The day-to-day activities of a funeral business in Auckland, specialising in Maori rites and rituals, might not be to everyone’s taste, but this is done very well, combining the human comedy of everyday life – will Francis ever find a way to sneak that fabulously expensive leaf blower past his accountant wife Kaiora? – with the solemn, sad, and serious business of death, loss, grieving, denial, injustice, and anger.
Francis is the micro-manager par excellence in his drive to offer clients a perfect service, right down to scrapping gum from the sidewalk in front of the business. He also likes boy-toys like that NZ $1,300 ultra, high-powered leaf blower, and then there was that white van. What was he thinking when he bought that bucket of bolts? Not even he knows. His conversation with the mechanic who tells him it is not worth repairing is classic when he says it is worth to him [to avoid hearing those four words he fears most from Mrs, viz. ‘I told you so’].
On the other hand Francis seldom asks for or gets the list price on the funerals he sells. More often than not at the sight of grieving relatives he offers discounts, adds extras at no cost, and volunteers more labour for nothing. The accountant grinds her teeth but draws the line at the leaf-blower.
It put me in mind of a marvellous Japanese film Departures (2008), discussed elsewhere on this blog. Click away.
By the way it offers a small window on Maori life and culture that is informative, compelling, and thoughtful. My faith in the enduring idiocracy was confirmed by reading the 1.0 ratings on the IMDb.
IMDb meta-data is 78 episodes of 55 minutes each, rated 7.2 by 2888 cinematizens.
Genre: PI
Verdict: Location, location, location!
It has all the clichés of the genre cosmetically refreshed by the location among the goofie Newfies in St John’s Newfoundland. Anne of Green Gables, Joey Smallwood, and Annie Proulx are nowhere to be seen.
A wannabe Jim Rockford approaching forty and living at home with father, much to the annoyance of stepmother, is PI together with Dad. It is all by the numbers thereafter without the laconic charm of Rocky, but at least there is no annoying Angel on the scene. Out hero is unkempt, unshaved, and childish, a clear case of arrested development that appeals to its like. His private life is a mess and dominates his professional life as a PI. He drives an old banger. All boxes checked. It is easy to imagine the checklist in the screenwriters manual consulted for this project.
Still the setting in and around St John’s Newfoundland is distinctive and the cinematography makes the place look attractive. It’s not, but it looks that way on film. The soundtrack, for once, also adds something to the ambience.
Despite my quibbles it is one thing many Canadian film productions are not. It is Canadian. It looks and sounds it. Many Canadian productions are so deracinated for the international market that they are anonymous, e.g. Street Legal, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Traders,…. [so anonymous that they are forgotten].
IMDb meta-data is 19 episodes of 25 minutes to date, rated 7.5 by 101,362 Kiwis.
Genre: Horror
Verdict: 3D (Dry, Droll, and Deadpan)
Tip One: Watch in sequences. You’ll see why. Tip Two: The delivery is often fast, there are asides, and sotto voce comments that are best appreciated by turning on subtitles. We have seen all the episodes and we are watching them again but to be specific these comments concern Season 2, Episode 6 Mobots.
Sergeant Ruawai Maaka briefs the duty watch at Wellington Central Police for the morning. Once again he urges officers not to use of pepper spray on lunch! Too late for those who tried it for breakfast but had the nozzle turned the wrong way around. Captain Frank Furillo never had this problem.
After the others have their assignments, e.g., assisting the spray victims to the medic, changing the channel on the television, making tea, Sarge turns to the crack Hardly Normal Squad of Officers Karen O’Leary and Mike Minogue. These secret squirrels retire to the concealed room behind the bookcase in the back hall. What’s going down? All over the Mt Victoria area old mobile phones and other discarded electronics have disappeared from kitchen drawers, sheds, garages, under stairs, attics, coat pockets, and closets. First these items disappeared into these recesses and then they disappeared from them. Wow!
Thereafter Sarge Maaka offers the running commentary of a police reality television show as O’Leary and Minogue scope the doings, starting with O’Leary’s mum who lives in the area. Yes, this is Mrs O’Leary without a cow. The cow turns up in another episode.
There is a delightful scene with a snake, sort of, and a taser that makes Davis Quinton of Dog River look responsible.
