Disgraceful!
Not so long back, I advised you about being published in Online Magazine 'Lhyme' to promote a recipe for the British classic dessert Spotted Dick, fused with the musical genius of Margaret J.
It would appear that one the Pretties of my overseas harem hath been hit with undeserved snipey bitchiness from the Overall Editor as regards tweaking some text as regards David 'Buoy' ( see here) and The Cure.
In a fit a pique, my Lady Doom was purged from all records.
And by association, it would appear the ignoramus has also removed all my carefully crafted perfect prose!
This is blasphemy of the highest order! I am THE Xym - how dare any mundane misery deny the populace the Words Of Xym? Outrageous!
However, this does leave me free to revise, improve and extend my somewhat restrained review! So, without any further Agadoo or pushing pineapples up yer bum, here is my commentary upon Pop Tart Margaret J, with accompanying VD-dye-oh:
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So, you teen girls know how embarassing parents can be (as my Niece Jess can attest!), however it's come to something when your parents turn into The Dentons and insist on Nude Day to celebrate your Dad's birthday, and they berate you for not denuding yourself.
After all, it's only a nudie poolside BBQ for your dad's birthday, including all their friends and neigbours.
So you take yourself off into your bedroom, to avoid seeing everybody's exposed 'Barbarellas" and "Godzillas" that are being invited into your pantyhose (or tights, if your not American. Possibly leggings). Which would probably make you a hermaphrodite. or something.
And for that she thanks you very much. Or spanks her furry muff. probably.
So you decide to brave the party, but not naked, obvs. The kitchen is filled with grizzled, wrinked, sagging, obese oldies, so you sit on the sofa in the living room with all the hot young kidz.
And isn't it just your luck to sit right by the man from the BBC1 dancing alongside, waving his way below knee-lenth wang about the place and almost whipping your face with it. Yet another oversized weapon of mass distraction!
And then there's the cutting of the cake - at least it isn't your birthday, so you don't have to have any, seeing as any "hundreds and thousands" and "chocolate sprinkles" on top are probably moulted pubes, dried arse shit, diseased skin and crabs.
And then it's dancing time for everyone, and there's no better way to celebrate than to be accosted by a great fat nudie pædo who presses you into his sweaty moobs.
Barbarella? More like fucking Blubberella doing them high kicks. Flash the gash with yer lardy labia. And fat pædo punches to clear a space so you can all adore his Adonis physique.
And out by the pool, some poor bloke is grilling his sausage as Marge sits there singing about biting it on the end...
...before the manly men man up for some manly wrestling...
...hold on... didn't Jimmy Savile start out as a professional wrester? Now then, now then, jingle jangle, pearl necklace jewellery. No wonder Margaret didn't want to party in her nuddy suit.
And to cap it all, after avoiding a facefull of phallus from the token Person Of Color With Obligatory Massive Cock, someone's semi cock-knocks her Coke out of her hand! And because she's in the middle of a nudie-fest, and doesn't want to go about all underagey undressed, she's now stuck with a damp & sticky gusset. For all the wrong reasons. Probably. or something.
And then you're invited back inside, to be compressed against the clammy flesh of the family, as the bespectacled grandparents poke and pinch at you. More worrying is that the baldy bloke looks suspiciously like he would be more at home in a PVC Nazi uniform.
And after all that effort they put into pixellation, at 2:40, some brazen trollop is presenting her shaven pussy to the camera. Or it could be a beaver. Heck, it could be anything - it just looks like some hairless hellbeast (immediately followed by a REALLY creepy look from the fat pædo).
How come I never get invited to parties like this?
Original published version:
Salutations gastro-gnomes! For mine debut, one hath been tasked with checking out the latest teen sensation, the Pop Pixie known as Margaret J with her equally debut single "Thank You Very Much". A tune that deals with the harsh brutalities of adolescence and being embarrassed by your parents:
To whit; being forced to attend a naturist party for your dad's birthday with all his nudie neighbours. A horrific soirée of skyclad Barbarellas & Godzillas as you get told off by your mum for not denuding yourself.
Where Rebecca Black's "Friday" called for ear sealant, this pop tart's visual accompaniment will have you reaching for the eye bleach! How can one compete with Robin #Thicko's "Blurred Lines" topless models & Miley Cyrus's twerkage? Why, by surrounding the dodgily aged popstress with great fat hairy nudie dancing old folk like a rather dodgy pædo party!
Which it CLEARLY ISN'T. A minute into the video, and there's nothing more natural than to subject your offspring to a waving wang, but you know what they say "Oop Norf o' t'England" - Once tha's 'ad black puddin' fer t'breakfast, tha'll never go back. or summat.
