HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE VAULT OF BUNCHENESS!!!

Yer Bunche, in the throes of enjoying his ongoing mutation.

Yeah, I know it's just New Year's Eve, but I figured I'd wish a happy whatchamhoozits beforehand and thank you all for reading this galloping festival of geekishness and drivel. Your support means a lot, and I strive to have more and more stuff to keep you entertained/appalled in 2010, "the year we make contact." Drink responsibly and make sure you check in again soon.

-all my love,

Yer Bunche

AVATAR: MY IDEA FOR THE INEVITABLE PORNO KNOCKOFF

"Sully, once I put our brains into genetically-engineered avatar bodies, we will walk among the planet's natives and make sweet love to them. But first, how about a practice run, right here in the lab?" (CUE WAKKA- JAWAKA GUITAR)

Now that AVATAR is a major box office smash — and let's face it, even if it weren't — some kind of porn version of it is as much of a given as death, taxes and the inexplicably longevity of AMERICAN IDOL, so with that in mind I'd like to be the first out of the gate with a scenario for the upcoming (no pun intended) tenderloin cash-in.

Hewing close to director James Cameron's basic concept but shifting the character focus, my filthy AVATAR would be about the doctor who came up with the Avatar Program rather than the paraplegic soldier. This time around, the good doctor — hopefully to be portrayed by an actress with the nom de porn "So-Horny Beaver" — creates the Avatar Program with the intention of fulfilling her long-held dream of seeking out new alien life forms (in this case the "Noo'kee"), transmitting her brain into a gene-spliced blend of human and indigenous alien DNA, walking among the aliens in a form that's familiar to them, and subsequently fucking the living shit out of them. She would be accompanied on this noble quest by a team also kitted up with wearable, fully-functional alien bodies, therefore allowing for more characters than just her to get into the action. And since this would be a "feel good" porno that would play directly on the fantasies of many sci-fi geeks of either gender, this setup allows for the aliens to get fucked by humans, but not get "fucked" by humans, if you get what I mean. Yes, the good doctor would be forging a link of understanding and good will between the species with a scientifically-crafted vaginal avatar, or VAGITAR for short, which would also serve as the title. (Or maybe even JAMES CUMERON'S VAGITAR, or would that be overkill?) And the budget for this opus would be however much it would cost to buy blue body paint for a cast of maybe ten people, some cheap caveman/jungle girl gear from the local costume shop, styrofoam and silver paint for simulating "futuristic" lab and spaceship sets, maybe a dozen potted plants to create the alien planet's forest look, and a foam prop with a posable wire core for the scene where the heroine pleasures a girl from the alien tribe using her prehensile tail, so we're talking maybe $2000 if we hire some game amateurs for the cast. It's a guaranteed hit and will go on to make more money than all six STAR WARS movies combined. You mark my words!

AVATAR (2009)

Paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) prepares to transfer his consciousness into a fully-functional Na'vi body and get to know the natives on the planet Pandora.

By now I would bet that you've heard all manner of stuff about James Cameron's ultra-lavish 3-D spectacular, AVATAR, but since you read this site — replete as it is with endless ruminations on movies and what does or does not make them work — you're most likely interested in Yer Bunche's take on the ALIENS director's latest effort. Well, I'm getting to that shortly, but first here's what you need to know about the story.

AVATAR takes place in the year 2154 on Pandora, a moon of the planet Polyphemus, and tracks the journey of paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who replaces his murdered brother on a fascinating mission: the RDA corporation seeks to exploit the vast resources of Pandora — most notably the ridiculously-named "Unobtainium" — and essentially render the place an environmentally raped place like the Earth (which we're told is now pretty much barren and bereft of anything green on its surface, which would make the planet uninhabitable, but I digress...), but standing in the way of this environmental-rape is an indigenous people, the semi-feline and 10-foot tall Na'vi. Since Pandora's atmosphere is not breathable by humans, irascible Dr. Grace Augustine (my girl Sigourney Weaver, rocking the screen yet again in her sci-fi element) has developed the Avatar Program, in which a genetically engineered body spliced from human and Na'vi DNA is grown and into which a human operator's consciousness may be transferred in an effort to mingle with and get to know the natives. Sully takes his brother's place in the program (by dint of his DNA being compatible with his brother's avatar, plus his handy military/defensive skills as a soldier) but he has no training in the ways and language of the natives, an aspect that doesn't suit Dr. Augustine at all, but what choice has she got?

Jake in his Na'vi avatar form.

Unbeknownst to Dr. Augustine, Jake is tasked by testosterone/sadism-fueled Col. Quaritch (a superb villainous turn by Stephen Lang) with using his avatar form to infiltrate the Na'vi and convince them to vacate the territory designated for mining or face the most dire of consequences for non-compliance. Given a window of three months to accomplish his mission, Sully ends up getting thrust head-first into the Na'vi way of life when he's accidentally separated from his team of fellow avatars and rescued from Pandora's hungry fauna by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a beautiful native and member of the Omaticaya tribe.

Pandoran forest native Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the jungle girl/huntress fantasy archetype transplanted to science-fiction.

Assigned by her people's shaman (who also happens to be her mother) to teach Sully the ways of the Na'vi after signs that he may be favored by their deity, the mother goddess Eywa, the huntress and the Earthman grow close and Sully "goes native" with a vengeance and finds himself becoming more Na'vi as his very literal connection with their world grows with each passing day, a state of self-realization and enlightenment that directly conflicts with his orders and sets in motion a horrifying clash of technological superiority and corporate greed with Pandora's rightful inhabitants. But what the humans don't realize is that there's more going on here than just callously kicking the collective ass of an entire world's people...

