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NEWS AND VIEWS - SEPTEMBER 2018
WRITING NEWS I started writing Champions Weekly, the latest Signalverse superhero novel, at the beginning of September. Unfortunately I haven't really made much progress; I'm only about 7,000 words into it right now. I keep getting discouraged: lousy (actually nonexistent) sales, a couple of not-so-great reviews of some of my other books, and growing doubts about whether Champions Weekly is even worth working on, have left me feeling somewhat...unmotivated. I'm trying to stay optimistic here, but it's tough. I did, however, come up with an idea for a new fantasy novel this month, which I quite like; I've been plugging away at an outline for the past couple of weeks, and I really like how it's shaping up. This story begins where most fantasy stories end, with the prophesied hero entering the villain's inner sanctum, defeating her, and raising his sword to deliver the final blow. Before he can destroy her, however, a mysterious spell causes both of them, the hero and the villain, to be teleported to the other side of the world...without their powers. Forced to cooperate to stay alive in this dangerous, unknown country, the two of them discover they're not actually all that different. This is a pretty fun idea, I think, with a lot of potential, so I'm going to keep working on this outline and see where it takes me. * * * * * * * * REVIEW: ROBO VAMPIRE Here, just for fun, is a review (slightly edited) which I wrote many, many years ago, of a hilariously bad movie called Robo Vampire (which you can watch, in its entirety, on YouTube). Robo Vampire is an egregiously bad movie, incompetently directed, edited, and acted. Released in 1988, the film consists mostly of surreal fight scenes and violent 1980's-style machine gun battles, held together by a bizarre, meandering sort of plot which doesn't make any sense at all. It's pretty funny. We begin in some kind of deserted jungle village. Two generic dudes in camo carrying monstrously big machine guns wander into the frame, accompanied by a prisoner they're apparently escorting. The camo-dudes throw open the lids to some coffins that are sitting out in the open, and are so terrified by what they see inside that they fall back and shoot at them. All hell breaks loose. Some snakes pop out out of one of the coffins and slither around, but the real danger proves to be one of those silly Chinese vampires, who jumps out of a coffin, hops around ridiculously, and attacks the camo-dudes and their prisoner with some clumsy martial arts. The prisoner escapes, but the camo-dudes are killed (the second one gets the worst of it; the vampire bites into his neck and theatrically tears out a big wad of flesh). This all occurs within the first two minutes of the movie. I should also note that apart from establishing what the film's numerous vampires look like and how they tend to behave (particularly the silly way they hop around) this scene has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The escaped prisoner doesn't show up again, and the events depicted here do not tie into the larger plot in any way. Nice! Next, we're shown some drug smugglers smuggling some drugs. They're caught in the act by a group of cops, who immediately open fire, without trying to capture them or read them their rights or anything (I understand this was pretty common in the 80's). Unfortunately, one smuggler escapes to tell the tale of the bust to his boss back at the HQ. The Boss, who looks something like a scrawny Ron Jeremy, laments this loss: "Listen," he tells two henchguys, "we've gotta find a way to handle Tom, that goddamn anti-drug agent!" (The agency Tom belongs to is left unnamed). The henchguys exchange a glance. "Boss, what are your plans then?" one asks. The Boss responds: "I've employed a Daoist. He'll train vampires to deal with him." Judging from the non-reaction of his henchguys to this line, I'm going to have to assume that hiring a vampire-trainer is about as commonplace as hiring a gardener in the universe of this movie. We cut to some grimy basement, occupied by vampires like the one we saw at the beginning of the movie. They're standing still as statues, though, held in place by bits of magic paper stuck to their foreheads. An uppity comic-relief guy appears and blathers inanely at them, until another guy shows up and they get to work doing something or other with packages of drugs. In the course of this, one of them screws up and wakes up the vampires, who instantly attack them with their goofy martial arts. The idiots get beat up, but hold out long enough to be rescued by the vampires' trainer/owner/whatever, who competently fights them off and re-spells them into standing still. This guy, we learn later, is the Daoist the Boss hired. Some odd, disjointed scenes follow. The