France Continues Fighting From North Africa? Pro-West Korea But PRC Taiwan?

Still checking on the public forums of the Internet's premiere alternate history site despite having been self-banned from posting for several years at this point. Here are some of the most interesting recent offerings.

Essai En Guerre: An FFO-Inspired TL-"France Fights On" is one of the more well-known scenarios in the online AH subculture, albeit more so in France than in the Anglosphere. It diverges from our history when the suspiciously pro-Axis mistress of French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud dies in a traffic accident. This tiny change leads to a Reynaud more willing to exert himself to continue fighting Germany from the colonies even if it means disengaging from the losing battle on the mainland. As a result, the French evacuating much of its military to North Africa and continuing the war from there rather than having Marshal Petain get a cease-fire and set up the puppet Vichy regime. Here's a YouTube video breaking the first part of the main timeline down and here is an in-progress English translation. This version, though it has a lot in common with the main FFO scenario, has some unique spins. It's definitely a worse world for the Axis on top of the additional losses the Germans took having to fight for the entirety of European France--the Italians get their stuffing wrecked in Africa well before they did in real life and the French, reequipped with gear they'd ordered from the US that didn't arrive in time to help them fight the Germans, contribute enough for (most of) mainland Greece to hold against the Germans and their various cronies in the Balkans.

(Not as crazy as it sounds--Hitler's strategic priority at this point was attacking the Soviet Union for "living space," so leaving the Allies with a toehold in mainland Europe that they now have to feed is plausible. He was pretty overconfident about defeating the "subhuman" Russians, so him thinking he can deal with Britain, the French die-hards, and that little bit of Greece after the Soviets are destroyed isn't that much different than his real-life view he could deal with Britain once the Soviets were destroyed.)

Pro-Western United Korea, PRC-Controlled Taiwan-This timeline has two different scenarios, not just one. In the first, the Red Chinese finish off the Nationalists in Hainan Island more quickly than in real history, allowing them to attack the Nationalist remnant in Taiwan before the U.S. can organize the Seventh Fleet to defend them. This keeps them too busy to intervene in Korea to keep North Korea from getting obliterated. In the second version, the Chinese don't intervene in the Korean War, leading the U.S. to withdraw the Seventh Fleet--and after a sufficiently-decent interval the Chinese pounce on Taiwan. Either way, this world is spared the horrors of the Kim Dynasty, but the Chinese Communists have a direct outlet on the Pacific. That in turn will have its affects on U.S. possessions and allies in the region, like Okinawa and the Philippines.

Bad Movie Review: Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991)

Once upon a time, Myopia Movies did an episode on the Christopher Lambert classic Highlander. Some years later, we decided on an episode on Highlander 2: The Quickening, the 1991 sequel. AKA "the one where they're aliens." The version I ended up watching was the "renegade cut" from 1995 that removed all the nonsense about the immortals being aliens from the planet Zeist, although it still has its problems. The episode is exclusively for our Patreon subscribers; sign up here.

And now for the review. Calling it a "Bad Movie Review" this time, since I didn't see it years before like many Myopia films and, well, it's BAD.

The Plot

After the events of the first film, the thinning of the ozone layer necessitated the creation of an artificial replacement sponsored by none other than the now-mortal Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert). This new atmosphere, though it protects mankind, denies humanity the stars, ordinary views of the sky, and seems to have a generally negative effect on the climate. Connor has grown old and is despised by many of the people he had tried to protect.

However, the villainous General Katana (Michael Ironside), ruler of a lost civilization from the distant past (in the theatrical version an alien civilization) that had exiled the immortals to (their) distant future, worries that Connor might choose to return to his own time and once more challenge him. So he sends goons to kill him, inadvertently reactivating his immortality and de-aging him 30 years. Connor joins forces with ecoterrorist Louise Marcus (Virginia Madsen) to fight against Katana's henchmen and ultimately Katana himself, who allies with the sinister megacorporation controlling the planetary shield.

And what role does Ramirez (Sean Connery), Connor's long-dead immortal mentor, play in this whole situation?