One of the critical brickbats hurled at AVATAR is that it's derivative of several works, DANCES WITH WOLVES being the most frequently cited parallel, but since it's basically a sci-fi allegory about heavily-armed greed/superiority-driven assholes bent on destroying a way of life they neither understand nor care about and one of their own recognizing what's wrong with that outlook and siding with the people he was sent to lay waste to, I doubt there's much that could be done to put an original spin on the narrative, be it science-fictionalized or not. The film was also pre-judged for the look of the Na'vi, namely that the CGI that brings them to life was not very convincing, prompting some wags to declare the film to be "CAPTAIN PLANET with cats" before they'd actually seen the movie. I admit that I have often pre-judged movies by virtue of their trailers or pre-release posters — Jackie Chan's upcoming THE SPY NEXT DOOR being the most recent example of that propensity — and to some degree I don't blame the aforementioned wags, but I'm here to tell you there's nothing to gripe about in regard to the rendering of the Na'vi. In fact, once viewers get past the whole derivative thing, there's a hell of a lot to enjoy in AVATAR. Lemme break down what you need to know:

• The film is a very compelling two-and-a-half hours long and you will not want to miss a moment of it, so going to the bathroom before the movie starts is very strongly advised.
• While perhaps a tad preachy, the story will draw you in in spite of that aspect, simply because we all know that decimating indigenous populations is a terrible, grievous wrong that can never really be redressed. The tragedy looms from the story's setup and percolates throughout the film's running time, placing the Na'vi in a seemingly over-matched position and leaving Jake to betray both his own species and, by initial intent of his actions, his new-found people.
• The look of the Na'vi takes a little getting used to since, in my opinion, CGI still has a way to go before it can truly craft realistic-looking humanoid forms, faces and expressions, and as of this writing I would say the benchmark for completely believable CGI characters was set by Andy Sirkis' motion-captured performance as Gollum in the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Coupled with some superior CGI, Sirkis' work brought the character to vivid life, and while not as good as the efforts seen there, I would give the Na'vi an A-minus for believability. Plus, as the film progresses, any perceived deficiencies are rendered negligible by the audience getting to care about the Pandoran natives and want to see them win out over the human assholes.
• The entire cast turn in solid performances but the three heavy hitters are Sigourney Weaver as sci-fi cinema's answer to Margaret Mead, Stephen Lang as a hardened nightmare of slash-and-burn militarism made flesh, and Zoe Saldana as the huntress Neytiri. I mentioned Andy Sirkis' Gollum earlier as the standard-bearer for quality motion-captured acting, and now I champion Saldana's work as Neytiri to be second only to Sirkis and one of the film's chief assets. Even setting aside my own well-documented fascination for jungle girl characters, I adored every moment Neytiri was on screen because first and foremost she is a solid character, and she is completely fucking awesome in every way.
• The film's 3-D is excellent and it is less concerned with sticking things in your face than it is with creating a "you are there" sense of depth perception meant to place the viewer firmly within the narrative's environments, be they technological or eco-system organic, and it succeeds mightily. I know some of you have difficulty with viewing the 3-D process through those Clark Kent-looking glasses, but it didn't bother me at all, and I have to wear those ugly bastards over my own spectacles. That said, individual results are likely to vary.
• If you plan on seeing AVATAR at all, you must see it on the largest screen possible and make sure that you're seeing a 3-D screening because it's also playing in standard 2-D, so be sure what you're seeing when you purchase your tickets. The film is a visual feast, en effect's-lover's multiple-orgasm if you will, so it must be seen in the format for which it was made. When it hits DVD it will lose so much of its grandeur that it will almost be a completely different cinematic experience, so do not, repeat, DO NOT miss it on the big screen.

The bottom line on AVATAR is that I enjoyed it a great deal and will definitely see it again (on a decent NYC screen, as opposed to the piddling screen I saw it on in Norwalk, CT). Its content is best recommended for age ten and up because some of the sequences on Pandora can be pretty intense and possibly quite scary for younger viewers. The worst profanity on hand are a couple of uses of "shit" (your kids hear and, let's face it, say worse every day in school) and there is no sex/nudity, although there is a love scene from which one can infer that the beast with two backs will be made, but it's all in quite good taste. My personal litmus test for a film like this is whether or not I think my oft-mentioned and much-beloved niece, Cleo could take it, and I'm greatly saddened to note that she's not quite six yet, too young for a movie of this length and intensity. I know she'd totally dig the visuals and Neytiri (who definitely fits into a cooler-than-usual "princess" role since she's the daughter of the tribal leader and the shaman), so I hope AVATAR eventually gets a full-tilt re-release when she's old enough for me to share it with her on the big screen. And then I've got to sit her through SHOGUN ASSASSIN, SISTER STREET FIGHTER and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, but those are also a long way off...

NO, JACKIE! NOOOOOOOO!!!

Jackie Chan in DRUNKEN MASTER II (1994), an instant classic and one of the ten best martial arts films ever made.

How long has it been since Jackie Chan made a good movie? I love the guy for his charm, comedic chops and truly incredible willingness to stage and perform mind-boggling stunts and kung fu, but has he done anything of worth since the epochal DRUNKEN MASTER II (1994)? Since then it seems to me like he's made a slew of films that range from the mediocre to the downright horrendous, and now he's starring in a film whose poster, as seen in my local subway station, elicited agonized groans and much eye-rolling from myself and many of the commuters waiting for the Manhattan-bound R train. THE SPY NEXT DOOR is clearly a kiddie flick and there's nothing wrong with that, but it has all the earmarks of something that Eddie Murphy, a once great talent, would do nowadays, and that just fills me with both sadness and dread. I was initially inspired to post about this because of the version of the poster previously mentioned, namely this one:

But then, while searching for the poster's image online, I found this alternate poster which blows the first one out of the water for sheer cloying awfulness. I mean, look at this shit:

Did Jackie learn nothing from THE TUXEDO? Apparently not, because here we have Jackie as a babysitting super-spy with three young charges, along with an adorable pig for extra cuteness value. Kids. And a fucking pig. Truly we are in the Last Days.

Oh, and do not get me started on the offensiveness of the clearly kung fu-based KARATE KID remake being titled THE KARATE KID...

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE VAULT OF BUNCHENESS!!!

Merry Christmas, dear Vaulties! Enjoy the feasting, the boozing, the prezzies, the fucking under the Christmas tree while dressed as the Virgin Mary and the black wise man, and most of all don't forget to pop a copy of the terrific SANTA'S SLAY (seen above) into the DVD player. The little ones will love it!

AN APPROPRIATE COMIC BOOK COVER

From NATIONAL LAMPOON #57 (December 1974). Art by Neal Adams.

THANKS FOR THIS ONE, PRINCESS DRAGON

From my old pal "Princess Dragon," I know I'm getting a one-way ticket to aitch ee double-hockey sticks for this one...

And they thought THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST was offensive.

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS: ALTERNATE ENDING

I would like to thank my pal Chez for this one, a wee re-edit that will bring a smile to all my fellow Christmas curmudgeons.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009)

Quentin Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS was a movie I meant to see on the big screen but missed thanks to every single show I tried to get into being sold out, so I figured I'd wait until it hit DVD. Well, less than four months after its U.S. theatrical run it's out on disc and I sat through it the other night, fully expecting an R-rated, ultra-violent, cussing-riddled Q.T. version of SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS, but what I got was something else entirely.

