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Punching Day: Ninjas & Superspies
Author: Merritt K
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Upsetting Day: CustodianðŸŒ
Last year I introduced you to the horror that was Peachtree Carnivore. And what did you do with it? You unleashed it upon the world by electing to make it a free article in December. Now we are all complicit in sin. But who is to judge us? Surely not one of our own kind, wallowing amongst us in the filth. We need a being free of our base needs, our petty vendettas, our carnal desires for the flesh of our mothers-in-law. In the past, this function was fulfilled by God. But God is dead, and we have killed him with our incestuous anti-woke polycules. Perhaps we need not a judge, but a caretaker. A janitor. A… custodian.
Yes, we once again delve into the mind creations of Mark Mitchell, author of multiple X-rated 9 Chickweed Lane fanfictions. But rest easy — there will be no pained descriptions of luscious curves or male emissions in Custodian. As the author puts it, this is a “simple desultory philippic,” which in Mitchellese means “self-insert story about what if a space monster could solve all human problems by using mind torture to create a libertarian paradise.”
Peachtree Carnivore opened with a knock on the door from a beautiful woman. Custodian opens with a knock on the door from a slightly supercilious, innocuous man. Two data points may not be a pattern, but it’s absolutely possible that Mitchell thinks you have to open every story, whether pornographic or didactic, by having a character show up on the doorstep of another. So would that make Carstairs our author insert?
There may not be any actual sex in this story, but there’s certainly a lot of guys jacking each other off. Carstairs is getting the full Mitchell protagonist treatment, having his incisive knob slobbered over by a godlike alien who’s come to earth to stop World War II. Our man immediately takes this as given.
Jones is the designated protector for the Milky Way, can transcend the speed of light, and is capable of influencing civilizations on a massive scale. But, uh, he only just heard about how fucked up humanity is, which is why he didn’t step in sooner.
Jones has revealed himself to the unknown genius that is Carstairs to inform him that humanity has nearly reached the branch of the tech tree that unlocks nukes. Carstairs reacts to this information by temporarily losing his grip on reality and calling Mr. Jones “Smith” for one page. That, or Mitchell just forgot what the name of his god creature was and refused to hit the backspace key because a man of his prodigious talents sees it as nothing more than a shackle of mediocrity upon the titanitude of his superlative perspicacity.
Hold up, though; because Carstairs isn’t the only author avatar here. When Jones lays out his dilemma, Carstairs decides he needs a drink. And since Mitchell completely lacks a theory of mind and can only write characters as extensions of himself, his alien space wizard enjoys a tipple or two.
God I fucking loathe this guy. I bet he thought it was cute that he gave his formless cosmobeast a taste for whiskey, the favored liquor of men who use the word “sundry” and think it makes them sound fuckably clever.
Jones is a brain genius who has read every book on the planet. I’m thankful there aren’t any women in this story, because knowing Mitchell, by now they would be begging to consume his worldly, libertarian seed. Instead, the dueling representations of our author intellectually 69 themselves into a frustrated heap before Jones departs to yell at Adolf Hitler.
Jones kicks things off by disabling the German army’s PVP flag, teleporting into Hitler’s armored train and telling him “nothing personnel, kid” before psychically torturing Göring for making a useless show of hostility towards him. And I mean, I’m not saying the guy didn’t have it coming, but probably not for that.
Now, again, it’s not like the Nazis don’t deserve this. But Jones is an immortal, nigh-omnipotent creature from beyond time and his solution to war is the same one we use to train rats to drive little cars. He couldn’t spike the Nazis with astral MDMA or fire a Holocaust beam at them like Professor X to implant the horrors of genocide in their minds? Maybe he considered all of those and this was just the simplest solution. Or maybe this story is the kind of adolescent wish fulfillment normally associated with bullied sixth graders only written by a powerless elderly man who truly believes that if only he was in charge, there wouldn’t be any war anymore — and everyone would get to inseminate their luscious mothers-in-law, besides.
