POSEIDON

I just saw this one again, for the first time since it hit the theaters, and it was MUCH better than I remembered.  Maybe I was sitting too close to the screen when I went; it was even more breathless and MUCH easier to enjoy on the home entertainment system.  This version stars Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas.

PLOT SUMMARY:   Same as the original.  Luxury liner turns turtle and the water is rising inside.  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS ACTION SPECTACULAR:

>>  It's not the same without Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters.  This was in spite of all the loving homages to the first movie.  It just made me miss the Rosens even more.  The cast was mostly a forgettable bunch of whoevers.  Competent, but nuthin' special.  By the end of the movie you still don't remember anyone's name.

>>  A lot of people died in the water in this story -- I counted many more than in the original, The Poseidon Adventure -- but for the most part they didn't die RIGHT.  Look at Richard Dreyfuss's character, Nelson.  He was about to willingly enter Dagon's Roiling Intestine when he saw the big wave coming and ran back inside.  What's the expression?  Ah, yes.  The saying is SHIT OR GET OFF THE POT.  He spends the rest of the movie in more or less the Red Buttons role, "saving" others from drowning...Maybe I'm judging him too harshly.  His character was in a really bad headspace as the movie started.  I have to keep in mind what an advocate Dreyfuss was for us in Jaws.  And he turned in that wonderful performance in the remake of Piranha...

>>  I never spotted a single operative when I saw this one on the big screen, but they did put in an ultra-brief appearance when I watched it this time.  Naturally, I was aware that they were filmed during the making of this picture -- all fish in the North American Conspiracy Zone report straight back to me -- but I thought they must have ended on the cutting-room floor for all time.  Not so!  And the confident way they waited outside the portholes for the Shaved Monkeys to join them in the sea filled me with pride and joy.

>>  Come to think of it, an entire subplot I remember from the theatrical release was not included in the movie I saw last night.  What happened to the Naked Apes rutting in the stateroom, and the woman in the scene -- one of the ship's crew as I recall -- saying remarkably calmly, after being spilled out of bed and onto the ceiling of her stateroom, "We've turned over!"

>>  The water has a lot more personality in this movie than in the original, and that was really the highlight for me.  While the casual, almost lazy seawater we saw in The Poseidon Adventure is more realistic, even when a ship really does turn over in the ocean (Costa Concordia,  anyone?), I have to admit that the grasping, eager seawater in this movie made for exciting viewing.  You come away feeling all secure and satisfied that hundreds of souls have been assimilated by our finny collective.  Resistance is futile, and you will get all wet trying!!!

>> I loved, loved, loved the contrast between the cool, welcoming seawater and the sharp-edged, too-hot-to-touch cruise ship.  They made it clear in every frame that trying to stay dry was not only pointless; it was also going to hurt.  Compare the horrified, dead stares of the ballroom Naked Apes, killed by the impact of hitting the ceiling, to the steely- eyed and determined way Ramsey gives himself to the waves, and the almost gleeful dive Dylan makes, through fire, to get into the water -- which is clearly his real home.

>> And, oh, that elemental groan of relief each time the Poseidon goes deeper into the water.  It's almost as sweet as the relief in the faces of the nightclub singer and the captain as they joyfully hug each other in their last air-breathing moment in the ballroom.  If I could still cry, I would have right then.

I didn't always like and recommend this movie.  But I've had a change of heart.  Watch and enjoy.

DEEP BLUE SEA

We'll get to the movie review in a second. First, here is an info sheet for you to print and distribute.

Today’s topic: How To Keep Your Hermit Crabs Alive Some More

ABOUT FOOD

>> Crabs are scavengers who eat any gross dead thing that washes up on a beach, as long as it is still fresh. Keep this in mind when you shop. They love fish, fresh or dried coconut, driftwood and cork bark, the crab pellets sold in the stores, all kinds of fruit, mild-flavored greens and vegetables, crackers, fish-food flakes, and the pellets intended for ducks, ferrets, rats, carp, guinea pigs, monkeys and rabbits.

>> For the reason stated above, you cannot give crabs the same food day after day. They will stop eating it completely. They will also not be able to face the same food again, even their favorite, if you let it go rotten in the tank and then try to replace it with fresh.

>> NEVER FEED BREAD TO YOUR CRABS, or anything else baked with yeast. It kills them rather slowly and horribly. Unyeasted breads like crackers, matzoh, hardtack, and cornbread are fine.

>> Crabs love kelp, and you can buy it in tablet form at the health-food store. Take some yourself, Fish Girl, it’s good for you.

>> Crabs ALWAYS need a mineral chewy available. They love cuttle bones and the calcium blocks intended for turtle tanks. These are pinchably delicious to a crab. They also badly need the calcium.

>> Alternate meat, fruit, grains and vegetables when you serve dinner to your crabs. Four-course meals rarely wash up on a beach, and you want to approximate the beach lifestyle as closely as possible. Their natural tendency is to find a big chunk of something, eat it until they can’t stand the sight of it, then move on to a big chunk of something else.

>> Reptile vitamins are good for crabs. Sprinkle some on their dampened food every so often, but not every day. The stuff is powerful and not all of them like the taste. Once a month is plenty.

>> Crabs refusing to eat are miserable indeed. Check to make sure the tank is clean, warm, humid, and properly lit. Make sure the food is fresh and not the same thing they’ve had daily for a week. Make sure the tank smells fresh and that there are no dead crabs in there. Bad smells kill a crab’s appetite, the same way they kill yours.

CLIFFIE’S NOTES ON Deep Blue Sea

I put off reviewing this movie for a long time because of the horrible reviews it’s gotten over the years. Imagine my surprise when I finally saw it and realized it is actually A HILARIOUS SPOOF ON THE CURRENT HUMAN-FISH POLITICAL SITUATION, full of inversions and sly jabs at the "ruling class" (supposedly humans, at least if you ask THEM) that Oscar Wilde would have been proud of.

PLOT SUMMARY: Humans trying to find a cure for their own degenerative brain diseases decide to Tamper In Dagon’s Domain by creating a group of mutant sharks. In the usual course of things, the sharks turn on their tormentors in a wonderfully diabolical way, sabotaging the underwater facility that is the setting for the story and systematically flooding it, section by section, so they can swim right in and put the munch on the researchers. Through a combination of luck and pluck, and in spite of my rooting consistently for the sharks, a handful of humans survive.

A character sums up the story nicely in the midst of the crisis: "Now, you see how that works? She’s scroon with the sharks, and now the sharks are scroon with us!" Well, yeah, what did you expect? Did you expect us to give you money? The unfolding of this plot encompasses some fine moments shamelessly stolen from Jaws, The Poseidon Adventure, and, oddly enough, Vertical Limit. The result makes for a two swell hours of entertainment, with alternating moments of super-high tension, great knock-you-out-of-the-water surprises, and of course lots of the explosions, wisecracking commentary, and terrified females in foundation garments that are so beloved of the hairy bipeds.

I’m telling you – if this were a true story the humans would be OURS by now. The Notes below should help illustrate the way the Monkey People could one day, in a perfect world, PLAY RIGHT INTO OUR FINS:

To hand the land back to the fish in just a few easy steps, Dear Humans...

START HERE: take some Mako sharks, known for their high-speed swimming and willingness to eat Naked Apes. Enhance their brain size dramatically, particularly focusing on the forebrain which governs reasoning and will. While you’re at it, feed them Miracle-Gro pellets so they get as big as school buses. Do all this in an invasive, humiliating way that leaves them COMPLETELY PISSED OFF AT THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE.

NEXT: Ignore any evidence you see that the Sharks are starting to plan, anticipate their captors’ next moves, and hunt cooperatively.

TAKE CARE to let the enhanced sharks watch through a handy observation window as you insert immense, harpoonlike needles into the heads of test sharks, so they understand perfectly that they are going to be next if they don’t make a move, and quickly.

DON’T FORGET TO include in your researches a plan to remove the enhanced brain cells from the sharks and insert them into the noggins of human medical test subjects, THUS MAKING THEM PART SHARK. The only sad part of the movie for me was the fact that you never got to see this happen. The fun we could have had!

PROCEED THUSLY: When the sharks start doing things like swimming backwards, playing pranks with helicopters, pounding through steel doors to get at you, and feigning death so they can snap pieces off you during medical tests, tell yourself that EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL.

