Front page

Are you afraid of the dark?

(Click to invert colors, weenie.) (Requires JavaScript.)




All email will be assumed to be for publication unless otherwise requested.


What's in the banner?


Monday, April 26, 2004



Obscure Adventures in Pop Culture



Today, Lileks is beating himself up over having done insufficient research on...well, something or other. I can't figure it out. Something about a guy named Babbit and "The Three Little Fishies" and seafood, MAMA:

The other day I was listening to the big band channel on the DirecTV, and there it was:

Hold tight, hold tight, hold tight, hold tight
Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki
Want some sea food mama
Shrimpers and rice they're very nice

It's "Hold Tight," made famous by the Andrews Sisters.

You might ask: who gives a flyin' farg? Eh?

Um, yeah. Turns out that someone sent him email identifying the phrase "seafood, mama" in "The Three Little Fishies" as being from "Hold Tight", and he never read the email, and now he's so ashamed.

So I'm not even going to try to send him email to ask whether he thinks Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki has any relevance to the Jetsons' Foodarakacycle. (Googling turned up no links between them.) He can think of it himself one day, and here I'll be ahead of him. Nyeah.

Really cool matchbook today, too.

(What does Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki mean, anyway? How about "seafood, mama"? Why would Kyser's band single out that particular phrase for inclusion in their version of "The Three Little Fishies"? Is it a drug reference? A sexual practice? Do I really want to know?)

Saturday, April 17, 2004



WOULD. YOU. LIKE. TO. PLAY. A. GAME?



Emily has a game for us:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 23.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Okeydoke.
The entropy behind the shock is constant along a streamline, and |grad(S)| is used to designate the magnitude of the entropy gradient aligned as indicated in Fig. 1-6.
--- Hypersonic Flow Theory, Hayes and Probstein

Too geeky? Well, I have about three books which could be said to be the "nearest" book. Let's try another.

Hmmm. It's hard to know what's a sentence in this one.
-a --reset-access-time

Set access times of input files to now.
--- Linux in a Nutshell
, Jessica Perry Hekman

OK, last try. It's even harder to figure out what's a sentence here.
Pro. Upon some book I love I'll pray for thee.
--- Two Gentlemen of Verona
, William Shakespeare

Fun, eh?

HOW. ABOUT. A. NICE. GAME. OF. CHESS?

No?

LET'S. PLAY. GLOBAL. THERMONUCLEAR. WAR.

Thursday, April 15, 2004



Rank Acting Identified



And now, a movie update.

An old friend of JKRank's, Jeff Crawley, has come forth to identify JKRank's role in Dragon Storm, which I was unable to do. He was the captain of King Wednesday's guard. He (and some other guards) go out hunting with Princess Medina and come across our pretty-eyed hero, Silas, in the woods. Seeing that he has King Fastrad's ring, they suspect him of being a thief. The princess orders him arrested, and the guard captain takes him by the scruff of the neck. In short order, however, the guards get their butts kicked and it remains for the princess to get the drop on Silas with a cross-bow. I believe the guard captain was also freed with Wednesday when the dragon-slaying team retook the castle from Fastrad's army, but I can't be sure.

When JKRank was the driver of the submarine Jimmy Carter in Deep Shock, his hair looked very dark (and he looked very young), so in Dragon Storm I looked for a tall, young, dark-haired guy. I didn't see one that matched JKRank's description of his role. When he put his picture on his "About Me" page, I thought, "Huh, he looks kinda like that one guard. But much geekier." And now Jeff Crawley has confirmed it. Thanks, Jeff!

By the way, this sort of thing wouldn't be a problem if TV movies didn't have their credits shrunken to sub-atomic size to make way for more commercials. Movies used to have just a few titles at the end. Now they make extra-sure they acknowledge everyone down to the pizza deliverers, but shrink it so that you can't read their names without an electron microscope.

I guess there are no small roles, only small print.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004



The Crucial Terrorist Vote



Charles Johnson lets us know that the John Kerry has picked up the all-important mujahideen endorsement:

"If John Kerry wins the election and withdraws the Americans troops from Iraq, and maybe just leaves a few in bases, then we will not fight. But Bush we will always fight."

