Category: UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Bad Mojo 🌭

Look, I’m not a complicated man (although “man” is strong, lately I’ve been trying to discover a sense of gender identity inside me that really rings true, and wondering if in fact I’m one who doesn’t feel gendered at all, in the conventional sense, and what the appropriate pronouns might be for someone in that boat). Simple. I only operate in two modes: fucking and upsetting. Perusing all the topics I soon plan to force down your eye-gullets to harvest the sweet foie gras of your pop-culture-ruined livers, I was struck by the fact that every single one falls into one of those two buckets, and indeed at least eight of them qualify for both, like some impossible dream-shape able to fall into two buckets at once. And while I don’t apologize for my two-track mind, I do apologize for it. It’s a sorry not sorry situation. Let’s play a cockroach game now! Do you get to fuck it? Only if you choose the correct romance options throughout!

Bad Mojo came out in 1994 and was a way for Pulse Entertainment, founded by Bill Woodward and Young Harvill, to show off some of their proprietary animation tools. It’s the only game they ever made, as they instead went on to make stuff that makes the Internet work, like embedded web video and publishing tools. In short, boring. So who’s idea was it, I wonder, to try and sell their new tech to a bunch of other software developers by making a game where the art assets include a dead rat filled with razor blades?

My money’s on Harvill, because he has a more interesting name. Incidentally, that’s the same reason I know Sirhan Sirhan is guilty but have my doubts about John Booth. The official description of this game starts with the sentence “Roger was about to do something bad. Unfortunately, he can’t remember what it was because he has been transformed into a cockroach.” It’s so bad he can’t remember what it was, you guys. This game posits that being turned into a sentient cockroach was the preferred alternative to whatever it was “Roger did bad.”

It also calls itself “Kafkaesque,” but they mean it only in the sense that Kafka has a story about a cockroach, which is kind of like calling the O.J. Simpson trial Kafkaesque because it’s a trial. You’re not wrong, you’re just introducing eight-year-old Swaim to concepts like karmic reincarnation and what it is to be eaten alive. Bad Mojo opens with a monologue from a disaffected loser who sounds like a cross between the new Riddler and an incel Tim McVeigh complete with a mysterious truck on its way to a state building in the pounding rain.

Oops! Did we just zoom in past a CG window to reveal some full-motion video shit? I think we did! This is some Night Trap Tully Bodine Sewer Sharks shit right here, bitches! I urge you to comprehend the fact that this game was made to prove the tech for taking real photographs and putting them into games as discrete objects that could respond to game logic. It’s similar to how games like Mortal Kombat and Pit Fighter operated at the time. So these guys were trying to show off their amazing video-gaming-hybrid technology, and their second thought was “we should take some pictures of dead rats and stuff, I bet that’s cheap.” Their first thought, of course, was “hybrid? Why, that reminds me of a story about a man turned into a cockroach I once imagined and definitely jerked off to!”

Bill and Young immediately reveal their true colors as our anti-hero Roger pauses both his plan to rob a bar and desperate need for a different haircut to pick up a cat and look at it very sternly while his inner monologue says “Now I was in control.” We get it, killing animals gets you off! Us too but you’re not supposed to talk about it!” is what I imagine you saying. The collective you, as well as the specific person reading this sentence now. Hello.

After Roger straight-up fondles his stolen money…

…he’s quite predictably struck by purple lightning from a magic locket his mother gave him that’s carved to look like a cockroach.

You, as him, ew, then wake up metamorphosed into a roach and transported to the little system of tunnels with Bioshock valves but cockroach-sized that we all keep under the floorboards of our house. Seriously, who is that for? Even in Bad Mojo, cockroaches can’t use valves.

The music is, incidentally, so heavy on the bass that YT autocaption thought it was people applauding. That’s how you know this roach fucks. Speaking of which, it’s time for Romance the Roach Question #1! Please keep your own score and tally at the end.

What’s a legit okay pickup line for a cockroach?

A. “It’s a miracle I’m not up in those spiracles.”

B. “Is your eye compound? Because I just came. Pound?”

C. “I’m like Andy Cercus, cuz I’ll gollum that pussy. Cercus is spelled c-E.”

D. “I am a cockroach with sentience and who can speak. Hello.”

E. “My coxa ‘bout to get up in your labial palp.”

So since you can’t use valves, you must instead set off on a quest through a series of levels that, I cannot stress enough, are collages of photographs of dirt and grime and the death and decay we all must someday face. You encounter awesome stuff like rusty drains, cigarette butts and bottle caps. Do you want to buy our FMV backend games production software now?

As if that wasn’t upsetting enough, every time you talk to an NPC roach you’re treated to a closeup shot of a real cockroach.

All the roaches are mystical and speak in cryptic rhymes and snatches of visions, like Rafiki if he helped you do stuff like start the pilot light on a stove and trick a rat into a mousetrap.

Ah yes, “Music,” that’ll help this go down easy. Speaking of the Lion King, here’s Bad Mojo’s equivalent of Pride Rock.

“Behold, my son. Soon you will hold dominion over all the adhesive touches.”

