Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - SPOILERS!

you might want to leave. You know that Ed Norton's character's name, right, not narrator, Definitely not Tyler. All the books he keeps finding, I'm Jacks Colin, I'm Jack's blah blah blah, He's Jack. Anyway, got some corrections. In last

week's episode, when I was discussing Alien Earth, I kept referring to the head of the Prodigy Corporation as Kid Cavalier. His name is Boy Cavalier. In my defense, I co host Knight Mister Walters, a taxi podcast, and in the most recent episode of that, Tony Banta went incognito in the boxing ring as a fighter named Kid Rodriguez, and there have been a ton of kid fighters because kid anything is a cool name. Boy would lose its luster at age sixteen, probably earlier if you're a child genie,

which clearly I am not, because it's boy Cavalier. In other alien xenomorphic corrections, my mother informed me that she would have definitely purchased that eighteen inch alien figure for me had I only asked. This was a crushing revelation, as you might imagine. I mean, I'm certain forty years later and that figure would be long gone or and or destroyed by me at some point, but it could have been mine, freaking me out from the corner of my room as I tried to sleep. Jesus, I'm glad

I didn't ask for it. My mother then reminded me of her one and only toy rule, no toy guns, as if I needed reminding that the only squirt gun I was allowed as a child was shaped like bugs bunny's head, humiliating in neighborhood warfare situations. And that's all the corrections, because my reporting otherwise is unassailable, and there's no Ripley here to check that well, I mean, she's here,

but she's asleep. Remember a few months back, I was obsessed with Madmen because I discovered the joys of streaming services that have created entire channels populated with only one show. That's right, twenty four hours a day of the Goldbergs bad example. That show's terrible. But anyway, mad Men was like wallpaper here in the kab Lighthouse for a few weeks. And now it's MythBusters. Remember MythBusters? Remember when everyone was obsessed with how cool science is for a few years there.

That was heartening, hopeful even Well, there's like eighteen seasons of that show. So that's what's on when I'm home these days. It's comforting to hear Adam Savage cackling in some portion of my home. Oh god, And it's nice to see some critical thinking for a change. All right, that's the end of the social commentary. The other thing I ankled deep in these days is the Tim Robinson

show I Think You Should Leave on Netflix. I was really slow warming to this fella and his humor, even though every fucking comedian I respect has been singing his praises for years. I just couldn't crack that code. Then I watched his show Detroititer's also on Netflix, and that was the key Robinson does cringey humor, which I am generally off put by. Life is fucking awkward enough without experiencing it vicariously through others, but Robinson has elevated it

into an art form. Also on Netflix. Also, I missed the Boat on its initial run. The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience The Lonely Island's visual poem. This is a fictional album by jose Canseco and Mark maguire set in the late nineteen eighties. The specificity of the music is what finally grabbed me here. The beats and the rhymes they're laying on top are so fucking era appropriate that it hurts. I'm a little obsessed. It takes me half an hour

to get to work. That album is thirty minutes. How many times do you think I've heard Andy Samberg as jose Conseco boast about his room full of Kathy Ireland cutouts. I got one hundred card board cutouts, the Kafy Ireland all in one room. A run through that shit naked, make them all watch me fuck myself with the broom. Oh cassies, Oh my Cathys, you're the only ones that know my pain, and you'll the only ones to see my shame and yo jusse, Come on, man, we'll live

for the game. Let's talk spoilers. I generally just don't

give a shit about them myself. I'll read that script for something years before it's made if I can get my hands on it. My thing is, if the totality of the entertainment is based on one surprise, then how entertaining was it? Does it stand on its own, does the twist or reveal deepen the other parts of the drama, and how fucking rewatchable is it? Anyway? My system of rules is not on trial here. I am very sensitive to those viewers who preserve the twist with their very lives.

That's why I'm so hesitant to say as much as I do in the pocket reviews here on the roundup, which is me saying, turned this show off now if you're allergic to the future, And if that's the case, thank you for tuning in thus far, and I hope you'll be back on Friday, where Yaoucha fest returns and our pal HP with it. He and I are discussing the PG thirteen masterpiece Aliens Versus Predator AVP. Hey, you know me, no matter who wins, we lose. Look at

that tagline, it's predicting the future. That's Friday or if you want to hear that and our review of Alien Versus Predator Requiem, you can hear them both right now on the Patreon channel, as well as the latest installment of HP Hates Me, where he made me watch Corey ham me myself and I what a fucking nightmare. Okay, you have now been sufficiently warned spoilers by still here.