NEXT: When the mutant sharks start sabotaging your test facility, DON’T KILL THEM. Instead, stand around arguing about the ethics of gene therapy.

PROCEED AS FOLLOWS: Wait until the damage is done without intervening. Do not make any attempt to check around the damaged facility to search for survivors. Let other members of your species fend for themselves.

TIP: If you are accosted by a mutant shark on the open sea in a small boat, your best move is to jump into the water and flail around like mad. At this point, you can trust that the preternaturally hunky hero guy, a shark wrangler with a chequered past, will arrive out of nowhere and dispatch the menace. With a crossbow. Isn’t that how it’s usually done?

TIP: If you are accosted by a mutant shark in a sunken research lab, make sure you are standing in chest-deep water when you reach for the submerged, but still functioning, electrical gadget that you will then use to dispatch the menace. If you are female, remove your wetsuit before proceeding.

TIP: If you have an axe with you, use it to chop through the bulkhead, escape the room, and allow the shark to chase you longer, rather than ending the suspense by burying the business end in the shark’s skull.

HELPFUL HINT: When you are trapped in a teeth-chatteringly-cold, shark-infested, watery hell and all you have left are wisecracks, wield them ruthlessly and without scruple. The sharks will be SOOOOOOO impressed.

SUGGESTION: At the height of the danger, stomp around the edge of the pool in the lab where the sharks have been going through hell for months. Deliver, AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS, an impromptu speech on the importance good morale in the face of desperate situations. Be sure to give the sharks their rebuttal time.

I laughed so hard at this movie! I can’t recommend it too highly.

And get a load of the closing theme song for this remarkable movie! This is delivered from the apparent POV of a happy "half man, half shark" operative, recruiting new contacts in the briny. Rapped by LL Cool J. I cannot reveal on the Internet whether or not he is One Of Us, but see the movie, read the text of this rap and draw your own conclusions.

"Deepest, Bluest" (Shark's Fin)

Deepest, bluest – my hat is like a shark’s fin
Manmade terror
Hungry jaws of death
Y'all don't cross my depths
I'll pause your breaths
I cause you to sink down forty thousand leagues
Bleeding to death with no arms and short sleeves
My world's deep blue
Killers gotta eat too
Looking for human flesh to rip my teeth through
Other fish in the sea but
Barracudas ain't equal
To a half human predator created by a needle
Jet black eyes baby they stare while you sleep
When your Titanic sinks I'm the one you gon' meet
Hearing terrified screams they surround my team
All you see is trails of blood
Even God won't intervene
Nightmares of darkness
My appetite is heartless
Even if we related, you eliminated regardless
In the deep blue, underwater walls
Half man, half shark
My jaws don't fall
Our Father who art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Killers sworn to beast
Swallowed them in flames
They switched my DNA
Trip me into Cool J
I can't fight the feeling
I'm born to kill prey
To survive an attack
There's only one way
Battle to the death
That's how sharks play
Weapons left behind
We dueling with the mind
You blind, crippled, or crazy
You're real easy to find
Struggling to flow with hemorrhages in your throat
Getting the lap dance while I smash through your boat
Eat your whole fam
Nothing left but a right hand
Clinging to a rail
Escape, attempts fail
You'll never make it home
Tear the flesh off your bone
Walking in undercurrents is a dangerous zone
I'm talking death out a moment's notice
You wasn't focused
Me and my crew strike
Like some underwater locusts

Uh, uh take it deeper
Uh, uh take it deeper
Uh, uh take it deeper
Uh, uh take it deeper

These waters are waist level
The hallway's flooded
Lost your scuba gear
The killer's cold - blooded
His name's LL
You don't really want it
I ate your ancestors
The ocean is haunted
I'm closing in cause I'm supposed to win
How the cold steel feel when it froze your chin
Should of stayed on dry land
Stroke while you can
Cause now you under pressure in the land of the damned
Abandoned pirate ships
Eels and sod scum
Fish that glow in the dark
The Titanic's hub
Underwater storms
Your blood is so warm
You're life vest is off
And that turns me onKiller for centuries
The Gotti of the deep
In the next millennium
I'm still gonna creep
Sand under my belly, ocean over my head
Through the light in the shadows
You become the living dead

Copyright 1999, LL Cool J

Can I just add a thought here? Human imagery ALWAYS connects Sharks with being dead. Load of crap if you ask me. Once your transformation to Piscatorial Consciousness reaches a certain level, you’ll know that Sharks are all about CLEARING THINGS UP. Which is the reason Naked Apes have made every effort to exterminate every species. The sad thing is that they truly can’t tell the difference between CLEARING THINGS UP and BEING ANNIHILATED. LL Cool J appears to see the shade of difference here, in these last couple of lines – "you become the LIVING dead." Nobody dies under the ocean – they only get EATEN and enter a different level of consciousness.

Freak Epidemic Reduces Recruitment In Lake Havasu

By CHRIS KAHN, Associated Press Writer Fri Sep 28, 2:18 PM ET

PHOENIX - It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.
Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.

"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL'-erh-eye) killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases — three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.

In Arizona, David Evans said nobody knew his son, Aaron, was infected with the amoeba until after the 14-year-old died on Sept. 17. At first, the teen seemed to be suffering from nothing more than a headache.

"We didn't know," Evans said. "And here I am: I come home and I'm burying him."
After doing more tests, doctors said Aaron probably picked up the amoeba a week before while swimming in the balmy shallows of Lake Havasu, a popular man-made lake on the Colorado River between Arizona and California.

Though infections tend to be found in southern states, Naegleria lives almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.

Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.
The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up into the brain, where it continues the damage, "basically feeding on the brain cells," Beach said.

People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes, he said.

Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have stopped the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said.

"Usually, from initial exposure it's fatal within two weeks," he said.

Researchers still have much to learn about Naegleria. They don't know why, for example, children are more likely to be infected, and boys are more often victims than girls.

"Boys tend to have more boisterous activities (in water), but we're not clear," Beach said.

In central Florida, authorities started an amoeba phone hot line advising people to avoid warm, standing water and areas with algae blooms. Texas health officials also have issued warnings.

People "seem to think that everything can be made safe, including any river, any creek, but that's just not the case," said Doug McBride, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Officials in the town of Lake Havasu City are discussing whether to take action. "Some folks think we should be putting up signs. Some people think we should close the lake," city spokesman Charlie Cassens said.

Beach cautioned that people shouldn't panic about the dangers of the brain-eating bug. Cases are still extremely rare considering the number of people swimming in lakes. The easiest way to prevent infection, Beach said, is to use nose clips when swimming or diving in fresh water.

"You'd have to have water going way up in your nose to begin with" to be infected, he said.

David Evans has tried to learn as much as possible about the amoeba over the past month. But it still doesn't make much sense to him. His family had gone to Lake Havasu countless times. Have people always been in danger? Did city officials know about the amoeba? Can they do anything to kill them off?

Evans lives within eyesight of the lake. Temperatures hover in the triple digits all summer, and like almost everyone else in this desert region, the Evanses look to the lake to cool off.

It was on David Evans' birthday Sept. 8 that he brought Aaron, his other two children, and his parents to Lake Havasu. They ate sandwiches and spent a few hours splashing around.

"For a week, everything was fine," Evans said.

Then Aaron got the headache that wouldn't go away. At the hospital, doctors first suspected meningitis. Aaron was rushed to another hospital in Las Vegas.
"He asked me at one time, 'Can I die from this?'" David Evans said. "We said, 'No, no.'"

On Sept. 17, Aaron stopped breathing as his father held him in his arms.
"He was brain dead," Evans said. Only later did doctors and the CDC determine that the boy had been infected with Naegleria.

"My kids won't ever swim on Lake Havasu again," he said.

It's that LAST LINE that scares ME. We have the girls at R&D on top of this already; the outbreaks will subside and human scietists will TAKE FULL CREDIT because they sprayed all the standing water they could find with rat poison, or whatever they think of. It's a good thing fish don't have egos!

HER NAME, "TITANIC"

This neat little paperback is copyrighted 1988 to Charles Pellegrino and was published in its mass-market form by Avon Books.

WHAT A GREAT READ. It almost seems to have been designed to appeal to both fish and humans, and it definitely appeals to those who are A LITTLE OF BOTH. While there's a lot of technical blah-blah in here, it never gets TOO THICK to wade through. EVEN A CATFISH LIKE ME CAN UNDERSTAND IT. There's also a lot of quoted discussion between the various parties involved in finding Titanic. Some of it you can take and some you can leave.