So anyway

OH SHIT IT WASN’T DEAD IT WASN’T DEAD! Yes, unlike almost all other games of this nature, Bad Mojo featured a limited number of lives and tons of ways to get killed, all of which were both designed as jump scares and to give young Swaim as disturbing a nightmare as possible. Fun Fact: my mom took Night Trap away from us because she heard it had scantily clad ladies being abducted by men in it, which is not untrue. Bad Mojo is the video game standing beside me at Night Trap’s grave to whom I whisper “She took the wrong one.”

Here’s a rat skeleton being used as a bridge, which is a great example of basic meat-and-rat-skeleton puzzle design. You also traverse a roach motel by using the still-struggling bodies of your fellow roaches as death-bridges, which I believe is either the fourth or fifth circle of Hell. I forget, but it’s the circle with all the advertising executives.

Through a series of flashbacks unlocked by interacting with certain objects, you come to develop empathy for your landlord, which is a feat that was apparently fanciful even at that time. The first of these memories is when his wife died in childbirth. Okay, grim, but that can be shown a lot of different ways. What do you think, twitching rubber baby with surgery being done on it? I do, I do think that.

This flashback also reveals that your landlord’s name is fucking Mr. Potato and that he overacts just as hard as Roger, something they can now bond over.

You also find out more about Roger through found objects and learn both how scuzzy he is and that, deep down, he’s not such a bad guy. You know, story.

But who gives a shit about that? Here is a real photograph of a dead cockroach in some mashed potatoes.

NOW do you want to buy our FMV game software?!

No? But you wanna answer another question to hopefully get you closer to banging this cockroach? Deal!

How do you tempt a roach?

A. “Hey kid, want to eat a dead body?”

B. With a pile of shit, just human shit.

C. By opening your wings up and pumping that tergal gland, G.

D. I don’t know, probably the last one because I can tell from context that the tergal gland is something.

E. Yeah, D.

No, you’re all wrong, the answer is to roofie your landlord’s beer and listen to him say the saddest thing anyone’s ever said out loud in a room alone.

This causes him to spill his loose change when he passes out, see, which lets you use a coin to form a circuit to make a radio work so the ghost of his dead wife can tell you that flesh is only a shell, a pale reflection of the abyss within.

Things get extremely Kafkaesque when three discarded wedding rings form a Triforce of bitter regret and open a magical portal to the back of a refrigerator.

That naturally segues into watching a decapitated fish spew cockroaches where its blood should be, but there is also blood as well.

The dead wife appears once more to reveal that you ARE the son that killed her just before you were going to try to murder your landlord/father by staging a gas leak, and hits us with the moral of the story: “Love can flourish even in the soil of death, and this is the key to life eternal.” You know, like Kafka might posit.

Which of these things is the least Kafkaesque?

A. You wake up and you’re a swan.

B. You wake up and you’re a human but you were a swan before.

C. You go on trial for metamorphosing a stranger.

D. I think Stranger was Camus, actually.

E. Michael, you should try harder than this.

I could spend all day pulling horrors out of the Bad Mojo sack like Satan Clause and dispersing them to the children, but I don’t want to gild the urinal cake. Suffice to say the rest of the game is a cavalcade of mystical nonsense, suicide, disgust, and a talking plate-clock haunted by your mom.

In the end, instead of blowing up the bar and killing your sleeping Dad, you turn off the gas and are rewarded by being made human again so you can make up for lost time. Just kidding! You let the old bastard burn, get arrested, plead insanity and spend the rest of your days in a straitjacket trying to kill yourself but you can’t even do that because the walls are padded and they feed you with a funnel.

Okay, last chance, NOW do you want to buy our software? Maybe I’m being overly grim. There is a good ending you can get, in which the roach bravely sacrifices his life to warn the landlord of impending danger. Of course, since he and his money are destroyed in the explosion, the landlord never finds out about his son and ends up homeless because of the debt incurred in trying to rebuild.

There’s another ending where they find out they’re father and son and escape to Belize together with the money, but that one also reveals that the kid’s full name is “Hitler Potato,” so I don’t think we’re moving a lotta units here on this software deal.

That’s just my opinion as a comedy writer commenting on its successful conclusion twenty-nine years after the fact.

Now let’s tally up those scores!

0 – 2 – BAD MOJO: You remain a cockroach and Will Smith steps on you to taunt an alien.

3 – 4 – MEDIUM MOJO: You got more points than the quiz implies are available. Good job!

5 – 6 – GOOD MOJO: You wonder how it’s possible to tally up scores when it was never revealed which answers are correct or how many points each answer is worth. You lose.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Thomas Cavazos, who answered all of Swaim’s sexual roach questions correctly and has earned a terrible prize.

