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Punching Day: The Bansenshukai
Category: PUNCHING DAY
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Punching Day: Carnosaur 2
By now, longtime HOTDOG readers are well acquainted with my dedication to write about the year 1995 specifically. I make no apologies for this fact, because none are required. We don’t ask the spider why she weaves, or the dog why he eats turds from the litter box. You don’t question the sky or its winds, because they’re going to keep blowing. Just as my mind will remain encased in the amber tomb of the year you could buy Batman glasses at McDonald’s.
1995’s Carnosaur 2 is the sequel to 1993’s Carnosaur, an $850,000 movie shotgunned into existence to capitalize on confused audiences trying to buy a ticket to see Jurassic Park. Carnosaur 2 ups the ante by being as close to a scene-to-scene remake of Aliens as you can get without being sued by James Cameron. Incidentally, the Carnosaur franchise was produced by B-movie icon Roger Corman, whom Cameron used to work for as a special effects artist. I have no idea what that means. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
Carnosaur 2 is a fascinating exercise in blunt force storytelling. It’s like a term paper written by a college freshman who missed most of the semester fighting a public intoxication conviction in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The creative powers behind Carnosaur 2 knew they wanted a sequel to Carnosaur, but they had so little inspiration that the film has nothing to do with the original, and is in fact a remake of a sequel to a different movie.
The film is set in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, which is a real place, sort of. It is a proposed underground storage facility for radioactive material, but it hasn’t actually been built yet. Allegedly. But Carnosaur 2 presupposes that it has. Not only that, but in the process of drilling tunnels deep beneath the earth, the government uncovered dormant dinosaur eggs. Uh, I think. They might have found the eggs in some other project dig site and transported them to Yucca Mountain. I can’t be sure, because I’ve already seen this movie twice, one of those viewings was in the seventh grade, and I’m not watching it a third time.
Anyway, the details don’t really matter, because the point is the dinosaurs have broken loose in Yucca Mountain and eaten absolutely everyone inside. They’ve also completely trashed the place, like the time I tried to install a wall mount for my television.
A badass team of mercenary nuclear technicians arrives, because that is a combination of words Carnosaur 2 boldly wants me to accept.
But they quickly realize this is no mere equipment malfunction when they encounter evidence of a massacre, the lone survivor of which is a catatonic teen.
Incidentally, this teen is dressed like a process server trying to sneak up on Eddie Vedder, because it is the year nineteen hundred and ninety five.
But then the team’s badass leader is killed in a sudden dinosaur attack.
When they attempt to evacuate, their helicopter pilot is ambushed by a velociraptor hand puppet.
The helicopter crashes and the team is stranded.
Their boss, a swirling dickweed working for the government, attempts to betray them in order to keep the dinosaurs a secret from the rest of the world.
But the team has to put aside their differences and escape the facility before radioactive material leaking from all the dinosaur violence causes the mountain to explode.
But before they’re able to execute their escape plan, angry raptor puppets breach the control room. One badass technician gets snatched through a grate.
The prickish company man and the perpetually angry badass blow themselves up to avoid being eaten.
The only survivors are Scummy Teen and Fake Plissken, who is haunted by the loss of his Dead Family. Fake Plissken is played by John Savage, who was in The Deer Hunter, so his hauntedness is authentic, because he has seen what a good movie looks like.
Fake Plissken is captured by the dinosaurs, so Scummy Teen leaves the rescue chopper and goes back down into the facility to save him, only to come face to face with a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The Tyrannosaurus is brought to life by the stunning special effects wizardry of a Robot Wars team that got cut out of their episode because their robot caught fire in the green room.
Scummy Teen carries Fake Plissken to safety, then fights the T-Rex with a power loader.
Scummy Teen opens a 200-foot mine shaft using a button on the loader and forces the dinosaur into the pit, where it falls to its death.
“Falls to its death” is a phrase here meaning “it bounces off the ground like a rubber toy, because that’s what it is.”
Scummy Teen and Fake Plissken escape in the helicopter just as the facility explodes, dooming the American southwest for centuries to come.
Does that sound familiar? Specifically, in an “exactly like James Cameron’s Aliens” sort of way? If not, please return to the beginning of the article.
Now, just because it’s a baffling remake of Aliens doesn’t mean Carnosaur 2 is totally without merit. After all, I watched this film, and then decided to watch it again three decades later. I didn’t have to do that. I could have lived the rest of my life instead.
No, something drew me back to this barely-remembered gem of a compromise Blockbuster rental from years past, and I’m glad I chose to revisit it, because it is one of the most earnestly shitty movies I have ever seen. It’s like a piñata full of beetles, or a Sega powered by fear. It has the desire to be fun, but not the ability.
The first character we see is a man in a cowboy hat. He is listening to country western music, because he is wearing a cowboy hat.
He spies a dinosaur and makes a face that can only be described as “Will Ferrell cumming at an improv class.”