I read the film's script when it was leaked to the Internet (however long ago that was) and figured what I read was most likely going to see several revisions before it finally hit the screen, simply because the movie read more like some kind of WWII-set arthouse flick rather than the kind of non-stop violence-fest I would have expected from Tarantino. Let's face it: when evaluating the guy's filmography it's impossible not to realize that what he's succeeded in building his career on is crafting what are basically high-end exploitation movies. To some degree each of his films has taken the tropes of a given exploitation mainstay genre — crime thrillers, blaxploitation, revenge/chopsocky flicks — and stripped them of their low-budget rawness while infusing them with a "quality" Hollywood look and not losing an ounce of that signature exploitation visceral charge, and now Tarantino applies his grunge-film makeover skills to the brutal WWII "mission" genre, and the finished product did indeed undergo a number of tweaks from what I read in the script, including the loss of my favorite scene, but I'll be getting to that shortly.

WARNING: If you intend to read any further, keep in mind that here there be spoilers.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (a title whose spelling is at no point explained in the film) is ostensibly about a behind-enemy-lines mission undertaken by commanding officer Aldo "The Apache" Raine (Brad Pitt, chewing up the scenery in unashamed and ludicrous full-blown good ol' boy mode) in which he and his all-Jewish squad of American commandos wage a war of terror against their Nazi foes. Making a name for themselves as a deadly scourge of the Boche, Raine and his "Basterds" mercilessly exterminate all comers and mark any they chose to let live to spread the word of their terroristic activities with a swastika carved into their foreheads with the tip of Raine's Bowie knife, an act that strikes deep terror into the hearts of Nazi scum everywhere.

The Bear Jew (Eli Roth) and Aldo the Apache (Brad Pitt) do what they do best, and it sure ain't pretty.

When the Basterds are assigned to wipe out the German political/military hierarchy while said officials attend a film premiere in occupied France, their plans coincidentally collide with a similar agenda held by Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a French Jew who escaped the massacre of the rest of her family at the hands of Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Nazi whose renowned knack for tracking down Jews earned him the nickname of "the Jew Hunter." Escaping from Landa some four years before the real meat of the story takes place, Shoshanna inherited a movie theater in Paris (stocked with an impressive library of highly flammable reels of old film prints) and through various plot machinations ends up being forced to host the aforementioned premiere.

Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) steels herself for the premiere of "Nation's Pride."

Filled with a desire for righteous vengeance, Shoshanna, aided by her lover (Jacky Ido), aims to trap Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and other high-ranking officials within her cinema and burn the place to the ground. As the plans of the Batserds and Shoshanna converge, an apocalypse of carnage is guaranteed, but will the good guys prevail or will they end up just another statistic on the Third Reich's score card?

That's the basic setup and it sounds like fertile ground for a slam-bang WWII-era actioner, no? Well lemme tell ya, bunky, if you're looking for action, you've come to the wrong war movie. Rather than being the DIRTY DOZEN-style pic the trailers led one to believe it was, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is more of a somewhat-highbrow WWII epic with arthouse pretensions that is by no means a bad movie, but it is definitely not all that it's been cracked up to be. Let's break it down, both the good and the not-so-good (there's very little here that is outright bad):

• The movie is over two-and-a-half hours long and there is perhaps a total of ten minutes of action/mayhem. Not good for a war movie that advertises itself as an action flick.
• Despite being the title characters, the Basterds are given virtually no development and consequently register less as characters than as interchangeable plastic army men. The small exceptions to this interchangeable aspect are Lt. Raine, psychopathic German/former Nazi team member Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), and the menacing Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), aka "the Bear Jew" who savagely beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat, but the minuscule development they receive is not sufficient to make us connect with them as heroes. The remaining Basterds are cannon fodder at best.

• For all intents and purposes the film really belongs to Shoshanna and her plan for revenge, which is simultaneously given a boost and a thorn in her side when she catches the attention of young Nazi war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl). Zoller stars in "Nation's Pride," a feature film dramatizing a battle in which he picked off scores of men while holed up in an unreachable tower, and he attempts to win over Shoshanna with his status as a star, not knowing he doesn't stand a chance with him thanks to her justifiable loathing of Nazis. Much of the film has to do with Shoshanna's futile and frustrating attempts to give the young soldier the brush-off, but his efforts to win her over include him convincing Goebbels to hold the film's premiere at her cinema, thus cementing the location for the grand finale.

• While not as oppressive with his cinematic cherry-picking and references this time around, Tarantino did annoy the living shit out of me by using David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" as a would-be mood-setter as Shoshanna gets ready for the big premiere evening. That song is indelibly linked to Paul Schrader's (1982) remake of CAT PEOPLE, and those of us who've seen that film cannot hear that tune without having flashbacks to hallucinatory sandy dreamscapes, horny panthers and a sultry Nastassja Kinski, so finding it's dance floor-flavored throb juxtaposed against a WWII setting is both jarring and incongruous. Yeah, I get that Shoshanna is "putting out the fire" of the entire Nazi hierarchy by trapping them and immolating them, but the use of that song was just too on the nose.
  

• Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa is a terrific villain and completely steals the movie whenever he's onscreen.
  

The superb Christoph Waltz as the vile yet utterly charming Hans Landa, aka "the Jew Hunter." No lie, this guy deserves the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Landa is smooth as greased otter shit, is an accomplished detective (albeit one who puts his considerable talents to highly questionable uses), is quite charming, is a polyglot with apparently native speaker fluency (which is a huge problem if you're trying to get disguised enemy operatives past him, as happens during the story) and is a pragmatic opportunist of the highest order. When it comes to bad guys, Hans Landa comes from out of nowhere to make my Top 10 list of the best villains of the past fifty years, so make of that what you will. In fact, I think Tarantino's biggest error was in not devoting a whole movie to the character, especially since Tarantino looooooooves characters who like a good conversation, but audiences may have suffered from the CLOCKWORK ORANGE effect had that been the case, and would probably have left the theater realizing they'd been made to care about a piece of human garbage. Very charming garbage, yes, but refuse nonetheless.

• By far the worst thing in the film is the ill-advised inclusion of Mike "Austin Powers" Myers in the role of a high-ranking British military official. When he shows up in a uniform and makeup that renders him balding, bewhiskered and graying, the viewer cannot help by say, "Hey! That's Mike Myers! What the fuck is he doing in this film?" Seriously, when he appears he launches into more of his tired U.K.-accented schtick, although not (?) meant to be humorous in this context, and his miscast and intrusive presence brings the movie to a dead stop and completely removes the viewer from the "reality" that the film had thus far successfully set up.