So says a young member of the "Army of Mohammed".

After the first Gulf War, I read a quote from a random Iraqi woman. The US elections were nigh, and she was quoted as saying, "I would cut off my baby's head and eat it, if it would make Bush lose the election."

(I tried to google up this quote, but no luck. Can you believe "cut off my baby's head" turned up not a single hit?)

Now, I voted for Clinton in that election, but strangely enough I did not do so because this woman's declaration made me realize how mean Big George had been to the Iraqis.

So, I guess my point is that we've seen this before, and it has nothing to do with Kerry.

Bush, of course, lost the '92 election. Wonder if that woman ever made good on her threat.

Sunday, April 11, 2004



Less Morford


Behold, for Tim Blair brings us tidings of great joy: Mark Morford has been suspended from SFGate.

SFGate.com, the Web site of The San Francisco Chronicle, suspended three staffers for a column that the site's boss said was "grotesquely outside the standards that we have."

Robert Cauthorn, vice president of digital media for The Chronicle, suspended writer Mark Morford, news editor Vlae Kershner and features editor Amy Moon for a week for their role in the incident.

Grotesque? Morford? Say it ain't so! Morford's been grotesque for as long as I've been aware of his pathetic existence. What could he have done to actually step over the line?:

Morford writes an edgy column called Morning Fix that appears daily on the Web site and goes out to about 13,000 people via e-mail.

The column typically offers humorous and controversial takes on offbeat news stories culled from The Chronicle and wire services. On Friday, Morford wrote what struck Cauthorn as a particularly outlandish take on an Associated Press story from Philadelphia: "Female teacher accused of sex with 13-year-old boy while friend watched."

"I riffed off of that (story)," said Morford, whose offending column is no longer online. "I wrote that from my own experience as a teenage boy, we shouldn't jump on this as a bad thing in every case. . . . I would bet that most teenage boys in this country would say that given the choice, this would be a positive adventure for many of them. . . . For teenage boys, there are things far worse than having older females perform a sex act in a parking lot."

Here's where I'm suppose to feign shock and indignation, and accuse Morford of approving of child molestation. Er, actually, he sort of is. But he's also right: many thirteen-year-old boys would consider this "a positive adventure". That's why we don't let thirteen-year-olds loose on the landscape. And, needless to say, we don't look the other way when adult women---teachers, for pity's sake---fulfill their desires.

But, really, for Morford this is pretty tame, and I'm surprised they dinged him for it. Maybe the above quote is considerably sanitized.

Here's something I wouldn't have guessed in a million years:

Morford started at SF Gate building the home page. When Kershner, a former regional editor at The Chronicle, moved to SF Gate two years ago, he said he reassigned Morford to writing columns.

I wonder what "building the home page" means. I wouldn't have pegged Morford as a web geek. Learning to program a computer requires a certain amount of discipline. (I'm sure Morford's into discipline, just not that kind.)

Oh, but there were other people suspended with him. I wonder why?

Kershner said Morford filed the offending column Thursday and Moon edited it. Moon declined to comment. Kershner said Morford also forwarded him a copy.

"I looked at it, rolled my eyes and passed it on," Kershner said.

Hot damn! That's some editing! Of course, if there were any editing at SFGate, Morford's crap would never have seen the light of day.

Hold onto your stomach contents for this next bit:

"Mark has been described a few ways -- as a Lenny Bruce character, or as a Generation X Hunter S. Thompson, or as a liberal redneck," Kershner said. "He has a following, but he's always close to the edge."

Would that his following follow him off the edge.

A liberal redneck? No. I'm a liberal redneck. Morford's more like a red-assed yellowbelly, or a superannuated two year old who's just discovered his own tackle and can't stop playing with it, or a hippy preserved forever in some sticky substance on the floor of the bummer tent, or a serial killer of the English language, or...well, you make up one. It's fun!

Morford concedes that "maybe it was flawed."

"It's an edgy column," he said. "It's going to go over the line. I expect to miss. I expect it to be yanked every now and then if it crosses the line."

