WHERE IS TODAY'S RUSS MEYER?

While sitting here at my work desk I'm often rendered into a blank-minded drooling state when I think of one of my favorite things in existence, namely tits (yes, I'm aware they come in pairs). I have no idea why I enjoy them as much as I do and I have no desire to have that query answered since such enlightenment is totally unnecessary, but I do know that I just plain love 'em and will continue to do so until I fall over dead, my last, croaked words being "Goodbye, tittieeeeeeees! AAAARRRGH!!!" My whole life has been one of worship and pursuit of the zaftig, and throughout my boob-addled existence there have been a number of creators of art in various fields who were clearly on the same page as I when it came to those warm orbs of womanly flesh. Frank Frazetta's horsey-assed, pendulously-dugged cavegirls and warrior women, and most especially Richard Corben's abundant cartoon goddesses kept me sane (sort of) until real-life girls kindly granted me access to the dairies, and once I became an adult I found myself unable to resist the siren call of the films of Russell Albion Meyer, or simply "Russ."

Russ goddamned Meyer.

Now there was a motherfucker who wore his love of the chestical on his sleeve, and at least two generations of horndogs owe him a great debt for shamelessly celebrating massive jugs. At times his fetish spilled over into territory too ludicrous even for me, but I could nonetheless get where he was coming from. But, alas, Uncle Russ has gone on to the bra-fitting room in the sky, so where is the Russ Meyer of today? Is there one? Seriously, is there anyone out there who's introducing us to stunners like Uschi Digard?

Or Kitten Natividad?

And what about Erica Gavin?

Or even Tura Satana, for that matter?

No one, that's who. The closest thing I've had to a latter day Meyeresque revelation of mammalian marvels that literally stopped me in my tracks was when I first saw Leila Arcieri on SON OF THE BEACH, and frankly she blows away all of Meyer's ladies in terms of across the board knockout power (and, coincidentally, the ability to act).

Leila Arcieri... Excuse me, I have to go be alone for a while...

Sure there's always Monica Bellucci and her Pastaland perfection to keep me hypnotized, but where is there a visionary who so clearly understands the needs of those of us who are plainly and unashamedly breast-crazed (provided the puppies in question are 100% natural)? Where are you, o deliverer? Any of you readers have a clue?

THE BELLES OF ST. TRINIAN'S (1954)

Way back in the days when British humor was very much a “safe” and staid animal, a series of cartoon illustrations by renowned cartoonist Ronald Searle launched a minor dynasty of anarchic humor. Searle’s original concept was a skewering of the British private school system, focusing on the fictional St. Trinian’s school for girls, and his sense of then-transgressive humor was very much akin to our own homegrown Charles Addams, or even the yet-to-come National Lampoon. St. Trinian’s itself was a haven for budding sociopaths and children of highly questionable breeding, and a training ground for all the things young British girls were never supposed to get up to — especially not during the post-WWII, pre-rock’n’roll Britain — such as drunkenness, gambling, torture (with medieval implements), arson, mucking about with automatic weapons, smoking (of tobacco and, well, you know), witchcraft/Satanism (which comes as little surprise since Satan himself was depicted arriving for parents’ day), profanity, sports hooliganism, flagrant promiscuity, and outright murder (of innocents, each other, the school’s rivals, and even their teachers). This was quite radical stuff for pre-punk England and was apparently quite shocking during its day, but it struck a chord and become something of an institution, so much so that Searle sought to distance himself from his creation by penning the following statement in 1953:

ANNOUNCEMENT

ST. TRINIAN’S is gone. Encouraged by the success of recent atomic explosions in the Pacific, the school Nuclear Fission experts threw themselves into their experiments with renewed enthusiasm and with the help (thanks to certain old girls) of some newly acquired top secret information, achieved their objective at midnight last night. The remains of the school are still smouldering. By some miracle the statue of our patron saint, scorched but uncracked, still stands where once the ripple of girlish laughter could be heard on a clear frosty morning. The fate of the teaching staff is unknown, nay, will never be known, and a few young ladies are believed to have survived. Early morning reports from various parts of the country bring news of blackened figures trotting through sleeping villages, but bloodhounds have failed to pick up a scent — however radioactive. This blow from which St. Trinian’s cannot recover (the building fund has been embezzled anyway) may bring a sigh of relief to many a parent and a quiet tear from true lovers of healthy girlhood. Let it suffice for us to say (before we draw a veil over the last broken limb) we are proud that the name of St. Trinian’s has echoed through this land. R.S.

But, much like Ian Fleming’s completely and utterly failed attempt at killing off James Bond in the novel of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1957), the miscreants of St. Trinian’s have proven unkillable and spawned a series of movies that continues to the present day (the seventh film is due for release this year), all stemming from 1954’s THE BELLES OF ST. TRINIAN’S.