Scummy Teen and his friend break into the Yucca Mountain facility using Terminator 2 hacking technology to steal dynamite from a storage room. Just dynamite in old timey crates. Like they’re trying to build a railroad in 1864.
And I really need to take a moment to introduce you to the team of badass repair technicians.
Everyone got a perm the night before. Except for their bald leader, who also has an eyepatch. He must have lost his eye during a particularly deadly repair mission. They look like an arena football team. Each one of them is dressed like a different kind of school shooter. Also, they’re all wearing a lightning bolt patch that looks like the SS insignia. Like, a lot.
John Savage shows up drunk, cooling his forehead with an empty beer can. He wistfully touches a photograph of his family in his locker, so we know that they are Dead.
The team plays an indecipherable rock-paper-scissors game in the helicopter, which is meant to convey how nonchalantly badass they are.
Their headsets are incredible. They look like they’re wearing old office conference phones on their heads. A Magnavox executive has spilled cocaine into one of those.
The control room at the facility looks like the bridge set from a Star Trek CD-ROM game. Jonathan Frakes has given players a side mission from this chair.
The filmmakers realized that having a character chew gum and/or eat candy is a good way to convey that they’re cool and don’t give a hoot. Consequently, four or five different characters are constantly chewing gum. One character is perpetually eating Twizzlers.
Two characters set tripwire traps throughout the facility and end up tripping over them themselves. I can’t stress enough that they are a repair team. These are repair technicians.
Finally, the acting in this film ranges from “poor” to “astonishing.” This is best illustrated by the several moments in which John Savage seems to forget his lines in the middle of saying them.
Maybe he was thinking about The Deer Hunter.
Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busily writing a sequel to The Deer Hunter that is a remake of Jaws 2.
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Punching Day: Live Wire
I love reading this website. It feels like our own private li’l “Midnight Society”. But instead of sharing tall tales about Neve Campbell battling evil soup, we gather for REAL tales of cursed cultural artifacts. Today, for your approval, I present Live Wire – a movie about Pierce Brosnan battling evil glasses of water. Water is bombs, in this movie, runtime 85 minutes.
This is cursed beyond its “silly movie” layer. There is actual, accursed, built-on-a-burial-ground style grimness within this flick. But we gotta start with the bomb-water. This movie depends on you getting interested in the following premise: Euro-terrorists devised a chemical. When the chemical gets added to water, and then mixed with the stomach acids of a person who drank the water, that person will combust. Humongously. Plus there’s a middle step before the explosion, where their eyes turn red and they start wiggling around. That’s the hook of this movie: a technology where one sip of evil water turns anyone into several tons of dynamite.
I acknowledge that this premise almost works. Conceptually, it’s scary that anybody could blow anybody else up with innocent-looking water. But this almost-good idea gains a lot of hilarity in its path from the page to the screen. The screenwriter types “terrorist!” The resulting movie points its quick cuts and ominous music in the general direction of…a limo driver re-loading drinks.
Or a judge who is thirsty.
Or a clown, with “lemonade.”
GoldenEye it ain’t. And I know what you’re thinking: “Pierce Brosnan must have made this crummy movie one million billion years before he was famous.” That is what you are thinking, right now. I am a psychic. It’s freaky! Anyway, Live Wire was intended as a huge movie. It came out in 1992, and it was supposed to be Pierce Brosnan’s Die Hard. You can tell because it copy-pastes a lot of Die Hard. Brosnan plays a tormented Police Guy slash (Estranged) Wife Guy, forced to defeat a Euro-terrorist plot masterminded by a good actor from British dramas. Armed only with his wits, a few guns, and his Black Friend, Pierce McClane re-Wifes his life by impressing her by saving the world.
Live Wire also makes a few key additions to this format:
🌭 Bomb Water (as discussed).
🌭 Brosnan’s Police Guy is a Police Bomb Defuser, specifically. (So look out, Bomb Water!)
🌭 Black Friend has his own Robot Best Friend. (Whatever robot you’re imagining, think cheaper.)
🌭 Ron Silver.
Hey, wow: that haircut! Ron Silver plays a United States Senator, with that haircut. That is the most fantastical element of this film – a film where James Bond and a robot hunt terrorists doing spontaneous human combustions. That coiffure is still the most bonkers element. Live Wire claims Ron Silver could get elected to Congress while sporting the exact hairdo of Lord Farquaad (from Shrek) and Dianne Feinstein (from the United States Senate).