Tags 1990s, best of 2023, Free, games, Video Games

UPSETTING DAY

Puppet Week: You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 10/27/2023
5 Comments on Puppet Week: You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man 🌭

As the fall of Puppet Week encircles us, our only choice left is to die well. To take as many of them with us. But first… the year was 1939, and the world was at war. One of America’s biggest celebrities was a ventriloquist doll and it was the lead in a feature film about a puppeteer swindler betraying a circus to destroy a marriage. I’m not kidding. If I was kidding I’d have said, “If your only friend was a puppet, would his wooden temptation be enough for you to put him, tuxedo and all, into my wife? Could his tiny body hold enough courage for a darkness so wet? Hi, I’m Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn.” And then I would have included a picture of Todd McFarlane like this:

But no, I’m being serious. The following is Charlie McCarthy’s You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, more or less exactly as it appeared in theaters 84 years ago. Please enjoy this barely retouched classic.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, who through the magic of cyberspace is now pregnant with puppet crabs.

Tags Free, movies, puppet week, puppets

UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Jan Švankmajer’s Alice 🌭

Post author By Michael Swaim
Post date 10/19/2023
9 Comments on Upsetting Day: Jan Švankmajer’s Alice 🌭

Well met, my precious hotdog flavored readers! Call me a chocolate starfish, because I’m about to make your biscuit limp.

“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important AAAAAAAAAAAH!” Yes, in a radical and unforeseen pivot, I’ve Swaimaranged you yet again by promising to discuss nothing but sex and then slapping you with prescription-strength boner-killer mid-thrust! Damn-that’s-a-lotta-hyphens! Sorry for the jerkaround, but the only thing that overpowers my horniness is my urge to be a certified Bad Boy. What am I rebelling against? Whatcha got? But also mostly this:

That’s a still from a 1988 film that reimagines Alice in Wonderland, the classic tale of a child’s imagination and also whatever the fuck that thing I just showed you was. It was set like a pack of hyenas upon our misbegotten world by the unholy hands of a dark wizard known only as Jan Švankmajer.

Švankmajer is a Czech stop-motion animator, filmmaker, theatre director, all-around weirdo, and man whose last name wears a little hat. With this banger, originally titled “Something from Alice,” he perfected an art form so cool and accessible that no one’s ever replicated it before or since except right after having sex with a corpse they tortured. I’m talking about STOP-MOTION TAXIDERMY BABY, and as perhaps its ~~greatest~~ only practitioner, Jan has much to teach us. Primarily what going mad must feel like.

As will become a recurring theme in this column, I was exposed to Jan Švankmajer’s work by my dad, because my childhood was a very specific kind of dojo preparing me for this job and this job only. At the tender age of four, FUCKING FOUR, I was cordially invited into the sitting area for tobacco pipes and gin. Once we had supped and discussed the news of the day, dear old Dad put on a laserdisc of what he called “an Alice in Wonderland movie.” What then transpired has shaped me from that day forth, or at least the part of me that likes to find small animals in the woods and make them wear human teeth. It is an “Alice in Wonderland movie” only in the sense that the My Lai Massacre was “a game of hide and seek.”

Let’s pause here to note that as a stop-motion movie, the creation of this piece of singular art required touching and wiggling all of the taxidermied animals’ little parts around thousands of times an hour. Like, this guy has quite possibly handled more dead animals than anyone in human history outside of Bob Barker (spaying and neutering just wasn’t enough for you, was it Bob?! I hope they nail your ass someday). My four-year-old self also enjoyed imagining Jan laboriously wedging glass eyes into each and every one of their heads, because he didn’t like to sleep very much.

Now that I’m an adult and know a bit about how filmmaking works, I’m honestly even more fascinorrified. For each of these monstrosities, I know there’s a pile of discarded animal parts and stitched-together homunculi that didn’t make the final version. This is the only movie in existence whose cutting-room floor was a bunch of loosely intermingled bits of what were once living things, and also scraps of film. Jan doesn’t make deleted scenes, he makes missing pets. “Sorry Timmy, Scout isn’t going to be around anymore. He went to a big farm upstate to be dismantled for a children’s horror movie.”

This movie isn’t even nightmare fuel, because once you’ve seen it you don’t sleep, you merely close your eyes and relive Jan Švankmajer’s Alice each night in a mindless fugue-state. What made Jan do these awful, awful things? My theory, without looking into it even a little bit, is that he was shunned growing up because his name is only two letters away from “Spankmajor.” Only the animals of the woods would play with little Jan, and when they passed away he missed them, so he decided they would be thrice immortalized: once as a stuffed animal, once on film, and then again at the one-man after party in a cave near the freeway where you know he had sex with that rabbit.

But please don’t think of my dad as the villain in this tale, even though I previously admitted to him owning an imported laserdisc, which most these days consider a beating offense. The true miscreant is whoever let their human daughter stumble through what could only have been a baffling ordeal. The movie’s only actor, she is also shot in stop-motion, which means making this, for her, was a process of being meticulously posed by a strange man with his dead animal collection more times than Milhouse had to shoot his scene in the Radioactive Man movie.