Not Göring? Maybe he just killed himself offscreen after that embarrassment earlier. Regardless, Jones shuts down the Nazi war machine and hurries off to Japan to have a little chat with Hirohito.
God, imagine trying to commit ritual suicide and the sword just disappears like a gag knife when you plunge it into your belly. You’d look so fucking stupid. Thankfully, Jones never thought to nerf poison!
You don’t need to read all of that. I just include the whole thing to point out that around here, Mitchell breaks into the same pattern as he did in Peachtree Carnivore, where he just starts writing a character’s name before their wall of text dialogue. Long story short, Hirohito is worried that the population is going to descend into chaos and Jones tells him to deal with it before fucking off to destroy Stalinism.
Stalin sneered ragefully in a sneering rage. But he sneered no longer! He was no longer capable of sneering, for his brain was under assault by Harold’s god magic! You have been rendered sneerless, Comrade!
Jones delivers a big speech about the reasons why Stalin sucks, and you can imagine Mitchell tearfully reciting this aloud in the mirror. “This is what I’d say if I ever met Stalin,” he thinks. “And if I had superhero powers! Then I’d marry a beautiful busty woman and put my throbbing rod in her mother’s birth canal!”
There’s just one last stop on Mr. Jones’ tour of world leaders. We know how this goes at this point.
Surprise! FDR is the Nice President and Jones doesn’t Force Lightning his ass. This is supposed to happen in 1939, so I guess in this timeline FDR doesn’t sign Executive Order 9066. Nice! Funny, though, how Jones shows up just in time to stop America — but not any other country — from taking its most loathsome actions during the war. FDR, for his part, asks Jones if he can help extricate humanity from the grinding logic of capital.
Don’t do socialism, FDR! For every socialism you try to do, I will explode your brain.
Colonialism? That’s not part of it. Jones doesn’t deal with that. We’ve got to wrap things up here. Jones offers to reverse the ravages of polio on FDR’s body, but he demurs, saying it wouldn’t be fair to everybody else. He does, however, accept Jones’ offer to supercharge his organs and ensure that he stays President for a long time to come. His work done, Jones returns to Carstairs, who effusively congratulates him on an accomplishment that never had the slightest chance of failure.
Again, there was absolutely no possibility that Jones’ plan wouldn’t work, at least in the short term. Humanity didn’t learn that it could short-circuit The Pain through the recitation of the Litany Against Fear, nobody invented an anti-Harold Stealth Cloak to commit sins without him seeing, and Batman didn’t even try to use Prep Time to defeat him. Still, The End.
Stories in which overwhelmingly powerful beings descend to earth to impose order usually have some kind of argument to present. Scratch that, stories in general usually try to make an argument about how the world is or should be. Olivia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy depicts the horror of an alien species that rescues the remnants of humanity from nuclear annihilation only to reshape them and the planet as they see fit. Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has the alien Overlords impose a kind of utopia on humanity at the cost of creativity and culture. And my novella Vampirocene — sorry — explores the fantasy that someone is coming to save us from ecological disaster, but posits that for better or worse, we might not be willing to accept them.
Custodian isn’t interested in questions about the legitimacy of power or the implications of externally-imposed rules and restrictions. We don’t learn that preventing WWII leads to a much greater tragedy down the line, like mass nuclear war or Dennis Miller remaining on SNL well into the 21st century. It’s just a more pathetic version of the old Hitler time travel trope, only Mark Mitchell couldn’t just give his protagonist a Glock and a Delorean, he had to make him a Silver Surfer-level demigod. And as always, trying to write a superintelligent character when you’re kind of a dipshit just makes you sound like Mark Millar. I’m not sure which Mark that’s meaner to.
That’s all for Custodian. In the Mitchell corpus, it’s certainly less imaginative and depraved than Peachtree Carnivore — whether that makes it better or worse depends on your perspective. Come to think of it, at this point I’ve probably read more of Mitchell’s work than anyone else on the planet. By default that makes me your biggest fan, Mark! So, what’s next?
Nope. Give me The Pain.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Honk, an unrelated but better all powerful and genius demigod. Honk only uses their power to replace every instance of Honk with the word Honk, though.
How are we to educate the children? Moreover, the children — how shall they be educated? Debates on the subject have raged for centuries. In Emile, or On Education, Rousseau said, “Instead of keeping him mewed up in a stuffy room, take him out into a meadow every day; let him run about, let him struggle and fall again and again, the oftener the better; he will learn all the sooner to pick himself up. The delights of liberty will make up for many bruises.” In a 2013 email to Jeffrey Epstein, Pablos Holman said:
The carrot or the stick? Should children be induced to learn through the trial and error of hands-on experience, or through the temptation of busty anime babes? In the ’80s, the truth was somewhere in the middle. Children learned about the world and its myriad dangers by witnessing the misadventures of an adult woman pretending to be a nine-year-old abandoned by her parents.
Why “The Video,” as if this is an adaptation of an existing intellectual property? Was there a Kid Safe board game or track suit I’m not aware of? Regardless, parents could obtain Kid Safe: The Video in 1988 through a promotion by its sponsor, cough syrup brand Triaminic. If anyone ever actually did this, the first thing they would see upon open hand palm slapping the tape into their $500 VHS player is a disclaimer informing them that they had made a terrible mistake.
Cowards. If Kevin Siembieda wrote this disclaimer it would have been twice as long and made clear that he didn’t endorse draculas, gin, or the many crimes of Jason Voorhees.
We open on a coffin and a carved stone bearing the name “Count Floyd” and— whoops, sorry. It looks like I have the wrong video. Someone must have recorded over my copy of Kid Safe with an old episode of legendary Canadian comedy series SCTV.
Yep, here he comes now, Count Floyd doing his trademark werewolf howl. And once again, I find myself in the position of having to explain some CanCon-ass shit. See, SCTV was a show about a fictional low-budget television network. Each fictional staff member played several roles across different fictional shows. Fictional news anchor Floyd Robertson, played by real actor Joe Flaherty, also appeared as fictional horror host Count Floyd, only Robertson didn’t really know what a vampire was, hence the howl.
Count Floyd is the host of Monster Chiller Horror Theatre, and tonight he’s got a movie about a girl named Kathy who’s left alone at home during a thunderstorm under a full moon. With no fanfare, we immediately cut to said girl…
…who is portrayed by then 41-year-old comedian Andrea Martin. Wait, shit. This is Kid Safe: The Video, only it takes place in the SCTV universe! And it stars two of the biggest names of that show that aren’t John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara, Harold Ramis, Martin Short, or Dave Thomas!
Andrea immediately begins hamming up the joint, walking around in her pigtails and oversized t-shirt like she’s acting out a Thunder Bay pervert’s extremely specific sexual fantasy. I think they gave her prop braces and she can’t quite speak properly in them, so she sounds like she’s talking around a mouthful of dip for the entire runtime.
Unsettled by the large, empty, dark house in which she finds herself alone, Kathy does what I always did when the eerie silence of nighttime solitude started to get to me as a child — she turns on the TV. But whereas I found movies like Vampiros Lesbos and The Toxic Avenger, which had no effect on my development whatsoever, Kathy encounters a werewolf film, a news report about boy scouts mauled by a bear, and a violent car crash.
She is so frightened by this spectacle of fur and fiery carnage that her hair briefly becomes a majestic eagle in flight.
So she does what we all do when we’re freaked out — make cinnamon toast. What, you never made a nice piece of cinnamon toast after seeing a kid’s head get exploded like an overripe pumpkin at the beginning of The Toxic Avenger?
Kathy climbs up onto the counter to reach the bread, then goes back for the cinnamon. Spinning around the spice rack, she discovers her parents’ secret gin that they store directly next to the pills in case of emergency suicide.
“This always calms my parents’ nerves,” she says as she reaches for it and unscrews the cap. The most charitable read here is that Kathy’s parents are irresponsible 18th century alcoholics who would do well to get themselves off of Gin Lane and onto the straight and narrow road of Beer Street.
I mean, why else would they leave their child home alone in the middle of the night, especially given that she demonstrates all of the self-preservation skills of a lemming? The videogame ones, not the real animals. We all know by now that the image of lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff was spread by Disney in the film White Wilderness, wherein they deliberately killed a bunch of those little guys, right?
The official Disney family museum claims that the director of that “documentary” acted without Walt Disney’s knowledge or approval, but we’re talking about a guy who once said “It’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way. And I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up. Nothing can change that.” You really think this dude would care about killing some ice rats if it got him his money shot?
Where was I? Oh yeah, Kathy says “party time” and starts guzzling gin.
Emboldened by the sweet, sweet juniper berry taste of gin, Kathy investigates a sound at the other end of the house. It proves to be nothing but a tree scraping on a window, and all seems well — but recall Chekhov’s toaster.
Kathy rushes face-first into a kitchen filled with more smoke than a ’90s goth club. She discovers the culprit and attempts to remove the toast from the deadly appliance, but quickly learns that toaster equals hot. It feels like we’re watching a baby from a race of incorporeal energy-based aliens take on the form of an adult woman and discover all of the various agonies of the flesh in rapid succession.
Luckily, there’s a solution to Kathy’s predicament. Can you spot it?
That’s right! >USE FORK ON TOASTER
If your kid is this stupid, leaving them home alone is how you free yourself of the responsibility of parenthood when you don’t feel like waiting around for measles to get the job done. But against all odds, Kathy survives electrocution and stumbles around the house, knocking shit over and getting spooked by her own shadow. Near death, she grasps at the phone and dials 911, hollering that there’s a “real emergency” in her house before immediately hanging up.
Having notified the appropriate authorities, she crawls back into the kitchen to slather her burn in butter. Alas, no butter is to be found! She considers applying peanut butter to her blistering hand, then decides no, that would be fucking stupid. Instead, she squirts ketchup all over her face.
We are watching a prehistoric ghost trapped in a meat prison try to escape from a world it is incapable of understanding. For the thing that is Kathy, life is ceaseless pain — one negative sensory input after another with no rhyme or reason. The next one is the sound and flash of sirens outside.
The inside of her skull now mostly full of ketchup and crispy, randomly-firing neurons, Kathy has already forgotten that she dialled 911 five seconds ago. She interprets this stimulus as the arrival of threatening aliens intent on studying the brain of the world’s most unlikely child to survive infancy. Upon opening the door, she realizes her mistake — it’s just a firefighter!
Haha, no. Having never been exposed to basic earth concepts, Kathy assumes that the firefighter is an alien with a “laser axe” out to get her. She flees, ketchup-soaked, directly into a cop and paramedic.
The cop is Stephen Lee, whom you might remember as “Chorgon” on The Next Generation or the fussy carpenter on Seinfeld. The paramedic? Shuko Akune, who appeared on The Wizard and was the voice of blindfold ninja Jinx in the GI Joe movie where they find out that Cobra isn’t just a terrorist organization but a centuries-old plot by an underground civilization of bioengineering snake people to turn the entire human population into snake people. I’m talking going snakehouse, man!
Ernie and Tina clean the sauce off of Kathy then immediately start bickering like an old married couple about how best to address the presence of an axe-wielding invader from beyond the stars. That invader turns out to be…
Meshach Taylor?? One year after Mannequin, three years before Mannequin 2: On the Move, and during the second season of Designing Women? Indeed. And what happens next is such an incredible tonal shift that I had to remind myself what I was watching. While ostensibly explaining to Kathy all of the dumb shit she’s done over the past ten minutes, Ernie the cop and Marty the firefighter engage in a battle for social dominance
The two one-up each other’s comments, both striving for the last word. To what end? I ask you, for what reason does any man do anything? To impress women.