The Good

*Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, and Michael Ironside are having lots of fun playing their characters. Ironside in particular is absolutely over the top, playing the character as Jack Nicholson's Joker wearing Conan the Barbarian villain Thulsa Doom's wig and costume. Ironside is really entertaining to watch. He later said that he, Connery, and Lambert all recognized they were dealing with a crappy script and he decided he was going to have as much fun as possible. Ironside makes for a much more entertaining villain than the Kurgan--sorry Clancy Brown and your awesome medieval outfit that inspired the villain Grendel from my novel Battle for the Wastelands.

*They clearly had more money for action sequences and special effects for this one than they had for the original.

*Katana's duels with Connor are pretty impressive. It's my understanding that Lambert has really bad vision and thus couldn't fight effectively in the first movie, but in this one everything's much more fluid and they're a lot more likely to punch and kick each other. After all, this is a battle to the death, so why bother with any rules about technique and what-not?

*It's fast-moving and other than one scene, never dull.

*There are some genuinely funny bits, many of which revolve about Ramirez's difficulties with the modern world and his propensity to flirt with every woman he meets.

*I liked the callbacks to "Who Wants To Live Forever," probably one of the most legitimately poignant sequences in any movie I've seen in recent years.

The Bad

Where to start? Even with all the alien nonsense removed, there's so much in here that doesn't make any sense or is just plain ridiculous.

*The whole ozone-layer plot is ridiculous and really dated. The thinning of the ozone layer would cause increased likelihood of skin cancer and other problems, but it wouldn't cause masses of people to burn to death. And an artificial ozone layer wouldn't affect the climate like it does. And it shouldn't be that hard to determine if the ozone layer has recovered enough that the hugely expensive shield would not be required. And how was Connor in the position to sponsor a massive feat of geoengineering? He was "New York City antique dealer rich," not "Elon Musk rich." And not only did he help create this world-saving megaproject, but then he essentially abandons it and allows some generic 1980s/1990s corporate baddie to usurp it?

It would have been better to have the dying mortal Connor living in some kind of generic Bad Future where his attempts to use the psychic abilities gained from his defeat of the Kurgan and winning "The Prize" to improve the world ended up either being totally useless or backfiring and causing the whole situation. Suddenly his youth (or at least his immortality) return and he loses his psychic abilities because new immortals have been activated (i.e. they suffer their first death and resurrection). Now he essentially plays Ramirez to new heroes and fights a new villain. If his immortality is restored but he's still in his 60s or 70s he might not be a frontline fighter like he used to be, although given how bad Old Man Connor is, having him stay in his old-man persona the entire film would be really lame.

(If Connor has to be a mentor to a new generation of immortals you could have flashbacks to his mentoring by Ramirez, allowing Sean Connery to make a return appearance without the completely absurd magical explanation. According to some Highlander fans, Ramirez was training Connor for a year, so there could be plenty of interesting things not depicted in the original film.)

*Instead of being aliens, the "renegade cut" makes the immortals rebels from a long-forgotten ancient civilization who were punished for rebellion by exile into the distant future. They had to kill each other until there was only one left, and that lone survivor could choose to return. Whatever happened to Ramirez asking "why does the sun shine" when Connor asked why immortals existed? Better no explanation at all than the absurdity we got.

(Also, the flashback sequences to the distant-distant past looked like B-Roll footage from the 1980s adaptation of Dune.)

At one point Connor is explaining to Louise how the whole situation works and she seems to think it makes absolutely no sense. He decides at this point to end the conversation by saying "it's a kind of magic," a call-back to the original film where he explains his immortality to his adopted daughter Rachel. I think they were deliberately mocking their own premise at this point. 

*General Katana is such a stupid name, especially since Connor's main fighting sword is a katana. No wonder Michael Ironside thought the script had been written by a 13-year-old boy.

*Connor as an old man sounds like he's trying to continuously do "I could've been a contender" from On The Waterfront. It's ridiculous-sounding. TVTropes said he sounded like a six-year-old trying to mimic his elderly grandfather.

*Louise is much less effective a character than Brenda, Connor's love interest from the original film. Brenda managed to figure out Connor was immortal from handwriting samples and studying his confiscated sword, got taken hostage by the Kurgan to bait Connor into the final battle, and then helped Connor defeat him. Louise clues Connor into realizing something is wrong at the megacorporation running the planetary shield and later helps them infiltrate the company's HQ, but her role is much less impactful.