See, Dad?! We could have been watching The Simpsons and shit! But no, you had to ruin me, just like Alice’s parents ruined her by giving her over to the machinations of one who has seen beyond the veil and returned to tell us there is nothing after death but diamond dust and the screams of those still dissolving. Here’s Alice crawling across a cracked wasteland so she can painfully cram herself into a tiny drawer:

Here she is being turned into a doll…

… and if this doesn’t replace that meme of the monkey puppet looking to the right I don’t know what possibly can:

Later she becomes not-a-doll again by ripping out of herself chest-burster style and it’s somehow much much worse:

Here is a jar with some bread with some nails in it:

Alice actually finds a lot of jars with a mix of food and metal shavings in them, because Švankmajer didn’t think the people who put fentanyl-dipped razorblades in candy on Halloween were going hard enough.

The funny thing is, those people don’t actually exist, but Jan does. He’s out there somewhere, wiggling stuff around and taking pictures of it, flensing squirrel skulls and buying glass eyes by the sack. What was crafty on the set of this movie, herringbones and sawdust? Jellied aspic? Hotdog flavored water? All good guesses, but it was actually big bowls of scabs. Got that off of IMDB* trivia.

Here is a flat of eggs, each of which hatches a little (real) rat skull that then slithers away on a trail of its own fetid yolk:

One soon gets the impression that the filmmaker didn’t read Alice in Wonderland so much as beat himself in the groin so hard with a hardbound copy that he hallucinated and dictated everything he saw to an assistant who wrote it down and then hanged themselves in a fit of insanity. Here is Alice being screamed at by the corpse of a frog lacquered and dressed up like Beethoven. FYI, the scream is the recorded sound of a baby crying.

I think that scene is actually supposed to mirror the Mad Hatter tea party sequence, but it’s a little hard to tell because the action is a frog slapping its hideous tongue around and busting up all the china like some kind of reverse Qin Shi Huang (fuck you, look it up, that’s how jokes work).

They do later have some tea, and by “they” I mean the velveteen rabbit that didn’t find a happy home plus a wooden man with three clocks nailed to his chest who refuses to let you see his eyes.

Not to say that the entire movie is just a random cavalcade of off-topic horrors. Švankmajer presents his own versions of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the Queen of Hearts as a literal playing card, and the caterpillar, who is played by two glass eyes and dentures inside a sock that was definitely cummed in and looks like a prototype mockup for the baby from Eraserhead.

And of course, no retelling of Alice in Wonderland would be complete without everyone’s favorite scene, when the white rabbit joins forces with three bone-creatures including a dead pregnant fish:

My point is (and kudos to the stalwart few of you who masturbated to this column anyway), I wasn’t the only casualty of this movie, although I was the most important and internet-famous one. Alice herself is left profoundly twisted by her experience, as showcased in the final line of the film.

Is that…is that how Alice in Wonderland ends? Does she decapitate the rabbit? I always thought they ate crumpets and learned to fear the Christian God.

None of this shit would be nearly as scary if Švankmajer weren’t actually talented, which he definitely is. His shot selection and attention to detail is awesome, it’s just pretty weird that he’s chosen to do this with it. It’s like a world-renowned theoretical physicist designing a perpetual motion machine that only slathers mannequin parts in mayonnaise.

In other words, I love it, and you should go watch it right now for free on Youtube. Considering the original Alice in Wonderland was written because Lewis Carroll thought British children needed a dose of pure imagination, I think he’d like Jan’s take, especially the shot where Alice looks like the girl from The Ring.

Anyway, you now have seven days to live. I’ll see your tortured corpse in two weeks for my next column, on the topic of The Muppet Babies performed by cadaver marionettes!

* Insane Madness Death Batshit

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rhia, the only Hot Dog Supreme who has a plan to defeat all of these little skeleton monsters. Vote Rhia!

Tags best of 2023, children, Free, horror, movies

UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: That Bank Teller From Dragged Across Concrete 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 09/22/2023
7 Comments on Upsetting Day: That Bank Teller From Dragged Across Concrete 🌭

In 2018, writer/director S. Craig Zahler released a movie called Dragged Across Concrete. You might know him as the guy who made Bone Tomahawk which you might know as the movie where savage natives hack a naked man in half in front of Kurt Russell. He also wrote a movie about nazi puppets. The point is, he’s a man of subtle, artful presentation and he, probably by accident, filmed the darkest comedy scene that will ever be. Let’s talk about the bank teller who gets executed in Dragged Across Concrete.

When I describe Dragged Across Concrete, it’s going to sound like I’m a film genius inventing the least likable movie. The two heroes are cops in trouble for racially motivated police brutality, which isn’t a misunderstanding. We see them do it. They stand on a suspect’s neck and then rough up his girlfriend. She’s deaf, nude, and Mexican, and they take deliberate care to mock all three of those things. They’re played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn, who for different reasons, are each perfect answers to the question, “Who is the worst person in the world’s favorite movie star?”

The stakes of the film are that each of these cops want more money. Mel Gibson wants it because his daughter keeps getting white hate-crimed in their black neighborhood, which again, is not a misunderstanding. Someone wrote that and filmed it. Vince Vaughn wants more money because it would be nice for him and his girlfriend. So our heroes are bad, racist cops trying to steal money. Most of it takes place in Mel Gibson’s car, and it’s almost three hours long.