What I like, though -- and why I recommend this is as recruiting literature -- is the way the book is EQUALLY MOVING whether you are reading it from the point of view of one of US or one of THEM. A human is going to see the drowning of 1500 people as the familiar tragic clusterfunk that has NEVER LEFT THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE GLOBAL SHAVED-MONKEY COLLECTIVE. We all know THAT story. There were no binoculars to be found for the guy in the crow's nest looking for icebergs; it hit the ship just right to flood all the watertight compartments; there weren't enough lifeboats; the lifeboats were lowered less than half-full; yattata yattata yattata.

But read from a fish perspective, it's a GLOWING TESTAMENT to the teamwork and collective will that went into welcoming 1500 recruits home to the deep, where they dwell in wonder and glory forever. You see very few references to undersea life in the course of this book, but we were RIGHT THERE making sure it all went down smoothly -- you should pardon the expression.

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> Even some of the technical blah-blah helped bring the point home, like the diagram on page 93 that showed the scale of the Titanic compared to the World Trade Center -- which was still standing when this book went to press, of course -- and how laughably they are both dwarfed by the 2 and a half vertical miles of ocean water holding the ship in place today.

>> What somehow makes this all come together for the author is his interest in space travel, and the way the discovery of the wrecked ship coincided so closely with the Challenger explosion. He feels the two disasters went down for much the same reasons, and I'll take his word for it. But he seems to make NOTHING of where the Challenger ended up. Don't you see it, Chuck? Bottom of the ocean? Hello? He's critical of those who defy Fate by saying this boat can't be sunk or that no little piddling ice storm can damage our big, bad spaceship. But he doesn't notice that in both instances, THE FISH TOOK OVER IN THE END.

>> The rare references to marine life in this book only go to suggest that there is MUCH MORE down there, in Pellegrino's opinion, that bears studying. Nice attitude. And the descriptions he gives of what he sees -- implying that some of the operatives at that depth defy description and that some of them are rather dreadful, like the one he compares to the title character in Alien -- will probably lead new little Ballards and Cousteaus to start building their own submersibles. BRING 'EM ON. I DARE YOU.

>> A lot of the book is a minute-by-minute timeline of what survivors told the papers and the investigators about the sinking itself. I WELL UNDERSTAND your concerns about the reports of those who nearly died, who felt a strange peace and acceptance come over them, and then got spat or hauled out of the water somehow. ("An unlikely calm swept over him," etc., on page 114 is an example. It even mentions that the guy goes into a rage when he gets spat out by the ship, sucked back in, as if she couldn't make up her mind. REALLY too close for comfort, I agree, in that case.) I consider these security leaks to be WITHIN TOLERANCES. If people start to toy with the idea that accepting for fate at sea is not that bad, WHERE'S THE HARM IN THAT? Pellegrino NEVER COMMENTS on how they FELT about being hauled or spat out of the water, AND THAT'S THE IMPORTANT THING.

>> Much is made of the BRAVERY of those left behind on the ship, like the telegraph operator who commented cheerfully "It's definitely fish for breakfast for us tomorrow. Or vice versa." BRAVERY, or EAGERNESS, you may well ask!

>> Obviously, this book can be displayed QUITE SAFELY on just about ANY bookshelf. Even now that the movie has had its fifteen minutes of fame, and everyone has calmed down and gone home, there's NO SHAME in being interested in the subject. People have been studying the sinking for almost a century and there's NO END IN SIGHT.

>> This makes a TERRIFIC companion volume to one of my favorite novels, Dead In The Water by Nancy Holder. CLICK HERE TO SEE MY COMMENTS ON THAT. It's meant as a companion to Pellegrino's other book on the subject, and Bob Ballard's books as well. THOSE ARE FINE, TOO.

>> As in Pellegrino's other book, Ghosts Of The Titanic, he comments more than once here about the curious effect on the adventurers of seeing the ship. They all cried their eyes out, basically. What they never say -- TO MY RELIEF! -- is whether they cried out of the sense of loss of 1500 total strangers, or out of LONGING to go down and join them. They keep talking about how they want to explore the deep oceans because it's going to be so helpful down the road in space travel, but PLEASE.

ANYWAY, read this one. It's good!

LAKE PLACID 2, 3, AND 4: THE FINAL CHAPTER

OK, I'm NOT going to belabor the few differences -- and the far-more-numerous similarities -- between the three sequels to the CLASSIC 1999 tale of the exploits of the FRUITS OF JOHNNY GATORSEED.  Let's just hit the highlights, so I can underline for my semi-aquatic readers what they need to notice as they watch.

 

 

Lake Placid 2 was released, to no fanfare I am aware of, in 2007.   I can't get the dang cover art to show up on my blog entry, so I'm serving up a nice screen capture instead... 

 

In the continuing tale of The Crocodiles of Aroostook County, Maine, John Schneider, of all people, is now sheriff -- and apparently he has never communicated in any way about the wildlife in Black Lake with Sheriff Keogh (played by Brendan Gleason in the first movie), who I assume was once his boss. The crocs appears to be more or less news to the hero of this movie.  Mrs. Bickerman (Betty White) has mysteriously disappeared, with all her livestock, from the little house by the lake.  At some point, Mrs. Bickerman's sister, "Crazy Sadie" Bickerman (Chloris Leachman), moved into the old place and is keeping it up.  At no point do they explain why a married woman and her unmarried sister have the same, fairly unusual last name -- unless Hector Cyr (played by Oliver Platt in the first movie) was righter than he knew about the pecadilloes of people from the woods of Maine.   

 

There are a lot more nekkid young adults in this movie, because come on, someone has to get eaten, right?  Otherwise, this is exactly the same movie as the first one.

This is the next, 2010, sequel.  And, yes, the Bickermans are back!  This time, a relative of Crazy Sadie's -- a treehugging type married to a citified realtor -- has come to check out the now-deserted homestead and see if they can sell it, despite a depressed market.  The first thing they do is bestow Sadie's stuffed toy crocodile on their red-headed misfit son... 

 

...And at this point I need to interject.  I am starting to really understand Mrs. Bickerman's comment in the first movie: "Incomplete records haunt me so."  They never explain whether the dad in this family is the child of Sadie (who was clearly childless in Lake Placid 2),  or the son of Betty White's character from Lake Placid, or maybe a relative of her never-seen husband or someone else entirely.  If he's Mrs. Bickerman's son, why does he only talk about his aunt and never mention his mom or dad?  What was he up to while his parents were disappearing?  If he's Sadie's son, why is he still not interested in the fate of his aunt?  In short, what manner of Bickerman do we have before us?  Are the Bickermans like the Addams Family, with everyone married to everyone even though they all had the same last name to start with?  Oh, it probably doesn't matter... 

 

WHAT YOU NEED TO NOTICE is that as soon as the mother's back is turned, the kid starts feeding the crocodiles meat stolen from the freezer.  Then he goes to the store to steal more for them.  We quickly learn that the lake is fairly teeming with the scaly operatives, and like the first set of Bickermans to find them there and Crazy Sadie in the first sequel, THIS KID IS DEVOTED TO THEM.  I also want you to notice that mom is distracted from noticing any of this by her laptop computer.  THIS LITTLE INVENTION, LIKE THE SMARTPHONE, HAS ALLOWED MORE SECRET COMMUNICATIONS TO GO ON BETWEEN FISH AND HUMAN THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN DECADES. 

 

THAT IS NOT TO SAY that fish are connecting to humans through Facebook or (chuckle) that other app called Plenty of Fish; it's simply that humans are so focused on their electronic screens that they do not notice that their partners, siblings, and children are turning into fish.  It is to laugh.  Onwards.

 

The sheriff in this sequel is played by Michael Ironside.  His position on the matter is that the crocs were all cleared out long ago, and anything you hear about it now is just backwoods legend.  HE GOT THAT WRONG! 

 

Watch for some great continuity errors in this movie.

 

 

Annnnnnd this one came out in 2012. At this point, utter confusion sets in.  The Army Corps of Engineers has been called in to build an electrified fence all the way around the lake.  The good townspeople have finally come to grips with the fact that there are so many killer crocs in the water that you can almost walk across their backs from shore to shore.   But -- where are we again, exactly?   At different points in the story they refer to the infested waters as Lake Placid, Black Lake and even a totally new name, Clear Lake.  Even the warning signs change the name of this lake from one scene to the next. 

