Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Urge 🌭

Urge is a 2016 movie starring Pierce Brosnan. Urge is also the most secret, hidden Pierce Brosnan movie ever made, for one cursed reason and a lot of fun reasons. Here’s the trailer. Here’s one of its many frames that drew me in:

Brosnan? Vaping? In cocaine clothes? Count me, and only me, in. Despite my repeated and correct proselytizing, society has not yet adopted Pierce Brosnan as its central cultural figure. You would think “he played James Bond when Alex Schmidt was a child” would win folks over. What a convincing argument for making Pierce Brosnan the star of every movie ever. But no! Pierce has to settle for whichever roles he can get. For instance, he settled for third billing in the elaborate psychological experiment Black Adam. Don’t get me wrong: Black Adam was important. Black Adam won the Nobel Prize In Superhero Genre Entropy Confirmation. That’s an important scientific finding and it makes Pierce Brosnan the Irish Einstein. But as an actor, in this century, Pierce doesn’t get picked to be a movie’s top star. Urge is a rare exception to that. Here’s why no one’s aware of that:

What a progression. Sure, Pierce Brosnan is the beloved Dad-God to us all. But Justin Chatwin is not a name you know or face you recognize. I watched Justin Chatwin be the main character of this whole movie, and I’m still half-convinced I generated Justin Chatwin, by asking an A.I. art program for “a spare Justin Bartha.”

That’s not the big problem. Star #3 on that list is why this movie got buried. Davey Masterston, this movie’s co-co-lead, is a monster. The only people who want to see A Danny Masterson Vehicle are cops double checking a car’s fingerprints. Urge hit theater(s?) in June 2016. Less than one year later, three women jointly filed sexual assault claims against Danny Masterson. Last year a judge sentenced him to 30 years to life, in jail. It’s grim. It’s bad! And it’s a slam dunk reason for the whole world to vanish this movie. People can barely watch the best work of Woody Allen or Kevin Spacey. This movie’s criminal is an actor I called “Davey Masterston” without you noticing. A much less famous guy, doing a passable portrayal of “boring selfish guy.” Nobody NEEDS that. We can lose that morsel of acting. And this situation is a rare case of entertainment algorithms being a good thing. One line of code evaporated this movie from streaming services. Evaporated it, like a gross puddle, in a way that is a bummer for no one but Pierce Brosnan. Pierce has performed 101 Hollywood roles and counting. Due to Pierce’s co-star’s crimes, this role is his absolute least discoverable.

What movie are we missing out on by “cancelling” Urge? A bad movie. A movie with less Pierce Brosnan in it than we want.

Pierce Brosnan has three scenes in this movie, and he exits two of the scenes by vanishing. I’m only pretty sure it’s on purpose, and they didn’t run out of their limited Brosnan Minutes. This role is the briefest role I’ve ever seen be most of a movie’s poster. Pierce barely swings through here. If Pierce Brosnan is the lead of this movie, I’m the lead of my nearest gas station’s security footage.

Here is the gist of the movie: seven bad, boring twentysomethings go to an island and then to a nightclub and then take a magical party drug called Urge. Later, the most obvious twist in the world happens. Nothing before or after that twist is engaging or comprehensible. There’s also a bulbous hell-clown who does some dance moves.

I’m boiling this down. But not way down. Urge has a runtime of 82 minutes, then credits. Then there’s one post-credits scene, which is 100% a scene from a zombie movie.

Thanks, IMDb. Let me expand on that. The after-credits scene is in a dim deserted grocery store. A child discovers an aisle of frenzied bloody moaning people. It’s not really relevant to Urge. None of Urge’s cast are in it. Here’s why I think this scene exists. I think the producers embezzled their own budget, shot a proof of concept for a next movie, couldn’t sell that next movie, and did their fallback plan of gluing their demo onto the end of this movie.

The beginning of the movie is also plausibly part of something else. The opening titles are a montage of sex-writhing bodies in matching red unitards.

Is this a powerful metaphor for the dangers of hedonism? Or is this the Hollywood equivalent of hopping over a residential fence to slip a business card and resume through the front door mailslot of whoever makes American Horror Story? Perhaps the answer is “all of the above.” That’s not a good answer, but it is dumb and vague. Dumb and vague are what Urge is all about.

The movie begins with our main character, Danny Masterson, gathering bland twenty-nine year olds on a New York City roof. They gather on this windy rooftop so the producers don’t have to pay for a background.

Hell yeah: a free Chrysler Building. They can’t make you pay for that location if you’re at Peeping Tom distance. Meanwhile, indoors, we meet one of the ladies from Twilight. Her first scene establishes she’s the sexually exploited corporate employee of Danny Masterson, because why not dramatize what LAPD’s sniffing out IRL.

Everyone gets in two different helicopters and flies to Manhattan-Adjacent Party Island. Upon arrival, Danny Masterson and friends find their other friend (played by Justin ChatGPT) having shameless, mostly-clothed sex in a glass room. His partner is a woman who vanishes from the film immediately after coitus.

This is one of one million interactions, between all the non-Brosnan characters, where they all disregard and disgust each other. Somehow seven old friends can’t stand any member of a large group of themselves. They just glare at each other and make cutting remarks, on their vacation. Why? This movie is HARDCORE. This movie is here to get real about the depraved evil lurking in the hearts of men. The filmmakers know humans are so evil, they cannot form one relationship anyone would ever have with any other human. Because people are frauds, you see. This movie is here to prove people are frauds, by revealing the hidden evil lurking under the surface of our… obvious upfront evil. Wow: a powerful insight. Humans present themselves as jerks, while privately being jerks, because deep down we’re jerks. And if we have no positive qualities, that raises a very smart question. Perhaps humans are not as civilized as we pretend to be? Perhaps we’re just a big ol’ ball of…urges. Isn’t that right, one of this film’s producers?

