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Upsetting Day: Baggage
Category: UPSETTING DAY
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Hi everybody you might know i recently cured myself of a cripplin monkeyaphobia by usin compassionite exposure and i have taken advantage of my new flexability and mind freedom to consider a new stretch of simian landscape that before was closed off to me. By meanin i watched the ape movies i was too scared to before like todays object of interest:
Some of you may know this one is a sequel to a earlier film called Every Which Way But Loose, also with a magnificence cover:
Because in 1980 there was just no satisfyin the public thirst for Phylo Beddoe and his orangatang, Clyde, all gettin into scampish aventures in the glamorous location of the greater Bakersfield california metropolitan region. We’re focusin on part 2 today but Its ok if you didnt see the first one, we’ll get you up to speed real quick here just answer two questions:
1) what’s the best most authentic job a man could have?
Truck drivin, that’s correct.
And 2) what’s the best most honrable hobby a man could do in his off-hours?
Street fightin, that’s right.
And so Phylo is BOTH fighter and driver and you can already imagine the bell-bottomed box office stampede this by itself would initialize but then also our feather-haired moms and our permed dads learned that there was a MONKEY in this movie who could drink beer and flip the bird and lets just say many sweet vans were harmed in the rush to them theaters. That is only a little bit of a eggsadgeration for comedy effect, look:
So they called in Buddy Van Horn to direct this one (I will have a chapter on Buddy in my upcomin dissertation (Media Arts and Technology, DeVry University) about how many of our finest american films were made by former stunt coordinates). We start our story with a duet song called Beers to You sang by Ray Charles and Clint Easthood himself. If you have the time and incline nation you might click on that link to really allow your body to settle into a 1980 mindset by listenin to Eastwoods pretty weird and thin singin voice and some musical choices they didnt know were racist yet and ray charles sayin “Huh!?” at 1:33 like what the hell did i just sing. But most importantly: the dad culture in the comments is just wonderfuly fierce and in-passioned defenses of this as the best music and film of all time (but we know its really about fearin parts of there identities might also become unrelevant and not apreciated):
So the movie begins by showin us that Phylo he is still drivin in them trucks and fightin in them streets, and he is the BEST there is you can tell because the movie opens up with a motorcycle cop foolishly betting AGAINST HIM and Officer Shits-his-pants truly is a dummy because Phylo just TruckerPunches his ‘ponent right down into the california dust
Oh also and then clyde takes a shit in a cop car.
Well, his FIRST shit in a cop car, its kinda a runnin bit.
So, tone establissed, we’ll meet our main characters here, a course we have Phylo and Clyde but also: we learn a interestin fact that Geoffery Lewis, playin Phylos brother Orville, was once apon a time just a absolute peanut m&m snack of a man:
Look at him. I don’t care what your historical patterns of orientation are, imagine that you just finished up a fun weekend ice fishin but its gettin dark and that oncomin storm is lookin pretty ugly, is there any one you’d trust more at the handlebars of a ski-doo haulin ass outta there? while you hold tight from behind somehow feelin safer then you ever have before?
Rest in Peace Geoff, my good good bud.
Movin on we meet phylo and orvilles’ “Ma” played by acadamy award winnin Ruth Gordon who is very convincin in her performins comin cross absolutely drunk at all hours of every day and says many memorable lines such as: “Come back with some Oreos ya hairy ass!” and as we will see provides a model for maintainin sexuality even into advanced age:
And then also there is Phylo’s love interest Lynn (actressed by Clint’s real wife and pretty regular movie pard, Sondra Locke) shes a country-western gal here pictured singin a song about “Either Yours Is Too Loose Or Mine Is Too Tight”:
And then acourse who could never forget everyones favorite: Beans MOROCCO
In addition to characters there is also a plot, it starts with kinda a jarrin cut from Bakersfield to the staten island tugboat
and we enter a room with a buncha mafia types
Who are watchin a ferret fight a rattlesnake but they call it a mongoose probly because of Ricky Ticky Taffy.
Its unclear if the mongoose dies from snakebite or second handsmoke and the human depictions are not very culturally nuance either, you can kinda tell it was made for a audience who still isn’t sure: are Jewish and Italians the same thing or different? But dont worry about it too much it just means our bakersfield boys have inverdently landed themselfs in some East Coast Trouble.
Which you can probably imagine me having sorta a widenin smile watchin all this and just gleeful snugglin deeper into my barcalounger with a growin sense of: this is gonna be good.
But
Then there is a unexpected and upsettin subplot which starts when Lynn comes to Phylo with a bad case of 80s horny for a man who sleeps in jeans and no shirt and Phyllo is just not gonna say no when her voice is all husky like that and so they begin to sex but then:
So i paused this one for a second and considered what I had seen and kinda shook my head clear of some of the more disturbin implications and decided: maybe in the 80s this was just like letting the dog stay in the room while you made it; aka a personal preferants pon which reasonin people may disagree. Me, for example.
But when we come back to our lovers the morning after things arent really clarified any because we see Clyde givin Lynn a tender morning kiss
Then some sad music teaches us that: far from feelin satisfied and full-filled from whatever role he played in there lovemaking, it only hilighted his own lack of a lady partner.