Widely hailed as one of the all-time classics of British comedy, the first entry in the series introduces us to the school and its girls, a largely faceless group who serve as a wild white rabble not too far removed from what one would imagine the most savage of headhunting tribes might be like had they been transplanted to the English countryside and played for laughs. When first we see them, the girls are returning from school break and as they return the locals board up their windows and flee, all of which is apparently par for the course when living so close to the posh dumping ground of estrogenic delinquents. Even the local police dread the girls, and the board of education turns a blind eye to the school’s flouting of the law and general decency following the disappearance of two of its inspectors (who, unbeknownst to the board, have taken up residence at St. Trinian’s in order enjoy the attentions of its horny teachers and older students).

The story proper is rather slight, intending to amuse the audience more with the overall symbol of the school's very existence being a "fuck you" to British propriety than giving the girls much by way of true character, so the focus is mostly on the school's headmistress, one Miss Fritton, played in drag by Alistair Sim, one of the most beloved of the old school English thesps.

Not Bea Arthur: Alistair Sim as Miss Fritton.

Miss Fritton is considerably more sweet and traditional than her charges, so she's at a bit of a loss when faced with the school going under due to lack of funds (she accepts checks for student tuition that are post-dated as far in advance as four years), but salvation rears its head when her sleazy brother, Clarence (also played by Sim), arrives and announces that the daughter of an Arab sultan has come on board as a new student. The princess' father owns a can't-miss race horse named Arab Boy that Clarence seeks info on in order to further his own illegal betting endeavours (he wants the horse to lose), so he blackmails his sister into re-admitting his expelled daughter to St. Trinian's so she can be his intelligence gatherer.

From there it's the loosest of plots involving Miss Fritton betting what remains of the school's cash on Arab Boy to win the money that will save the school's ass, and the war between the older girls who are working on Clarence's behalf and the younger girls who are on the side of Miss Fritton and the school. That totally predictable plot's pretty much there to serve as something resembling a narrative so as to appease the more persnickety members of the audience while the rest of the film allows viewers a very amusing look into the everyday goings on at St. Trinian's, shenanigans that are kind of like ANIMAL HOUSE only with the anarchic fraternity brothers being a pack pre-collegiate females; we get to know the avaricious, dissatisfied, drunken (and in one case hiding out from the law) teaching staff and also witness the doings of the younger girls, a violent if industrious lot who brew commercial quantities of gin in the school's science lab for sale by the hilariously sleazy and shady cockney quasi-crook Flash Harry (George Cole). There's a chaotic Parents' Day thrown in that corresponds with the return of a small army of the school's "old girls" (previous graduates), as well as a devastating field hockey match, and it's all quite amusing, but to today's viewer it will most likely be seen as a case of the film's reputation as being its own worst enemy. It's good, but I really think this is one of those you either had to be there for in the first place, or else have grown up with it. By the standards of the average American viewer this is pretty tame when stacked up against U.S. comedies from the same period.

The thing that strikes me most about THE BELLES OF ST. TRINIAN'S and its iconic status is how staid it is for something once considered shocking. I'm sure that's a matter of what one culture would find transgressive while another would not necessarily, and much of the film's humor reminded me of such 1960's American sitcoms as BEWITCHED and THE ADDAMS FAMILY. In fact, St. Trinian's would have been the ideal school for Wednesday Addams to attend, and there's even a teacher who's a dead ringer for Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams. Anyway, it's fun and definitely worth checking out, but don't expect anything that'll really knock you out. And in case you're wondering why I bothered with THE BELLES OF ST. TRINIAN'S in the first place, I wanted wanted to see the movie that served as the template for the 2007 remake, a film I saw the latter half of on cable during my recent visit to England. I finally got around to watching the remake last night, so expect a look at that flick sometime soon.

"JUST ONCE IN MY LIFE (SENTENCE)": PHIL SPECTOR GETS 19 YEARS TO LIFE

Music producer wunderkind Phil "Be My Baby" Spector has just been sentenced to 19 years to life in prison for the murder of actress Lana "Barbarian Queen" Clarkson. The fatal shooting of Clarkson occurred some six years ago and now, fucking finally, Spector's off to the p0key to pay for his well-documented gun-wielding lunacy. When the murder was first reported I didn't doubt for a second that the guy did it because of Johnny Ramone's very candid description of himself and the rest of the Ramones being held at gunpoint by Spector during the reportedly torturous recording sessions for the band's 1979 album "End of the Century," and while the Ramones may have been a pain in the ass to many people, I don't think they in any way deserved to be threatened by some crazy music-Hobbit with a firearm.

Good riddance to ya, fuckstick. Killing Clarkson and threatening the Ramones like that... For shame to say the very least!

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968)

Undisputed classic, or the most over-rated giant monster flick ever made?