But enough about fictional universe-based Senators. I’m only here because of Pierce Brosnan. I’m a fan! He’s my James Bond and I don’t care who knows it. He’s the whole reason I’ve watched The King’s Daughter for your benefit. Pierce’s life is the doorway to the most cursed, bizarre rabbit hole hidden within Live Wire. But the business side of this movie is cursed too. It failed! Singularly! Live Wire was a wide-release summer tentpole, back when those were things. It was such a non-hit, Pierce Brosnan’s Wikipedia page describes a different 1992 Pierce Brosnan movie (The Lawnmower Man) AND a 1992 Pierce Brosnan not-picked-up television pilot, with no mention of this multi-million dollar blockbuster released that same year. And he was famous at the time! One year later, Brosnan villain-starred in Mrs. Doubtfire. One year after that, he got announced as the new James Bond. Which thrills me! That means thousands of people heard the James Bond casting news, and muttered “That guy from Die Wire?”, after spit-taking their 1994 Beverage (Fruitopia).
Let’s begin the movie. As you know, it’s an action/sci-fi film. Those usually begin with thrills. Live Wire, due to Premise Problems, begins with ominous b-roll of water – and then red water.
Next they present the movie’s title. Which is also wet. Wet and steamy.
After that Schlitterbahn of a credit sequence, the movie proceeds to show you dry text. Which I’ve screencapped. Warning: this block of text I’m about to show you will feel gross and out-of-nowhere. It feels that same way in the film.
Reminder: this movie came out in 1992. Question: can a thrown-together Die Hard ripoff cause a real-life terrorist attack, by doing a humongous jinx? Because the World Trade Center got bombed within months of this movie’s release. And then attacked again, later, in a way I do not need to hyperlink. Remember when I said this movie is legitimately, nightmarishly cursed? Well oh no, oh god, there are more blocks of text.
What a pile of words. Words that accurately capture America’s political stability and lack of sad bombings. Anyway the film knows it’s making you read. It’s losing precious seconds to reel you in. So its next moment is soundtracked with a badass guitar sting. However, this is not the main thing you notice. Because as your ears begin to 🤘rock🤘, your eyes are looking at a duck.
A duck! Fun! I know this shot is also a shot of the U.S. Capitol Building, reflected in water (i.e. The Bad Guy). That’s probably what they storyboarded. But you do not notice what they storyboarded. You notice a big funny white duck dominating the first shot of the whole movie, with the exact musical backing of a WWE entrance.
They probably needed a duck-free shot of this. They definitely didn’t bother spending time and money getting one. This whole movie feels thrown together in that way. With each passing minute, there’s a new jarring li’l whoopsie. Such as this phone call, between two people in the same city. One end is a sunny day and the other end is a rainy night.
There’s also this thrilling employee management situation, where the Euro-villain kills off his Science Henchman by neck-stabbing him with a pen.
This scene is written so the villain isn’t carrying a pen. Because that would be impossible? So before the murder, he asks Sci-Henchman to lend him a pen.
So if Doctor Science wasn’t carrying a pen, the villain…just strangles him? Or if Sci-Doc is carrying a crummy Bic, the villain…inks him to death? I know that’s not an important problem. Neither is the duck. Neither is another part of this movie, where Pierce and Black Friend go to a high-security carnival, and the carnival staff put Black Friend’s Robot through a metal detector.
This movie DOES NOT HAVE TIME for thinking through that stuff. This is ACTION filmmaking, focused on how HARDCORE the main character is. Pierce Brosnan’s Character is so hardcore, he attends carnivals to do two things: interrogate clowns, and whack clowns’ noses off when they aren’t quick enough to answer the question “have you seen any suspicious water?”
This HARDCORENESS gets-a-rippin’ from Pierce’s first scene. When we meet him, he’s in the middle of defusing a car bomb and ogling a vagina.
Does Pierce defeat this (non-water) bomb? He does. He defeats it so hard, he can barely keep his shirt on.
But wait – what’s that item electrical-taped to Pierce’s ribcage?
An item he tape-rips off of his ribcage? (hardcore!) It’s a set of photos of Pierce and His Wife and His Child (family!).
Pierce sarcastically (hardcore!) lets us know the pictures are his lucky charm (family!) for defusing bombs (hardcore!). One millisecond later, a flip-up sunglasses man enters this active crime scene to serve Pierce a restraining order from His Wife (famcore!).
Pierce spends the rest of the movie battling sinister bombs while battling to get His Wife back. That is his central pair of dramas. Those two threads intersect because Pierce has to solve both problems. Those threads also intersect at His Wife’s vagina. For you see, the Euro-terrorists are targeting United States Senators. Pierce’s Wife has moved on to a new relationship with United States Haircut-Senator Ron Silver. In the end, Pierce wins His Wife back, nominally by solving the terrorism. It’s not convincing, in the movie. But it makes more sense than his other strategy for getting her back, which is to show up wherever she is and do Actually Scary Yelling at her.
The movie excuses this yelling by making Pierce a Justifiably Sad Man. He is sad about their daughter’s death. Still, Pierce spends basically the entire movie being sad about losing His Wife – except for each time a person is mid-explosion, and one scene where he Recaptures His Wife’s Vagina. He does this in a candlelit bathtub. She loves this. She also keeps wearing an entire terry cloth bathrobe throughout this tub-lovin’, because there is no hotter pork-sperience than feeling like you’re inside a swim meet’s hamper.
