Category: LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Frank Frazetta Museum 🌭

Post author By sissyneck
Post date 11/22/2022
7 Comments on Learning Day: The Frank Frazetta Museum 🌭

Yes hello to this weiner bunch. Well a while back i started to get that real strong PULL in my head again and a course the sorta scatman crothers wakin-dreams, i couldnt remember the details but I knew they was real important and tellin me it is time again to journey fourth, this time to the East for reasons there to be disenveiled. I didnt even have to tell LaRene she also sensed it so she packed up about a dozen loaves of zuchine bread for me (with nuts even though i dont like em she knew I’d need the protein) and I told Trayton: be good just cuz i’m gone for a bit doesnt mean you can start sleepin in Rabbit’s dog-crate again, and they saw me out to the 92 civic we keep around for hi-way driving and hugs of course and off I went!

Well we had to jump the battery first but then off I went! With nary a map or destination only my kinda ESP GPS and my 1900HOTDOG Diners Club Card but I trusted that would be enough.

And pretty easygoing at first honestly just me and the road and some music from the library and I got all the way to Alliance, Nebraska when i got my first sense of: somethins about to change. So I asked the fella at the Maverik there (nice kid, i was offerin to trade him some zuchine bread for slices of the older pizza in the warmer and he said just take em), i asked him “When’s the next Maverik after this one?” and he said “Goin’ east?” and i said yep and he said “Nope, aint any more Maveriks that way only Flyin-Js.” which we both spit on the ground about that and I thanked him and went outside lookin at the gatherin darkness and took it in that i had reached the verily edge of my known realm.

Well i’ll not go into detail about the rest of the journey but it was some days and nights an there were many ventures and happenins along the way. There was the Corn Wolf of course and I had to answer his Vittle-Riddles to gain passage. And then outside a St. Louis was the beautiful but treachersome Sauce Sirens what emit a seductful and enticin’ hickory-vinegar smell to lure the unsuspectin and I had to plug up my nose with the zuchine bread lest i dash the Civic up on the bales there. And then the fearsome Anabaptist Kratom Raiders who was actually pretty nice once i offered to share my pizzas with em but always followin that PULL in my head like some kinda brain mapquest: East and Easter still into strange lands with service-stations like i never seen before with bitcoin atms and interestin arts:

And candy-toys with unpleasant names:

What kinda tasted more like scabs than candy, but I think Trayton will like the jeep sticker.

And then at last ‘ppeared the twin stone guardians what told me i was pretty much arrived at my destination:

So i parked up the civic and patted her grateful-like for wasnt she a good an faithful steed and approached the portentious buildin what my brain was tellin me go inside there.

And upon openin up the door mine eyes did beheld a cavern of treasures most precious and beautiful!

Many of em which tempted me but I knew i had to follow my psychic guide to the ultimate end of my journey and so i stayed that path until i reached the far end of this treasury and this is what it was i had been called to witness:

So i nodded and said “yep” to myself and thats the spiritual part of this journey over.

And it’s pretty convenient that a quickly-resolved psychical urge helped advance this-here story about:

And yes right away there was a girl come up sayin sir theres a $15 required donation, which you know what? I paid it gladly because Frank Frazetta is a favorite artist of mine and this museum is the building what used to be his studio where i could look at many of his works up close for as long as i wanted. If your not sure you know who Frank Frazetta is I bet you do actually, like if you had a older cousin what made his own weapons than you probably seen these:

Or if your a fan of cool animal drawings that sometimes include human figures for scale:

And theres even a pretty strong 1900HOTDOG connection:

But if you STILL dont know who im talking about well surely there isnt anyone reading here today whos got this far in life without watchin what is for-real a masterpiece of rotorscoped animation i’m of course talking about when Frazetta teamed up with Bakshi and made:

Which in the museum they have it playin on a infinity loop:

A man could get trapped there til security poked im.

And you can probly see theres just all kinda special Frazetta memoriables all over the museum like pictures of Frank and his special friends such as Cobra:

And Clyde’s dad:

And Dave Mustaine’s understudy:

And i dont know who this one is:

But hes got that lollipop head so probably a actor? (Frazetta there you might could tell had a stroke near the end and had to relearn paintin left-handed)

So i’m enjoying myself learning about Franks life and neat pop-culture stuff but honestly mostly just looking at what to me is evidence that even though i cant really define it there is such a thing as talent and there’s people what have it and some mix of fortune and effort lets em make real good use of it, i mean look at how much life and sexy and personality there is in just this lil newspaper comic:

But then as i’m walking around i start to notice some things about this museum like its not the tidiest:

And somebodys been using the Fire-and-Ice tv for non-museum purposes:

And the workers are just kinda setup wherever with dunkin-donuts right next to the million-dollar arts:

And then I hear the gift-shop girl talkin to the lady doin the tours and to the older guy who is just kinda wanderin around and arguin about whose car has enough room for the stuff for a trade-show and tryin to explain what “hi-res images” means to each other and did they e-mail em and we better call Will to make sure and you know what? I worked in enough disfunctionin samwhich shops and pizzarias and gas-stations in my time to know that this all is addin up to:

This museum of priceless irreplaceable and pretty much iconical art of a once of a generation talent is: Family-Owned and -Operated.

