Top 3 Things I Learned From my Father

Most of us start out in life and our parents are just there, like the weather. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Maybe we fight it, during those awkward growing up years, but we’re like our parents, in more than a few ways. Mostly our parents are there as a weird mirror of life when they grew up. A way to see the end product of what the world wanted men and women to be like in those times. Face it, we’re all here because we are prisoners of our DNA and its imperative to continue into the next generation nomatter what. The times change, but the blocks of what we, and our parents, were made up of do not. We are just them filtered through different times. What I hope to avoid from now forward is taking that presence for granted. Like it will be there forever.

As those who know me are probably aware our family grew short of a father this year’s father’s day. So I’d like to say my piece on fathers while I may. The value of letting your dad know how much you appreciate him is, it seems, a limited time offer, for all of us.

I grew up the youngest of three kids and I have little doubt that owing to my personal brain wiring and changing times my father had little idea what to make of me. I grew up so far outside of his frame of reference he must have struggled harder with every passing birthday to connect with what was mostly an ungrateful kid who had no idea how to deal with what has, thankfully now, become mostly comedic episodes of rage and frustration from his dad. For much of my childhood my father worked like a beaver at jobs he mostly hated to provide for his family and, never a man to keep things inside, the frustration uncorked from time to time. That is, all the time. I remember one particularly vengeful confrontation between my father and the vacuum cleaner that taught me a few choicer epithets when I was about six. I ran for cover. The next time I saw the vacuum cleaner it was sporting a series of duct-tape bandages. But let’s look at the big picture here: my father was doing housework, at a time when men didn’t do that shit.

Which brings me to the first thing I learned from my father. He is a man who always put his kids first and all he asked in return was a little cooperation. Heaven help the child, or vacuum, that didn’t catch on fast enough. My siblings and I would come home from school for lunch each day with a mixed dread at what kind of strange concoction of Campbell's canned soup we would get. Ox-tail mixed with creamy tomato? Creamy mushroom mixed with vegetable? You could never be sure. And added to this I had a sensitive palate and lived in terror of that day we would run out of bologna and I would get some sort of salami lunchmeat that would make me gag. To avoid the inevitable outbust over a perceived slight to his skills as a chef I spent more than one lunch chipmunking my cheeks with sandwich, left for school right away, and spit masticated sandwich into the nearest storm drain. It wasn’t until years later when I was a father myself that I realized my dad had taken his own lunch hour to drive home and make a hot meal for us rotten ingrates. Now when I look on those lunches I picture how he took his responsibility for us seriously. Personally. Not just a ‘I work all day to put food on your table!' kindof parenting. He put the food on the table too.

It wasn’t too many years after this my father quit his soul-crushing job and started a new career as an apprentice putting together custom-made wooden furniture and cabinets. The first I heard about it was coming home from school and seeing my dad was already home and my parents told me he had quit his job. I was just a kid but I knew not having a job was a pretty bad thing. But my dad busted his ass even harder at his new job working for crazed, eight-fingered germans until he could start his own business and finally become the thing he really wanted: his own boss. They say people who work in jobs where they can physically hold the things they worked on at the end of the day have less stress and a better quality of life. Running his own business maybe wasn’t a great stress reliever but he was certainly a happier man making cabinets than he had been as an assistant manager in a chain store providing liquor to the public. Although the stories he told us about the underside of society that walked into his store looking for beer every night at dinner were embellished with the humour my dad adds to everything like ketchup to a meal, there was an underlying loathing of the world in them. That slowly receded as years went by until by the time I was a teenager he actually took anger management courses and the change became easily apparent.

So the second thing I learned was that anything worth doing in life meant hard work. That you didn’t shy away from doing the right thing because it was tough. That self-improvement was a reward for those you loved most, not for yourself. Years later, when I had to make some of the hardest decisions in my life I had my father’s example to fall back on. And while I struggled building the relationship I had with my own children while we were apart and quitting a job I loathed for 12 years but kept because I thought I needed the security, I was able to come out the other side. Come out as what I hope is a better man.

Like I’ve said, the DNA humans are made out of doesn’t change that much while the world around us changes pretty much daily in pretty terrible ways, or at least it has since the industrial revolution, anyway. For most of the 20^th century young people have worked hard to prove that they are unlike the generation before them. That they talk like parents don’t even speak the same language as them. Today, standing astride the 21^st century, we may have entered a time when that is literally true. My ongoing efforts with my teenager to continue to keep up with the L33T speak he uses in increasingly cryptic internet communications (“Email? Ugh. Might as well chisel a letter into a cave wall! Don’t you IM?”) prove this out. But look at the men from my father’s generation. His parents won the Second World War, for Ah Pook’s sweet sake. Can you imagine being born at a time when the supremacy of the white male from the western world crested its high-water mark in history? When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. In other words it was inevitably downhill from there.

My dad grew up into a young man as a folky, and while I could go on about having an appreciation for a while on how his music appreciation has vastly enriched my life, what I value most about my dad is that he has struggled to understand the world around him. Unable to stand the small-town mentality of northern Ontario he and my mother moved their family south to the big city and tried to instill in us kids a value for not just culture, but for what was right. Betrayed at every turn by changing demographic of population that values his place less and less since the heady days white guys brought down the Nazis, my dad has been noted by many as a paragon for stubbornness. This is the man who bought his first VCR when I was about eleven, and ever since the day I left home when I was nineteen there has been a little strip of paper taped over the flashing 12:00 because he can’t make himself learn how to change the clock on its face. A man who stopped voting years ago when he realized none of the politically parties available to him would ever make the clock go back to the world he grew up in. All this may be true but I think what I admire most about my dad is his ability to never cease being surprised by the world. Passion is one of those words you don’t hear applied too often anymore, with a straight face, but I think my father has never stopped being angered by injustice or become jaded to cruelty and suffering. That is a remarkable quality as we round the clock in the year 2010. Most people try to cultivate a ‘been-there-done-that’ coolness that ages bitterly but as my father ages I find more and more commonality with him through books and his writing and what is obviously still a mind eager to grow.

For most of us growing up is a contest of wills against our parents. We push hard to prove we’re different from them and its easy to pick apart their parenting. The truth is nomatter how bad they really were, with few exceptions they could have done a lot worse. We’re none of us perfect and while our parents tend to point out our shortcomings its really nothing compared to the scrutiny we apply to them. But the best part of us will always be from our parents, just focused through a lens of our experiences. And for every child who shudders at the thought that they may end up repeating the same mistakes of their parents, there is a father out there who is proud of how much his children have grown up beyond himself. I know that’s how I look at my kids every day, and I hope its how my dad thinks of me.