• In Tarantino's original script, there was a powerful explanation of why Donny Donowitz wields a baseball bat against Nazis, namely that he'd gone throughout his neighborhood and asked all the Jews who still had family in the old country to write the names of their loved ones on his bat, thus infusing it with power to be used against the enemies of their people. I dunno what you have to say about it, but that's some major mythic shit that I completely understand and feel would have gone a long way to give the Bear Jew a stance as a righteous avenger instead of just presenting him as some creepy thug with a bloodied Louisville Slugger. Do yourself the favor and track down the script online, then read the sequence where Donowitz explains his mission to an old lady in his neighborhood. Very strong narrative stuff that is nowhere to be found in the final product.

• For those of you who hate sitting through films with subtitles, bear in mind that a good two-thirds or more of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is in French, German and a smattering of Italian, so have your reading glasses at the ready. I enjoyed this aspect of the film because the speaking of native languages only adds to the authenticity.
  

• For me the film seemed less like a straight-flowing narrative and came off like a collection of well-shot and well-acted one act sequences, most of which were of interest and occasionally compelling and suspenseful as hell. That said, the movie did not work for me as a cohesive whole work. There was just...something missing, and I can't quite figure out what.

Bottom line, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS looks great and is definitely worth sitting through once, but I find it odd that the film fleshes out everybody except the guys who you'd think were supposed to be the main characters. Perhaps this was Tarantino's attempt to outgrow his more overt exploitation influences, but I found it to be a valiant near-miss. And for the record, out of Q.T.'s entire filmography, I would rate this admittedly opulent and well-acted work as last in my estimation of his work. Some of his other films are flawed, but this is the only one I would never sit through again (although I could be tempted back just to see Christoph Waltz again).

MY LATEST PWCW PIECE IS UP

Robotic soldier Boilerplate, history's mechanical marvel.

My latest article for PUBLISHERS WEEKLY COMICS WEEK is up and it features my interview with Paul Guinan, co-author of the highly recommended BOILERPLATE: HISTORY'S MECHANICAL MARVEL. Check it out and make sure to pick up a copy of the book. It's excellent in every way and I especially recommend it to history buffs. (Yeah, I'm talkin' ta youse, Jared!)

Boilerplate spars against white people-infuriating Jack Johnson. This really happened. Honest!

FIRST SNOWMAN OF THE SEASON

Here's the first snowman of the season, located a few doors down from my apartment building in Brooklyn, and he is one disturbing-looking sunuvabitch.

Sporting a wide-eyed stare made from cucumber slices and bearing a pair of eerie, womanly lips, this guy would not surprise me in the least if he came to life and embarked on a neighborhood-wide spree of rape, murder and flaying of children.

"Merry Christmas, kids! I'm gonna cut off your goddamned head and fuck it! Ahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!"

INTO THE WOODS

Taking zero time to make and due out in January, we just knew this one was inevitable:

Yes, it's TIGER'S WOOD, a porn confection culled straight from the headline-making sex scandal that itself features several elements that made it a natural for translation into tenderloin fare, namely:

• Black dude
• Blonde white woman
• Alleged mistresses coming out of the woodwork with tales of sordid checkerboard lovin'
• Rightfully pissed-off white woman attacking horndog black man with golf club

Honestly, if someone hadn't made a porn flick based on this I would have been both shocked and totally confused. But the good ol' porn industry once again shows its enterprising nature and cranks out a Tiger Woods cash-in less than a month after the the incident that inspired it took place. It may be morally bankrupt, but you've got to give it up for the filmmakers' for their Barry Allenesque speed in putting the danmned thing together.

FIRST BIG ONE OF THE SEASON (NOT ALL THAT BAD)

This past Saturday saw the first big winter storm of the season, yet while it was heralded on the local news with all the dread one would expect from a rampage by Godzilla, I have to say I've seen far worse. Here are shots of the snow as seen from the stoop of my apartment building just as it was starting to come down in the early afternoon, and the same two angles as seen at roughly 9:30 PM.

President Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn-12/19/2007 approx. 2:20 PM


President Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn-12/19/2007 approx. 9:30 PM


And as of this writing — 11 AM on Monday morning — the streets have been thoroughly plowed and the sidewalks are navigable, although things are slushy like a motherfucker in Manhattan.

GONE TO JOIN THE MANGER BABIES: R.I.P. BRITANNY MURPHY (1977-2009), VOICE OF KING OF THE HILL'S LUANNE PLATTER

After suffering a cardiac arrest while in the shower, actress Britanny Murphy is dead at the way too early age of 32.

First garnering attention for her role in CLUELESS (1995), she won a place in my heart as the voice of pathetic, dim-witted but sincere evangelical Luanne Platter on the long running animated primetime series KING OF THE HILL (1997-2009), and among a cast heavily populated with memorable characters, Luanne was perhaps the most human of the lot.

Luanne and two of the Manger babies, Hosea the cat and Sir Reginald Featherbottom the Third.

Luanne's brain-dead white trash misadventures were many, but she was a well-meaning soul who even sought to impart good Christian values to children via the staggeringly absurd puppet show "The Manger babies," a recurring bit that never failed to make me laugh my ass off. Murphy appeared in many other roles, but it is for Luanne that I wager she'll be best remembered.

Rest well, Ms. Murphy.

"You know, at the beauty academy they teach us that people aren't black or white or yellow or red, but their hair can be."
-Luanne Platter

THE XENA PROJECT-UPDATE

"Bunche, either you get your beige ass back to work, or you'll be wearing this here chakram as a fuckin' cock ring!!!"

One of the many problems found when maintaining a regular blog and not being bound to either an editor or deadlines is that the dedicated blogger can get caught up in covering many things while unintentionally placing a long-planned task on the back burner. In the case of Yer Bunche, that long-promised piece would be the waaaaaay behind schedule XENA PROJECT, and I am ashamed of myself for letting it lapse for as long as I have. That said, I have resumed my studies and hope to have the second installment ready to post sometime just after the new year.

Just so ya know.

THE GREAT DEBATE: DOLLS OF EVIL!

Occupying an admittedly small niche in the annals of horror is the killer doll, a concept that takes something so innocent and renders it into a force of sheer, full-blown terror. There have been several examples of this monster in books, TV and movies, but there are inevitably three who stand out from the pack and are usually named as the ne plus ultra of the lot. Those would be:

Chucky, a "Good Guy" doll possessed by the spirit of a homicidal maniac, first seen in CHILD'S PLAY (1988).