So some of you might be like me and just even that phrase brings up black-and-white war memories of owners’ kids comin in real late to make themselves a pizza after you already cleaned up for the night or ugly husband/wife arguments happening right in front of the customers who just wanna pay for there slimjims or the one son takin money from the til sayin his dad said he could (but he didnt) or findin out you accidentally took a side in some anscient family feud by sayin hi to the one sister when she came in so you can guess i needed a minute here to process. Out i went to breathe a little bit but now that mine eyes were opened to the nature of this outfit, stuff i had kinda noticed on the way in now had a differnt countenance to me. Like I seen the place didnt look super kept, but first I thought maybe it was on purpose to show how the Artist drew Insparation from his Environment and cant we dissern parallels between his daily world and his creative outputs like:

RUIN OF ONCE-GREAT CIVILAZATION

MANS VIOLENSE AGAINST NATURE

THUNDERSOME MOUNTS WHAT HAVE WELL-EARNED THERE REST

THE INEVITABILTY OF DECAY AND ENTERPY

FELINE-SENSUALITY

AND SEXUAL FRUSTATION

But now it didnt seem real epic and heroic anymore just more like no-one was botherin to keep up the place. So i was a little bummed but I still wanted to get some tradin cards so I went back in and the girl at the counter at first seemed annoyed that i was askin questions about everything and she just kept saying: “That was my grandpa’s I don’t know anything about it.” But then her mom came by and accidentally took a sip of the wrong Dunkin Donuts and made a yucky face and said “Ew that one has sugar!” and the girl rolled her eyes and I said “My wife does that exact same thing haha!” and the girl laughed and was like “So dramatic!” and the mom kinda embarassed smiled and said so do you want the tour? And I said sure and she started show-and-tellin me about her father-in-laws art and his life and i learned that Frank loved his wife Ellie very much and she was the one that made sure that his art was never too dirty or ungodly here is his painting of her:

Except heres one she thought WAS pornographic and blasphemous so before she died she made the kids promise that they would never-ever take it out to show it and they kept that promise…

…by keepin it on its easel and its the first thing you see when you walk in.

Frank himself was also intents on keepin things family-friendly, here’s a memo he wrote about Fire and Ice:

In case you dont want to read the whole thing he says he taught the actors how to KILL FRAZETTA STYLE and invented ROLLING UP NEWSPAPERS IN LUI OF PHONEY WEAPONS and was THE IRON HAND IN MAINTAINING THAT THE FILM BE KEPT CLEAN

AND

INOFFENSIVE

(no ironhand about the racism though)

And I learned other interesting things like how Frank had 4 kids including Frank Jr. (who was the guy wanderin around) and it was his idea to start the museum but the other 3 kids didnt want to donate the paintings they inherited so theyre pretty selfish but also when they sell theres, all of the paintings in the museum get more valuable so also theyre pretty dumb.

The Mom was real proud of her family too, she said how Frank Jr. coulda been a artist like his dad probly and Frank Jr. came around then and said yeah but when he got to anatomy classes that was like math to him and his brain doesnt work that way. (Also he told a pretty long story about how the guy from Metallica bragged about his real expensive bathroom and Frank Jr. didnt think much of that.) And the mom said that her own daughter (not the one working that day, a older one) was a excellent artist too and heres a album of her drawings so everyone can see how she “really captures the Frazetta Face.”

Which i wanted to see that but I got distracted by some other albums that were on the same table which were full of strange photos i didnt understand at first like:

They look fancy and famous like I SHOULD recognize em but I dont really. That couple on the right there looks pretty happy together though, something tells me their gonna be ok.

But then some of em started looking ACTUALLY familiar like hey.

I’m pretty sure that guy made Mission Earth!

And:

I think was she was the queen of pop!!

And then hold on just hold on is that…?

It totally is!

That’s Trilogy of Terror’s Karen Black!!!