Speaking of language crimes, does anyone else remember when the word "edgy" described a person who trembled and chain-smoked and sweat a lot? (Hmmm, come to think of it, that probably describes Morford too.)

Tim's commenters are beating Morford black and blue. Some choice quotes:

I have to say, I love it when corporate America thinks they have to do something edgy and is then shocked to discover what edgy actually means these days. -- Mike G.

and, summing it up pithily:

The SF Chron has standards? Who knew? -- Andrea Harris

Knew? I never even dreamed.

Friday, April 09, 2004



Between Love and Hate Lies...L'Obsession



James Taranto (and several others) links to this book review in the Asia Times. In it, John Parker (an American living in Vietnam) unleashes his atomic-powered thesaurus on the forces of anti-Americanism while reviewing Anti-Americanism (L'obsessian anti-Americaine) by Jean-Francois Revel (now available in English).

Parker compares anti-Americanism to a religious cult:

Still, the anti-American cult provides its legions of drooling adherents with the crucial element of any faith: the illusion of meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. That priceless psychological salve, in this case, is the comforting delusion that, no matter how hypocritical, backward, bigoted, ignorant, corrupt or cowardly the cult's followers might otherwise be, at least they are better than those awful Americans.

Parker is dead-on about that. I've often thought that many Leftist beliefs serve as a kind of religion. Their basic dogma---capitalism bad, Kyoto good, etc---is accepted without question, even in the face of refuting evidence. But the religion's primary purpose, as far as I can tell, is to make the believer feel superior. It's pious to be for the Poor, for the Earth, against Racism, without once ever having to think about what damage your simple-minded solutions might do. It's enough to be one of the Good People, to have good intentions, even when they lead to disastrous results.

This behavior is not confined to the Left, of course, but conservative religious fanatics tend to be...well, religious.

Revel, Parker says, points out something that I've noticed for a long time now:

Revel also breaks new ground when he discusses the striking tendency of other countries to ascribe their own worst faults to the United States, in a curious "reversal of culpability". Thus the famously peace-loving Japanese and Germans excoriate the US for "militarism"; the Mexicans attack it for "electoral corruption" in the wake of the 2000 election; the British accuse it of "imperialism"; Arab writers condemn it after September 11 for "abridging press freedom"... The gold medal for jaw-dropping hypocrisy, however, goes to the mainland Chinese, whose unelected dictatorship routinely accuses the United States of "hegemonism"... What they actually oppose, of course, is not "hegemonism" itself, but the possibility that any power other than China would dare to practice it.

...

If anything, Revel does not develop this point highly enough. For, to an American observer of countless anti-American diatribes, the most striking aspect of the United States they describe is how little it resembles the actual, physical United States, and how uncannily it resembles a doppelganger of the writer's own society.

Amen, brother. I refer you to (as Parker goes on to mention) constant French accusations of "arrogance" (which sit no better in the mouths of Britons or Germans), Arab and East Asian cries of "racism" (I don't know about Vietnam, but Japan and Korea certainly aren't known for their enlightened attitudes toward their indigenous minorities), and (especially) Saudi Arabian indignation towards "religious persecution" of Muslims. I've also heard the US accused of being a "police state" by citizens of countries which do not have the anywhere near the tender concern for civil liberties that the US does.

I used to think that they expected better of us because we expected better of ourselves. After all, the US claims to be "the land of the free", and when we do not quite live up to that ideal, that's grounds for legitimate criticism---more so, say, than some other country that does not make that claim.

But after a while I realized these critics weren't really interested in us living up to our hopes, but only down to theirs. They were so busy pointing out the motes in our eye that they had no time to spare for the beams in others'.