86.5% is still human

1993 was a good year for Olivier Gruner and director Albert Pyun. Basically because it would never get this good for them ever again. They made a little B-movie sci-fi film that successfully synthesized every Cyberpunk story ever written far better than 'real' movies like the cinematization of Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic in 1995 with 'real' actors like Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer (the female lead starship trooper who dies in Starship Troopers) Dolph Lundgren and Takeshi Kitano. Nemesis, for all its many, many faults, seemed to be the only movie in 1993 paying attention to science fiction written after 1965. It went on to enough success it bankrolled a pair of sequals: the laughable bad Nemesis 2 notable for its bizarrely mesomorphic casting choice of Sue Price as a gynoid freedom fighter. And the agaonizingly unwatchable Nemesis 3. Thankfully by the time I'd finished watching Nemesis 3 I had micro-lesions on my frontal lobe that rendered me physically incapable of even aknowledging he made Nemesis 4.

Pictured above: bodybuilder Sue Price carries the entire movie in Nemesis 2: electric boogaloo

Nemesis 2: Nebula (actual irrelevance of title to movie 86.5%) essentially had nothing whatsoever to do with the first movie and was in no way connected to cyberpunk, instead it was a kindof deathmatch between a heroine pumped to ridiculous proportions with roids and breast augmentation vs some guy in a rubber suit recycled from The Guyver.

Nemesis 3: massive cerebral hemorrhage waiting to happen was an exciting look at what would happen if the main character spent an entire movie slowly dying while crawling around naked in the same ruined square block of some bombed out east-bloc city and fucked gross strangers in cars. Sortof like a load tolerance stress test for the audience to see how long it took them to figure out it was Albert Pyun, some guy with a camera and about 400$ US getting passersby in Bratislava to adlib lines. I'm pretty sure the guns weren't props, just the personal firearms of local citizens conned into posing in front of the camera. News flash for Pyun, you are not Goddard. Also, nobody actually likes Goddard, they just pretend to in front of other film buffs like guys suck in their guts around women.

All this to say, you're looking at the pinnacle of the art form when you watch the original Nemesis. Sure the crew couldn't record sound for shit and all the lines had to be dubbed later on, but Gruner, in his prime, was as close to a meat-machine as you could hope for, displaying an athleticism that convinces you he's mostly cyborg; and Pyun, when he was trying (or before he got coked out and lost his mind) put more effort into conveying menace and tension with a single shot of bad guys hurrying down a hallway then he did during the entirety of the next sequel. Watch this clip of the first ten minutes.


You know this movie is about to rack up a serious body count when the good guy savagely decapitates a blonde hottie instead of sleeping with her. Not content with shooting her in the face all mafia stylz so her mama can't have an open-casket funeral her shoots her in that spot that makes her whole head erupt so all that's left is her lower jaw and a spanking animatronic tongue. And this happens before the title credits have finished. Pyun films the opening chase and fight scene with a tactile caress that is almost pornographic (and we're talking about how you rewatched at 7:05 to get the full effect of the upskirt on the babe in the minidress emptying an H&K MP5 bullethose).

He shoots the entire choreography from 2 or sometimes 3 angles, just to give him room to edit back and forth as they unleash a thousand rounds of ammo in just over five minutes. In five minutes and five seconds there are 161 edits with a minimum of 10 cuts for each exchange of gunfire. I particularly like the cuts at 6:35 to 6:41 where he cuts to an extreme long shot of all sorts of hell being unleashed so he can get the rapid-fire exchange of bullets and the reports of the bullets hitting in frame together then cuts again to the leader of the bad guys unshipping the folding stock of her monster gun while the same gun battle echoes in the distance.

Now for the bad news. I hoped you liked those ten minutes because most of the rest of the film is, hmmm, shall we say a letdown. We're talking last episode of Seinfeld letdown. No, scratch that, we're talking TV writer strike letdown.

So, here, in no particular order, are the top 6 sucktastic moments of Nemesis:

1. Bryon James trying to do a german accent. After a career-making role as Leon, the homicidal android forklift driver in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Bryon James went on to portray other villains, and bounced around in a lot of B-grade sci-fi (see both him and fellow b-grade staple Tim Thomerson in Cherry 2000). As a viewer of this movie, I was desperate to draw similarities between Nemesis and the cult hit Blade Runner (the movie that mostly inspired the cyberpunk movement) just so the whole thing make a kindof perfect circle of postmodern self-reference. I was overjoyed to see James as one of the heavies in this flick. Until, that is, he opened his mouth. He has what linguists refer to as perhaps the worst german accent to ever be uttered by a human being. It's like he'd never even heard a german speak before. It's like he'd never even heard of Germany before. Seriously, how fucking hard would it have been for him to flip channels to an old Hogan's Heroes rerun before showing up to the film set. The legend of how astoundingly bad his german accent is in this movie has given rise to the myth that James' character wasn't supposed to be german at all and he was simply unable to resist making fun of Gruner's acting.

2. The climactic fight scene pits Gruner against one of the animated skeletons from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. In a film shot without much to speak of for a budget and with most of that money already spent on ammunition, blood squibs and that awesome headless corpse in the opening credits, a big climax fight scene was bound to be a crapshoot. And by that I mean about as good as monkeys flinging shit at you. This scene called for the bad guy's entire flesh exterior is blown off and a savage beat-down as he starts opening whoop-ass like the terminator at the end of The Terminator, and actually rips the top of Gruner's head off. About now a normal director (read: only mildly coked-out instead of coked out like Charlie Sheen) would maybe unlock the writer from his bamboo cage and get him to change the ending. But not Pyun. Rewrite? Never! Instead they dusted off some of Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation that was cutting edge in say, 1933, when he dazzled audiences with an aerial dogfight between biplanes and King Kong on top of the Empire State building. It's so jarring the entire film derails and any shred of suspension of disbelief remaining gets flung at the screen along with whatever heavy object you can reach.

