Merry Squidmas, Everyone!

One of the factors that will keep the celebration of this sublime holiday SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE is the fact that while not everyone is Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist, EVERYONE LOVES A SQUID.

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While the image above is not precisely a representation of the Jingle Squid, it NICELY CAPTURES the TRUTH OF THE MATTER: The Squid are watching you, and YOU CANNOT GET AWAY. Now there's a Squidmas thought to put a smile on EVERY FACE, be it hairy, scaly, leathery, feathery, or chitinous.

The Friend Of My Enemy Is Dead

YOU HEARD ME. First Peter Benchley, now THIS GUY. DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. And it COULDN'T HAPPEN TO A NICER GUY.

Frank Mundus, pictured above with one of our North Atlantic operatives, was probably the model for Captain Quint in Peter Benchley's epic of Shark slaughter, Jaws. Benchley always denied it, but let us pause a moment and CONNECT THE DOTS:

 

>> Mundus made a career of Shark hunting, chartering out his Montauk-based fishing boat, the Cricket II, to bored or under-funded "sportsmen" (paugh!) looking for a big kill on a budget. He called Sharks "the poor man's big game."

>> Benchley went out on the Cricket II many times over a period of weeks, learning about Quint's Mundus's line of work, including all the ins and outs of "sharkin." This included all the fine points you remember from the book: the chumming, the barrels attached to harpoons, the home office full of boiled Shark remnants. Then Benchley went home and wrote Jaws.

 

>> Nahh. Benchley probably based the book on SOMEONE ELSE.

 

A Middle Western operative found an obituary about Mundus in, of all places, the Sept. 27th, 2008 Economist. It takes up all of page 102. Says here old Frank felt sorry for every fish he ever caught. Okay. It also says he died in his bed at age 82. Whatever. AS LONG AS HE'S GONE.

Some of you newer operatives will ask why, after I heaped praise on the heads of the crew of the Andrea Gail, I would then turn around and cast aspersions on Frank Mundus. IT'S HARD TO EXPLAIN. Sport fishing, as they call it, makes me grit my pharyngeal TEETH, and sport fishing for Sharks makes me want to empty my stomach on everyone who supports this sort of activity. The guys on the Andrea Gail brought Swordfish together with those who LOVED AND APPRECIATED them. Frank Mundus did something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. He took the reputation of Sharks and changed it. He taught his customers to stop treating Sharks as valuable tidiers of the ocean, uncomplaining cleaners-up of ANYTHING that needed eating, and made them look like SOMETHING ELSE. He made them look like TERRIFYING WILD BEASTS THAT WANTED TO EAT YOU. 

Why did he do this? So he could TURN A BUCK.

Sic transit gloria Mundus, I guess.

Welcome, Andrea

This post welcomes Andrea, an operative who made the transition from dry-land work to FULLY AQUATIC, this last fall. We, and indeed SHE, felt more comfortable waiting to post the welcome until we knew whether the shaved-monkey medico-legal authorities were going to release the information that she DROWNED IN BED. This is a standard method of making the change for US, but damned unusual for shaved monkeys in general.

Now I think of it, the last really large group of bed drowners in shaved-monkey history was the one hundred million "victims" of the 1918 flu epidemic. WHAT A RECRUITING FESTIVAL THAT WAS.

The RED HERRING Andrea left behind just before joining us in the Detroit River -- splashing the entire condo she lived in with blood, not hers -- still has them scratching their pointed little heads.

Andrea's name will be changed, and her job duties assigned, as soon as her physical transformation becomes final.

Brought To You By Ray Troll!

CLICK HERE to see a fabulous link provided by none other than Ray Troll, that most puzzling of recruiting operatives, in that he is not only MALE but 100% Shaved Monkey. (DESPITE OUR BEST EFFORTS.)


In fact, here's a second one he sent which is even more fabulous, as it is suitable for that IRRITATING PERSON on your Squidmas list WHO HAS EVERYTHING.

TREES and TREES 2: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

OK, you ladies must be wondering: what could a couple of poverty-row horror movies about trees run amok possibly have to do with anything, let alone THE WORLD TAKEOVER OF DRY LAND by YOU AND ME, the ARMY OF FED-UP AQUATIC LIFEFORMS? The answer is: PLENTY. Let me tell you why.

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Trees, the brainchild of some feller named Michael Pleckaitis, is a direct spoof on ripoff of homage to Jaws, the Holy of Holies. The film, which looks like it cost about a buck ninety-eight to make, is a scene-by-scene reprise of the recruitment epic, with one major change: the menace is a great white PINE.

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Wait, there's another major change: this movie sucks. It does help show you just how great Jaws is, by showing you how bad it could have been in less skilled hands. The acting in Trees is perfunctory. The camera work is uninspired. The special effects are disappointing. The incidental music, which sounded almost exactly like that in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, got me all revved up expecting some serious splatter, but nothing ever happened.