This element of the movie is its most accursed element…if you know real life stuff about My Hero, Pierce Brosnan. This is about to get more cursed than you think it will. CURSE WARNING begins now. Because in real life, Pierce Brosnan lost his wife Cassandra Harris to a long battle with cancer. She died in 1991. Here is her photo:
The movie Live Wire came out in 1992. Pierce plays a guy pining for His Wife, who is played by this actor:
Are you noticing what I am noticing about this movie that was filmed in 1991? I am confident somebody noticed. The production of this movie involved a meeting where Pierce had to say “hey by the way, you’re making me re-experience my raw grief.” And a higher-up replied “we blew our emergency-switch-actresses budget on the robot.” I hate it. I hate it so much I’m a little bit obsessed with it. It’s so tragic it’s thrilling. Pierce bursts into disjointed yelling in every scene with that gal, and I watched this movie knowing why.
Anyway, bomb stuff. The Euro-terrorists are assassinating Senators with water-combustion bombs, because some Senators blocked a $10 million dollar arms deal. (In 1992, $10 million could hire two good baseball players for one season.) Pierce figures this plot out quickly, yet too slowly. Then he and Ron Silver do a Die Hard in Ron Silver’s big house. Pierce’s Now-Loved-Up Wife is also there. Pierce gets shot in the chest with a gun, and he keeps acting normal for several minutes until the battle’s over. The end of the battle is Euro-villain consuming his own chemical, to blow up the heroes with his own body. He does this because Euro-villain is too suicidally angry to run away, regroup, and slip Pierce a future Bomb Evian.
Pierce chucks the bomb-villain out of the house, and they all leap a safe distance away…
…except for Ron Silver, who gets impaled (Pierce-d?????) by his own spiky rich-guy fence, as justice for his numerous crimes (corruption, fashion, Wife-Thefting).
The movie doesn’t quite know how to end itself from there. So they have Pierce solve another car bomb, while ogling the same lady’s same vagina from the beginning. Also in the middle of this bomb defusal situation, which takes a total of fifteen seconds, he receives a phone call telling him His Wife had Their Baby. Thrilled he’s finally solved his child’s death by making a replacement, Pierce joyously sprints away, probably to go to the hospital. This is the final shot of the movie (timecode: 1:21:05). And it’s filmed with the wobbliest Rising Helicopter Shot I’ve ever experienced.
So there you have it. Much like Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, one must imagine Pierce Brosnan happy. I’d like to think he kept on sprinting, for thousands of miles, from Live Wire’s Washington D.C. to Mrs. Doubtfire’s San Francisco home exterior and nicer craft services table. Sprinting to a better life, where his movies are hits, and his cinematic romantic interests are not cast for maximum widower-torment. Pierce seems nice. He seems like a guy who just wants to be a good husband and also a good friend and co-worker. He got past this film. And that’s my wish for all of us: the luck to land a great next job, coming on the heels of an intensely shitty job, awaiting us beyond the frame of that wobbly helicopter shot.
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Punching Day: Sandman vs. Sabu 🌭
Is this a tool, a weapon, or an entire medium?
The elect know the answer. With the race and gender wars settled, only wrestle war remains. I’m unearthing Sandman vs. Sabu at November to Remember, final proof that stimulants are healthier than hallucinogens. Even in wrestling, where sobriety makes you a generational genius.
As a writer, this cause is close to my heart. Coffee and nostril Stevia dominate workshops, yet mushrooms and LSD get all the mass media representation. Granted, I abstained from everything out of lingering Baptist fear of joy. But the insult matters.
I should specify pro wrestling. Wrestling also refers to a real martial art without side flips. I’m told Hercules invented it to make Zeus appreciate his only consensual son, a legend worthy of a pro wrestling storyline. The kind ECW founder Paul Heyman would hear out, reject, and steal on primetime television next week.
Today’s wrestling duopolists, Vince McMahon and Tony Khan, are respectively accused of treating wrestlers like old racehorses and new action figures. This is progress. Paul Heyman treated wrestlers like fireworks: objects burned for crowds and then forgotten.
Mostly literally.
Paul Heyman saw the myth holding wrestling back: paying people. Cutting out that excess let him bring underground wrestling styles to a national audience. ECW stood for Extreme Championship Wrestling, and it’s the only product to live up to nineties marketing.
It had everything. Fire. Staple guns. Models that loved awkward loners. Fire again. Attempted murder by a former bounty hunter before a live crowd.
Boldness earned ECW a following. It wasn’t cult-like: cults were ECW-like. Wrestling that delivered on blood and sleaze was like a banner ad sending real widows to your dorm room: an illegal miracle. That’s harder to televise today, when Roman only inhales with FCC approval.