To assist the field officers Sarge has called in a tech head, who begins by undoing everything his predecessors did, reinstalling all the software, and then rebooting in the middle of the operation for beta testing. Doing all this gives Tech time to pick his nose.
Loved the interrogation with the transformer. Updates are indeed dangerous. Try this IOS, Punk! After seeing this object lesson, for the moment I am holding off Catalina.
So far we have had no references to the Bee Hive in Wellington, though surely that is a tempting target.
IMDb meta is 1 hour and 17 minutes, rated 5.1 by 332 cinematizens
Genre: SyFy
Verdict: Incomprehensible
‘The virgin sacrifices to the gods of a ghastly galaxy!’ The marketing tag line.
Somewhere in middle England Dr Joe uses a radio telescope half an hour a week. This access infuriates the Director who tries to KPI Joe off the ear piece. There is much gobbledegook about the radio telescope for connoisseurs. It seems a storm in a screenwriter’s teacup.
Doc has a loyal secretary who is sometimes Sandy and at other times Zena. Continuity editor please note. He also has an underling to order around.
But (what a surprise) a few hours before the plug is pulled Dr Joe gets a call: from outer space! He answers the call. Big mistake. He was warned not to do so by the Carry On accountant who just happens to be there for annoyance.
Next thing you know a Dalek on an asteroid sends a robo-ship to Earth to space-nap the lot and plonk them down in a one room set and they end up donning shower caps with USB cables on them. No Hollywood ego would have put those on, although it was amusing to imagine it.
This is the A-Team. The first and last line of Solar defence!
Once they plug in they become Eggheads! No, they become the Solar System’s first and only line of defence. Oh? Let’s review this A-Team: Doc who cannot get a research grant, underling who waits for loser Doc to tell him what to do, a secretary who doesn’t know her own name, a Carry On accountant, and the cleaning lady (who sensibly refuses to wear a shower cap). This is it. This is the best we’ve got. Only they can save us from a Republican apocalypse. We’re doomed! Doomed!
There is an unrelated aside with human sacrifice, as per the marketing tg line cited above. Ho hum. The knife man moves so slowly the fraternity brothers fell asleep during this episode. Really he will never fulfil his Killing Performance Indicators at that speed and doesn’t.
They play a PAC Man arcade game with the unnamed, unidentified, and unknown invaders — probably Europeans looking for terra nullius — and win! ‘Fire!’ is repeated eight times in this segment to give the illusion of action. [No sale!]
Journeyman Sy Fy author Murray Leinster wrote the story which was adapted into a screenplay by John Brunner. That is a good pedigree but it hardly shows in the finished product. Admittedly there is some awareness of the laws of physics in contrast to so much Sy Fy: There is a lag in signals. The angle of declination is determinate. Yet we have flames in space.
More importantly, we have a title that makes no connection to the story and some very poor acting.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 44 minutes, rated 6.5 by 3213 cinematizens.
Genre: War, Fantasy.
Verdict: Ahab, tank whisperer.
Context. In the July and August of 1943, near Kursk in South West Russia, an enormous tank battle occurred as the Nazis launched their last major Eastern offensive, putting into the maw a million men (Germans, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovenians, Croatian, and more) with 3000+ tanks. Big, huh? But the Soviets saw that bid and raised it, offering to Ares more than two and half million men with 7000 tanks. The air fleets were likewise enormous. Events far away determined the eventual outcome when the Western Allies invaded Sicily leading the Nazis in Russia to fall back because reserves of men and material intended to sustain a counter-attack in Russia were diverted to Italy.
Set-up. After one tank engagement in the weeks this battle dragged on, a badly burned Ahab is pulled from a T-34 and miraculously recovers from his near fatal wounds in ten minutes. This is Comrade Found who becomes the tank whisperer. He communes with the steel hulls of burned-out hulks and confirms that his tank was destroyed by the titular White Tiger tank.
This is a long way from the Soviet propaganda films about the Great Patriotic War like Two Soldiers (1943), It Happened at the Donbass (1945), The Star (1953), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), ….. where bare and barrel-chested hero workers rip German tanks apart with one hand while hold Lenin’s testament aloft in the other. In this film there is blood and grit, and no one turns to Lenin for solace. Moreover, the tank whisperer is a non-entity, pigeon chested, cross-eyed, monosyllabic, and stooped. This is no Hollywood hunk taking time off from the steroids and the gym.