To fans of the daikaiju genre there are a handful of films that are generally considered to be inviolate classics of the form, movies like the pre-Americanized version of GOJIRA (1954), RODAN (1956), MOTHRA (1961), GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1964), GHIDRAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1964), and MONSTER ZERO (1965). But there's one rubber-suited, city-stompin' teriyaki terror-fest that is almost universally hailed as "the greatest Japanese monster movie of all time" and that would be 1968's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, a film that would clear the streets of kids if it were know to be playing on THE 4:30 MOVIE during my early youth as part of that series' celebrated and semi-frequent "Monster Week" (the other film that could be counted on to have that affect on afterschool playtime was JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS). Many a fan of the Toho monster opuses gets a wistful look on their face when mention is made of DESTROY ALL MONSTERS — DAM for short — but, despite a lifelong loyalty to Godzilla, his colleagues in urban renewal and their far-fetched adventures, I'm here to call "bullshit" on DAM once and for all and hopefully find others who share my opinion.

By the time the Godzilla flicks reached the point when DAM was ready to roll, there had been a marked shift in the function of Big G and his fellows that saw the once dreaded anthropomorphizations of the horrors of atomic radiation now being cast in the role of the implacable protectors of the Earth, and while the movies remained fun they also veered ever steadily into kiddie movie territory. In my opinion that course in content was firmly in place as of MONSTER ZERO, but that shift definitely worked within the context of that film — Godzilla's infamous "victory jig" notwithstanding — and the somewhat spare quality of the film made the threat of Devo-looking invaders from Planet X quite intimate and unquestionably dire.

MONSTER ZERO's would-be invaders from Planet X, moments before breaking into an encore of "Gates of Steel."

Even the film's requisite "human interest" subplot engages the audience and actually figures seamlessly into the story's conclusion, and if you ask me no original-era Godzilla movie succeeded so well from a narrative standpoint from MONSTER ZERO onward. The Godzilla films had pretty much said all they had to say, both in terms of symbolic commentary on nuclear arms proliferation and general entertainment, so any subsequent pictures would have virtually no choice but to be a re-hash of what had come before, but how to keep the series going and keep asses in seats? Simple answer: excess, excess, excess, all at the cost of the elements that made the Toho monster cycle so engaging in the first place. (That way of thinking was also exhibited in the James Bond series as evidenced in 1965's THUNDERBALL, an overblown and bloated "spectacle" outing that began the Bond films' long stretch of creatively-arrested development and repetition.)

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS can be seen as a more elaborate remake of MONSTER ZERO, only one in which the interesting human elements are replaced with a dull and faceless group of space-force astronaut heroes who are virtually interchangeable, and the threat to the Earth is both perfunctory and uninteresting, marked only by the fact that the silver wimple-clad alien invaders of the piece, the Kilaaks (love that name!), are all females.

The Kilaaks: has a bunch of would-be world-conquerors ever looked more like they'd be right at home during a '70's-era Parliament show?

Their plot for conquest isn't even original, what with being a bald-faced swipe of Planet X's idea of mind-controlling the Earth's giant monsters and using the unstoppable behemoths to cause catastrophic destruction on a massive scale, but in MONSTER ZERO the plan hinged on the enslavement of only Godzilla and Rodan and later the space-monster King Ghidorah (or "Ghidrah" as he's known in the West). In DAM, the Kilaaks mind control the titanic inhabitants of Ogasawara Island, aka "Monster Land" — a Pacific marine research island not to be confused with the later and better known Monster Island — and turn them loose all over the globe, which in some cases is quite spectacular (Gorosaurus' attack on the Arc De Triomf from underground is pretty cool, and Godzilla's virtuoso atomic flame curveball assault on the United Nations building is delicious giant monster showboating at its best), but other than the expanded scale, this is very much a case of "been there, done that."

I'd say the reason most people give this film the kind of adulation it receives has everything to do with many of its supporters not having seen it since childhood and the fact that it's got every Toho giant monster "star" in it, with the notable exceptions being the Japanese version of King Kong (as seen in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA and KING KONG ESCAPES), brothers Sanda and Gaira (from the memorable WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS), space-jellyfish Dogorah (from DOGORAH THE SPACE MONSTER) and the charmingly ludicrous giant version of Frankenstein (from FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD). Unfortunately, while those critters didn't make the cut, non-entities like Varan the Unbelievable, Gorosaurus and Manda are included, along with the utterly unwanted return of Minya (or "Minilla," according to Toho's spelling), the supposed son of Godzilla, also known and loathed by Westerners as "Baby Godzilla." Minya is a character that I have never liked, not even as a child, and I have yet to find a daikaiju fan from anywhere on the globe, not even Japan, who can stand him in the least. His antics are not cute but insufferable, and I would love to see his unformed, quasi-mongoloid/tadpole-looking ass blown into showering, smoking chunks of foam rubber by a judiciously-placed Specium blast from the skilled hands of professional inter-galactic monster-slaying badass Ultraman.

The awesome Ultraman unleashes his famous Specium beam, a weapon that blew the motherfucking shit out of damned near every monster he turned it against. If only he'd met Minya...