3. Gruner's mullet wig. In an effort to show how Gruner's character keeps getting blown up and rebuilt over and over again the special makeup effects people pull out all the stops with a series of descendingly atrocious wigs. Bad wig days seemed to be the general rule for this shoot, including the super-back-combed mass on the love interest in the second act - what was considered totally Hawt at the time - and today just seems like her hair product didn't agree with the Javanese humidity.
I'm the real Olivier Gruner! Look at my chiseled jaw and boss haircut.NO, I am the real Olivier Gruner! Bet you couldn't tell while my entire image is redone with the simple addition of a 1.99$ joke shop wig.

NO, I alone am Olivier Gru-- oh screw this. I'm sitting here wondering if my pay cheque is going to clear while they put this Guns'n'Roses Slash wig on me and Bryon James makes fun of my accent. Where the fuck did I go wrong?

4. The big finish is shot in exciting, tropical - where the fuck? No one knows where the hell Java actually is or knows who lives there except java is also a word for coffee so I assume it has something to do with growing coffee beans. I think the script originally called for a shoot in a 'Japanese hotel' and when the budget turned out to be essentially pizza money and pocket lint they did a quick correction to 'Javanese hotel' with some whiteout and ball-point pen. So instead of a bunch of yakuza heavies that show up in the third act to keep the brain-damaged, wandering plot on track we get polynesian surfer yakuza dudes in Hawaiian shirts, with such spot-on gangster dialogue such as 'chill out, brah, you live longer'.
In the grand film noir tradition of Johnny LaRue's gritty detective movie, Polynesiatown, Pyun sicks the Javanese surfer yakuza dudes on the bad guys. At least LaRue's movie had that crane shot.

6. Little old ladies packing heat. For some unknown reason eurotrash cyborgs start harassing local citizens on the street looking for the good guy. After one asshole starts hassling a little old lady for kicks she then produces a .45 auto and wastes the fucker, palsied hand or no. The premise of this scene, as dumb as it is, isn't the terrible part. To the contrary it's fucking awesome. What's terrible is the logic behind how easily cyborgs die. Two scenes earlier it takes a pair of 50 cal machineguns continually firing for at least 30 seconds just to knock a cyborg down. Then another guy has to empty a clip into her spine just to cut her legs off. And she still isn't dead. Nor does she die after Tim Thomerson gouges out her eyes and skullfucks her memory interface. He has to empty another clip into her forehead at point blank range to do the job. And yet here's granny smith who gets off a couple 45 slugs into a cyborg's kidneys and he goes down like a prom date, begging for his mechanical life like a pussy while she plugs him five or six times. WTF?

Where Pyun got it right.
Despite it all there's a certain operatic quality to Nemesis. Like his hero, Sergio Leone, Pyun sets up his scenes with a kindof lazy machismo, allowing characters to stand around looking menacing and vulnerable in perfectly framed establishing shots. Moving between extreme long shots and closups that wring all the emotion possible from the slab of frozen beef, Gruner. Nemesis tends to slide into staging shots that look like a western, in ghost towns and jails from a century ago, with dust blowing in the background. There's a keen eye for light and colour that is easy to miss while you're laughing at the terrible acting or raging against the cheap special effects. Los angeles is a sepiatone reminiscent of Chinatown. The main character's descent into despair and drug addiction is marked with deep blue filters.

Where Pyun excels is a flair for staging the kinetic ballet of violence choreography. The worst thing you can say about the action as that he blew his wad too soon, packing so much in the opening ten minutes there wasn't much room left to go except downhill. despite that he never stoops to using the same shot twice, and each fight is a treat of inventive genius. Sometimes these perfectly staged shots are borrowed from other (better) pictures like a slow-motion gunfight that erupts through a triptych of floor-to-ceiling glass windows taken straight from the iconic Jesse James escape through the plate-glass storefront in the Long Riders. Other times Pyun invents something so utterly kick-ass it gets pirated years later like his escape from a java hotel by shooting a hole in the floor around his feet that was redone almost shot for shot in Underworld.

Check out this clip at 7:05 to see where Underworld got the idea.

Pyun's greatest strength is his ability to go balls-out, ape-shit over the top whenever the fuck he feels like it. Where other directors swim back to shore at the sign that says 'Danger' he swims out into the undertow past the sign that says 'Beware telekinetic shark-pirhana men with laser-guided anal-probe harpoons'. Maybe it's Pyun's training on the set with Kurosawa (I shit you not) that cemented his unflinching ability to say 'in this scene he fucks her through an artificial vagina implanted in her belly button with his mechanical eye-ball cock'; certainly there's a hint of later japanese shock-cinema in his work.

Check out this cyborg nutshot that caps all the action in the movie. After jumping out of no less than five buildings, killing untold men, women and cyborgs, having his arms legs and scalp blown off and put back on twice, doing a quadruple backflip high dive off a frickin cliff while shooting a rocket propelled grenade and finally dropping the evil mastermind out the bottom of a harrier jump-jet and into an active volcano with a time bomb fuck-you bon voyage present by severing his own left arm, director Pyun somehow decided not enough cyborgs had their balls blown off. Watch at 1:35 to see a 9mm cyber-gonad castration.

Connery's kickass mustache owns the future.

I have vivid, memories of the 1970’s. And by vivid I mean nightmare fuel. Being neurologically atypical I’ve always been unable to stop myself from witnessing the true horror of the world while others blithely run through the flowery meadows in search of Julie Andrews to tell them just how alive the hills are. But this was bad. My own private ‘Nam flashback kinda bad. I must’ve been around 8 years old the first time I saw Zardoz on late-night television, which alone could account for only a small percentage of the dope-fueled trippiness the 70s was intent on force-feeding all children as the straights and squares started discovering just how fun and easily 60s counter-culture could be assimilated into mainstream culture and more importantly, commercialized. Zardoz was the least of my worries.

At that age my older brother, through a combination of good looks and charm (read ‘fucking asshole’) was sixteen and fast becoming the most popular kid in highschool, swaggering through life like he owned the place. He was already dating an eighteen year old blonde senior and she drove a candy-apple blue corvette convertible. He and his friends pretty much were this bunch of pricks.

Above, nomatter how bad you imagine the 70's, even Dazed and Confused awful, it sucked way worse.

In a moment of bitter irony my brother would grow up to be an even more bitter malcontent who made a lot of money crewing Hollywood movies and moved to Austin, Texas, where he crewed for the shoot of Dazed and Confused. During this he bitched endlessly how Linklater just wasn’t capturing the 70s because the actors weren’t bringing the level of tawdry small-mindedness of the real era. That's right, you heard me. A real-life insufferable asshole from highschool circa 1978 didn't feel that Dazed and Confused made the 70's look shiteous enough.