Later – MUCH later – we meet Pierce Brosnan. He is in a lair, in a nightclub. The characters get into this nightclub by lining up outside, offering the bouncer money, learning no amount of money can get them in, then going straight through the velvet rope after a big exterior wall projection of eyes looks down at them.

Our wealthy Manhattanite characters descend into a club. The club blows their minds more than any place they’ve ever been in their entire lives. The club looks almost as good as an average Gossip Girl prom.

Remember: this club refused their money. Then this club offers them an astounding party drug, for no money, with just one rule (don’t take it a second time). Hmm. What manner of club is this? It’s as if this club is…a test? A test of the characters’…urges? Perhaps Pierce Brosnan can explain. In his first scene, Pierce says a bunch of mysterious stuff with Biblical connotations in a room full of Biblical art and tentacle projections.

Before you lambast me in the comments, let me take one step back. The fanatical Urge fans know I’ve mis-described Pierce’s character. His character is not named “Pierce”. His character is called “The Man.”

“The Man”! What new cinematic concept is this?! Truly nothing more deft than putting one nameless character in a movie. Probably no twist or shock coming! Also, scratch that. The movie doesn’t have the courage to actually make Pierce nameless. His character gets called “The Man”, out loud, more than a few times. He’s named a lot. People say “The Man” so often, there’s one part where it’s medium-confusing who or what is being discussed, like this is an Abbott And Costello And James Bond routine. Why don’t the filmmakers go all the nameless way? I have the urge (lol) to theorize why. These filmmakers hamfist this because the filmmakers are smart, according to them. This movie is loaded with Smart Person Blather, despite all its non-Pierce characters being callow jackals. Characters presented as hellraising cokeheads, with no interests beyond nonstop party times, also paint modern art and quote philosophers. Don’t get me wrong: this is not Quentin Tarantino’s fault. But much like how everybody decided Quentin Tarantino is smart because he gives smart dialogue to burger-filled hitmen, the guys behind Urge want their window sex man to tell you he’s read a book, because the filmmakers sure have googled one.

Here’s the entire rest of the movie: the characters accept Pierce Brosnan’s totally normal and not suspicious offer. They take one dose of the Urge party drug, and have the best night of their entire lives. You can tell it’s the best night of their entire lives because they stand at a bar and tell each other they are having the best night of their entire lives.

Yes, my Dear Hotdogger: some of the characters kiss. On the lips! And also dance on each other somewhat. That is the power of Urge. If you take Urge, like the characters in the movie Urge do, you too might achieve the dizzying heights of the coolest 60% of Winter Formal attendees.

I don’t know how they kept making the movie after shooting those scenes. The whole movie depends on those scenes. This drug is supposed to be more seductive and powerful than every real drug. The rest of this movie is the characters deciding to break the one rule and take the drug a second time. They decide they simply must do this drug again during their sober next morning, set in a kitchen nicer than the club.

The characters insist they must take Urge a second time, despite the ominous warning, because they had a spectacular fantasy-fulfilling orgy of pleasures [citation needed] last night. They also insist on retaking Urge despite Danny Masterson offering them an amazing day of spa treatments, meals, relaxation, and a private tennis lesson with Pete Sampras. I am not throwing in a gag. When Danny Masterson describes his planned itinerary, he brings up tennis lessons with Pete Sampras as if they’re as big of a deal as dinner. Pete Sampras is a world-famous tennis player, with independent wealth, married to the lady who played Veronica Vaughn in Billy Madison. He is harder to get a hold of than, say, a table at a steakhouse. I don’t think Jeff Bezos can book tennis lessons with Pete Sampras, and Jeff Bezos can kidnap every one of us. No one told the actors this Tennis Fact, and they don’t react to this suggestion at all. They reject Danny Masterson’s itinerary of four equally ordinary things, and make a plan to do more Urge. To do more Urge, they return to the club. They discuss this club passionately, and call it by its name for the rest of the movie. The club is called “Volcano”.

I need more people to have seen Urge so we can quote “What do you think I do here at Volcano?” to each other. It could’ve been the new “my wiiiiife!” The name is supposed to be ominous and it comes off as heartwarming. “Volcano” is what America’s restaurateurs could’ve named Rainforest Café, with no modifications. But in this movie, Volcano is home to the most incredible drug in the world. A drug that turns obvious jerks into differently obvious jerks. That’s what we do here at Volcano!

The rest of the movie is not worth recounting blow by blow. Jacked up on Urge, the characters do random acts of The Purge until we run out of characters. One of them starts a vague Fight Club. Another eats parts of a cake with her hands, and later describes this as “fucking” a cake, because this movie won’t put dirty stuff in its dirty scenes. Urge-fueled Danny Masterson says mean things to the gal from Twilight. That’s messed up. That’s less messed up than the sexual exploitation he put her through before he took Urge. Then the gal from Twilight gets revenge on Danny Masterson, by tying him up for sex reasons, but then not doing sex, then inflicting burns on his chest with the ferocious heat of one table lamp’s one lightbulb.

The island descends into chaos. Only Justin Chatbot is unaffected. He is immune to Urge, it turns out. The characters say this might be because he’s already so uninhibited [citation: one window sex]. This is supposed to be ironic about morality. The one voice of reason and sanity on this Bronx-adjacent island is Justin Chatwindows97? Irony! Smart! Makes you think! Justin Clubpenguin wanders the island as civilization erodes. He seeks sustenance in a diner, where Pierce Brosnan apparates into a booth for his second scene.