The Verdict

This isn't as sucky as Battlefield Earth or Spawn, but it's still not worth the bother. You want to see what happened to MacLeod after the events of the first film, go watch Highlander III, the TV show (where his character dropped in occasionally), or Highlander Endgame. I'm pretty sure this movie isn't even canon anymore. 5.5 out of 10.

(If you want to hear us absolutely wreck this film, including an amusing sequence where Daniel and I take turns impersonating Connery and Lambert while singing that song about milkshakes bringing the boys to the yard, sign up for the Patreon here.)

Blast From The Past Movie Review: THE ABYSS (1989)

Once upon a time in elementary school, I spent a weekend or two with my friend Robert at some lakeside property his family owned. And one thing we did a couple of the times we were there is watch the 1989 underwater science fiction film The Abyss. I hadn't seen the movie since then ("then" being in the 1995-1996 range), but it definitely fits the Myopia Movies timeframe--more than 10 years old and you hadn't seen it in five years, with the fact I saw it when I was 10-11 years old even more useful. So I suggested it for the podcast and we did it for this most wonderful season eight.

Here's the podcast episode. And now the review.

The Plot

It's the near-future year of 1994 and an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine the U.S.S. Montana wrecks in the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico not far from Cuba. As Soviet and Cuban naval vessels gather, the United States Navy hires a group of deep-sea oil drillers led by Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris) to use their underwater drilling platform to send in a SEAL team to rescue survivors. Coming along to make sure everything goes according to plan is Dr. Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), designer of the platform and Bud's estranged wife.

However, the mysterious forces of the deep ocean that caused the wreck of the Montana are still there and interested in these surface-world visitors...

The Good

*The acting is very good. I particularly liked Mastrantonio as Dr. Brigman. She does well as an engineer who's better with machines than people and can really sell grief and panic in a more subtle way than Ed Harris. Michael Biehn does a good job as the psychologically-deteriorating SEAL Lieutenant Hiram Coffey. I got some serious Caine Mutiny vibes off him, especially later in the film. And Todd Graff is fun as "Hippy," a conspiracy theorist who's quite attached to his pet rat.

*The script is well put together. The climactic events of the film are well-foreshadowed (I make a lot of "Chekhov's _________" comments in the Twitter-stream). Although an aggressive military man as opposed to a more peacenik kind-of scientist is the main conflict in the film, it's subverted rather than stereotypical--Coffey is suffering from a legitimate mental illness, the rest of his team seem like decent enough people even if (at first) they follow the orders of a man having a break with reality, and the anti-military clichés (soldiers are unthinking order-following robots, they can only see enemies) are criticisms coming from flawed characters rather than being treated as the actual truth by the narrative.

*For a movie made in 1989, the special effects for the most part hold up really well. The underwater aliens (at this point we all know what's really going on) are very well-done, as is the famous "water tentacle." Only at the end do they falter even a little, and even then it's not bad.

*Even though I'd seen the movie before and generally knew what would happen--and spent much of the film live-tweeting it--there are sequences of legitimate suspense. Had I never seen the movie before or been more focused, this would be even more well-done.

*With the exception of some of the nuclear stuff, the science works. Per the almighty Wikipedia, director James Cameron got the idea for the film in high school while seeing a presentation on liquid breathing and that plays a key role in the climax. Another major plot point revolves around deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, which is also a real thing.

*The entire cast had to become certified SCUBA divers for the film and lot of the underwater stuff rings true (I got my PADI open-water diving license in middle school). Overhead situations (i.e. wrecks and caves), diving so deep you need to use special mixes of oxygen and other gases rather than compressed air, panicking underwater, and the need to avoid decompression sickness are all portrayed as the tricky and dangerous situations they'd be.

*There are some fun action sequences once Coffey starts to go totally insane, including what's essentially submarine demolition derby.

The Bad

*When Ed Harris is supposed to display deep emotion--worry, grief, etc.--he overacts big time. Although given the circumstances it's pretty obvious he'd be upset, he kind of overdoes it.

*A lot of the lesser characters aren't given that much to do. Several characters die in early on when part of the underwater rig is flooded and if they'd been better-developed, their deaths would have hurt more.