The film pauses everything else here because it is very portant that we understand the depth of his orangutangular lonesome onwee. Here is a edited-for-time cut of the montage I have intitled: “Clyde, Alone”
To think that it was just a few months ago that witnessin such antics would of had me dissociatin right in my pants. But now i can watch them with a calmed heart and open curiosity and only a little bit of a dry mouth.
So Phylo understands his friends sadness and makes a decision to help, which in this movie friendship means you break into the zoo with your orangutang bud and give him, like, a turkey-baster syringe filled with roofie to inject into a banana to abduct a mate.
Now this is where i was very glad that i can now observe the ape without fear because what I saw and learned from Clyde was truly impact full. He is somehow operatin on a higher moral plain than his human friend and knows it is wrong to disrupt the automony of another, but he is unable to speak his objections in English. Faced with a important an impossible ethicle dilemma of his own making, in a flash of simian brilliants Clyde identifies: he is trapped and and and STABS HIMSELF with the syringe. Which, this shook me honestly and made me wonder: would I have the moral integritty to take a action so bold?
Such…courage. Cept I accidentally said that part aloud and laRene glanced up from her phone game and looked at me and said “did you just say `Such Courage’ about this movie?’’ and I looked back at her and said ‘’I don’t know what to else to call it” and her eyes softened up with mine and she held my hand for a minute.
But in the end Clyde’s concientous objection is for nought cuz Phylo goes and gets the female orangutang by himself and takes her and Clyde to a motel so they can consumme there love.
Clyde once again shows us some maturity in his understanding of intamate connections and declines to pursue sex in favor of just bein playful and allowin if there is a friendship compatibility between him and Bonnie what might develop.
But the humans in the vicinity think theyre making sex noises and hotdog reader: this is the horniest thing thats ever happened to them. Phylo for eggsample loses his mind and all dignity as he postures and presents for his lady.
Then they Do It. Theyre hump-sesh mightily inhanced by them imaginin about the monkeys in the next room doing the same.
But thats not all, like that part in terminator 2: judgemint day where we see the range of impact of a nucular blast, the film continues to follow the powerful waves of the monkey sexual field: There is another couple in the motel (the bad lady from goonies and her man) and when they hear the monkey-thumpin he is also overtaken by a bestial lust (you’ll have to supply your own comical bongo-bongo noises for this one):
Then they hump too.
We continue our gods eye view of this, the intire specktrum of human sexality. We meet The motel manager, who was struck by the erotic musk pulsing from room 104 and has been desperately tryin to peek in the window at the monkeys, and who comes along but Ma. He turns his lustful attention to her and we are treated to this special effects master’s piece:
Imagine how your mom and dad laughed and laughed in the theater when this happened and probably poked each other and whispered “That’s Bo Derek from Ten!” Like when i saw shrek in the theater that lady who’s arm went over the armrest into my airspace kept chucklin and saying stuff like “huhuh, spiderman” everytime there was a reference.
But Ma is into it and they retreat to tenderly and elderly sex each others behind the front desk.
I paused the tape once more here and went for a nature walk to again consider and reflect. I will tell you that I checked myself carefully for signs of a rousal and, findin none, asked myself: am I the amonaly, that witnessing ape’s sexual activities does not move my needle? Or, perhaps the transmissive of sexual excitation from monkey to human was very normal for the time and place and I too, but a leaf on a tree what happens to be in shade or sun through no choice or action of my own, would also have left the theater in 1980 in a state of: Ready for Love. When the next generation of hotdog writers is mining and scholarizing the popular medias of this current day and age, what will they find distastesome and gross that we nowadays esteam as really sexy?
Game of Thrones probly, I decided.
Anyways my deadline was coming up so I went back inside to finish the film and honestly there were many more parts that I just thought were so crazy and funny but not in the way they meant it that i laughed at and took notes about and made many witful obsirvations about, for example when phylo goes runnin for exercise in the heat of the sun in wranglers and a mustached-stranger says mind if i jog with ya and phylo says hell no and a hawk screams and then…
O but I am mindful of our plicit agreement here about how long these col-umms should be so we will jump ahead to the ape-sex finale, right after Phylo just won a street fight in Jackson Hole which:
Im tellin you people, the whole world just really loved this movie so much.
But Anyhow, we meet our heroes at the end of our tale right where we found em when we started, drivin in a truck. And here is where this motion picture makes a sudden final dive into dispear and hopelesness and makes our hearts hurt the likes of which i never seen since the end of The Descent because when Phylo asks Clyde what he wants to get up to now we learn that our once pure and moral king of the apes has been contammanated by the stink of mans need for control and manipulation. You see, Phylo looks over and sees that the orangutang has somehow ackwired some human pornography and has formed a attachment to the centerfold model:
Phylo and Lynn agree that this is pretty cute and ask Clyde: but what is your plan and, very unfortunately, he has one:
Which if that filthy grin and dirty glovebox nanner dont relapse me probly nothin will.
So i just guess its my sol’umm prayer that as this relationship continues to develop between human kinds and the apes of the field that we can find ways to borrow and emulate the best of each other instead of the very very worst and in the name of jesus christ amen.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mike Stiles, who was once ground zero for an ape sex blast and now seeks to educate the world about horny ape safety procedures.
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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.
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.