Author: Michael Swaim
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Greetings, fellow Squeeg. I am humbled that so many of you emerged from your chrysalises for this, and there will be pseudopod soaking pools made available following the presentation. Please refrain from vibrating each others’ applause-organelles until the end.
Our invasion of the pathetic world known as Earth is nearly upon us, and as such our science and recon teams have returned with a trove of fresh information that will make subjugating the ape-men a fairly simple matter. By gathering what the humans call “’90s video game ads,” we believe we have cobbled together a full picture of their social structures and any potential resistance they may muster against our forces.
Let us begin.
Here we see the inherently craven nature of humanity of full display. Note the delight father and son share as they manhandle their gaming robots. They show absolutely no concern for the small man being kicked to death, easily visible through their view-port. Instead they gaze creepily at one another under the banner of “domestic violence,” which can only take the form of bare-ass whipping with controller cords. These two humans are easily distracted, and can be probed without risk.
Here we see a stark example of human cruelty – a man jamming his crotch into a gaming robot with or possibly without its consent. His penis, thus digitized, is projected onscreen at larger-than-life size to stoke the user’s ego. So fascinated by his own phallus is he, he has neglected to lay hands on his mate, immediately reneging on the promise of domestic violence. Humans are a fickle and erratic bunch.
This gentleman, clad in the traditional garb of an Earth zookeeper, proudly displays the lower animals he has confined to a tiny handheld prison. Also it’s pretty racist.
The suggestion that one devour a sentient creature is bad enough, but here we see the shocking lack of hygiene which is standard for humans. Note the filthy fingernails and runny feces spread across the lower cracker. Our top scientists also take this image as evidence that the human fist may be detachable, and should be avoided at all costs.
Yet again, the human need for tiny windows filled with simple colors and lights is prized above a potential mate. It is our contention that the species may soon wipe itself out through sheer lack of procreation. Nevertheless, we recommend a full-scale invasion in the near future, as they appear to have set their sights on Saturn.
If you lacked the conviction that humanity must be subjugated, look no further than this sacrilege. The quote in question originates in Edge Magazine, the planet’s leading periodical on the topic of edging. Humans would rather coax each other to thunderous orgasms than submit to the will of the holy one, blessed be He.
What’s blue and pisses all over everything? The Alderian Schraktbeest, as we all know. Not only do the humans crudely co-opt our own bestiary, they have forced an unwitting female to birth a creature full of spikes, wearing shoes, and with drink in hand. Her genitals, presumably, are in ruin. Also, note along the bottom that the Earthlings have begun to dabble in rudimentary palindrome technology, meaning it’s only a matter of time before they sit on a potato pan, Otis.
WARNING: the humans have developed the ability to submerge indefinitely. Females are attracted to the blue mating spikes displayed by this male, presumably leading to the birth of the blue thing that pisses everywhere. The nearby hash pipe is merely more evidence of their depravity.
There’s no other way to say it: that man is sexually assaulting a Sega Game Gear. On the bright side, those planning our offensive strategy believe we can blind our opponents simply by fondling their genitals over a protracted length of time, making our invasion all the simpler. See how the fools broadcast their weaknesses!
This is a photorealistic rendering of the human birthing process. As the shrieking progeny rips its mother in twain, it is already being prepared for battle by a cadre of vicious mutants whispering words of death into its ears. And don’t worry about the implied threat…our best minds are currently working on a weapon capable of delivering triple trouble, for which the Earthlings will be woefully unprepared.
It’s becoming clear that humans do most of their gaming in the nude. This puts us at a distinct advantage, since we do most of our conquering in fully-mechanized battle suits. Admittedly, our terran merchandologists had many conflicting interpretations of what in all the Star Hells may be happening here. Their Trick Style conclusions may be off, and catastrophically so.
The humans appear to make love as we do. When a suitable mate has been selected, they are targeted for a full cloaca evacuation. All fluids, all waste, all at once. “THE EAGLE HAS LANDED,” they call it. Such allure could end up testing the loyalty of our soldiers.