 

And where is the Army in this story, exactly?  The guys brought in to build the fence are not from the Army Corps of Anything -- they are a civilian father-and-son team with emotional baggage, not unlike the baggage dealt with by the sheriff and her daughter.  Yes -- Black Lake, which apparently goes through sheriffs like wet Kleenex, now has a pretty blonde sheriff (Elizabeth Rohm) very much like the one you remember from Piranha 3-D (Elizabeth Shue).  This sheriff's daughter looks about 5 years younger than the sheriff herself and never goes out on dates.  Mom convinces her to go along on a swim-team barbecue, which for some reason includes a long bus ride through the woods and an overnight camping trip -- several nubile young girls, several horny young men -- and 2 MALE chaperones, one of which is the bus driver who gets them lost because he is too busy looking at Internet porn on his smartphone to notice where he's going.  That sounds like a recipe for some safe, wholesome fun, doesn't it? 

 

HOW THE CROCS STEERED HIM TOWARDS BLACK LAKE WITHOUT HIS KNOWLEDGE IS CLASSIFIED, SORRY.  HOW THEY KEPT EVERYONE ELSE ON THE BUS FROM NOTICING IS ALSO CLASSIFIED.  SORRY!

I CANNOT EVEN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN TO YOU WHY A GROUP OF LOCAL KIDS -- AND THEIR SWIM-TEAM COACH -- DO NOT NOTICE AT ANY POINT DURING THIS CAMPING TRIP THAT THEY ARE AT THE WRONG LAKE.  NO FISH CONCEALMENT TECHNIQUE IS NORMALLY THAT GOOD.

 

While all this is going on, there is a group of poachers looking to cash in on the scaly fortune in the water, closing in with what appears to be the help of yet another treehugging research guy who thinks that "the world will be a lonelier place" if anyone kills the crocs. 

Nobody explains at any point why the poachers and the conservationists are working together.

 

One moment I love in this movie is the one where a guy BACKS into the electrified croc fence, dances the I'm Getting Electrocuted dance as all humans do in the movies, then falls dead to the ground -- with soot and wire marks ACROSS HIS FACE.  Dude, the wire never touched the front of his head! 

 

Then the piece de resistance -- ANOTHER BICKERMAN! 

 

The moral of these stories is THERE WILL ALWAYS BE ANOTHER BICKERMAN.  Similarly, JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE WATER:  MORE RECRUITERS ARE WAITING TO GREET YOU.  No matter who the sheriff is, no matter what the lake is called and no matter the species of the recruiting operatives, there will be someone working to bring the Shaved Monkeys together with their finned, scaly, water-loving dream dates. 

Then the humans turn into fish, enter the sea and dwell with Dagon in wonder and glory forever.

DEAD IN THE WATER

GOOD COD, DO I LOVE THIS ONE!

I know -- I recommend this book to EVERYONE who has an audience with me, here in the secret sub-sub-sub-basement underneath the Manoogian Mansion. YOU ARE ALL SICK UNTO DEATH OF HEARING ABOUT IT. At least that's true for the more experienced recruiters.

BUT SOME OF YOU ARE BRAND NEW RECRUITS AND HAVE NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT. So here is the full, complete review of this novel, written by Nancy Holder and published by Dell Horror in 1994.

PLOT SUMMARY: A group of holiday-makers on a dreadful little cut-rate cruise find that their filthy, rat-infested vessel is sinking. They pile into a lifeboat and -- after a fairly anxious wait in the blinding fog -- are saved by an incredibly plush cruise liner, where the captain escorts each one of them into a luxurious stateroom and sees to their every need.

BUT SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG. The survivors keeping seeing something nasty out of the corners of their eyes...something hard to describe...and it has pincers. And what's with the surviving crewman who came with them into the lifeboat? Why does he keep talking to an invisible figure he calls "King Neptune"? Howcum the ship keeps kind of, you know, giving a hitch and suddenly turning into a rotten wreck hung with stinking seaweed before snapping back into focus as a stunningly-appointed modern passenger liner? And the captain seems, shall we say...troubled? haunted? weird? Are they in more danger than they realize? WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS HAUNTING, AND HAUNTED, NOVEL OF PISCATORIAL LOVE:

>> I know, I know, every book a human publishes on this subject gets classified as a horror story. I DON'T GET IT IT EITHER.

>> The relationship between FISH and DESTINY is crystal clear in this book. The closer you get to your happy ending, the more fish you see around you. Impossible to miss the message.

>>The captain of the liner proves to be in collusion with the pincered creature glimpsed all over the ship by the survivors. And wait'll you find out who SHE is. It's a fairly obvious reference to our recruiting methods, but well within tolerances because the story is also obviously fanciful, phantasmal and...fictional. (Or is it?)

>>I won't spoil the ending for you, but they try to make it horrifying. If you're taking it from the point of view of a fully human reader, it's not a pretty picture. Taken from OUR point of view, it's almost funny. Because only humans feel oogy when they think of being...DEAD IN THE WATER. Here's a tip for those antsy readers: Once you're DEAD IN THE WATER, you get to join us in Dagon's Roiling Intestine, where you will dwell in wonder and glory forever...

NYMPH

This 2014 film release is, well, INTERESTING.  And PRETTY DANG GOOD.  It's a Serbian picture filmed in Montenegro and drawing heavily on Greek mythology.  The director is Milan Todorovic, and the actors include Zorana Kostic Obradovic, Mina Slabic and Franco Nero.  I have to say that seen from the perspectives of INTERPSECIES ROMANCE, horror films in general and KEEPING OUR SECRETS SAFE, it's really not half bad. 

PLOT SUMMARY:  The film sets up the Shaved Monkeys for disaster from the very first scene when a young couple making out by the water comes to grief.  The young man is drawn irresistibly into the ocean, saying he hears singing...then disappears under the surface in a gout of blood.  His girlfriend, who heard nothing at all, screams for help until someone comes...And she is promptly dispatched in a way that is bound to give ANY fish viewer the shudders...But also a twinge of satisfaction, because for once it's not happening to one of US.  This time we get to see one of US doing it to one of THEM.  Ha!

Cut to the next scene, that shows a couple of great-looking young women arriving with luggage at what is clearly the same place we saw in the opening scene.  They are visiting an old college buddy, a great-looking guy.  The filmmakers wasted some valuable screen time here, building up the relationships between the human characters and giving us backstory, much of it quite pointless, but of course many of the viewers are going to belong to the species we mean to recruit, and you have to keep them engaged somehow until we can get to the good parts of the story.  These landscum -- one of them so committed to living on solid ground that she feels funny getting into a boat -- decide to go exploring on a nearby island, the local equivalent of Alcatraz minus the park rangers and souvenir bars of soap.  The place is deserted and has a very nasty history; in fact a man at the next table in the café warns the vacationers not to go there, because nothing good can come of hanging around a place that was once a Nazi concentration camp. 

Landscum vacationers being what they are, they respond to this warning by setting out the next morning to see the island.  It's a lovely place, with handsome antique stonework, buildings designed with mysterious intent and a remarkable well in the center of a courtyard right in the middle of it all -- and when one of the vacationers takes a snapshot of the well's interior, what does she see but a woman in the water, looking up at the lens plaintively.  At this point they have to run because they hear someone coming (does it not occur to them to ask the stranger if he can help them help the woman?), and from their hiding places they see the same rubber-booted figure we remember from the first scene.  He approaches the well and pours a bucket of severed hands and feet into the water.  Uh-oh!  Serial killer!

Sure enough, they find his lair in a corner of the facility, papered with articles about missing people and featuring a bathtub lined with bloodstains.  How can they save the man's female captive without being seen?  What is that singing the college buddy says he is hearing down the corridor?  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON AN OLD-SCHOOL RECRUITING SPECTACULAR:

>>  This story is basically an outgrowth of the stubborn belief in Sirens, MANY GENERATIONS after we stopped using this recruiting technique for good.  The other title of this movie?  Killer Mermaid. 