And i think i remember reading about her wasnt she a big…

Oh yeah ok i know what these are now: Elrond Hubbard liked Frazetta and got him to do some of his book covers and I guess Frank went out to LA for some of their Sciencetonomy parties. Look: he kept the program too and put it in his scrapbook:

But where were we oh yeah we were gonna look at Frank’s granddaughters art which her mom said you could see she got some of her grampas talent, here we go:

And lookin at this well, is where my heart grew three sizes that day on the whole family-business thing. ‘Cause here’s this mom and dad surrounded by and curatin’ these real expensive master’s pieces but the thing they kinda talk most about and want to make sure everybody sees is the cute drawings their girl did when she was little, which: I can relate real hard. (And not just the parents, later I saw that somebody had covered up the kid drawings book with the scientomony scrapbooks and the daughter went over and made sure her big sisters book was back on top.) So anyway it made me think it’d be pretty weird and hard in a way i hadnt considered to have your dad/grandpa be real famous and talented and your probly torn between wanting to make a living from his work but also bein real tired of talkin about him to weird scifi nerds for your whole life. Like imagine if a big part of your job was signing books of art that you didnt make and didnt even write, just because you had the same name as your dad:

And probly practiced a lot to make your signature look like his, I guess.

Anyway they still had more kinda salty things to say about the other siblings and haters on Facebooks and such but for me now it was feelin like they were just about as bickery and ‘fectionate and shitty and lovey and lazy and doin-there-best as any other family and they were real nice to me personally and asked about where did i drive from and did i have any questions and take all the pitchers i want and gave me a discount on a book I knew LaRene would like…

…and told me what was a good place to get food (Alaska Pete’s, I got the Philly-Cheese-Steak Spring-Rolls to be like a local) and wished me safe-drivin home and even took a picture of me and Frank Jr.

And yeah maybe they never talked about the part of the museums history when Frank Jr. got arrested for breakin in with a backhoe and steallin about $20 million dollars worth of paintins but i guess maybe all i can say about that is: its probly good luck i never had access to a backhoe on MY worst night In the name of Jesus Christ amen.

Tags art, Best of 2022, fantasy, Free

LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Taoist Feces Exercise 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 11/18/2022
12 Comments on Learning Day: Taoist Feces Exercise 🌭

Hold on, this can’t be right. This DVD is called… Taoist feces exercise.

What a lucky mistranslation this must be of an ordinary kung fu style. How hilarious that the Chinese phrase for “self defense for seniors” is the same as our word for “feces.” Unless… no. No, this video couldn’t possibly be about… no. Impossible. This isn’t… no. No.

This is a kung fu style for pooping. I guess you have no reason to believe me and my Mandarin is not good enough to detect sarcasm, but I am 99% sure this is a kung fu style for pooping. Even if this wasn’t called Taoist feces exercise, I would recognize a man channeling the cosmos to shit his pants anywhere. Which raises the question, fucking what?

Taoist feces exercise is a series of ten tai chi movements sincerely designed to evacuate your bowels. They are demonstrated by 90-year-old Xuan Tongzi, sometimes by a waterfall, sometimes from a dimension beyond our understanding. The subtitles say he has a “florid complexion and bell-like voice” which are strange things to notice about a man flushing waste through his body with ancient magic. I would have probably said, “Xuan rides atop a torrent of diarrhea and that should be plenty of details by which to recognize or remember him.”

This martial art is perfect if you need to desperately poop forty minutes from now and have plenty of room to stretch. The ten skills cure more than “can’t poop,” though! There is a long and unlikely list of diseases it claims to eliminate. Again, maybe. These are not good subtitles, and I do not trust turd karate.

According to the video, these stretches should take care of your “hypertension high blood fat hyperglycemiacervical spondylosis hyperosteogeny and constipation and so on.” And maybe I’m cynical, but it seems suspicious that sitting down and nodding your head cures constipation but also a diverse bunch of medical problems found right next to each other on Wikipedia’s “List of diseases.” It’s like saying, “I’ve had plenty of sex partners! Milky Puppet, Chandra, Charlotte, Chelsie, Chair, and Chair!”

So let’s hold off on telling science some old guy in his pajamas solved hyperglycemia cervical spondylosis and focus only on the constipation. And about that, I have some good news: mother fucking time travel.

This started as a man dedicating his life to kung fu and then dedicating that kung fu to shitting, so I’m betting this was crazy before its meaning was beaten to death by language barrier. But if I’m understanding him correctly, which again– ridiculous, he knows you’re worried about pooping too soon. Don’t be. These movements will create time fluctuations in your bowels to hold your feces in stasis until you can get to a toilet. Maybe? All I know is I am so happy right now. This coot doing laxative tai chi said the words “time quantum from the time point of going to lavatory to relieve the bowels after.” What a miracle.