*The theatrical release was rather long and the director's cut (which I didn't watch) was nearly three hours. This is definitely a time investment and although it starts out great, it does drag a bit later. The director's cut might have some improvements--I think it elaborates on why the Brigmans are heading for divorce and how the wreck of the Montana is becoming an international crisis--but the length sounds pretty intimidating.

The Verdict

9.0 out of 10. This is definitely worth seeing again. I ended up ordering the DVD off eBay, since I would have otherwise had to get a full-on Amazon Prime subscription to watch it. Thanks Videodrome, the last video rental shop in Atlanta!

Bad Movie Review: Nightbeast (1982)

Courtesy of Atlanta's Videodrome, I had the...pleasure...of watching another 1980s low-budget horror film, Nightbeast. There also used to be a lot more regional indie films shown in drive-ins and locally-distributed VHS rentals, and I thought this might be one given how the back of the box emphasized its Maryland roots. And some of the back copy hinted it might be so bad it's good, so I figured that might be worth a shot.

Probably not the best idea, although it certainly compared better to the other film I rented that afternoon, The Deadly Spawn. Here's my review...

The Plot

An alien spacecraft collides with a meteor and crash-lands in rural Maryland. Can Sheriff Jack Cinder (Tom Griffith) and his deputies, including Lisa Kent (Karin Kardian), and various armed townsfolk stop its murderous occupant before it before it kills everybody? And will the ambitious Mayor Burt Wicker (Richard Dyszel) glad-handing with the governor get in the way?

The Good

*I liked the concept. How often do aliens invade rural Maryland of all places?

*They do develop the characters a bit, although they definitely could have gone farther.

*The sheriff, his deputies, and the townsfolk they collect to help fight the titular monster do display some degree of competence like ability to maneuver under gunfire. Given the time the movie was made and the local culture, odds are good these are people who are regular users of guns (hunting, for example) and many likely served in the military, possibly in Vietnam.

*In one scene there's a creative anti-monster technique involving the use of laundry equipment that I liked.

*J.J. Abrams played a role in the film's production as a teenager. Given how something like that would have been my high-school dream, good for him. Great things often grow from humble beginnings.

The Bad

*The actors' delivery is generally abysmal. They sound very passionless and monotone, even with discussing things like an alien who is rampaging in the town or a local thug who abuses his girlfriend (more on that later). The students acting in my high school student films put more passion into their roles. Most of the time it's just plain stupid, although there're a couple parts where it's so bad I actually started laughing. 

*What exactly is the monster's goal? Was it hungry and hunting people to survive? Trying to find a way to phone home so to speak? They could have designed its attacks based on that. Instead it just mindlessly rampaged around.

*The filmmakers copy a subplot from Jaws (the sheriff who wants to protect people vs. the self-interested mayor), but they don't follow that film's principle of not showing the monster to make it scarier. The monster isn't as bad as modern hokey CGI, but it's too shiny and stiff to be really scary. The same with the dead bodies resulting in its rampage. Remember, what people imagine is often scarier or more disgusting than what they actually see.

*The cannon fodder's occasional competence makes their inability to hit the titular monster even once during multiple encounters even more blatantly. Later in the film Jack claims bullets can't hurt it, but we don't see any bullets bouncing off or anything that would show that. Heck, in a couple of scenes they have the alien on the run and don't bother pursuing. There are several instances where the cast displays very little sense of urgency, despite having a C-grade Predator rampaging around. They don't even call the state (let alone the feds) until relatively late in the film even though they're dealing with an alien invasion. If this is a creature the department's small arms can't handle, how about bringing in the National Guard? After all, the state governor was in the area during the creature's rampage. Maybe the state people will just laugh them off, but at least it'd show they tried.

*Per my comment about lacking a sense of urgency, the film contains an absolutely pointless sex scene, a scene even the back of the movie box describes as "awkward."

*Also, there are some extraordinarily poorly-done brawls, either human vs. human or man vs. monster. If this is the late 1970s or early 1980s in a small Southern-ish town, I imagine people would have more experience with fighting.

*The soundtrack is absolutely terrible. It doesn't serve to build suspense or atmosphere and doesn't make the mood of the scene at all.

