This Wasn't Meant to be about Mutants
/Hello everyone! Oops it’s been a while hasn’t it. How very unlike me.
So, I hear you ask through my magical internet ears, what have I been up to in the embarrassingly long time since I last posted? Well. Many things. But most of them I can’t tell you about, because I have been sworn to secrecy.
No, that’s not true. Sorry friends. It’s because they’re generally very boring and/or work-related, which is really just another word for boring.
No, that’s not true either. Sorry friends! This blog is built on a DEN OF LIES.
Truthfully, things have been Very Stressful and so I Retreated into a Cave (of emotion, not a literal cave, although at times that would have been nice). And part of being in the Cave was “bleh I don’t feel like doing anything except be in this cave” and so I… didn’t.
But then we had a Mindfulness Session at work - which I will tell you about later* because it was its own Cave of Emotion - and one of the things in the Mindfulness Session was ‘write down some things you enjoy and when you’re feeling a bit shit, do one of them’ - although if I recall correctly it was phrased a little more mindfully - and - why is there a kazoo mariarchi song playing in this bar? This is throwing me right off my mindfulness-writing stride.
What do you mean why am I writing in a bar? Why aren’t you writing in a bar?
Anyway, the mindfulness lady said ‘when you’re feeling shit do a thing you like’ which a) is sensible advice and b) is actually kind of just common sense when I think about it and c) wow, how much did we pay that consultant? but most importantly it turns out writing is one of the things I like, so now I am back.
(Kazoo solo!)
—-
*nah fuck it I’ll tell you now. Our company engaged a Mindfulness Consultant for reasons unknown, and we had four weekly sessions where our office had a Skype meeting** with the consultant, and some of it was quite good (practice gratefulness, be compassionate, etc) and some of it was, well, ‘mindful eating exercises’, which is where you have a mandarin and you SMELL the mandarin and you OBSERVE the mandarin and you CARESS the mandarin and you CONTEMPLATE the mandarin and you are GRATEFUL for the mandarin and then finally you eat the mandarin and the Mindfulness Consultant says in a soothing-but-accidentally-sensual voice “Swish it around your mouth. Swallow. Can you feel it hit the back of your throat?” and the less mature of your colleagues, which is all of your colleagues including yourself, get the giggles and have to temporarily leave the Skype meeting.
**like a regular meeting but seven of you are in the office and the other one of you is on a big screen over the… internet telephone. It’s like every 80s movie conference call between an evil overlord and his henchmen, except for the bit at the beginning where the Skype doesn’t work for five minutes and everybody gets fucked off.
—-
So here’s a brief list of what I have been up to.
Author’s Note: this was meant to be a brief list of what I’ve been up to, but somehow it turned into a brief list of cinematic B-grade hits featuring mutants.
I don’t know whether to say sorry, or you’re welcome. YOU’RE SORRY.
1. ‘Swamp Thing’
Swamp Thing, for those of you unfortunate (?) enough not to know about Swamp Thing, is a DC comic-book superhero, who is also a thing from a swamp, which is why he is called that. Which honestly is not something that I think we’d get away with in this very woke day and age.
Anyway check him out. Check out Swamp Thing or, if you prefer to be politicallr correct, Marshed-Biome-Person.
FRANKLY I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DON’T HAVE MORE SUPERHEROES WHO ARE THINGS FROM SWAMPS.
source
I’ve never really been a comic book person and so naturally my first question (after ‘when did I learn the word biome’ and ‘who at DC is in charge of naming superheroes*’) was ‘how is this villainous-looking plant-headed motherfucker** on the side of righteousness?’
Then I watched the series and you guys, he never wanted to be a Swamp Thing, he was just a normal everyday biologist who got shot to death in a mutagen-filled swamp by a mysterious cloaked*** figure, and the swamp… saved him? Overcame him? Swamped him?
My point is it could have happened to any of us. We are all Swamp Thing.
Anyway, it got cancelled before the whole first season was even out so I don’t know if I can fully recommend it, but it is certainly a series that I’ve seen.