Another unmentioned aspect is the sheer adolescent pettiness of the criticism. This can be seen most clearly in international press coverage of the United States, which scarcely ever misses an opportunity to America-bash, even when reporting on areas that are in essence non-political, such as economic statistics and scientific discovery. Revel discusses the typical example of a story in the economics journal La Tribune, which gleefully announced "The End of Full Employment in the USA" when the US unemployment rate climbed to 5.5 percent in early 2001 (at the time, the French government was congratulating itself for reducing French unemployment to only twice this level). More recently, the British Broadcasting Corp gave exhaustive coverage to a technical problem with the US Mars Spirit Rover, but barely mentioned the successful effort to solve the problem. This spiteful editorial decision, and countless others like it, was typical of an organization in which balanced, accurate news coverage has become secondary to the holy task of denouncing Uncle Sam.

I don't think much of the examples given here. Revel might have a point about the employment figures, but I would say that this was more an example of the French press trying to gin up another round of "the failure of capitalism", rather than sheer anti-Americanism (although the two often go hand-in-hand). And the bit about the Spirit (which is so recent it must be Parker's contribution) belongs under "If it bleeds, it leads." Once it stops malfunctioning, it's no longer news (I never heard about its recovery from the American media, either, until it started to discover things).

But that doesn't mean Revel's not right. This sort of thing showed up occasionally in the Sydney Morning Herald's TV listings, where the "What's on Tonight" snippet would sometimes make offhand sneering comments about American culture, and occasionally pops up as a non-sequitur in Guardian articles.


For decades, the anti-Americans have compared the US to the Roman Empire...

This ought to be a hanging offense, by the way. Overused.

...in the fond hope that a similar "decline and fall" would someday materialize (given that what followed the Roman collapse was centuries of war, ignorance, and barbarism, one questions their motives).

Actually, we might wonder when the Roman Empire got such a bad rap. A century ago it was considered a bastion of civilization in a barbarian world. When did this change?

To illustrate, countless commentators have parroted the cliche that the "war on terrorism" is unwinnable, but how many have noted the obvious, undeniable corollary that Osama bin Laden's self-declared war on the United States is equally unwinnable?

Now here's an interesting question. I believe that most critics of the WoT know that Bin Laden's war is unwinnable, and therefore we shouldn't fight it. The result is something akin to a pack of jackals watching some rats try to kill an elephant. The jackals know the rats can't possibly succeed, but they enjoy the sight of the mighty elephant in distress. So they tell the elephant to keep still, that the rats aren't really hurting it, that if a rat gets killed, it'll only make the rest mad. Most never dream that the rats can succeed, that the elephant's seeming inertia will only draw more rats, and those that do never think of the consequences of the death of the elephant, or realize the rats will soon be hungry again.

But now enjoy with me, friends, what seems to be the heavy hand of an editor:

It is ironic, however, that so many East Asians would be drawn to the cult, since they, out of all the regions of the developing world, have the least reason to feel inferior to the United States (after all, many societies in the region have already surpassed the US by various objective criteria). It may be that in the Asian "school" of anti-Americanism, a different psychological dynamic is at work: since Asians are as convinced of their innate cultural superiority as all the other critics (though with infinitely more justification than most), it must make them very uncomfortable that, in almost every case, their societies' escape from thousands of years of static, inward-looking despotism only began when US, or British, influence arrived.

Riiiiight.

Parker goes on to say that the book's flaws lie in a lot of repetition, and the fact that Revel takes many of his examples from French sources which tend to be unfamiliar to a wider audience.

There's much more. Go ye and read of it.

Thursday, April 08, 2004



Hell-o Submarine



(Yes, I deliberately chose the worst pun I could think of for the title. Rejected ideas: Hell Cheeses Over, Hell Is for Heroes---and Subs!, and Helltire and Firestone. I strive at all time to induce groans, if not actual vomiting. My gift to you.)

I've been working hard on a scientific paper, and my part is finally done, until my co-authors have finished with it and decided it's a piece of crap and needs to be completely re-written, or better yet, burned.

Until then, though, I can turn my mighty intellect to more stimulating matters, to wit: Phantom Force another Sci-Fi Pictures original from the Unidentified Flying Object, er, Unique Fruit Orb[*], ah, United Film Organization dream factory, which employs a certain blogger.

There will be SPOILERS, yes.