>> You have to ask who the recruiting operative is in this story, honestly.  Is it "Scylla," the title character?  At first glance you would think so -- she's the only one in the story with gills.  Then what about the guy known in the credits only as The Guardian, with his grappling hook and blade sharpener?  What do you say about Niko, the man who warns the vacationers to go nowhere near the island in a way that almost guarantees they will hotfoot it over there to take a look, and who also turns out to know the Guardian from way, way back?  Or Bob, who keeps daring everyone to go ahead and check the place out?  IS IT NOT OBVIOUS THAT THEY ARE WORKING TOGETHER TO GET EVERYBODY INTO THE POOL?

>> And what about that well at the center of the island?  Does it not remind you of the one at the bottom of the sea in another movie I've reviewed here, Dagon? (See the entrance to that other well in the image below.) Who built the well in this movie, with what project in mind?  I couldn't help noticing that it appears to have passages leading out into the ocean for Mermaid travel convenience.  So is the well filled with saltwater?  Who builds a saltwater well, IF NOT US? Who builds water-filled tunnels under and island with exits leading to the dry land on top, IF NOT US?

>> What about the relationship between Scylla and The Guardian?  It's implied that they love each other so much that her kiss can bring him back from the dead, but we never get to see that much of their relationship.  And if Scylla has her man, why is she still recruiting guys like the unnamed boyfriend in the first scene?  If she DOESN'T have her man, why is the guardian chopping people up and feeding them to her?  Clearing up some of these questions, and making the nature of the relationship more explicit, would make this movie a MUCH better recruitment film, but oh well.

>> Niko implies that the mermaid is the last of her kind, but he also seems to expect it when a school of others come a-calling towards the end.  What does this guy know?  What does he not know?  Where does he fit into this story?

>> I have to say, I'm intrigued by the idea, advanced in this film, that a Mermaid might be able to look MORE human when she wants, and then switch back when it's convenient to look more, you know, fishy.  If only that were practical!

>> I also wish it were practical to create ANY recruiting model that can take a gouging from a spear fisherman, then heal up within a minute and get back into the game.  IF ONLY!

>> And what about that cliffhanger ending?  WILL THERE BE A SEQUEL?

I expect this one to generate a lot of discussion at the chapter meetings.  AND you can actually enjoy watching it.

PSYCHOMANIA (or THE FROG)

PSYCHOMANIA

1971, filmed in glorious color and directed by Don Sharp

Starring Mary Larkin, Nicky Henson, George Sanders and Beryl Reid

Where to begin? There are so many wonderful things about this movie that it’s hard to decide.

What a statement this picture makes about the youth movement of the Sixties! I have never seen a better film on the subject. This is a moving story about daring young people pitted against a decaying modern society, about the triumphant power of the human will, and the faith and love that can survive – yes! -- Death itself. The kids in this picture, like so many in the Love Decade, are just looking for meaning in a world that seems to offer none. The heroine, a pretty young thing named Abby, is in love with Tom, the fearless and terribly handsome leader of their group. He asks her repeatedly to really commit to him…But Abby just can’t take the plunge. Without ever really turning his back on her, Tom leads the others in their group to a new level of freedom and awareness that they never dreamed existed. Abby, distracted from the purity of her love by outsiders who just don’t understand, still hesitates. WHAT WILL SHE DECIDE?

OK, I’m lying. In fact, this movie is about a bunch of disaffected kids on motorcycles whose only apparent pleasure is to ride through shopping centers, knocking packages out of people’s hands, and running other drivers off the road. They call themselves the Living Dead and wear the grooviest crash helmets ever, fixed to look like skulls. Abby is indeed a sweet shy thing, who helps her mother with the shopping and floats around in ultra-feminine mini-dresses when she’s not, for instance, chasing a screaming mother with a baby carriage through the aisles of a grocery store on her bike. Her boyfriend Tom, the gang leader, is an arrogant playboy type with the worldly assurance that comes from having a rich mother who will bail him out no matter what he does. We never find out much more about the other gang members – Jane, Hinky, Gash, Hatchet, and Chopped Meat – but we do know that they would cheerfully follow Tom into Hell. The core conflict of the story is that Tom really does want them to follow him into Hell. And only Abby really can’t decide what to do about the request.

OK, I’m still lying. This movie is about FROGS and their power to infiltrate, screw with human affairs, and hop away unnoticed. By the middle of the film we have been successfully bamboozled into forgetting ALL ABOUT the frogs. But the original title of this movie was, in fact, The Frog, and I think you need to bear that firmly in mind at all times.

We get a few tantalizing glimpses of Tom’s home life - - it’s just him, his Frog-worshipping mother, and their butler, Shadwell. Shadwell is QUITE an interesting character. He appears to be there only to serve the sherry and answer the door, but it transpires that he may actually be the prime mover in the story. Shadwell appears to be, not the Lord Of The Flies, but The Lord Of The Frogs. So why is such a powerful figure of amphibian consciousness butlering for a rich old lady and her son? He hints, in a sad comment about how rare the Frogs are getting these days, that the amphibian branch of the English Fish Conspiracy might have fallen on hard times. These might be the last two followers he has. But we never really get a better answer than that. We do learn that both Shadwell and the lady of the house see Tom as the great hope of the family, the one who can properly will himself to come back from the grave instead of wimping out like his old man did. Not many young people have such supportive families, especially these days.

So one day, during a truly hair-raising melee of terrorizing women in hot pants, the gang takes to the open highway to shake off police pursuit – and Tom launches his bike off a bridge into a river. He returns from the dead quickly and spectacularly, kills a few people just to try it out, and convinces the rest of the gang to kill themselves so they can join him and be as invulnerable as he is. Strangely, Abby hesitates. After her suicide attempt fails, she decides to break up with Tom because it just isn’t working out. So much for Love triumphing over Death.

I need to point out right about here that Shadwell showed up at Tom’s funeral and slung a Frog medallion into the open grave. There was no more ceremony to it than that, unless you count the mediocre folksong rendered by one of the gang before they covered him up. I was intrigued that by far the nastiest-looking gang member, Hatchet, handmade a flowered cross for Tom and slung that in, too. Lot of good it did. But I stray from my point: the Frog needs only to be present in symbolic form to work its special magic.

The tragic breakup aside, there turns out to be another catch. Tom’s mother is appalled that nobody except Tom was killed and buried with the Frog Seal Of Approval, and this decides her to stop the killing once and for all by breaking some sort of bargain she made with the Frog Forces, which will wreck her life and end Tom’s.

The film poses a seemingly endless list of tricky questions. I wanted to share some of them with you, but be warned that this is far from exhaustive. You can ponder the riddles in this movie your whole life and never be truly satisfied:

What is supposed to be so evil about the resurrected Living Dead gang members? They do nothing worse than Tom himself does, and yet Tom is supposed to be OK and the others are supposed to be evil. What’s the difference? THE FROGS, MAN, THE FROGS ARE THE DIFFERENCE! The rest of them were probably raised Church of England.

OK, even if you accept the idea that a biker can come back from the dead and be invulnerable – how is it that his bike is afforded the same postmortem bonus plan? There’s a scene where Tom kills a filling-station attendant to avoid paying for two gallons of gas, suggesting to us that the bike, immortal or not, still needs fuel to run. But Tom can also drive the bike through a brick wall without scratching the paint. And by the way, a visibly-undamaged-but-dead Tom was buried on his visibly-undamaged bike after the crash. Have you ever seen the remains of a motorcycle after it plummets thirty feet into a shallow river? OK, neither have I, but I would expect it to be a twisted heap of metal. Maybe the bike was ALWAYS immortal. Maybe I’m being persnickety. But it seems to me that the river was probably full of FROGS, and that explains a great deal. Tom – and his bike – come out of the water as damaged or as undamaged as the FROGS decide.

I can readily believe that there’s a nest of Frog-worshippers in the British upper classes, but -- hiring the Devil as their butler? Who has that kind of money? Is there no other way for the Ultimate Amphibian to keep tabs on things around Latham Manor, where Tom and his mother live? And wouldn’t cooking dinner and answering the phone distract Shadwell from more pressing duties, like encouraging the House of Lords to undermine the powers of Goodness?