Rating: 7/10, would be an 8, but don’t cast literally one handsome man and then turn him into Swamp Thing in the first episode.
—-
*DC creative meeting:
”He’s a man but he has super powers. What should we call him?”
”Super… man?”
”Fantastic! I love it! Ok Bob here’s another one - still a man, but this time he dresses like a bat - what have you got?”
”B- bat man?”
the boardroom erupts into applause.
”ONE MORE FOR YA BOB-”
”-HE’S STILL A MAN-”
”-BUT THIS TIME HE’S UNDERWATER-”
”…Water…. man?”
”GET THE FUCK OUT BOB. GET THE FUCK OUT”
**sorry Mum. Mum reads this blog sometimes and she said while she very much liked the post about the penguins she felt the swearing was unnecessary and ok, she wasn’t wrong but also sometimes they just pop the fuck out.
***wrote ‘cloacked figure’ which… I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think this figure had a cloaca and so we are going to correct that typo and move on. Cloaca are gross though, aren’t they? I mean, I suppose they’re nature and so we can’t really say they’re gross per se, but man, I wouldn’t want one.
—-
As part of this Swamp Thing Journey of Self-Swamp-Discovery, I swamp-discovered that there was a 90s kids’ cartoon about Swamp Thing.
Because not only was the 90s the heyday of selling heaps of merch through kids’ cartoons, it was apparently also the heyday of greenlighting absolutely any old shit in the hopes that the kids would eat it up, which of course they (we) did, because it was the 90s and we had no internet and so it was either watch cartoons or YOU KIDS GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY and holy shit, who would choose that?
(There are a lot of 90s kids’ shows out there that confirm this, but none more so than Street Sharks.)
“THEY ARE CRIME-FIGHTING SHARKS. BUT ALSO WITH HUMAN LEGS. AND THE THEME SONG WILL GO, ‘HALF SHARK, HALF MAN, FIGHTING EVIL, THAT’S THE PLAN.’”
”BOB, YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN!”
Anyway, Street Sharks aside, there was a 90s kids’ cartoon about Swamp Thing and the single best thing about it was (and still is) that the theme tune for Swamp Thing is literally just a re-record of Wild Thing.
Except instead of ‘Wild Thing’ it is ‘Swamp Thing’ and instead of ‘you make my heart sing’ it’s ‘you are amazing’ and instead of-
You know what, just listen to it.
CONGRATULATIONS IT’S STUCK IN YOUR HEAD NOW UNTIL YOU DIE
I’m not sure where I was actually going with this but I think the key points are:
1. new Swamp Thing: worth watching, if you’re into that kind of (swamp) thing.
2. you are amazing
3. you fight everything….. nasty!
4. if you make your colleagues listen to the 90s Swamp Thing theme you had best be prepared to hear it being softly hummed in the office for the remainder of the week. Also you had best be prepared for some unimpressed colleagues.
While we’re on the subject of mutant-based televisual entertainment… I didn’t set out on this post with the intention of talking about Hell Comes to Frogtown, but now seems as good a time as ever.
Have you seen Hell Comes to Frogtown?
IF NOT, WHY NOT?
“Why should I watch this, Ally?” I hear you say. “Apart, of course, from the stunning poster, clearly amazing special effects, and intriguing concept of a frog town?”
Side note: the bar soundtrack has now changed to ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’, which is remarkably apt for Hell Comes to Frogtown’s 80s B-Grade weirdness. Feel free to play it (in your head or in real life) as you read this next section.
If you haven’t seen a movie set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic future filled with mutant frogs, who are second-class citizens forced to live on reservations, then this is the film for you. If you also haven’t seen a movie where one reservation (“frogtown”) has kidnapped a bunch of fertile human women so they can breed with them - fertile human women are hard to come by in this post-nuclear future - this is also the film for you!
The fertility of mutant frogwomen is never discussed, but… does it really need to be?
It does not.
