Month: May 2024

Hollywood seems incapable of making anything original and all the sequels and reboots they make suck mightily.  So, I have decided to step into the breach and provide the ultimate in sequel mashup awfulness.

Movie Treatment: Cosmic-Horror-Palooza

Rick Deckard is at home with his wife Rachael having breakfast before he heads off to work as head school crossing guard at the Philip K Dick Elementary School in Portland Oregon.  Rachael is pregnant with their first child and asks Rick to bring her some sweet gherkin pickles on his way home.  She chastises him briefly because this is the third time he’s forgotten.  He absorbs the abuse kisses her on the forehead and heads out the door while absently loading .45 shells into his revolver.

When he reaches the security office, he notices on the various video surveillance screens that a protest has set up shop in the intersection adjacent to the northwest corner of the school.  A mostly crossdressing mob of activists with signs that say REPLICANT-PHOBIA IS HATE were chanting and marching in one of the crosswalks.  This would not be an easy day.

Suddenly an energy bolt blazed across the screen and struck one of the extremely plus-sized blonds-wigged transwomen in spandex and left a visibly gaping hole through his body before collapsing onto the asphalt.  Several other energy bolts followed in quick succession wreaking havoc with the chant as deep bellows and hoarse screams erupted from the targeted activists.

Deckard bolted for the door and sprinted toward the crime scene.  As he approached, he could see that the attack was coming from a tree located fifty yards from the corner.  He approached warily, shielding himself from view with the side of the building and ending up very close to the base of the tree.  Peering carefully around the corner of the building he could see a shimmering patch of foliage that was the source of the deadly beams.  As he watched he could make out what looked like a humanoid form and aiming for the head he unloaded with his .45.

The shimmering patch fell to the ground and Deckard ran over to it.  What he saw there startled him.  A man shaped creature lay on the ground but the inhuman head had insectoid mandibles.  The .45 slugs hadn’t done the head any good but Deckard added a couple more through the cranium just to be sure.  Looking around on the ground he found a long rod with a blinking light at one end and what probably was a trigger near the other end.  Picking it up and sighting through the blinking light device he aimed at the tree and pushed the trigger.  A bright red bolt drilled a two-inch round hole precisely through the 36 inches of the tree trunk and elicited a respectful whistle from the impressed former blade runner.

Looking into the foreground he could see a shimmering area about twenty feet down the sidewalk.  Suddenly four of the humanoid creatures approached with their right arms raised in the universal sign of respect for a successful warrior’s victory.  They came bearing a large blue lawn dart which one of their comrades had claimed as his trophy over a human in a 1968 Cincinnati Ohio suburb.

But before they could bestow this trophy on Deckard, other creatures poured out of the dimensional portal that the four earlier beings had opened.  These creatures were decidedly unlike the first ones.  They were about eight feet tall with extremely elongated heads with two sets of jaws, one inside of the other.  They had long claws on the feet and hands and a long, pointed tail.  Deckard instinctively knew that the saliva dripping from the creatures’ jaws was molecular acid and that this wouldn’t end well.

About twenty of the creatures attacked the four earlier visitors and an enormous battle ensued.  The bug-jawed warriors put up a hell of a fight with their energy weapons and the lawn dart but there were just too many of the xenomorphs (Deckard somehow sensed this was what these other creatures should be called).  Seeing that the battle would soon be over Deckard called his office and ordered his team to lock down the school and call the authorities.  Then he sprinted over to the protest site to warn them away.

Unfortunately, the activists had repurposed the event into a day of rage against transphobic energy-beam wielding haters and they had begun turning over cars and torching them.  They had formed a kind of funeral pyre for their fallen comrades but it hadn’t really done a thorough job of consuming their bodies so a very questionable pile of remains remained.  Seeing Deckard running toward them carrying the energy weapon they assumed he was the killer and they charged toward him.  He stopped and looked around.  Behind him the remaining ten or so xenomorphs were coming up quickly in his direction.  With the two groups converging on his position imminently, he did what any clear-thinking individual would do.  He ran sideways and hoped for the best.

