Strange Catfish-like Monster Sighted Stalking Japan

We had NOTHING to do with this...this...What would you even CALL it?

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Today's Infiltration Tip

AND THIS JUST IN from one of our own Great Lakes operatives:

"It turns out that when you hit level 41 in CITY OF VILLAINS you can gain one of four new power sets to reflect your increased status. I signed up with Captain Mako under the assumption that I should get in good with the Deep Ones while I can. Because of this, I can now throw ghost sharks at people I don't like. Level 44, I get better armor and at level 47 there's a power where a giant spirit shark rears up like the JAWS poster and bites people, holding them in place and messing them up real good. I can hardly wait."

I gather this refers to a video game of some sort. Some of you will know what to do with this specialized information. Go to it.

Inspiration Corner: Roly Poly Fish Heads

"Fish Heads"

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm!

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm!

In the morning
Laughing, happy Fish Heads
In the evening
Floating in the soup

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm!

Ask a Fish head
Anything you want to
They won't answer
They can't talk

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm

I took a Fish head
Out to see a movie
Didn't have to pay
To get it in

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm!

They can't play baseball
They don't wear sweaters
They're not good dancers
They don't play drums

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm!

Roly poly Fish heads
Are never seen drinking
Cappacino in Italian restaurants
With Oriental women...Yeah!

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm
Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm...(Yummm)

Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm
Fish heads, Fish heads
Roly poly Fish heads
Fish heads, Fish heads
Eat them up, Yummm

YEAH!!!!!!!!!

by Barnes and Barnes

From the album: Voohbaha!

You know, ladies, I was just thinking about the hymn quoted above, and IT ALL OF A SUDDEN HIT ME: Is this what the drunken hero was going through in the shattering nightclub scene of Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster when he turned around and saw that all the dancers suddenly had...FISH HEADS?

That's your devotional meditation for today.

FRANKENFISH!

Is there anything finer than spending a steamy afternoon in the Louisiana bayou, fisting for Catfish? YES. It gets a lot finer when GIANT CHINESE SNAKEHEADS come after all the fishermen and EAT THEM UP, YUM. You know what I’m talking about, right? The smash hit movie of our movement: FRANKENFISH, released in 2004 and directed by Mark Dippe (now there’s a guy who needs a good professional alias). There's a cast of folk I've never seen before and may never see again, but clearly the filmmakers want this picture seen far and wide: you can watch the DVD in English OR Japanese, OR subtitle it in English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Korean, Thai, Chinese or Portugese. (What, no Finnish?)( I kid, I kid...) But my point is this: SOMEBODY wants this film seen everywhere, by everyone. NOW WHO COULD THAT BE?

PLOT SUMMARY: A boat with a Chinese crew and a hold full of genetically-altered Snakeheads is tooling around a remote area in the Louisiana swamps. The crew falls afoul of the cargo, and THE FUN STARTS as the Snakeheads leave their prison and move in on a small group of houseboats moored out in the middle of nowhere. WILL ANYONE WITHOUT FINS SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE’S NOTES ON THIS DELIGHTFUL FISH FANTASY:

>> The cast of characters includes a medical examiner trying to find out what’s killing the locals; a grief-stricken Hoodoo practitioner and her daughter; a middle-aged rich guy who fancies himself a Big Game Hunter; and a Trustafarian nudist. You have to love the image of these landscum, from all races and all walks of life, people who normally wouldn't give each other the time of day, pulling together against a mutual enemy: FISH THAT CAN WALK ON LAND. It’s SO RIGHT, and yet SO WRONG. I only WISH we could work this way, and just COME ASHORE AND EAT YOU.

>> Nobody in the movie really comments on the astounding horror of a large Alligator, decapitated by the title character while she was minding her own business and pretending to be a floating log. A Gator eaten by a Snakehead? That is just wrong, ladies. >>shudder<<

>> The computer-generated Snakeheads are spectacular, much nicer than the ones in the TV miniseries Snakehead Terror. The only drawback I can see is that they don’t much resemble the real article. The colors are wrong. The shape is wrong. They hump along the ground with the same undulating, blubbery motion you’d see in an Elephant Seal. They have little moustaches, like Carp. In fact, they really are very Carplike in a lot of ways. But I guess FrankenCarp didn’t sound scary enough to someone. LITTLE DO THEY SUSPECT THE ROLE THE HUMBLE CARP PLAYS, EVEN NOW, IN THEIR ULTIMATE DOOM…Oops, was I yelling?