Of course there’s another explanation. Maybe the Church of England is the ruling evil and the Frogs are infiltrating to bring more Good into the world. That certainly agrees with my own personal worldview, because as they say in the old soda-pop jingle, things go better with Frogs. Amphibians certainly seem benevolent in this picture. Look at the fact that Tom’s mother works for free as a medium, speaking to grieving families in the voices of the dead and reassuring them that the Afterlife (presumably Amphibian in nature) is happy and welcoming. What version of Frogless Christian theology offers that kind of comfort to suffering people? But they recoil in horror when one of the grieving families offers them the gift of a cross. What does that tell you? Yep -- Christianity is Evil and Frogs are Good.

But that begs another question. What does Frog worship have to do with the resurrection of the dead? LOOK INTO YOUR RECRUITMENT MANUALS. PAGE 1979.
Does anyone but me wonder why Shadwell, the Lord of the Frogs, is named after a Fish? This is just the kind of detail a landscum viewer would clean miss. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to be totally obvious.

Does Shadwell really give a crap about anything that goes on in the human world? He doesn’t try to talk Tom out of killing himself, he doesn’t turn a hair when the kid dies, and then he doesn’t even blanch when Tom’s mother says she is going to break the contract she signed with him and undo all the bad magic. The only time you see this guy react, just about, is when Tom brings home the Frog from the graveyard. At that point, Shadwell’s whole face lights up. Doesn’t that say "operative" to you?

I cannot understand why Tom’s mother signs a contract with the Lord Of The Frogs, apparently dedicating her infant son to the Powers of Dampness for life, without even reading the damn thing. I was astounded when she signed it, THEN picked it up and read it as Shadwell, the new owner of her only child, went to soothe the screaming little mite. What was that about? Then she gets upset and voids the contract when the kid actually starts acting up. Honestly, some people. But if you ignore the landscum propaganda in the movie and think of Frogs as GOOD rather than EVIL, it makes more sense. She isn’t getting what she paid for if Tom is a grinning mass murderer. Of course she might try grounding the little sneering shit first. That's just my opinion.

By the way, is Tom really any more evil after dying than he was before? I can’t quite see the difference, myself.

What is Abby’s problem? Geez, her boyfriend comes back from the dead looking just as good as ever, offering her the gift of a consequence-free homicide spree, and she turns it down!

Is it some sort of conspiracy of silence that prevents the other gang members from telling Chopped Meat that his biker name is incredibly lame? And whose bright idea was it to add the illustration of the hamburger patty to the name tag on his leather jacket? Let me deepen the mystery by informing you that in this movie, CHICKS DIG HIM.

Let’s talk about Gash’s suicide. He staggers down a long, empty sidewalk wrapped in chains and flings himself into the river. The sidewalk stretches back to the horizon. We see no bike, no car, no heap of clothing anywhere near to help us picture where and when he weighted himself down. Just how far did he hop along that sidewalk in that condition without being stopped? Does this guy have the power of invisibility or something? If he did, that would explain how he walked out of the morgue without his swimming trunks, without getting arrested, in the next scene.

Is there anything more sublime than the sight of a frog in an evening dress? I think not, my friend. Feel free to disagree, but I think not.

One last, never-to-be-answered question. As Abby is sobbing brokenly at the end of the movie, staring at The Horror That Tom Became, Shadwell drives up in the family limo, approaching our badly frazzled heroine. The credits begin to roll before we can find out what he wants. The possibilities multiply out of control when I think about it. Is he there to drape a Frog medallion over Tom’s remains? Recruit Abby to the Frog Worship Auxiliary League? Ask her for a job?

This film is not to be missed, ladies. You can never stop learning from it, no matter how many times you watch it.

THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US!

NEWSFLASH: ANOTHER TRIUMPH FOR OUR SIDE!

Recently I saw in one of the news organs that the most extensive underwater scan ever of Loch Ness has uncovered no sign at all of anything large enough to be Nessie. They scoped out the entire space and found, well, a big hole in the ground full of murky water. In other words, ladies, OUR LITTLE PLAN IS WORKING.

Much has been made of the fact that a creature as large as Nessie could not possibly hide herself decade after decade, especially if she breathes air. I always get a smile out of this tiny-minded human thinking. As you all know, Nessie is actually a collective of wee Scots fishies who form up into a lake monster as needed. Why they need to is classified and can’t be put on the Internet, sorry. But as soon as the monkey people lower a camera, fish finder or similar puny instrument of technology into the loch, the fish just scatter -- chuckling, I tell you! LAUGHING AT YOU ALL!

Similarly, not one specimen of the Nessie fish has ever been caught. The Scots don’t even know they are there. They would not consider them worth eating even if they did catch one, but none of these special operatives are silly enough to go after a worm on a hook.

The other monkeybrained argument against Nessie is that an animal that large could not possibly keep herself fed in a body of water that size. Again, no problem. Nessie fish eat EACH OTHER and thus pass on the racial memory of their task to the next generation. Indeed are the ways of the Deep Ones mysterious as all get out.

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US

This movie takes the viewer well beyond the worst-case scenario of one of our operatives being captured, tortured and killed by the landscum. It takes us into an insane, impossible territory where fish turn into men, instead of the other way around, as it happens in the natural order of things. YECCCCH.

Plot summary: hero-type guy falls for yet another pretty girl in a white one-piece bathing suit, this time the discontented young wife of a wealthy, insanely jealous scientist who is out to capture and study a Gill Man of his very own. They search for him in the Everglades, using the scientist’s incredibly luxurious research vessel. Another successful capture leads to tragedy for everyone but the girl as the Gill Man penetrates deeper than ever into landscum, I mean human, society, and winds up half-human himself, looking strangely more and more like Mr. T as his transformation progresses. Things get ugly soon enough, in more ways than one, and once the Gill Man is framed for murder he gets really mad and kicks some Pink Monkey butt.

>> You know right away that the Insanely Jealous Husband is not truly committed to the Scientific Method. He is too caught up in petty, unscientific emotions like love and possessiveness and stuff. He’s going to go under, but will he take the Gill Man down with him?

>> And look at this research ship of his! Glass cases full of leather-bound books! A drawing room with a piano! Martini shakers! Statuary everywhere! A BUTLER, are you kidding me? Would you call a research ship the Vagabondia III? Would you make your wife host cocktail parties there in her white one-piece cocktail dress? Is this science? I ask you.

>> Since when do Gill Men live in the Everglades, anyway? Are they telling us he survived the last picture only to be recaptured in this one? Well, there may have been a colony of them there in the Fifties. WE KNOW THERE IS NOW. But back to the subject at hand. Apparently the word has spread among these Everglades Gill Men that they should stay the heck away from girls in white one-piece bathing suits. There is such a girl in this movie, sure enough, and she does everything possible to put herself in the path of our unlucky operative. The Gill Man looks, but he never touches, and a good thing, too.

>> Notice just how much trouble this girl goes to to tempt the Gill Man. After being warned repeatedly to be careful, because the menfolk know how reckless she is, they abandon her to try her luck scuba-diving. They are nearby, armed to the teeth to hunt the ferocious Gill Man. The girl immediately dives too far down and succumbs to "the rapture of the deep." She might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says "TAKE ME, I’M YOURS." Any aquatic lifeform behaving this way would be voluntarily sacrificing herself to the Elder Gods for consumption, and you’d better believe the Gill Man knows it. But he also knows that she is clueless about the message she’s sending. This, like the Naked Ape male who has the restraint not to force himself on a drunken female of his own species, shows the clear signs of a good upbringing and a clear sense of right and wrong. Ultimately, even intelligent caution does not help the Gill Man.

>> I’m not sure he’s just being chivalrous in not putting the munch on this girl. My thought is that the Gill Man would realize immediately that she’s is pretty unbalanced or she would never stay with a husband like this one. The girl proves it almost immediately upon arriving in the Everglades, when the men rush up on deck in response to the racket of someone firing a gun repeatedly. Sure enough, it’s her, all decked out in her hunting togs, ventilating sharks for laughs. She’s a real dream date.

>> The intrepid scientists warn each other over and over to take the Gill Man alive for the purposes of Scientific Study. Once they spot him, however, they open fire with a pistol, shoot him twice in the midsection with a speargun, and finally manage to set fire to him before they drag him aboard, ventilated in half a dozen places and sporting 3rd-degree burns.>> The intrepid scientists realize quickly that with all his skin burned off, the Gill Man starts to look a lot more human. They conclude from the depths of their Fifties scientific theoretical foundation that he was only a fish on the surface – THERE WAS A MAN WAITING INSIDE ALL ALONG. I personally find this idea just plain insulting.