The unnamed and unforgettable Zuni fetish doll that relentlessly hunted Karen Black in the made-for-television TRILOGY OF TERROR (1974).

Talky Tina, an innocent-looking plaything that seeks to murder Telly Savalas in the classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Living Doll" (1963).

So I ask you, dear readers, which of these three is the one that makes you fudge your undies? For me it would be Talky Tina, hands down. The other two certainly have their merits, especially the Zuni warrior, but Talky Tina just creeps me the fuck out on a completely primal level. Discuss.

MONTY PYTHON: ALMOST THE TRUTH (2009)

I'll just cut right to the point: I fucking love Monty Python, and if you do too I cannot possibly recommend this boxed set highly enough. It's a six-hour documentary on the landmark British comedy troop that is so exhaustive and informative that it upon its release it instantaneously rendered all future documentaries on the subject utterly superfluous. Pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about the Pythons and their histories as both individuals and a team can be found somewhere in here, recounted by the surviving Pythons themselves (along with archival interviews with the late and very much lamented Graham Chapman), and it's a fascinating look at how a pack of Brits and one lone Yank inadvertently changed comedy forever.
There are many extras and full-length interviews included, plus a (failed) attempt at answering the eternal question of exactly who should rightfully be considered the seventh Python, namely Carol Cleveland or Neil Innes (my vote unhesitatingly goes to Cleveland), and the while film is littered with commentary by many clebrities and comedy pros who were influenced by the Pythons (Russell Brand's comments are great). Simply put, a majorly solid winner across the board that should be immediately added to the collection of every serious (?) Python fan. No lie, dear readers, get off your ass and snag yourself a copy immediately!

HOLY SHIT! I'VE GOT FAN ART!

This was sent in by Olliver Kirby, a high school senior I met while on line at a Steve Dillon signing at a comics shop, and we've been friends ever since. An aspiring comics writer, the guy is well-versed in many areas of geekdom and even had the wherewithal to create a sense of cosmic depth in the drawing with the strategic use of "Kirby Crackle." (That may go with the name via osmosis.)

Olliver's already pretty cool and is well on his way to being a healthily twisted member of post-high school society, and I am honored to know that The Vault of Bunchess is a part of his daily edutainment. Thanks for the support, dude!

HOLIDAY GEEK GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS: JOKES MY FATHER NEVER TAUGHT ME (2006)

I’m no stranger to family dysfunction yet I’m fascinated by the accounts of others’ experiences within the special Hell that can only be found at home, especially the homes of celebrities. My love of Richard Pryor’s brilliant, pain-fraught comedy has lasted for three decades and lead me to read just about anything I could about his turbulent, utterly fucked-up life, and the most recent book to plumb those depths tells his story from an unexpected perspective.

JOKES MY FATHER NEVER TAUGHT ME: LIFE, LOVE AND LOSS WITH RICHARD PRYOR is the eloquently profane memoir of Pryor’s third child, now forty-year-old Rain, the dead ringer spawn of Richard and a blonde, Jewish go-go dancer, and her narrative of her life from the moment she met her dad at age four is a compelling read. All the familiar tales of Richard Pryor’s excesses are present but there’s a certain extra punch in the guts when those stories are related from the point of view of a now-adult little girl whose time with her dad was punctuated with physical abuse, a constant parade of whores, her father’s addictions and insecurities, and the agonies of growing up half-Black and half-Jewish (yeah, being Jewish is not an ethnicity so one can't really be "half-Jewish," but that's how Rain describes herself). When not staying with her father, Rain was raised by her mother and grandparents in an observant Jewish household, so at various times in her life she was told that she was neither Black nor Jewish enough — her grandparents even suggesting her mother put her up for adoption because she was a potential visual embarrassment, an idea that they later thought better of — and while weathering the difficulties of trying to maintain a relationship with her father and bearing witness to her mother’s steady emotional decline, she sought to find her ethnic/cultural identity and define herself as her own human being.

The grownup Rain Pryor.

If all of this sounds like some self-pitying “you GO, girl!” page-turner, it most definitely isn’t; Rain is savvy enough to know that anyone who’d buy this book is probably most interested in hearing about her dad’s sordid world of drugs, pussy, violence, shattered relationships and abandoned children, so that’s what she gives us, yet somehow making it clear that she adored her dad, even when he was at his worst. The book is also an interesting look into the life of a kid who endured a lifestyle that ping-ponged between her mom’s working class worries over money and day-to-day concerns and her dad’s lavish comedian-as-rock-star existence, both influences that inspired her to become an actress and playwright. Rain’s adolescent years were as painful and awkward as those of any of us, but her adventures walk a thin line between girlish fantasies come to life and reality sticking its dirtiest finger straight down the throat of the little princess’s living daydream. Her attitudes on sex, love, self-worth and life in general are spelled out with a stark honesty that is seldom seen in tell-alls of this type. Highly recommended for Pryor fans and the curious alike.

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

HOLIDAY GEEK GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS: DEAD! THE GRIM REASPER'S GREATEST HITS (2006)

Perhaps the ideal antithesis to the same treacly seasonal tunes being played while the family opens prezzies on Christmas morn, this comprehensive CD collection of two decades-worth of "death rock" classics is sure to delight both Scrooges and non-Scrooges alike. Once an inexplicably popular sub-genre of American pop music (with the occasional British offering thrown in for good measure) the death rock oeuvre began as tales of star-crossed young lovers who were parted due to not receiving their parents' blessings, engaging in stock car racing or some other such teen woe before dying meeting a horrible demise in a flaming car wreck. Not my idea of romantic, but that kind of stuff was big back in the days, with "Teen Angel" serving as the template from which the genre would arise, reaching its peak with the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" (a tune conspicuously missing from this disc, but the compilers instead gave us another Shangri-Las downer, the overwrought "Give Us Your Blessings").

The Shangri-Las: "Yeah, we're from Queens. So fuckin' what?"

Virtually all of the songs here will flat-out crush any life and happiness in the room if you're stupid enough to play it at a party, with the prize for most depressing being a toss-up between Ferlin Husky's "The Drunken Driver,"a song that not only has the nerve to feature a long-absent father mowing down his own kids on the very day he's returning home to them, but also has the mangled and expiring kids give him an extra guilt-trip by demanding an explanation with their dying breath, "Patches" — not to be confused with the equally-uber-depressing 1970's hit by Clarence Carter, this one tells of a rich kid whose parents don't approve of his white trash girlfriend, so he's forbidden to see her and she commits suicide, after which he solves his dilemma by offing himself — and "Mother, Mother (I Feel Sick)," in which a woman's lifelong playing of headgames and emotional manipulation of others catches up with her when she discovers she has a terminal illness.

