How Feminism Killed Journalism

It's more or less indisputable at this point: the more women are involved in journalism, the more biased (and lower quality) the media becomes. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

The absolute worst job I've ever had was working as the only male reporter at a shitty small town newspaper where practically everybody else in the office had ovaries. Holy hell, the horror stories I could tell you here.

Do we begin with my Skrillex looking editor, some 30-year-old bipolar, cat-worshiping spinster-in-training who came into the office hung over at least once a week and spent 95 percent of her on-the-clock hours having phone calls about having sex with random guys for cocaine (no, for real) so loudly that the owners of the day spa next door had to waltz on over and tell her to STFU because she was scaring off their clients? Or how about the staff photographer, who just watched episodes of Ninja Warrior all day, or the associate editor who made flippant, degrading remarks about how unattractive our visitors were (this, despite the fact she looked like Zoe Deschanel with Down syndrome?) You get all of them in the same room, and absolutely fucking nothing got done, ever. They'd just gossip about everybody else who worked for the company, and as soon as one of them would leave, they'd start gossiping about her. And for those of you keen on sexual equality, I'll have you know I was referred to by all sorts of hilariously progressive slurs by my female cohorts, including but not limited to "fag," "faggot" and "homo" - whenever they thought I was out of earshot. 

Alas, despite being sexually harassed virtually every day I was there, that's not what pissed me off MOST about these menstruating Haagen-Dazs and Zoloft receptacles. What really irked me were the stories I proposed and the stories they assigned me. I wanted to do hard-hitting stories about classism and the lack of affordable housing in the community and discrimination against minorities in the local school system, and they turned around and told me to cover ice cream shops and animal shelters and - the one that infuriated me most - advanced publicity (read: shameless propaganda) for all of these circle-jerkin' socialite "for a cause" weekend parties arranged by the county's hoity-toity elites, despite the fact the money never ever went to what they said it was going for and none of those stuck-up pricks ever did a goddamn thing to address rampant poverty in their own fucking neighborhood. So why was I constantly forced to cover these trifling parades of real white privilege, seemingly week-in, week-out? 

Well, for one, it's because the newspaper wanted to suck the upper crust's dick because they were the only people outmoded/disconnected from reality/flat-out stupid enough to actually spend money on newspaper advertising in the 2010s. But mostly? Because by me covering these stupid aristocratic, oligarchical jerk-off sessions, that means all the broads and floozies I worked with got to attend them for free. And boy, did they never turn an opportunity to get shit-faced ... especially on the company dime.

Hey, did I mention that virtually all of my period-havin' colleagues were also borderline to severe alcoholics with at least one co-morbid mental disorder, like bulimia or "severe depression" (which, conveniently enough, afforded them all sorts of PAID healthcare-related days off?) Because they were, and my goodness, did they play the "muh ovaries card" any and every time it appeared they were in the cross-hairs for any kind of upper brass admonishment. 

That oh-so-fanciful "millennial feminine mystique" was evident in the production process, too. It soon dawned on me that they didn't even bother editing their own papers - you know, the thing they were being paid to do - so I had to spend untold off-the-clock, unpaid hours making sure my articles were as polished as possible before going to the printer. So yeah, I literally had to do their job in addition to my own, while they kept the extra $4 or $5 per hour to themselves.

I couldn't say anything, because the entire Leviathan of shitty journalism (if you even want to dignify it with the term) was basically one big, fat, ugly, woefully unhappy "girl squad" that covered for each others' many glorious incompetencies. They put their own in-group bullshit above actually producing a halfway decent product, and none of them gave a damn. They had a cushy job were they didn't really have to work (even if their income was a relatively paltry $13 or $14-something an hour), and the "office" gave them ample time to chinwag with their kindred about whatever stupid TV shows they were into and the deeper complexities of the Ed Sheeran discography and - most importantly of all - plan out all of their drunken escapades over the weekends.

It didn't take long for me to realize this wasn't a newsroom. Rather, I felt like I was stuck in remedial English class, cloistered in the cluster of snobby, pampered, upper-middle-class girls who just wanted to talk about getting drunk and who's fucking who when a midterm group project was due. So I just did the exact same thing I did in the seventh grade - I kept my mouth shut, did everybody's work for them and got the hell out of Dodge the first opportunity afforded to me.

That grisly little year in Tampon journalism land taught me a lot of hard truths about the media and gender. I've worked a lot of places over the years, and looking back on my litany of experiences, one fundamental truth arises: wherever there are more women employed than men, a.) the less overall productivity there at least seems to be and b.) the lower the quality of whatever product you are putting together appears to be. This is especially relevant in journalism/new media, where the percentage of women in the office has already risen above the male populace (with more women than men, by a fairly large margin, wielding executive editorial power.)

With the field of journalism losing almost all of its lucrativeness in the Great Recession, I'm guessing a lot of seasoned male writers, editors and publishers cut bait while they still could and migrated over to other industries. So what we've seen is a twin effect; because journalism revenue keeps going down, the overall pay for most reporters and even some editors has become less than the national average pay for custodians. But the publishing structures are still there, and because there is a surfeit of women with college degrees in stupid, non-skilled things like gender studies and race theory, somebody has to write the damn news ... and since that affords them the appearance of wielding just a sliver of a microscopic thread of cultural power, the modern newsroom has been flooded with millennial women - often, with no real reporting experience - willing to work for $11 an hour because one, it beats Starbucks, and two, it gives them the (perceived) ability to set the local cultural narrative. And let's face it - just about all of them are still living with their parents or being heavily subsidized by them anyway, so it's not like the piss-ant pay is that much of a deal breaker, especially when the trade-off is being able to shower your friends' social media feeds with a deluge of posts about all of that hard-hitting journalism you're doing.

Holy shit, have you ever seen news this hard in your fuckin' life?