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And LET'S BE REAL: Pine trees are not scary. Seriously, can you imagine a tree chasing you down and eating you? NEITHER COULD THE FILMMAKING CREW. They didn't come anywhere near giving me the impression that this was the point of the movie, because it never happened on screen, no matter how long the story went on -- and it seemed to go on practically forever.

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Again: WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH US?

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Again: PLENTY.

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There is a powerful message in this film, one that you can't miss if you've ever seen or heard of Jaws: Sharks get the job done. Spielberg somehow made a simple, "see-Bruce-munch" type of story into a horror movie -- only Cod knows why -- but you could not miss the fact that what the Shark wanted in this story, the Shark got. He lay in wait as long as he needed to, and from there he got it done quickly, with minimum fuss -- A SHARK SPECIALTY. The Naked Apes in the story created plenty of fuss, of course. CALL IT A TRADEMARK. There are no drama queens in the Shark world, however, and somehow, if you are a human, THAT IS THE MOST TERRIFYING THING OF ALL.

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And here's the cleverly-concealed genius of the Pleckaitis film: A White Pine is also a terribly undramatic species. It pretty much stands there shedding needles. As Matt Hooper might put it, it's a miracle of Nature. It sucks up water, exhales oxgygen, and makes little Pines. It even does a little recruiting of unsuspecting Shaved Monkeys here and there, infiltrating human coffins to slurp up the contents and occasionally crashing down on the living specimens in a droll manner. But basically, there is not a tree out there that gives a rip about humans. Trying to make it look as if a tree were on the rampage against the good townspeople is...just laughable.

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One has to ask whether that's what Pleckaitis and Company intended all along. It's really hard to tell if they're kidding or not.

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When you actually sit down and watch this movie -- painful as it is -- you can't help but notice some nuggets of well-thought-out commentary in there about, not Jaws, but its hundreds of rip-offs. Most elegant was the fact that the killer tree used in the attack scenes was NOT a White Pine, reminding me irresistably of all the Blue, Lemon, and Nurse sharks used in post-Jaws films and described by worried-looking actors as Great Whites. There was even a priceless shot in Trees in which the terrified Hazelville campers fled what was obviously a ravening Douglas Fir: one woman ducked behind an actual White Pine in the attempt to conceal herself. It was a great moment. The filmmakers were also careful to make sure that none of the GIANT KILLER TREES were any taller than the humans they were eating. Most of them only came up to the hero's shoulder. Brrr, terrifying!

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An example of this movie's embarrassing lameness: remember the scene in Jaws that has Sheriff Brody freaking himself out by reading books on Sharks? Here's the Trees equivalent: Ranger Cody is paging in disbelief through a book on trees. He asks his wife in horror: "Did you know you can tell how old a tree is by sawing it in half and counting the rings!?" She shuts the book firmly, saying "That's enough of that. You won't sleep a wink as it is." Yeah, right. Again, the message here is clear: NEVER MIND THE TREES. IT'S THE FISH YOU NEED TO BE WORRIED ABOUT.

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Let us not forsake the subject of the sequel. Trees: The Root Of All Evil is a big improvement on the original, but I have to say Jaws has NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. This film combines the best features of Eight-Legged Freaks, Starship Troopers and every other crap sci-fi film you ever watched in your life, as the heroes struggle to find a weakness in the killer trees. Naturally, the menace proves to be the result of a National Forest Service genetic experiment, loosed on an unsuspecting town by Christmas-tree poachers. The ravening pines have learned to uproot themselves and scuttle after their prey, and they actually show you the trees in this movie -- the usual ridiculous computer-generated cartoons of course. Again, they only reach shoulder height. It's a riot. The wounded survivors, who have been sprayed with sap, needled, and scraped by the bark of the killer trees, are being treated in the high-school gym, while the bad guys come to a deservedly bad end and the good guys save the day.

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There are a lot of bewildering, but hilarious moments X-actoed out of other films and thrown into the sausage grinder that is the filmmaking mechanism of Trees. For instance, a burly lumberjack in a Santa suit whips a crowd of fellow loggers into a frenzy by announcing "I AM FANG!" and going on to paraphrase the speech William Wallace delivered to the troops before the Battle of Stirling in Braveheart. ("They can take our trees -- but they'll never take our AXES!") The loggers take heart and charge the trees, hollering like a hundred angry Scotsmen -- and indeed, being loggers, they're even wearing plaid shirts. A lot of the film is like that, just nutty, but in a fun way that the first film never got cl0se to.

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Again, the message here is clear: All this human drama is going on around the trees. When the characters aren't all upset about the Great White Pines, they'e worked up about the marital infidelity, bed-wetting, government cover-ups and child endangerment that make up the gritty stuff of everyday Naked Ape life. In every case, THEY'RE MISSING THE POINT. IT'S THE FISH THEY NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR.

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The second film, at least, is a delight that I learned about just in time for the Squidmas holiday season. Both movies come on the same video disc, so I suggest you buy it for someone you love and hate equally. You'll understand what I mean when you see them.