ECW opened November to Remember by celebrating their biggest crowd yet, which is how you tempt the Fates. The winged sisters cursed the pay-per-view with three generations of CTE, an audience sweatier than the athletes, and a match six percent crazier than intended.
Said match begins with chaos from another match. Transitions anchor every medium, and post-match brawls are wrestling’s shot-reverse shot. In this tortured metaphor, Paul Heyman is Robert Rodriguez, The Rock is The Rock, and Vince McMahon is simultaneously James Cameron and Tommy Wiseau.
That’s a double nutshot, on referees, because ECW is this blessed world’s highest art. But let he who strikes first also weather the lash:
Perfection.
Nothing’s gone off the rails yet–this is ECW on clockwork time. The revenge killing of Beulah McGillicutty (the testicle assassin above) goes off without a hitch. Beaulah’s a woman in ECW, putting her somewhere between a Greek Chorus, stripper, and stuntwoman.
More the latter, today.
The testicle avenger’s called Sabu. His own match is in moments, but he makes time to torment the weak with his friends. A display of the brotherhood and esprit de corps missing from the judgemental masses. So who really clotheslined an unarmed woman? We did.
Player 2, a junkyard boxer named Sandman, comes to the rescue. He uses the power of evil stepfathers for good. Our hero’s ready to drink, bash cans against his forehead, and probably wrestle too.
Sandman is one of the most distinct, popular, and beloved wrestlers of the era. He’s mostly bad at it.
You see, Sandman’s not into clean moves or unslurred sentences. But he comes out to “Enter Sandman,” will die for a stunt, and looks like your favorite uncle before AA ruined Thanksgiving. Sandman simply stands out in his environment. After spending Princeton’s “breathing black human” scholarship, I can confirm that it’s a superpower.
His opponent’s an omega mutant as well: Sabu reinvented acrobatic self-harm. He didn’t come out to pop-era Metallica, but agility and redneck-agitating headwear made him a fan favorite anyway. For example, here’s Sabu doing a basic chair strike:
That’s years after his prime, for an audience of “the guy holding the camera.” Today’s match is peak Sabu, who’s much more concerned with killing you than surviving the match. He wielded the rare threat of going to the hospital with you.
It looks tough for our hero. But Sabu attacked a bottle blonde during the Attitude Era, a debt to be paid in blood and ruined furniture. Seeing red, Sandman rushes in to dispense justice.
And rushes.
Give him a sec.
…It’s been three minutes. Something’s off.
Here, we move into the world of myth and conjecture, which I normally embrace like a WSJ editor. But searching “Hotdog Lawyer” only returns a gripping Nickelodeon pilot, so I’ll tone down the libel.
The widely circulated story is that Sandman allegedly took acid before the match. It isn’t necessarily true: he method acted an addict, and enjoyed a range of exciting chemicals. Sandman was an icon to everyone that produced, purchased, or confiscated gas station drugs. What matters is that today, he’s not entirely there.
Okay, he’s on acid.
It’s a tables and ladders match, which lets both competitors wield half a construction site. While Sandman poses on a ladder and contemplates infinity, Sabu decides to start the match. A flashy mistake.
At first, it looks like a normal match for both. Sabu does premium flips, and Sandman flails. I’d call it a metaphor for immigrant and domestic work ethic, but Sabu’s from Michigan.
A few minutes in, things break down. Sandman slows down (more), and the objects hitting Sabu in the face look less and less intentional. Sandman’s face is stuck in the blank, stupefied wonder of an adult paying for a palm reading. It’s debatable when the mescaline overtook the adrenaline, but I’m fond of this moment:
The crowd reviews the new tempo with the chant “Sandman sucks dick.” I disagree. Even as he converses with his ancestors, Sandman makes a compelling target for ladders to the skull. Or so a pissed Sabu decides.
At least some part of Sandman remembers the match. He successfully gets in place for an air-mailed ladder to the stomach:
A few other stunts kinda-sorta-almost work. They’re just eclipsed by Mr. Bean pratfalls like this:
That’s when I fell in love with this match. None of the near-obituaries can compete with an adult tripping over a stationary ladder. It’s a visual metaphor for every lockdown relationship. Sabu passing it off as his nefarious plan only makes it better.
Then again, there are some excellent near-obituaries. Here’s Sandman unleashing the ultimate attack:
Some trivia about me: I used to breakdance, because hip kids hung out at the hospital. There’s a genre of flip called a “suicide” where you fake a crash landing for effect, only to resume spinning unharmed. This isn’t a b-boy suicide. It’s a normal one.
By now, it’s clear Sandman’s mind is out exploring new planets. But Sabu finishes the match anyway, stunts and all. For my money, that puts at least a third of the blame on him.
Half. Sabu gets half.
Here’s the issue: behind all the exploding barbed wire and vascular ghosts, wrestling is driven by rigid professionalism. Wrestlers jump from ballroom balconies because they trust the tack-covered man below can and will catch them.