But once Found recovers in record time from burns — he is reborn, he is back in a tank seeking out the White Whale of a Tiger in some mixed up zoology. White proves so destructive and elusive that the Soviet Army dedicates a small unit led by the Tank Whisper to seek and destroy it. Shoot ‘em ups occur. Tank whisperings save Ahab but the great White gets away again and again. There is talk that it has a ghost crew as well as magical powers to cloud men’s mind. It is the S-H-A-D-O-W tank! Talkative German prisoners tell everything they know which is not much without even getting a cigarette in return.
One of dozens of books on the battle.
That occupied the first hour plus, then — inexplicably — we cut away to a ceremony led by Russians with a German Field Marshall surrendering in the presence of American and British flags and at least one American general officer uniform. The Nazi delegation includes all arms: Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe. Huh? From 1943 to 1945 in a flash. The White Tiger made no further appearance in the last two years of the war.
There follows another half hour with several pointless scenes in a ruined city, perhaps Berlin, which I watched with one eye. It ends with an incomprehensible monologue from guess who? Only one ear was required for that: Found says the White is still out there waiting. Ah huh…, and…. Nothing.
By the way, there are no women in the film after Tank Whisperer leaves the hospital, apart from a few passing in street scenes at a distance.
Leaving aside the last half hour it had some mystery, which was never resolved, and so just became an excuse for blown ‘em up and shoot ‘em up. Tant pis. The early musings of a couple of the characters were a good start but they became repetitive rather than informative, not a patch on similar musings in The Thin Red Line (1998) or Castle Keep (1969). Still when I compare it to the trailers I have seen of recent Anglo-American war films White Tiger has a verisimilitude completely lacking in them. There is not a bareheaded, bare chested Brad Pitt in sight reminding us his food-fad diet, the hours a day he spends in the gym and at the make-up chair.
I cannot forbear, and why should I, from mentioning that one reviewer on the IMDb refers to the setting as the winter. Winter in July, well maybe, in Boston but not in west central Russia.
Not my usual far but I found some references to it that made it sound more thoughtful than the usual shoot ’em up. Not so, I found.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute run time, rated 5.7 by 128 cinematizens
Genre: Howdunnit (not Whodunnit).
Verdict: All hat, no oil.
‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!’
Unlike The Whistler, The Shadow did not need to spy on people to find out their secrets: he got up in the morning knowing them. Moreover, The Shadow had ‘the power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him,’ completely unnecessary where the fraternity brothers are concerned, but handy nonetheless. Still it left the brothers wondering about women’s minds. Nor did The Shadow need a gimmicky off-key whistle like you-know-whom. Finally, he was voiced once by Orson “I am a Genius” Welles. It ran to 677 episodes from 1937 to 1954. Most of which have been lost to ravages of indifference. But some can be had from Audible.
What a pedigree to take to the movies! What a flop the movies were and are!
In the movies he knows from nothing and back again. His mind is the only thing clouded. His gimmick is a black cat suit for a costume party. He is surrounded by people who know his secret.
Lamont Cranston interferes in police investigations to the amusement of his uncle, the Police Commissioner. His faithful driver is an oaf. He ridicules his girlfriend, Margo Lane whose single contribution to proceedings is to wear silly hats. Yet this is the Shadow. Hardly! A mere silhouette of his radio self.
This Shadow is so pathetic he has to hold a gat on the cops while he explains things to them. Not a cloud in sight. However in this outing the police do figure it out and there is a nice scene toward the end when the Irish Inspector No-First-Name Cardona and Lamont piece it together based on nothing but the clock and the script.
But to back up: Four sneaky types fall off balconies to break their necks and die, apparent suicides. Each was alone when taking the concrete dive. No one pushed them. Were they drunk or drugged? No. Were they following a Des Moines Sky Mall map? No. Were they by some scriptwriting coincidence suicides? No. Were they raptured by the Kool Aid? No. What then?
That is intriguing but the weary and dreary direction undercuts the suspense. Later the explanation involves either Indiana (Jones) or Australia, sort of.
There is also a neat idea about a secret lab in a warehouse that is not integrated. The only critic linked to the IMDb entry who bothered to comment on it said the plot was ‘not wholly coherent,’ exemplifying understatement.