Don't Worry, Be Happy" this ain't (thank God!), but at times it wallows so shamelessly in its tear-jerking that you can't help but laugh your ass off. The nauseating "Once You Understand" by Think comes off like a "relevant" song you'd hear performed as intentional humor on a show like GET A LIFE or something (it would have fit in perfectly with "Zoo Animals on Wheels"), and dredges up memories of the ultra-saccharine "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing." It's just a hippy-dippy chorus of "things get a little easier, once you understand," repeated ad infinitum, as sort of punctuation to scenery-chewing "sketches" of teenagers and their dysfunctional relationships with their stereotypical "establishment" parents (this song has late-1960's/early-1970's written all over it in that whole trite BILLY JACK way). Mom and dad bitch out their admittedly whiny kids over every conceivable thing, such as not wanting daughter to visit a certain part of town because they "don't like the kind of people living there," son's too-long hair, lack of trust that daughter's not getting laid when she's supposed to be babysitting, the kids wasting their lives on "foolish things," son not having a job in which he works "twelve hours a day, six days a week, to pay for food and board" just like dad did, and so on, culminating in dad berating his son on how "there's more to life than joining a group or playing your guitar." Son responds with, "Yeah, dad? What is there to life?" Then "life' gets repeated several times with a "spooky" echo effect as that fucking chorus escalates into full-blown tambourine/piano/handclapping idiocy before it all comes to an abrupt halt and we hear a voice ask a "Mr. Cook" if he has "a son named Robin, aged 17." When Mr. Cook replies in the affirmative, he's told that his son has died from an overdose and he'd better come down to the stationhouse. The father's anguished sobs continue through the end of the song as the chorus starts up once more; perhaps this would have had some kind of tragic effect if we were told that Mr. Cook was the gruff dad heard throughout the song, but we have no idea who this guy is, and he sounds completely different from the way the father sounds on the rest of the record, so our ability to care at all just doesn't happen. And what happened to mom and the daughter? Who the fuck knows?

And while "Once You Understand" is unintentionally funny, Jimmy Cross' infamous 1964 classic "I Want My Baby Back" is genuinely hilarious and downright offensive; a then-contemporary parody of the death rock style in general, Cross relates the tragic death and dismemberment of his girlfriend while they're on their way home from a Beatles concert and the run smack into the Leader of the Pack. Distraught over his loss, Cross wails about how he wants his baby back, how he misses her "oh so much," and "can't live without her touch," as the sounds of earth being dug up with a shovel register in the background. When his tale of heartbreak is finally told, Cross opens his girl's coffin, gets in with her corpse, closes the lid, and finishes by singing "I've got my baby back!" Necrophilia rock is a tough sell some forty-three years after the song was released, but when it arrived in '64 it was quite controversial, what with it being in generally questionable taste as well as coming less than ten years after the Ed Gein case, an event that still resonates five decades later, so you can imagine that it still hadn't faded from the public consciousness at the time.

Ed Gein: murderer, cannibal, amateur tailor, and possible inspiration for Jimmy Cross's "I Want My Back."

I have no complaints about this compilation other than the glaring omissions of "Leader of the Pack" and some "classics" from the early-1970's, namely "D.O.A." by Bloodrock — a song relating the point of view of a soon-to-be-corpse slowly dying in the back of an amulance following a horrifying plane crash — Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey" (a strong contender for the title of most maudlin song of all time), "Rocky" by Austin Roberts (a bald-faced ripoff of "Honey" that some consider to be even more maudlin), "Run, Joey, Run" by David Geddes (guy gets girlfriend pregnant, girlfriend's dad chases guy with shotgun, girlfriend's dad accidentally kills his own daughter when she takes a shotgun blast meant for the boyfriend), and of course "Timothy" by the Buoys, the only song about cannibalism ever to crack the Top 20, as well as having been written by Rupert Holmes, the diabolical mastermind behind "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)." Come to think of it, there are enough omissions to warrant expanding this into a perfect, kitschy two-disc set, but what the hey? Worth every cent of its cost, DEAD! THE GRIM REAPER'S GREATEST HITS is a lot of fun, provided you're in the mood to be buried beneath an avalanche of Top 40 morbidity. TRUST YER BUNCHE, and if you're curious, the full track listing can be seen below.

1. Terry - Twinkle
2. Give Us Your Blessings - The Shangri-Las
3. Endless Sleep - Jody Reynolds & The Storms
4. Death Of An Angel - Donald Woods & The Vel-Aires
5. Condition Red - The Goodees
6. I Want My Baby Back - Jimmy Cross
7. Dead Man’s Curve - Jan & Dean
8. The Drunken Driver - Ferlin Husky
9. Johnny Remember Me - John Leyton
10. Last Kiss - J. Frank Wilson & The Cavaliers
11. Patches - Dickey Lee
12. Once You Understand - Think
13. The Death Of A Surfer - The Riviares
14. Dead! - Carolyn Sullivan
15. Psycho - Jack Kittel
16. Ebony Eyes - The Everly Brothers
17. Requiem (For A Girl Born Of The Wrong Times) - Betty Barnes
18. A Beginning From An End - Jan & Dean
19. Tell Laura I Love Her - Ray Peterson
20. The Dream - The Fox
21. Teen Angel - Mark Dinning
22. Mother Mother (I Feel Sick) - The Martin Sisters
23. The Bed - Walter Jackson
24. Let's Think About Living - Bob Luman

MORE POORLY-NAMED PARODY PORN

If you've ever seen a James Bond movie, you are no doubt absolutely certain of one simple fact: agent 007 of Her Majesty's secret service liked to fuck, a lot, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that ol' James slipped the Queen herself a length. With that in mind, there have been a number of James Bond-themed porn flicks, and the latest to come down the line stunned me with its feeble title.

Yes, it's PORNSTARS LIKE IT BIG VOL. 7: QUANTUM OF SLUTS. Talk about not even trying to come up with a decent title... Think about it for two seconds and one easily comes up with CONDOM OF BONE US or CUNT NUMB FROM SO MUCH, neither of which is all that great, but QUANTUM OF SLUTS? Is filthy creativity finally officially dead?