Quick summary: A powerful magic dingus, thought to be a DOORWAY to HELL!, and lost in a shipwreck centuries ago, is found by an oil-company research sub. It takes over the sub and wreaks mild havoc in the Aegean Sea, until the Phantom Force is dispatched to bring it to heel.

Plot: The movie begins well enough, with the original shipwreck. The ship's captain has managed to acquire what appears to be a stone tire (the Hades Stone, or, as I will call it, the Firestone). He's really excited, because this will make them invincible. His crew is dubious, and even more so after a lightning strike activates the Firestone, and it disgorges a handful of extras from Mad Max---no, I mean---DEMON WARRIORS from HELL!, who immediately cut the crew down. This turns out to be SOP for the DWfH!, but is never adequately explained. The ship sinks to the bottom, and there the Firestone sits for centuries. Eventually, the Venture---an oil company exploration submarine patrolling the Aegean---finds the Firestone and takes it aboard. Hours later, contact is lost with the sub, and random ships begin to sink.

At about this time the movie switches to a surface crisis, in which a gang of terrorists (ripped from today's headlines!) takes over a chemical plant in some vaguely Eastern European locale, and threaten to kill the staff if they do not get what they want---cylinders of Special Sooper Dooper Mystery Gas. The hostages, who seem more bewildered and put out than frightened, tell them that most of the Super Gas was hauled away, as scheduled, a half hour before. This leads to a rather Dilbertesque scene in which the terrorist field operatives express their frustration that the pointy hairs at Terrorist HQ have sent them on a wild Gas chase.

While all this is going on, a special squad of crack ninjas is creeping into the plant, moving silently as a herd of elephants. They are led by a small ninja whose mask reveals a set of pretty eyes, so you know he's our hero (this seems to be a pattern). The ninjas and the terrorists eventually battle it out, slinging hot lead in every direction, and yet managing not to puncture any VX cylinders or sulphuric acid tanks. The Mystery Gas remains safe behind its vault (which was what was pissing the terrorists off). The terrorist leader plays possum, then tries to kill the ninja leader when his back is turned. But a cryptic montage alerts the ninja, and he whips around and shoots the terrorist, who dies with a look of great surprise frozen forever on his face. (Actually, we liked this part a lot.)

The hostages are saved, but our ninja leader (who turns out to be Marcus Dupree, played by Richard Grieco) is disappointed, because he realizes the whole chemical plant thing was just a diversion from the hijacking of the main shipment of Spooky Gas. He feels he has failed, but his boss (Bavaro, played by Nigel Bennett, who looks like a cleaned-up version of the DWfH!) apparently disagrees, because he immediately assigns Dupree to head the team which is going to try to recover the Firestone (which he calls a Hellmouth). Oh and the Venture.

Meanwhile, under the sea, a US Navy sub is looking for the Venture. They find it, sort of, but can't see it. The Venture fires two torpedoes which miss, and two which don't, and the Navy sub is destroyed.

Back at Shadowy Organization HQ, Dupree meets cheerful, perky psychologist Rebecca Weaver (Jenna Gering), whose scientific specialty is parapsychology (oh, for fun!). Rebecca wants to ask Dupree about his neat-o psychic powers. See, the confusing montage which alerted Dupree to the terrorist leader's tricks was actually his psychic power: he has some sort of mind-reading skill, but only when it comes to murder. He can tell when and how a person has, in the past, murdered someone. Apparently this causes him a great deal of pain, because he's always meeting people who've committed murder at one time or another, and he gets to see it in his head. (He should find a different line of work.) He tells Rebecca that, because of this, he doesn't really want to get to know her, in case he finds out that she, too, is a murderer. This causes her to get all offended and flounce off in a huff.

She can't escape the movie's clutches that easily, though, because Bavaro has assigned her to the team, along with a geekoid (Cutler, played by Jim Fyfe) who dabbles in psychic experiments, former N'Awlins detective Potts (played by the ssssmokin' hot Tangi Miller---her nickname in the force must've been "Hot Potts"), and a couple of thick white guys. This is the audience's opportunity to play Spot the Redshirts (we spotted wrong).