But it’s pretty good! Anyway, the part I want to talk about starts an hour and twenty minutes in. We leave our main characters to meet a woman trying to get on a bus. It’s Jennifer Carpenter who was paid to act anguished and was having a closing sale. If you tell Jennifer Carpenter to pretend to be in pain, she will lay an egg on an electric chair and say, “Something like that?”

She is being emotionally tortured by the bus, and we don’t know why yet.

The battle continues. Whether you’re Team Bus or Team Lady, the film stays with this conflict long enough the viewer is forced to take a side.

Which side are you on, reader?

Woman or machine! Who will claim victory in this battle of wills?!

Bus wins! Bus wins! But we still don’t know why they were fighting. If you had to guess based on the politics of the rest of the film, she probably got kicked off one for some unwritten rule about screaming racial slurs. “I learned that the hard way; the global elites, and you know who I mean, use city buses to traffic children to gender-affirming surgery,” her co-star Mel Gibson definitely told her when they met. I guess what I’m saying is when the movie Dragged Across Concrete shows you a person and nothing else, you are going to assume they are terrible in complicated ways. But you’re wrong! She’s wonderful, and cartoonishly so!

Defeated by bus, the mystery woman stabs at the elevator buttons to flee to her apartment, maybe.

Some guy asks her to hold the elevator, but she does the opposite. She tries to help the doors close like a tiny child might understand elevator doors. It’s visual language for, “I am desperate, not capable. I have one purpose, and it is not elevator door science.”

She gets to her apartment (maybe) and struggles with the lock. Jennifer Carpenter is in sheer panic, as if the guy she didn’t hold the elevator for is coming up the stairs with a knife. Which, again, is the tone of this movie. If she was stabbed to death right here, her name in the credits would be “Murdered Bystander #11.”

Like the filmmaker, I’m making a deliberate choice here– the same one we saw at the bus. I’m taking so long building to something you have to take a side: this is either very important, or very silly.

You’re right, I’ll get to it. The fastest way to say it is this: Jennifer Carpenter has been locked out of her apartment by her husband because she loves her baby too much. There is very literally nothing more to this character than that. Her baby is in there, she loves it, and leaving it causes her pain. She’s a baby junkie, and it’s no secret. The husband put the chain up because he knew she’d come right back up the elevator and pull this shit.

She starts pleading, threatening, bargaining to be let in.

I can’t stress enough how much time we spend doing this.

It is fucking sloppy and insane. She tries everything to get to that baby. It’s not just too much, it’s outrageously too much. It raises the question: is this a powerful dramatic moment or did a prankster give Jennifer Carpenter money in exchange for snot?

This is a filmmaker trying to communicate “she is a loving mother” with absolutely no restraint. It’s how an unlicensed monkey scientist would do it. I’m not saying it’s artless, I’m saying it is every artistic weapon pointed in the same direction and we are watching them blast a hole in a smoking crater that was once an idea.

At these dramatic heights, you’re one wrong step from falling into comedy. This is the first time I’ve seen a hysterical new mother beg her husband to let her skip work to play with her baby, and it’s already a parody of the genre.

So the husband won’t let her in, and he knows all her tricks.

They argue for a long time, and we learn nothing more. She wants to be with her baby like it’s a disease, and the people in her life are very patient and accommodating. You don’t need to hear all the details; I’ll skip ahead t–

I’ll skip ahead to the end of their argument where she negotiates for kissing the baby’s foot through the crack in the door and stealing one of its socks.

She gets back on the bus where we see her wallow in childless misery. The writer of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich thought, “I must show the audience this mother loves her baby,” and nailed it. Maybe even overdid it. We continue to watch that auteur bring his vision to life.

She was on maternity leave for two months, and then skipped work for another four weeks to stay home with her baby. And now, here she is: 90 minutes and one month late for work and she gets paralyzed by another door. For the fifth time, we watch this character emotionally struggle to change locations.

She finally manages to go inside, and if you thought they were done establishing the importance of her love for her child, that’s cute.

Her boss knows her whole deal, and he’s more than okay with it. He greets her at the door with magical prophecies about her boy’s potential. He believes in the boy. The bank believes in the boy. He says to her, “Your absence was a weight upon us. Your return is a divine blessing.” There’s really nothing like it. The director of Dragged Across Concrete is warping the rules of his entire universe to demand we know how much this supporting character loves her baby. For an entire month the employees of this bank have been waiting for this clinically insane mother to return while maintaining fresh flowers and balloons in a shrine to her newborn son.

We met this character ten minutes ago, and since then the entire gritty crime drama has been about her overclocked maternal instincts. That’s not an exaggeration. We’ve been learning and re-learning about her single personality trait for a quarter of an episode of The A-Team. If you were watching that instead, Mr. T would already be building his third battle truck. Artistically, I can’t put this into perspective any harder than that.

“A small token. A miniscule manifestation of our affection,” her boss calls the baby shrine. This is not how people talk. This is not how anything wo– hold on, what was going on in the main movie we left so long ago?