And there is a big, big difference between traditional male reporters and contemporary female reporters. The old vanguard of male reporters had no political affiliations - they hated all those elected motherfuckers equally and sought to knock EVERYBODY off their pedestals. Above all else, there causa sui was a crusade against the state; not a particular political entity, mind you, but the mere existence of these gargantuan, overbearing taxpayer-funded mechanisms that lord over everything. They weren't driven by a desire for status or recognition - indeed, even before the cyber-revolution, most journalists were paid fairly poorly - they just wanted a legacy. They wanted to rage, rage, rage against the machine their entire lives and when they finally keeled over at their desk at age 54 from a heart attack, they at least went to their grave knowing they left behind some kind of important track record. The absolute best reporters were never in the game to "make a difference," they were in it because they understood the grave danger of bad record keeping. Fifty years from now, what they wrote might be the only surviving information and chronicle of the times. They regarded that privilege as the penmen of modern history with great responsibility; at the end of the day, their utmost goal was to be as accurate over the course of their career as possible. Getting as much truth - literal, tangible, physical truth - out there before they croaked was their utmost goal in life. Everything else - including their families and their own health - were secondary causes. 

From my experiences, female newspeople have no such allegiance to the truth as is, because they generally see promoting their own brand of identity politics as priority number one. To tell the truth about the world isn't even on their radar - rather, they just want to air their opinions on the world to as large an audience as possible. They seek not the pride of accurate record keeping, but the positive affirmation of their like-minded identitarians. To them, news is anything that reinforces their preconceived notions of society or anything that bolsters their own biases. Anything that doesn't gel with their own personal prejudices - and really, anything that is beyond their narrow realm of personal interests - is never considered, and virtually never published. So stuck in the new wave feminist hive mind that they can't actually detect the pulse of modern existence around them. For example, my Corey Feldman looking coke-snorting editrix once pooh-poohed a story about the new head coach of an NFL team doing a surprise appearance in town in favor of covering some stupid ass bicycle committee meeting that a whole three people attended. My story could've garnered national attention (since it was just a day after the dude got hired), but she was so blind to the reality outside herself that she couldn't see the potential.

The problem isn't so much their inability to distinguish opinion from fact as it is their seemingly universal ideal that journalism should be some sort of vessel for political activism. Simply stating what happened isn't enough for them, they have to be able to express how things ought to be, as well. They see no conflict of interest here, which makes the Kotex Newsroom all the more insular and detached from public life. Remember all those bitchy girls who put together the yearbook in middle and high school, who did as much as the administration would allow to fill them up with photos and writings from their friends? Well, those egotistical little snots have all grown up, and now, they're in charge of writing your hometown newspaper. And because prestige - even a facade of it - means more to them than anything else, of course they're going to turn the damn thing into a rag vaunting all of the hoity-toity about-towners, if only for the sake of getting themselves free drinks at the next "upper crust" social mixer.

Perhaps it's just the fact that I'm a male, but does anybody else see the inherent moral hypocrisy here? All of the newswomen out there want to promote their pro-XY, pro-multiculturalism and pro-leftist causes under the auspices of legitimate news coverage, but their very survival as newswomen hinges on courting and maintaining the approval of the rich white men who tend to run everything in their specific niche or locality. Sure, sure, they may express a stated desire for political change or what have you, but deep down, what they REALLY want is social power. They want to have the same culture-shaping capacity as the town's big wigs, the developers and attorneys and big businessmen, yet without their financial blessings, their own journalistic power-grab attempts couldn't be funded. To be a "feminist" in journalism means being utterly schizophrenic; to further your agenda by writing anti-patriarchal screeds while simultaneously furthering your own personal career by sucking up to the very same patriarchal forces you perceive as public enemy No. 1.

Then again, the bulk of the newswomen I've encountered have very much settled on being professional dead-enders. Theirs may be a small domain, but they would rather lord over an ant hill (or a shit pile) than be outside the sphere of alleged "cultural influence." They've no real career aspirations, more or less beaten down by the consequences of their own bad choices to the point a quite static quo sounds mighty comfortable - even if it also means never earning more than $15 an hour in their life. Almost certainly already buried alive in student loan and credit card debt they'll never repay, financial success becomes something they simply stop caring about. Thus, their cultural lifeblood becomes an altogether different cultural commodity - good old fashioned in-group approval. Popularity and affirmation and anything else that reinforces their ego is worth more to them than money - so in short, with absolutely no willful consideration to being stewards of truth and chroniclers of the times, constantly pollinating the hive mind becomes their only reason to exist.

Now, I'm not saying that every last woman in the field of journalism is like that, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of them most definitely are. Hell, that's pretty much the way it is in every woman-dominated office setting. My S.O. has worked in a totally male-free work environment for eight years, and every day she tells me stories about all her colleagues acting like a bunch of high school bitches, bickering and complaining and branching off into Survivor style alliances and scheming to get one another fired. Nothing ever gets done, she keeps telling me, because their clashing egos and malicious gossiping overshadows - and really, overrides - all the functions they've been hired to actually perform as employees.

Here's the the big difference between men and women when it comes to office politics. You see, men are competitive when it comes to work, but collaborative when it comes to life outside of work. Of course, you want be more productive at work than the guy at the cubicle next to you, but outside of the confines of the office and your official work duties, there's no antagonism. You don't give a fuck if he has a hotter wife than you or if his kids are smarter or if he has a nicer TV or that his dick is probably a good two inches thicker, wider and longer than yours. Just as long as he does what he's supposed to in your professional environment and he doesn't try to fuck you up while you're doing what your're supposed to be doing in your professional environment, everything is just peachy between the two of you. If you're having a game day barbecue you'll invite him over for beer and brats and if he asks you to help him move some furniture on the weekend - or vice-versa - both of you'll do it out of common, reciprocal human decency and the tacit understanding that neither one of you considers the other a major league asshole.

Now, the womenfolk do it the exact opposite; they're collaborative in the office but competitive as all fuck when it comes to life outside of work. That means they all huddle together and help each other with their assignments and they throw birthday parties and shit for one another and they all like to go out for lunch on Fridays and cry on each other's shoulders and text each other back and forth and share inside jokes on Facebook. So, really, there's no attempt to outdo one another the way men do, by pumping out a higher quantity (or higher quality) of work. The idea, of course, is to keep the "girl squad" together at all costs, because as one codependent blob, they can all slack off together and no one individual can rightly be set up as "the fall guy." Naturally, this leads to fissures, with the "girl squad" inevitably splitting into two secretively warring factions a'la the N.W.O. and the N.W.O. Wolfpac (or hell, maybe even more subgroups than that, depending on how large the operation is) that jockey for position in virtually every facet of life you can think of. They WANT to be thinner and prettier than everybody else at the office and have a better looking husband with a higher paying job and smarter kids and a bigger house and a better Pinterest page and more likes on Facebook, and they want to flaunt it in the face of everybody who works with them. They're all striving for some sort of "queen bee" social stature, but they're also trying to keep their little work in-group cohesive enough that nobody really has to do that much work or at the very least, so that nobody can really be blamed for doing anything wrong because everybody's kinda' working on the same thing and it's one of those group efforts were nobody really has any personal liability for fucking things up.