Some of you may have taken issue with my repeated assertion that there is little separation between mankind’s genital apparatus and their gaming robot. I trust this will put the matter to rest. Whether or not such fondling leads to the aforementioned blindness, we are vigorously testing on our abductees. Unfortunately, so far most of them seem to enjoy it. Curse the indomitable spirit of these creatures and their rupturing pelvis tubes.
Here a human female describes her son’s genitals to another, who admits to electrically torturing someone named Johnie, an objectively incorrect way to spell Johnny. We must assume from this she has no son, and instead stalks the night, looking for young boys’ genitals to plug into wall sockets. How can our invasion fail when they turn against one another in such numbers? When mere proximity to something penis-like destroys their instincts and language centers?
Curse these beasts. How can creatures so repulsive, so foreign… be so like us? By the pleasure ferreted trousers of Squarr, these Earth monsters are unpredictable. Yet by studying ’90s video game ads, and ’90s video game ads only, we have uncovered the heart of humanity, and it is ripe for the plucking. These ghost-trapping robot rapists will soon swear fealty to the Squeeg Imperium! All hail Tuxibo, Emperor of Saturn and Lord of Never Misconstruing Things!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsors and Hot Dog Supremes: Zach and Eva, notoriously untentacled and probeless. Trust them with your orifices, human!
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Upsetting Day: Cemetery Man
Categories
Ape Week: Spymate 🌭
Spymate is the kind of movie you throw on on a lazy Sunday morning, when your opera plans fall through, or when you feel like hammering yourself in the crotch in film form. From the director of Air Buddies and Most Vertical Primate, it’s a movie only worth watching if you’re being paid to write about it. But is it worth reading about? Probably also no, but what the hell, we’re here.
Our saga begins with perhaps the most shocking images of all, the titles of two reputable production companies.
That’s right, this movie wasn’t farted out of some guy’s camcorder; it was farted out of the labor of a hundred human beings including celebrities and everything. That doesn’t make it not a fart, just an expensive one.
As if to prove that very point, we are then whisked away to a desert wasteland where one lonely chimp is toddling over the dunes like John Wick if he wore a wildly problematic “Arab guy” outfit.
This turns out to be a rescue attempt, as Minkey the Monkey must save his spy partner from a hostage situation. In a profession where you’re allowed to have any name you want, this dude goes by “Mr. Muggins.”
A chimpanzee sword fight ensues, while lots of guys dressed like stock terrorists “speak native language.” Always a good sign when the subtitles are afraid to call out any particular ethnicity. I’m sure those actors are speaking fluent Arabic, and not a broad parody of same.
Fortunately, Minkey’s packing a hang glider and enough C4 to cause an international incident. That monkey just absolutely reduced several men to chunky pink pudding. USA! USA!
But Mr. Muggins has seen enough of the horrors of war. As his nostrils flare with the stench of burnt human flesh, he confides this to Minkey.
Yeah, no shit, we had to send a monkey to save you. Sir, you’re no James Bond, or even James Bond’s orangutan.
Our heroes are aided in their mission by a classic “man in the van.” If you’re wondering whatever happened to the mom from That ’70s Show…uh, she died. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I’m sure Deborah Jo Rupp would rather we think of her as dead than as being in this movie.
The screen wipes and a chyron says “10 years later.” Considering that chimpanzees only live about thirty years, we have to assume Minkey is off on a beach somewhere, flinging shit and masturbating like all retirees. Even Muggins has left the spy game behind, and instead taken on a job so tedious his daughter has to remind him what it is in the sweatiest exposition scene ever shot.
Minkey, in fact, now works at the circus, because the life of a slave to human entertainment is a harsh and bitter one. His act, such as it is, involves flying around on a jetpack only to land and calmly walk into the venue so no one even sees him doing that.
Minkey’s jetpack shenanigans are short-lived though, as we’re then introduced to the movie’s primary villain, Richard Kind slumming it so hard that it makes actual slums seem like garish Trumpian penthouses.
See, Mr. Muggins’ expositing daughter is a science genius, to such a degree that the local newspaper puts her on the front page, presumably bumping a piece about a raccoon hitman to page two.