Boss talks to some random guys on the docks about switching from drug smuggling to body smuggling, and we're subsequently shown (in rather graphic detail) a young woman slitting open a dead cow and stuffing it full of bags of drugs. So bizarre is the editing here that a suspicion begins to arise in the minds of astute viewers... Later, some more of the Boss's henchguys show up at the Daoist's place to inquire after the vampires he's trained. Before the Daoist can present the super-special vampire he's made to the skeptical henchguys, however, a woman in white flowing robes appears on the scene and attacks him. "How can that be a lady ghost?" one of the henchguys blurts, to the undoubted bafflement of anyone watching. As it turns out, this "Lady Ghost" was the lover of the guy the Daoist is planning on resurrecting as a "Vampire Beast". She doesn't want him to be resurrected, because then they'll never be together in the afterlife. She fights the Daoist, but before she can kill him, he manages to bring the Vampire Beast to undead life to fight on his behalf. Vampire Beast and Lady Ghost fight for a while, until the Vampire Beast (did I mention his costume consists of a gorilla mask?) finally recognizes her as his former lover and stops fighting. This angers the Daoist, but the henchguys calm him down by suggesting that he marry the Lady Ghost to the Vampire Beast (????) since they obviously love each other so much. The Lady Ghost finds the idea immediately enchanting, and begs the Daoist to marry them. "A marriage," he muses thoughtfully. "All right." So he begins to make the preparations for their wedding ceremony. Following this, Tom the anti-drug agent is sent out on assignment (people invariably call Tom a "cop" but he wears fatigues and carries a machine gun, and so do all his buddies, so this may be inaccurate). At a checkpoint, he stops a red jeep, but -- and this is Tom's bad luck -- the jeep is carrying drug smugglers and that damn vampire-training Daoist. While his comrades are getting shot up by Tom and his forces, the Daoist runs behind a big rock and summons some vampires out of a big bottle. The vampires kill Tom and all the other "cops" by shooting sparks at them from out of their sleeves and burning their faces up with caustic breath. It's quite a sight. Cut to a "hospital": a doctor and a nurse are working on Tom, but it's too late. Two of Tom's colleagues are given the bad news: "It was a fatal wound; he's dead," the nurse explains. The two lower their heads in sadness at this news...for about a half a second. Then one man turns to the other. "Since Tom's dead," this bearded fellow says, "I would like to make use of his body to create an android-like robot." I can only hope that my own passing inspires this sort of comment from my friends. Anyway, because this is a very strange movie, the bearded fellow's superior takes the suggestion seriously. "You're assured of success?" he asks. "Um-hmm," the bearded fellow replies. "All right, it's approved." And with that, Tom is reborn as a RoboCop rip-off called RoboWarrior (although the synopsis on the back of the DVD case calls him "Androibot"). The next scenes take place in a church, where an angry group of armed thugs are browbeating a priest into telling them where the drugs they're after are hidden. They finally kill the priest, find the drugs hidden in a cross, and manage to capture a gun-toting woman in white robes. We learn that she's an undercover narcotics agent named Sophie. What she was doing in the church, and why she had drugs hidden in the cross is anybody's guess. With Sophie captured, only one man stands a chance of bringing her back alive. That's right: Ray! Who's Ray, you ask? Who knows? The movie introduces him out of the clear blue sky, and at this point the astute viewer's sneaking suspicion about Robo Vampire becomes rather blindingly obvious: the film was sewn together, Frankenstein-like, from two entirely different movies. Basically, director "Joe Livingstone" grafted the stuff with the Daoist and the vampires and the Lady Ghost and RoboTom onto a pedestrian drugs-and-gangsters-in-the-jungle movie of Asian origin. This movie is all about Ray and his team of commandos infiltrating a compound to rescue Sophie from a druglord. Ray meets up with a guy named Andy, and a guy who wears a blue beret, and Andy's cute sister Wendy, who he leers at (upon seeing her bathing in a lake, he suavely says, "It's a great view! You should bathe more often!" Smooth!) This part of the movie is not particularly interesting, but it's regularly interspersed with scenes of RoboWarrior fighting vampires, getting blown up, getting fixed by the bearded guy, and going back out to fight more vampires. We learn that RoboWarrior has telekinetic control over his machine gun (he can summon it to his outstretched hand) and can burrow under