Now imagine a doctor celebrating the death of the Hippocratic Oath, or an attorney celebrating the repeal of the Fifth Amendment.

So basically, the matriarchal work environment is intrinsically bipolar, this little ecosystem where everybody is impossibly trying to cover for each others' asses but at the same time trying to exert their dominance over everyone else in the office. And of course, when you strive for two diametrically opposite endgames, you inevitably wind up unsuccessful at obtaining either, and nowhere is this product failure more apparent than the world of girl journalism.

Solipsism and the quest for in-group approval is especially pronounced in female-oriented journalism. Rather than envisioning the journalistic medium as a vessel for facts and truth, they instead see it as another opportunity to self-justify whatever stupid intersectionalist feminist bullshit the virtually worship as a sacred Tao. News, to them, doesn't exist to relay impartial facts, but to reiterate their own identitarian doctrines and advance their own insular group narratives. If what happens supports their pre-existing precepts of how the world is, they try to make it a bigger story than World War II and if what happens doesn't support - or mayhap even refutes - their shared idealism, not only must it be glossed over, it must be swept under the rug or distorted (perverted?) in such a way to superficially contour to the girl squad mission statement. 

Notice anything about the list of Pulitzer Prize winners for best investigative reporting? Not factoring in the catch-all awards given to entire newspaper staffs, give or take 30 female reporters have received the distinction, while more than 70 male reporters have received the honor. It's an even larger differential if you factor in the winners of the category's forerunner, Best Reporting, which was awarded from 1917 to 1947 - and to a grand total of zero female reporters. The gender gap is even bigger when it comes to the winners for best explanatory reporting: less than 10 women have ever received the honor, while about 40 male reporters have been given the coveted award. Meanwhile, the only Pulitzer categories where there seems to be a considerable gender equilibrium are the categories that shirk objective news reporting, categories like Feature Writing and  - god help us, Public Service - which are literally anchored around the author's attempts to persuade the reader into believing his or her perspective. Meanwhile, male reporters' absolute dominance in the award category for History and Biography writing - which not only entails a dedication to objective fact and the renunciation of the author's own opinions, but innately demands it - more than demonstrates the clear cut gender divide on the role, purpose and general ethics of news writing.

Simply put, male reporters tend to write because they want to thoroughly explain how things objectively, TRUTHFULLY happen while female reporters tend to write because they want people to side with them when it comes to certain issues.

You see this when The Huffington Post publishes articles about how the word "too" is disparaging to women, as if such was an objective fact of reality. 

You see this when CNN runs stories about fringe feminists who put glitter in their underarm hair, as if such was even remotely newsworthy to anybody outside of said fringe feminists.

You see this when Teen Vogue publishes pseudo-scientific quackery about the trauma of slavery LITERALLY being hardwired into the genes of black women, as if such was a 100 percent indisputable biological truth.

You see this when Buzzfeed runs a photo spread on women's reactions to junk-food-inspired makeup, as if such was even remotely informative or insightful or enlightening use of website bandwidth.

Generally speaking, men tend to value facts more than feelings, while women tend to value emotions over reason. Men find themselves subservient to the logical and the evidence-supported, while women find themselves subservient to whatever aesthetically pleases them and provides them with the least difficult solution. Men tend to confront cognitive dissonance head on, while women tend to mire in it. Men tend to think more about the long-term consequences of decisions than women, who generally try to solve issues as fast as possible without giving too much consideration to the possible unintended consequences of their actions. Men tend to put the larger, broader issues at the forefront while women put their narrower, more personal issues ahead of the supremely important (albeit frustratingly complex) issues of geopolitics and international economics. Men hunker down on the technical specifications of things, while women care more about the general concept of things. Women may be more sympathetic, but men are generally more empathetic - their aim is to understand the minds of the masses, not the longings of their hearts. 

Or to put it in a very concise little summary statement, men simply care more about what's real, while women care more about their ideals. 

And with that noteworthy (yet largely overlooked) discrepancy between the sexes factored into the equation, is there really any wonder as to why female-oriented and female-operated journalism - where the truth is not reported, but manufactured - is such a fantastic, floundering, financial failure these days?

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JIMBO GOES TO THE MOVIES: 'Split' and 'Death Race 2050' DOUBLE REVIEW!

M. Night Shammalammadingdong cranks out another 'un, while Roger Corman decides 40 years isn't too late to make a sequel. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Well folks, I've finally found it - the absolute stupidest Wikipedia article of all-time.

And let's not downplay this momentous occasion by writing of all the other dumb Wikipedia articles as minor annoyances, because they've got some downright idiotic ones on that site.

No, folks, this article is worse than the entry for "fictional tricksters." It's worse than the entry for "gender representation in video games." Hell, it's even worse than the entry for "list of furry role-playing games."

Ladies and gents, somebody out there actually made a Wikipedia page about racism in horror films.