My sister, like all teenage girls in the 70s spent at least 16 hours a day on the telephone with her friends. And by telephone we’re referring to those black, rotary-dial monsters that weighed as much as a car engine and gave you a workout simply challenging the big mechanical gear on the lid. These sort of phones don’t even exist outside of museums anymore unless you shop at Toys r Us where the good people at Fisher Price are still making pulltoy models that no toddler even remotely considers related to telecommunications, but rather a crappily made car that’s so precariously fragile they tie parts that tend to break together with a rope.

Ring Ding! Hello mom and dad? Buy me a toy that looks like an actual fucking phone!

She was busy masterminding the eventual bloodless coup that would leave her in command of the cheerleading squad which, under her iron rule, would go on to narrowly lose first place at the provincial championship. I hardly blame my sister for this since by the time I write this pretty much every single teenager on the planet spends more time wired than a girl in the 70’s could ever dream of, especially with all that time taken up by dreaming of Shaun Cassidy.

Hawt in the 70s

Stalinesque jockeying for power and compulsion to dominate at cheerleading were also all too real in the 70's.

All this to say that by 1978 neither my brother nor my sister did anything so lame as hang out at home so my parents could duck out of two-thirds of their child-rearing responsibility every Friday and Saturday night, leaving only their tail-end spawn at home. They used the extra leisure time to grow a series of hairier and hairier handlebar mustaches or bleach their hair blonde, invite all their close personal friends over for loud parties and crank up the Deep Purple.

All this to say I was essentially unsupervised every weekend night except for the fourth sibling in my little family, the glass and fake-wood-paneling bulk of the television in the basement rec room. This television was a stone-age monster by today’s standards sortof one step up from a box with a bird inside who chisels pictures on slabs of stone with his beak and shrugs, saying ‘It’s a living’. And like our telephone it required getting out of your chair and turning big clunky dials on the face of the machine. But if you didn’t count the agonizing two minutes it took for the screen to warm up it lasted my entire childhood without breaking, something even the top of the line models of today can’t do because they are designed to be POS fail-bombs about five minutes after the warranty expires. Welcome to the high-tech future where we are forced to re-buy every household chunk of electronics every 25 months because it’s cheaper than fixing the busted one. It was around this time my parents leapt into the future with the twin strides of a cable box offering (gasp) something like 30 channels and a VCR. I’m surprised we didn’t end up with a dead-end technology betamax machine given my father’s still obvious tech-savviness that means a little square of tape is pasted over the clock face of the VCR that has been steadily blinking since around 1989 when I moved away from home. With that first VCR you had to fine tune each individual TV channel on the machine with a series of minute switches and Lilliputian dials before you could use it. If it hadn’t been for my unhealthy obsession with the all-new technology the VCR it would’ve remained a big paperweight on the TV until my parents tried to rent out Coma or Every Which Way But Loose or some movie where Dolly Parton almost falls out of her shirt.

Hawt in the 70s

It was during this period, while my parents and their guests partied steadily and noisily from above me, I got to watch a lot of movies my parent’s should’ve had the better sense to turn off. Including Zardoz, starring a certain Sean Connery. Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction film. Although more accurately it is a crazy-ass drug-trip softcore porn hallucination vomited out by director John Boorman much in the same way the godlike floating head of Zardoz showers his cult of homicidal maniacs with guns n ammo. You know these guys are bad mofos when Connery turns to the camera and shoots the cameraman in the face during the opening scene (using a Webley .455, the only fully automatic revolver ever mass produced). He was probably aiming for Boorman.

Zardoz worshippers run around wearing what is essentially a mask of the god Janus, ancient Roman god of fucking shit up (also the main bad guy in one of my favourite episodes of Buffy) and a red loincloth. Many critics of this movie can’t get over the Connery is in a diaper factor but fail to recognize the pure awesomeness of his vast amounts of exposed body hair, in particular the instant win of his handlebar moustache. Connery’s revealing outfit assures us he has more hair on his nutsack than Gerard Butler has on his entire body. It only makes Connery even more badass. Let’s face it, you’re apparently a gun-crazed murderer who has survived the apocalypse and lives only to massacre every living being on the orders of a giant floating head that showers your with large-calibre firearms. People live in fear that you and your marauding band of screaming lunatics will sweep down from the hills and blast everyone they’ve ever known into oblivion. I’d have a hard time not wearing whatever the fuck I wanted. Who’s going to laugh? You? Nope, cause me and my man-pelt just annihilated your entire family.

Above: not your typical exchange between god and his subjects . Imagine Moses coming down from the mountain and saying “Thou shalt lemme show you what my AK can do, bitches.”

In 1978 TSR paid James L Ward to adapt his kinda cool but mostly unplayable RPG Metamorphosis Alpha into the vastly superior and fuck-yeah inspiring Gamma World RPG. Gamma World was a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that borrowed most of the rules from TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons to save time and spent the rest of the budget packing the rulebook with randomly generated mutant superpowers for your character and a list of mutants, robots and high-tech gadgets for you to pick up as ‘treasure’. 1^st Ed Gamma World had none of the constraints of Dungeons and Dragons where you were basically channeled into some sort of high fantasy Tolkienesque storyline involving elves and evil wizards. Gamma World was about nothing but causing havoc with your mutations that ranged from the massively overpowered (shooting radiation death-beams from your eyes) to the cripplingly useless (you suffer from seizures that make you fall down and foam at the mouth whenever you are attacked) You struggled to stay alive past the radiation, deathbots and freaky mutant xenophobe bunnymen long enough to plunder ancient ruins until you were able to get into your flying car armed to the teeth with laser cannons, powered combat armor and shoulder-fired neutron missiles and vaporize everything you laid eyes on.

You thought I made that part up, didn't you? Nobody say "Fudd".

The game was so short of actual goals that to provide some semblance of playability the designers added a section called Cryptic Alliances – secret societies with weird competing goals – for players to adopt. You could be a benign technophobe (the Seekers), a primitive screwhead blindly following the insane screeds of a five-hundred year old traffic monitoring computer (Followers of the Voice) or a kind of post-apocalyptic White Aryan Brotherhood devoted to wiping out all the mutants so non-mutated humans could return to their rightful place as rulers of the world (the Knights of Genetic Purity). It was a LOT like playing Paranoia without any of the irony. It’s safe to say Paranoia cribbed a goodly amount of the game from somebody’s dog-eared Gamma World rulebook. How Paranoia creators West End Games avoided a court case with the at-the-time notoriously litigious TSR remains a mystery.