Kane Richmond as Lamont Shadow has the profile of a superman double, chiseled features, powerful jaw, a brow untroubled by thought, a masterful baritone voice, broad shoulders, an effortless glide of step, a toothy grin, and the confidence of a schoolyard bully. Yet, strangely, he has no presence on the screen.
Margo gets some compensation for the twenty-four carat sexism throughout. Her best line is a reply to Lamont is: ‘Don’t yell at me until after we’re married and then don’t you dare!’ Even better when Lamont is trying to open a safe with much manly posturing as he prepares to pick the lock, she reaches past him and opens the door which she had noticed was not closed but which Lamont had not, so busy was he preparing for his display of masculine genius. Hssss [sound of ego deflating].
On the radio The Shadow and The Margo were a team and all business but on film they seem to be auditioning for a comedy show on the way to a masked ball, and failing. There is much, too much, slapstick with the black costume that he always has handy. The comic relief is annoying as usual.
It is little wonder that translating this successful radio serial to film failed. The radio audience would have found it to be a failure as above. The scriptwriter used bait and switch, and the audience switched back to radio.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 8062 cinematizens
Verdict: In the beginning.
The Set-up: Monsoon rains in Wales wash out roads and lead two separate travelling parties to pitch up at the Old Dark House of the Femm family. If only the travellers had been able to read the map where it said ‘Do Not Stop Here.’ But it was too wet, too dark, and the director was in too much of hurry for that warning.
You rang?
There they find the hirsute, mute butler, Frankestein’s monster, moonlighting in a second job. Melvyn Douglas wise cracks; Raymond Massey looks serious; Lillian Bond just looks as does the very talented Gloria Stuart (of Titanic) in this pre-Code film; but Charles Laughton has the best part and plays it superbly. Then there are the cross-dressing Femms, Horace, Rebecca, Saul, and Roderick engaged in a race to the nut house.
Enthusiasts for creepy old dark houses, ahem, like me, are in for a disappointment. There are no secret passages (from which chain saw wielding cats leap), no sliding panels (to reveal a torture chamber), no peep holes (through which to see terrible sights, like a Republican), nor does anyone flounce around in a cape (the most common ensemble for villains in Old Dark Houses).
On the other hand, the Femms do provide compensations. Horace jumps every time someone scratches. Rebecca screeches denunciations of all as sinners. Roderick is the cross-dresser. Saul likes fire. Lots of it.
We never do find out anything about the travellers and they all survive the night to continue being unknown though in a slightly different configuration. In these days Douglas often played the wise-cracking wastrel, belying his later, memorable dramatic roles.
Potato any one?
Gloria Stuart before taking passage on the Titanic
James Whale of Frankenstein directed, wasting Boris Karloff behind some hairy make-up, from the novel Benighted (1927) by J.B. Priestly; the screenplay closely follows the book. Among the nice touches are many visuals, nobody can open a door like Frankenstein’s monster, or the split mirrors before Gloria Stuart, the shadows on the dining room wall, and never did the phrase ‘Have a potato!’ seem so strange. By comparison the Hammer remake in 1963 is a toga party.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 5.1/10.0 by 333 cinematizens.
Genre: Old Dark House
Verdict: A well lit Old Dark House.
Wallace Ford rocks up at the Rogues’ Tavern, aka the Old Dark House, with his fiancée to cross the state line for a quickie … wedding. With that mind and little else, they could not pass by a place called Rogues’ Tavern. the more so one possessed of a possessive apostrophe. Wallace does his best, as always, to inject some energy and wit into the catatonic proceedings. This is a classroom specimen for a film school assignment: which is worse? The leaden direction or the directionless screenplay. Tough call there.
Gathered at the Tavern (which had none of the furnishing that the word ‘tavern’ calls to mind, spilled beer, overflowing ashtrays, dart boards, big screens, buxom barmaids, a fetid atmosphere) where an assortment of crooks sit around looking crooked in very long takes. After the third take, the fraternity brothers dozed off.
Along for the fun – aside: that’s an ironic comment – is a femme who reads tarot cards like the telephone book. Slowly without inflection. More very long takes of her looking at the camera.
