DEL TORO SAYS NO …

To sappy wuss-bag vampires with big boofy hair ...



From 2009, Guillermo del Toro on Craig Ferguson's "Late Late Show"

It’s about time someone put the teeth back into bloodsuckers, and del Toro, director of “Hellboy” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”, is just the right guy to do it.

Tongue has a happy.

THE SQUEALING OF THE SWINE

We knew it would happen. Those of us who pay attention to such things. I knew it would happen. The only question was when.

And so we prepared. We were always prepared, and they, people like you perhaps, thought us all fools for our cautious ways. Paranoid, you said we were. Some of you called us psychotic and stupid, hicks, halfwits, and my, how you laughed.

Well, well.

Are you laughing now?

I doubt it.

Most of you are dead.

But I take no pleasure in your misfortunes or the misfortunes that may have befallen your loved ones. It gives me no comfort. Perhaps you will listen to us in future. Should this happen again. And it will happen again. Mark these words. Or something similar, some variation on another strain. The same strain? Yes.

I had spent thousands, tens of thousands over the years reinforcing the house, the stronghold as I began to call it during the onslaught, to ensure it was bugproof. And that it could not be breached by any poor, desperate soul who may have been infected. Or, more importantly and most probably, a mob of souls. Angry souls. I had built, as a necessary backup, a bunker in the yard. Beneath the earth. I had stocked it well. That, and the central stronghold, the house, contained all those things that one could consider essential to one’s survival. In the short term, and the long term. It was the long term that mattered most, though.

There were not many of us who did this. Who went to these lengths. We were not a “group” or a “force” or a “unit” of any kind. We were scattered throughout the country with little, if any, ability to communicate with each other. We were not going to stand as one, for to do so would be a fatal error. If one became infected, there would be nothing to stop the spread among the others.

And so, as individuals, did we take our stand and vow to resist, to fight to the bitter end if need be.

And we had no guns.

Goddammit.

Howard, that bastard. He took our guns away. 1996, 1997, I think it was. Cheap political ploy, a stunt that was. I never liked Howard. Pissweak, he was. To take a man’s gun. What type of “man” would do this to another? A coward, that’s what type. A girl.

And so, we stocked what we could in the way of knives, bats, power tools, whatever we thought may help us through the darkest days we knew were coming, whatever we could lay our hands on. Some improvised.

We didn’t really have much time.

And then, time ran out.

People dropped like flies. A cough, a sneeze, that was all it took. Within minutes, the disease would tear its way through the most able-bodied of men and women and reduce them to shuddering lumps of virus-ridden flesh and, in hours, death would take them. The children went the quickest, a small mercy, to be spared the prolonged agony afforded the strong and the capable.

In two weeks, eight million had died.

In three weeks, forty seven million.

In four weeks, two billion.

The world went to rubble.

Yet, through it all, I, and those like me, prevailed. We stood our ground, defended our territory, made ourselves deaf to the entreaties of those who tried to worm their way through our defences and take advantage of our stocks, our supplies, of food, of drugs, of anything that we had because we had had the intelligence, the foresight, to prepare for this exact moment in advance of the moment coming.

The fools. The poor, poor fools.

By the time it had become clear to those in charge, supposedly in charge I should say, that the human race were facing such an implacable, invisible foe the likes of which had never been encountered before, a confusion of so-called “advice” tumbled from their lips, “do this”, “do that”, “don’t do this”, and so on and so forth. None of it added up. One piece of advice contradicted another, one “expert” clashed with this other “expert”, one minute it was a call for calm, the next, some piece of information caused thousands to panic.

I ignored it all. I knew, people like me knew, what we needed to do to survive. We had our own code to follow and we weren’t going to throw that overboard on the say so of some fucking politician, some bureaucrat, some statistician.

They had never listened to us. Damned if we were going to listen to them now.

Ludicrous, yes? That one third of the world’s population would be decimated because a bunch of goddamned pigs got the fucking sniffles.

Well, no, not ludicrous. Not at all. Probable, that’s what it was. And it was probability that we, people like myself, concerned ourselves with.

Listen …

They told us to stock up on dry goods. Rice, pasta, beans and such. Stupid. You need water to cook these things, precious water, and you’d have to be a fool to waste such a resource on the preparation of a bowl of fucking pasta. I had 100 eight-gallon drums of water stocked. It was for drinking. Not cooking, that’s for sure. What was I, Jamie fucking Oliver? No.