Hmm. “The Good Book”? Why would this regular club owner bring up the Bible, in his very first words of an interaction? This brings us to the movie’s second greatest crime. Crime #1: false adver-brosnan. He’s almost not in this. But crime #2: The entire movie is one big obvious twist (morality test), but the twist gets exaggerated into a much bigger and dumber thing there wasn’t any setup for. Here’s where it goes: Pierce Brosnan is not merely testing the morality of this friend group. As he explains in his third and final scene, Pierce Brosnan is God. Specifically, he’s the version of God from the Old Testament, as understood by a guy who’s not religious, and doesn’t respect religion, and did go to USC for Camera School. Pierce Brosnan’s nameless mystery character… [waggling eyebrows at you from behind the most Los Angeles eyeglasses ever not filled with a prescription] …IS MORE THAN HE SEEMS. After an entire hour of all of us knowing the basics of that, the film says Pierce Brosnan is a vengeful God doing a Biblical Flood. While “He” was morality-testing seven ding-dongs, Mean God implemented global distribution of his club drug that makes you feral.

This scene happens on a ferry boat. Pierce Brosnan tells Justin Barthish that by taking this ferry ride in the New York City area, Justin Barthish has ended humanity. How? Because something something something Urge spreads worldwide now. For failed morality test reasons. Or not? It’s about that clear. Then the camera shows us the name of the ferry boat. The ferry boat is called “Megiddo”.

Did you know Megiddo is the name of an ancient Mesopotamian city? Whose Greek name has something to do with Armageddon? I did not know that until I skimmed its Wikipedia entry, in disgust, after that shot of a ferry’s duct-taped prop name sign was the central image of the “we give up” final shot of the movie.

I’m furious about this role for Pierce Brosnan. I’m not just furious because a sex criminal plunged the footage into Hollywood’s Phantom Zone. Pierce Brosnan should have the time of his life for the rest of his career. Once you’ve been James Bond, you’re a permanent star with unimpeachable credibility as a cool handsome guy. That’s a magic power. If you walk into the middle of Hollywood Boulevard and say “I would like a next paycheck playing a silver fox”, a camera crew leaps out of a manhole to film you. It’s unique stardom security. This gives you a free pass to do fun weird stuff forever. Timothy Dalton is leering creeps now. Daniel Craig is wackadoodle Southerners now. Sean Connery was Spanish, twice. I want that same freedom for my man Pierce. He should be out here sinking his teeth into every bizarre character he pleases, with the same verve he gave one line in Taffin. It’s obvious that’s why he took this almost-a-role. Pierce signed on for Urge with the clear goal of a Timothy Daltonian Rumspringa. Why not get weird? He can always fall back on playing a zaddy the next time his mortgage is due. But it wasn’t the 31st yet, so he did this movie. Pierce plays a character in a pale suit, swilling red wine, offering a demonic bargain. Brosnan delivers it with the wild vibe of a louche, vaping Agent Smith. He toggles between a snarl showcasing his bottom teeth, and a liquid shimmy while cooing the words “easy breezy”.

This brings us to my biggest joy, and my favorite problem with this movie. The problem: Pierce Brosnan is too clearly a nice guy. This extraordinarily flawed movie needs Pierce Brosnan to come off as more evil than every other character. They stack the deck against him. Every twentysomething main character is an unlikable rich dingus, on the verge of their deserved comeuppance, while one-seventh of them are Danny Masterson. Meanwhile, Pierce Brosnan says a bunch of lines about humanity being a sickness that must be eradicated, with the vibe of a guy who made the craft services lady’s day two seconds ago. Don’t get me wrong: he delivers these lines as loudly as he can. He’s showing up. But my man Pierce is not my favorite actor for acting reasons. Kind of the opposite. He never quite lets go of the sweet guy I know so well. The guy from Pierce Brosnan’s Instagram account.

Pierce Brosnan has a mere 2.1 million followers, because some of you are not living your best life. His account consists of three post types: Pierce Brosnan’s paintings, Pierce Brosnan complimenting people, and boomer photo collages of how much he loves his wife and sons.

This movie’s filmmakers want us to be terrified of Pierce Brosnan. Pierce Brosnan wants us to be terrified of Pierce Brosnan. Instead, a zaddy teddy bear inflicts righteous vengeance on that criminal from That 70s Show. You could try to miscast 100 movies and never chuck your dart this far from the board. It’s an exquisite miss. I’ll never watch it again. And it brought me less than a fraction of the joy of my Instagram feed. When he’s in the role of himself, Pierce Brosnan is not spooky or demonic or an offensive caricature of God. He’s posting this:

That’s right: earnest, blurry cell phone pics of dinner with Greg Kinnear and three other guys and one business card I briefly worried was the zoomable front of somebody’s debit card. It’s nice. It’s pleasant. And it turns out you don’t need Urge when you’re high on my man Pierce’s life.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Kyle Campbell, who is revealed in the big twist to be the actual Old Testament Tod. Not a typo.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Carnival Towel Creations with Freddy 🌭

You are 12 years old. Your grandmother just returned from a three month cruise. She’s been to Lisbon, Malta, Istanbul. She’s traveled the world, visited exotic places rich in culture and history. She has gifts for you. I want you to close your eyes and picture the worst thing she could possibly give you.

“Let’s have some fun with towels,” is a troublesome statement. In a locker room it means you didn’t tuck tight enough and now you’re about to show your dick to the coach. In a barracks it means you let down the platoon too many times and now you have to pay for it. But let’s put aside the inherent despair of this premise. Let’s focus, just for a moment, on Freddy. Freddy the Carnival Cruise Towel Monster. Freddy, whose body is formless chaos, whose eyes screech madness from the prison inside his skull. One look at Freddy and you know, reflexively, that it’s your duty to die fighting this thing so the rest of humanity might live.

If Freddy is an actual mascot present on a Carnival Cruise Ship, I promise you he gets the shit beaten out of him several times a day. That costume must be armored. Wearing it is a punishment for cabana boys who don’t wear condoms. Donning the Freddy costume is the cruise variant of putting someone in the stocks. The Freddy head doesn’t even come out of storage until the ship hits international waters. Nothing about Freddy is fun, and he is on every page of this book. Doing nothing. Bending, pointing, jumping – if you flip the pages fast enough he’ll do the dance that ends time. Freddy is such a fucking walking atrocity that he overshadows the numbing sadness of this book, which is so tragic they have to put the words “fun ships” in quotation marks.