Our main topic is going to be weapons, but I did want to touch on some of the alien Earth to start. By the time you hear this, you might actually know more than me, because the fourth episode will be out as of this recording. I've watched the first three a couple of times. I have to talk about the fucking eyeball, you know, the one IMAGINEO the Wayland Utahanni deep space research vessel at the center of this series, the one that crashed into a Prodigy building in New Siam,

has apparently been in space for sixty five years. The crew volunteered for what Ellen Ripley accidentally did to herself at the end of Alien and they've brought back five species. One is the xenomorph. One is this horrible bug thing that drinks blood until it's a swollen sack of fleshy grossness. There's a flying thing that's yet to be revealed. There's what's being called the orchid, an apt name considering it looks like an unopened orchid bud hanging upside down and

promising to open and reveal something really horrifying. And it'll have to be to top the t ocellus, that's the cruise designation for the octopus eye, a giant eyeball with half a dozen irises and tentacled legs that are tensil and lethal. And the motherfucker climbs into corpses, inserts itself into the ocular cavity and then puppets their body. What the fuck, Noah Hawley. He demonstrates it with a cat

one that looks like Jonesy. Holly himself described giggling as he was writing it, recognizing just how horrible the scene is.

That's the correct response. As I said in the last round up, Holly understood the power of surprise in the first Alien film, and he very wisely realized he's not going to get there as far as mind chattering moments like Cain in the very first burst Chest, so instead he's stacking up so much twisted, odd and mortally questionable material that it creates the same overall effect as the

chest Burster. We're lucky he's interested in loftier ambitions because I'm convinced, had Holly decided to just barrel into horror, this could be unrelenting and most likely scarring. Another thing that's kind of wackad do off kilter in this series is the young adults that are our heroes and the

fact that they're actually children. The show never shines away from reminding us about these tiny kids are running around in adult synthetic bodies, nor does it shrink from confronting some of the dodgier aspects to the process and the character's own struggles with their new busy and identities. Speaking of them, Wendy, our lead, is played by Sidney Chandler. In addition to being Kyle Chandler's daughter who saw that coming, she was the best part of Danny Boyle's mini series

Pistol about the rise of the sex pistols. Chandler played Chrissy Hind and she fucking killed it. That series was adapted mainly from Steve Jones's memoir of his time in the Pistols, as such as heavily freighted towards Steve Jones as the chief creative force behind the Pistols, which is great for the Chrissy Hind subplot as she was Jones's friend. But I'll let you decide for yourself the overall quality.

Maybe I should watch it again. I did come away with a deeper appreciation of both Chrissy Hind and Vivian Westwood. In any event, I really like her in Alien Earth, and I particularly like the fact that Wendy and the Lost Boys are synthetic hybrids. It solves two problems elegantly. James Cameron recognized that in a hand to hand situation, humans stand zero percent chance of surviving against an alien,

so he ramped up the firepower. And that's been the only solution since then in any of the iterations until now, because now our leads have no reason to fear the creature, and odds are they're just as strong. And and this is the really clever bit. If next season he wanted to jump ahead, say twenty years, and tell the story of Amanda Ripley, who's out there searching for her mom. He could do so with these characters who don't age.

Jump another thirty years, and he could have them running around the Silaco while Hicks and Bishop and Ripley are slugging it out on LV four twenty six. I'm not suggesting they need to do any of this actual interaction with legacy characters. I'm just saying it's possible and exciting. Okay, weapons, not joking anymore. This isn't a series you can push a button and watch right now. So if you haven't seen weapons, here we go. It's witchcraft. There's a witch.

She's kidnapping the children to feed on their life force. And by she I mean Aunt Gladys, a shrunken apple doll under a severe shocking red bob and a slash of lipstick where her mouth ought to be a character that every time she popped up on screen had be confusedly wondering who is that? She really reminds me of? Amy Madigan. Of course it is Amy Madigan, who I hope is getting all the fucking notoriety she deserves. Remember her on Carnival. She was the real evil there too.

She has had a long and illustrious career. But here's the flick I always recommend. Streets of Fire. That's the Walter Hill, a rock and roll fable from nineteen eighty four. She auditioned for Ellen Ame and ended up taking the role of McCoy, that is, the badass, fully capable soldier of fortune sidekick that had been written for a man. That's how fucking awesome Amy Madigan is. And if you rewatch the movie, do so for one moment that involves McCoy.

When our heroes have infiltrated torchies. Of course there's torchies. It's a Walter Hill movie. McCoy goes upstairs and gets one of the gang alone. The speed with which Amy Madigan draws a pistol and places it against the guy's skull is nothing short of breathtaking. See for yourself. So weapons, Aunt, Gladys. The story is that Alex, the only boy who didn't go missing, His parents inform him that a distant relative

is ailing and coming to live with them. Thus Gladys, and as soon as she's in the house, the parents are different, distant odd threatening because Gladys, who claims at times to be Alex's aunt, his mother's sister, and Alex's great aunt, a sister of his grandmother, is above all a witch, one who is winding down and falling apart and needs to feed, and has chosen Alex's parents, but finds that they're not sufficient sustenance. Thus she targets Alex's class.