Bottom line: with the exception of the sheer number of giant beasts, everything that allegedly makes DESTROY ALL MONSTERS great can be had to much greater effect in MONSTER ZERO — which is available from Amazon in a great edition featuring both the subtitled Japanese version and the dubbed US release in gorgeous re-mastered widescreen — so enough with the dubious pleasures of DAM, already! Sit your kids through the better alternative instead.

A bigass shitload of giant Japanese monsters: a good thing in theory...

A GENIUS MUSICAL MOMENT

While making my way through the long-delayed (by five years or so) marvelously juvenile and filthy second (and sadly final) set of SON OF THE BEACH, I was floored with laughter by an utterly ridiculous episode that parodied SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, with elements of FOOTLOOSE thrown in for good measure. Starring David Arquette in a reprisal of his role as former-biker/delinquent Johnny Queefer, the episode is entitled "Saturday Night Queefer" and features several idiotic musical numbers, but the one that had me wheezing was a lively ode to taking a dump called "Stool Loose." You just haven't lived until you see a semi-Tony Manero-looking David Arquette with an atrocious Guido hairdo and leather jacket, happily shakin' his booty as folks on the pier where's dancing also break into choreographed dance moves like people are wont to do in musicals, only the whole lot of them are jubilating to Arquette's enthusiastic description of one of his bowel movements. I'd direct you to the clip of this terpsichorean masterpiece, but it's not up on YouTube so this transcription of the lyrics will simply have to suffice:

"Stool Loose" (sung to a tune rather similar to the theme from "Footloose")

I been dancin' so hard
My colon's gettin' jarred
Pinchin' a loaf is a piece of cake
'Cause this bumpin' and grindin' always makes
Muh-muh-muh-muh my...

(CHORUS)
Stool Loose!
I don't need no funky prune juice
I just took a doody the size of a moose!
So everybody shake a stool loose!

I like to play it cool
When it's time to drop the kids at the pool
If my back door's shut too tight
I just get down and start shakin' my...

Stool Loose!
I don't need no funky prune juice
I just took a doody the size of a moose!
So everybody shake a stool loose!

So when you got a load in your caboose
Eatin' bran muffins just ain't no use
I don't need no funky prune juice
I just took a doody the size of a moose!
So everybody shake a stool loose!

I don't what you think, but I'd say that's a vast improvement over the Kenny Loggins original. Hmmm... Kenny "Log"-gins...

THE WRATH OF MILDRED-FUN AT THE CIA

You're gonna love this one...

I chatted with my mom on the phone last night and she mentioned that she went on a day trip yesterday to the the Culinary Institute of America with some of the Westport idiots from her "Y's Women" group — "Y's Women," get it ? Oy... — and the bus driver was a dark-skinned black woman of nearly six feet in height who outweighed my mom by a good hundred pounds and wore her hair in a close-cropped Afro, plus she was wearing the uniform of the bus company (can you guess where this story is going? I bet you can...). As the group finished the tour and prepared to get back on the bus, one of the Westport idiots walked up to my mother and demanded to know when she was bringing the bus around.

(PAUSE FOR TIME TO RUN TO THE BOMB SHELTER)

My mother, who looked nothing like the driver and was wearing a tan blouse and gray Capri pants, looked at this moron and asked "What? Are you talking to me?" The woman said, "Yes. When are you bringing around the bus?" My mom said it took all of her reserve not to start cursing the woman out, but instead she walked over to her, got in her face and snarled, "You think I'm the bus driver? Do You see me in a uniform? Am I six feet tall? Am I wearing a 'fro? I look nothing like our bus driver, and you should know that because you see me every damned week at the Y. Next time you speak to me, you'd better think of me as an individual rather than just a faceless colored person." With that my mom walked away, fuming, and the woman later saw her again from across the room and mouthed "I'm so sorry."

Yeah, it's fun to be a seventy-six-year-old Mildred...

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my latest piece for PUBLISHERS WEEKLY COMICS WEEK is up, so click here to check it out.

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND-LAWN GUYLAND, FRIENDS, FAMILY AND WAY TOO MUCH FOOD

This past weekend found Yer Bunche on Long Island for my niece Cleo's fifth birthday and a mellow backyard barbecue at her parents' place in New Hyde Park, and the annual hoo-haa at my pals Seth and Ruth's in Baldwin. That's all well and good for me, but rather than bore you readers with all the details regarding the assorted mutants and miscreants who comprise my extended family, I've opted just to give you highlights and a few touching/charming/sweet moments from the whole magilla.

Probably my favorite roadside oddity in New Hyde Park, Long Island, wouldja believe this is a McDonald's, complete with drive-through window?

This quite atypical McDonald's is a colonial-style house that, according to my friend Cat, was several different things during its history, including a funeral home and a pancake house, but it eventually fell into disrepair. It was either going to be torn down or Mickey D’s was willing to buy it. And they freeze the garbage so it won’t smell and pollute the area.

Seth Lerner: smokin' fool.

Seth turns the "bacon explosion," a pork tenderloin wrapped in a woven lattice of swine-flesh strips. Aka "too much of a good thing."