Not today.
If you pulled this on Jackass Forever, Johnny Knoxville would jam his hand into your chest and absorb your youth. Stunts aren’t just about attaching a car battery to your loins. They’re about doing it safely enough to shoot four sequels with bigger cars. I guarantee Steve-O knows what voltage ignites pubic hair.
Alright, so catching’s hard on acid. At least Sandman’s not jumping from–
No.
Desist.
Goodbye.
The crowd couldn’t love it more. It’s a Barrabas situation: given the choice between fake blood and a real addict falling off a ladder, the hospital wins every time. Nineties wrestling could be simulated grappling or authentic Bumfights.
Alternatively, Street Fighter. Sabu nails Sandman in the face with a fireball. It’s not pitched as magic (that’s Lucha Underground’s beautiful contribution to human culture), but the rule of the streets. Clearly I missed out on Gun Hill Road, where they just threw boring bricks.
The match ends with another ladder spot, or as commentary calls it, an “atomic Arabian facebuster with a lateral press.” I’ll accept “jumping with a ladder” on tomorrow’s test. Here’s the last shot before insurance premiums went up.
At this point, I’ve circled back around to admiring the match. Consider Sandman’s distorted point of view. He’s trapped in South Mordor, and the only thing more terrifying than a beheading is a beheading on a bad trip. We don’t have words for that courage in the square world.
Luckily, we don’t need to stretch our dying imaginations. Feeding AI art generators the sentence “Sabu jumping from the top rope with a ladder” provides a convenient window into wrestling-themed hell. I’ve taken the liberty of naming the results.
I prefer reality. No watercolors of a dying universe, just simple, grounded, and familiar pain. Give Sandman some credit for navigating The Ladder Over Innsmouth on Pay-Per-View.
Sidebar: If you’re wondering why NFTs died, generating these took three minutes.
This is my favorite installment of Paul Heyman’s Wonderland. It’s not representative—for all the manic vision and rebel posturing, wrestlers usually saved acid for the afterparty. But it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
As humiliarious as this incident was, it didn’t define the competitors. Today Sandman’s sober, and Sabu probably can’t enter Singapore. They had a few (better) rematches, and both occupy the long list of people underpaid for WWE’s sugar-free version of ECW:
You’re not on acid: nobody’s bleeding and Sandman’s touched a gym. If you told me that in 1998, I’d say “Are you the new babysitter? I put a frog in the microwave.” I didn’t watch any of this until lockdown, long after I’d run out of frogs. Time flows on.
“Drugs make great art” is the two-time world champion of creative cliches, and it’s nonsense. My best writing on drugs is the word “Ascend” 200 times in red ink. I maintain that drugs simply steal credit for glorious ignorance of consequences. With the right mindset, you can do moonsaults and blow up frogs far, far longer than you should.
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Hambone, who first taught wrestling to the AIs and is responsible for the upcoming Flying Elbow Robot Apocalypse.
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Punching Day: FaceGym 🌭
I used to think the perfect job was the person at the top of a waterslide who tells people when to go. You get to experience godlike power over another human being’s life for a small amount of time with very little consequence if you do a bad job. However, you probably have to clean up a small child’s fear vomit sometimes. The point is, there’s a downside to everything; no job is perfect, except for the job where rich people pay you to slap them in the face.
The woman doing the slapping in that video has the best job in the world. She works at a place called FaceGym, where slapping rich people isn’t just allowed; it’s a job requirement.
FaceGym is a growing UK skincare brand selling a specialized face slapping technique that I was sure must have been done in by the pandemic. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but something about it didn’t seem pandemic friendly to me. Maybe it’s the fact that their version of skincare is having someone grease up their fingers and rub them all over your mouth and nose.
I’m sorry if I made it sound like they JUST slap you in the face earlier. That diminishes the scope of what FaceGym provides. They also have a service wherein someone wraps their arms around your neck and puts you in a sleeper hold. They call that move the Ichabod Crane. You can’t be ugly if you don’t have a head. They’ll see if they can pop that bad boy right off for you.
The idea behind FaceGym is that by exercising the muscles in your face you can sculpt them to prevent wrinkles without any kind of invasive surgery. That’s right, it’s totally noninvasive! It’s simply painful for other reasons! You can buy FaceGym products online, or you can go into a store where for around a hundred and twenty dollars, one of their employees will smack you around for fifty full minutes.
I feel like now that Botox is widely available enough that even my middle class midwestern aunts can afford it, rich people have to resort to wilder and wilder methods of preventing visible signs of aging. Inge Theron, the woman who created FaceGym, loves to push how natural and body-positive the process of slapping your face fat around until you’re perfectly smooth is. Last year, she told Forbes magazine, “My message is this: you’re already great, but let’s see how we can make you even better.” One of the natural beauty methods FaceGym uses is putting women in a Hannibal Lecter mask that will electrocute them.