Oh, right. Crime!

The bank is being robbed by three casual murderers whose personalities are silent, silent, and racist. Through a recorded message, they ask if anyone is in the back of the bank. The tape says, “If you are mistaken, your testicles will be removed with this,” which is the cue for one of the robbers to hold up an ordinary knife. It’s adorable, like a big part of the heist planning went into choreographing this little play.

Sorry, Jennifer Carpenter, I got distracted by characters with a second detail. I’m worried this robbery isn’t going to go well for you, and a lot of time and effort has gone into making me feel that worry.

We are on an emotional train being driven by someone who had to look up love on Wikipedia. The tension is so far beyond parody that even the biggest sap is asking their TV, “Wouldn’t it be funny if after all this they shot her?”

While she’s handcuffing the other employees, one of them signals to his computer. He’s started an email to the police telling them they’re being robbed and wants her to hit send. The two of them wordlessly argue about whether or not the police will make the situation better, and you’ll never believe which side the white lady is on!

Jennifer Carpenter is a great actress. With what only looks like five lifetimes of agony, her face can form any shape, so she has no trouble silently communicating, “Aiiieee, no, I’m not going to sacrifice my baby’s mother, my precious baby’s mother, no no no.” But you don’t get ahead in banking by listening to women. He goes for that enter key.

She tries to shove him away from the computer with the same technique she used to speed up the elevator doors…

… and the robbers are already shooting. They’re watching the same thing we are and nobody can miss Jennifer Carpenter’s facial expressions. There are passing jets who can see she doesn’t want this guy to hit send so she can get home to her baby.

When we cut back, the new mother we’ve now spent a lifetime with is standing carefully still with mannequin arms.

They shoot her hand off. Which reminds me of a dele–

Sorry, there’s a d–

Okay, in 1997, the DVD release of Austin Powers included a d–

There was a deleted scene in the first Austin Powers where Austin Powers runs over a henchman with a steamroller and it cuts away to his loving family. They talk about missing him… how he’s become like a father to his stepson. It’s sort of a basic gag about how it’s ridiculous to imagine all the nameless victims in movies as actual people with full lives. And 26 years ago, the producers of Austin fucking Powers knew it was a hack joke they should cut. Yet this movie, with two monstrous ham hands, was doing the same bit in 2018 with full sincerity. And it wasn’t done.

She hits the floor and goes digging for the sock she stole from her baby. Not to treasure him one last time before her life drains from the spurting stumps, though. It’s sadder than that, or at least more pathetic than that.

With almost one total finger, she holds up the sock and politely asks, “Will you make sure my baby gets this? His name is Jackson.” I was already suspicious that S. Craig Zhaler learned how to write characters from Skyrim NPCs, and as if to prove it, this one gives a quest to the first maniac stranger she sees.

We’ve been building to this moment for a truly deranged amount of time. Across five locations, a filmmaker has put the full force of a $15 million budget into making us feel for this character. And never has anyone’s artistic motivations been so naked. This is how a wild horse would try to get an audience worried that Female Bank Employee is about to die.

Obviously, obviously, she barely finishes her sentence.

Her entire head explodes with the timing of a cannibal finishing a knock knock joke. It’s horrific, but way too absurd to be serious. This is like someone collected the DNA of historical murderers to create a vaudevillian comedian. This character existed only to die and an unmoderated madman said, “What if that was sad? For instance, what if she has a kid? No no, I mean like this lady really fucking has a kid. Quadruple what you’re picturing, at least. Medical science has no name for how much she has a kid. I’ve got it: picture a very long, premise-heavy Saturday Night Live sketch, only it has a button. That is the emotional impact we’re going for. I want this extra’s death to be so extravagant she gets featured on the Blu-ray menu.”

After stalling out the film and having no effect on the plot, we never see her again. Bank Teller is most of a torso squirting from three holes and memorializing a lack of creative discipline far from the main characters’ concerns. She was a joke pitch made by a serial killer who snuck into a brainstorming meeting and she stood next to the director at red carpet events!

Years ago I read an interview with Alan Spencer who was inspired by the stilted, phony toughness of Dirty Harry. He couldn’t understand how anyone could take it seriously, and he made a parody called Sledge Hammer!. It was an amazing show that ended with the main character trying to disarm a nuclear bomb and destroying a city. I bring it up because while misfiring drama is funny to some people, a lot of people interfaced with this art as it was (maybe?) intended– as, wow, feeling the super serious effects of death. When you elevate a situation so far beyond normal, it can become a Rorschach test, but this is like baking fifty cakes that say “INVEST EMOTIONALLY IN SAD MOM” and slowly hitting you in the face with each one. If you didn’t see the punchline coming after all that setup, you’re a dog left in front of the TV. I have no idea how to end this article, no wait:

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jaber Al-Eidan who we love so much, they’re everything, oh Jesus it hurts every second we’re not looking at them hold on, there’s a bear at the door-

Tags best of 2023, Free, movies

UPSETTING DAY

Nerding Day: McGruff’s Smart Kids Album 🌭

Post author By Dennard Dayle
Post date 08/29/2023
10 Comments on Nerding Day: McGruff’s Smart Kids Album 🌭

Tuesdays are mine, forever. Time to celebrate. Summon the wheel.