Now, from the get-go, you know it's going to be a big ole steaming pile of bull hockey because they use the term "people of colour" with the extra "u," which means it was prolly written by somebody in a country where they only have five or six actual black people in it. You know what? I reckon I'm just going to have to republish the first two paragraphs - charmingly titled "White dominated world" - of this damn thing in its entirety for you to truly grasp the awfulness of the situation:

The stories in horror films are very central to white culture and lifestyle. The films often cater to the fears of white people drawing upon their fantasies.[4] Many horror films stem from a figure or event interfering with an ideal or precious lifestyle, threatening to take away the comfort of the protagonists. Horror genres such as slashers, home invasion, and paranormal films are examples of an unknown "other" coming into the protagonists lives. This presence of the unknown "other" forces the characters to deal with pain, ultimately pushing the protagonist to the point where they must stand up to the attacker and become the hero.[5]

Horror films often start by clearly showing the ideal life or plans of the main characters, showing their promising futures, and privileged everyday lives. Movies like Funny Games and Friday the 13th showcase this setup, with characters going to vacation like destinations to either relax or achieve their goals. These movies are set up in this way to interrupt the fantasy of escaping everyday life. White audiences seek excitement like relaxing in a vacation home or spending the summer at a camp, and to violate that privileged fantasy is the goal of most horror films.[5]

Now, as something of a horror historian (meaning I read a book about it once in the seventh grade), I can tell you up front that the "other" whoever wrote this stupid ass article talks about ain't the black man. Why? Because for the first 40 years of cinema, the only horror movies being made were made by people who had never even seen a black person in their life. You think the folks who made The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were secretly worried about an African-American uprising? You honestly believe the guys who made The Golem and Nosferatu  and The Student of Prague gave half a shit about people of colour taking their jobs? No way, Jose, because the entire damn genre has its roots in post World War I German expressionism. 

What these people were afraid of was the Wiemar Republic collapsing and some megalomaniac coming to power and sending them to war all over again, not some dude name Jamal moving into the cul de sac. Even once you get into the heyday of Universal Studios' creature features and all those big bug movies of the 1950s, the great "other" terrifying audiences wasn't black power, but atomic power - the idea that modern science and technology was beginning to spiral out of our meager human hands' control . Really, you had to wait all the way until 1968 with Night of the Living Dead before anybody really tried to directly address racism in the genre, and even then, the director himself keeps saying whatever political statement that came out of it was 100 percent unintentional.

But now this Wikipedia article is about to get all kinds of retarded on us. Again, this is the kind of shit I have to print in full, so you can soak up all of the sheer inanity firsthand:

Horror films have a tendency to ignore actual social issues, and the root causes of violence.[4] People within minorities, however, have first-hand experience with the violence depicted. According to Ariel Smith, a native horror filmmaker, "We do not need to think up imagined incidents of vicious, macabre torture. The horror, the terror: it's all around us".[4] In horror films made by/created for minorities, realism acts as the source of fear, rearing from current issues faced by minorities and using it cinematically.[4]

Say whut? Horror movies ignore social issues? The whole goddamn genre is ABOUT facing social issues. Wasn't Dawn of the Dead about mindless consumerism? Wasn't They Live about Reaganomics and the underhanded practices of the advertising business? Wasn't It's Alive about the nation's pro-life/pro-choice schism? Hell, even the rise of the slasher movie in the late 1970s can be seen as a conservative reaction to the sexual liberation movement. Even the cheesiest horror movies out there usually have some kind of real world commentary. For fuck's sake, the ultimate embodiment of camp cinema, Godzilla, started off as a metaphor for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and there's so much academic stuff out there explaining why movies like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street are actually PRO-feminist that you could probably fill up an entire library floor.

Which segues quite nicely into the comments from one Ariel Smith, this make-believe Jew-Indian from Ottawa who I'm pretty sure is the person who wrote the Wikipedia article. Pardon me, Pocahontas, but exactly how many black folks do you know that have had Dracula chase them around in a haunted mansion? You know of any Meskins who had to outrun Leatherface and his clan of cannibal hillbilly brethren when they crossed the Rio Grande? Can you name a single LGBT Eskimo who's survived a night on the run from a hockey-mask wearing machete killer? Show me one Filipino crossdresser who has "first-hand experience with the violence depicted" in a movie like From Beyond or Basket Case and I'll break dance in your living room for half an hour. 

And what kind of "realism" is this broad talking about concerning ethnic horror films? You mean those outstanding documentaries chronicling real world inner city violence, Scream, Blacula, Scream and Black Devil Doll From Hell? You mean the gripping, authentic account of Guillermo del Toro's real life experiences being chased around by a nine foot tall flukeworm with eyeballs in his palms as a child? Hell, if Takashi Miike has experienced just one percent of the things he's depicted in his movies in his actual life, methinks he'd be too shell shocked to even hold a camera upright, let alone make six or seven damn movies each and every year.

And why would anybody complain about the representation of ANY ethnic group in a genre that literally revolves around killing off 95 percent of the cast? To argue for more diversity in horror films is to literally demand MORE people of colour get killed onscreen OR you want to see more blacks, women, Asians, Hispanics and homosexuals portraying psycho killers. And even that old chestnut about black folks being the first to die in genre movies is a myth - in fact, non-scientific studies have determined that blacks are the first to get killed in just 10 percent of all genre movies. Hell, I can name off the top of my head at least 10 movies where one of the only survivors is a black person: Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Thing, Night of the Demons, Friday the 13th Part 5, The People Under The Stairs (which is one of the few mainstream horror movies out there that is indeed explicitly about racism), Elm Street 3, Demon Knight, 28 Days Later and Halloween: Resurrection. If we're excluding all the crossover blaxploitation/horror hybrids out there where pretty much the entire cast is black, literally the only mainstream horror series I can think of with a black villain is Candyman. Just looking at the rock solid F.B.I. data, if anything, there's a staggering disconnect between the dearth of cinematic horror antagonists who are black and the real world share of actual African-American murderers - talk about avoiding social issues, eh?

The rest of the article is just a bunch of pissing and moaning about "magical negro" stock characters and Native American mythology, which intersects in exactly one horror film ever made. A good gander at the references used for the article - and my goodness, has Wikipedia ever gotten lax on what constitutes an official source of information - reveals about a dozen links to blogs written by pro-feminist women of colour (a.k.a, professional grievance hustlers) and a couple of college papers written by adjunct professors who will spend the rest of their lives in debt because they just had to get a master's degree in lesbian indigenous film studies.

You know, I have a hard time believing that this meets the "merit" requirements for a Wikipedia page. Indeed, if I didn't know any better, the entire thing was prolly created by one of the people listed in the references, just so her shitty Tumblr page or five sentence abstract on the symbolism of Iroquois vagina iconography in Poltergeist III got more web traffic. 