“Create your own towel family!” is a real sentence on the first page of this book. That’s some shit Freddy says to a cruise orphan. It’s deranged. Carnival says they “received literally hundreds of requests for a new, expanded book.” A dangerous lie, just like the smile carved on Freddy’s face. But let’s pretend it’s true: That means there was a first book, they learned nothing from its failure, and they convinced a roomful of executives that kids love towels, twice. If I walked into a pitch meeting like “we all know kids love towels,” I’d watch the table carefully to see who nods, then hit them with a flamethrower and say “now that we’ve destroyed the Thing infiltrating your company, let’s do the real pitch.”

The whole premise is succinctly and perfectly engineered to make sure no human could possibly think it’s a good idea, it’s a reverse Voight-Kampff test, and yet real money has gone into bringing this to life. It’s a hardcover book with thick high gloss paper, full color photos on every page, and it is way longer than you think. Somebody saw this-

And said “yes, you’re right, kids would love to do hours of whimsical laundry – you just earned a promotion, Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles.” And this is even assuming the towel sculptures fucking kick ass. That there is a Michaelangelo for every medium, and towels have waited for millenia to find theirs.

That is not the case.

This is their opener. The hook. They hope some rich, demented grandma flips Carnival Towel Creations with Freddy open to the first page, sees a rumpled formless towel soaring through the night, and thinks of home. Family. That’s the only way they sell a book!

The next spot should be a clincher. You set the hook, now reel it in.

That’s actually pretty good, it looks sort of like a snake. Because it is a rolled up towel with sunglasses on it. If I got this back at the end of a summer camp craft session I’d tell the kid I know she played phone the whole hour and she’s getting half rations the rest of the week. Cool Cobra sucks. Cool Cobra looks like he’d be voiced by David Alan Grier in a Christian puppet show about Leviticus. You can’t just put sunglasses on a rumpled towel and call it art, I’d just assume Matthew McConaughey got vaporized.

“Maybe the kids want to fuck the towels?” Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles says in the brainstorm meeting.

There are confused mutterings, the others avoid eye contact.

“No bad ideas, am I right?” Wilford Brimely Head With Tentacles tries to laugh it off.

No one else does.

Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles frowns into his coffee.

“This is fucking soy milk,” Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles sighs.

We all have off days.

They say every bad idea is worth trying sixteen times, and by they, I mean the Carnival Cruise executives hosting Freddy’s eggs.

“Why are the towels naughty?” is a question I’ve only asked once before, when I had the stroke. This shouldn’t have to be said, but if you’re four pages into a towel animal cheesecake pinup book for kids maybe you need a life coach. “Let’s get back on heroin,” your life coach would say. “I feel like we made better decisions with a little horse in us. NO! I didn’t mean it like that.”

Let’s move on-

I really thought we’d be moving on.

This cannot stand.

There was a step in these instructions to give a towel goat individual identifiable buttcheeks. Carnival Cruises asked a child to do that. I don’t think that’s a crime, but I think it will be if I mail this book to my congressman.

Maybe we’re approaching this whole thing from the wrong direction. Maybe it’s not that the book shouldn’t exist because no child would want it. Maybe the book is for children who shouldn’t exist. Like if you give this book to little Suzy and she flips through the pages, gasps, asks with light in her eyes: “Can we make this one?”

You know you’ve been cuckooed. You need to check around outside your house to see if the real Suzy has been pushed out a window and left to starve.

The book calls this one the Honeymoon and it’s normally filled with chocolates and lubricant. Picture anything else in that heart-shaped depression. Your mind automatically sketches in a VHS about the joys of anal. If your kid used one of the good towels to make this you would go wordlessly fight his PE teacher.

You guys did a bunny earlier! It was 114% too sexy but you did it. Why make another, worse one with its face smashed in? We don’t breed pug bunnies. This is a bunny rescue farm for glass door tragedies. And it’s still horny!

If I find either of those last two shapes in my kid’s room I’m putting filters on the internet and we’re done watching Space Jam.

I’m going to say something insane, but it’s absolutely true: These are the best ones.

Most of this book teaches kids how to burn an entire afternoon recreating forgotten laundry.

Guess what that’s supposed to be. Write it down, you’ll get points if you’re correct.

My first guess was Roadkill Duck, but if I squint now I’m seeing Birth Defect Lobster. Actually I’d like to change my guess to Crashed Concorde.

You get no points if you guessed-

Because that is not a fucking crocodile. I’ll give that beast Prone Bone Pyramid Head before I give it Crocodile. I’ll – hold on.

This is a multi-towel creation??

You want children to gather three fucking towels just to make this uncertain heap? If I came back from work to find the kid used every clean towel in the house to make a Submissive Sandworm I would report myself to child services, because clearly the fault lies with the parents.

There are only, generously, like five things you can make with a towel. Too bad this book has about sixty. Because the rest of these are just various mounds, occasionally seductive.

“I love it, Billy! It’s very obviously an Autopsied Otter, and this tells me you’re finally processing your feelings about the divorce.”

So coquettish. So coy. You can really see its come hither stare, and by come hither, I mean it’s saying “come hither and stomp me out of this cursed existence beyond even the peripheral vision of God.”

See, the problem comes from the premise. Origami sucks anyway. It’s complicated and fiddly and your reward, at the end, is ruined paper. Flaccid origami only adds frustration and takes away both results and towels. If you use all the bath towels for crafts I am not going to dry my ass on the turkey wad. That’s an ironic trap for crafty moms, I know it’s stuffed with nails and a hand grenade. You won’t get me this time, Macrame (that’s crafty mom Jigsaw).

“That’s not a bird,” you tell the panicked burglar you caught in your cabin, now trying to convince you he’s a cabin boy.