>> I especially like the natural-looking (if not very fishlike) movements of the Snakeheads as they hop onto the decks and rooftops of the terrified humans. CGI really is improving, even in buck-ninety-eight pictures like this. Just compare these specimens to the transparent, stiff, bright auburn, cartoony-looking Bull Sharks in Red Water. If we could have perfected a design like the one in Frankenfish down in the R&D labs, IT ALL WOULD HAVE BEEN OVER WITH YEARS AGO and I would not need to spend these grim years as a half-fish, half-human, always in hiding, never able to say THIS IS ME! LOOK AT THESE GILLS, YOU HAIRY MONKEY! Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, I guess. Back to the review.

>> I love the way the alienated Vietnam vet type guy is ‘hoist by his own petard.’ He allows himself to be distracted from the business of survival by his need to perform one of those goofy, typically human, eat-the-heart-of-your-slain-enemy rituals, and thereby loses his life. I especially have to like that the heart used in the ritual was obviously a four-chambered business purloined from a Cow. As if a fish, even a landfish, would be caught DEAD with a four-chambered heart.

>> The narrative structure is a thing of beauty: altered fish manipulate unwitting humans into taking them just where they want to go, allowing them to infiltrate and RECRUIT, RECRUIT, RECRUIT.

>> I have to like that the female lead is victimized less by the Snakeheads than she is by the blunt attempts of others to get her to engage in sexual congress, as if that were more pressing than NOT GETTING EATEN. Her mom is trying to fix her up; her repellent boyfriend wants her to forget these people and leave with him; some woman she’s never met is making a pass at her too; and meanwhile she herself is angling for another party’s attentions. I really got the feeling, after all was said and done, that a lifetime of dodging unwanted romantic attention is what taught her the skill and ingenuity she needed to OUTSMART THE FISH. Like THAT could ever happen.

>> This conceit in the film is even more delicious when you realize that the human fixation on mating is exactly what we are using to LURE THEM INTO OUR RANKS. Fools.

>> For landscum viewers this movie is satisfyingly full of the explosions, imperiled womenfolk, chases, boat sinkings, and gory messes beloved of their species. They do not fail to deliver on the promise of AIRBOAT MAYHEM, de rigeur in a bayou action picture.

>> For fish viewers it’s satisfyingly full of GIANT KILLER SNAKEHEADS. The attorney’s big scene is enough to bring tears to your eyes. (If your eyes still make tears.)

>> Don’t get the idea that this is any sort of quality cinema. For one thing, the entire movie managed to look as if it were filmed on a set, even though it was clearly done on location. That is the mark of a quality moving picture show. Or not.

I would recommend this film to anyone.

BLUE DEMON

This CGI killer-shark spectacular was released in 2004, directed/written/produced by Daniel Grodnik. Stars Dedee Pfeiffer, Randall Batinkoff, Danny Woodburn, Josh Hammond, and Jeff Fahey.  For the most part, they DIDN'T OVERSPEND ON STAR POWER.

Featuring the SHARX BROTHERS -- Chico, Groucho, Harpo, Gummo, Zeppo, and Red Dog!

PLOT SUMMARY: Genetically-modified Great Whites -- faster and smarter than the standard issue, able to breathe in fresh as well as salt water, and microchipped like Stepford Wives to obey commands -- slip out thru a hole in the fence one day and make for the Golden Gate Bridge. One of them, the strongest and least biddable of the test sharks, happens to be carrying a disused Russian suitcase bomb. CAN THEY BE STOPPED IN TIME? WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

This is a rare film -- budget middling to low, premise ridiculous, dang fine starpower and direction, and above all, a conscious sense of humor that almost never falls flat.

>> You have to love Jeff Fahey as General Remora, chomping a big black cigar and barking orders like crazy, carelessly betraying his intention to make the test sharks -- designed to defend our shorelines from foreign invaders -- into a new stealth weapons system. I especially love the shameless Gilligan's Island way his subordinates capture him by pinning his arms in a life ring after he finally gets completely out of control.

>> DeDee Pfeiffer is very convincing as the research specialist --stalking around in French heels and a black Kelly Bundy skimp dress under her lab coat, with her hair always falling seductively over one eye. She's married to the only other scientist in the lab, played by the same guy who played Buffy's boyfriend in the original Buffy movie.