Come on, even a half retarded bot can see a line like "much of the attention that minorities get within horror films is through the use of their culture as plot devices and structures to scare or guilt the white protagonists," is a statement of personal opinion, not concrete fact. And how such brazenly false statements like "often times in these films, female and minority character have only a minor role in the plot" - when 9 times out of 10 the last character left standing in a horror film is a woman - have passed the great Internet populist smell taste this long is simply beyond me, folks.

Hate to break it to you, kids, but this isn't a screen shot - it's literally a third of the entire movie.

Speaking of things that are totally inexplicable, we've got a pretty discombobulating double feature to plow through this week. Up first, it's Split, the latest genre movie from M. Night Shammalammadingdong, which - believe it or not - has actually grossed more than $100 million at the box office since January.

Long story short - you know the pickings at the multiplex must be mighty slim if this sucker can hit the nine digit, two comma mark.

Right off the bat, I can tell you this one is a steep decline in quality from Shammalammadindong's last movie, The Visit, which was actually a pretty good little found footage movie. It's not quite as bad as some of the other movies he's made - there are still people in withdrawal from The Happening, I've read in at least one medical journal - but it's still a pretty big letdown. 

So we begin with these three high school girls at the mall played by 23-year-old actresses just enjoying some Orange Julius when one of their daddies gets the teriyaki chicken to-go box from Panda Express knocked out of his hands by some chrome dome carjacker who proceeds to spray 'em all with chloroform juice. Naturally, they wake up in some sort of subterranean lair, wondering how in the hell they got there, and that's when we get hit with the movie's big gimmick. 

You see, these girls aren't being held hostage by any old run of the mill psychosexual manaic. Oh, no siree Bob, they're being imprisoned by a guy who has no less than 24 split personalities, which you gotta' admit, is a pretty ingenuous way to spice up what would be an otherwise paint-by-numbers teen captive movie. So practically every four minutes, we're dealing with a different psycho killer personality. One's an autistic fashion designer, one's a gay hairdresser who talks like a James Bond villain, one's a Brooklynite with a germ phobia, one's a mental retard who wears a yellow rain slicker, thinks he's 9-years-old and has a lisp worse than Mike Tyson and - perhaps most terrifying of all - one of them's practically a skinhead Woody Allen. 

So for the first half hour, things are swimming along quite nicely. We've got the gals trying to break out of the ceiling with high heel shoes and everybody getting chased around a boiler room while our primary protagonist has flashbacks of her uncle giving her the bad touch during a hunting trip when she was in the second grade, and then we slam headlong into the thing that pretty much sinks the whole dang movie. 

Say it with me, kids: psychiatrist fu. 

I'm not kidding, I'd venture to guess that at least a third of this whole movie involves the schizophrenic kidnapper visiting his shrink over and over again to talk about this mysterious 25th personality called "the beast" and all the times he gets in trouble at work. It's even worse because the psychiatrist sits around watching Wheel of Fortune and doing seminars where she talks about how people with disassociative personality disorders might actually have super powers, and I think all of this might have come about because a whole bunch of special interests dweebs complained about the depiction of the mentally ill in Shammalammadingdong's last movie and he felt he needed to at least delve into the positive side of having two dozen voices in your head telling you to strangle eleventh-graders to death. 

Well, I suppose you can figure out how this one ends. Eventually, our antagonist does evolve into that 25th personality, and he REALLY does have super powers, including the ability to climb on walls like Spider-Man and bend iron jail cell bars open like Popeye. And don't even think about trying to stab this motherfucker - all it does is make him angrier. 

Which - of course - leads to our big "everybody run down the halls a million billion times and even though we've got a shotgun never shoot the bad guy with it" grand finale. Yeah, it's pretty stale stuff, but I'll at least give 'em credit for coming up with a pretty hilarious post-post-post-modern "the deep, dark secret is revealed" sequence where our final girl uncovers the truth about her captor ... by finding out he maintains 24 separate YouTube accounts.

Oh, and there's a really, really great surprise ending that isn't exactly a twist, but it is something you'll definitely want to stick around for, especially if you are a fan of the overall Shammalammadingdong filmography.

We've got three dead bodies. No breasts (but the captives are in their underwear for most of the movie, if that'll give you your jollies.) One chair upside the head. Therapist crushing. Gratuitous Skype product placement. Gratuitous sandwich making. Gratuitous animal trivia. Gratuitous geek dancing. Gratuitous camping trip flashbacks. Chloroform Fu. And, of course, the thing that made the whole plot possible - failed cognitive behavioral therapy Fu.

Starring James McAvoy, as the psycho high school student kidnapper who says lines like "only through pain can you achieve greatness" and "the broken are more evolved"; Anna Taylor-Joy as the final girl none of the other girls like who momentarily stops the psychosexual maniac by showing him a bunch of self-inflicted wounds on her stomach; Haley Lu Richardson as the obligatory blonde jailbait who says "we should drop a crazy ass bomb on him"; and Betty Buckley as the therapist who's too dumb to realize the patient that emails her 45 times a day is trying to skin teenagers alive in the basement of a zoo and at one point describes Hooters as the King Richard III of fast food places.

Not your best, M. Night, but I'll at least give you some credit for responding to critics who said your last movie insulted the mentally disabled by following it up with a movie that paints them in an even worse light. I give it two stars out of four - it prolly ain't worth paying full price for, but if they're playing it at a dollar theater near you, it does give you an excuse to avoid the misses for a full two hours.

The totally needless romantic subplot in the original movie may have been tepid, but these two stiffs somehow manage to make Nekromantik look like 9 1/2 Weeks.

And if you thought that one was a bit of a head scratcher, what 'til you get a load of the ass-end of our double header: Roger Corman's Death Race 2050. 

Yeah, I have no earthly clue why they decided they needed to make a sequel literally 40 years after the first one came out. Maybe the failure of the big budget, big studio remake a few years ago (which, itself, spawned a slate of sucky straight-to-Redbox sequels and a knock-off of the knock-off starring the Insane Clown Posse and former ECW 'rassler Raven) had something to do with it, or maybe old Roger's gotten so senile he just rubber stamps every script that people send him to nowadays. Regardless, Death Race 2050 got made, and ... 