Dr. Farley (Kind) tricks her into getting into his limo so he can kidnap her, a fact he allows himself to feel really good about.
No shit dude, she’s twelve.
Then this brilliant master criminal sends Papa Muggins a video admitting to the kidnapping, so that rather than just going missing, his daughter can force him to team up with his old partner for one last mission (at least until Spymate 2: ‘Panzee Panic).
Muggins re-recruits this innocent and aging animal, as well as his four circus performer pals, because apparently the way you become a spy is to ask any spy if it’s cool if you spy with them.
Easy as that, we’re back in the game. Time for some spy shit. And where would a spy be without their gadgets? This time around, the monkey is given not one, but two guns, and a little suit that makes him look almost exactly like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.
For this he is rightly jailed, with his own cute little convict outfit and everything.
Just kidding. That’s actually part of an elaborate flashback that fills in Minkey’s backstory, lest anyone doubt the veracity of this movie about a monkey spy. That’s how we learn that Mike Muggins met Minkey when he was ordered to take him out and drown him for the government, but didn’t have the heart. Coward.
Back in the present, the plucky duo track down a person of interest, which takes them all the way to Jamaica, a sequence which I’m sure will be handled with the same level of racial sensitivity the film has shown so far.
The person in question is Dr. Amour, a sex kitten superscientist who’s only in the movie so she can do a James Bond woman-emerges-from-the-ocean scene, then slide conveniently into the background where she gets no character development whatsoever. Probably for the best.
While Muggins clumsily hits on her, one of Richard Kind’s goons spies on them using a special spy camera capable of zooming in while having a bunch of shit in the way block your view.
Luckily, Minkey is there to snap the albino’s neck. Whew, that was a close one!
Less fortunately, the movie then forces us to watch a whole sequence with the circus performers, totally chimp-less, with no bearing on the plot whatsoever.
I know what you’re thinking: final destination? Do they all get decapitated by boards flying off the back of a truck? Let’s say yes and move on…
…to yet another quick encapsulation of an entire people, this time in Japan. The chimp bows over and over, encouraging others to bow back in what the Japanese consider an orgy. You can tell because Minkey is clearly sucking his own dick.
Meanwhile, old man Muggins mugs and gags an innocent bystander so he can steal their clothes. We never check on this man again, so it’s safe to say he at least pisses and shits himself before anyone comes to his rescue. Spies are cool!
The albino guy reports in to Richard Kind, after which Minkey hangs from a departing chopper.
Incidentally, that’s how the production ran through four of the seven Minkeys they were allowed to kill. Anything for film.
Kind then invents his own slur for chimps. More like Richard UNkind, amiright?
The action shifts to an arctic base as Muggins and Dr. Amour – the ocean woman – struggle to keep up. Probably because they think compass directions are relative rather than concrete.
Minkey himself pauses briefly to meet Pat fucking Morita and train as a ninja, which in this case means somersaulting around for a while and kicking Pat in the nutsack so hard that he briefly turns into a stuntman.
The villain keeps Muggins’ daughter pacified by pretending to be him, which yields a shot that will live forever in my nightmares: a man ripping his own face off to reveal Richard Kind.
After that stops working, she tries to escape but is stopped easily by some guards because, again, she’s twelve. There’s nothing difficult about this.
Minkey departs his training montage after all the ninjas prostrate themselves to a golden idol of him, because apparently ninjas don’t care if they break the First Commandment.
It’s shortly after this that Minkey infiltrates Kind’s secret base, where he runs into his old friend the albino goon and snaps his neck a second time for good measure.
Muggins and Amour finally join the party, causing the bad guy to do the most Richard Kind thing possible: immediately give up.
Pat Morita jumps in to help kick some butt even though he explicitly said he wouldn’t, and Minkey celebrates their reunion by showing everyone what an avid eater of puss he is.
The crew steal a snowmobile to get away, and naturally Mike Muggins decides to ride with the hot chick, leaving his daughter and partner to figure their own shit out.
Everyone snowboards away, and it turns out the third time’s a charm for our main goon, who gets shot by a monkey and then swallowed by an avalanche, as we all must someday.