“I practice accumulative feces skill in last seven to eight decades,” Xuan tells us, his teeth snapping down on every inconceivable word. Whoever was in charge of his green screen knew the seriousness of this announcement and took away the crashing waves and cosmic wonder. He’s no sorcerer. He’s just a man in a television studio telling you he’s been storing pressurized waste inside himself for 80 years. “May our deaths be glorious,” he tells a toilet with a bow. “Whatever they call you.”

Find a safe place attached to an anus you trust, and let’s begin our movements.

The first movement is called “Head skill.” You look to the side, then up and down, sometimes chomping. As with everything else in Taoist feces exercise, I can’t be sure if his martial arts style includes random bite attacks or if he’s screaming in pain from snapping his neck around. There is no microphone on Xuan Tongzi. Whether he is shouting instructions or his last words as his colon turns inside out, there’s no way to tell. My theory is they recorded 55 minutes of whatever the Mandarin word for “AIIIIiiiIEeeeeeEE” is, then decided to do voiceover instead.

“Head skill” really is just looking around from a chair, so I think you got it. Let’s learn the next movement.

“Teeth granding skill” is similar to “Head skill,” but with less head. Bite, bite, bite, you shit-filled kung fu masters! We are now twenty percent done with Taoist feces exercise, and we have simulated a mild discussion. That’s the razor’s edge you didn’t know you were walking every time you had a conversation from the middle car seat.

I refuse to believe how close this is to nothing. Let’s get some more teeth granding information.

Okay, so you bite exactly 36 times and… then stir tongue? I know we’re watching an elderly madman crap his pajamas, but this got fucking gross.

Let’s move on to the next movement: “Rub waist with separate hands to reinforce kidney.”

This one seems easy. Scream nonsense, absolute chittering nonsense, while you swat at your kidneys. There doesn’t seem to be a wrong way to do it. Maybe I’m the idiot, but for some reason I thought we would be learning how to swirl some kind of mystical energy through our bodies, not reaching back and pinching crap out our holes like we’re toothpaste tubes. So far, this seems like something the first ape to discover constipation would have invented with the added slurp of some tongue stirring.

We’ve attacked the poop from the back, now let’s go at it from the front. Focus your tummy for “Abdomen kneading skill.” This is extra crazy when you consider how in the fiction this man lives in, he could have dedicated 80 years to death touch or levitation. Xuan probably trains alongside kung fu masters working to throw qi balls or bring the dead back to life, and he’s chosen to master rubbing his belly for maximum poop. If Xuan was in Street Fighter, half-circle back would make him eat a bowl of oatmeal and excuse himself.

Another thing I admire about Xuan is how he admits this might not work, but in a way that makes it seem like it’s your fault. For instance, if you have done all this and “bowel not be relieved still,” it’s up to you to make adjustments. Try closing your scapula backwards. Or shrink neck. That’s really his advice! Because everything about Taoist feces exercise is perfect! Try shrinking your neck, you prison-boweled coward!

“Face-washing skill” is useful in emergencies where you rubbed your feces in the wrong direction.

Let’s move on to the most important part of your digestive system– the back of the head. Snap your fingers against your skull in a skill Xuan calls “Sky-shaking drum.” This is the kind of excellent move-naming we were missing. If I had any notes for Taoist feces exercise, it’s how everything should have been called something like this. The tummy rub could have been “Naughty Bear Steals The Honey” and the kidney milking was obviously “Dirty Boy Fingers The Breakfast Sausage.” This move has some really specific instructions, so let’s learn more.

You’re going to want to really squeeze those antilobiums, but it’s a trick. You want your skull to think you’re building to some kind of sky-shaking drum climax, snapping and squeezing, then suddenly yank your hands away. It’s called Dominant Monkey Edges The Ear Canals, and it will make you shit.

I don’t have anything to add to this next one, so I’ll simply repeat Xuan’s instructions, which are also the name of the skill.

Rub ears

“Comb hair with fingers” builds on the face and ear rubbing we learned earlier with an added tapping. Remember to do this gently– sound is greatly amplified inside the body and if you frighten your feces it may never trust you again.

The next skill is called “Horse-riding step and move hand like clouds,” which is a big step up in difficulty from sitting on a dining room chair and pawing at yourself. With a wide stance, you summon and consolidate your qi around your pelvis, which should add some psychic damage to your farts.