sand. And if by chance he's blown up by a bazooka, he can be repaired by the bearded guy moving some dials around while he lies prone on an operating table. Unfortunately, he doesn't really do so well against the vampires. His bullets don't really affect them, and they can disappear and reappear around him at will. At length, he stumbles onto Lady Ghost and the Vampire Beast in an old abandoned building. Lady Ghost pleads with RoboWarrior, in a heartwrenching scene: "Don't kill us we love each other, you can kill us but wait till our love's consummated!" How a ghost and a vampire can be killed, or have their love consummated, is an ontological puzzle I leave up to the reader. Anyway, RoboWarrior is deeply moved; soft music plays, and he's able to recall a little scene from his life when his girlfriend nearly dumped him for being a cop. He leaves the lovers alone, but they attack RoboWarrior anyway as he's leaving, and a silly battle ensues. This goes on a while. Meanwhile, in the other movie, Ray and Wendy are captured and subjected to water torture, but are ultimately freed and are able to blow up the druglord's compound (after rescuing Sophie, of course). This upsets the Boss, who consults with the Daoist about rebuilding his drug empire. The Daoist suggests he start by getting rid of RoboWarrior. Unfortunately for the Boss and the Daoist, however, RoboWarrior chooses that moment to attack, and lays waste to their base. The rest of the movie is all but incomprehensible; RoboWarrior fights the Vampire Beast and the Daoist all around town (the scenery constantly changes), and then the Daoist fights the Lady Ghost again, and RoboWarrior kills the Vampire Beast and more vampires...and that's the end. Robo Vampire is a weird, amateurish movie, with very little to recommend it besides the funny dub and the fact that it'll only run you a couple bucks on DVD. Sad to say, until the inexplicable paucity of robot/vampire movies is finally addressed and more sophisticated attempts are filmed, fans of the genre will have to settle for drek like this to get their fix. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING Finished Brian McClellan's Sins of Empire, which was quite good; I also read most of Robinson Crusoe and started in on another Herbert Asbury history, The French Quarter, about the New Orleans underworld. I can't get enough of these Asbury books; they're full of wonderful historical tidbits, and they're written in this dry, witty style which is always making me laugh. Highly, highly recommended. * * * * * * * * TO BE CONTINUED... My family moved from Minnesota to a town called Johnstown, Colorado when I was five years old. We only lived out there for a couple of years (1985-1987) before moving back, but those were formative kid-years for me, so I tend to get pretty nostalgic about them. He-Man, ThunderCats, Garbage Pail Kids, fireworks, Zap-It! guns, Pogo Balls, comic books, Hostess Fruit Pies, Roald Dahl books (Roald Dahl was my favorite author back then), T-Ball, Battle Beasts, Casa Bonita, baseball cards, M.U.S.C.L.E.'s, palling around with my (many) cousins, building bike ramps out of random junk we found in the local junkyard...it was good times, being a kid in the 1980's. 
Every once in a while my parents would buy me a comic book at the convenience store down the street. I usually chose ThunderCats comics, because I was absolutely obsessed with ThunderCats back then, but occasionally I'd take a chance on something else: Spider-Man, Superman, etc. I eventually managed to build up a small collection of comic books. Unfortunately most of these comics (and a lot of my super-cool toys, too, like this guy), were lost in the move back to Minnesota in 1987. Only two issues survived: a copy of Transformers #27 and this beat-up copy of Superman #3: 
I read and reread this issue about a thousand times. It's all about Superman getting blasted to Apokolips and running afoul of Darkseid and his goons (it was a part of a crossover story called Legends, which ran through a bunch of different series). The story ended on a cliffhanger, with Superman getting thrown into the horrible furnaces of Apokolips ("I can feel its blistering heat even through my invulnerable skin!" he moans at one point). I was always curious as to how this little cliffhanger was resolved, so a few weeks ago, just for the heck of it, I went over to eBay and tracked down the next issue (Adventures of Superman #426). So here I am now, thirty years later, finally finding out what happened next. 
Alas, this issue was something of a disappointment. Basically Superman gets fished out of the furnaces, loses his memory, and joins forces (inadvertently) with Darkseid. It's not terribly interesting. And wouldn't you know it, this issue ends on a cliffhanger, too! * * * * * * * *
BH
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