I stocked tin foods, frozen, stuff you could microwave (we all had generators and we all made sure to have enough fuel to run them indefinitely) and if water were needed for its preparation, it would be only a minimal amount, a half cup perhaps.

I had 200 cans of goddamned baked beans. Among other things. Jesus, did I ever get sick of fucking beans.

But those damn things saved my life one night.

Listen …

When it seemed the worst of the plague had played itself out, as we knew it would eventually for that is the manner of such things, I went to the fortified observation deck of my stronghold. I could see, in the distance, smoke, small fires, nothing unusual in that. There were no emergency services anymore and so, when a fire started, it just burnt itself out. God only knows how many poor souls got caught in them. If it wasn’t the sickness that got you, it was a fire, or starvation, or, in the worst cases, some bastard stuck you in the ribs ‘cause you had what they wanted.

Law and order? Not anymore. Not in this gutted new world.

But that night, I heard a rising sound in the near distance. A sound I hadn’t heard before and it seemed, to my ears, like the sound of some strange new mob and not at all human.

I quieted my breathing, deep, slow breaths and focused my hearing, trying to identify this noise.

What fresh new hell was this?

I had a long, large carving knife at hand. I had a heavy, six-pronged fork, its tines fashioned (by myself) to the sharpest tips I could manage. I had a pocket knife.

Downstairs, power tools. If I needed them, I could have them to hand in 26 seconds flat from where I stood. I left nothing to chance.

The sound grew louder. It seemed to be coming straight for me. Still, I couldn’t quite make it out. What the fuck was that?

My stomach growled, my bowels seemed to shift. From fear? No. I’d been eating goddamned beans for the last two weeks now, twice a day. I hadn’t shit in a fortnight. I’d deal with it later. After this thing, whatever it was, was dealt with first.

And just then, I saw them. The things that had been making that sound. And yes, they were coming straight for me, straight for the stronghold. Hundreds of them.

PIGS!

Goddammit.

All of them gone feral and looking for a kill. This was no random mob of brainless animals. They knew what they wanted and they were working as a group, a gang, to get it.

And what they wanted was me.

I felt my stomach groan again, louder this time, longer, a massive shudder went through my bowels and then, that’s when it struck me.

What I had to do.

They got closer. Fast.

Not close enough, though. Not yet.

Hold.

Hold.

Hold.

Hold.

They were one metre from the front wall of the stronghold. And that was when I blew the whole lot of the oinking little fuckers to hell.

I turned my back on them.

Dropped my trousers.

Shifted my arse over the side of the deck.

Grabbed the cigarette lighter from my pocket. Flicked it to life. Held the flame to my anus.

And let nature take its course.

The methane that had built up in my body the last two weeks would’ve gassed a small country. My anus flapped like a bust balloon for what seemed like an hour, and the flames lit up the night sky and obscured the stars, the roar of the fire drowning out the squealing of the swine below me.

Nothing sweeter than the smell of crackling in the morning. The smell, that sweet pork smell. Smells like victory.

And that’s what it was. Victory.

When the plague was over, or rather, the worst of it was over, I told others of my tale of survival. They called me a hero.

And when the world was stable enough that some forms of manufacturing could resume, some forms of commerce, the people at Heinz, they called me, they said they were repackaging their most popular product, renaming it.

Victory Beans.

In ham sauce.

They put my picture on the label.

Goddamn, if that didn’t make me swell up with pride.

I wished the old folks could’ve been around to see it, but, fortunately, they had passed several years before the plague hit.

One thing for sure, they didn’t raise no nancy boy, no sir.

They raised a man.

Damn right they did.

Illustration courtesy of c N m © 2009 c N m. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission. Ta very much.

DANGER! WHITEGOODS!

Noted in today’s New York Times ...

“The Last House on the Left” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Characters are raped, stabbed, shot, mangled and fed to labor-saving devices.

Sweet.

WE'RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER OCEAN

Oceans are big.

…

And they're full of water.

…

Fish live there.

…

Sharks are very big fish.

…

Learn to fucking live with it, okay?

UPDATE: The above was published in the Sydney Morning Herald March 3rd (minus the dots and expletive.)

TOM ♥ JULIE BISHOP

You and your pussycat nose, whoa-oh-oh-oh …

I AM ZOMBIE

Someone should make this movie ...

"I AM ZOMBIE" ...

In the not-so-distant future, post-zombie plague-sickness, the last zombie on earth finds itself hounded and harassed by hordes of uninfected humans who, having enjoyed popping zombies in the nut willy-nilly for nigh on a decade, have become consumed with a rabid blood-lust all too typically and historically human.