Spotted dick? No! Thank you, pixelation. Thank You Very Much
1 BIG BLACK COCK
Oh you crazy Russians greybeards!
So, you've discovered an alien spaceship, deep in the Arctic wastes. Within, there lies a most amazing discovery - a lifeform beyond imagining.
And what do you do with such a discovery?
Why, send a crew up into geo-stationary orbit to artificially inseminate spiders with space monster DNA in the hopes of breeding a Queen spider that will generate bullet proof webbing to get your armour light years ahead of The West.
As you do. When you're not fighting off or imprisoning Somalian & Greenpiss Pirates who ram your ships and try to board your vessels.
But lo and behold, would you Adam and Eve it - once bred, your alien arachnid hybrids run amok, and eat your crews faces off!
And on top of that, space debris from meteor shower collisions would decide to smash into your space station and send a cage of killer spiders tumbling to Earth.
To New York no less! Home of the oversized invasionary monster. Through the streets and into the subway goes the mutant multilegged mostrosities, and before you know it, some hitherto unknown cavern is taken over as a nest.
Of course, the Tube Station Manager only knows something has crashed, and the trains need to get back up and running in time for rush hour, so you naturally send down your best engineer.
Who promptly gets bit and falls on The Third Rail.
Naturally, our Hero of a station manager can't believe his experienced engineer would be such a gormster to step on the third rail, so visits the coroner, who's pulling eggs out of the engineer. Damn good luck his wife is a Heath Inspector, so he can take a couple of eggs for assessment.
And naturally, his wife his all moody, as he's missed his daughter's 12th1 Birthday, and comets crushing the tube and monsters impregnating engineers is a poor excuse. And she has the final divorce papers to hand.
But all she can deduce is that there is no contaminatory bacteria in the eggs.
So naturally you go down into the subway with a team of military folk, and promptly get et by oversized spiders, and so the area's cordoned off.
But what's this... the Ruskies have teamed up with The US and are intimidating the coroner and going through her eggs... but... oh noes! They can't find the Queen egg, coz as luck would have it, it's in the grubby paws of The Healh Inspector!
So, once more the brilliant Russian Intelligence comes to the fore.
Nick the eggs back out of the Health Inspectors car, inject Tube Manager's mate with spider eggs (and let him die in the street) and quarantine the Tube Manager/Health Inspectors daughter. Oh, and put the Queen into the spiders nest (ooooh, they grow bigger in Earth's atmosphere!)
Failing to see the flaws in this plan, the streets are soon overrun with human sized space spiders(Where are they coming from? I thought we had them contained?), as within the nest the Spiders spin webs over the CCTV so they can't be watched. Disaster is surely on the way!
But, the family must be reunited, and they can't get to their daughter because of the armed soldiers around the quarantine zone... quarantine zone being their high-floored apartment, rather then the subway with the Spiders in.
So, mom and dad take to the subway, as it luckily links directly to their apartment block!
Well, it would, it it wasn't populated by space spiders trying to eat your face off, who chase you out into a warehouse. Where, like Ripley, you take them on with a Caterpillar P-5000 Powered Work Loader, I mean - a forklift truck!
And after you've spent ages spearing spiders and disarming guards withing yards of your door... you ends up being surrounded and arrested.
Whilst your child escapes the apartment and legs it to hid in a toy shop, you're taken to the Sentry Point outside the gate. Tied up, you watch all the soldiers get their faces et off - even the Top Brass bloke, until the spiders all scuttle off so the Russian Scientist can free you. You help your wife out of the back of the jeep, taking the opportinity to grope up your co-stars preposteroulsy oversized busom in tight top, ...
...just as the Giant Queen Space Spider bursts out from under the sidewalk and eats the Russian all up!
Roaring like a behemoth beastie from beyond the stars (or the Cloverfield beastie), the gargantual monster steps on the babysitter to death, before putting a foot/claw through the toyshop window to tumble your daughter into the basement!
Not only are most of the spiders bullet-repellant, the Queen is missile repellant! Boom boomy boom! And follow the daughter into the Toyshop basement (which is also the subway for some reason).
Thankfully, the daughter finds a small alcove the Queen is too big for, being a great big fuck of giant spider. So it seals her in with it's thick, sticky, bullet-proof webbing. Damn - it's so thick, sticky and bullet-proof, you can't break through!
Thick, sticky and bullet-proof it may be, but when mom & dad come to the rescue, they can just peel it apart and let her out.
Oh noes - here comes the Queen! OK, distract it from your family! Pick up a pole and poke the arachnid as your spouse and offspring escape! Make it chase you to an old, abandoned train and seek safety!