In a movement Elvis Presley might call, “Say, Forrest Gump, show me that crazy little walk you just did there,” Xuan grabs each knee and wiggles it. This leads to disaster. He starts demonstrating a move he did not name, but definitely calls “Rubbing the diarrhea out of pant leg.”

Lick around the inside of your filthy mouth while you squash liquid poop into your slippers. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time. It takes some up to 80 years to master this technique.

It’s been a crazy workout, and depending on your quantum fluctuations, you are now either bursting with feces or covered in them. It’s time for “Cooling-down.” Start by rubbing yourself, doing your best to avoid erogenous zones.

When you’re starting to feel more comfortable, really go for it. You should look like a below average actor in a shampoo commercial. “The Beginner Mime Looks For His Wallet.” Spread your legs and rub until you’re evenly coated in everything your body rejected from breakfast. If you’re doing it right, positive energy will be swirling around you, the kung fu shit pervert. Okay, now stop.

The next skill is called “Get rid of the stale and take in the fresh.” You stand very still and let a cameraman film you while your viewers get increasingly confused.

I should mention this DVD is over an hour long, but not because Xuan had a lot to tell us. It repeats these movements over and over, and a weird amount of Taoist feces exercise is this old man standing very still while three seconds of ocean footage loop behind him. It was only on the third demonstration of “Standing,” when we got more details about what we should be doing here. And here is where we find out if you have become the poop master.

Without looking at the next gif, try to guess Xuan’s instructions.

You were right! You fill your thorax with air and pull up your anus! There is nothing left to teach you!

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Badger, ancient master of Shinto Piss Karate.

Tags Free, how-to, Martial Arts, VHS

LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Lydia Bugg’s Mancavin’ Redux

Post author By Lydia Bugg
Post date 11/14/2022
8 Comments on Learning Day: Lydia Bugg’s Mancavin’ Redux

Tags books, Lydia Bugg, men, redux

LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: NUDE Cigar Smoking

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 11/11/2022
10 Comments on Learning Day: NUDE Cigar Smoking

Tags how-to, sex, VHS

LEARNING DAY

Upse- LEARNING DAY??: How to Prepare and Administer Hypnotic Prescriptions

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 11/04/2022
9 Comments on Upse- LEARNING DAY??: How to Prepare and Administer Hypnotic Prescriptions

Tags books, hypnosis, medicine

LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Death Train

Death Train is a 1993 movie starring Pierce Brosnan. It is also a flop, a mess, and contains the most evil action I’ve ever seen perpetrated by a movie’s “heroes.” Here’s the trailer.

As you saw, this movie stars Pierce Brosnan AND Patrick Stewart AND Christopher Lee AND a couple other recognizable actors. It also gets called “Detonator”, in that trailer, because it’s a trailer for a VHS tape of Death Train – a made-for-TV movie they needed to trick people into buying.

Wow: what a box. I’d love to be glowered at by both those guys, from a shelf, in my 1993 media den. Also that box implies a thrilling conflict between Hero Brosnan and Looming Stewart. It would be fun to see those two face off. Now that I think about it, it would be mega-fun to see those two Face/Off. Two steely minds, flipping between having the most or least robust head hair. Follicle/Off ! But no: that is not this movie. You would have heard of that movie. Pierce and Patrick are boring allies in the movie Death Train aka Detonator aka 100 Minutes Of Phone Calls About Central European Rail Systems.

This movie is the perfect honeypot for capturing my attention. I’ve explored not one but two Pierce Brosnan movies for our website here. Why? Because he is my pop culture hero. Why? Because when I was impressionable, he played James Bond four times. As Bond, he imprinted himself on me. Like a mother duck, if that mother duck did one PAIN FACE over and over again and called that acting. That is James Bond, to me. I seek it wherever I can get it. And holy cow, this movie pits Pierce Brosnan against The Man With The Golden Gun (Christopher Lee). Its other main character is Jean-Luc Picard, doing the exact stuff “M” does in Bond movies (phone calls, British accent). And on a meta level, this 1993 movie is a key milestone of the Dalton-to-Brosnan Bond casting timeline. Brosnan almost became Bond in 1986. But Timothy Dalton got the role, made two Bond movies, almost shot a third film in 1990, and didn’t officially quit till 1994. As far as I can tell, here’s what happened next: Pierce Brosnan learned the role was open again around 1991. He spent the next few years re-auditioning, in public, by acting in every similar-ish movie he could find. His first effort toward that was Live Wire: The Movie Where Water Is Bombs. Did that flop? Yes. Did Pierce follow it up by starring in Death Train? Yes. He starred in a TV movie, with a few Bond-shaped elements, based on books by an Ian Fleming-shaped writer, because that’s less embarrassing than self-taping an action scene in Brosnan Manor’s backyard and mailing it to the Broccoli family.

