll be reminded of a certain amphibious also-runner behind Trump. Sandahl is Hillary being sold to the Middle States ('can she dance?' asks the Frog Prince in he fez before voting/purchasing); the passive, fertile harem are the women voters of swing states looking askance at the brutalizing Handmaid's Tale future awaiting them under The Frog mutant's sway even though they've been trained to submit (one grand dame frog lady takes a shine to Piper and frees him, though it means her death -- she'd be the swing state independent female voting bloc). The matriarchy embodies the idealized Hillary future. Scruffy Roddy stands for the American midwest, reckoning the pros and cons between giving a woman control of the nation's balls, or else letting power-hungry toads run riot over our civil liberties. Some choice.

THE BROOD

(1979) Dir. David Cronenberg

***1/2

If you need a map through this genuinely strange, disturbing Cronenberg picture, I'd say watch his subsequent film, SCANNERS first. That film is a zippy mind-expander with solid acting, exploding heads, Michael Ironside in his best role (his facial expressions when he's scanning are beyond brilliant). Here in BROOD-land things are a little less pleasingly Hitchcockian and more gender/menstrual/reproductive disturbing. Oliver Reed is Dr. Raglan, the controversial creator of a very 70s form of gestalt therapy called 'psychoplasmics.' A method of focusing rage that causes the body to break out in spots... or cancerous tubers or worse, little homicidal blonde moppets, it's the Freudian 'hysteric complex' writ large upon the body (instead of a paralyzed arm, an extra one).  Wildly unhinged Samantha Eggar plays Raglan's star patient, so deep into his regressive therapy he won't let her concerned husband get in to see her. Their child, on the other hand, is brought in for weekends, but comes home traumatized and bruised. Weird and kind of ridiculous, it all goes down in another wintry remote experimental clinic (Cronenberg has a thing for private clinics operated in the wintry Canadian byways - socialized medicine, must be nice).

I don't want to spoil the plot, but what's going on in the subtext is kind of a post-feminist version of FORBIDDEN PLANET's Monster from the Id, making this a bit like KRAMER VS. FRANKENSTEIN. It's pretty yucky in spots but, for me, the hirsute actor in the beginning demonstration is the most disturbing part. He's so open and needy in that gross kind of harrowingly 'lonely man-boy who goes to 70s encounter groups or ecstasy parties so people will touch him' kind of way he gives me hives. Still, him aside, the scene where a cute possible love interest Ruth Mayer (Susan Hogan with a great 70s elfin hair cut) is hammered to death by two of the monster kids right in front of her horrified kindergarten class is perhaps the most outrageous and deeply disturbing scene in all of 70s horror. Dude, there's always SCANNERS if you're squirrelly. If not, hold on, for once Eggar gets a decent size piece of scenery in her hands she tears it up an industrial wood chipper.

PS - Seeing this again, I recognize my new favorite stealth character actor: Robert A. Silverman (above). Wearing a white towel on his neck to cover an awful mutating psychoplasmic affliction, he's so good in BROOD --and as Hans in NAKED LUNCH (above), and the artist in SCANNERS--well, he just knocks all Cronenberg's films up a notch. Why only Cronenberg seems to know of his genius is beyond me. Toronto experimental theater's gain is the cinematic world's loss?

Why Hillary: It is foretold in ancient texts: amok liberalism ushered in by a woman prez shall lead to the return of the 70s encounter group /EST craze. The nuclear family unit will be broken apart by an anti-patriarchal shrink who won't let the husband have control over his own wife. It's Canadian but you can argue that the human body being ruptured in The Brood is America itself: "Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me," notes Silverman, "and it did." Asking why he's suing when he can't possibly prove Raglan's methods gave him cancer, Silverman says he's doing it for revenge! So people will know from the press that "psychoplasmics cause cancer." -i.e., global warming. The title 'brood' are the protestors disrupting Trump rallies. As with the Trump supporters themselves, it's not important whether or not the orange one is a genuine threat, it's enough that the protestors/children get angry thinking about him, and the anger justifies the reprisal. Imagine if all the rage spewed on internet comment sections was able to manifest itself as armies of homicidal moppets?