You too can get the smooth, wrinkle-free complexion of Uncle Fester from the Addams Family with this four hundred and fifteen dollar device designed to give an instant lift to your complexion. Your face will be up so high after you introduce enough electricity to it naturally.
Inge Theron is a former journalist who covered the beauty and wellness beat. She claims the idea for FaceGym came to her after three years of travel and research. She says she “worked with fitness instructors, dermatologists, facial therapists, and even a Mexican shaman to align ancient wisdom with modern technologies.” I thought the most ancient wisdom we have as a society is not to pay someone a hundred and twenty dollars to slap you in the face, regardless of how dripping wet their hands are.
I know there are plenty of other things that people do to their bodies in the name of beauty that look dorky as hell. There’s a medical procedure called a Brazilian butt lift that’s so popular Amazon sells multiple inflatable beds with recovery butt holes in them so your butt can properly heal post butt-perfecting surgery.
Red light therapy masks are also very popular right now, and they look like misplaced horror movie props that no one was willing to tell Gwyneth Paltrow she’d mistaken for skincare. Everyone understands they look nightmarish, but no one is willing to stop using them for that reason alone. One of these masks could latch onto a face and pull it to hell every full moon, but if you made a case for it being 15% more effective than lotion alone, women would take that chance. Personally, I’d be willing to deal with one to two blood filled elevators, some lights flickering, and the occasional disembodied laughter of a ghost child but not for anything less than twenty percent better visible results.
FaceGym seems extra dumb to me because I have a theory that how much something sucks is directly tied to how branded it is. For instance, if you walk into a restaurant and you’re greeted by a man in a pirate hat who tells you that you “arrrrrr about to have some amazin’ fish and chips,” you’re about to eat the worst goddamn fish and chips you’ve had in your entire life. If the fish and chips were good, you wouldn’t have to sacrifice a man’s dignity to get me into the restaurant. The same principle applies to skincare.
If the facials were good, FaceGym probably wouldn’t have all of their employees dress like personal trainers in workout pants and tank tops. They wouldn’t have you put on an unnecessary little sweatband to start your face workout, and they wouldn’t have a tiny branded exercise ball you rub on your face because it’s something you would see at the gym but tiny for FaceGym!
When FaceGym was founded in 2015, there was a move toward natural beauty, which meant very expensive unnatural things that made you look so good it didn’t seem like you paid money to have them done. Inge Theron was jumping on that trend, but it looks like over time, what she learned is that people don’t want to feel naturally beautiful. They’re more into getting a series of tiny shocks from metal sloth fingers as they gently glide across your face.
Or maybe having your skin flavor-blasted to hell by a jet-powered puff of air and various serums they keep in an IV bag for some reason? I’m sure it’s a holistic IV bag made from the skin of organic soup and beeswax with a hint of mountain spring water filtered through the tear ducts of an endangered elephant (who was made to cry through all natural means).
You might be wondering how this moist, mucous membrane-smearing business made it through the pandemic. FaceGym managed to survive while other skin care specialists closed down because, it turns out, people who FaceGym are more than willing to pay for exclusive online classes to learn how to slap themselves in the face at home.
This is a still from FaceGym’s Instagram page, showing off their outdoor class. An instructor is teaching these women how to do the old greasy slap. Sorry, I’m being told I can’t call it that because FaceGym has trademarked the term Old Greasy Slap™. It’s their newest treatment! It’s administered in the alley behind the FaceGym by a woman going through a painful divorce and you have to wear a mask that looks just like her ex’s face. It costs nine hundred dollars, but for an extra three fifty she’ll also electrocute you. God, I want to work at FaceGym.
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Punching Day: Baby Boxing
By Jove, boys, by Jupiter! We have dwelt in dark corners of late. Let us remove to nobler escapades. You all recognize honor and sacrifice by their blood-name. If not the sport of kings, then certainly the sport of inconsolably bawling dauphins. I speak, of course, of baby boxing!
Unlike our modern baby boxing—in which two strong men duct-tape babies to their fists and stare into each other’s eyes to gauge whose soul has grown cold enough to throw the first punch—the classic baby boxing squares toddlers against babies in the ring. We consider it cruel sport these days, but maybe you’ll feel better knowing all of these children were reclaimed from the polio pile.
In 1942 society gathered to answer a question: How young an age can we instill mankind’s propensity for destruction? Our grandfathers knew that nothing develops—nor disrupts—motor skills faster than a combatitude of fistulatory mayhem. For the only thing softer than boxing gloves are a sweet babe’s still-pliable cranium! When these gladiators were done with the razoo, they would either stand as men or die as babies. Let us salute they who were about to die ’ere they had yet truly lived.
Look at Basher—weaned from his momma’s breast an hour ago and hoppin’ mad about it.