*The alien's gun turning its victims into body-shaped burn marks on the ground is unintentionally hilarious.

*There's this whole subplot involving local bully Drago (Don Leifert) who's abusing his girlfriend that comes out of nowhere. If they even bothered to include it, it should have been before the alien's arrival as part of the problems within the town. The conflict between Jack and Burt was handled much better in Jaws.

*The movie starts to drag toward the end as the confrontation builds between the sheriff's department and the alien.

The Verdict

This movie comes off like a mediocre mix of Predator, Laserblast, and Boggy Creek II: And The Legend Continues and you're better off watching those. This isn't even so bad it's good, despite a couple moments. Maybe one can get some amusement value watching with friends to make fun of it. 4.5 out of 10.

Bad Movie Review: THE DEADLY SPAWN (1983)

I was returning Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets to Videodrome the other day and there were a couple films I saw in horror section that caught my attention. One was The Deadly Spawn, which I remembered coming across uploaded to YouTube earlier. As an ethical matter I want to pay creators for their work and I was already there, so I rented it.

Now to review it...

The Plot

A meteor crashes to Earth, bringing with it a predatory alien (according to a prequel comic in the DVD extras it's a bioweapon) that chows down on some campers and then hides away in a basement. It proceeds to snack on anybody who comes down while spawning (hence the title) lots and lots of little monsters. The family living in the house above goes about their day, but it becomes increasingly obvious there's a problem.

The Good

*The concept of a family going about their day (a visiting uncle is preparing for a psychology conference; the older brother is having friends over to study) while being completely unaware there's an alien monster lurking in their basement is clever. I also liked the atypical protagonists--a bunch of college science students and retirees rather than typical dumb teens just waiting for Jason to kill them.

*The filmmakers, especially early in the film, are pretty clearly following the Jaws principle of never showing their monster. There are shadows, silhouettes, and partial glimpses, as well as blood spattering from kills, but it's not until around a third in that we see the big kahuna. Given how cheap the creature ends up looking, that's wise.

*Although they didn't have the resources to make a decent-looking monster, the creature design and concept is pretty cool.

*There are some interesting character dynamics, like two characters who are conspiracy theorists and another who's a skeptic--and did I mention there's an incipient love triangle? They play well off each other.

*Not going to go into more detail for reasons of spoilers, but it does have an epilogue showing just what happens after the events of the film that's slightly amusing.

The Bad

*The acting simply isn't very good. In the opening sequence where a couple campers get mauled, they don't seem to be putting much effort into emoting or delivery. The main cast is better, but not by much, and lesser characters who appear later in the film (an old ladies' luncheon from hell) are about as bad as the campers from the beginning. It's not impressive at all. Taking a look at IMDB, most of the people didn't seem to have been in anything else, or only in a small number of films. It would have been a lot better if they'd just consolidated the cast.

*The main characters aren't really built up well, so I didn't really care much about whether or not they ended up monster chow or not. Note that I don't use any of their names in the review--there's a reason for that. :(

*The movie takes too long to get anywhere, despite its relatively short runtime of 78 minutes. There are many overlong shots that are increasingly-obvious padding, especially toward the end.

*The monster-puppet is cheap-looking and not very good.

*The lighting isn't very good. Half the time one can't see anything at all, especially at night or in a darkened basement. Done well, shadows can be spooky, but this just looks cheap and poorly made. There are several occasions where the film is straight-up blurry, which doesn't help.

*There's a major moment relatively early in the film where a character would be literally dead meat if the monster acted like it did earlier, but it was uncharacteristically unaggressive. This is intended to reveal the creature is blind and hunts by sound, but I didn't get that at the time. And what seems like a prolonged standoff lasts so long that one wonders why nobody noticed the character is missing.

*There's some really weird camerawork and editing.

*The monster is pretty big, but not only can it move very quickly, but also very quietly as the plot demands.

The Verdict

Some good ideas, but very poorly executed. Don't bother unless you really like cheap 1980s horror films. If you really want a good creature feature from that era, watch the original Gremlins or Slugs instead. 3.5 out of 10.