A submarine takes them near the Venture, but they have to actually find it using cute little two-man minisubs. This is where the movie, which has been dragging a bit, becomes a little more interesting, and much more confusing. The Venture, Geek-boy explains, is actually in another dimension. His experiments have featured a gizmo which will translate (or possibly rotate) the team members into that other dimension. Of course, he's only experimented on bunny rabbits so far...

So the team docks their little subs and slips aboard the Venture as quietly as a Kraken waking on the wrong side of the bed. Geek-boy's dimensional gizmo works well, and they begin to explore the Venture.

Periodically, while all this non-action is going on, we switch back to the surface, where some Slavic military types are running around doing, um, something which we're sure will be very important to the plot, especially when Bavaro turns up in their midst, bargaining with them for something or other.

Here the movie turns into a teenage slasher flick, except that the teenagers are really elderly and all the action takes place on a submarine (and the elderly teenagers have cool guns). Our heros wander jumpily around the ship while spooky music plays. Unseen things stalk them, and inanimate objects (doors, valves, medical equipment) move of their own volition. Also, as in a teen slasher picture, our team bickers among themselves, the girls share heart-to-heart talks, and the leader broods.

The lurking poltergeists (or whatever they are) manage to kill one of the team rather messily before the remainder find the Firestone propped up agains the ship's nuclear reactor. Moments after they do, technobabble emissions from the reactor activate the Firestone, causing the Hellmouth to belch forth another cadre of DEMON WARRIORS from HELL! (man, I so wish for a cool B-movie font). Our heroes flee, taking care to shut the heavy watertight doors on their way out.

This precaution is futile, however, because the DWfH! kick those things aside like the cheap balsa wood they are. In the time-honored tradition of crappy movies, it turns out that the DWfH! have extremely eccentric powers. They're big half-naked guys armed only with swords and axes, and they're invulnerable to hot lead and must be destroyed with "condensed proton splitters" (snicker), but Hot Potts slows one down by laying some kung fu action on him.

Some of the DWfH! are destroyed, and another team member bites the dust (though not exactly via the DWfH!). Soon we find that the special effects generators are going haywire, and need to be rebooted. If they are not, then the containment field will collapse, leading to a warp core breach, which---no, wait---actually, I'm not sure what happens. It's a Bad Thing, though.

Tactical genius Dupree hits upon the brilliant strategy of grabbing the Firestone and hauling ass (his words). At the last minute Geek-boy announces he must stay behind and reboot the generators. (Oh, that's right---the consequences of letting the field collapse means that the Hellmouth might stay open permanently, except I thought the Hellmouth was the Firestone, which the team have loaded aboard one of their little subs. Well, details.) He manages to do this in the very nick of time, but it's all for naught, since a second Navy submarine has located the Venture, and blows it and him to hell. (Or, in this case, perhaps not.)

The rest of the team manages to escape, meet up with Bavaro, and the movie is over.

Ha ha! Not so fast!

Instead, their helicopter lands among the encamped pseudo-Slavic army. The team is bewildered, but this is obviously something Bavaro has arranged ahead of time. What he hasn't arranged, however, is the betrayal by the army's commander. Bavarro and the team and the Firestone are marched to a cave complex, where the Slavic Army's leader commits Movie Villain Error #1: he leaves his enemies alive.

He, naturally, wants to use the Firestone for his own fell purposes. It is here that we find he has procured the juice that activates it---the Sooper Dooper Gas from the beginning of the movie! It does all tie together! ("See, it's a good movie."---MST3K) Better still, they identify the Sooper Gas for us.

It's xenon.

Yes, indeed, we must send out a team to terrorize some hostages, but only to make a diversion so that we may steal a bunch of gas that you can easily buy on the open market. I'm sure that budget cuts have been hard on whatever army this is.

At this point Dupree's psychic powers make an appearance, showing him that his guard has killed a woman in the past. Dupree starts talking to him about it, which unaccountably upsets and frightens the guard (you'd think the ability to kill without remorse would be a requirement for a job in a mysterious paramilitary organization; must be those budget cuts again.) The guard lunges at Dupree, allowing Bavaro to get the drop on him. They go to free the remaining team members while, outside, the commander activates the Firestone.