HOLIDAY GEEK GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS: ABRAXAS AND THE EARTHMAN (2006)

Rick Veitch has been one of my favorite creators of comics for nearly three decades, his work being flavored with a heavy duty psychedelic edge that's simultaneously lysergically wondrous and scary as a motherfucker, a storytelling style born out of the underground spirit and visceral kick in the balls of that genre, only without the frequently incoherent vulgarity found therein. His stories explore humanity on many levels, often presenting challenging observations tarted up in the drag of the fantastic to make his messages that much more vivid, each a visual and intellectual feast that is truly epic in the truest sense of the term, and no work of his exemplifies that better than the stunning ABRAXAS AND THE EARTHMAN, now finally available in a beautiful trade paperback. I would have preferred a hardcover, but fuck it, I'll take what I can get!

This collected edition of the seminal graphic novel/ psychedelic journey first seen in serial form during the early 1980’s in Marvel Comics' EPIC ILLUSTRATED magazine is a welcome change from standard comics fare. Veitch (THE MAXIMORTAL, BRAT PACK, RARE BIT FIENDS, ARMY @ LOVE) astounds the reader with a heartfelt tale that is equal parts Herman Melville, consciousness expansion, environmental treatise, and gripping sci-fi adventure replete with space battles and all manner of exotic extraterrestrial cast members.

Cetologist John Isaac is shanghaied from a naval research mission and, along with the submarine’s commanding officer, is thrust into the thick of mad Captain Rotwang’s interstellar vendetta against Abraxas, a spacefaring crimson leviathan who cost the captain his leg and, arguably, much of his sanity. As both earthmen are put through horrific physical alterations, Issac discovers to his shock — and dawning fascination — that he may be the nexus between humankind and a great cosmic truth of staggering proportions.

A lush and thought-proving narrative seamlessly expressed through a script that veers between extremes of wide-eyed wonder and outright horror, coupled with illustrations that verge on the palpable, this volume could not come more highly recommended. Comics seldom get this good, and if you don't like what sometimes comes off as hippy-dippy self-indulgence, get over it. Veitch may have gone on to what some would call bigger and better works, but the fucksticks who think that can kiss my big beige ass; ABRAXAS AND THE EARTHMAN is Veitch's masterpiece and I would give my left arm to see a lovingly faithful big screen adaptation while out of my mind on a Ziploc bag full or righteous trip-fungus.

HOLIDAY GEEK GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS: ALIAS OMNIBUS (2006)

While tidying up here in the Vault a few weeks ago, I unearthed this hardcover doorstop of a book and paused to re-read it over a few days.

Having nothing whatsoever to do with the TV series of the same name, this volume collects the complete twenty-eight-issue run of the inaugural title in Marvel’s adult-oriented MAX line. The series follows the daily goings-on in the life of private investigator Jessica Jones, a former super-hero who got out of the heroics-in-tights biz because she realized she didn’t have the right stuff to make in the Marvel Universe. Occasional displays of her rather meager super-powers (flight, super strength) aside, this detective series is really about getting into the head of the protagonist, and Jessica is the most realistically written neurotic female character that I have had the pleasure to read in quite some time. As the series unfolds, the reader sees the world through Jessica’s eyes, and she is one sad critter indeed; the chick is a borderline alcoholic, saltily profane, indiscriminately promiscuous — the series practically opens with a shocking scene of a very drunk Jessica getting boned up the ass by none other than Luke Cage, Hero For Hire — and harbors a deep-seated guilt that forms the core of her self-destructiveness. Yet what could have been an utterly unappealing character becomes an individual that the reader gets quite involved with, and I enjoyed this book so much that I went out and picked up the first two collected volumes of the non-adult followup series, THE PULSE, in which Jessica joins the staff of the Daily Bugle. The one drawback to the ALIAS whole thing is that a lot of what makes this book fun depends on a pretty thorough working knowledge of the Marvel Universe from roughly 1961 through the present; there’s a great scene involving Daredevil in his civilian identity using his hyper-senses, and if the reader doesn’t know who he is the gag is totally lost. That one narrative caveat aside, the one gripe I have is that the omnibus edition is out of print and currently fetches outrageous prices on Amazon, so if you do decide to pick track it down I suggest looking anywhere but there.

HOLIDAY GEEK GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS: SUPER INFRAMAN (1976)

Looking for a movie that's guaranteed to make this year's drunken Christmas Eve gathering of like-minded friends a memorable excursion to one of the crazier corners of the B-movie dimension? Dear Vaulties, say “hello” to INFRA MAN, finally available under its original Chinese title (SUPER INFRAMAN) in a beautiful widescreen transfer that's every bit as kickass as the movie itself.

Released in China in 1975 and hitting these shores the following year, INFRA MAN is among the most demented spawn of the venerable Shaw Brothers studio, a company beloved worldwide as the quintessential purveyor of old school kung fu films. Ripping off, er, influenced by the classic Japanese super-hero show ULTRAMAN (1966), this film is more fun than a weekend with Lynda Carter where she brings the cocoa butter and ties you up with the Lasso of Truth. Universally loved by those who have seen it, INFRA MAN is even championed by no less a film criticism luminary than Roger Ebert himself, and he loves it for exactly the same reasons as us Joe Sixpacks in the audience. This is a movie replete with what fans of super-heroes, monsters and virtually nonstop action look for in their entertainment, namely fists-a-flyin’ martial arts, an army of monsters who are not only hell-bent on conquering the world but also blatantly enjoy being evil, one of the most memorable villainesses in cinema history, ridiculous dialogue aided and abetted by terrible dubbing, and a super-hero who takes the fight to the bad guys like you’ve never seen. In its entire eighty-eight-minute running time there are perhaps five slow minutes and rest is a semi-psychedelic festival of in-your-face crazy fun.

The story gets off to a slow start with the Earth bursting open all over the place, causing earthquakes, collapsing buildings, spewing lava and incidentally reviving an ancient evil that has lain dormant since time immemorial. Said evil is Princess Dragon Mom — yes, you read that right — a blonde Asian woman played by Terry Liu in a horned helmet, a pointy, gold Madonna-style bra, a cute little pink bow around her neck in case you couldn't tell she's a girl, matching dragon-headed platform boots a la Gene Simmons, and a right hand that doubles as a whip. Broadcasting an address to the entire world she announces:

“Greetings, people of Earth. I am Princess Dragon Mom. The destruction you see is but a small sample of my great power! I have taken over the earth and there is nothing you can do about it! You will be my slaves for all eternity! I have spoken, and that’s all the warning you are going to get!”

And she meant that shit!

Terry Liu as Princess Dragon Mom, one of the greatest bad guys in movie history.