Six months along and doing great: a resplendent Olivia relaxes as "Batgirl Jr." percolates.

His Royal Blighness arrives, rockin' a t-shirt featuring Pazuzu, lord of the Assyrian/Babylonian wind-demons. And to think that John was once a nice Catholic lad...

Detail of the Pazuzu shirt. If you've seen EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, you'll get it. And I give this extra points for the inclusion of the locusts as a framing motif.

The traffic-stopping adorableness of Hannah.

This is a pitcher of Mint Juleps prepared by a well-intentioned Eddie Murr that I had to go in and re-tool so that it was fit for human consumption. There was so much fucking whiskey in it that just the fumes from it were enough to fuel the space shuttle for three round-trip missions.

A possessed Eddie foists one of his Satanic Mint Juleps upon an unsuspecting Susan Boardman.

John and Eddie vie to see whose t-shirt is the more stupid. (I say it's Eddie's.)

"Pops" Robertson and our hostess, Ruth Crystal. During my days at the barbecue joint, Pops once came in with Ginna ("Foxy Doctah") and (Sexy) Lexi — his daughters who are around my age — and Charlie and Barbara, his pre-teen offspring, and our bartender asked me who the old guy with the two broads and the kids was. When I explained that Pops was the father of the lot of them the bartender respectfully observed, "What a pimp!"

Olivia explains to the kids just how she came to be carrying the child of the Devil.

Following a week of fun at Disneyworld, her birthday party and a backyard cookout on the same day, and that followed by the Seth and Ruth shindig and a skull-meets-refrigerator moment during a friendly donnybrook with two much larger boys, an exhausted to the point of near-hallucination Cleo is brought home to catch some much-needed Z's.

"IN BLACKEST NIGHT..."

When I awoke this morning I threw on the first available t-shirt (following my shower of course) due to damn near every other bit of my clothing being ready for drop-off at the local laundromat, and the shirt I happened to end up with was my trust Green lantern Corps emblem tee.

Yer Bunche, rockin' it Oa-stylee.

I've always favored GL tees because while thoroughly geeky, they are not as instantly recognizable to the non-superhero cognoscenti — aka the general public or those who have a life — as a Superman or Batman crest, both of which you'd have had to live on another planet for the nearly the past seventy years not to recognize. But even when hiding in plain sight while representing for geeks everywhere, I can sometimes unintentionally get into trouble. Case in point:

Some years back, just after the majority of my friends and extended family moved away from Brooklyn for greener (and cheaper) pastures in which to raise families, I was eating breakfast at the New College Diner, a place my friends and I would take over in droves every weekend for a few years, when a black dude of about sixty walked in. The guy was decked out in very Afro-centric clothes, including a kufi, dashiki and sandals of the type often seen on men from Africa proper, and his silver 'fro lent him an air of snooty dignity. But I'd seen his type before, namely one of those guys who latched onto an "African" identity either during the 1960's or early 1970's, and instantly had him pegged as an all-too-American poseur who would undoubtedly have bored the tits off me if I allowed him into a coversation.

When he entered the place he gave the diner a once-over like some visiting dignitary, taking note of the other blacks present, but stopping when he saw me , his gaze affording me tight scrutiny. As I munched my toast while reading a scholarly hardcover tome on Toho's Godzilla cycle (you knew it was an egghead book because it had no pictures) , Prince Mamuwalde haughtily strode over to where I was seated, his equally faux Nubian wife/girlfriend in tow, and stood directly in front of me. He pointed at the t-shirt I was wearing and, in a voice so affected and pretentious that he could have passed as Jonathan Harris after a melanin transplant, asked me, "Say, my young brother-man. Unless I'm very much mistaken, that is an Ashanti drum symbol you're wearing. Is that not so?" I instantly deflated his attempt at including me in his feeble game of African culture "dress-up" by barely looking up and flatly stating, "No, it's the symbol of the Green Lantern Corps, a fictional group of intergalactic cops."

If withering looks of disdain and accompanying "tsk"-ing could kill, I would have been carted out of the diner in a beat-up shoebox.

TAKING THE DAY OFF

Yer Bunche, on the parapet of the design 'ho house, Manhattan's East Side.

It's Memorial Day, so I'm taking the day off to enjoy being a lazy turd. Hope you're doing the same.

THIS AIN'T STAR TREK XXX (2009)

Well! I checked out THIS AIN'T STAR TREK XXX and was quite pleasantly surprised for a number of reasons.

Porn parodies have been around since Day One and the majority of them expend little effort in doing anything with what they’re allegedly spoofing other than coming up with a title along the lines of HANNAH DOES HER SISTERS or SHINDLER’S FIST, and once the giggling over such titles has subsided, all viewers are left with is the uninspired uglies-to-uglies wrasslin’ that wouldn’t pass muster even during one’s teenage years. (Well, maybe during one’s more desperate teenage years, but you know what I mean.) Thankfully, THIS AIN’T STAR TREK XXX was made by a batch of pornsters who wear their love of old school STAR TREK on their sleeves (especially screenwriter “Roger Krypton”) and while it’s technically a parody, it’s played totally straight and is therefore quite funny when the humping isn’t in progress (and, if truth be told, sometimes even when it is). In fact, other than featuring different actors and some seriously hardcore sex, this DVD has the look and feel of old school STAR TREK down pat, with the sets, costumes and sound effects being as on the money as the budget would allow (it looks only slightly cheaper than TOS).