“You haven’t seen it fly!” the burglar says, hurling it at your face and going in for the tackle.

Here’s a tip: If you have nothing to begin with, slapping some tits on nothing and launching it anyway will only make you millions of dollars. Ask Hololive.

Flipping this upside down and putting googly eyes on was a nice try, but it’s not going to get you less suspended. You think Mrs. Davis doesn’t know a soft cock when she sees it? Ask Mr. Davis.

When in doubt, put sunglasses on a heap. Call it a day.

Actually Carnival called it a turtle, but if you can see the turtle in that image that only tells me you’re still processing some kind of turtle-related trauma. I’m sorry you went to the Coming Out of Their Shells Tour and saw Raphael puking in a gutter out back, but you only get out of therapy what you put into it. You have to want to heal, and the first step is admitting this is nothing.

Absolutely nothing! There were instructions to make this? This is how I would diagnose a busted fortune cookie press. Why’s it got a sideways gash for a mouth if not for a reason, for one specific reason??

TWO large towels and fifteen steps, just to make an abstract shape that no self respecting shark would give a test nibble. If I caught my kid fucking this I would take the filters off the internet and rent Space Jam, knowing I’d gone too far.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: FancyShark, who is a shark with dignity and would never nibble on that sad towel seal.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Hangin’ with Leo

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Cemetery Man

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UPSETTING DAY

Ape Week: Lancelot Link 🌭

Happy Ape Week! Today I’m talking about Lancelot Link: The 1970 spy-spoof television show starring exclusively chimps. It was a simpler time in America. A time when adequate men could become very rich by asking “what if anything, but chimps?” And they did. They did ask that. The writers behind Get Smart asked producers “what if we did more Get Smart, but chimps?” They were given a record-breaking seven figure budget for this astonishing idea.

I have lots of TOTALLY APESOME facts about Lancelot Link!

Here’s one: The chimps were made to “talk” by rubbing peanut butter on their gums. Most also knew a hand signal, which looked like the universal yapping gesture for “blah blah blah.” When they saw a human go “blah blah blah,” they’d all start flapping their mouths like bees got into the muppet set.

This is Tonga, the chimp who played Lancelot Link, and the only one who didn’t know the hand signal. Instead they had him chew gum in every scene. He loved it!

Today, you get to choose to know that, and only that. Or you can also know the APESOLUTELY TRAGIC facts, which will pop up in italics, like so:

APESOLUTELY TRAGIC!

Tonga despised the set veterinarian in a way normally reserved for grindhouse revenge movies. His trainer, Daryll, warned the showrunners “someday, he will get that vet.” Daryll is one of those prophetic ape trainers who can foretell ape tragedy. It’s actually really easy: Is there an ape around? There’s tragedy. While being led off set one day, Tonga leapt over the other chimp’s heads, scaled a wall, and sunk his teeth into the vet. This happened on the very first and only time studio executives visited the set. They showed up to a multimillion dollar ape disaster, witnessed a man being devoured by a chimpanzee, then walked away and pulled funding. I’m kidding. They did not pull funding.

Let’s meet the rest of the cast. There was Mata Hairi, whose voice actor once played “all the children in a Japanese train wreck” on an episode of Godzilla. I don’t actually know if that’s fun or not. That’s uh, that’s a NEUTRAL MANDRILL fact!

There was Commander Darwin, who gives his “theory” on each case – that’s almost but not quite a pun. Good job, writers of Get Smart! Darwin was voiced by Bernie Koppell, who you probably don’t know as Doc from Love Boat. NEUTRAL MANDRILL!

We’re being overrun by Neutral Mandrills. Let’s get-

TOTALLY APESOME!

Show writers were brought on after the chimp’s scenes were recorded, and made to match their dialogue to the chimp’s random peanut butter licks. As a writer, that’s the saddest job I can possibly imagine, and they were not very good at it. They filled out dialogue with insane gibberish, wild screeching, random coughs, gags, and sneezes. The only way it could have been sadder is if they had actually tried. Oh no, this was supposed to be TOTALLY APESOME! Uh…. t-this is maybe the most creative control a chimp has ever exerted over man! TOTALLY APESOME!

Our hero chimps worked for an organization called APE: the Agency to Prevent Evil.

That’s actually pretty solid. Is it weird to be proud of these writers when they get a win? It’s like watching an orphan catch a game-winning homerun at the World Series. Let them enjoy that moment while they can, you know an eBay reseller’s going to mug them in the parking lot.

It’s APE’s job to fight CHUMP.

The Criminal Headquarters for Underworld Master Plan. Oh no, there’s that eBay mugging.

CHUMP was run by the Baron, also voiced by Koppell, who previously played the villain Siegfried on Get Smart. Here he’s branching out by playing exactly Siegfried again, only for less money and shared credit with an ape, because he’s a home run orphan waiting for his turn in the parking lot.

The Baron was a foppish German evil genius, and here’s something TOTALLY APESOME! The chimp who played him loved his monocle so much that he never took it off. If it fell out, he’d put it back in himself – he was not trained to do this!

There was Dr. Strangemind, an eccentric mad scientist.

They actually taught him to play with those little beakers! He runs back and forth pouring liquids from flask to flask with this genuine look of concentration on his face, it’s magical. I love that a chimp knows how to do science now, but not why. If he ever escapes his cage at the Maybelline facility, they’ll find him in the lab inventing a new kind of foundation that gives you third degree burns. That doesn’t count as an APESOLUTELY TRAGIC fact because it’s only very probably true.

There’s the Baron’s bodyguard and chauffeur, Creto:

I know what you’re thinking. That’s a borderline offensive caricature of Kato, the Asian bodyguard/chauffeur from Green Hornet. That’s on you, that’s your bias showing. Creto is a directly offensive Mexican stereotype. That’s a little thing the 1970s called diversity.