Even when they collaborate to sing an impromptu number about the importance of stopping, dropping, and rolling, Ernie takes his chance to get near Tina when Marty’s back is turned.
This false emergency becomes the stage upon which these two men wage open warfare for the heart of their fair colleague, who for her part seems to assume that her coworkers are simply being friendly towards her. How wrong she is!
Ernie and Marty’s struggle is as intense as it could be before an actual physical conflict exploded in this tastefully-appointed 1980s kitchen. Marty’s certainly got the edge in physical fitness, but Ernie’s got a loaded firearm. I’m picturing a knock-down-drag-out single take fight that sees guns pulled and sent skittering out of reach, bottles of gin wielded as improvised blunt weapons, and heads smashed through wooden cabinets, American Movie style.
When Tina is trying to show Kathy how to perform CPR, Ernie dives onto the ground like he’s trying to avoid contact damage with loose fentanyl. They bicker over who gets to drive her back to the big house all of the emergency services live in, because I guess she walked here.
After their apparent exit, they definitively prove that Kathy should be fitted with rubber mittens and locked in her room whenever her parents have a key party to go to. Tricking her into opening the door by saying they know her folks (from a key party), they barge back in and demand that Kathy answer their safety riddles like a three-headed sphinx where two of the heads are trying to bone down the third one.
But the score is not yet settled! Ernie attempts to crush Marty’s ribs in a perverse rendition of the Heimlich maneuver. Only Tina’s intervention prevents this scene from becoming a grim image etched into young Kathy’s mind for the rest of her life.
Tina informs the two men that she cannot have hot apple pie (sex) with Ernie, nor hot apple pie with melted cheese (sex with melted cheese) with Marty. Her boyfriend is picking her up from the site to which she was dispatched by a 911 operator to take her on a date.
They rush after her out of the house. But moments later, there’s another knock on the door. A man’s voice says that his car broke down and that he’s a friend of Kathy’s parents.
But she’s developed a modicum of survival abilities — not enough to avoid drowning in the toilet, but enough not to let strangers into her home. Actually, she just assumes it’s Ernie trying to trick her again.
It’s fucking Jason? From being Jason?
He gives a shrug and tells his friends they’ll have to try next door. His friends include a witch, a werewolf, and Megamind.
Hold on. What the hell is this supposed to mean? Are we meant to infer that these four horror villains have teamed up to murder children, but are somehow bound by vampire rules re: needing an invitation? Were they on a wacky road trip and their car really did break down? What are they hoping to find next door, a telephone or candidates for the flesh tithe? If Kathy’s parents had been home and opened the door, would the entire family have been massacred by machete and mind bullets? What madman directed this thing?
Oh. Sure. The From Beyond guy. The Re-Animator guy. Fun fact: Kid Safe is one of only two films that our pal StuGo rocked the triple credit on. The other one? Stuck, a movie that opens with Mena Suvari hitting Stephen Rea in her car and spends the next hour depicting him writhing in agony, embedded in her windshield.
Funner fact: Stuart Gordon also holds a story credit on Space Truckers, the kickass straight to video Hopper/Dorff sci-fi comedy written by Ted Mann, who had excellent taste in drugs.
Kathy’s propensity for self-destruction stands in stark contrast to Stephen Rea’s near-superhuman will to live. She has none of the fighting spirit of Achilles in Robot Jox. As such, I give Kid Safe: The Video a Castle Freak out of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and do not recommend it as a substitute for adequate child care and supervision. I do, however, recommend Fortress for this purpose.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Brockway FAMOUSLY Loves the Meat Milly who had no idea Count Floyd existed outside of Ed Grimley episodes.