The plot — yes, there actually is one — is basically a re-do of “Space Seed,” the TV episode that introduced Ricardo Montalban’s arch villain Khan to the Trek canon, so if you’ve seen that story you know what you’re in for. Once more the Enterprise (which is never seen in an exterior shot) finds the “sleeper” ship Botany Bay and awakens the megalomaniacal Khan, thus setting in motion the conflict between the alpha male histrionics of Khan and Captain Kirk. Khan’s eugenics-derived super-human abilities are more or less forgotten here because, let’s face it, this is still a porno movie, and we’re here to see people in STAR TREK outfits get their hump on and not necessarily fully reenact a TV episode we’ve all seen a million times. The Trek-oriented sexual set-tos involve the following:

Spock (British pork swordsman Tony DeSergio) initiates “assimilation protocol” with one of two unfrozen female aliens aboard the Botany Bay. The first alien girl — also apparently her name — is played by the all-natural and very frisky Jenna Haze, Adult Video News’ 2009 Performer of the Year, and if her performance here is any indication of what’s she’s capable of, she certainly earned that accolade with flying colors. Her character states that she was "dipped in Venus juice at birth," which aids in her sole purpose for existing, namely to please men (thus making her, as she herself puts it, "the most popular female on the ship"). As a rule I usually hate blowjob sequences, but this fuck scene gets things rolling when Haze gives Spock the most impressive beejay I've ever witnessed, a virtuoso bit of fellatio intended to get the stoic Vulcan to break character and show some emotion. Seriously, it was truly a thing of beauty. Oh, and Haze’s costume is a different-colored semi-ringer for the one worn by Roger Korby’s android Andrea in the Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls made Of?”

Jenna Haze as "Alien Girl," the character who made this one an instant classic.

Next we get Nick Manning as Khan lording it ultra-macho-style over the delectable Aurora Snow as eventual turncoat Marla McGivers (a character also found in the original story, only now her deeply-dicked motivation for betraying the Enterprise being made explicit as opposed to implicit). How Manning kept up not only a straight face but also a completely insane grimace throughout is something to be pondered, and he’s a riot, while Snow is a delight to the eyes.

Khan (Nick Manning) plots, while Marla McGivers (Aurora Snow) finds herself wetter than Aquaman's Speedo.

When Kirk (an amusingly Shatneresque Evan Stone) gets the spotlight, he’s matched with Sasha Grey as a mouthwatering Vulcan in an outfit that would have been right at home on TOS.(R.I.P., Bill Theiss.) She's the other female from the Botany bay and she's there to warn Kirk of Khan's true intentions, but luckily for him (and us), before she can impart her info the Vulcan lady mentions that she is afflicted with Pon Farr, and if you know your Vulcan xenobiology, you know what that means… Being the selfless guy that he is, Kirk administers the cure for the “blood fever” right there on the transporter platform, an heroic act that made me wonder what happened to the transporter operator during the inter-species horizontal mambo. Next to T’Pol from ENTERPRISE, Grey is simply the hottest Vulcan ever seen, and I thank her for that bit of “fan service,” as the Japanese call it.

Sasha Grey as perhaps the most visually enchanting Vulcan yet to hit the screen.

Meanwhile in sickbay, Dr. McCoy (Cheyne Collins) and Nurse Chapel (Codi Carmichael) must ward off the potentially fatal effects of an airborne pathogen released by Khan, and the only way to counter its effects is by unleashing certain endorphins… You do the math.

Evan Stone as Captain Kirk, afflicted and in need of a cure...

Following that bit of business, Kirk finds himself afflicted with the pathogen (allowing Evan Stone to really let loose with the outright Shatnerism) and takes the good doctor’s advice as to the cure, engaging in an on-the-bridge threesome with Spock and Lt. Uhura (Jada Fire, whose brief bits of dialogue were wisely dubbed, if the behind the scenes footage is any indication of her verbal delivery). And before you K/S freaks out there get too lathered up, Kirk and Spock do not do each other, but a shared-orifice DP is about as close as it gets to that. (I guess you’ll have to wait for the all-male parody to scratch that itch.) This scene is by far the least inspired and most perfunctory of the lot, and for those of you who hate “facials,” the two-man pecker snot bombardment seen at the end of this sequence is especially nasty thanks to the pearlescent aspect of the guys’ semen starkly contrasting with Uhura’s very dark complexion, really driving home how much taking a load directly in the face can make one look just like a seriously-melted candle. (BTW, neither Spock nor Uhura were affected by the pathogen, but how often does one get to make the beast with three backs on the bridge of the USS Enterprise?)