It seems hard to fuck up a comedy show for kids starring all chimps. Basically just don’t make all the humor extremely racial and you’re good to go. Meet Dragon Woman:

Huh, no ape pun for that name. I guess I don’t have one either. Something about bananas being- no, this was the right call. This was the classy move. Here’s her henchman, Wang Fu:

That’s sort of adjacent to a pun on kung fu? Although I should clarify they did not teach this chimp kung fu for the show. I probably didn’t need to clarify that actually, we’d have a national holiday to mourn the ensuing massacre if they did.

There was Ali Assa Seen, the Arabic chimp henchman. Wouldn’t it be crazy if I told you he was actually a really sensitive and progressive portrayal of Arabs at the time? I am not telling you that.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a TOTALLY APESOME fact! Here’s one: That’s a real hawk on his shoulder. They were friends!

It’s also been a while since we’ve had an APESOLUTELY TRAGIC fact! Here’s one: The hawk is with Ali because he’s the only chimp who wouldn’t tear it apart. That seems like one of those things you can only find out through trial and error…

Finally, the Duchess:

No notes. A chimp pretending to be a posh English dame is the hand grenade of comedy. You don’t have to aim it real well; it still works pretty good if you miss.

I mentioned earlier they secured a record-breaking seven figure budget for this pilot, right? It was called:

And right away it opens with a cultural constant nightmare. A terror inexplicably shared across every human civilization, no matter how disparate.

Teaching a chimp to use scissors on another chimp is illegal everywhere except floating fight clubs in international waters. Even there it’s frowned upon as crass – a sophisticated chimp wields the katana.

APESOLUTELY TRAGIC! Speaking of chimps fighting with scissors, there was a rumor that all the male chimps were castrated before production, and that’s ultimately how PETA got the show shut down. That’s not true: They actually castrated the chimps one day before filming, and PETA has never accomplished anything. Also, castration didn’t help: the chimps were exactly as aggressive on set, so the only net good here was the bag of Purina they turned those 12 monkey cocks into.

The APE agent’s cover was a psychedelic hippy band called the Evolution Revolution playing out of the Coconut Grove club, which was really just a flimsy excuse to dress chimps like hippies and have them wail on instruments. You know what? I’ll take it.

TOTALLY APESOME! Chimpanzees usually hit things with the backs of their hands, and with both hands at the same time. But when trainers handed them their musical instruments, all the chimps just seemed to get it. At first they only flailed wildly with their paws facing down, but as soon as the director played music through on-set speakers, every chimp synced up to the beat. It mystifies Chimp Hop experts to this day!

APESOLUTELY TRAGIC! The chimp on drums stole the show. His name was Blackie. In the documentary I Created Lancelot Link, the showrunners are given his picture. They have this exchange:

“Remember him?”

“Oh yeah, Charlie.”

“Blackie.”

“Blackie, right. He was the one that had the stroke.”

WHY ARE YOU READING THESE?

The best thing Lancelot Link ever did was teach these chimps to dance. And they took to it instantly. This chimp fucking rules!

Fucking rules in particular, out of an entire party of dancing hippy chimps! That’s like making Valedicktorian in All Hunk High School (check my Patreon for more AHHS).

Let’s get to the pilot. Ali Assa Seen is recruited by the Baron to steal the Star of Karachi Diamond, which is worth a shocking three million dollars. CHUMP brags at one point that even after they split it, they’ll get 500k each. Also known as “not enough to buy a starter house anymore.” That joke wasn’t TOTALLY APESOME, and I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you:

Look at his little hawk friend riding his shoulder, surely bragging to all the other hawks about his sick problematic chimp mech.

Ali is supposed to hand the diamond off to Dragon Woman and Wang Fu, who’s using chopsticks when we meet him!

That chimp is working those chopsticks better than a conservative uncle at Panda Express, and I’m so fucking proud of him. Although hey, real quick, what do you think is the maximum number of racist props you can legally glue to an ape?

I don’t know the answer, either. I think it’s one less than this:

APESOLUTELY TRAGIC! The writers use lip syncing fills as an excuse for extra racism here. “Ah so,” and “me no,” and at least one racist sneeze. I didn’t know that was a thing!

IT IS VERY MUCH A THING.

I’m sorry if you’ve been avoiding tragedy so far and saw that, I don’t know how to make a screenshot italic.

Because it’s really hard to get chimps to do anything but fuck and eat vets, and because that seven figure budget was for sure a way to launder coke-money, the entire heist happens offscreen. Ali just shows up the next scene with the diamond already stolen:

These episodes are ten minutes long, we are eight minutes into the very first one, and the most we’ve done is watch a chimp eat with chopsticks. Don’t get me wrong, I’m real fucking proud of my boy – I’ll watch him maw those noodles down for an entire two-hour special feature. But for three-quarters of the pilot episode? And the other quarter is all phone calls?

Look, I know it’s pretty funny to imagine what one ape has to say to another on the telephone. “Probably something about bananas!” Say the writers, inwardly praying for a gas explosion. But the pilot episode is where you go all out to sell the concept, and the concept here was “chimps doing spy shit.” There’s only one more scene left, surely they won’t-

And that’s it! That’s the pilot. Now, remember it is a two-parter, but also remember studio execs will watch the absolute bare minimum of something before making a snap decision about its fate, because everyone in the world is sick of doing their job when they could be getting head on a yacht. Just imagine authorizing a seven figure budget and getting back a ten minute reel of chimpanzees opening and closing their mouths next to phones. If this was any other decade but the 1970s, in any other place but Hollywood, somebody would have been fired for Lancelot Link. Instead people like this were allowed to fail upward and upward until they negligently killed two children with a helicopter, and even then it just meant they had to fail sideways from now on.

We’re getting APESOLUTELY TRAGIC when we should be TOTALLY APESOME!

Quick, look at Tonga in his little ascot.