This is met with general approval.
Unwilling to trash just three celebrity legacies, the very end of the movie sees the President charge our spies with another mission. The President in this case is played by Barry Bostwick, doing one scene over video and cashing that paycheck faster than a chimp can snap an albino’s neck.
In the end, Spymate is a sloppy hacked-together mess of a movie, so naturally it took four people to write it. Hey, that’s the same as this column!
And with that, Minkey is off again, to his next thrilling adventure: starring in Nope.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: M Jahi Chappell, who also just came out of retirement to rip the limbs off an albino.
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Upsetting Day: Wake in Fright 🌭
Just after midnight, outside the last Tower Records in existence, deep in the bowels of one of Wuhan’s apartment cities, a lonely, pixelated saxophone plays. Rifling through his yellow plastic bag and grasping at hope is a desperate man on his way to nowhere. He’s got a date with a black box the size of a stack of pizzas. He just bought…laserdiscs in the rain.
This is of course the ongoing column-within-a-column where I dissect weird movies my Dad made me watch way too young because he was excited to have scored the laserdiscs. DVDs in the snow has been suspended; apologies to its many fans.
When the pater familias sat me and my brother down to choke on today’s film, he said it was “a cult classic” and “represented Australia perfectly.” I was already old enough to know that meant desolation and scorpion toxin- six – but what I hadn’t counted on was how little else there really is to the continent.
This movie represents Australia perfectly the same way vegemite represents Australia perfectly: by being disgusting and baffling anyone raised in a society. To this day, every time someone tells me a film “perfectly encapsulates Australia” that seems to be code for lots of shots of empty hellscape and people being unrepentantly brutal to one another. Sometimes Guy Pearce is there.
1971’s Wake In Fright falls squarely into one of my Dad’s favorite laserdisc subgenres, “imported foreign movies where nothing happens.” You spend the entire first half of the movie waiting for a plot to spin up before realizing “oh, wait, him rambling around talking to dipshits is the plot.” But unlike your average early ’70s hippie bullshit snoozer, Wake In Fright has the added benefit of making you feel greasy and scummy the entire time, like a movie made entirely of Ren & Stimpy extreme closeups.
This climaxes in a sequence so shocking I’m going to talk about it later to force you to read the whole article (here’s a hint: piles of dead kangaroos!).
In a nutshell, Wake in Fright tells the story of what happens when you’re broke and wasted in the Australian outback, but with a little less sandy penetration than you’re imagining.
The opening sequence takes place at a schoolhouse so remote that if you order DoorDash to it it costs you your firstborn child and several liters of blood (plus convenience fee). The school and the hotel that comprise the town duel across some railroad tracks over who can be dumpier, and both win. Then we find out the movie is based on a book, so you know you’re in trouble.
Like our protagonist, a shitty schoolteacher who gets waylaid by yokels while on his way back to Sydney to meet his girlfriend, the film takes a number of leisurely pit stops to soak up local color, by which I primarily mean a bar where people bet on coin tosses and treat it like a goddamn fight club.
Really, I can’t stress enough that a full twenty minutes of this acclaimed movie is watching people toss coins, bet on whether the coins will come up heads or tails, and then process those bets. It’s like if Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead was sent by England to colonize aboriginal land.
This was the point in the movie I remember asking Dad if we really had to watch this on my birthday, to which he replied “twice because you just talked.” As for the rest of Acts I and II, this lovingly restored masterpiece of Aussie cinema (or “chunderwuzzer” as they call it) is essentially one long beer commercial, which also feels achingly right.
The teacher gets a couple beers at his hotel, takes a train and has some train beer with the train people, then heads to a bar for a couple beers. To establish that he loves his girlfriend, we even get a flashback where he rubs a beer lovingly on her titties.
Australia, if you’re trying to communicate that you all have to piss very badly most of the time, I’m reading you loud and clear. Speaking of clear, that’s the same color this guy’s pee has never been. The one time he does drink water, it’s from a single water glass that the whole train shares, because Australia is a primitive land where water is scarce and backwash belongs to the community.