... well, to be honest, it ain't as bad as you'd expect it to be. Of course, it pales in comparison to the greatness of the original movie, and this four decade late re-do doesn't come anywhere close to matching its progenitor's biting political satire. And strangely enough, the special effects in this one are somehow worse than the ones in the original Death Race 2000 (which came out two years before Star Wars), but hey - at least we get Malcolm McDowell hamming it up for the camera while he puts on the worst Donald Trump impersonation you've ever seen in your life, so don't you dare say these people didn't try at least a little.

The plot is pretty much the exact same thing as Death Race 2000, except this time around, everybody's acting shitty on purpose - which, as you all know by now, is one of my biggest pet peeves with contemporary B-movies. While the smarmy, self-deprecating "comedy" is annoying as all hell, at least the actors in this one are moderately above average for this kind of flick. I mean, sure, there's no real chemistry ... or character development ... or even a real third act, now that I think about it ... but they pronounce most of their lines right, and for that, they should be applauded. 

A real big problem with this movie, though, is that it tries to be a sequel to Idiocracy more than a sequel to Death Race 2000. There's this whole subplot about the nation (rechristened as the United Corporations of America) having a 99.93 percent unemployment rate because everybody just plays with their VR goggles and eats anti-depressant laced Cheese Whiz all day, and it just feels like that's what the director wanted to focus on instead of the street pizza segments. The actual racing in this movie is god awful, with horrible CGI effects that look ten times shoddier than what we saw in the original. Say what you will about the inherent corniness of Death Race 2000, but at least the cars LOOKED real and looked like they were in actual motion instead of being greenscreened on somebody's MacBook Pro. 

BUT the new racers aren't too shabby. We've get this one bible thumping farmer's daughter named Tammy the Terrorist who tries to convince her fans to let her run 'em over because it'll send them to the great Hooters all-you-can eat buffalo chicken wing buffet in the sky and another one named Minerva Jefferson who I didn't even know was a woman until about 20 minutes before the movie ended who blasts a rap song with the lyrics "drive, drive, drive, kill, kill, kill, drive, drive, drive, kill, kill, kill the white people" at full volume while dodging hillbilly gunfire in what was the NRA belt. There's also a self driving car that gives its occupants electronic orgasms and the big bad guy is this boring narcissistic guy named Jed Perfectus who really isn't even all that ripped (yeah, a machine gun toting Sylvester Stallone, this fella' ain't) but the thing we really got to talk about is how badly they screwed up Frankenstein. Remember how eerily calm and collected David Carradine's take on the character was? Well, this time around, they've got this one dude who's basically a poor man's Gerard Butler playing him, and there's even an entire subplot in there about how his motivation for the race is being able to adopt puppies with mange in the offseason. 

So yes, it is a very, VERY watered-down imitation of the original, and the bulk of the humor - there's a gag about Baltimore being renamed "Upper Shitville" and a joke about an elementary school being named after Justin Bieber, among other kneeslappers - comes off as depressingly desperate. But what the movie lacks in ... well, pretty much everything ... it almost makes up for with sheer gratuitous violence. It might not be able to match the pure twisted metal transcendence of its forerunner, but at the same time, it's still next to impossible to hate a movie with not just one, but three sequences in which severed heads fly through the air spraying blood and spinal fluid in slow motion.

We've got 107 dead bodies. Ten breasts. Four totaled automobiles (and that's an unforgivably low number for a movie of this type.) Legs roll. Heads roll. Arms roll. Intestines roll. Bumper through the stomach. Spear to the abdomen. Spear to the groin. A guy sliced in half by trip wire. Head crushed under a tire. Head crushed with somebody's bare hands. MULTIPLE slow-motion suicide bomber explosions. Knife to the mouth. One transcontinental brawl. Gratuitous rockabilly music. Gratuitous break-dancing ninjas. Terrible Kung Fu. Flamethrower Fu. And, as to be expected, a total lack of original ideas Fu.

Starring Manu Bennett as the extremely poor man's Gerard Butler, who tries his best to say lines like "cheerleaders don't come to practice" with a straight face; Marci Miller as Frankenstein's traveling companion, who has the best line in the entire movie - "it's hard to turn global famine into clickbait"; Burt Grinstead as the movie's hyper forgettable main villain; Folake Olowofoyeku as the gender-bending, honky-hatin' rapper who's actually an Ivy Leaguer who quotes Blaise Pascal when the cameras are off; and Anessa Ramsey as Tammy the Terrorist, the psycho Jesus Freak with a Southern drawl who dresses up like a combination of Wonder Woman and Jan Crouch while spitting out gems like "math is for heathens and nerds" and damn near steals the whole movie in the process. Directed by some guy named G.J. Echternkamp and produced by the one and only Roger Corman, who apparently has decided to spend his golden years crapping out even worse movies than he did back in his salad days as movie-dom's exploitation par excellence. 

There's definitely some good gore in this one - too bad they forgot to wrap an actual movie around it, though. Still, I'm feeling a little generous, so I'll give it two and a half stars out of four. Check it out on Netflix, if you want - you prolly won't hate it that much.

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Comic Review: Poison Ivy - Cycle of Life and Death (2016)

The fan favorite floral femme fatale finally got her own limited-run series, but does the six-parter give the Vixen of Vines the spotlight she deserves? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Although I am, was and always will be a Marvel fanboy, I've always had a peculiar fondness for Poison Ivy. She's easily my favorite female villain in any medium, ever since I was introduced to her in her first B:TAS appearance where he made out with Batman while he was tied up by a vagina-looking plant monster. 

Over the years, the character has been rewritten from a huge-haired Batman fan girl in a leafy swimsuit into a hardcore feminist (and possibly lesbian) eco-terrorist into some sort of demi-goddess with the same skin hue as the Jolly Green Giant. Although the plant-based motif and a lot of the tried and true pheromone powers have remained consistent - whether the character was retconned into a teenager with hair shaped like a tulip or was transformed into a melodramatic drag queen who kinda sorta resembled Uma Thurman - Poison Ivy doesn't really seem to have the same consistent core identity and personality that a lot of the other Batman heavies share. Pretty much every time a writer gets a hold of her, they tend to rebuild her background, motivations and even powers from the ground-up; as a result, Ivy winds up being transformed into a totally new character seemingly every two or three years. 