I know that’s not a fact, but look at his bashful smile. He knows he’s handsome. That’s a fact!

In part two of “There’s No Business Like Snow Business,” Ali Assa Seen rides a camel from the Middle East all the way to a ski resort in the Alps to fence that stolen diamond. Ignore the inexplicable racism of that – they actually got a chimp to ride a camel!

That’s a hawk riding a chimp riding a camel, or as zoologists call it: The beginning of the end. This looks like the start of a transformation sequence in one of the weirder Sentai series. I imagine this is the kind of brag that gets you laid at animal trainer conventions. They would name this accomplishment after you, they’d call it the Daryll Trio and you’d get to sidle up to two ladies at the hotel bar who always smell like horse and ask if they’d like to make a Daryll Trio of their own. It would work. It would work. What a moment, what a victory…

To be immediately overshadowed by this chimp getting stuck in a hat.

Man, I could watch a chimp get lost in a ski mask for five straight minutes which is good, because that’s what happens. But I would not need seven figures to film this. All I’d need is your dumbest chimp, your most complicated ski mask, and a cameraman who failed the Voight-Kampff test.

This is not the showrunner’s proudest moment.

TOTALLY APESOME! When asked what their proudest moment was, the creators of Lancelot Link said it was this shot:

Understandable. That rules. It’s got everything: Chimps, silly outfits, attempted sports. This establishing shot of the ski resort took 30 chimps to film!

APESOLUTELY TRAGIC! They filmed this in California during the summer, where it was “110 degrees in the shade.” The chimps had to be out in the direct sun at midday, in heavy parkas, with bulky objects strapped to their feet and hands, while repeatedly being shoved down a hill. Also all that snow was fake, which in 1970, means it was probably asbestos.

But how did they keep the little guys from eating shit on those skis? I’m glad you asked:

Then there’s an all-chimp toboggan chase. That alone is worth a quarter million dollars to one specific guy, and he’s a rich Swiss pervert with a chimp fetish. Which means he still would have considered this episode a rip-off since it cost at least four times that to film.

We close out on a big chimp snowball fight!

TOTALLY APESOME! They clearly accomplished this by standing just offscreen and whipping snowballs at unsuspecting chimps. Or wait, maybe that’s not TOTALLY APESOME! No, come on, a snowball is pretty harmless and it’s a fantastic day at work when you get to whomp a chimp with a fistful of snow. Besides, I’m saving the-

APESOLUTELY TRAGIC fact! That’s Mata Hairi in the red hat and blue sweater combo, and she obviously gets the worst whomping. Maybe that’s because, when asked about Debbie, the chimp who plays Mata Hairi, showrunners said “she was a bitch chimp. If there’s a thing called a bitch chimp, Debbie was a bitch chimp.”

TOTALLY APESOME! “Whomp the bitch chimp” is a fun onomatopoeia you can use to beatbox Darude’s “Sandstorm!”

Link and Mata trick the evil chimps into tossing them the stolen diamond in one of the snowballs, and that’s the end of the two-part pilot! The seven figure two-part pilot! The successful seven figure two-part pilot that was ordered to series based on this footage! TOTALLY APESOLUTELY APESOMELY TRAGIC!

Wait, you haven’t heard my favorite story. It is both TOTALLY APESOME and APESOLUTELY TRAGIC. You can’t separate one from the other. It happens while filming the episode “Bonana” which, holy shit, is the title of the all-chimp Bonanza parody. I take back everything I said about these writers. They were tasked with shoveling shit and they made an all-shit Veiled Virgin.

First, and most importantly, look at the chimps ride the ponies!

How did they make sure the chimps didn’t eat shit while doing this? I’m glad you asked:

The less said about the motorcycles, the better.

This story isn’t about Pony Chimps vs. The Motorcycle Apes, that’s a more personal tale you have to sign up for my Patreon to read. It’s really about my relationship with my father. This story is about the chimp who played the Indian in “Bonana” which, don’t worry, is exactly as tasteful as you assume:

To the surprise of no one except everyone involved in making Lancelot Link, as soon as they got this chimp all dressed up like a genocide and let him free in the forests of California, he bolted.

Yes, in full costume.

They had no contingency plans for rogue chimps in redface. It wasn’t in any of the binders. Those all dealt with rogue yellowface chimps, plus one Mexican, and the tactics just don’t carry over. The showrunners couldn’t do anything but stand around, hoping whatever child it tore the face off of was near-sighted.

A few hours later, the chimp shows up again. As the showrunners describe it: “A hippy – a human hippy – comes walking out of the woods hand in hand with this little Indian chimp.”

Weird emphasis theirs. Personally I think it would’ve been wilder if the hippy was another chimp, escaped from a rival production across the forest. Kind of a Romeo and Juliet thing. Again, check my Patreon.

The hippy had a cabin out in those woods and was just chilling there, presumably stoned out of his mind, when he looked up and saw Chief Chimp staring through his window. Instead of assuming he was in the fun part of an anti-drug PSA, he decided to go out there and bond with an ape. Then, instead of hopping in a van with a chimp and having a series of grand adventures solving musical mysteries across the USA, this fucking hippy soured chimp/man relations forever by betraying his new friend and returning it to the set.

Another thing the showrunners don’t specifically say, because they don’t have to: Chief Chimp was high as shit when he came back.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Vooster, who would take that chimp vanning because she’s not a fucking narc.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Ape Week: The Many Faces of Tim Curry in Congo 🌭

Your cries have been heard, hotdog children. You demanded that I return to my roots and rate Tim Curry’s faces in the movie Congo for Ape Week. I wish rating Tim Curry’s faces wasn’t my greatest talent. I wish the space in my brain that I keep for Tim Curry face rating would hold something useful like math or CPR, or how to make a diamond into an ape-killing laser. I’ve now watched Congo twice in two years, thanks to 1900HOTDOG. A government employee should be sent to check on me any minute now, and I will tell them, “I’m fine; Hotdog made me do it!”