There is a dog howling on the sound track, perhaps pained by watching the film, a face peering in the windows from behind coke bottle bottom lenses. It did not require a degree in scriptwriting to recognise the colour of these herrings.
These are the high points. The rest is worse. Believe it or not, Ripley!
But, as every review of this sludge notes, it has a surprise ending, which, while nothing can redeem the sludge, certainly demands and gets attention. The villain has a lot to say and says it, though a few lessons from Bart Simpson on maniacal laughing would have helped. The last one standing was of course the villain but even so the speech is a rarity. That may explain the inflated rating of 5.1 when nothing else could.
Wallace Ford had a biography more tortured than any imagined by Charles Dickens. That is hard to square with the sunny disposition he always projected on the screen. Born in England an unwanted baby he was taken into an overflowing foundling home. In a few weeks he was packed with others and dispatched to a colonial orphanage in Toronto from whence he was enslaved to seventeen foster homes before he ran away to join the circus, more or less literally – The Winnipeg Kiddies. While a teenager he and a pal rode the rails to New York. Along the way, his pal was killed in a rail-yard accident hopping freight trains in a switching yard and Wallace took his name as a tribute. Stage struck, his fresh face, energy, willingness to do anything got him work on Broadway and led to his two hundred IMDb credits. In Hollywood he starred in B movies and when these evaporated he became a character actor in movies and then a regular guest star on television.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 6.1/10.0 by 3170 cinematizens.
Genre: comedy, horror (like much of life, an odd combination)
Verdict: Clichés along the Nile.
While The Mummy (1932) is a subtle romantic film about love across the millennia with the title figure in only one scene, The Mummy’s Hand is the film that spawned all the clichés that have followed in The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), The Mummy’s Curse (1944), The Mummy’s Homework (1955)….. and which are still repeated in re-makes. A title search on IMDb yields 200 title hits.
In this outing the mummy stumbles around at treacle pace like a concussed NFL lineman, trailing bandages with the use of only one arm, and that hand. His victims have to lie quietly while he sets upon them, and per the director’s orders they do, one after another.
To begin at the beginning, in Cairo two down-and-out Yankees come across a clue to a rich tomb — X marks the spot! — and set out to pillage it in the American way. Locals demur but lack the dosh to recruit the Magnificent Seven. Instead they turn to the curator at the local museum, George ‘Shiver’ Zucco, whose paladin is the titular escaped anatomy school specimen who lumbers around. So mysterious are the Tanna leaves which sustain Lumber that Wikipedia says they are fictional. Ha! False fact! They are as real as anything the president in thief says.
While the plot starts out like The Treasure of the Sierra Madres (1948), it lacks the soul of that memorable film. This one is played for laughs. Cecil Kellaway appears with a peppery daughter to add to the fun, and they sure do. Square Jaw is accompanied by the breezy Wallace Ford, whose mugging steals a few scenes but Kellaway holds his own and Marta, the daughter, makes an impressive entrance with six gun in hand. These four set off across the desert. These are the Tomb Raiders heading for Tombstone!
For what facts are worth these days, this film does not continue the storyline of The Mummy and ergo is not a sequel though it is routinely called that by those who uphold the contemporary standards of journalism.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour 22 minutes of runtime, rated 5.6/10.0 by 324 cinemtizens.
Verdict: nicely done.
On a quiet country road in the Yorkshire Dales a dazed individual steps out of the mist in front of a car, and gets walloped. (He had to wait a long time for a car to come along that road.) The driver takes Victim to the hospital and talks to the police after salting away his companion paramour. Of whom more later.
Meanwhile, some British National Servicemen are asleep at the switch when a blip occurs on the radar, and continue sleeping when the electric power goes off and on and off. These chaps are the Isles first line of defence if the Cold War got Hot. SSSh, don’t disturb them. These are the same ones in X The Unknown (1956) and it stayed that way as far as they were concerned.
Plod comes to investigate the scene of the accident and finds the now trigger-happy soldiers prowling around. A cast of familiar faces crosses the screen: Barrie Ingham, Glyn Houston, Valerie Gearon, and Lyndon Brook – it began to look like an episode of Z Cars. [Sigh, if only].