Personally, my favorite incarnation of the character was in the early 1980s, when she was just a bitchy brown-haired man-hater who wanted to seduce all the men in town so she could mutate them into plant monsters or feed them to whatever genetic experiment she was working on at the time. Really, it wasn't until they tried to turn her into an eco-conscious vigilante that things started going off the rails with the character; the same way Marvel fucked up Venom by turning him face, DC really hunched the pooch by turning Ivy - a sociopathic misandrist - into an Earth Firster tweener. 

So enter the latest take on the long running Bat-foe, a six-part miniseries that ran from January to June of this year titled Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life and Death. It was written by Amy Chu, an MIT, Wellsley AND Harvard Business School-trained funny book scribe who started her own imprint called Alpha Girl Comics (yeah, in case you couldn't tell from the namesake of her company, the identity politics is strong with this one.) Pulling primary art duties is Clay Mann, an industry journeyman who probably has the most supervillain-sounding name of any artist in the industry. So, with their powers combined, what did they manage to accomplish with the villainous vixen of vines? Well, let's hit up the stack and find out for ourselves, why don't we? 

All right, so issue one opens with Ivy in Southern Angola, in hot pursuit of some kind of "living fossil." This being Africa and whatnot, she and her tour guide are soon attacked by diamond mine guards, whom are easily dispatched by our anti-heroine and her ability to make gigantic vines pop out of the Sub-Saharan soil out of nowhere.

We tail Ivy back to Gotham, where she is now a researcher at the local botanical gardens, working on genetically modified plant-animal hybrids (considering her background, you REALLY have to wonder what kind of judge would sign off on such a work-release program.) From the get-go, we get a stern talking to about sexism, as one of Ivy's colleagues yammers on and on about how "misogynistic" her boss is.

And that's our cue for Harley Quinn to show up, incognito. She convinces Ivy to join her to a girls night out at, of all things, a rough and tough biker bar, and begrudgingly, she accepts her invitation, if only to avoid being hit on by an overly-flirtatious male coworker.

There, Harley has switched out into her finest Margot Robbie duds (a surreptitious ad for the Suicide Squad movie? Surely you jest!) They talk about Ivy being rich as fuck because of her bio-tech patents and Harley asks Ivy is she is more plant or human these days. Ivy responds by saying something about the Green - just read the Wikipedia page, it's too convoluted for me to give you a summary - and what do you know, a barroom brawl breaks out. While Harley wallops a few burly bikers, Ivy nonchalantly goes after them with a special spray that appears to turn people into homosexuals. What? Didn't anybody every tell Amy Chu that homosexuality is an INGRAINED GENETIC TRAIT THAT YOU ARE BORN WITH AND CAN NEVER, EVER BE REVERSED OR SYNTHESIZED? Oh goodness, it's only the first issue, and the staggering amount of Asian woman-spawned homophobia has me triggered something fierce.

After the melee, Harley criticizes Ivy for being too cold and distant. She responds by going home to her palatial apartment complex, walking around naked and bemoaning the simple-mindedness of humanity before saying some abstract stuff about CRISPRS. Ivy makes reference to an off-panel "project," which she assures us has grown faster than she thought. She then arrives back at the botanical gardens, and holy shit, somebody has brutally murdered her mentor!

The cliffhanger provides a natural segue to issue two. Here, we learn that Ivy's research has been stolen by ... well, somebody. We're introduced to the purple mohawked Darshan Bapna, who tells investigators the dead scientist may have accidentally poisoned herself. Ivy ripostes by saying her mentor was a consummate pro who never would have botched her job like that, but then she remembers her alibi is "hanging out with Harley Quinn" so she quickly shuts her yap. That's when sexist coworker Winston cuts in and says he took Ivy to the movies and "did" her, which gets the guy who kinda sorta runs the lab to say, damn it, he KNEW women weren't nothing but distractions in the work place.

For some reason, nobody can figure out that Pamela Isley is Poison Ivy, not even the homicide detectives. Shit, the guys who run Webutation ought to hire her as a consultant! So, Ivy and Darshan are working on creating a community garden to memorialize the dead scientist, and Ivy starts getting suspicious about her colleague. Then, they are attacked by pit bulls (the whole time, Ivy has an internal monologue about the dogs being conditioned into vicious killers by man) and then she kills the owner by making sentient vines ... well, explode inside her, I guess?

Then it's revealed that the recruiter knows she's Poison Ivy. Then we get Darshan's backstory - basically, he's a dude that became a scientist because both his parents are scientists, his siblings are biochemists and wasn't good enough to make it on Gotham's Got Talent. Then he tells Ivy about his Jainist upbringing (technically, he is not even supposed to eat potatoes because they have roots) and she rebuffs his offer to grab a coffee sometime. So he follows her back to her apartment (not creepy, at all) and finds the corpse of one of the lab higher-ups AND Ivy cradling a bunch of mutant plant-spawned babies she calls "sporelings." And from there: issue three. 

So the police are investigating the murder of Eric Grimley, world-class chauvinist pig and chairman of the plant sciences department at Gotham Botanical Gardens. Darshan tells them what he knows and then we check in n Ivy, who is admiring her self-engineered Cabbage Patch babies. One is named Rose and the other is Hazel because ... uh, the material demands groan-inducing plant puns, I suppose?

Ivy returns to the Gardens and she learns about Grimley's murder (or, she's pretending to learn about it anyway) and she gets questioned by the police and she almost goes plant-psycho on them but then one of them receives a call telling them to let her off the hook. Apparently, this Pamela Isley character has some powerful friends in high places...

Then, Winston - the pervert from the lab that hit on Pam earlier - rings her doorbell and he hits on her some more so she decides to kill him with one of her patented death kisses. The only problem is, they don't actually SHOW the kiss take place, even though the front cover of the damn comic is Ivy seductively crawling over his lipstick-smudged corpse. And then, a bunch of Petey Piranhas from Super Mario Bros. eat his poisoned remains, because goddamnit, being an obnoxious flirt MANDATES such a grisly demise, it seems.

Then she goes to a coffee shop and talks with Darshan about the blueprints of the botanical gardens. And that's when she calls up an old friend with some expertise in the field of breaking and entering ... Catwoman. 