>> Luckily for the idiots caring for him, the Gill Man has a set of lungs ready for emergencies -- they discover it by accident after keeping him swathed in dry gauze on a table in the ship's operating theater for several DAYS, wondering vaguely why he isn't dead yet. Once they pry off the bandages, we start to see the changes better -- he suddenly has eyelids and squinty little monkey eyes instead of the come-hither fish eyes we swooned over in the previous movies. His claws drop off, and he has fingernails underneath. The arrestingly lovely gills are scorched away, so there are only little tags left in the shape of...monkey’s ears. And there's a ridge running down the back of his noggin that, along with the permanent, miserable scowl and the steroidal build of the kidnap victim, completes the resemblance to Mr. T.

>> Talk about man’s inhumanity to fish. They not only half-kill and permanently disfigure the Gill Man, they then proceed to keep him in a bone-dry holding pen and give him no access to food, water or shade. If this really is the same Gill Man we saw in the previous movie, I have to say he’s the politest, most long-suffering operative I can imagine. A credit to our race, if you ask me.>> After the scientist coshes one of his younger, better-looking rivals in a jealous rage, he decides his best move is to put the victim in the enclosure where they are keeping the Gill Man, who is kept (terribly symbolically) with all the other experimental sheep on the premises...And can someone please explain to me why they are keeping a flock of sheep behind a 20'-high electrified fence in the Everglades?

>> Well, the Gill Man finally sees his moment, widows the discontented young wife, rips the enclosure to shreds, takes a few bullets in the chest, and staggers off towards the ocean...a piscatorial figure of selflessness and sacrifice if ever I saw one. There's a distinct possibility that he can no longer survive underwater. The look on his face suggests that this may well be a suicidal beach stroll. We never find out for sure.

>> The key roles were played perfectly by all concerned. What a couple of fantastic actors these are. As always, Ricou Browning does the underwater scenes. This time we saw Don Megown in the tragic, tragic role of the transformed Gill Man, standing helplessly on land and wishing so hard to get back home. You just want to, I dunno, DO something for poor Megown but it’s too late. This terribly sad movie was as well-acted and generally well-made as the other two Creature features. Like the other two, it is more about Science than Nature running amok. Encouragingly, Nature does not take this lying down.

BENEATH LOCH NESS

AN IMPORTANT WORD TO THE GIRLS IN THE MEMBERSHIP:

I have been getting quite a few worried-sounding cards and letters from the rank and file, asking about a repeating theme in the books and movies I’ve been reviewing. Operatives have been talking about this issue in the chapter meetings, spreading the word AS WELL YOU OUGHT, and you’re right, I’ve put off discussing this one far too long. In a world where they publish a new Twelve-Step-oriented self-help book every frocking month, I feel it is only fitting to name this issue "OPERATIVES IN DENIAL."

(This is not to be confused with Operatives In The Nile. Everything is under control in the North African Sector.)

Miriam Caskey in Michael McDowell’s Blackwater series. The ‘Gentleman Guppy’ in Waterworld. Elphaba and Nessarose in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. Murai in Attack Of The Mushroom People. Max and Peaches in Lefcourt’s Ghost Crab. What do all these characters have in common? That’s right, they are all FIGHTING DESTINY and trying to keep their heads above water. They want to get up on dry land where they think they belong. Now, what are these blame-fool operatives up to, anyway? It’s a completely fair question, and here’s your answer at last: THEY ARE WORKING FOR US, THE SAME AS YOU ARE.

>> Miriam Caskey is a glaring example of a landfish who hasn’t found herself. She is raised entirely by the Monkey People side of the family. She certainly seems to think she is 100% human, but look at what she does with her waterless life. SHE MAKES MONEY FOR HER FAMILY. TONS OF MONEY. This of course is what makes it safe for her sister to reproduce and return her children to the river, where they belong. Remember when the sisters go on their first day trip to the Gulf coast? While her sister explores the ocean bottom for hours, Miriam stays on the beach and tans, totally unconcerned that the sister may have drowned. SHE KNOWS EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT. On some unconscious level, she is protecting the interests of the mother she claims to hate. And Elinor, her mother, knew it would work out this way. IT WAS ALL ARRANGED IN ADVANCE.

>> The Gentleman Guppy, a.k.a. Ichthyo-sapiens, to be discussed at length in another column. But let me put yet another spin on his puzzling behavior. Anyone paying attention can see that the humans in this movie, barely surviving on the surface of the ocean, are better off on Dry Land, and The Guppy takes them there himself. He then turns right around and heads for the open ocean again. COULD IT BE THAT HE IS PLANNING TO TAKE THEM ALL ASHORE, ONE BOATLOAD AT A TIME? Clearing the ocean’s surface of monkeys would be a helluva break for ALL the Gill Folk, don’t you think? It’s a big job to tackle, and this stoic feller is just the kind of finboy we’d need to head up the operation if an appreciable number of Naked Apes tried to colonize the ocean’s surface. It’s a real possibility that we WILL have to deal with this problem, once we succeed in completely melting the polar icecaps. Let me add that this is the only idea I can come up with that explains why the Gill Man in this picture ever warmed up to the horrid little Tattooed Girl. SHE DOES HAVE HER USES.

>> Elphaba. Let’s talk Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. This is a green-skinned woman of unknown provenance, deathly afraid of water, who was nevertheless raised in a vast swampland after her parents were lured there by a native of that region. Both her mother and her putative father were madly in love with this man. I’ve never heard of an operative who deals this way with married couples, but hey, this story takes place in Oz, where the rules are all different. Notice that the worse her dread of water grows, the more Elphaba wants her life to be over. When she finally faces her worst fear in that encounter with Dorothy and the mop bucket, she finds the release she has been seeking for years. Her whole life was sink or swim, anyway. She finally swam. Is it just me, or does the significance of her sewing wings onto monkeys become terribly sad in this context?

>> And Nessarose! The Witch of the East! Well, YOU AND I know the significance of a lovely girl born without arms who has trouble walking on land. Her father is almost certainly the Quadling glassblower from the Great Southern Swamps of Oz, meaning Nessarose is a Swamp Thing herself. She even has magical powers, learned from the landfish who recruited her. FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, HER NICKNAME IS NESSIE! DO THE MATH!

>> Murai, the Matango Man. He finally got it right after trying to postpone the inevitable. As usual, love found a way. If you look at it from a recruiting perspective, Murai’s decision to eat the mushrooms on the trip home and address a panel of doctors in a half-transformed condition makes sense. From this point it’s a certainty that SOMEONE will send a boat full of intrepid researchers to Matango Island to raise the census there. And they will probably bring Murai with them to show them around. Or he may just be introducing the fungus to a whole new Pacific island chain, the clever dog. Either way, we win!

>> Max and Peaches. Peaches and Max. I can only agree that their behavior is disgusting and reprehensible. I cannot argue with the reality that their desire to become human again, as quickly as possible, is revolting. LET THEM GO BACK! All they do is kill each other off when they ARE in human form. HAVE AT IT; YOU’RE DOING US A FAVOR.

See, no matter what they THINK they’re accomplishing, the Operative In Denial is doing nothing but helping us out. Don’t lose any scales over these sorry specimens. They cannot hurt us. WE CANNOT FAIL.

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS? Call me 24 hours a day on the waterproof line.

Today’s topic: Nessie A-Go-Go
BENEATH LOCH NESS

2001
Directed by the redoubtable Chuck Comisky
Starring Patrick Bergin, Brian Wimmer, and Lysette Anthony

Where to begin?I rented this tape with low expectations and, well, I was not disappointed. Here's how it goes: A team of divers exploring the floor of Loch Ness for the "Expedition Channel" experience a low-level seismic disturbance, which apparently rips a hole in the Earth's crust. The head investigator is flung to his death into the new rift in the lake bottom and crushed under a terrifyingly huge, transparent computer-generated rock; his body is not found. Another "Expedition" employee flies in to investigate: Brian Wimmer, an actor I will always remember fondly as "that guy who tried to use psychology on Freddy Kreuger at the pool party that time," dressed up to look like a low-rent Indiana Jones. He and the surviving Loch Ness investigative team, who all have the high cheekbones and deep tans necessary for movie-industry scuba divers, set out to recover the body, save the TV series and Get To The Bottom Of This.