We'd all be hammered.

DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT

(1994) Dir. Linda Hassani

****

Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither whimsical nor grungy), this Satanic daughter love story is like THE LITTLE MERMAID x SPECIES with a refreshing lack of qualms about sex, God, or killing. The story begins in Hell: an Old Testament-style marching line of desert-wandering souls (ala STARGATE x PHANTASM) head to their fates, guided by pumping ominous-but-giddy Fuzzbee Morse liturgy. Angela Featherstone stars as the young, wistful demoness Veronica, who's about to come of age and take over torturing the embezzling bankers of Hell, but she dreams instead of seeing the surfaces of Earth and walking under the sky. Even thinking such a thing is forbidden by her sputtering, over-acting demon father (the "psycho's psycho," Nicholas Worth). Undaunted by his furious scourging lashes, Veronica sneaks up to the land of men and immediately fathoms there is much good work to do, tearing the spines and hearts out of rapists and racist cops, feeding their hearts to her dog Hellraiser, and shacking up with a handsome sweet-souled doctor named Max (Daniel Markel). And if any homicide detective tries to get in her way, she just shows him the hellfire behind her glowing eyes while making dire announcements about the grim future that awaits mankind. That's enough to keep him from digging any deeper. Besides, the chief doesn't mind a few less rapists and racists on the streets.

Like some Satanic bible school instructional video, this confusingly-titled (there are about 100 shows and movies named Dark Angel) female-directed little miracle has become one my go-to favorites the last few years, thanks to its dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality, its incongruity of set and setting (everyone speaks English but it was clearly filmed in Romania), its Shelly Duvall-meets-Val Lewton-in-Ed Wood's basement mythopoetic aesthetic, its great cast and its dusky red and black color scheme (ala another favorite, Ghosts of Mars). Sure, Featherstone isn't the greatest actress in the world, but what she lacks in chops is surpassed by what she has--the ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time--is unteachable. Her flatline reading of dialogue like "I've always wanted to witness people coupling, Max, but I never thought it would move me so much," is so spot-on you realize better (or worse) actresses would never be able to match it. They'd either try to be sexy (and come off campy), imperious (and come off stuffy), mean (and come off bitchy) or tough (and come off jokey), but Featherstone's assertive confidence and deadpan demeanor is so despite-itself sexy she gets away with the actor equivalent of murder, which is just right for Matthew Freeway Bright's genius script (full of great lines like: "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max.") And when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm--while luxuriating out in the bed, it's somehow very reassuring, as is her matter-of-fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed Hellraiser. I've only ever seen that kind of deadpan female genius--commanding both adoration and respect--in German science fiction film female characters from the 70s (as in STAR MAIDENS in the west, ELEOMA and IM STAUB DER STERNE in the east). It's sad America has never been able to duplicate it. Even Featherstone and Hassani had to go Romania to show it. Why there wasn't a sequel (judging from the title more than one was planned) I don't know, unless of course it's the damn patriarchy, the same one that stops STAR MAIDENS or those other films from being released, yet gives us no end of sequels to horror films starring men and/or puppets.

Why Hillary: One of Veronica's first assignments down in Hell is to come up with creative ways to punish the lawyers and bankers, mirroring Hillary's promise to clean up Wall Street. When Veronica kills two racist cops after they beat up on a black guy she mirrors Clinton's support of Black Lives Matter.  Predictions of a hellfire future for sinners mirrors Hill's certainty that global warming will haunt the future of big oil consumers. Also, Veronica tells a nun "she cannot enter a church" as she "would surely combust' --depending on whom you ask, neither can Hillary! 

In Hell, the cinema has cold, unpadded wood seats. 

DEMONS

(1985) Dir. Lamberto Bava 
**1/2

In the land of Trump it's all about the thermonuclear family, be it ever so "humbly" nouveau-riche (I don't want much," as Groucho Marx would say, "just a little place where I can phone my wife and tell her I wont be home for dinner.") But this Italian film, shot in Berlin, in the 80s, sums up life in conquered Axis countries after the death of disco. It's the story of a demonic theater showing a film about a silver mask triggering a demon outbreak, and there's a promotional display silver mask in the theater lobby that actually causes a demon outbreak. When a brave prostitute seeing the movie with her cool pimp tries it on, the mask pricks her skin and she becomes patient zero for an outbreak of demons running around in the theater ala MONSTERS CRASH PAJAMA PARTY.