The plot thickens when at the hospital Victim who looks Chinese, has no blood, and — most suspicious of all — wears a latex suit straight out of a 1970s exercise video. The Chinese nurse in residence in this rural hospital, after a glance, says he is not Chinese, despite appearances. What will he say about her when he regains consciousness? Well they all look alike and later when an imposter takes this nurse’s place no one else notices the switch. (Not even her since we never see her again. Loose end or what? Wake up the Continuity Editor.)
Square Jaw sweats a lot in the effort to be reasonable. Victim is a talkative alien who says he was taking some prisoners to the galactic slammer when his low-bidder built UFO blew an O-ring and he had to crash-land on the Third Rock. In the subsequent confusion his two charges — two equally bloodless women, who are also not human, but are women, nonetheless (figure that one out) — got away. All this explaining did in the fraternity brothers. Mind you their interest had waned since the reading matter of the radarman was left behind.
Many dark atmospheric shots of figures watching, womanly figures. They scare the car driver to death. Oops. We come in peace, and all that.
Meanwhile, the hospital heats up, and up, and up. Now everyone is sweating including Square Jaw. It seems Victim likes heat and he keeps turning up the thermostat on the central heating. Sure, like an NHS country hospital would have central hearing in 1965, let alone such advanced technology as a thermostat. Victim also wants privacy and the hospital is surrounded by a forcefield. The McKinsey trained hospital manager knows a KPI when he sees one and he sees in this alien publicity, funding, and, let’s not forget, promotion, the keyest of all KPIs. A devotee of Pox News he does not believe in science, still less than anything he cannot see, so he get into his Austin saloon and speeds off … smack into the forcefield. In the days before the Red Queen made everyone buckle up he went right through the windscreen to his final KPI, as in Killed Performing an Indicator.* That sobers everyone up. They came in peace. Now two dead.
Somewhere out in the countryside the National Servicemen smoke cigarettes and look bored, as do viewers at this stage. The light is too poor out there for further reading.
Then the page of the screenplay turns, and the doctors begin to think that Victim may be the villain, and the two others are the police making a terrible job of looking for him. Well, why not, that makes as much sense as anything else.
Two things standout. The hospital switchboard operator gets hysterical and has to be slapped into sense by one of the doctors. The slapping doctor is a she. The hysterical women is a standard feature of this genre but that is the only time I can recall seeing the mandatory slap delivered by a woman in authority. Nice twist. Though the only reason the operator is there is to get slapped. It would have been even better if she had slapped an hysterical man. For that, we are still waiting. Second, Square Jaw saw The Third Man (1949) and is inspired to take to the sewers to evade the forcefield and retrieve his iPhone or something. He slogs back and forth between sceptic tank and well for no discernible reason but an actor has got to do what a director tells him to do.
Victim makes a run for it, and the alien women (the not human ones, probably Kappas, muttered the fraternity brothers) explain they are the Law and he is the Villain. One of the doctors goes all Stockholm Syndrome and follows Victim cum Villain to the downed spacecraft and after he ditches her he boards and fires up. But in the sky his ship is blown up. Was the Law in another ship blasting him, or did he hit another forcefield? Or was the low-bid contractor at it again. We’ll never know.
There is also a faint hint earlier that the inhuman women run the show where Victim comes from, but that is never developed. Still it is intriguing for a while when Victim asks with incredulity ‘She/ does what you tell her?’ when a male doctor directs a nurse to bring water. (Warning: Men, do not try this at home.)
The use of Asian talent is the most obvious distinction of the film: Yoko Tani, Ric Young, and Tsai Chin got a gig out of it. It catches the eye but is not integrated into the plot or character.
The reviews I scanned are condescending, but I rather liked this low key approach. The direction is not Val Guest standard and there is treacle time, especially at the start when many of the actors move as if underwater. The screenplay is not Nigel Kneale level but it has more intellectual bite than most of this ilk. But in the end too much was left unexplained. Why was the driver’s paramour such a zombie? And why was she there at all? Did the cat do it? Who fenced up the forcefield? Why don’t the doctors notice the switch of nurses? Who let the dogs out? If the inhuman women are Law why don’t they go all Dirty Harriettes and get their man? What is the ISO rating of that hospital? Why are the aliens Lysterians? Why not Republicans? What does the title have to do with the story? Best for last: Who cares anyway?
*A biography of the Red Queen is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking.