Crapola! It's monstrous mandibles can tear through metal! Bugger! Oh wait - what's that on the terminus wall in front of the drivers cab? DANGER! FLAMMIBLE GAS! Of course! What else lies at the end of the trainline, except pipes, cannisters and valves of explosive flammable gas!
So, sift away the æons of dusty detrius, and turn on the decrepit engine! Wow, it has power! The controls are a bit stiff, but we gets it in reverse! Back down the track at speed, chased by a Giant Mutant Space Spider! Ha! It's stuck in the tunnel entrance! BRAAAAAAKE! And... forward!
Tie the forward lever down with yer shirt, dive onto the platform, the train charges down the tunnel, smashes into the spider, hurtles headlong down the tunnel and splats the spider into the end of the line wall, igniting the gas and flambéing the ferocious menace.
Awww... the family reunites on the streets, as the soldiers shove dead spiders into the back of a jeep.
All's well that ends...
...y'aaargh! Space Monster Spiders survived on streetlights! Save us from a sequel!
1 12? 12? IF SHE'S 12, I'M JIMMY BLOODY SAVILE! LET ME JUST PAUSE IT AND CHECK IMDB... YEP, SHE'S 19. 19!!!, NOT 12 AT ALL!
Oh deary me, Dairy Lea, The Xym is going to try his hand at reviewing stuff! Let me know if it's any good, or not to bother in future.
THE THING (2011) First cinema viewing
BACKGROUND
'Who Goes There?' was written by John W. Campbell in 1938, and was adapted into the movie The Thing From Another World in 1951. The movie bore very little in common with the novella, and is memorable for the classic line of B-Movie dialogue: "An intellectual carrot! The mind boggles!"
In 1982, John Carpenter's The Thing was released. This was an extremely faithful interpretation of the novella, and formed a sequel to The Thing From Another World. The discovery and digging out of the alien & it's craft and subsequent rampage in the first movie is referenced from video footage & the state of the (now Norwegian) camp.
And now we have a new movie, called simply 'The Thing'. This is a remake of the 1951 movie so that it now seamlessly links into it's sequel. John Carpenter's The Thing is now seen as a classic, so does the 'prequel' match up to what is now considered the 'original' (despite being a sequel).
PLOT
It's 1981. A group of 12 or so Norwegians are working in an arctic research station. Investigating a beacon, they discover an ancient ship and a lifeform. Their leader contacts an old American scientist to bring in a select team of 5 experts to help with analysis and share the discovery. They arrive, a storm's coming in, and something breaks free...
REVIEW
On the whole, I was pleasantly surprised, but there are some minor issues I had with it.
Plotwise... well, on the plus side, it does cover all those alluded hints and discoveries Mac and Copper made at the Norwegian camp in John Carpenters The Thing - The Axe in the door, The melted two-face, Slitwrists, etc. There's also a few major continuity errors, but I need another viewing to check (or find a reason!)
However, being limited to what's in the sequel and how it starts, it's very much a standard by-the-numbers plot. American scientist wants it kept alive - check. Feisty sub-standard Ellen Ripley type - check. You get the picture.
One of the strengths of John Carpenter's The Thing was the atmosfear. The brooding menace and claustrophobia of an all-male distrustful individuals worked - especially with the slow pace. This movie is fast. Boy, does it race along! As such, it loses a lot of what is the essence of The Thing. That said, you could justify the change in pace as this is The Thing's first encounter with humans, so following it's experience with the Norwegians, it's learned not to be as direct and therefore more slow & insidious in the sequel.
Another of the great successes of John Carpenter's The Thing was the on-set FX. This Thing is CGI, which is sometimes excellent - sometimes too CGI, particularly in the brighter scenes. Also, being CGI, there are times it suffers from the Transformers problem - so much blindingly fast action you can't tell what's going on. Yes - this mother can move - imagine the Blair monster, then have it rampaging about at 10x the speed. Or Hellboy's Sammael, on speed, with extra tentacles
There are nods a-plenty to the Carpenter version. Perhaps slightly too many and too obvious. Surprisingly, the Morricone/Carpenter motifs aren't used. The opening minute and closing credits re-use the infamous theme, but the score doesn't evoke the same feeling, and sometimes seems out of place.
VERDICT
Not bad, actually, and I did enjoy it. For filling in the blanks and building the backstory, it does the job. And it links into John Carpenter's The Thing perfectly. On the downside - there are at least 3 plotlines left open for another sequel.
Is another sequel needed? Definately not. Was this prequel required... probably not. I'm glad the tale of the Norwegians is there, and seamlessly seagues into the sequel, but I think leaving the fate of the Norwegians may have been better left with Mac and Copper's puzzlement at what went on at the crazy Swedes camp.
After 1 viewing, I'd rate this as 7½/10, and will purchase the blu-ray.