So, the xenon opens the Gates of Hell!, which disgorge some more Mad Max extras, who commence to whacking at the soldiers. After about ten minutes, Dupree finally hears our shouted exhortations to just DESTROY THE FIRESTONE, ALREADY. He does so over the objections of Bavaro, who later claims to have been worried that the Hellmouth would open forever, but we all know that he just wanted it to "study", kinda like the Ark of the Covenant.

Analysis:
I must give the movie credit for avoiding certain cliches. When the team was introduced, I was sure that we were going to see a romantic relationship between these characters, and that those characters were going to be killed, and the movie confounded those expectations. So, yay. As a whole, though, this movie was neither good enough to enjoy, or bad enough to enjoy hating.

JKRank says he was in this as a State Dept. hack, but there were no such creatures in the movie (unless I was blinking while he was on). I couldn't find him in Dragon Storm either. I suspect his scenes end up on the cutting room floor, poor sap.

Phantom Force is a sort of sequel to two other movies, Interceptors and especially Interceptor Force 2, which again starred Nigel Bennet as Bavaro and Hristo Shopov as Commander of Glorious Slavic Militia (actually he played different characters in the two movies). I just love the name Hristo. Hristo! Sounds like something a magician would say.

In the scenes at shadowy HQ, Grieco plays his character like a sulky 15-year-old who's just been grounded. His entire attitude drips with, "This is so bogus, man." Grieco's early career was spent playing a cop who infiltrates a high school in the eighties drama 21 Jump Street, so maybe it was some sort of nostalgia trip for him (he's aged since then: now he looks college-age). He does OK in the sub scenes.

What is the shadowy organization they work for, anyway?

At one point I shall not divulge, Hot Potts is revealed to be a Voodoo Mama. This is just plain silly. I mean, if you're going to watch a movie about the Gates of Hell!, fine, you have to suspend some disbelief, but really. She holds back Hell! No way.

I should note here that the male team members dress pretty much like you'd expect people to dress if they were going on a dangerous mission. The women, however, dress as if they're going to appear on MTV, with tight pants and little midriff shirts.

One fun thing about this movie is seeing how many other movies you can identify in it. For example, there's a scene with an underwater trench which is reminiscent of the trench scenes at the end of Star Wars. And the whole Hell-belching thing is kinda like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark ("Don't look at it, Marian!"). Then of course there were the teen slasher flicks, and the condensed proton splitters (tee hee) remind me of the positron colliders in Ghostbusters, and there were other scenes which I've forgotten now. This IMDB review says the prologue was reminiscient of Relic Hunter, and also notes the Ghostbusters elements.

The whole Hell thing is not very well thought out. What is Hell, really? Is it a Dante-esque afterlife where the wicked are punished by fires and various other torments? Or is it just a dimension filled with large, angry guys with edged weapons?

Who's in charge of the Venture after the Firestone comes aboard? Our team found only one body; what happened to the rest of the crew? Do the DWfH! know how to work a submarine? The DWfH! weren't there when the team boarded, but were unleashed later. So who destroyed the Navy sub? What is the force which kills our two team members?

It's suggested that the Venture was able to destroy the first Navy sub because it (or its torpedoes) could get close without being detected, possibly because it's really in another dimension. How does that work, anyway? When the team arrives on the Venture, Geek-boy cautions them about not wandering around before the field is established. I assume that means that, since they are not in the Venture's alternate dimension, they might walk right into the ocean. Presumably, in the Venture's dimension you don't interact with the real world (er, except that the ghostly Venture---which does look very cool---floats around like a real sub would). So how is it able to destroy the first Navy sub, and be destroyed by the second? Especially when it's suggested that the first sub cannot destroy the Venture because it's in another dimension?

Consistency is Hell.

[*] When I was in Australia, Niles sent me a sticker like this one, which came from a mutant peach he bought at the supermarket. They're advertised as "Unique Fruit Orbs", or UFOs. They don't really look much like UFOs. They're also called "Saturn peaches" or "donut peaches", and look like this.