Issue four begins with Ivy and Catwoman dealing with Darshan, who gets ensnared in one of Ivy's apartment plants. Eventually, they decide to hatch a plan to break into the gardens at night, using the old steam tunnels built in the late 1800s. Then, Ivy starts hearing a "disturbance" in the Green and a whole bunch of scientists start running for their lives and they uncover a worker who has been "treed" a'la the old people in the B:TAS episode "Eternal Youth."  That's when they encounter a THIRD plant child, this one hiding out in the air vents like Newt in Aliens from some unseen menace. Apparently, the lab workers stole Ivy's work and tried to create their own armada of plant people - almost all of which resulted in hideous, aborted plant-people fetus thingies. Ivy goes nuclear, kills the remaining scientist in the lab and then brings the whole damn Botanical Gardens using her plant-control powers.

Issue five begins with Ivy naming the lab specimen "Thorn." Apparently, the Sporelings age at a rapid rate, so at 25 weeks old, they already look like teenagers ... well, teenagers with gold and green skin and needles sticking out of the top of their skulls, anyway. Darshan brings over a karaoke machine and the "girls" bitch and moan about how bad they want to go out and mingle in society, like they were repressed Ninja Turtles or something. 

Ivy has a nightmare about this giant Doomsday-looking motherfucker that's been teased in quick flashes for the last couple of issues and she realizes, oh shit, the kids have shut down the security system and escaped! So they sneak into a club and, whoops, some businessman hits on one of them and has his hand turned into a redwood paperweight. Of course, Ivy has to come bail them out before the shit gets too deep, and for all the carnage they caused - which includes major property destruction and HOMICIDE - Ivy decides to "ground them." Get it? Because they are like, half plant and shit.

Then Ivy enters some sort of metaphysical tree-world in her head where she speaks to a "parliament of trees" and oh shit, she gets attacked by Grimley, who is now like, a 40-foot-tall tree monster! 

Chapter six, here we come. As it turns out, Grimley stole Ivy's research because he thought it would grant him immortality. Granted, it's a form of immortality where he's going to look like the eponymous monster from Pumpkinhead, but hey! It's immortality, nonetheless. 

After explaining why he had to kill Ivy's mentor (she was too close to figuring out he was mutating into Tree Man), Grim tells Ivy he needs a steady supply of Sporelings stem cells to prevent his cancer from coming back. That's when Darshan and the Sporelings come to Ivy's rescue. And before you can say "dues ex machine," MOTHERFUCKING SWAMP THING just shows up out of nowhere to save everybody. Cue an extended battle scene where everybody starts hacking up Grim with rakes and machetes, which concludes with Swampy giving P.I. a pep talk about managing realistic expectations of motherhood. And then, the Sporelings hop aboard a Greyhound headed down South, where one of them proudly proclaims "we're going to change the world."

And ... fin. 

...still a better interpretation of Ivy than the one in this one, though. 

Well, that was - a mixed-bag, so to speak. Frankly, this just isn't the kind of Ivy I want in my nerd books. The whole aloof, semi-lesbian, pro-STEM feminist single mom environmental justice warrior shtick is really annoying and makes the character a boring, lifeless, needlessly political figure whose role isn't so much to engage in bizarre capers that jeopardize the fate of an entire metropolis just 'cause as she is to stand around and make, ugh, socially cognizant remarks about the state of sexism in contemporary U.S. culture. Look, if I wanted to get a lecture about why all men are a bunch of worthless layabouts, I could always spend a few minutes on Tumblr until the ironically indiscriminate hatred makes me want to pluck my own eyeballs out; if I wouldn't voluntarily do such in a medium that's 100 percent free, then why oh why should I be asked to spend my disposable income on the same kind of irritating, hyperbolic propaganda?

Granted, Cycle of Life and Death doesn't exist SOLELY to make some sort of anti-man statement. Rather, the series - a shameless attempt to garner a regularly monthly comic - tries desperately to transform Ivy into some sort of almost-justifiable vigilante, whose M.O. is going after really rich industrialists that hurt the environment and hold women down and all that jazz. The problem with that is evident in this series: that kind of protagonist is supremely boring. Indeed, Cycle itself illustrates just how much this take on Ivy is unable to stand on its own - without the cameos from Catwoman and Harley Quinn (and especially the spin-off bait in the form of the Sporelings), this thing just dragged like an anchor across a wooden floorboard. And hoo-boy, do not even get me started on the last-second addendum of Swamp Thing, and all that abstract crap about the Green, or the inclusion of an American Idol reject as the series' primary comedic foil. Seriously, don't even. 

For me, the ideal Ivy has always been the Bronze Age version, as written and drawn by Gerry Conway and Irv Novick. Forget the voluptuous ginger from the '90s cartoon and definitely forget the Martian-looking version heaped upon the masses by Jim Lee in the mid-2000s - the petite, laurel-crowned, brown-haired P.I. that used her feminine wiles to seduce, trick and scam wealthy business men into their economic (and sometimes, literal) doom is the iteration that I have long felt best expressed who and what Ivy was about. No Warholian lesbian overtones, no mother-complex nonsense, no jibber-jabber about the moral righteousness of eco-terrorism; rather, she was just a super smart, super sly under-the-radar villianess who used her botany background to make herself wealthy and stamp out a few overbearing, old white guys who proved long-term threats to her financial aspirations. I mean, really, what would you rather read, month in and month out - a whole bunch of monologuing about biochemistry and why gonaded-Americans are destroying the planet, or the exploits of a hot '70s looking chick who uses mind control lipsticks on CEOs so she can force them to give up their companies and leave their families and come with her to a facsimile of the garden of Eden where she plans on systematically feeding them to a giant Venus's fly trap? Yeah, that's what I thought - the saga of a woman who dresses up like a cucumber, blow darts people and really, really wants to fuck her arch-nemesis hard is infinitely more intriguing a concept than anything tossed around in Cycle, for sure. 

So yeah, there ain't too much to get excited about in this half-year-long series. And if this is the template for a full-fledged, regular title, I really dread what sort of meandering identity politicking-in-lieu-of-genuine-storytelling-nonsense we're ultimately going to wrench out of the prospect. Sorry Ivy fans - looks like you're going to have to wait a little bit longer before the iconic villainess receives the standalone treatment she rightly deserves.

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