Movie Review: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017)

While I was at Videodrome renting a copy of The Abyss for a future Myopia Movies podcast episode, I saw a copy of the film Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets, which I thought about seeing in theaters back in 2017, dawdled, and ended up missing. Like my father says, if you wait long enough, "I don't know," becomes "no." I eventually got around to renting the film, and now it's time to review it.

The Plot

In the distant future, humanity is one of a vast number alien species coexisting throughout the galaxy and what was once the International Space Station has grown into a galaxy-traveling city of millions. It's also the base of operations for an interstellar police force, two agents of which are Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne). Although they both clearly have romantic feelings for each other, she isn't content to be one of his many sexual conquests and he's commitment-phobic.

Into this drops a mission to retrieve a rare "Mul Converter" from a gang of black marketeers. The two officers stumble into a conspiracy involving a planet officially erased from the records and a high-level military cover-up.

The Good

*The acting and characterization are very good. I really liked DeHaan and Delevingne playing their characters as essentially Harry Potter's Ron and Hermione, if Ron were James Bond in terms of martial capability and libido and Hermione were much more sarcastic and rebellious and had a shorter temper and more explicitly traditional views about sex and family. The two have really good chemistry and are fun to watch.

*Writer and director Luc Besson, the mastermind behind The Fifth Element, is clearly having a blast adapting one of his favorite comics to the screen. It's clearly a labor of love and very well-done. This shows in the casting--Besson put in the effort to cast well-known performers like Clive Owen and Rihanna and the costuming, art, etc. are all awesome. Owing to the obscurity of its source material, it's a hell of a lot more interesting than the endless remakes and sequels of more well-known films that dominate today's market.

*The overall plot is a lot more thoughtful than a lot of sci-fi films.

*There are some good uses of "show, don't tell," like a scene early on when Laureline uses the ship's computers to make a point about Valerian's love life.

*There are a lot of fun action sequences.

*The opening montage in which the International Space Station grows to include more and more Earth nations as well as increasing numbers of alien species to the point it becomes a city in space is very well-done, and even includes some cool science bits like how artificial gravity is introduced.

*Although this is hundreds of years in the future, religion--touched on however briefly when Valerian and Laureline are about to go on a mission and during a conspiracy flashback--is something that still exists and is respected, even by a lothario like Valerian. Valerian's offer to find a priest specifically is also a nice tie-in with Laureline from the comics--she was a medieval French peasant who was brought into the future and thus likely to be an actual Catholic.

The Bad

*The movie is about thirty minutes too long. This wouldn't be a problem if an entire subplot involving Laureline getting kidnapped--something that shouldn't be possible if her armor and martial skill are half that of Valerian's--got cut down or excised completely. Seriously, it basically came off as an excuse to have a Rihanna dance number, plus it also relies on a section of the titular space station essentially being off-limits to federal law enforcement agents. That makes no sense.

*There's a sequence at the end where a character introduces some elements that would make the overall situation much more morally gray, but it isn't handled well. And Valerian and Laureline make some ludicrous deductive leaps to figure out parts of it. More details about the war we see before we meet Valerian and Laureline would have been nice, as it would explain a villain's actions.

*There are some Chekov's guns that are put on the mantle but not fired. Valerian's promiscuity could have caused problems during the main plot--perhaps he's betrayed by a bitter ex-lover--but it doesn't really come up.

*There's also a major suspension-of-disbelief problem with a group of aliens who play a key role in the climax of the film.

*Early on some people our heroes are supposed to be close to get killed, but they don't seem to care.

The Verdict

It's definitely good and I hope that Besson eventually gets his way and produces a sequel, but it's got some flaws. Worth a rental, or buying cheap. 7.5 out of 10.

Productivity Update 7/13/21

It's been awhile since I've posted an update on my current projects. However, I saw that Chris Nuttall had done that and that reminded me. So let's start with my current primary focus...

Serpent Sword: Battle for the Wastelands #2-There are ten completed chapters, and between those and the partial chapters later on, I have a total word count of 53,694. I think the finish product will be somewhat longer than the original Battle for the Wastelands' 89,000 words, so I'm about halfway through perhaps? I already have the cover art (see below) and have written the book copy, but even if I complete the manuscript in, say, October or November, tasks like hiring a professional editor, revising, formatting, finding another author to blurb it, etc. will take time and then releasing it in December might not be a wise idea. It might be better to hold off until early 2022.