Among the Cryptic Alliances was the Red Death: a bunch of murdering lunatics that only existed to kill every living thing on the planet, cut them into cubes and stomp the stewing chunks into paste before consuming themselves in mass suicide, hopefully using some sort of atomic doomsday device. Sound familiar? TSR openly admitted Gamma World was directly inspired by a number of drug-fuelled 70s sci-fi such as Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. The implication is clear that the red-diaper clad genociders of Zardoz were the inspiration for the Red Death.

Connery and his Red Death cultists hate every living thing so much they firmly believe the ‘penis is bad’ since orgasms just make more babies you’ll have to kill anyway. Mick Farren said it best describing post-apocalypse movies as asexual: “There is no sex in the aftermath, only varying levels of crazy, self-destructive rage. You worked yourself up into a frenzy and then threw yourself in front of a Mack truck.” For a bunch of crazies with serious penis-substitution issues there is an awful lot of fucking that goes on in the rest of Zardoz and remarkably little gore. Probably because it is a British film. In the UK they have a pretty-heavy-handed film censor board that banned movies like Natural Born Killers but seems pretty OK with lots of nudity and screwing, including showing Connery’s enormously potent Scottish wang onscreen. Seems they have this crazy notion that sex is kinda cool and fetishizing murder for society as a whole is batshit retardedness. To get the plot rolling Connery sneaks aboard the giant head inside an offering of baskets of grain the Red Death cultivates using slave labor. Yeah, they started taking captives instead of killing the shit out of everybody on Zardoz’s orders so they could use the slave-labor to play Old MacDonald. This, it turns out, was a bad idea because it made them pretty pissed and they sent Connery on a secret mission to take out their revenge on Zardoz like a kindof Road Warrior James Bond. Ironically Connery apparently took this role to try and break out of the Bond typecasting; and in that sense this movie is a complete success. Bond relies on charm, that Aston Martin with the ejector seat, laser wristwatches, a Venetian gondola that turns into a hovercraft and the occasional army of ninjas. In Zardoz Connery’s only gadgets are his revolver and body hair.

Zardoz the flying head turns out to be a kindof ship that takes him over this massive invisible force field into a kindof Forbidden Zone (Stay tuned for a review of Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone and why Molly Ringwold made me fall in love with redheads). Did I mention the Red Death are trying to get past this big invisible wall so they can find more stuff to kill on the far side? Fuck it, it barely matters in the acid-trip mess that follows.

Connery is so hardcore he attempts to chew his way through the force field.

Apparently beyond the big plate-glass wall is a perfect utopia where a small elite society has perfected technology and never age or die. Also they created the whole Zardoz religion to control the masses outside the wall. Surprise! Zardoz is a big hoax, and in fact is loosely based on the whole ‘pay no attention to that man behind the curtain’ scene from the Wizard of Oz. Get it? wiZARD of OZ? At age 8 I didn’t. Doesn’t matter. Connery is held captive by the deathless ladies of the utopia where he, and the audience, are subjected to a succession of barely coherent scenes that were meant to be ‘mind-blowing’ and ‘far-out’ and achieved at best a kindof cinematic petit-mal seizure. The studio of the day tried to bill Zardoz as Boorman’s answer to fellow Brit filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Basically there wasn’t a director in the UK during the 70’s who wasn’t tripping balls over Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

No caption required.

A bunch of weird shit happens. The utopia ladies read Connery’s mind and find out he’s thinking about sex. Also there’s a weird computer that may be from outer space. Waitasecond, what was that? Did this movie even need a computer from outer space? I’m guessing it was part of the story pitch Boorman sold to the studio to get the green light for this monster. “What do you mean it doesn’t sound like a science fiction movie? It’s, uh, it’s got a COMPUTER. And it’s from OUTER SPACE. You know, like HAL 9000.” But once he started filming it was all “Fuck the studio, drop another lid of acid.” Eventually Connery gets loose and runs around getting up to shit trying to figure out a way to let his buddies past the invisible wall. This doesn’t turn out to be as hard as it should be because, twist ending, the utopians are bored as shit with living forever and just want to die.

Mostly.

There is also a second faction who want to get laid and have babies and start over again. These are the ladies who caught a glimpse of how fucking potent Connery and his moustache are and beg him to impregnate them all. In pure Connery style he bangs every one of them, singlehandedly begetting an entire new generation of hybrids who we’re sure will not only be immortal but murder-machines with enormous balls and moustaches. As these knocked up ladies ride away Connery manages to knock out the force field like a muy macho Ben Kenobi turning off the Death Star tractor beam and hordes of the Red Death deal out the wanton slaughter the bored immortals so desperately wanted. And not a moment too soon; I never would have made it to the orgy of violence in the closing scenes if I had to endure another of Boorman’s acid-trip mind-vs-computer imagery bombardments.

For a child watching this movie one would expect permanent psychic damage, or at the very least micro-lesions on the frontal lobe. But surprisingly this movie didn’t seem that strange. At age 8 I’d already been subject to Jewison’s Rollerball, Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run and Rene Laloux’s animated Fantastic Planet, not to mention the irreparable influence of the world-changing Star Wars in 1977.

My parents let me watch this movie before I was old enough to reach the sink to wash my hands.

You knew that the trippy drug imagery meme had been tapped out when an entire generation of children started getting hysterical about ‘Jawas’, ‘Wookies’, a lovable whistling garbage can robot, and a laser-sword wielding geriatric spouting some semi-mystical bullshit about invisible magic and the adults didn’t bat an eyelash. In other words real life in the 70s didn’t seem that different from what they tried to sell us as science fiction. The 60s radical counter-culture had dissolved like acid in kool-aid until the late 70s when nobody cared anymore because they were bored-to-shit with the drug and alcohol fueled decade’s long hangover. Anybody too busy worrying about enlightenment and good times was due to be steamrollered by Gordon Gecko, and end up serving coffee to yuppies who got onboard the money train then detonated the train station behind them. The 80s was almost upon us and in those terrible times the only purpose your ideals served was to be murdered so you could sell the body parts for profit.