After watching Congo entirely focused on Tim Curry, I’ve come to realize this movie underutilized Tim Curry. His face isn’t even featured on the poster! What a whiff. He’s doing what he does best here, playing both a villain and a bit of comic relief. Funny villain is actually difficult to pull off and he is the master of it. We love him, but when we see a gorilla bash his head in with its fist, we’re like, “Yeah, that seems right.”

Tim Curry’s acting in this movie is downright subtle. He’s letting the accent do a lot of the heavy lifting, and boy is it lifting. I made a note of some of my favorite pronunciations Herkemer Holmolka made in this movie, but it doesn’t translate well into writing. If you want, you can listen to our extensive, perfect impressions on the Dogg Zzone 9000 Podcast episode about Congo. Or, you can picture Count Chocula over pronouncing every syllable in the word diamonds, and that’s basically it. When we first see Tim Curry, he’s doing a gentle evil smirk that is so restrained I barely recognise him. One out of a million Tim Curries. What is happening to our boy?

Congo doesn’t linger on Tim Curry’s little smiles. It doesn’t pan in on his evil scowls. It’s taught me to appreciate Curry in a new way. Ignore the main characters in the scene; ignore the plot; it’s laser gorillas anyway; watch the Curry! His usual brilliance is in there; they just don’t want you to know. Why would you hide this 3.5 out of five Tim Curry face from us, Congo?

A human/gorilla hybrid has to throw a decapitated human head at Tim Curry for us to get that reaction out of him, and it’s so underplayed. It’s a quiet little moment between Tim Curry and that skull where he has to show so many emotions with one quick expression. Yet when you see that face, you know immediately that man is looking at a human skull that’s been torn off at the hands of a super ape that can only be killed by lasers or volcanoes. This is a two-second clip where they quickly cut to other actors reacting to the head. Who cares! Tim Curry is there.

The worst thing that happens in the movie Congo is that a man has to burn a leech off of his dick as a comedic bit, and we never get to see Time Curry’s reaction to it. He’s not in that scene at all, so that face is lost to history. Instead, we’ll have to be sustained by Tim Curry, sadly contemplating a little snack. Timmy loves a snack! I give four out of nine Tim Curry’s.

Did that sesame cake kill his mother? The man looks devastated, absolutely crushed by a pastry. A Congo congoisseur might recognize this as the scene where a soldier screams at him to “STOP EATING MY SESAME CAKE.” On closer rewatch, this is the look right before Tim eats the cake. It makes me realize he knew he shouldn’t eat the cake, but he did it anyway. What a scamp, how perfectly in character. He’s tortured by his love of that sesame cake. Then, after he gets yelled at for his love of cake, he turns to Ernie Hudson to see if he’ll fight for his right to eat cake, and I give that face four Tim Curries, plus a secret fifth one (he’s hiding).

This scene is the most we get to see Tim Curry being Tim Curry before the heads start to come off. He was made for the drama and intrigue of the last fifteen minutes of Congo and not for understated wandering-through-the-jungle-and-joking-about-a-guy-fucking-a-gorilla middle of Congo. You might wonder what the heck Tim Curry’s character is doing there for most of the middle of the movie, and the answer is he’s waiting around to make this face.

Woah, I’m so sorry that was far too powerful of a face this early in the article. It almost overloaded our system, but I managed to use some diamonds I found in the jungle to reconfigure a few things. Let’s take it down a notch and appreciate Tim Curry’s subtle anger at Ernie Hudson for outing him as a Romanian con man who is somehow not faking that accent.

A mere seven Tim Curries for that one. I’ve seen the kind of rage this man harbors for Kermit The Frog. I’ve seen the darkest depths of his soul reflected in the black button eyes of a Muppet, so I can’t buy this burst of rage at Ernie Hudson. However, when Ernie Hudson absolutely destroys Tim Curry later in the movie, I do believe his utter despair. Three Tim Curries, BUT they’re all smoking cigarettes.

Uh oh, I just accidentally released the title of my Congo fan fiction early. Nobody take Ernie Hudson Absolutely Destroys Tim Curry from me, I called dibs. Tim Curry is so hot in this movie; like physically, he’s sweaty a lot, and it makes me wonder if there was an intern specifically in charge of dampening Tim Curry between takes. Here’s a sweaty Tim Curry in a Walt Disney World cave, realizing he might not get to see any diamonds on this Congo trip and will, therefore, never get to make the perfect face he was hired for. A solid five Tim Curries, one of them is smoking even though I specifically asked him not to.

During the last half of the movie, we get my second favorite genre of Tim Curry faces, which I call Scream Queen Tim Curry. We usually know him as a snide, cocky man, making indistinct British noises of joy, but his indistinct British noises of despair are just as good. Here’s Tim Curry realizing he’s in the movie Congo, a meta king, seven out of 12 Tim Curries.

What face would you make if you were about to be punched to death by a human/ape hybrid? Would it be something that reads as, “not this again?” Because that’s what I take from Tim Curry’s absolute exhaustion at the appearance of the murder monkey. What is the backstory on this? Tim Curry has created such a rich history for Herkimer Homolka we’ll never fully understand his complicated relationship with death and killer ape-men, nine very confused Tim Curries.

After a gorilla mauling, you are about to be smashed into liquid Tim Curry here in the Lost City of Zinj. Action.

The power of Tim Curry has been disseminated to a subatomic level. I am Tim Curry. You are Tim Curry; just kidding. None of us are cool enough to be a Tim Curry. It would be a great reveal if Lydia Bugg was a pseudonym for Tim Curry this whole time. Let’s say that’s how I end this article. You don’t get to be Tim Curry. Only I am Tim Curry! Yeah, I like that better.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Hambone, who is the sixth secret Tim Curry hidden… in our hearts.