Wheel! Wheel! Wheel!

Perfect.

McGruff the Crime Dog failed to kill drug culture. But for one shining moment, he killed beats. Perhaps the game itself. CDs simply took credit for cassettes rejecting moral panic. McGruff’s Smart Kids sits next to ET: The Game and Grimes’s lawyer for ending an entire medium.

I found Sgt. McGruff late in life. When I hit prime brainwashing age, he’d already abdicated to a lion with a flashier purity vow.

I missed that too. Island Baptists are more into uppercuts than mascots. That’s why no Jamaicans do drugs.

I see the appeal: McGruff’s the perfect strawman, louder and blunter than a G.I. JOE PSA. Which fits my agenda. Everyone that dates artists with arrest records loves drugs. A good Five Minutes Hate imitates chemistry.

After all, it’s fun and profitable to imagine The Enemy as brainless mannequins. Lord knows I indulge when a sibling speaks or an election exists. But everyone follows some kind of logic. Which made McGruff’s Smart Kids a puzzle. It’s an album for no one.

If McGruff’s new to you, think Rosie the Riveter for the War on Ourselves. A werewolf in a streaker’s coat, quoting Nancy Reagan with a soprano’s impression of a baritone. Every McGruff PSA felt like a glitch, so he did a decent job replacing drugs. His debut album includes this beautiful checklist:

Amen. The untainted shall inherit heaven’s dullest cloud.

McGruff’s Smart Kids shares a year with Ride the Lightning, after Dave Mustaine somehow drank too much for a thrash metal band. That sounds like a pull, but it’s the best sobriety fable we’re getting today. Stay clean or lose screentime on Some Kind of Monster, the most humiliating music doc without a sex crime.

Imagine twelve tracks of drug war anthems, featuring McGruff singing in-character. Now double the synths and triple the fear. If there’s a stoner in your life, here’s their wedding gift. McGruff’s Smart Kids slam dunks the wrong net. It’s Reefer Madness with color and star power.

Yet McGruff’s Smart Kids has a reason to exist. Two, even. One: through sheer numbers, someone must have avoided morphine after listening. Thousands more sprinted into freshman alcoholism after learning McGruff was full of shit, but this album saved the life of Sam Lagow of Yorktown Heights, New York. Good for Sam. Addiction is for food and pornography.

Two: the production’s good. If you like Devo or their children, you’ll dig half of these songs. Until the vocals hit your brain like eight semesters in a toga. McGruff sings just as well as he saves lives. If the owners want half their money back, they should sell McGruff’s Straight-Edge Instrumentals. Electronic music fans aren’t into drugs.

Enough pregaming. The first track’s called “Winners Don’t Use,” and broadens McGruff’s appeal to Wall Street. Someone’s done a line off this cassette before short-selling a continent’s future. In concept album tradition, “Winners Don’t Use” gently hints at coming themes.

Pure eighties magic. Before threats of early death, addiction, and more McGruff vocals, we face life’s worst pain: losing. Producing less. Burial with fewer trophies and concubines. “Users don’t win” channels zero children, and every Madison Ave coke rant. Which, in McGruff’s defense, lead to desperate Geico spots.

Still, the backbeat works. The brief said “Steal You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” and the team delivered. When late Pixar finally sinks to PSA content, it’ll sound like this sans throat cancer vocals. And the competence gap only widens from here.

I like slapstick as much as the next uninsured clown. But first graders giving addicts unsolicited opinions is a step too dark. Even South Park spaces out preschool casualties, like a spice. Except in the hockey episode, which is art. In fact, scratch that advice, go for it.

We get McGruff’s catchphrase, from the jump, twenty seconds in. Fair for children’s media or state propaganda, but I smell something. That’s a branding reflex.

Years of clients asking for bigger logos inflict psychic damage. Three-peating slogans before the skip button loads becomes instinct. If most people sound like NPCs, agency slaves sound like the game box.

Let’s go behind the music. Who retired off of McGruff? It’s grim stuff, so there should be a glowing Times profile.

Cool, a children’s mascot and McGruff. Ronald fought drugs the Jay-Z way: selling instead of using.

McGruff’s voiced by Don Draper’s benchwarmer. I love it. It’s even educational: an article about McGruff is comedy, but franchising a dog that eats and licks boots is satire. That takes focus, which is why ad writers don’t do drugs.

I wrote ads for a year or five, so I know a bit about the death of the Nephelim. The black lord will rise, and drink this world’s tears. I am his blade. Clutch your powerless bibles as blood chokes the sea. Man will not live to finish despoiling the Earth.

Nice gig.

Design by an elder daemon isn’t a surprise. McGruff’s off-model look doesn’t reek of auteur passion or a junior daemon’s fear. But the same executive voiced him. Every McGruff project had upper management in the room. I’ve watched my leg bend the wrong way and still can’t imagine that pain. Jack Keil stood behind the producer until he mixed McGruff’s plague rasp above human tolerance.