After he gambles away all his money, he goes on a drunken bender through the outback meeting a host of colorful hillbillies. It’s like Deliverance but if there was no rape and no one was forcing you to do it, you’re just an asshole who wants to gawp at yokels. Yet even though no humans die, Wake in Fright somehow feels so much grosser than Deliverance that the yokels from Deliverance probably use it as training material.
Somewhere along the way he shares a meal with Donald Pleasence, which I bring up because the steak cost a dollar and came with fries and unlimited free coffee. This comprises the most pleasant concept presented in the film.
Despite this largesse, it’s impossible to come away without the impression that Australians are a sad and violent cadre of drunken wastrels scrabbling in the dirt like dogs just to forget their awful lives for one fleeting moment. People keep asking us “don’t you like it here?” like those Twilight Zone folks who had to stay positive all the time. Also, their accents are so thick that the movie sometimes has subtitles even though they’re speaking English, or at least their pitiable approximation of it, mate.
The teacher whose name escapes me takes a brief pause from downing beers like shots to try and cheat on his girlfriend, the ale-tittied one, but is saved from infidelity by the fact that the second he gets his pants undone he fully vomits the entire contents of his stomach right by the lady’s head. This is, I’m going to assume now and forever, how all Australians make love. Finally, a lovemaking scene I can show to my wife and say “See? It’s normal!”
Empty and therefore ready for more beer, our hero heads back inside and we spend ten minutes on a montage of the evening’s entertainment, which is betting on when a pregnant dog will pop and waterboarding Donald Pleasence with beer while he stands on his head – you know, party stuff.
The climax of the movie comes later that night when he goes out into the brush with some buddies. Things start off strong when it appears that the ghostbusters have arrived.
Unfortunately, we find out it’s the Australian ghostbusters, by which I mean drunken assholes hunting kangaroo. They kill one baby kanga with a hunting dog, one with their car, and one with a gun, like trying to rack up a combo multiplier in a Tony Hawk game.
Then they just generally massacre kangaroos with rifles for so long that it goes from day to night and you forget what the rest of the movie was about, before bitterly remembering it was nothing and you’ve wasted yet more of your precious life.
Speaking of wasted life, the footage of murdered roos is actually just…real footage of guys murdering kangaroos. The film crew tagged along with some hunters because it was cheaper than effects, and I suspect this is the only reason the movie’s still talked about. This was what weirdos had to watch before the advent of rotten.com.
As a result, we’re treated to dead and dying kangaroos shot multiple times, entrails out, pouches ritually defiled, the works. The film crew was actually so disgusted by the drunken hunters that they faked an equipment failure to end the night early. What’s incredible, though, is that just after experiencing that, they decided making a bunch of other people experience it would be cool too. Hey, so did I! Here’s a man wrestling with a kangaroo until he’s able to slit its throat.
That’s also the part where Dad leaned over to me and repeated “Cult. Classic.” I settled into my oshkosh and sipped a juicebox apprehensively. This movie makes you feel gross all the way down, like a turd wrapped in boogers. Then it proudly proclaims to be representing what Australia’s really like, and I have no reason to question that except for the lack of venomous scorpions.
Our guy ultimately does one smart thing and tries to shoot himself in the head to get out of Australia, but instead he wakes up in the hospital, presumably with a beer IV, and the doctors call it an accident.
The key takeaway here is that no one made this man do these things. The movie acts like he’s stuck in Hell, but he could hop a train out of there at any time, he just chooses not to. He wrestles and sleeps in shit and flies and then goes home; that’s the whole plot. At the end he just goes back to being a schoolteacher and tells his pal about what amounts to his Wild Spring Break.
You did it, Wake in Fright. I fear Australia. I fear her and her half-formed progeny. Between this, The Proposition and Fury Road, I believe Australia may be the literal gateway to the underworld, and I hope I never set foot in her until I’m finally called home to her cursed shores for my wicked deeds. Additionally, g’day to any Aussie fans out there!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Kyle Campbell, who fought extra hard in every boxing match he’s had against a kangaroo purely out of spite for the animal.