I've noticed that at conventions and on Amazon (especially after the BookBub featured deal), the "Long War" novels The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion sell significantly better than Battle and its prequel novella "Son of Grendel." Consequently, once I have Serpent Sword out the door, it is my plan to swing back to that series and put out the third novel The Walking Worm (book copy here) and then the fourth novel, Shadowmen before returning to the Wastelands world with the third book, tentatively titled Escape.

(Once Serpent Sword is published, I'm going to try for a BookBub featured deal for Battle on the grounds that an available sequel would make it more likely to get approval and ultimately more profitable--people might get Battle for $0.99 and then pay full price for Serpent Sword and "SOG." If BookBub does for the Wastelands series what it did for Thing and TAI, I might do Escape before Shadowmen, but the Wastelands world is weird--it's secondary-world fantasy without magic, it's steampunk and post-apocalyptic but it's not in our world, etc. And generally horror sells better than steampunk.)

I have already started writing TWW and Shadowmen, although I don't think I have any completed chapters. TWW's current word count is 16,504 and Shadowmen's word count is 11,236. I can definitely complete TWW in 2022 and I could potentially complete Shadowmen in 2022 as well, given how the "Long War" series is less research-heavy than Wastelands and in particular Shadowmen takes place in the same town as Thing.

Like Serpent Sword, I already have the cover for The Walking Worm made. Here you go. That's MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton (who first appears briefly in Thing but is in TAI a lot more) on the left and our hero James Daly on the right.

Finally, in April I completed the short story "Run, Hide, Feed" and submitted it to a modern-monster collection. They chose not to include it and it was rejected by an online horror magazine soon after. There are still some pro-rate horror publications I haven't submitted to, although the subject matter (it was written to comment on U.S. mass shootings, in particular the amount of media attention paid to the shooters) makes it a bit of a hot potato. We shall see.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)

The Myopia Movies pain train rolls on with this Scientological "classic" Battlefield Earth, in which longtime Scientology devotee John Travolta finally gets to adapt Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction novel (well, the first half of of it), to rather lackluster results. Per Box Office Mojo, it grossed $39M against a $73M budget and is considered one of the worst movies ever made.

(A pity, since the book was all right, or at least had some interesting concepts. Then again, if the movie did well, that's more money for Scientology. As you can no doubt tell, I have an extraordinarily low opinion of the organization.)

I don't remember seeing it in theaters, but I did read the book around the time the film came out and I'm pretty sure I saw at least a large chunk of it on television somewhat later. Here's the Myopia episode, which is probably one of the most hilarious and over the top episodes we've ever done. And now for the review...

The Plot

It's the year 3000 AD and Earth is under alien occupation. The greedy Psychlos are strip-mining the planet for minerals and the dwindling human populations are reduced to essentially cavemen. In this bleak environment, Psychlo Terl (John Travolta) enslaves Johnny Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) as part of an off-the-books scheme to make himself rich mining gold in areas too dangerous for the aliens to visit. Trained by Terl to operate Psychlo technology, Tyler ends up leading the remnants of the dying human race in one last battle for freedom...

The Good

*It's not boring, most of the time. A lot of the unintentional hilarity means it'd work as a comedy. Maybe Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rifftrax, or Cineprov can get their hands on this.

*Travolta's campy performance as Terl is pretty funny. Listen to the podcast episode, especially the parts where Daniel is talking, to get a hint of just how horridly glorious (gloriously horrid?) it is. Imagine John Travolta with dreadlocks and costumed to make himself look nine feet tall angrily lisping about "man-animals" and calling people "rat-brain."

*They wisely kept out the whole "psychiatrists made the Psychlos evil" plot from the book, although given how that doesn't show up until the second half (which was supposed to be a sequel film) maybe it wasn't wisdom on the producers' part.