Boorman went on from Zardoz to helm the vastly superior Excalibur, a sweeping epic of sex, violence, betrayal and occasional overacting, following the entire rise and fall of the Arthurian saga with just enough of Zardoz’s weirdness to loan it a sense of magic. Excalibur is still my all-time favourite version of this story, putting to shame the Richard Gere-fest First Knight, starring a geriatric Connery with far less cojones as King Arthur than in Zardoz. While Miranda Richardson and Martin Short clearly win against everything, ever, as Queen Mab and Frick from the Sam Neil miniseries, Merlin, I prefer the realistic scenes of knights as walking human tanks hammering each other into pork chops in Boorman’s Excalibur. Also it has Jean-Luc Picard as Guinevere’s dad. Zardoz itself remains famous for the evenly divided reactions it generates from watchers who stumble across it; you either think it’s cinematic genius or an embarrassing double-barrel nutshot to Connery’s uneven career.

Lumiere 09 - feat. Fire Weavers

Xmas 08 3 short films

Mazenta's Tale - Part 4

“Watch,” Jess said to the others and massaged the veiny bulges of the pod-door; it opened like a flower in bloom with a wet squelching sound. “Then I do this,” she rubbed the inside of the sphincter and it squeezed closed. She smiled as she demonstrated again, “Door opens, door closes.”

Squelch, squish.

“Gah!” Demona made a face and turned away, with her fingertips pressed to the base of her horns. “I can barely look at it without being constantly reminded of your mutual shame.”

“Indeed,” Imaris tried to look bored by it all. “You should see the carpet they use instead of stairs. We found the way down to the next level while we scouted ahead.”

The Lost Hope were crowded in the small portal room, the swirling blue haze still covered one wall, showing a misty picture of the courtyard platform and the stone dragon. As I stared longingly at my petrified brother I saw the shimmering form of a red-scaled dragonfolk climb the steps and rest on the haft of his pole arm, studying the portal from the far side. It was Brahma, devotee of the dragon-god, who had elected to stay behind when the Lost Hope abandoned their safe haven at the gatehouse and moved to the inner bailey. I tapped Icarus’ armored shoulder until he noticed the other dragonfolk.

"Your cake is now ready and wondering where you are," Icarus muttered cryptically as the dragon priest hesitated longer and longer on the other side of the portal.

Finally steeling himself, Brahma hunched his shoulders and stepped through the portal, appearing beside the others in the small room.

“Greetings, companions and the blessing of Bahamut upon you all.” Brahma was a huge, fine specimen of a red. Hulking even taller than Icarus, his scales a deep cherry-red like hot coals. The glaive he carried was a massive weapon, longer than he was tall, like a sword on the end of a pole. The leverage this allowed made terrible wounds. There was a gabble of surprised talk.

“What the?”

“Nice perimeter control guys-“

“Holy dammit Christmas!”

Brahma raised one hand in a placating gesture. “I’m sure you have many questions and I will do my best to answer them all.”

Silence lengthened as the Lost Hope exchanged looks.

“Uh, what took you so long?” Xandra asked finally.

“I fasted, many hours, and pondered long and hard over the nature of good and evil-“

“Shocker,” Demona said to Jess in a stage whisper. The little elf turned a confused look at the Tiefling and raised a hand with only a pinky finger extended. “Never mind,” Demona said.

Brahma continued: “I called upon the dragon god for guidance hoping, in his infinite wisdom and goodness, Bahamut would tell me what needed to be done. First, I considered returning to Nevermore with news of our success. Then, I considered how the kobolds we had just slain were aspects of the divine dragon nature-“

“Brahma,” Imaris said.

"How could I rectify this seeming dichotomy? If Bahamut the all-powerful allowed such wayward essence of dragonosity to flourish, did that mean the people of Nevermore were meant to suffer, to learn the nature of punishment so that they might go enlightened to the afterlife?”

“Priest,” Demona smouldered.

“But, there I sat, among the remains of so many kobolds, victorious, and I pondered if the dragon-god had simply been directing events to that one moment, where I would be the instrument of his hand. Of course, this led me to the logical discourse on predeterminism-“

“So you meditated long. And then you followed us?” Xandra jumped in.

“No,” the red dragon paused. “More kobolds crept upon me while I meditated. I woke bound and prisoner.”

“What?”

“Oh yes, it’s very true. At first their wyrmpriest thought to make a sacrifice of me, at the next sunset. This of course left me many hours to recite Bahamut’s Edda Before Dying. Death usually comes swiftly and I considered myself lucky to have the time to recite all five hundred stanzas. The stanzas about the welcoming golden hauls have always held particular meaning to me. As a spawn my mother’s brother told me of an adventure he had once-“

“Underverse, give me strength,” Demona massaged her horns.

“And yet you live!” Imaris cried. “No doubt a wonderful tale of redemption and battle. Well suited to a long winter’s day beside a roaring fire with cups of hot rum. Many cups. Certainly you then followed the bodies we left behind and found us here. Your bravery is unsurpassed, Brahma. Now join us as we delve further down into this mysterious den of foul goblins. You may have the honour of going first!”

“Uh,” the priest’s mouth hung open in mid-sentence. “Yes, of course. On my honour.”

The Lost Hope moved through the glowing crystal hallways until they came to a wide opening and a tunnel slanted down. The ramp itself was carpeted in some slowing undulating blue moss. Brahma visibly recoiled at the sight of it.

“Look, it moves for you,” Jess stepped onto the ramp with delight. The moss gently moved her to the bottom while she stood still.

Brahma grunted, a puff of smoke jetting from his nostrils and followed her onto the ramp with the others behind him.

I refused to touch the strange moss and simply opened my wings to glide down the ramp, deking aside from Jess who momentarily swatted at the air, sensing something flying past her, and landed in another glowing corridor. This one was much wider and the ramp exited at a bend. To the right the hallway immediately ended at a wide, square arch into a much larger chamber. Jess immediately skulked to peer into the room and as Brahma and Icarus’ heavy, taloned feet clicked across the crystal floor she winced and glanced sharply behind her. The rest of the Lost Hope exited the ramp, milling in the hall uncertainly when an eerie music began.