A couple of things here, because this is the line of demarcation, it would seem amongst viewers of the film a contentious line at that early images of those seventeen children climbing out of bed and stepping out and running off into the night are so fucking evocative and so weighted with possibility that for a lot of people, finding out that it's the crazy old lady you avoid at

the grocery store is kind of a letdown. And I get that, because the mystery of seventeen disappearances in one night is intriguing enough on its own, that there was seemingly no perpetrator is doubly so. And in my horrible brain, I go to lovecrafty and darkness. Those kids could very well be trapped in some hell of infinite teeth and terror, But you know, sometimes the honest thing just clicks in your mind. A puzzle piece you didn't know you were

looking for just appears. Here's how the overly analytical cinematic dissection machine of a brain of mind worked. I mentioned Fight Club earlier. You know what I realized in that movie when Jack is punching himself in front of his boss, he thinks for some reason, I thought about my first fight with Tyler, and my mind went, because you've been beating yourself up the whole time. There is no Tyler. Oh,

we're fallowing the journey of a crazy man. Somehow. The site of the children running in the manner in which they do, and the mystery and the title. The title specifically locked my brain in on the notion that it's witchcraft and someone is controlling these children and potentially as

human weapons. That's still pretty vague, but it's also a pretty good cushion for the reveal, because had I been convinced of the limitless possibilities of what actually happened to those kids, I can see where it's a witch might be that letdown, But I was not let down. That's a scary fucking character and a scarier scenario we get five separate tales around the central mystery. Those are all peripheral characters when it comes down to it, because the

only story that matters here is Alex's story. In the parallels between his ordeal with Aunt Gladys and the one children dealing with alcoholic parents or drug addicted parents or rageaholic workaholic. There's no shortage of parental distraction you can plug into this scenario. But Gregor himself has alluded to alcoholism at its route. Those parallels are largely unexplored in popular entertainment, and those are the images and scenes that

keep turning over in my head. It's horrible to lose a child, I know, and it's horrible to deal with the fallout of tragedy in your community, especially when there's a mystery at the center of it. But it's so much worse for that child trapped with a monster, compelled to do its bidding and be forced into silence above all,

suffering alone. God damn it, that's fucking horrible. Piggybacking off of Paul Waller's podcast A Year in Horror for a second here, Paul mentioned on his show that Creiger offered Amy Madigan two backstories for on Gladys. One she was in fact the distant relative who, in the intervening years since last they'd encountered her, had found black magic and become a witch. Or she was never human to begin with, just a demon inside a withered human suit. We don't

know which one Amy Madigan chose. We don't know which one Craiger had in mind, which I love. I think it's in between. I think she's human, but I think she's impossibly old and has been pulling this I'm your long lost relative act for decades, if not centuries. But I don't suppose any of that matters, because they've already announced a prequel to Weapons, and that fills me with as much dread as some of the scenes in it look so far. Cregger's has shown remarkable restraint and thoughtfulness,

so I shouldn't doubt his intentions with a prequel. It's just that prequels tend to be exposition machines for films that definitely avoided such clumsiness. Oh that's why he said that, Oh it's really a ghost. No answer is scarier than no answer, yadeg. Weapons The movie has stayed with me on a lot of levels, but it's the finale that

really grabbed me by the lapels. The sight of children previously hypnotized and fed upon by a shriveled old crone who's using an arcane system of outdated beliefs and powers over them, chasing her down and tearing her apart was more than cathartic. It was joyful. It was fucking hopeful.

There actual end of social commentary and end of this brief but also weird episode of the Roundup. I'm always around if you want to talk about this subject or any subject, really, check the show notes on Instagram. We are at midnight underscore viewing Oh my God. Check out our Instagram everybody. Paul Williams Rainbow Connection, Paul Williams Swan from Phantom of the Paradise, Paul Williams, emmittt Ottero's jug

band Christmas. Paul Williams liked and commented and reposted one of my posts, and it's one where I'm singing one of his songs, So I now consider myself a singer with Paul Williams seal of approval. Anyway, find us there or hit me up on the email, or go to the Patreon and buy Ripley a new bag of pork medallion dog treats. Oh fuck, I said it out loud, and now she's awake and staring well for a hungry Ripley gene. I'm father Malone, see you on Friday. What

I have, no trees, no baseball game. Man in the baseball and the pack ro for the skin and in the brains of the baseball, gonna run a on the fucking train on the baseball. Tell me to be fucking on the jumble. And my mother so strong now to paint so bad that my motherfucking horse a