See? Action! Somebody else held the camera and everything! Therefore, this is not sad. ALSO: this is astonishingly sad. Because when asked about this film by the media, Pierce did not admit the truth, and say he was angling for Timothy Dalton’s casino night cummerbund. Instead, he admitted a whole ‘nother truth, which is [TONE SHIFT INCOMING] this movie helped him forget his wife died. As you Avid Hotdoggers know, Pierce Brosnan spent the production of 1991’s Live Wire grieving. His wife passed away that year, after a long battle with cancer. (His wife was also a Bond Girl, which is both not relevant and mega-relevant.)

I had to know what Pierce did next. And when he made this movie, the Los Angeles Times did train-pun headlines about Brosnan resuming his career.

Ha! “Back on track” is right, L.A. Times. Toot toot: all aboard the Freshly Minted Widower Express! Because Death Train is indeed a train film. It’s overwhelmingly a train film. Its highlights are a few train-based action sequences, such as what I screencapped just now. In those sequences, Pierce and others do battle aboard THE DEATH TRAIN – a small, slow-moving train that contains a nuclear bomb.

This train is the coolest part of the movie and the least-cool part of the movie. On the one hand: action! On the other hand: THE DEATH TRAIN is three cars long, and ordinary-looking as hell. This is an impediment to even the most basic thrilling moments. For example, around the 87-minute mark, there’s a shot of a television screen inside a burning villain lair. The TV’s news anchor tells us “the death train waits, empty!”, because our heroes defeated the train’s villainous occupants. However, we’re seeing that small train on a tiny TV screen. At that combined scale, THE DEATH TRAIN looks like A LI’L CHOO-CHOO.

The movie wants us to feel like THE DEATH TRAIN is an unstoppable force of doom. But our eyes remind us THIS SMALL TRAIN could be stopped by any modest obstruction. One stalled truck, one fallen tree, one ambling cow – any of these impediments could’ve aced out Brosnan to be the film’s real hero. Speaking of heroes, they do not do all that much action in this movie. Most of the film features the (cheaper) thrill of discussions, and planning sessions, inside a Mission Control style office where Patrick Stewart tracks The Death Train’s location.

The VHS cover promises a tense battle between two famous actors. The actual movie is a list of European rail hubs. It’s one actor saying the word “Stuttgart” to the other actor one hundred times. This movie feels like that tank chase in GoldenEye, minus the entire chase, replaced by a Shakespearean actor listing each boring strasse und alle which the tank’s route incorporated.

This is a movie where all the key crisis points are a set of train junctions in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Slovenia. That’s because the film’s villains are trying to bring a bomb, by rail, from Germany to Iraq. That is a silly plan. It’s also a failed plan, because the film’s heroes stop the train and seize the bomb in Slovenia. This conclusion accidentally gets foreshadowed by the heroes’ command center map, because the map yada-yadas the entire Middle East.

Also: this film involves Slovenia! It bothers to acknowledge the existence of Slovenia. Weird! I’ll bet you have not thought about Slovenia in a while. Most people do not. Yet the climax of this Hollywood movie is set there. Why would they feature Slovenia? For the answer, let’s turn back to those yuk-it-up jokesters at the L.A. Times.

That’s right: they filmed this in an active European war zone. Presumably for budget reasons. If nothing else, it sounds like hotel rooms were not overwhelmed with tourist clientele:

Relatable! Whenever I’m on a business trip, and my hotel is overrun by ragtag freedom fighters, my first reaction is “ha ha, wow!” and my second reaction is to say “working hard or hardly working? Amirite? It’s cool that I’m saying that because we basically do the same job.” That’s what I always say, in hotels, to troops. Anyway, the filmmakers went ahead and wrote their real-life war zone into the fictional script. Probably so they wouldn’t have to set-dress it as a different, cooler place. And Pierce Brosnan brought his remaining family members to the site of that civil war, to hang out, while he filmed a movie where he speaks in two different sets of accents. Surprise: Pierce Brosnan accidentally feels like James McAvoy in Split whenever he talks in this movie. He plays “Mike Graham”, a British guy who is also a U.S. CIA agent and a Kentucky semi-nude motorcycle racer.