The semi-faithful low-budget remaking of “Space Seed” is utterly beside the point since there are virtually no other actors on hand other than the main cast — there’s no Chekov and both Sulu and Scotty have little more than walk-on parts — so Khan’s lack of a sizable force of supermen and the conspicuous absence of a visible Enterprise crew component would have rendered the plot moot anyway, so we just have to content ourselves with what amounts to a feature-length pornographic cosplay movie. And I, for one, have no problem with that.

THIS AIN’T STAR TREK XXX is very entertaining as contemporary porn flicks go, especially for Trek geeks, and the second disc even includes a sex-free version of the film should you for some reason choose to watch it. Also included on the second disc is an entertaining “Making of” documentary that takes us on a comprehensive tour behind the scenes, complete with cast interviews, a look at the costuming and makeup effects (most notably the Vulcanizing of Sasha Grey, who’s quite pixie-like and dainty when seen out of context of the feature), and plenty of amusing backstage buffoonery. Evan Stone’s David Lee Roth-ish words of warning to men who would enter the porn biz and thereby threaten his own work are hilarious, especially his statements that he and Tony DeSergio would tell the poor bastard in question to show up for a location shoot at some place that doesn’t exist, or that he’d make sure the guy was forced “to work with one of those girls who really, really hates guys, a serious lesbian who’s only in it for the money and will totally take it out on you. Why? Because you’re the new guy!”

The famous Vulcan salute: actually a secret shout-out to those of us who like to "get a taste?"

And while the behind the scenes documentary is fun enough, Jenna Haze gained my undying appreciation for the following quick-witted and funny observation, delivered from the captain's chair:

(Haze makes the Vulcan salute) "It's like a little pussy-eating thing, that's what it is. It's not the Vulcan salute; it's like (sticks tongue between splayed salute fingers) inter-galactic pussy-eating, right? That's what he really meant with that! He doesn't show emotion 'cause he's always buried between somebody's legs. Spock's really a secret pussy-eater, I bet..."

After which she supplements that brilliant observation by confessing to being a geek, but not for Trek, instead preferring Star Wars, video games and werewolf and vampire novels. Gotta love her!

Bottom line, THIS AIN'T STAR TREK XXX is way more fun than it has any right to be, so if you're both a Trek goon and porn-friendly, you should definitely TRUST YER BUNCHE and check this out. I believe a parody this close to the source material is considered "fair use" but I would not be at all surprised if Hustler could only get away with this once, so enjoy this while you can.

A TALL "DRINK" OF ANIME AND AN ASSLOAD OF JESUS

Okay, it's Sunday and time for porn and related filthiness, but these two items take the goddamned cake. Ask yourself which is more conceptually appalling: a disposable and ready-to-use pussy in a can,

The can, with anime-girl label...

...and the contents (or should that be "cuntents?")

or a Baby Jesus butt plug?

For me, it would have to be the tall-boy of silicone punani, because talk about taking something totally excellent and reducing it to a soulless bit of minimalism that would make for the most disturbing bit of recycling yet seen... And what's up with how it looks? The Japanese are virtual sorcerers when it comes to their skills at sculpting things that look like they're practically alive, and I've seen other artificial vaginas created in the Land of the Rising Sun that blow this sorry example away like Nagasaki, so why does this look like a grapefruit-half in a can? Where are the labia?

As for Baby Jesus as butt plug, I feel like I've already had Baby Jesus repeatedly shoved up my ass since childhood, so where's the novelty in that? I will give it points for blasphemous appeal, but I still think can-o'-cooter is worse for ruining the image of "the Good Place." Seriously, what the fuck ever happened to just plain old jerking off?

Discuss.

ODDS & ENDS

I fucking hate "reality" TV shows, and I hate them even more when they feature people I never gave a shit about in the first place. Current case in point: TORI AND DEAN-HOME SWEET HOLLYWOOD, featuring colossal no-talent Tori Spelling and whoever the fuck "Dean" is, apparently her husband or some shit, and their two kids. I could not possibly be less interested, but my attention was drawn to an ad for it that blights my already none-too-spectacular subway platform in Brooklyn. The ad is one of those candy-colored numbers showcasing the parents in director's chairs looking over their shoulders at us miserable proles, as they feign rudimentary attention toward their demon-spawn. What got me to look at it was the instantly recognizable defacement work of the stop's resident phantom defacer, and while by no means a genius of the obscene graffiti form, the unknown scrawler is usually good for a laugh and his (her?) current contributions did not fail to amuse (double click on them to enlarge):

Ain't it the truth!

Tori Spelling's known to have had at least a nose job, but if you ask me in recent years she's come to look more and more like a masculine and unconvincing drag queen.

Graffiti involving kids is almost always fun due to the more often than not inappropriate things seen issuing from the mouths of babes, but this example displays a more conceptual touch by having the snarky dialogue issue from the telephone the kid's holding.