We are then introduced to the Princess’ bargain basement monster army, an ultra-phony lot who look like the bastard children of Gwar and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, only with less of a budget. They cheerfully joke and boast among themselves about just how they will destroy mankind and beg the Princess to let them loose immediately to kick some human ass; these guys ain’t kidding, and they jump about hyperactively in anticipation of doling out world-class nastiness.

Luckily for us, Professor Chang of the Science Patrol (a bunch of guys in cheap silver and blue jumpsuits who ride around on motorcycles a lot) has figured out that Princess Dragon Mom is a creature from antiquity who ruled the world in the distant past (this information is prefaced with the statement that nothing is known about her, so go figure), and he has just the solution to the problem: Infra man, the “Man Beyond Bionics,” as the movie’s poster so kindly informs us.

Recruiting the Science Patrol’s resident bohunk Rayma (Li Hsui-Hsien, star of the also insane THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, aka GOLIATHON) for cyborg conversion, the professor gifts him with an incredible arsenal of built-in weaponry such as ray beams, “Infra Blades,” heat missiles, “Thunderball fists which can destroy everything,” super-senses and strength, and enough kung fu skills to make Bruce Lee say “Gaw-Dayum!”

Upon being fully transformed, Infra Man’s super-hearing detects monsters on the attack and he immediately flies through the roof to enter the fray. When he lands, people point and shout “That’s Infra Man there!” (despite the fact that up to this point he has never made an appearance anywhere) and from that moment on the movie is a nonstop foot-to-ass orgy of insanely-cackling monsters getting trounced with extreme prejudice by our hero.

Among many, many other insane moments, one of the film’s highlights is Infra Man’s battle with the ranting Spider-Man (no relation), who suddenly shoots up to two-hundred-feet tall when he realizes he’s losing the fight. Infra Man ain’t having it and, in a stunning example of a hero pulling powers out of his ass, he too becomes a giant and beats the living crap out of Spider-Man (or rather the empty foam rubber suit of Spider-Man). After getting hurled into high voltage power lines, the monster shrinks back to normal size and the towering Infra Man steps on him like the bug that he is, causing cartoonish gore to spew with appropriate flatulent sound effects. Needles to say, that moment absolutely killed when seen on the big screen with an into-it audience.

The rest of the film builds to a dizzying crescendo as our hero storms Princess Dragon Mom’s lair, hands out explosive death to her remaining army of monsters and robots, and finally engages the Princess in mortal combat after she turns into a seemingly unkillable dragon.

Folks, this flick is a stone hoot and will delight kids and drunks everywhere. Seriously, you owe it to yourself and other like-minded loonies to see INFRA MAN. It ain’t high art, but it is flat-out one of the most entertaining movies ever made. Oh, and while am usually a subtitles guy, this film simply has to be experienced with the English language audio track; it's a triumph of unintentionally awful and hilarious dubbing, and your cinematic education is sorely lacking until you've witnessed its idiotic glory for yourself.

HOLIDAY GEEK GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS: CYNTHIA PETAL'S REALLY FANTASTIC ALIEN SEX FRENZY! (1993)

Let's face it: dirty comics are nothing new. They've been around at least since the days of those nasty eight-page "Tijuana Bibles" that depicted celebrities and popular comic strip characters getting their hump on with grossly exaggerated genitalia running rampant, and were further popularized by the underground comics boom of the 1960's, particularly the fleshy, sweaty and at times downright filthy spewings from the febrile pen of Robert Crumb. I have loved Crumb's work since first sneaking issues of ZAP COMIX and other such forbidden treasures into the house when I was thirteen, and as I got older and gained more wisdom in the area of the couplings that he delineated, I appreciated his stuff for the simple fact that he was a geek, and in case you didn't know it, we geeks tend to be a sex-obsessed lot. As such, Crumb's interests fueled his illustrations with a realistic animal lust never before seen in the medium; to put it bluntly, the reader could feel the urgency in the character's parts, and those black & white cartoon pussies appeared to be every bit as humid and inviting as the real thing. But the one aspect of Crumb's work that rendered his pornographic efforts somewhat offputting to many (myself included, depending on the story in question) was a pervasive sense of fear and even hatred of women, something that Crumb's later-period works seem to have grown past, but it's a real shame that his unmatched talents could not have been channeled into a work that celebrated sex with the detailed eye and sense of humor that he freely displayed in almost everything he created. Only Richard Corben has come close to equaling Crumb in the arena of squashily-rendered torsos engaging in the skin-to-skin bossa nova, while far lesser "talents" crank out unpleasant dreck like HORNY BIKER SLUT and VEROTIKA. But then guys like Dave Cooper pop up from out of nowhere and breathe a breath of fresh air into the fetid atmosphere of the sex comics seraglio.

Cooper has brought readers many oddball concoctions over the years — most notably the uber-surreal, perverse Mother Goddess yarn SUCKLE — but nothing prepared me for CYNTHIA PETAL'S REALLY FANTASTIC ALIEN SEX FRENZY! The setup is simplicity itself: Cynthia Petal returns home from work one night only to find a trio of bizarre, telepathic aliens from another dimension hanging out in her apartment. The creatures are benevolent and tell her that they are "here only to bring you pleasure," which they do by first amping up her natural pleasure receptors, spurring an impromptu session of showerhead masturbation with a cucumber chaser. From that point on her every wish is made reality thanks to the aliens plumbing her subconscious for erotic/pleasurable fodder and in short order her home becomes the setting for a spectacular and visually ludicrous orgy involving booze, music video stars, superheroes, close friends, and anyone Cynthia happened to find attractive. There's no violence, no bad vibes, just a bunch of characters enjoying each other without fear of any negative consequences (the aliens can handle anything), and that's what makes CYNTHIA PETAL'S REALLY FANTASTIC ALIEN SEX FRENZY! so much fun. The good feeling conveyed in the story is infectious and the incredibly graphic content is never offensive; oddly, it is actually very charming. In fact, with a good budget and a creative team that actually gave a shit about what they were doing, this would make for one hell of a fun porn flick!

Just a minor taste of the wacky and free-wheeling orgasmic smorgasbord found between the comic's covers.

So scour the back issue bins of your favorite comic shop or search the Internet and track down this unsung gem of comix erotica. No shit, this treasure deserves a place on your naughty bookshelf, right next to the waaaaaaaay raunchier YOUNG WITCHES Volume 2, a collection that needs a serious lesson in class, which CYNTHIA PETAL is more than capable of giving.