Brosnan’s character is supposed to be a British person whose accent has shifted after years of living in the United States. That’s a challenging accent to get right. Brosnan tackles that challenge by speaking with a British accent most of the time, plus a deranged sprinkle of his best guess at a Duke Of Hazzard voice. It’s jarring and also plain confusing, because they did not mic his lines very well, so it’s hard to tell what he’s saying in general, let alone when he pulls an Uncle Jesse. Also, that garbling might be for the best. Pierce doesn’t say anything great in this movie. When they do let him talk, he wishes he was racing his motorcycle, and he wishes he wasn’t working with A Woman. Because look out: there is one woman in the Hero Squad. She’s part of the mission because after years of being stuck in an office job, she’s finally asked Patrick Stewart nicely enough for permission to save the world.

The movie then spends whole scenes debating whether its one notable female character should be in the movie. In a heated exchange, Stewart pushes Brosnan to accept her by describing a dizzying array of her skills, Mad Libs style.

To Brosnan’s credit, his co-star Alexandra Paul is not super convincing as a Mary Sue mega-genius spy/hero. She is no better than anybody else at stopping that dumb little train. Also, at one point she says the villain’s bomb contains “fishtuhble” material. I think she meant to say “fissible”, or “fissionable”, or any other real word. And the rest of the movie displays similar mastery of what words mean:

Yee-haw to that, General Stewart! Also that’s not even the funniest weird thing Patrick Stewart does in his command center thingy. Because here’s another way this movie is borked: it’s got the sloppiest and least lucrative product placement I’ve ever seen. Only two products get “placed” in this movie. They are a bottle of Pepsi…

…and cans of Coca-Cola.

Which is…illegal? Or at least breaking a contract? You can’t place competing products in the same movie! Especially if they’re the most famous rivalry in the history of products! Both companies probably get their money back for that. Also each of them should be furious about how their products get depicted in this movie. Starting with Pepsi: as you saw, Patrick Stewart holds one. What is the context? A grim setback for our heroes. All our main characters watch grainy news footage of the terrorists chucking the corpses of murdered hostages off of the Death Train, as a warning to not get in their way. It’s legitimately grisly. The movie then shows us Heroic Woman being horrified, Heroic Brosnan being Masculine-Horrified, and…Patrick Stewart, being pretty calm, enjoying the first snack of the whole movie.

Refreshing! Yum. At least that Pepsi gets consumed normally. Coke gets used for mid-air emergency waterboarding. In Coke’s scene, most of a helicopter’s passengers are drinking it.

Then, suddenly, the heroes realize one passenger on the helicopter is a Soviet hardliner who’s been in league with the terrorists this whole time. (Oopsies!) Guns are fired. The pilot takes a bullet, and passes out. Thinking quickly, Protagonist Woman reaches for her can of Coke…

…and sugar-boards the pilot back to consciousness. The pilot hates this more than he hated getting shot. He reacted to the bullet by slumping quietly in his chair. He reacts to this Coke-shower by writhing and shrieking in agony.

Products-wise, that’s all! Those are the two recognizable products in the entire film. It feels less like advertising, and more like each brand exploited political “Equal Time” laws to purchase an attack ad against their opponent.

Back to the Pepsi room: this odd placement is not the end of the world. Other parts of the movie are literally the end of the world! Remember Patrick Stewart’s martial/marshal law speech? He said that to a couple new guys, presented as his team’s new Russian allies. I’ve screencapped those guys below. See if you can spot any clues that the Russian allies might actually be enemies, who harbor Soviet sympathies:

The problem is the untrustworthy shape of their skull bones! Surprise: I’m way into phrenology. Just kidding. I am not into phrenology. I am into flags. And I can tell these guys are anti-democracy and pro-Soviet because – get this – they have big Soviet flags on their jackets. This is a movie released two years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet these cartoon Soviet moles proceed to infiltrate the United Nations, and sabotage Pierce’s hero team, in support of Russian general Christopher Lee’s plan. The plan: bring a nuclear bomb from Germany to Iraq, in a way that inspires Federal Russia to re-militarize and re-Communize.