If you saw DEMONS in the same theater as the characters seeing the movie in the film, with the same actors all in the theater (as might be at the premiere) then I can imagine this might freeze your hard drive with its meta refraction, i.e. the folks at the advance screening midnight show of DARK KNIGHT RISES in Aurora, Colorado. But at home, decades later, it's just a dumb hair metal stoner kind of good time. Produced and co-written by Dario Argento, with the help of director Michele Soavi (STAGEFRIGHT), featuring sublime boom operation by Angelo Amatulli (SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS), and music from Claudio 'Goblin' Simonetti, it's truly an Argento-Goblin-Bava Jr. family affair, by which I mean nowhere near as good as 70s Argento but nowhere near as bad as 00's Argento, and still nowhere near as meta as the best Soavi.

Genius is fleeting --even in the best of us.

Michele Soavi - showing his good side

Lamberto Bava, though bless him, never was/is a genius, nor even a terribly decent director. I don't envy having the pressure of such an iconic legitimate genius father (Mario) to measure up to, but with no talent for either blocking, pacing, or storytelling, Lamberto must get by with a little help from his talented friends. Argento lends him the brilliant red and blue lighting gels from SUSPIRIA; a selection of MTV-ready rock songs by Billy Idol, Rick Springfield, and Mötley Crüe adds just the right note of 80s 8th grade 8-ball of crank snorting dirtbag shop class idiocy; Soavi himself plays an enigmatic robot with his human mask half-gone (or a human with half his robot mask gone). Meanwhile, a carload of coked-up punks drive around downtown Berlin, eating up the running time with out-the-window-B-roll as they snort their coke through a straw in a Coke cup. Is that genius or idiocy? Exactly. Once a full-size helicopter drops through the ceiling of the auditorium after the surviving couple have ridden a motorbike riding up and down the aisles killing demons with a samurai sword, then you finally realize maybe you love this dumb film. It took over an hour to get there, but there you are. For me, though, the best section is the slow lead-up to when the first victim in the film-within-the-film and the first killing offscreen match up in their anguished noises, and a giant close up of a flashing blade on screen seems to be cutting the (normal size relative to the audience) 'real' girl's head off. But once the film-within-a-film runs out, and everyone realizes they're trapped, that kind of meta weirdness fades in favor of long stretches of typical (but nonetheless diverting) demon attacks. There are way too many special effects shots of facial postules dripping food coloring green goo, but stick around. And don't leave during the credits - the film just keeps on rolling.

And give thanks to Hulu, now you can watch it on your phone in perfect safety (the screen is too small for any demon to climb through).

WARUM DIE HILL?  Filmed in Germany, that land where a single demonic prick started an outbreak of inhuman violence that swept the continent, it's waiting for just the right moment to bubble up and burst anew upon the acne-scarred facial landscape. And, to make it all about this moment in America, a woman starts all the madness off by insisting on trying on the mask in the lobby (cuz ladies always be tryin' on strange display masks in lobbies, am I right fellas?)

DAGON

(2001) Dir. Stuart Gordon

***1/2

We of the Lovecraft cult have become quite used to being disappointed by big screen adaptions. Maybe it's because the pantheon of his elder Gods like Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath and their hideous half-human offspring--all summonable via the unholy bible of black magic, the Necronomicon--reverberate far deeper than ordinary mind's eye boogeymen. No 2D or 3D representation can compare. Seeming to cohere out of the electric blur behind our eyelids, these indescribably leviathans urge us forward through Lovecraft's prose as if his writing had its own dark power to transcend the very limits of fiction, so that just reading the story we might waken the elder behemoths from their slumber in the timeless ocean below our archaic collective unconsciousness. Naturally no film is going to be able to capture that feeling. Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS was about that feeling, but didn't create it, and suffered from bad 90s clothes, hair, and acting. Corman made a decent stab at it with Vincent, but the results weren't quite up to his Poe stuff. Thank the Mad Arab, then, for Stuart Gordon, whose FROM BEYOND and RE-ANIMATOR are easily the two best Lovecraft adaptations. In each he wisely keeps the events flowing in something like real time, over a single night or weekend, so there's seldom time to get or need a 'third eye' complete picture. Seeing protagonists being chased along progressively more surreal avenues without ever stopping for a dissolve captures just what the stories are like: snapshots of Hell barely developed before they're already burning, the terror of nightmare momentum, racing across a dangling rope bridge over the yawning chasm of alarm clock death/waking.