Aided and abetted by members of the outlawed activist organisation PETZ (People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies), our zombie fugitive (whom we shall name Fredd, a one-time hairdresser to the stars of a popular, if not quite critically acclaimed soap, "Our Neighbourhood") is shunted from hiding place to hiding place as his allies bravely, perhaps foolishly, attempt to preserve the last of his kind, fighting against time to find Fredd a willing (or not-so-willing as the case may be) mate so that Fredd and his half-caste offspring may be reintroduced to society and learn to take their proper place alongside those of a non-zombie, non-undead persuasion.

For the lawmakers of the land had once, many years before, decreed that if they were provided iron-clad proof that zombies were capable of reproduction, reproduction being a gift from God, then their status as "undead non-citizens" would be revoked and they would be duly regarded from then on as simply "undead" and be issued with temporary citizenship until such time as they could learn a trade and become productive contributors to a faltering economy.

Even though Fredd has a somewhat disconcerting habit of chowing down on the brains of those members of PETZ who's do's he's just cut and fluffed (and expressing an appropriate level of remorse for acting on his baser instincts and impulses thereafter), our valiant activists, not easily discouraged or diverted from their passionate desire to see Fredd “git it on”, set about abducting various ladies from various walks of life to see if any of them hit it off with our zombie hero before finally settling upon one Ladybird Bishop, a fine female human specimen drawn from the ranks of the minor, but quite influential political party, "For God & Family".

Believing herself to be chosen by God for the sacred, if not quite understandable purpose of giving life to the undead, Ladybird reluctantly agrees to offer her services to PETZ on behalf of Fredd in order to serve her higher power. A date is set for the act of conjugal frivolities ...

However, as the day draws near, the baying crowd of (by now) quite unhinged humans have discovered Fredd's hiding place and begin to close in ...

It’s a race against time as PETZ personnel and Ladybird Bishop frantically explore every possible avenue and resource in order to stimulate Fredd’s rather reluctant and long-dead member to rise to the noble and holy purpose for which it was no doubt intended before it turned a darker shade of puce …

© Ross Sharp, 2008**

**Hell, someone might just take the hint and do this. After all, someone made a movie called “Zombie Strippers” didn’t they?

LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT

From the London Review of Books, "Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill", Jonathan Raban writes about Sarah Palin ...

"Like Wally the Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the style she developed as mayor of Wasilla and then perfected in her triumphant gubernatorial campaign in 2006 ...

... What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness ..."

Read the full article. Palin is spectacularly creepy. She may not be smart, but she appears to have the type of focused rat-cunt cunning so typical of the contemporary political sociopath and aspirant. The type of person who, crashing rather than crashing through, would happily take you with her to the bottom of the wreckage. Raban also looks back at her reign as Mayor of Wasilla ...

"She abolished its building codes and signed a series of ordinances that re-zoned residential property for commercial and industrial use. When the city attorney ordered construction to stop on a house being built by one of her campaign contributors, she sacked him."

And what happened in Wasilla as a result of her fiefdom? Raban observes ...

"Present-day Wasilla is Palin’s lasting monument. It sits in a broad alluvial valley, puddled with lakes, boxed in on three sides by sawtoothed Jurassic mountains, and fringed with woods of spruce and birch. Visitors usually aim their cameras at the town’s natural surroundings, for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s a generic Western settlement, and one sees Wasillas in every state this side of the 100th meridian: the same competing gas stations, fast-food outlets, strip malls and ‘big box’ stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Fred Meyer and Home Depot, each with a vast parking lot out front, on which human figures scuttle with their shopping trolleys like coloured ants, robbed of their proper scale ... Wasilla is what inevitably happens when there are no codes, no civic oversight, no planning, when the only governing principle in a community is a naive and superstitious trust in the benevolent authority of the free market."

And we thought George W. Bush was the worst. If this woman comes to the White House, we're fucked. Frankly, given the way Raban writes about her, if this woman comes to the White House, John McCain won't live to get much older.

THE PERFECT DATE MOVIE

No comment.



From 2007, “Teeth” Trailer

FLESH EATING MONSTERS STALK THE EARTH!!

"Geysers of blood, insinuating camera angles and an extremely playful editing style add to the mayhem, keeping us gasping in horror and laughing at the gleeful excesses on screen."

A review of "Planet Terror" by Rich Cline from Shadows on the Wall

I'm going to go hide in my room till it all blows over ...