McGruff’s roots change the game. I’m not here for a strawman. This is a peer. And I have no idea what he’s doing.

Comedy Premise #6 would make Jack some kind of stoner double agent, or at least neutral. But interviews point toward genuine belief in McGruff, this project, and giving children nightmares about LSD. Nightmares that returned after they tried LSD.

The devil’s work continues on “Crack & Cocaine.”

Who is this for? Walk down the checklist. Is this how you tell a sober child about crack? Or a crack-using child? A sober adult? Tyrone Biggums? A Toronto mayor? The mockery escalates the further you go. “Mockery” is crime-code for “beating.”

Jack’s responsible for day-drinking and targeting messages. He got halfway there. “Crack & Cocaine” aims for Martian children with Atlantic City problems. The courts didn’t enslave enough subalterns to keep the drug trade on Earth. The first Venusian D.A.R.E contracts are just launching now.

Someone backstage agreed with me. The 1986 rerelease adds a garbled intro to the effect of “crack exists.” It still leads to this verse:

A 1980’s ad guru should know about cocaine from market research. And something about children from being alive. A Cylon’s take would be more relatable, empathetic, and on-key.

Sadly, “Cocaine & Crack” rules. The synth has Yo Gabba Gabba crossover power, with all the stimulating joy snow promises. McGruff hides behind production like DaBaby mixed with DaBaby. That’s a creative miracle on the producer’s part, and proof that disc jockeys don’t do drugs.

While coke has to share, other drugs get their own diss tracks. McGruff takes on alcohol, inhalants, and ma—inhalants? With a New Order knockoff? Is this a fakeout?

Sarge. We don’t naturally get along. You’re a cop, and I’m a comedian. We’re the shittiest table at an alphabetized career fair. We both welcome police brutality ending that round of small talk.

But I’m rooting for you this time. Inhalants are just simple enough for this stupid, stupid method. Jack Keil’s vanity spinoff of a vanity project can save a second soul.

Try to deliver.

You know what? D+, pass. McGruff sounds like he’s talking about a wandering gorilla or Lesnar. But he forgets to blame users for being born, so this is lyrical growth. I’d prefer no children’s chorus call-response about overdoses, but I’m a picky grader.

I could go on. McGruff raps on “Gangs.” “Vandalism” goes full James Brown to declare war on street art. McGruff runs out of lines on Side 1, and keeps rolling for six more tracks. But Gmail is 200 words away from telling me to fuck off. It’s time for the main event.

I’ve hoarded the good shit. Lesser propaganda kneels to “Marijuana.” I get to type “Sgt. McGruff’s magnum opus.” Look: we both know this is a comedy site. I’ve puffed up earlier tunes for a laugh, and to style on a coworker’s ghost. I need gags like that for endorphins, because comedians don’t do drugs.

“Marijuana” bangs.

Based on my inbox, I’m divisive. Here’s an olive branch. If you support a drug arrest made since Prohibition, meet the best art on your side. We can sing it at bipartisan karaoke, as long as you don’t arrest me for hogging a microphone. You get this gold and Killer Mike in the same summer. Be reasonable.

You might question that simile. Try jamming instead. We’ve covered propaganda rhymes from half the SPLC. Animated cryptofascists are the first ones to bring a bassline. Enjoy that moment. If you have trouble unwinding on your own, light up some abstinence, or slug a shot of self-control. Today, we are all brothers.

I’m not the only one to recognize the magic. “Marijuana” has a hardcore remix, a Scientology-adjacent skate part, and a bright future as a rap sample. And, naturally, a following among everyone that can remember Pineapple Express quotes. I bet a child’s even heard it.

Hell, McGruff steps up his death threats:

“If you gamble with life, you could lose it,” is a leftover “Many Men” lyric. It’s the last thing you hear after stealing a rapper’s Crystal Skull. It’s a Power character’s line before shooting their spouse. A blocked number texts it to Ja Rule every Monday, at midnight, on the dot. My point is that Fat Joe would love this song, since rappers don’t do drugs.

My response to McGruff’s closing rant? The stock rationale behind a generation of broken lives? Nothing. I’m busy doing windmills. There’s room on the cardboard. All the sober breakdancers stayed home.

To think, some uncredited rockstar dragged this across the finish line. I hope he gets his roses. Or at least an edible.

What.

Modern life is beautiful. Hopefully it continues.

I have a proposal for Mike. Only Mike. No comedy fans or confused aunts can read it.

Mike, we can be clean again. You have videos in church, so I’ll be direct. As things stand, we’re going to burn with the Taco Bell Chihuahua and Geico Everything. And I mean we. My portfolio has names from the evening news. LexCorps in a world without Superman. I need this at least as badly as a Reagan collaborator.

It’s simple: we make a sane, honest, McGruff album. I’ve got lyrics, a full children’s chorus, and enough rusty nails to imitate McGruff. But this reunion’s doomed without the real star. As a show of good faith, here’s a preview: