HBO’s Santa Inc: Do they want us to hate? [editorial]

I’m sure by now you’ve all heard about HBO’s SANTA INC and the ensuing controversy. In this video, I explore the careers of Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen, showing that these two have always had a problem with Christmas. In fact, it is my belief SANTA INC was created with the explicit purpose of angering and further dividing us. These Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen made their fortunes by dumping on Middle America and crying “anti-Semitism!” the moment they are criticized for it.


GEIGER [review]

By Geoff Johns

There was once a time when Geoff Johns could do no wrong. His run on the Justice Society of America, to this day, remains some of the best storytelling of its kind. One thing that always stood out to me in his JSA was the fact that he didn’t write about politics or ideologies, but rather universal values. If anything, his JSA truly did embody the American melting pot and the promise of the American dream. No race, religion, or moral code was singled out as simply good or bad. Good and evil were born out of a character’s intent and actions.

Well, forget about all that. Geoff Johns has since been absorbed into the cult of wokeness and it shows.

Ever wonder what Fallout: New Vegas would be like if it had been woke? Well, my friends, wonder no more! In Geiger, Geoff Johns writes what amounts to woke New Vegas fanfic. Seriously, there are so many similarities I’m shocked Bethesda hasn’t sued yet. What does Johns bring to the post-nuke genre? A world where good and evil are color-coded! Want to know if someone is a bad guy? No problem! Caucasians or Asians are almost always pure evil. Meanwhile, all forms of good come in varying shades of brown.

Patricia and Mark Thomas McCloskey make a cameo appearance in Geiger as murderous white people.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s more racist. The way Geoff Johns portrays white people as bigoted, sadistic, power-hungry monsters. Or how, even in the apocalypse, blacks can’t manage to achieve anything without first coming under the bootheel of the white man. Even the gangs in this book are all white. Meanwhile, in Vegas, where seven warlords each rule over a casino, the one black warlord is at the very bottom of the hierarchy and his casino on the verge of collapse.

At some point, these woke twits need to realize repeatedly portraying blacks as helpless and in need of saving isn’t enlightening. Its racist

So what about the story in Geiger? Is it any good? No. There are the bones of a good tale here, but it is constantly derailed by ham-fisted woke politics and one-dimensional characters.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. So few comics are worth reading these days. It’s sad to Geoff Johns sacrificed his talent and join the extremist ideology that’s all but destroyed the industry. Oh well…at least there’s plenty of good manga to read.


Why Horror? [editorial]

Often called, “the most terrifying two hours and twelve minutes put to film,” the 1973 horror classic, The Exorcist, is without question the most visceral portrayal of demonic possession ever shown. Its narrative of an innocent child tortured from within by a demon continues to shock, unnerve, and utterly scare the hell out of audiences to this day.

I found it hilarious.

The Exorcist is by no means a bad film. It has everything a good horror story should. What’s lacking is within me. For the narrative to function, The Exorcist needs viewers to accept (at least momentarily) a 16th Century concept of Christian lore, otherwise it comes up dry. To me, the Devil is an idea and a mythical character, a powerful symbol lodged deep within our cultural consciousness. What he isn’t, though, is real. As a boy who grew up on original Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and whose concept of the universe was shaped by Carl Sagan’s The Cosmos, the devil simply does not resonate. But little grey men from Zeta-Reticuli? Absolutely.

Like a lot of children from the 70s and 80s, the Greys are firmly planted in my brain’s language of symbols. Our parents had the Devil. Millennials have Slender Man. And Gen Z? Their boogie man has yet to crawl out of their collective subconscious. I imagine it’ll be something akin to a genderless fatty in a Five Nights At Freddy’s bear-suit.

Like humor, horror is subjective.

So what breed of horror does strike a nerve with me? Over the next few installments of this series, I’ll discuss in-depth some standout horror films that have a lasting impact. And for those curious why I’m not starting with novels, it’s simple: the film is easily the most accessible and widespread. Most of us have never read John W. Campbell Jr.’s, Who Goes There, but chances are you’ve at least heard of its film adaptation, The Thing.

Event Horizon
Unlike most films on the list, Event Horizon sparks a genuine fear reaction in me. Doesn’t matter how many times I see it, this tale of a small search & rescue team becoming trapped on a spaceship that’s traveled halfway across the universe and comes back haunted, still managed to keep me on edge from start to finish. The second the crew boards the ship, there is a sense of unease. Something is cosmically wrong within the hull of this hunk of metal found orbiting around Neptune, and the more that’s discovered about the original crew’s fate, the worse it gets. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ship itself refuses to let the search & rescue team leave.

Beyond the sharp writing and gorgeously disturbing visuals, what makes Event Horizon work is how it so perfectly creates a sense that nowhere is safe, compounded with a glimpse into the unknown and possibly forbidden. When I was struck by a bullet I gained a horrible awareness that has never left me…there is no truly safe place in the universe. To simply be alive is to teeter on edge the chaos and oblivion. This was the abyss I was forced to peer into—the illusion of safety and inevitability of death. When I watch Event Horizon, this abyss is given form.

It’s never entirely clear what it is that happened during the spaceship’s trip across the universe—just that when it returned it was possessed by something that doesn’t belong to our world. Something very old and very evil. Something that wants us to suffer. Which is another reason this film affects me as it does. It’s not afraid to portray true evil.

These days it’s common for authors to describe villains as bad people attempting to do good. The boilerplate convention panel answer usually goes something like, “When I write my villains, I write them as believing they’re the hero.” Or worse, “Nobody is truly evil.”

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

Right now, in the African nation of Liberia, there are warlords forcing young boys at gunpoint to rape, kill, and then eat family members—usually their mother or a sister. Read that sentence again. Now ask yourself, how could anyone inflict that level of cruelty on a child and assume it’s somehow good or heroic? The man who tried to kill me was very open about his motive. From the arrest to the deposition, to the courtroom, his excuse was, “I’d had a very bad week.” Moral, decent people do not resort to shooting up a car full of teenagers when they’re feeling rotten. Now consider the following: One in every hundred people is a psychopath. Four in every hundred is a sociopath. One in fifteen is a sexual sadist. The world is full of monsters ready and willing to inflict suffering with or without reason.

Realizing I’d been shot was horrifying. In a split second, I was thrust into a total awareness of my own fragility, mortality, and how easily life can be ripped away. Processing that took years. Accepting the reality of evil, though? That was a far more difficult truth to digest. When soldiers enter therapy for post-traumatic stress, I’ve often heard the healing cannot begin until they come to terms with the existence of evil. This is another reason Event Horizon affects me the way it does. There’s something about how the film portrays evil. Throughout the narrative the entity that has possessed the ship reaches into the crew’s minds, bringing forth their inner-demons—a mother’s guilt, a scientist’s obsessions, a captain’s remorse over those who died under his command—and uses these human frailties to bring the worst out of the crew. Some are lead to their deaths, some self-harm, some turn on each other. Only the ship’s surgeon is immune. His job and his past have already forced him to confront his own mortality and failings. He has no weakness for the evil to exploit. So it outright kills him.

As good a film as Event Horizon is, one critical theme sets it apart from so many other films that guide us through Hell—an underlying humanity to the story. Every character is a fully developed person, likable and sympathetic in their own way. Their deaths matter. And every survivor is a victory earned. More to the point, though, the film ends on one of the greatest acts of compassion a human can show, an act evil is incapable of understanding—self-sacrifice.

The captain, played by Lawrence Fishburne, dares to confront the evil face-to-face, fights a battle he cannot possibly win, sacrificing himself so the remaining members of his crew can escape.

 

 

 

 

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Maxwell Cain: Burrito Avenger [review]

By Adam Lane Smith

Remember that 1980s-era Stallone action-film COBRA?

No? Seriously? What heck’s wrong with you?!

Go watch it. Now. I’m serious.

It’s okay, I’ll wait…
Right. Now you’re back. Good. Now we discuss MAXWELL CAIN: BURRITO AVENGER. Y’know how over-stylized, hyper-violent, and pants crappingly insane COBRA was? All the cheesy one-liners. All the tits and bullets. Yeah. Great stuff. Well, if you’re man enough to enjoy that level of blood-drenched, explosion-happy, action movie madness, you just might be able to handle Maxwell Cain.

Set in a futuristic Los Angeles that feels like it came straight out of a late-night cable B-movie, Max is a tough as nail cop who shoots first, shoots often, and bothers with questions only when he feels like it. He’s big, bad, full of rage, and has a very, very short fuse. Sort of a mix of Marion “Cobra” Cobretti, Judge Dredd, Clint Eastwood, and that creepy guy who sits at the back of the local Denny’s looking as if he’s about to snap.

Then Max loses his job. Loses his burrito. And loses his temper. And the only thing more dangerous than Max Cain with a badge, is Max without the badge. Now he’s gone pure Punisher, and taken the law into his own hands. Max is a big man with a big gun, and the criminal underworld is going to pay!

Oh, there’s also the hot blonde in the book who also has some big guns, but I don’t want to get this review pulled from Amazon. So, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

 


A letter to the boys & young men of America.

A response to the mass shooting in Florida.


CLICK HERE TO VIEW

The bodies aren’t even cold yet and already you are being blamed.

Yes you.

All of you.

The boys and young men who will grow up to become one half of America’s future.
Once again, due to society’s failure to raise you, to teach you, to properly guide you on your path to manhood, your mere existence is being held responsible for seventeen more deaths—this time in Florida, and once again, at a school. The headlines of the last few days say it all:

  “Guns don’t kill people; men and boys kill people, experts say”
  -USA TODAY

  “Michael Ian Black reacts to Florida shooting: Boys are broken”
  -New York Daily News

  “How Gun Violence And Toxic Masculinity Are Linked, In 8 Tweets”
  -The Huffington Post

  “Toxic white masculinity: The killer that haunts American life”
  -Salon

  “Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
  -The Boston Globe

  “Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
  -Harpers Bazaar

  “Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings; Blame Men”
  -Politico

In the handful of decades I’ve been alive, I’ve seen America shift from a culture of responsibility to one of blame. We don’t solve problems anymore. We cry, we pray for, we seek to find closure, and then finally, slaughter a sacrificial lamb for our sins. When I was young and Columbine happened, that lamb was Marilyn Manson and video games. Before that, it was D&D and Twisted Sister. These days, though, as body counts continue to rise and excuses continue to vanish, the lamb America has chosen to sacrifice is you. Rather than take responsibility for the seeds we’ve sown, the culture we built, and the disaster you’ve been left to inherit, we as a nation have chosen to lie to ourselves. To listen and believe those who claim that the answer is simple: “Boys are simply born bad.”

As an aging Gen Xer watching this tragedy unfold, I can’t help but look back at my youth and realize we were the dry run for this “crisis of masculinity” as the media likes to call it. In my time I’ve watched as fathers were pushed out of the home, separated from their children, and their role in society debased and devalued. Like you, I was taught male behavior was bad behavior. That I was broken and needed to be fixed. Drugs, therapy, mass socialization were required to save me from my most innate instincts—

—the need compete.

—the drive to create.

—the urge to protect.

—the desire for female affection.

Like you, I was told these instincts were not only wrong, but dangerous. That due to my Original Sin of being born a boy, I was destined to mature into a lustful monster and an oppressor of women. All this was burned into me before I even reached college, where campus policy actually assumed all men to be rapists waiting to happen.

It isn’t hard to see how we got here, to an age when America is more than willing to sacrifice its boys. To quote Fight Club, “We’re a generation of men raised by women.” And the women who raised my generation had a saying: All men are pigs. But there’s another saying those same women were enamored with and that is: The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

So here we are, coming close to fifty years of single mothers raising their boys as if they were animals. Two generations of young men raised to believe they’re broken, immoral, and dangerous. That their natural state, if left unchecked and unmedicated, is a sexual ticking time bomb of rape and abuse. Half a century of academia peddling a grim version of history that holds your gender personally responsible for all the wrongs ever to have happened in the world. And a press, that at this very moment, is blaming YOU for every school shooting to have ever occurred.

After all this, how could there not be a crisis of masculinity?

So to the boys and young men of America, believe me when I say it isn’t you who should be apologizing for the state of our world today. This mess was set in motion long before you were born.

You are not bad.

You are not broken.

You are not inherently evil or a sexual abuser in waiting.

You are boys who were robbed of your right to be men.

All your life you’ve been told to act, think, and behave like women. To suppress your passions, your pride, your need to compete and drive to achieve.

Now society is crumbling around us.

Feminizing boys didn’t make better men. It’s resulted in broken homes and shattered families and record suicide rates. It’s destroying any notion of a healthy partnership between men and women, and is pushing us ever closer to total collapse of gender relations.

Boys, we don’t need you to be like women, the world has plenty of women, already.

What the world needs now more than ever is for you to be men.

For you to grow-up, to grow strong, and do what men do.

For it is men’s strength and determination that tamed the wilderness, built civilization, and has kept the world fed despite all predictions we’d all die starving before the year 2000. It’s men’s curiosity that lead us to explore the oceans, to conquer space, and peer into the tiniest of microcosms of the human body. It was men who built the cities we inhabit, the luxuries we enjoy, the medicines that keep us alive. Men built the road, the plumbing, the electrical grid, the phone in your hand, the internet it’s connected to.

Men have always been innovators, explores, defenders, and leaders.

But most importantly, men have always been fathers.

So to the boys and young men of America, please read this and take every word to heart.

The world needs you.

 

-J. Ishiro Finney, Feb 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


WHY HORROR? Pt. 2

Often called, “the most terrifying two hours and twelve minutes put to film,” the 1973 horror classic, The Exorcist, is without question the most visceral portrayal of demonic possession ever shown. It’s narrative of an innocent child tortured from within by a demon continues to shock, unnerve, and utterly scare the hell out of audiences to this day.

I found it hilarious.

The Exorcist is by no means a bad film. It has everything a good horror story should. What’s lacking is within me. For the narrative to function, The Exorcist needs viewers to accept (at least momentarily) a 16th Century concept of Christian lore, otherwise it comes up dry. To me, the Devil is an idea and a mythical character, a powerful symbol lodged deep within our cultural consciousness. What he isn’t, though, is real. As a boy who grew up on original Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and whose concept of the universe was shaped by Carl Sagan’s The Cosmos, the devil simply does not resonate. But little grey men from Zeta-Reticuli? Absolutely.

Like a lot of children from the 70s and 80s, the Greys are firmly planted in my brain’s language of symbols. Our parents had the Devil. Millennials have Slender Man. And Gen Z? Their boogie man has yet to crawl out of their collective subconscious. I imagine it’ll be something akin to a genderless fatty in a Five Nights At Freddy’s bear-suit.

Like humor, horror is a subjective.

So what breed of horror does strike a nerve with me? Over the next few installments of this series I’ll discuss in-depth some standout horror films that have a lasting impact. And for those curious why I’m not starting with novels, it’s simple: film is easily the most accessible and widespread. Most of us have never read John W. Campbell Jr.’s, Who Goes There, but chances are you’ve at least heard of its film adaptation, The Thing.

Event Horizon
Unlike most films on the list, Event Horizon sparks a genuine fear reaction in me. Doesn’t matter how many times I see it, this tale of a small search & rescue team becoming trapped on a spaceship that’s traveled halfway across the universe and comes back haunted, still managed to keep me on edge from start to finish. The second the crew boards the ship, there is a sense of unease. Something is cosmically wrong within the hull of this hunk of metal found orbiting around Neptune, and the more that’s discovered about the the original crew’s fate, the worse it gets. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ship itself refuses to let the search & rescue team leave.

Beyond the sharp writing and gorgeously disturbing visuals, what makes Event Horizon work is how it so perfectly creates a sense that nowhere is safe, compounded with a glimpse into the unknown and possibly forbidden. As mentioned in Part 1 of this article, when I was struck by a bullet I gained a horrible awareness that has never left me…there is no truly safe place in the universe. To simply be alive is to teeter on edge the chaos and oblivion. This was the abyss I was forced to peer into—the illusion of safety and inevitability of death. When I watch Event Horizon, this abyss is given form.

It’s never entirely clear what it is that happened during the spaceship’s trip across the universe—just that when it returned it was possessed by something that doesn’t belong to our world. Something very old and very evil. Something that wants us to suffer. Which is another reason this film effects me as it does. It’s not afraid portray true evil.

These days it’s common for authors to describe villains as bad people attempting to do good. The boiler plate convention panel answer usually goes something like, “When I write my villains, I write them as believing they’re the hero.” Or worse, “Nobody is truly evil.”

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

Right now, in the African nation of Liberia, there are warlords forcing young boys at gunpoint to rape, kill, and then eat family members—usually their mother or a sister. Read that sentence again. Now ask yourself, how could anyone inflict that level of cruelty on a child and assume it’s some how good or heroic? The man who tried to kill me was very open about his motive. From the arrest, to he deposition, to the courtroom, his excuse was, “I’d had a very bad week.” Moral, decent people do not resort to shooting up a car full of teenagers when they’re feeling rotten. Now consider the following: One in every hundred people is a psychopath. Four in every hundred is a sociopath. One in fifteen is a sexual sadist. The world is full of monsters ready and willing to inflict suffering with or without reason.

Realizing I’d been shot was horrifying. In a split-second I was thrust into a total awareness of my own fragility, mortality, and how easily life can be ripped away. Processing that took years. Accepting the reality of evil, though? That was a far more difficult truth to digest. When soldiers enter therapy for post-traumatic stress, I’ve often heard the healing cannot begin until they come to terms with the existence of evil. Thus another reason Event Horizon affects me the way it does. There’s something about how the film portrays evil. Throughout the narrative the entity that has possessed the ship reaches into the crew’s minds, bringing forth their inner-demons—a mother’s guilt, a scientist’s obsessions, a captain’s remorse over those who died under his command—and uses these human frailties to bring the worst out of the crew. Some are lead to their deaths, some self harm, some turn on each other. Only the ship’s surgeon is immune. His job and his past have already forced him to confront his own mortality and failings. He has no weakness for the evil to exploit. So it outright kills him.

As good a film as Event Horizon is, one critical theme sets it apart from so many other films that guide us through Hell—an underlying humanity to the story. Every character is a fully developed person, likable and sympathetic in their own way. Their deaths matter. And every survivor is a victory earned. More to the point, though, the film ends on one of the greatest acts of compassion a human can show, an act evil is incapable of understanding—self-sacrifice.

The captain, played by Lawrence Fishburne, dares to confront the evil face-to-face, fights a battle he cannot possibly win, sacrificing himself so the remaining members of his crew can escape.

This wraps up part 2 of my “Why Horror” journal series. In the next installment I’ll be covering 2013 sci-fi horror film Dark Skies.

Click here to read Part 1 of the “Why Horror?” journal series.

 

 

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