I clambered up Icarus’ shoulder as the Lost Hope followed the music, slowly advancing into the large chamber. It was vaulted, with towering triangular arches easily long and wide enough to lair a full-grown dragon and her hoard inside. Lined against either wall were strange instruments, almost like living organisms grown from coral, with clustered tubes, webs of strings, drums stretched with living skins. More disturbing were the rotting corpses of goblins lurching through the chords of the disturbing music. One stared slack-jawed in the air as its bony hand thrummed strings like the bass twanging of a crossbow, another pumped bellows that sent blood curdling howls out of the mouths of horns. The Mournful sounds seemed focused by the curious crystal architecture of the hall until my back teeth began to hum uncomfortably.

The face of the Eladrin wizard was appalled as the music continued. Imaris gripped his staff with white fingers until he could contain it no longer and with a gesture and arcane shout he blasted the nearest goblin zombie with fire, sending its shattered corpse to smash against the wall and drop to the floor, burning with a foul stench of charred meat and bone. If anything the music was worse. Robbed of one band member the sound grew more discordant. Demona clapped her hands to her ears.

But Jess and Xandra were spinning around, weapons raised, and so was I. Under the cover of the noise a single figure had crept up behind us. It was swathed head to toe in fiery robes. Rusted orange, burnt red, corroded black. Not an inch of flesh was exposed; the arms were crossed, with hands inside voluminous sleeves. But nothing disguised the eyes that shone behind the veil, glowing yellow. Both Jess and Xandra were prepared to attack but the intruder made no aggressive move.

One by one the rest of the Lost Hope turned to face the newcomer, but Imaris turned back to the room, face set as he began to systematically blast the remaining zombie orchestra.

“S’one of your kind,” Jess said to Demona, making two fingers into horns on her forehead.

The Tiefling warlock stared at the robed figure a moment before her face seemed to relax. Demona never spoke of her own kind, the cursed offspring of devil-ridden rulers from a long-dead empire. Certainly she was the only one of her kind seen in Nevermore for some time.

“Can I kill it?” Jess asked in a tone she would use to comment on the weather.

“Baxt hai sastimos tiri patragi,” Demona bowed her head and said some greeting in the infernal tongue of the underverse. “How do you come to be here?”

The robed figure barked a laugh, harsh, and pulled down her veil. Her mouth was elongated, like an animal, with long canine teeth, and a pair of sharp, curved horns, barely the size of a small finger, sprouted from her forehead. She had a strange and unsettling beauty.

“What are you doing here, sister?” she replied in a tone that clearly meant she was the one who should be asking questions.

“Kill?” Jess whispered.

Demona made a shushing sound and spoke to the other Tiefling again. “We come to rid the area of goblins and serve their blood to the gods.”

“You and your- friends,” the robed figure sneered.

With a final blast the orchestra of evil went silent.

Brahma stepped forward, “We mean to investigate this strange crystal tower. If you would aid us, we look to bring goodwill to those who join us.”

“You think this pitful band will last much longer? Back home you’d be across an altar before sunset.”

“That’s it,” Demona raised her rod, energy crackling along the iron.

“Kill!” Jess nodded gleefully.

“No, wait,” Brahma held her back with one arm. “We mean no disrespect, what can you tell us of these halls?”

The robed figure snarled “Te malavel les i menkiva,” 1

Demona’s face darkened, “You’re so dead! Yekka muri buliasa nashti beshes pe done grastende.”2

Before she could make a move the stranger made a single hand gesture “Ka xlia ma pe tute,”3

Demona cried out, hand to her face, as blood began to leak from her eyes and ears. Jess ducked past Brahma and moved forward, one arm cocked back with her punch-dagger, but as she came closer she too screamed, and blood streamed from every orifice in her head. Blinking past the pain she landed a blow on the robed figure. Not a moment later her prey disappeared, leaving Jess alone with her bloody dagger. She quickly turned down the corridor.

“She’s a magic jumper, an there’s two of her,” Jess pointed where the others couldn’t see.

Icarus didn’t hesitate and passed the little cutter, axe raised; as we moved around the turn in the hallway I saw another of the iris-doors nearby and two robed Tieflings: the first one and another, still veiled with midnight blue robes. The second had obviously lain in wait around the corner and attacked Jess unawares as she rushed the first. I sprang from Icarus’ shoulder and clung to one of the irregular surfaces of the crystal wall. A moment later he brought his axe in an uppercut that struck the blue Tiefling. There was a swirl like the blue robes were caught in a whirlwind and the tiefling was suddenly gone, standing much farther down the hallway.

“Oh. They teleport,” Icarus grunted.

Demona staggered forward, blood now running freely from nose and mouth, and she made arcane gestures, ending with a single finger extended from her fist: “Kon del tut o nai shai dela tut wi o vast.”4 A smoking, clawed hand, like the disembodied fist of an abyssal giant with claws of black flame materialized around the first teifling and closed around her like a fist, dragging her kicking and screaming back to the Lost Hope. But even as she did the bound tiefling was canting in the abyssal tongue.

“Isi ili daba,”5 and Demona staggered as if struck, full trickles of blood running from every orifice. The midnight Tiefling closely followed suit by targeting my Icarus. He took the blow to his mind stoically, blinking blood away from weeping eyes and growling.

Jess and Xandra darted down the corridor towards the midnight Tiefling. Again, after Jess struck her the creature swirled away, further down the corridor towards a group of doors and when Xandra leapfrogged Jess to slice with both blades the creature vanished to reappear at the far end. But something was different this time and even as the swirling cloak revealed the Tiefling it collapsed to the ground.

The air resounded with a magical blast. Demona and the first Tiefling were trading arcane fire with insults.

“Shuk tski khalpe la gunoy merel dei.”6

Icarus strode forward raised his axe and struck the Tiefling once again; once again in a swirl of robes she was out of his reach.

“Prohasar man opre pirende - sa muro djiben semas opre chengende,”7 the unveiled Tiefling snarled but moments later Demona crowed as a final eldritch blast sent her opponent to the ground.

One of the far doors squished open and two hobgoblins loped out behind the fallen Tiefling corpse, now making a red puddle at their feet. Both had strung longbows and in the narrow confines of the corridor they made an easy target of Jess, and the little elf staggered back, looking down in surprise at the two arrows sticking out of her side. Tugging both free she charged the two archers.

“Jess, wait,” Xandra called, but too late.