For DAGON, Gordon adapts Lovecraft's quintessential "Shadow over Innsmouth" moving the locale from New England to an ancient Spanish fishing village, and having the action go down over one long rainy afternoon into late rainy evening, capturing the strange disorienting nightmare of trying to procure help after a freak storm rolls in and hurls a passing yacht--helmed by American investment wizard Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden)--onto a rocky outcrop, trapping him under the onrushing flood of water from the hull. Guests Paul and his Spanish girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Meroño) rush ashore to get help, are immediately separated by a seemingly friendly priest and... well, the weirdness never lets up for a moment, nor does the rain.

As a fan of the original story, I balked at the substituting contemporary Spain for olde New England but the language barrier actually adds a nice gateway frisson New England would lack. In the terror and confusion of panic in a weird town, the locals may very well start to resemble fish monsters even in the best of circumstances. I was lost in Prague once and the same thing happened!

All in all, DAGON comes as close as any adaptation yet as far as capturing the eerie mood of the fish god cult mythos, and the feeling that some wild recurring dream is coming true and that, between these nightmare wafers, is a wet (literally) dream cream filling, the sort of nightmare magic that happens when the dreaming male's conscious ego meets his mermaid-esque unconscious anima (Macarena Gómez) and it's as if time stands still and you 'wake up' from reality. The truth of the dream and the moment stretches across all time and space; the world around you vanishes; the dichotomies of dreams and waking, of past and future, real and surreal, are momentarily--maybe permanently, fatally--transcended. All dichotomies re-submerged: childhood and adulthood / life and death / male and female / mammal and cephalopod...

Wait what was that last one? Kiss me, baby, and never mind.

POR QUE HILÁRAYE K'LIHN-TOÑ: An evil fish god cult priest incites the elders to smash the iconography of the Christian church? The locals kill a Rupert Murdoch-esque yachtsman (offscreen)? Hell yeah. And the open ending suggests the future depends on the Democratic Party's ability to adapt to weird new paradigms as the only viable answer (vs. the Republican Party's resistance to change). As with the other films on this list it's ultimately about a sort of high Precambrian matriarchy. The plethora of Spanish speakers stands as a mockery to the the anti-immigrant Trump supporters who consider it a violation of their civil rights if you try to explain the difference between Spain and Mexico.

+ 5 RUNNERS UP:

 SHIVERS

(1975) Dir. David Cronenberg

***

I disgust la SHIV in an oilier post but fack it. Spiked with livid, funny gross outs and a red kidney thing hopping inside any old orifice, here's a 'careful what you wish for' example of 70s singles swinging rather too successfully. As the wild orgy heats up, maybe ask yourself: is this how the red states really think we behave up here in the blue beyond? Or is it just how they would, were they not good decent Christians? Either way, you may never want to have sex again, and--on behalf of our stressed planet--thank you for that. Looking almost sex ed film crummy, it really should be shown in every high school health class, for it would chasten the louchest Hefner. The performances are deceptively brilliant; the moments of freeze frame slow motion unique and effective; the scenes of orgies breaking out in the halls and stairwells remind me of drug parties I've... heard about... on Fox News. Just thinking about Fox News in fact should answer your question why this film is 'Hillary-esque'! After it's over, you'll be grateful for all the repression that makes social order of any sort possible.

THE DESCENT
(2005) Dir. Neil Marshall

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS

(1970) Dir. Jaromil Jireš

GINGER SNAPS
(2000) Dir. John Fawcett

SHE 

(1935) Dir. Merien C. Cooper

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"I wrote 'fertilizing the eggs,' Gene."