The movie really picks up speed when one man, whose last name is Hell, is sent into Frogtown to rescue these women. But also to sleep with and impregnate them to ensure the future of the human race, as fertile men are also hard to come by in this post-nuclear future. What? It’s a perfectly sensible film premise.
This hero’s fertile loins - oh and by the way, if you’re expecting the hero to be played by anyone other than professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper in his first film role, you will be sadly disappointed - are the property of the government! Literally!
This is why he goes to Frogtown in the first place, because his junk is rigged in an explosive contraption that he can’t unlock, and unless he goes to Frogtown the government is just going to blow his wanger right off.
THIS IS THE MAIN BAD GUY AND HIS NAME IS ‘COMMANDER TOTY’ BUT IT’S PRONOUNCED ‘TOADY’ BECAUSE SUBTLETY IS NOT 'HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN’S STRONG SUIT.
ITS STRONG SUIT IS FROGS
Rating: 8/10 it’s a very good film and you should probably watch it.
While we’re on the topic of questionable mutant films, who’s seen Zombeavers?
ZOMBEAVERS: EXACTLY WHAT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS
Zombeavers is a movie about zombie beavers, obviously, and from memory it’s also about a group of teens who go on holiday to an isolated cabin and then ZOMBEAVERS! Also maybe once people get bitten by a ZOMBEAVER they turn into kind of a person-beaver-zombie hybrid? I don’t remember the plot very well because it fades away in a haze of sophomore boobs and appalling zombeaver special effects. Like, “how does this movie that was made in 2014 have worse special effects than that absolute roarer of an 80s classic, ‘Hell Comes to Frogtown’,” appalling special effects.
Mind you - I don’t want to spoil Zombeavers for you, but the ending is one of the best pieces of theatre I think I have ever seen and it was robbed for an Oscar nomination. ROBBED.
Rating: 5/10 because amazing ending but also points off because the zombeavers eat a dog.
IT WAS NOT ROBBED OF THE SPECIAL EFFECTS OSCAR.
Are you tired of terrible mutant-based movie suggestions yet? Yes?
Tough luck, because I’m not.
Also firstly, that’s rude, you should be Practicing Gratefulness like the mindful lady told you and secondly I only have one more and it is 100% not the best of the lot but it DOES have the best line of dialogue I’ve heard in any movie in a long time and that line is:
“We’re going to need these baby crocacondas alive!”
I mean, give me all the “may the Force be with you” and “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” you like, but do any of those movies have the sheer cinematic charm that CROCACONDA brings to the screen?
“YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.”
CROCACONDA is mercifully, the last instalment in the Anaconda series and surprisingly, only the second-to-last in the Lake Placid series.
It’s a crossover movie where bikini-clad students get horrifically mauled by crocodiles and/or anacondas. This sentence from the Wikipedia summary (spoilers, but it’s not like it matters) sums it up better than I ever could: “Tully and Reba are attacked by a crocodile, which is in turn attacked by an anaconda, which crushes the crocodile until it explodes.”
There are also CROCACONDAS which are, as you would expect, a crocodile-anaconda hybrid. I think this happened because of a lab explosion but I’m not sure because the plot kind of disappears in a haze of sophomore boobs and terrible crocodile and/or anaconda special effects.
VERY disappointingly, there are no actual crocaconda (crocodile-anaconda hybrids) maulings because they are all babies.
Rating: 2/10, needs more crocacondas, bring on the sequel.
ALSO DISAPPOINTINGLY IT TURNS OUT IT’S ACTUALLY CALLED ‘LAKE PLACID VS ANACONDA’ .
BUT IN MY HEAD IT IS NOT. IN MY HEAD IT IS #CROCACONDAFOREVER!
Also, it now very much appears that I’ve done the thing where I write a massive post that gets away from me and has no real ending. How very unlike me. 2/10 massive plot holes.
In a vain attempt to get it together:
1. TIME NOT BLOGGING 0/10, WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THE CAVE OF EMOTION
2. WHEN YOU’RE SAD WATCH SOME MUTANT CREATURE FILMS
3. ALWAYS BE MINDFUL. BUT NEVER WITH FRUIT.