>> Get a load of the lab itself! The place is lined with tropical-fish Con-Tac paper, lobster-shaped Christmas lights, fishtanks full of real and robo-fish, sharks' jaws on the walls, and on and on. Fish effigies dangle from the ceilings at such frequent intervals that every close-up in the film shows someone with a wooden or paper fish jammed in a nostril. There is even a life-sized statue of a mermaid in the entryway. If I apply for a gummint grant, can I have a lab like THAT?

>> What you will NOT see in this lab: charts, graphs, petri dishes, droppers, tongs, Bunsen burners, sample trays, microscopes, Tesla coils, or any of the superfluous glassware associated with serious movie-science labs. All they have are a couple of computer terminals nestled in layers of fake fur and garlanded with toy fish. The only lab assistant is a surfer dude who wears a shark hat on the job.

>> The boss's office is pretty good, too. It's full of nekkid-water-nymph statuary. And the boss wears the grooviest pants EVER.

>> Oh, the deadly experiments? They are computer-generated of course, but really a cut above the transparent, stiffly-moving crap CGI you saw in Red Water. Fast moving, with great big teeth and a very incorrect champing motion as they swim. They are utterly goofy, but at the same time rather menacing and delightful. Not a fish you'd want to meet in a dark alley.

>> The menace disappears, oddly, when they're chasing swimmers. Their peculiar dorsal fins, shaped almost like capital "Ds", do not slice menacingly through the water the way one might expect. They sort of just...I don't know...sit there. There is a great scene where the fins not only stand still in the water -- a feat greater in my eyes than that of the shark in Deep Blue Sea who knew how to back up -- but one of them is heeled over lazily, revealing that -- oops -- there seems to be no shark attached to that fin.

>> One of the menaced swimmers is played by the same petulant girlchild we wanted to strangle in The Glass Trap. Apparently she is building a career on odious-child roles. Sigh.

>> I need to add that the scientist couple spends every inch of screen footage making marital threat displays at each other, while producing no evidence that they have any grasp of any known scientific principles. That does not stop them from using their cellphones and personal stereos, MacGuyver-fashion, to save the day.

This movie is ultra-light, but really a lot of fun if you think in that particular way. I take it as a sign of hope -- if this is how humans see us, we are going to be able to sneak up on them EVEN MORE EASILY THAN I THOUGHT.

A Penetrating Glimpse Into The Monkey Mind

Click here for an animated KILLER CRAB extravaganza! It takes about three geological ages to load, but it's worth the wait. I especially like the soundtrack. So stirring.


I offer this as study material, ladies, quite consonant with others you already have, like Attack Of The Crab Monsters and Island Claws. This is another very fine example of what they are expecting on the day we mount our final assault.

It will not be like this. Not at all.

And This Just In...

Man Drowns in Bird Attack

A young man drowned in northwestern Russia after being attacked by a flock of seagulls, Interfax reported Monday.

The 26-year-old Petrozavodsk resident was swimming in the Shuya Lake in the Karelia region on Sunday when the birds suddenly swooped down on him, Interfax said.

"Seagulls usually do not attack people without reason," a regional emergency response official told the news agency.

"There were probably baby seagulls or some nests in the area where the victim was swimming." (MT)

This just came in from one of Gertruuid's clipping-service operatives in the frozen North. (I LOVE my waterproof fax machine.) I want you all to notice that the Moscow Times writer who interpreted the information for the landscum readership seems entirely mystified by the actions of the enraged seagulls...

...Or were they enraged? Could they have been disposing of a shaved monkey who knew too much?

Operative Captured: COVER NOT BLOWN!

I confess I was startled to see THIS on a Website devoted to proving that the universe was created in seven days by an old white guy wearing a beard and a bathrobe. Imagine the horror at HQ when we realized that one of our deep-cover operatives had been fished out of the drink by a bunch of Japanese sailors. I TOLD you: we need to keep a SHARP EYE OUT for these guys AT ALL TIMES. They are a wily bunch, totally omnivorous, and if they eat the wrong operative at the wrong time, I shudder to think what would happen. We can't have Nessies humping through the streets of Yokohama, OK? BIG PROBLEM. COVER WOULD BE BLOWN. HEADS WOULD ROLL. STARTING WITH YOURS.

Luckily, the sailors appear stumped. The only person declaring himself to be NOT stumped is the goofy religious type guy who wrote this article. He manages to parody himself so well that NO DAMAGE CONTROL IS NECESSARY.

Thank Cod for the fundamentalists, is all I can say. THIS WAS WAY TOO CLOSE.

A Fishbrained Thought For The Day

This is so true, isn't it?