And that worked extraordinarily well for him.  But much less well for the angry mob that suddenly intersected with the xenomorphs.  It turns out xenomorphs are not transphobic.  In fact, it turns out they’re transphilic.  In fact, I think they even enjoyed eating the wigs.  It wasn’t pretty.

Deckard took the opportunity to sneak over to an entrance to the school and punch in the entry code and head for the security office.  When he arrived, his crew updated him on the current state of the “battle.”  The xenomorphs were somewhat leisurely feasting on the four warriors and the fifty some-odd rioters.  Deckard tried in his mind to come up with a strategy to hold off the xenomorphs until Space Marine troops could be summoned.  But nothing occurred to him.  He did remember that he had to get those gherkins for Rachael but that didn’t really seem to improve the situation.

But then a very odd thing happened on the screen.  One of the corpses of the warriors suddenly stood up and metamorphosed into something that was a combination of the xenomorph and a rioter.  It looked like a xenomorph wearing a yellow wig.  But it grew to five times the size of one of the xenomorphs and began eating the other xenomorphs.  And each time it ate one of them it got bigger.  The xenomorphs never ran away and kept fighting but one by one they were swallowed by the shape-shifting creature.  At one point a xenomorph managed to rip an arm off the shapeshifter and throw it to the ground.  The arm sprouted six spider like legs, a mouth full of teeth at the shoulder and proceeded to attack the xenomorph.  Within half an hour the battle was over and the shapeshifter and the walking biting arm coalesced into an amorphous mass of protoplasm.  After a short time, the blob flowed over to the school and covered it in a layer of pulsing goo.

Deckard watched in horror as all the doors began to slowly ooze rivulets of the creature.  He sent his crew to the doors and they used CO2 fire extinguishers to freeze the jelly as it attempted to enter the building.  Things were looking quite bleak as the extinguishers one by one were emptied of their frozen contents.  But suddenly the ooze retreated from the doors and the creature flowed off onto the nearby street and reformed into the shape of a yellow wigged transwoman complete with alarmingly overstretched spandex body suit.  The creature was apparently asleep.  As Deckard watched the sleeping form evaporated completely.  At that point he saw that there was a similarly sized shape on the ground about ten feet from where the sleeping creature had been.

Gathering his courage Deckard walked out of the building and approached the shape on the ground.  When he got near it, he saw that it was what looked like a giant seed pod.  And as he watched it burst open and slowly a living being pushed its way out.  When it had exited the pod, it was seen to be an identical blond wigged transwoman; spandex and all.  Deckard stood his ground, pointed the energy weapon at the creature and asked it to explain what had just happened.

The creature adjusted its costume, scratched at its beard and explained that its species sent spores throughout space that land on planets and produce seed pods that mimic other life forms and then replace them with their own individuals.  And slowly they replace all individuals of the local dominant species and thus take over that world.  However, because of all the various different cell types that were present in this individual’s new body, life on Earth was just too painful for it to continue and it begged Deckard to finish it off as a mercy killing.  And Deckard promptly obliged it using the alien energy rod.  At that point the creature evaporated into the air (except for the spandex suit and wig).

When the police finally showed up, they wanted to know what the hell was going on.  All that remained of the battle were the few burned out cars and the spandex suite and wig.  Deckard started to tell the whole story then thought better of it and just said there had been a protest that sort of got out of control and left it at that.  One of the officers asked him about the energy rod and he said it was a prop for a school play.  The police did a walk around and cited the school for a safety violation because of the empty fire extinguishers and Deckard had to fill out a lot of paperwork and give some of his staff a mental health week off to keep them from quitting.

He didn’t get home that night until ten thirty and when he walked in the door Rachael asked him how his day was.  He said it was okay.  But then she looked at him and said, “You forgot the gherkins!”

So, he turned around and headed off to the grocery store with his walking stick blinking along.  She said after him, “Men are so easily distracted.”