An iris door between Jess and the rest of the Lost Hope opened and two metal figures clanked into the hallway. They were constructs, animated by magic, shaped like some sort of man-ape gone wrong. The bulk of their bodies mercifully hid the savage tearing they did to Jess as serrated metal jaws opened and clamped on the tiny elfling. Xandra was on them then, both scimitars weaving, striking at one and then the other.

The fight in the narrow confines of the corridor was vicious and bloody. Jess, caught between hobgoblins and metal men could barely defend herself. Xandra barely succeeded in distracting one of the constructs at the cost of a mechanical bite while Demona advanced, sending bolts of black energy at their enemies.

“They’re getting cut to pieces,” Icarus shouted to Brahma and Imaris, still hanging back.

“They’re too close!” Imaris snarled back in frustration, “Any magic I use will hit our allies.” He sent a single dart of magic force at the constructs, but in the chaos it went wide and struck crystal chips from the wall.

“Do something,” Icarus grabbed the armoured collar of the dragon priest and pulled him close to snarl in his face.

Brahma shrugged free and with closed eyes began muttering prayers. “Divine bahamut, hear me now. Send your healing grace to my needy allies!”

A white glow began to coalesce around Jess and Xandra. When it lifted both were fighting easier, the bloody wounds staunched. But the archers, backed against the far wall of the hallway, drew back their bows until the wood creaked and immediately sent two more barbed points into the little elf. While she was still recovering the metal apethings bore her to the wall. Metal jaws rang like shears and they left her unconscious, bleeding out across the white crystal.

“Useless,” Icarus muttered, raising his axe he charged forward towards the metal apes.

Only I saw the two newcomers. Almost next to me they came out of the open iris-door and slunk forward on bare feet. They were Eladrin, but thin and wasted, their faces sunken and eyes haunted. Naked, but for a bloodstained leather apron and each carried a serrated knife as long as their forearm. Had I cried out they would certainly have noticed me; I could only watch and hope either Brahma or Imaris heard them as they snuck up behind the rear rank of the Lost Hope.

But with a vicious flourish both of the wasted Eladrin drove their weapons into Imaris’ unprotected back. The wizard cried out, stumbling and twisting. His hand came away bloody from the unseen wounds. Brahma roared in anger and also turned to face them.

There was a massive clash, like a wagon of scrap metal falling, and I saw Icarus raise his head to roar in triumph as one of the metal apes shattered under his axe. But the remaining construct attacked the weakened Xandra, and in a moment she went down under its savage bite, bleeding at the dragonborn’s feet.

Brahma took a moment to draw in breath and I quickly sprang from the wall, flapping past him to land in the middle of the contested corridor. Sure enough as Brahma exhaled a storm of flames washed over the Eladrin attackers. A moment later he mumbled prayer and made a sweeping gesture with one hand: a pearly wave of light struck them with radiant power. As the gaunt backstabbers writhed under the onslaught Brahma brought his great glaive about, landing a blow that staggered one of the Eladrin.

“Witch,” Icarus called over his shoulder to Demona. “Tend to the wounded, these are mine.”

I could barely contain myself as the battle raged on. My head snapped back and forth, watching the fights at either end of the corridor. Icarus was marvelous. He quickly dispatched the other construct then closed with the archers; the hobgoblins were handicapped at close quarters and one drew its sword while the other backed against the wall as far from Icarus as possible and sent a number of arrows into his hide. Demona went to the boneless lump of the elfling and knelt. Raising Jess to her lap she carefully uncorked a tiny vial and poured the healing drought into her open mouth.

Imaris and Brahma were at blades with the wasted Eladrin. Unable to use his magic at close quarters the wizard had his sword out but his blows were weak and ineffective. The half-naked opponents were cunning and vicious; each would duck and weave this way and that, making feints that drew out their opponents and let them land punishing stabs in their exposed vitals. Both Brahma and Imaris were bleeding from several wounds before the first went down.

There was a horrific scream suddenly chopped off and the butcher-block thunk of an axe hitting bone. Icarus was trying to free his axe after driving it down through collarbone and ribs before resting it in the pelvis of one goblin archer. Moments later he finished the other.

Now alone, the last Eladrin began to edge towards escape and breaking past Brahma it plunged into a nearby alcove, the entrance of one of the moving down ramps, and laughed as it was carried to safety. Imaris, his cool exterior for once replaced with rage, staggered to the alcove and, raising his staff, he called upon magic forces. For a moment the magic backwash shone on his face, then came a distant thump as the backstabber was hit, and fell.

“Let that be the end of them,” Imaris sagged to the wall. “Surely madness and captivity drove them to this.”

“Imaris,” Brahma called softly, one clawed toe nudging the corpse of the fallen backstabber in the corridor. “This is no Eladrin.”

Imaris and I both moved closer and indeed, it was some foul creature that lay where the Eladrin sneak had fallen. No elf. A pale, flat face, bulbous head and joints on a skinny body with slug-grey flesh.

“A shape-shifter,” Imaris sighed. One might have sensed relief.

“Why choose that form?” Brahma asked and his tone lent an air of philosophy to the question.

“Perhaps to confuse us. Perhaps they thought to dispatch me and take my place.”

The others from the Lost Hope were drawing closer. Jess was obviously hurt and furious, but standing. Her clothes were wet with blood but she bore no wounds. Demona held up a bloody nub of flesh.

“You sure you don’t need this bit?”

“Don’t feel anything missing,” Jess replied.

Xandra’s child-like form was cradled in the crook of one of Icarus’ massive arms, slightly dazed and with a number of bandages around her, but in no danger of dying. For a moment they all just stood and glanced up and down the ruin left in the corridor. Silence lengthened as they counted the bodies and wiped blood from their faces.

“Uh, loot the bodies?” Icarus shrugged.

“’Kay,” Demona quickly replied.


Translated Footnotes:
1. Te malavel les i menkiva – I hope you get the crotch pox and die
2. Yekka muri buliasa nashti beshes pe done grastende – your mama’s butt so fat she rides on two horses
3. Ka xlia ma pe tute – I’m going to rip off your head and crap down your neck
4. Kon del tut o nai shai dela tut wi o vast - He who willingly gives your mother one finger will also give you the whole hand
5. Isi ili daba – get ready for the smackdown
6. Shuk tski khalpe la gunoy merel dei – eat crap with a spoon and die
7. Prohasar man opre pirende - sa muro djiben semas opre chengende – you spent your life on your knees and I’ll send you to the afterlife without a head; surely the devils will still have a use for you