The Bad

*Pretty much everybody in the movie is an idiot. And that's to put it mildly. Terl knows that Johnny is rebellious and has attacked him and other Psychlos several times, but still chooses to entrust him with his off-the-books gold-mining scheme. There are many situations where he should at least be suspicious about what Johnny and/or other humans are up to, but he just goes along with it. His greed and arrogance blind him to an absolutely ridiculous degree. Terl and the various Psychlos keep screwing with each other in order to always have "leverage," to the point TVTropes called it the film's "arc word." One wonders how their society can even function when pretty much everybody has Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. Meanwhile, Johnny is openly discussing his plans in front of Terl, betting on Terl being so arrogant that he never learned to speak English.

*There is some really bad acting on the parts of people who've performed better in other films. That's one cause for the unintentional hilarity.

*The humans, at least in Colorado, have totally forgotten their history and anything above essentially a Neolithic level. When Rome fell, even though most people couldn't read and write, there was still enough of a literate class to preserve quite a bit of knowledge about what came before. If the modern US were destroyed by aliens, the survivors would be almost entirely literate and I imagine they'd at least make some effort to teach their children, and their children's children, etc. Instead all Johnny's tribe seems to know is that in the distant past "demons" came from the sky and punished mankind and they currently live in fear of a dragon outside their village that it turns out is a mini-golf statue. In the book the descendants of Scottish survivors, though they've regressed to a largely medieval state, still know the true story of the alien invasion and how their ancestors managed to protect their homeland. More on that later...

*There's only one major Psychlo base? In the book there were 15, scattered all over the world. That makes a lot more sense. Given the crap that's just lying around (more on that next), this could've been handwaved if Johnny and friends have reactivated some long-dormant intercontinental ballistic missiles and blew them all to hell offscreen. We could have had a nice orbital shot of alien bases getting nuked like the end of Terminator 3 as Johnny and his allies descend on the panicking Psychlo main base in Denver.

*The back-story for the Psychlo conquest of Earth makes little sense. Terl claims the aliens had wiped out all of humanity's military forces in nine minutes, but even 1,000 years later there is an absolute crap-ton of hardware lying around that is still usable, including nuclear weapons. The book's depiction of the conquest of Earth--the Psychlos used a nuke-proof gas drone to wipe out human population centers, then sent in ordinary military forces to mop up any survivors--makes more sense. And given Psychlo vulnerability to uranium--it ignites the gas they breathe--there were surviving human populations in areas where nuclear weapons were used against the aliens or where there were natural concentrations of it.

(In Scotland, for example, a British military force lured Psychlo tanks into a nuclear minefield and the whole region became contaminated with uranium dust, allowing for a medieval-ish Scottish civilization to survive in the Highlands. Our hero's hometown is in a valley where there were either natural uranium deposits or a nuclear cache that's been leaking, which explains the population decline due to sterility and cancer as well as why the Psychlos never bothered them.) 

Given how the final confrontation with the Psychlos goes down, it should have been at least implied Terl was lying about how easily they'd conquered Earth. I hesitate to do a "how I would have done it" for Battlefield Earth lest I give Scientology more time and attention than it deserves, but I would have had a prologue depicting the original Psychlo attack. We'd see the book's last stand of the U.S. Air Force Academy cadets in chemical-weapons gear against massive high-tech Psychlo tanks, since geographically that's nearest to where our hero and friends live. Maybe they're buying time for some civilian refugees (implied to be Johnny's tribe's ancestors) to escape into the mountains. During the last battle, there could be conversations among the soldiers and/or communications from outside, revealing what's happening--some kind of Independence Day-sized craft that can shrug off nuclear hits appeared over Britain and traveled around the world gassing population centers, followed by mysterious detachments of tanks and super-advanced planes teleporting in and hitting surviving cities and military bases. Rumors about nuclear counterattacks in Britain (our friend the Scots) and that the invaders aren't even human. The cadets eventually go down (perhaps killing Psychlo infantrymen or destroying a tank, revealing that the invaders are in fact nine-foot aliens), but they're able to blow up vital bridges or something so the civilians can escape. Then jump to the "present" day of 3000 AD.

The Verdict

If you want alien-invasion movies with varying degrees of cheese, check out Skyline and its two sequels, Battle Los Angeles, Battleship, or Signs instead. If you want alien-invasion books, check out Footfall, which is the most realistic alien-invasion scenario where humans actually win, or my own The Thing in the Woods and its sequel The Atlanta Incursion.

4.0 out of 10. Better  than Spawn, but that's not saying much.