Basher Bill vs. Tornado Tim was the title bout in the Annapolis baby boxing championships, sponsored by “NAVY.” It began somewhat normally: two hopelessly inept putti swinging hammer strikes at each other’s wrists and preying a sane adult would deliver them from the alien art of wholesale violence. Alas, the admiral merely watched, presiding like Shang Tsung on his throne of skulls. Soon one boy would be a Babality, and the other would begin a lifelong regimen culminating in 1962’s first SEAL graduation.
But until that day, the average toddler throws bitch-hooks. Cancel me if you must, but it’s simple biology that a two-year-old can’t punch straight even if Mother Russia is offering him a bounty of one extra salt-beef to kill the American Apollo Creed. The aptly named Tornado came at Basher like a flywheel that decided an avalanche was the perfect time to learn snowboarding, and for a moment, they were equals.
As the combatants squared up—despite neither being able to identify a square—the brutality began. Basher spun around to deliver a deadly nursery rhyme to the ribs, but made the mistake every child boxer learns: never turn your back on your opponent and trot in the opposite direction, you stupid baby.
While conking his opponent on the not-yet-sealed head the way we’ve all wanted to try, Tornado seized upon a new idea to draw out this murder movie: the jab.
Like all baby-harm innovations, it was crudely inspired, it was developed in a military contract program, and it was legal in Maryland. Tim faked another overhead thump, then stepped forward to let gravity deliver the punch his talent could only promise. Basher’s mouth caught a fist that would make “Googoo, gaga” technically his first words—not as babytalk but his blinkered brain’s dying efforts to describe what was pouring out of his face and how it felt. For one brilliant second, his body contained 214 Newtons, and only three of them were fig. YES, BUDDY, I HAVE DONE THE MATH.
Basher came up crying with all the fight knocked out of him, alongside what would have been his adult teeth. And it was only going to get worse. He had no time to look around for grown-ups to protect him before their lusty cheers erupted at the sight of his confused suffering. Dazed, crying, and still a wounded baby, he managed to put his hands up long enough for Tornado to continue coloring red outside the lines.
It was a two-fisted shove to a skull so flimsy that egg farmers consider it useless as packing material. The blow was fulsome enough that we had to invent freeways just to get use out of the seatbelt law it necessitated. Even today, neurologists ring up Level-6 CTE as “two Basher Bills over hard, hold the recovery, shug.”
Displaying the instinct for self-preservation common among professional battered babies, Bill stayed down, crying. It was the safest place for him, and it was all going to be taken away even faster than CPS should have removed him from his parents’ custody. The round ended, and he had one minute to pray for a kind reception from a God who had already shown no interest in letting him reach First Communion.
The second round started with Tornado tap dancing with glee. At last, he would employ father’s cruel methods for his own glorification. I have no words to describe the natural footwork of a violence-bent toddler given permission to attack a baby. Bill was a head shorter even before he got his block knocked off, but it’s entirely possible he started this fight the taller child before he was railroad-spiked into the mat a dozen times.
With merry staccato, Tim speedbagged Bill’s face all the way to the ground, then tripped over his victim in the berserker throes of a gut kick. Or as the coroner wrote in his report, “Seldom have I written that cancer would have been a kinder end for this child’s pancreas.”
I don’t want to accuse the ref of being crooked, but he teed up the littler kid for Tim’s deadly diametrics like he’d never forgiven Mrs. Referee for stepping out on him with a crying bag of sausage meat and road gravel. This is the worst defense the Navy has put up since that radar operator in Hawaii got up to get a sandwich so that FDR could pull off his inside job.
Reader, this child trusted adults to keep him safe, and now the entire world as he understands it is cheering for him to be harmed. He does not know how to violence, he knew only play. Everyone laughs at the worst fear and pain of Bill’s tiny life, even the British announcer. He is history’s loneliest human being until the priest who has to speak at Bill Cosby’s funeral.
Round three, and Tornado had mastered the craft of punching with a stiff-armed leap. He tumbled Basher’s toes to the mat behind his head in a gentlemanly gesture to let the small child kiss his ass goodbye. Sadly, the referee hoisted the corpse of what had once called itself Basher Bill to its feet so it could complete its certification as a late-term abortion.
Displaying survival wisdom once again, Bill’s body strode off, not realizing yet that it was dead. After five steps, the death punch was triggered, and the fair-haired kid crawled under the rope to expire with as much dignity as anyone wearing a diaper can do.
Years later, a reporter would ask Bill if he wasn’t grateful for the defeat that shaped so much of his life and bone structure. Having already faced the worst, was he prepared for every lesser challenge in life? From seven decades of experience, he pondered a long, quiet while. Finally, he spoke.
“Murmble staffish snoo pie,” he mused. “Jellyman. Jelly. Real plong.”
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Hey, fuck you if you didn’t retweet Brendan’s most lighthearted joke this month.