Okay! Sure it does. Also, it does not. After defeating the terrorists and capturing The Tiny Death Train, Pierce defuses the nuclear bomb. He does this by cutting color-coded wires…and CUTTING THEM WRONG. In a thrilling three-step phone call, which distractingly involves a young Clarke Peters, multiple people tell Pierce Brosnan he must cut the white wire and then cut the red wire. That’s the order: white wire, red wire. White wire, red wire. Here are screencaps of what happens next:

Whoops! They wrote a “sequence of colored wires” sequence, and they filmed the wrong order. So I thought I watched our heroes blow up themselves and Slovenia. Instead…

Oh well. Also, maybe not even the dumbest nuclear bomb in this movie. It’s the smarter bomb, out of two. Because for reasons too dumb to summarize, Christopher Lee has a second atomic device on a plane. Brosnan and Woman pursue and board the Death Plane before it can take off. They also kill Lee. But oh no: Lee already started the trigger. I was extremely looking forward to Brosnan cutting the wrong wires again. But instead, Brosnan fails to cut the wires before the countdown finishes. And then:

That’s a message from the bomb-maker (Leitzig). The “bomb” does not go off. It does play an audio clip of Leitzig’s voice saying “Whoever is hearing this, I give you the rest of your life.” And…that’s all folks! Why? Huh? Don’t think about it. Movie almost over. This bomb message is followed by one shot of Brosnan and Woman being bored, and clothed, even though any Bond movie would have them start porking each other within moments of bomb defusal.

Then they walk into a fog bank and the credits roll.

And that’s the end of the story…for them. It is not the end of the story for the majority of people on that Earth. Because in the world of the movie, the villains were not able to explode any nukes or re-Communize any Russias. But in the process, the heroes of this movie inflicted a psychological terror attack on a massive global audience.

This movie’s pace is a big draggy mess. There’s lots of phone calls, and train rerouting, and reading information off of that old school 1990s printer paper with the perforated edges. Boring! Laggy! And yet, like so many crap movies, it has a few opposite-problem bursts of whipping through stuff too fast. In one burst, the Death Train is set to stop at the nearest podunk Cyrillic-script train station. You see, the Death Train is now global news, because word is out that it carries terrorists and a nuclear bomb. The on-train terrorists, led by the guy who played Jame Gumb in ‘Silence Of The Lambs’, decide to exploit this. They demanded and will receive a personal interview from the lead reporter for “GNN” (a global CNN)…

…and they’re stopping to pick him up. Within seconds of that demand, the Hero Team is on the scene in Podunksberg with a plan in place. Hero Woman will pose as GNN’s camerawoman. Their associate, Zero Personality Version Of “Q”, will install a working rifle inside of a working TV camera.

This TV camera only has one bullet, because they’ve decided to keep it functional as a TV camera. Instead of just telling the terrorists they’re on TV, Hero Woman will film the terrorists with a working camera that delivers live streaming footage to a global audience. That working camera is also a working gun.

Are you able to think through what would happen next? Congratulations: you are wiser than the makers of Death Train. Because the heroes do not think this through! They also do not, oh I don’t know, turn off the camera at any point. They go ahead and get aboard the train, get the terrorist leader on camera, let him talk for a bit, and then point-blank headshot him in front of the planet.

I’ll remember that part of this movie forever. Because in that world, everyone on Earth would remember it forever. They broadcast that live! Globally! And they broadcast it through the murder weapon! It’s a Zapruder Rifle. And that killing would be Kennedy Assassination / September 11th level notorious. Generations would go to therapy for it. Everyone would trade stories of where they were on Terrorist Pink-Mist Camera-Gun Day. Here on Earth Prime, a lot of us know the name of a politician who shot himself on TV, even though he was only a U.S. state treasurer. This movie’s heroes broadcasted and inflicted an extreme-close-up brainsplosion to the world. Compared to nuking Slovenia, that’s…alright it’s not a nuclear attack, physically. But psychologically, it’s [Slovenian word for Chernobyl].

It’s villainy on a level I’ve never seen depicted in these types of movies. The closest parallel I can think of is The Joker using TV broadcasts to turn Gotham insane. Bond movie villains tend to be far more gentlemanly about their threats, murders, lasers, et cetera. But not Death Train. AKA Detonator. AKA the dark revisionist Bond-ish movie tucked into the prologue to Brosnan’s Bond run. It’ll stick with me – but it didn’t stick with Pierce Brosnan. Within one year of making this Pain Face, under a Death Train, during a Brain Assault By Hero Woman…

…within one year of that, Pierce got cast as James Bond. One year later, in November 1995, the world received a positive form of brain-bombing from GoldenEye. Which means I can put this chapter of Brosnan’s life behind me. I must be done! That’s gotta be all the ignominy worth covering. Surely Death Train was the end of Pierce’s wilderness years of secret Bond auditions..

Okay but, come on, surely there were no other available months, in between Doubtfire and GoldenEye, when Pierce could’ve followed through on that ridiculous–

Okay, wow. That’s real. Well at least there are no alternate posters for that. At least visually, in cover art and screencap form, my hero’s dignity remains fully intact–

Why do I feel funny? And why does my heart feel like it just grew a mustache…

Tags action movies, Best of 2022, Free