And while such things are quite tasteless and offensive in real life, somehow suggestions of undisguised parentally-directed lust crack me up when seen graffitoed on subway and bus ads:

It's quite plainly stated that she wants daddy's dick instead of a boring old bottle, but just this morning I saw where another scrawler added the label "Sperm Juice" to the bottle with blue marker, and that feeble bit of audience participation added nothing to what came before.

Remember back in the bygone days of yore when Eddie Murphy was funny? Yeah, I know it seems like a million years ago, but I witnessed when it happened and there are many of an age with Yer Bunche who can also testify to that period's existence. Nowadays it's easy to forget that Murphy was once the man who once gave us arguably the only good stuff to come out of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in those two disastrous years following the departure of the Not Ready for Primetime Players, to say nothing of being the performer of the hilarious DELIRIOUS cable special — inarguably one of the three funniest things to come out of the 1980's — , especially in the wake of his growing mountain of mediocre-to-downright-lousy and innocuous "family" films. The two NUTTY PROFESSOR movies were barely passable, his DR. DOOLITTLE movies amounted to the rape of a classic character and utter squandering of a fun concept — you have a guy who can communicate with animals and those were the best you could come up with?!!? — and do not get me started on THE HAUNTED MANSION, THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH, DADDY DAY CARE, MEET DAVE and the execrable NORBIT... Which brings us to the upcoming IMAGINE THAT, a film that looks every bit is wan and useless as what has come before, and apparently the phantom defacer thinks so too:

Lastly, and in a totally unrelated area of random reality, one of the design 'ho house's sales guys just returned from a trade show involving candy, and he brought back this amazingly-monikered bit of confectionery:

Yes, it's "Cracksheads," the ne plus ultra of high-caffeine treats! As the label explains, four pieces is the equivalent of one cup of coffee or two cans of Mountain Dew, and the sales guy described the people staffing the Crackheads display booth as looking "very jittery and strung out." I can't wait to see what happens when this stuff gets unleashed at Halloween!

SCORE!!!

I just got back from my favorite comics shop in NYC, Jim Hanley's Universe, and thanks to them cleaning out all the stuff that's been gathering moss in the basement for over a decade they unearthed something I've been searching for for years. It was a complete and utter stroke of luck that led me to walk down one of the aisles and spot a garish purple hardcover...

There it was: ACTION-THE STORY OF A VIOLENT COMIC, right there and practically jumping off the rack into my eager hands. Needless to say, I picked it up (using some of the mountain of trade-in credit I've accrued over the years) and was amazed to see it priced at a mere thirty-five bucks. I just checked to see if anyone had it on Amazon UK and found two copies that started at one-hundred and ten pounds, and when I've found it on eBay it went for as much as $300. I can't wait to read this because, other than the fun-though-poorly-packaged collection of HOOKJAW from two years ago, this book is as far as I know the only collection of strips from Britain's infamous and famously banned ACTION weekly, the comic from whose creative ashes 2000 AD arose, its editors having learned valuable lessons on just how to get away with scads or graphic violence. I'll get back to you with a review when I'm done, but for now I only have two words to say on this:

FUCKING SCORE!!!

A PRE-HOLIDAY GOODIE!

It's a well-known fact that I unashamedly love me some Orion slave girls — aka "green chicks" — from STAR TREK, so how could I pass up a cute caricature statue of one as the latest addition to my ever-growing collection of geeky work area paraphernalia?

Funko's Orion Slave Girl figure. Love the animated look!

I saw this Funko Orion Slave Girl online about two weeks ago and ordered one the minute I got back from my trip to the UK. It's fun enough that such a piece of kitsch exists, but I believe this is meant to be cartoon version of the illusion used by the unfortunate Vina (Susan Oliver) to entice Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) into willingly remaining in captivity on Talos IV and mating with her (it didn't work). That happened in the first STAR TREK pilot, "The Cage" (completed in early 1965), but is more widely remembered from the re-use of much of the pilot's footage as the 2-part Original Series episode "The Menagerie" (1966).

Susan Oliver as Vina.

If you somehow missed either "The Cage" or "The Menagerie," do yourself the favor and watch them as soon as you can (especially the uncut "The Cage") so you can see the Ground Zero from which the STAR TREK juggernaut sprang.

Anyway, the cartoon green chick showed up today's design 'ho house mail and I immediately afforded her a place of honor on one of my shelves. And just for the sake of comparison, check out how Playmates handled the same character in a "straight" version released some thirteen years ago:

I snatched up the straight version of Vina simply because there had not been a toy of her up to that point, and when you see its rather bland facial expression you can understand how I keep it solely as a piece of collection fodder that could end up in a box and stashed in my closet with no tears shed over its absence. The cartoon version, on the other hand, has a lot of personality and charm (she's totally workin' that "walk like an Egyptian" move), so I predict she'll be on display either in my work space or on a bookshelf in the Vault for the foreseeable future.

Man, I love me some green chicks...