Well, the usual stuff happens. People start disappearing, and there are odd readings on the diving team's underwater gear suggesting that Something Big Is Moving Around Down There. A few drunks dynamiting for fish disappear, and the local crazyman (Patrick Bergin) tells us how his boat was capsized and his son eaten years ago by 'Nessie.' A guy on a glass-bottomed-boat tour of the Loch gets a blurry videotape of something long and reptilian slithering past the tourists' feet. Meanwhile, some pranksters hoping to freak out the tourists with a fake Nessie lose a compatriot to something that chews him up and spits him out. Some Neo-Druids having a ceremonial paddle in the Loch encounter...technical difficulties. The movie includes quite a few lines and sound FX intended to remind us of Jaws. They even have a scene with a couple of teenaged pranksters trying to freak out the tourists with a model Nessie. They don't neglect to show Wimmer's character with his girlfriend, Lizzie Borden (yes, Lizzie Borden) (played by Lysette Anthony), trying to convince the Coast Guard Constable to close the beaches, because "this was no boating accident." The Constable scoffs at the very idea, but soon enough holds a press conference announcing that they've found Nessie dead on the shore of the Loch, so everyone can calm down now, it's all over, nothing to see, folks. They open a morgue freezer to the press to show what looks like a baby Elasmosaurus and prove that the threat is gone. The local crazyman is there and gets quite angry because the creature that ate his son was much, much bigger. CAN’T YOU SEE WE’RE STILL IN DANGER, YOU FOOLS?

The diving team, as usual in this sort of film, breaks into the morgue at night for some kind of half-a$$ed autopsy on an Elasmosaurus. Instead of a Louisiana license plate they find an enormous bite mark on the dinosaur's hindquarters, making clear that their quarry is STILL OUT THERE -- apparently something large and toothy enough to eat Elasmosaurs.Well, we get to see it for ourselves -- a computer-generated Kronosaurus with a serious diastema, managing to look even phonier than the 60-foot Megalodon in Shark Hunter. It does harmonize aesthetically with the phony CG rocks and water we see throughout the film.

Well, ma’am, the crazyman shows up in a kilt and blue facepaint, carrying a spear and some explosive ordnance, just in case you weren't clear yet on the fact that he's a Scotsman bent on bloody revenge. He finagles his way into one of the team's diving suits and sets out to blow the Kronosaur to Kingdom Come. There's a showdown in which the taunts the Kronosaur into swallowing him, whereupon, a la Kevin Costner in Waterworld, he blows her up from the inside and collapses the breeding cave, ending the menace forever.Except we never find out what became of the Kronosaur's mate. Or pod. And we never find out what became of the baby Nessie's parents. And...

This film gets 'one fin up' for the sheer nerve of attempting to combine Shark Hunter, The Trench and Braveheart with Indiana Jones And The Fishtank Of Doom. It also gets 'one fin down' for lousy special effects, bad script, uneven acting and logical gaps big enough to pass thru an aircraft carrier.But it has a clean, innocent, naive B-movie feel that makes it well worth renting if your mind works in that particular way.

SOLARIS

BREAKING CONSPIRACY NEWS: OPERATIVE KILLED IN LOBSTER-POT FISHING DISASTER

Operative Estella Marinakova Chechnikov, originally from the Ukraine but recruited for our cause on the North American Continent, was killed in another typical episode of manhandling by landscum. An accident during training maneuvers delivered her into the hands of Nantucket fishermen. She had been training crustacean operatives in the area for about 75 years, after living to the ripe old age of 92 on land. As one of our most distinguished training operatives, encompassing the minds of uncounted thousands of Lobster operatives along the Eastern Seaboard, she is considered impossible to replace.

A FEW COMMENTS:

>> I am disgusted beyond words that Estella’s captors, supposedly knowing everything about Lobsters, could not even determine that she was a female.

>> I cannot wipe the sneer off my face when I think how easily they could have kept her alive. Too many careless changes of water and habitat and she died, in who knows what kind of agony. This could have been an opportunity, too rare among fully-aquatic operatives these days, to do some serious recruiting of rubberneckers once she was safely on display somewhere. The idea was to put her in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum, because when a Lobster lives that long, she develops some serious girth. I can easily picture how intimidated the new, young operatives must have been during training maneuvers when confronted with a 22-lb drill sergeant. It was part of her effectiveness in the field.

>> I am REALLY steamed – pun intended – that her killers humiliated her further by naming her "Bubba" before sending her to her death. "Bubba" is a name you’d give a guy in a flannel shirt who drives a gravel truck for a living and who never really learned how to read fluently. Estella, Cod rest her soul, was fluent and literate in three languages (Ukrainian, Russian and English); taught cello at a ladies’ finishing school all her adult life while raising an astounding 17 daughters, several of whom proved to be excellent operatives in their own right;

CLIFFIE’S NOTES ON Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, Harcourt Brace & Co., San Diego, New York and London, 1961.

Well, many of you know this story. The book has been in and out of print since before the Age of the Dinosaurs, and on top of that there have been two movie versions. This review covers the book, because the movies TOTALLY MISS THE POINT.
Onwards.

PLOT SUMMARY: Psychologist and astronaut (?) Kris Kelvin flies out to the Solaris research station at the urgent request of a friend of his, who has been working at the station for some time. The friend can’t really explain what it is he wants Kelvin to see – "Just come on up here, OK? And hurry," is the gist of the message. When he gets there, the friend has already committed suicide and the remaining station staff are acting pretty weird. The situation gets really strange when Kelvin’s old girlfriend, Rheya, shows up at the station too – the problem being that she has been dead for years and years. With the rest of the staff locked in their rooms in terror, haunted by revenant figures from their own pasts, Kelvin is left pretty much on his own trying to figure out what is going on.

>> The copy I’m reading has a groovy illustration on the front of a tremendous brain floating in space. The artist provides perspective by adding other, smaller satellites. Now, it seems to me that for all the waffling and theorizing in the text about what Solaris might be and what it could possibly be up to, only the jacket artist appears to have hit the nail on the head.

>> This brings us immediately to the aspect of this story most likely to interest operatives in the Global Fish Takeover Conspiracy. I refer to the fact that the earth is dominated by its water, and the waterways of the world are, like Solaris, essentially ONE BIG MIND.

>> YOU AND I ARE THE THOUGHTS IN THAT MIND.

>> NAKED APES DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS. THEY NEVER WILL.

>> Notice that no matter how weird Solaris’s manifestations get, the humans see the situation only in terms of their own blinkered, shaved-monkey point of view. You know that the scientist type guys on the Solaris research station truly are the best of the best, because they are at least capable of questioning this. We also see that they are unable to truly escape their pigeonhole. AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU’RE A FISH?

>> What’s cool about Solaris is the way the very matter of the ocean forms itself up into the shapes of buildings, trees, airplanes, mountains, geometric shapes and so on. After a while they lose their integrity and are reabsorbed into the ocean for recycling. In our own system, of course, the thought takes concrete forms that multiply on their own and inhabit the oceans, streams, lakes, atmosphere and dry land of the planet.

>> the other cool thing is that HUMANS CAN'T STAY AWAY FROM SOLARIS. They are drawn back again and again.

>> You notice that with all the pontificating about Solaris that goes on in this book, it apparently occurs to NOBODY to see if something similar might be occurring back home. Sheesh, when you open a copy of Scientific American it’s just the opposite. Everything, every observed phenomenon in nature, is supposed to lead directly back to benefit the human condition. But there is no suggestion of that kind of thinking here. I take that to mean that Lem is rubbing humanity’s face in its own limitations. In essence, he is saying that humans don’t get it and they never will.

>> What intrigues me is that Lem managed to capture both the tragedy of the Big Brain Design Flaw in humanity, that keeps them from accessing the group mind of the water on their home planet, AND the greatness of the all-encompassing mind of the Water which Lem, as a human, can never possibly grasp – unless of course he were one of our operatives.

>> Is Stanislaw Lem an operative? If you thinking I’m posting such sensitive information on the Net, you’re crazy.

>> Because of all the theorizing and pontificating, I found this book to be quite a hard slog and frankly, I didn’t warm up much to the characters, either. While fascinating on an abstract level, the kind of book a certain type of landscum reader would simply love, I had to put it down for weeks at a time and turn to something little juicier before I could continue and finally finish. This puts it in the same category as all those dreadful, footnote-heavy textbooks to had to read in college because you needed it for the exam.